But there was no more shooting. Eustaly fell onto the gravel beside the fruit stand, the weasely man put his pistol away again, and the bearded man came over to say to his friend, “Just bravado, that. One would have done it.”
“I felt like a little noise,” said the weasely man, and grinned again.
The bearded man picked Eustaly up and carried him over to the Mercury and propped him behind the wheel. The weasely man, cheerful as a bird in the morning, explained to us, “He’s wanted, see, and the car’s wanted, so there’ll be no questions. The cops around here are a dumb lot anyway.”
The two of them got into their Sunbeam and drove away.
For the first time I noticed Armstrong. He looked very white, almost blue-white, particularly around the eyes. The skin seemed stretched over his face, his eyes seemed larger than usual, and he stood as though balancing an egg on his head.
That may be what helped me get my own balance back, seeing how badly Armstrong was taking it. And when he said, “I think I’m—” and staggered away behind the fruit stand to be sick, I knew I was going to be all right.
I had a chance now to make a getaway. In the truck or without it, either way. Get to the nearest town, even to the nearest phone. There’d be trouble at first, because officially I was wanted for the murder of Angela, but that would be explained away in time, and I could tell P and the others what I’d learned.
But what had I learned? Ten Eyck planned to blow up the UN Building, that’s all I knew for sure. I didn’t know when, I didn’t know why, I didn’t know who had hired him, and I didn’t even know how he planned to do it. Also, there was the business of the bomb in the U.S. Senate. He’d abandoned that idea for another one, but I didn’t know what. I could tell P practically nothing. In fact, since P already knew about Ten Eyck’s discussing, at the organizational meeting, both explosives and the United Nations, even the news about blowing up the UN wouldn’t be entirely fresh and unexpected.
If only I could sneak away long enough to make a quick phone call, and then come back. But with Armstrong around, that was impossible, and I didn’t see any way to get rid of Armstrong temporarily without exciting somebody’s suspicions. Either I had to give up the whole scheme now, or carry it on awhile longer.
Of course, if I left now, Ten Eyck would suddenly learn a lot of things. That Angela wasn’t dead, for instance. That I was a double agent. That his presence here in the United States was known to the authorities. All in all, it seemed to me the only one I could help by taking off now was Tyrone Ten Eyck.
Except me, of course. I was likely to live longer if I left now.
Or was I? With Tyrone Ten Eyck still on the loose? The Feds would never get to the Bodkin place before Ten Eyck had flown the coop, not a chance of it. So Ten Eyck would be free, would know everything, and would be looking for revenge, both on me and on Angela. And the Feds would learn nothing. And I would have done nothing.
I stood there with a pistol weighing down my pants pocket, making my trousers droop on that side, and while my Nazi friend upchucked on the fruit stand, I came to the slow, reluctant, painful but inevitable conclusion that this little fly was going to have to go back into the spider’s parlor.
Armstrong returned, looking paler and yet more alive. “I’m all right now,” he croaked, which was true only relatively speaking.
I said, “Do you want to drive? Or sleep?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, shocked. “I couldn’t drive either, look at my hands.” He held them out and let me see them shake. They shook.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll drive. You just sit there.”
“I’m not used to this,” he said, apologetically now. “I’m sorry, but I’m not used to it yet, like the rest of you. But I’ll be okay.”
“Sure you will,” I told him, from the height of my greater experience.
You can do anything if you don’t think about it. I was wanted for murder, with all-points bulletins out on me and everything. I was on my way back to a house full of madmen and fiends. I had just seen a man shot down right beside me. I was driving a truck full of high explosives. But I just didn’t think about it. I thought about the scenery, and the nice road, and how surprisingly good the truck’s engine was, and how unsurprisingly bad the truck’s springs were, and how nice it would be not to have the FBI snooping around me all the time, but on the other hand how not nice it would be to have to empty my own wastebaskets again...
... and how those three bullets had been meant for me.
South I drove, along a nice new highway I had mostly to myself. Beside me, Jack Armstrong slumped against the door, asleep after all, his forehead clunking the window from time to time. And I thought about how the weasely man had shot three bullets into the man wearing the red-and-black-check hunting jacket.
Ten Eyck had called after we’d left, the weasely man had said so. He’d told the weasely man there was extra money in the suitcases, for which he was supposed to shoot one of the men coming up to meet him. A man who was wanted by the police. A man who wore a red-and-black-check hunting jacket.
The weasely man hadn’t asked anybody’s names. Neither he nor Eustaly had given any impression of knowing one another from before. The weasely man had had nothing to go by but that jacket, that damn jacket!
Was that why Mrs. Bodkin had insisted I wear it?
No, she wouldn’t be a part of it. Even Eustaly hadn’t been told Ten Eyck’s plan for me. That was Ten Eyck’s way, tell everyone as little as possible. So he’d told the weasely man to kill the one wearing the red and black jacket, and if no one was wearing a red and black jacket, I’d be wearing, etc., telling him the suit I was wearing underneath. It hadn’t occurred to him either of the others might end up wearing that jacket, of course; Armstrong would be too much the physical-culture type, and Eustaly too fastidious.
Well, Eustaly had gotten cold.
Not as cold as he was now, of course.
South I drove, along the nice new highway. I knew Ten Eyck had tried to have me killed. I knew why: because I knew who he really was. What I didn’t know, not yet, was what I was going to do about it.
Except that I was going back there. Oh, you bet. I wouldn’t miss his face for a million dollars.
21
He carried it off well. We arrived in early evening, the return by truck having taken longer than the trip up by automobile, and as I braked to a stop behind the house Ten Eyck came out the back door, glinting a smile of welcome which hardly faltered a bit as I climbed down from the cab. He watched Jack Armstrong get out on the other side, watched us both stretch and move around a little the way you will after a long cramped trip, and then he said, casually, “Where’s Mortimer?”
“Dead,” I said. “Up near the border. In the Mercury. Wearing the Bodkin jacket.”
“Really. I hadn’t thought he’d consider that suitable.”
“He got cold.”
“Ah.” Ten Eyck made a minuscule shrug. “One never knows,” he said.
Armstrong, coming past us, said groggily, “I’m so tired I could drop dead myself.” He stopped in front of Ten Eyck and said, “Raxford said you knew about Eustaly going to be killed. You should of told us. Scared me out of my wits.”
“Next time,” Ten Eyck told him, smiling as one smiles at a retarded child, “I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“Good,” said Armstrong, and went cumbersomely on into the house.
Ten Eyck looked at me with wary interest. (He couldn’t know, of course, that exhaustion had anesthetized me as much as Armstrong. I’d driven slightly more than half the return trip, the first long stretch and then the final brief leg, with uneasy napping in the middle period. I was too doped from lack of sleep myself to be actively afraid of Ten Eyck, or even worried about him, an apparent assured coolness that [I later realized] impressed him very much, and which also made it more possible for me to maintain the manner I’d decided would be best in the circumstances. I’d thought of practically nothing else all the way south but this meeting with Ten Eyck, and what I should say, and how I should behave. Rehearsed and anesthetized to a fare-thee-well, I was prepared to bluff Tyrone Ten Eyck to a draw.)