“You idiot.” Ten Eyck’s voice rasped; at what a price had he learned his survival techniques. He called, “Lobo!”
Lobo appeared in the doorway, and that banana-cluster face managed to look sheepish. “He run past me,” he mumbled.
Sun Kut Fu, his hands still high, said, “I had to tell you, Mr. Eyck, I had to tell you. Federal agents! They raided the temple!”
Oh, for Pete’s sake! Not seeing me for a couple of hours, not hearing from me, P and his boys had gone running to the rescue. And I wasn’t even there any more!
Ten Eyck had already slipped his Luger away again. “We’ll go the other way,” he said. “Come on, Raxford.”
“My shoes!”
“You’ll get another pair,” he said. “Come along.”
18
“Put these magic red shoes on,” Billie Burke told me, smiling ever so sweetly, “and no harm can come to you. You will be able to run like the wind, dance the ballet, the jitterbug, the lindy and the frug, walk through air, over water, and past coals of fire. Your toes will never grow weary or painful, and you’ll be able to dance till dawn. But whatever you do, be sure you don’t remove the shoes, and do not let them fall into the hands of Wicked Witch Tyrone.”
“Aw, come on, Billie,” I said. “Do you really believe all that jazz?”
Shocked, her face turned to that of Tyrone Ten Eyck, all metal glitter and glisten. Smiling, he said, “Not for a minute, my friend. I’ll get you no matter what shoes you wear.”
That was enough to wake me up. I sat bolt upright, startled out of uneasy sleep, to find myself sitting in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. But a room ordinary enough: a plain bedroom with double bed, mirrored dresser, night tables with lamps, a chair on which my clothing was more or less neatly hung. A sun-warmed shade was drawn over the sole window, giving the room that orange aquarium look found exclusively in bedrooms in which one has just taken an afternoon nap.
But I’d had much more than a nap. I’d been asleep since... Since when?
I cast back to what I remembered. It had been about four-thirty in the morning when Ten Eyck and I fled that small dank room beneath the city, and dashed away through twisting turning tunnels, sudden rooms, corridors, echoing empty dusty forgotten halls. Ten Eyck went first, all in black, his cloak flapping as he darted forward. I followed, hampered by my slippers — oh, damn slippers! — and Lobo brought up the rear, hulking, thumping, rumbling along in our wake. Sun Kut Fu had scurried in a different direction, to a different destination.
And where had we three gone? We’d emerged at last, incredibly enough, on a subway platform, but dark and grimy with disuse; some aged spurline superseded by later planning. A dirty green door which appeared to be locked was not; we went through, and up concrete stairs, very narrow, and through another door into an alley. At last, in the open again.
An automobile was parked here in the alley, either the Cadillac I had been driven in from Queens or another very like it. We climbed aboard, Ten Eyck took the wheel, and we sliced through a great many mean streets I didn’t recognize before abruptly bursting out onto Canal Street, a mean street I did recognize. Across this we drove, Ten Eyck and I in front, Lobo hulking in back, and into the Holland Tunnel, and through it to New Jersey. (This was a different Cadillac, by the way, no side curtains.)
Something very like dawn edged up on our right as we drove northward through Jersey. The monotony of driving, coupled with the length of time I’d been awake — very nearly twenty-four consecutive hours by now — combined to leave me dopy, somnolent, not entirely aware of my surroundings. I vaguely remembered our stopping — somewhere — and Ten Eyck saying something or other to me in a jovial yet warning tone, and then someone ushered me to this bedroom.
At about six? That seemed a sensible estimate.
And my watch — just a watch now, a speaker alas no more — told me the current time was ten minutes past four. Surrounded by assassins, lunatics, and destroyers, I had slept like a gosling for ten hours!
I promptly jumped out of bed — I was wearing my shorts and T-shirt — hurried to the chair containing the rest of my clothing, and quickly dressed. The only footwear in the room was those same blasted slippers, placed neatly under the foot of the bed. I scuffed into them, checked my pockets for my arsenal, found it intact, and left the room.
I was now in that anomaly of American residential architecture, the thing at the head of the stairs. It is too square to be a hall and too small to be a room, it usually contains either no furniture at all or at most an odd table stuck here instead of being thrown away, and it is surrounded on all sides by doors; every second-floor room opens off this space. The thing at the head of the stairs could be called a hub, I suppose, or a core, but so far as I know it’s never called anything but what I call it: the thing at the head of the stairs.
And here I stood. More than anything else at the moment, I wanted to wash my face and brush my teeth. Feeling like the hero of The Lady or the Tiger, I studied this roulette wheel of doors, trying to guess which one would lead me to the bathroom.
My first guess was unfortunate. In a nearly barren room containing nothing but two tables and several chairs, six Orientals in dark clothing were assembling machine guns from a large wooden crate on the floor. They looked at me as I stood in the doorway. “Heh,” I chuckled weakly, backtracking. “My mistake. Heh.” And shut the door again on all those faces.
My second guess was better. I washed up, brushed my teeth with my finger, left the bathroom, passed through the thing at the head of the stairs with no urge to see what lay behind the rest of those doors, and went downstairs to find Ten Eyck sitting at his ease in the living room, leafing through a large and expensive volume of French Impressionist reproductions. The colors reflected from the pages onto his face, playing there as though a devil’s carnival were under way on the inside. He smiled on seeing me and said, “Ah. The sleeper wakes.”
“First good sleep I’ve had in a week,” I said, trying to sound bitter, gearing myself back into the role of the hunted killer, the clever madman, the desperate adventurer.
“Of course,” he said, his smile glistening with plastic sympathy. “If you’ll go to the kitchen,” he suggested, “I believe the lady of the house will find you something to eat.”
“Good.”
“We’ll talk later,” he said, as I went by. “Got a job for you.”
I may have blanched, I’m not sure, but I managed to make my voice hearty enough as I said, “That’s fine. I hate doing nothing.”
“My sentiments exactly.” He flipped a page; it ripped; he said something guttural and harsh, not in English.
I went out to the kitchen, where the lady of the house turned out to be Mrs. Selma Bodkin, looking pleased as Marjorie Main to have the house full of guests. She suggested pancakes, I nodded dumbly, she had me sit down at the kitchen table, poured me orange juice and coffee for starters, and began producing pancakes.
She made, amazingly enough, excellent pancakes. She also talked, non-stop. I heard only parts now and then of what she was saying, since I spent a lot of my time and attention worrying about what sort of devilish job Ten Eyck had in mind for me to do. Whatever it was, I thought it unlikely I’d be capable of doing it; and what then?
Mrs. Bodkin’s chatter was mostly autobiographical, concerning both herself and this house. It was an old place, a farmhouse which had lost its farm. All around us, screened from view by defiant tall trees, were the developments with the cemetery names: Fair Oaks, Green Hills, Far Vista. Mrs. Bodkin had been brought here as a bride — impossible to imagine! — and had stayed on after the departure of her children and the death of her husband. Meetings of the Gentile Mothers for Peace were often held here, and a Brownie Pack met once a month in the cellar playroom. The house was comfortably, if not stylishly, furnished, and was extremely clean.