He promptly supplied both. “I’m Sun Kut Fu,” he said. “Eurasian Relief Corps. Remember me?”
“Of course,” I said politely. “You were at the meeting.”
“Right. Come on in.”
I went in, to an ordinary Occidental office, complete with gray metal desk, gray metal filing cabinet, gray metal wastebasket, and green Kemtone walls. Sun Kut Fu said, “Sit down anywhere. What do you think of the front?”
“Very nice,” I said, and sat down on the brown leather sofa. Except for the swivel chair behind the desk, it was the only place I could sit; so much for his anywhere.
“You can’t beat a religious front,” he said, very pleased with himself, so much so that I guessed he’d thought up the religious front himself. “You can do all sorts of kooky things and the cops never turn a hair.”
“Somehow,” I said, “you don’t sound very Oriental.”
He laughed and said, “You kidding? I was born in Astoria, just over the bridge. My old man ran a laundry. Still does.”
“That’s nice,” I said, because he was still smiling. “About my shoes,” I said.
“That’s the best part of it,” he said beaming away. “Even if the cops are tailing you, it stops back at the temple. As long as your shoes are there, it figures you’re there. You can go all over the world, safe and sound.”
“That’s really wonderful,” I said. “But I’d like them back.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “Nobody’ll cop them. They’ll be right there where you left them no matter how long, even a week.”
“But—” I said.
He waved a cheerful but brisk hand and said, “Somebody’ll be by to pick you up. I got other things to do. Nice seeing you again.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Good work with that rich bitch,” he said. “That’s the kind I can’t stand, you know? They enter the battle even though they got no stake. What the hell, man, this world is theirs!” He shook his head, grinned at me, walked out, and shut the door.
I sat there a long time — longer than I’d waited at the diner — until all at once a section of the wall opened and there, framed by blackness, hulked Lobo. He shambled in, moving like a bear, and rumbled, “Frisk.”
“Right,” I said. I got to my feet and spread my arms out.
Thoroughly, slowly, painstakingly, Lobo frisked me. He found my necktie, my handkerchief, my pen, my mechanical pencil, the wallet containing my credit card, my belt, and my quarter. He gave everything back to me, walked back over to the new black hole in the wall, turned, raised one of those monstrous hands, and beckoned to me.
I was off again.
16
Four A.M. in a small dank windowless black-walled room beneath the city, I stood at last face to face with Tyrone Ten Eyck. Above us swayed a glaring light bulb suspended on a black wire from the dim ceiling. In the middle of the room stood an old wooden table and two unpainted wooden chairs.
I had been led by the silent Lobo through yet another tortuous series of corridors, staircases, empty rooms, and earthen tunnels, ending at last in this room, empty when I arrived. I had entered, seen it was a dead end, and behind me Lobo shut the door and went away.
After a few jittery minutes of waiting, during which I thought of eighty-three separate things that could have gone wrong with our plans, the door opened once again and in strode Tyrone Ten Eyck. (Face to face with him it was impossible to think of him under his pseudonym. “Leon Eyck” was nothing this man could possibly be called. He was what the young Orson Welles had always wanted to be.)
“Greetings, my dear Raxford,” he said, with a glinting smile. “I owe you my thanks for your prompt work upon the former Miss Ten Eyck.”
I cleared my throat. “Thank you,” I said, struggling for his kind of equanimity. “It was nothing.”
“It was, perhaps, more than you know,” he said, with a keen look at me. He had a resonant melodic voice, with something strange in it: the sound of the crushing of baby’s bones. The glinting smile still on his lips, he motioned at the table and chairs. “Be seated. We’ll talk.”
But why that keen look? Why had he said that the murder of Angela was perhaps more than I knew? Something, it seemed to me, was expected of me — but what? (I felt all at once like a man forced into a chess game with a grand master and given a ten-second time limit for each move. How could I possibly work out what my opponent was thinking?)
But then — barely within the time limit — I saw what he was fishing for. Angela and I had been together for some time between our departure from the meeting and my “murder” of her. Had she, in that time, told me who Leon Eyck really was?
Well, why not? I had an explainable justification for knowing Ten Eyck’s real name, why not use it? At the very least it would avoid the possibility of a disastrous slip of the tongue later on.
There was time for no more thought. “Thank you,” I therefore said, “Mr. Ten Eyck.” And reached for the chair.
Everything in the room became suddenly silent. The scrape of the chair as I moved it over the concrete floor was terrifyingly loud, and in the tense silence after it Ten Eyck spoke in a voice I hadn’t heard before, the sound of flint scraped across the beak of a hawk, as he said to me, “What name was that? What name did you call me?”
Had I made a mistake? Had I made the mistake? There was no time to think; I could only carry through. A little hoarsely, I said, “Ten Eyck. I called you Ten Eyck. Aren’t you Tyrone Ten Eyck, that girl Angela’s brother?”
It was the right thing to say. The speckled smile flashed again, the smoother voice returned, and he said, “She told you. I should have anticipated as much.”
“I hope,” I said carefully, “that creates no problems for you.”
His smile shimmered. “I think it will not. Do be seated, Mr. Raxford, we have more than ever to talk about.”
We sat facing one another across the old table. He withdrew from an inner pocket a small, dark, gnarled little Italian cigar, of the kind that looks most like a miniature shillelagh. I got out a cigarette for myself, which I badly needed, and he lit both our smokes from a delicate gold lighter with a gas flame. His cigar smoke, pungent, rich, foreign, soon filled our small room, making the surroundings seem less harsh but no less dangerous.
Watching me with eyes that sparked like live wires, he said, “What else do you know about me, Mr. Raxford?”
“Nothing, really,” I assured him.
A quizzical smile now. “Nothing? My dear departed little sister never told you a thing?”
“Oh,” I said, hurriedly picking over what I knew about him, “that you’d left the country a long time ago. That you were a Communist.”
“A Communist!” He laughed aloud; he seemed to find the suggestion absurdly comical. “That would be her level of comprehension,” he said. “A Communist!”
I said, “You aren’t a Communist?” Oh, if only I had my shoes on, if only P and the others were at this very moment clustered around a receiving set somewhere less than two miles away, hearing all this choice and vital information! Damn Sun Kut Fu and his religious cover!
Tyrone Ten Eyck withdrew the little cigar from the corner of his mouth and said, “I am nothing you can describe from a political Roget, Mr. Raxford. Nor, I suspect, are you.”