FBI men tend to look at one another a lot. These two did it again now, and then B whirled on me and snapped, “All right, quit stalling. You won’t identify the man in the photo?”
“Sure,” I said. “Who is he?”
A said, “You’re supposed to tell us.”
B waved the photo under my nose. “Take a good look,” he ordered. “Take a good look.”
“How am I going to take a good look,” I asked him, beginning despite myself to get irritated, “unless you people take a good picture?”
B looked at the photo himself, suspiciously, and said, “It looks all right to me.”
A suddenly said, “Do you deny that individual was in this apartment today?”
I said, “Eustaly? Was that Eustaly? Let’s see that again.”
But they wouldn’t; they were both suddenly scrambling for notebooks. B insisted I spell Eustaly, which I did, and then A said, “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“That picture,” I said (it was now back in B’s pocket), “threw me off. I knew you were coming up here to ask me about Eustaly, but that picture—” I shook my head, unable to go on.
“You knew?” B demanded, leaning in toward me.
A said to him, “Let’s not get off on that again. We’ll just report it to HQ, that’s all.”
“I’ve never seen such a security leak,” B muttered.
A abruptly turned and waggled his fingers in my face. I stepped back, offended, and A said, “Well?”
“Well what? Don’t do that!”
He did it again, waggle-waggle. “I suppose,” he said, looking knowing, “you don’t know what that means.”
I suspected it meant he was dangerously insane, but that’s nothing to tell an FBI man, so I said, “That’s right. I don’t know what that means.”
“That’s sign language,” A told me. “As if you didn’t know. Deaf-and-dumb sign language.”
“Is it?” I was interested. Ever since Johnny Belinda, I’ve had a hankering to learn sign language, but somehow or other there’s never been time for it. “Do some more,” I said.
“That’s how you communicate!” A said triumphantly, pointing a finger at me, which I guess wasn’t sign language but was just pointing a finger. “You never speak in here, you or any of your friends, and that’s how you do it. Sign language!” He turned to B and said, proudly, “I worked that out myself.”
Oh, I thought. These people were under the impression their microphones were still working. Since they never picked up anything, it meant I was doing my communicating with visitors some other way. That must be why they kept sneaking in all the time and emptying my wastebaskets, looking for notes.
Well, I didn’t like this sign-language theory of A’s a bit. If the whole FBI went along with it, they’d stop emptying my wastebaskets. I haven’t emptied a wastebasket in nearly three years, and I’d hate to have to start all over again.
So, knowing something of the FBI mentality, I said, “Sign language, eh? Huh.” And looked even more knowing than A.
A, as I’d guessed, was stricken. His confidence in his theory was shattered, never — I hoped — to be reassembled. (An outright denial, of course, would simply have confirmed A in his convictions. But the sly suggestion of superior knowledge, which is the FBI man’s own major tool of his trade, is also the weapon to which he is the most vulnerable. With one “Huh” I had puffed sign language right out of A’s head into oblivion.)
Gruffly, B took over then, saying, “Let’s get back to this man Eustaly. What did he want?”
“He came here by mistake,” I said.
Which gave them the upper hand again. They both looked knowing in the extreme, and B said, “Oh, yeah? Tell us about it.”
“He really did come here by mistake. What he wanted was terrorist organizations.”
B nearly closed his eyes, he was squinting so hard. “He wanted what?”
“Terrorist organizations. He thought the CIU was a terrorist organization, and he wanted to tell me about some meeting he was setting up with a lot of them, you know, terrorist organizations, and he wanted me to go.”
A said, “I thought your crowd was pacifists, conscientious objectors.”
“That’s right. Eustaly made a mistake.”
“You mean he wanted the World Citizens’ Independence Union?”
I said, “The what?”
But B interrupted saying, “You don’t expect us to believe that, do you?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “But on the other hand, what would you believe?”
“We’ll ask the questions,” B snapped.
“Ah,” I said, “but I’ll ask the rhetorical questions.”
“Don’t be a wiseguy,” A advised me, meaning he hadn’t understood the word “rhetorical.”
B said, “What did you tell this guy Eustaly?”
“I told him he was making a mistake. He wouldn’t believe me either, he thought I was just being careful.”
B said, “So what did he—” and was interrupted by the doorbell. Immediately he tensed up, and his right hand ducked under his coat tail toward his hip.
“Relax,” I said. “It’s probably a pacifist.”
I went to the door and opened it, while A and B watched me like goldfish eying a new cat, and I’d been right: it was a pacifist. A pacifist near and dear to me, in fact, the pacifist who lately does my laundry and loses my socks, washes my dishes and brings me pastrami sandwiches from the deli, changes my sheets and then helps me use them, my Beatrice, my Thisbe, this year’s love — Angela Ten Eyck.
How beautiful Angela is, and how gorgeously dressed, and how sweet-smelling, and how clean! She is possibly the only girl south of 14th Street who smells primarily of soap, but on the other hand she doesn’t live south of 14th Street, she only visits from time to time. She lives, to be exact, on Central Park South.
Angela is the daughter of Marcellus Ten Eyck, the industrialist and munitions maker best known for his contribution in World War II of the Ten Eyck 10–10 Tank, sometimes called the Triple Ten or the Triple Tee, the tank about which there was a muddled, inconclusive, and abruptly halted Congressional inquiry in 1948. As any psychoanalyst could have told the father, both of his children grew up to oppose him. The son, Tyrone Ten Eyck, disappeared behind the Bamboo Curtain in North Korea in 1954 and, except for an occasional scurrilous radio broadcast, hasn’t been heard from since. The daughter, Angela, had no sooner finished being a debutante, four years ago, than she’d turned her back on affluence and influence — symbolically, at least — and had come downtown to be a pacifist. (There was a widespread belief — perhaps not entirely unfounded — that of the two betrayals, the old man minded that of his daughter the more. Tyrone, at least, wasn’t trying to throw his own father out of work. In fact, one might even say he was out drumming up business.)
Angela always wears clothing such as to make me want to rip it to shreds, the quicker to get it all off her, and this time was no exception. On her feet were boots, black, narrow, high-heeled; they made me think of Marlene Dietrich. Above, black stretch pants, taut and tapering, made me think of ski lodges. Still further above, a bulky fuzzy wool sweater of the brightest canary-yellow in the world made me think of hayrides. And down inside there, I knew, she would smell of this morning’s shower.
The head, with Angela, is always the last to be considered. Not that it isn’t a lovely head, for it is, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful head indeed. Natural blond hair frames a face of smooth symmetry, flawless complexion, just enough cheekbone, and a jawline as delicate as an artist’s brush stroke. Her eyes are blue and amiable and very large, her nose is slightly Irish, her mouth is generous and usually smiling. But, alas, this charming head is hollow. Inside, the winds blow back and forth from ear to ear uninterrupted by more than the smallest nodule of brain. My Angela, though she is rich and beautiful, though she possesses a yellow Mercedes Benz convertible and a license to drive it, though she is a graduate of an exclusive New England girls’ college, though she pays part of my rent and I love her dearly, still I must say it — this Angela is a nitwit.