“Ooooh,” he groaned. “Ooooooh.”
“Hi there,” said Remo.
“Oooooh,” groaned the man. He was in his late forties and his face was a remnant of a teenage battle with acne. The acne had won.
“You’re going to die,” said Remo.
“Oh, my God, no. No.”
“Your partner made the hit on Willoughby, didn’t he? Oswald Willoughby.”
“Was that the guy’s name?”
“Yes. Who sent you?”
“Get me a doctor.”
“It’s too late. Don’t go with this sin on your soul,” said Remo.
“I don’t want to die.”
“You want to go without a confession? Who sent you?”
“No one special. It was just a hit. A five–grand hit. It was supposed to be easy.”
“Where’d you get the money?”
“Joe got it. At Pete’s.”
“Where’s Pete’s?”
“East St. Louis. I was needing. I needed the dough. I was just out of Joliet. Couldn’t get work.”
“Where’s Pete’s?”
“Off Ducal Street.”
“That’s a great help.”
“Everybody knows Pete’s.”
“Who gave you the money for the hit?”
“Pete.”
“You’re a great help. Just Pete at Pete’s in East St. Louis.”
“Yeah. Get me a priest. Please. Someone. Anyone.”
“Just rest here,” said Remo.
“I’m dying. Dying. My shoulder’s killing me.”
Remo checked out the small white house. The door was shut but unlocked. The killer had had the presence of mind not to leave it ajar so that the body would probably not have been found until it made a stink.
Willoughby probably got it in bed, thought Remo, as he entered the house. But then he saw the TV lit with the sound turned low, and a silent interviewer asking a silent question to elicit a silent response, and Remo knew Willoughby had spent the night here in the living room. His last night.
The room smelled of stale whiskey. Willoughby lay on a couch behind the door, an open bottle of Seagram’s Seven and an unfinished Milky Way on a tarnished end table. Willoughby’s brains were spread out on the high back of the couch, powder burns on the close temple. A phone rang. It was under the couch. Remo answered it.
“Yeah,” he said, lifting the phone and resting the base on Willoughby’s stomach.
“Oh, hello, darling.” It was a woman’s voice. “I know I’m not supposed to phone but the garbage disposal is stuck. It’s been stuck since dinner, Ozzie. I know I’m not supposed to call. Should I get the repairman? I’ll get the repairman. It’s the cauliflower that does it. And we don’t even like cauliflower. You like it. I don’t know why cauliflower. I don’t even know why they told you not to give me the number. I mean, who have these few phone calls I’ve made hurt? Right? Who have they hurt? Ozzie…are you there?”
Remo tried to answer but the only suitable answers were lies and he pressed down the receiver button terminating the conversation. He left the phone off the cradle, buzzing a useless dial tone.
What was he going to tell her? That her phone calls had ruined Willoughby’s only protection, the secrecy of his whereabouts? She had enough grief coming. By the time the dial tone turned into a continuous out–of–order whine, Remo found a stack of notes in the kitchen. They were in an old Eaton Corrasable Bond Box and there was a title page: “Testimony of Oswald Willoughby.”
Remo took the box. Outside, the driver of the hit car was discovering that he only had a broken bone. He leaned against the fender of the smashed–up car, pressing tight his injured shoulder with his free hand.
“Hey, I’m not gonna die. You’re a damned liar, fella, a damned liar.”
“No, I’m not,” said Remo and with an ease of motion that made his right hand seem hardly to move at all, he let his index and forefinger out, penetrating the skull, which jerked the man’s head back as if it had met a crane–hoisted wrecking ball. The feet flew over the head and the man slapped into the dust, silently and finally, without even a twitch of the spine.
Chiun, noticing that even to the breathing the blow had been without flaw, turned back to his trunks. They were undamaged. But they might have been and he told his pupil that such carelessness as his car driving could not be tolerated.
“We’ve got to get out of here and your trunks are slowing us down, Little Father. Maybe I’d better do this assignment alone,” Remo said.
“We are coequal. I am not only your superior in training but on assignments now, by order of Emperor Smith I am on the same level. My judgment is of equal weight to yours. My responsibility is equal to yours. Therefore you cannot say anymore, go home, Master of Sinanju, I will do this or do that alone. It is we. We do this or we do not do that. It is we. Never you anymore, but we. No more yous. We.”
“Willoughby, the man we’re supposed to keep alive, is dead,” said Remo.
“You failed,” said Chiun.
“But there’s some crucial evidence in this box,” said Remo.
“We have saved the evidence. Good.”
“It’s not as good as Willoughby himself.”
“You aren’t perfect.”
“But for the first time though, there’s a lead on the source which just might be the core of the whole thing.”
“We have the solution.”
“Possibly,” said Remo.
“Fate takes strange patterns at times,” said Chiun. “We may succeed gloriously, as is the tradition of the House of Sinanju, or you may fail, which would not be the first time in your life.”
In the matter of the trunks, Chiun explained that they had to take them along because their mission was to honor the Constitution of the United States and to wear one kimono continuously would be to dishonor the document by which Remo’s nation lived. Chiun understood these things now, being coequal.
The driver of a pickup truck understood the need to get the trunks to the closest airport immediately and to forget about the wrecked cars and the two dead bodies he saw when his country’s history was shown to him. Fifteen portraits of Ulysses S. Grant, printed in green.
“You fellas want a lift, well, I’ll show you, the spirit of cooperation is not dead. That’s fifteen of them little fellers. Thirteen…fourteen…and fifteen.”
· · ·
The Piper they rented circled over the Mississippi River town of East St. Louis because Chiun wanted to see it from the air.
“That is a fine river,” said Chiun. “Who owns the water rights?”
“No one exactly owns the water rights. It belongs to the country.”
“Then the country could give it to us in payment?”
“No,” said Remo.
“Even if we glorify the Constitution?”
“Not even then.”
“You were born in an ungrateful country,” said Chiun, but Remo did not answer him. He was thinking about Willoughby’s testimony. Willoughby did not give his life for it. He gave his life because he let his wife know where he was. People died, not for causes, but for stupidity or bad luck, which was another form of stupidity, caused by incompetence. This was the essence of what he had been taught for more than a decade. In the world there was competence and incompetence and nothing else. Causes were frills and came and went with each age. Luck was only the cloudy explanation for things people did not perceive. In this, the Master of Sinanju, more than fourscore in years, stood alone, atop the world.
A man like Willoughby had worked his entire life without knowing what he did. He took orders and he executed orders and nowhere in his testimony did it ever show that he understood more than a minimum about how food was grown and gotten to market. He had laced the testimony he had hoped to give with words like “hard futures” and “soft futures” and “the market strengthening.” Remo knew in his stomach that this was not how his country had become the greatest food producer in the world.
; There was talk today about his country being selfishly food–rich, but all those talking like that made it seem as if the food just grew by itself because the land was rich. This was not so. Men planted seed, and sweated over seed, and tried to outsmart the weather. Men invested their lives in the soil, from the laboratories where Americans sought constantly improving grains and fertilizers, to the iron shops of Detroit where men improved the substitute for the ox, the tractor. America had invented the automatic reapers. America had made the first real changes in agriculture since man had left the caves and put seed in soil. America’s food wealth was the fruit of its character. Genius, hard work, and persistence.
It deeply offended Remo when he heard it compared to coal or oil or bauxite, generally by some man in a university who had never broken sweat on his brow.
What made a country developed or underdeveloped was its people. Yet these men who knew not of labor referred to the natural resources of undeveloped countries as something belonging, by some divine right, solely to the people who happened to live over them, while at the same time they said the proceeds of those who worked for food belonged to the whole world. If it were not for the real workers of the world, the oil and bauxite and copper lying under sand and jungle would be as useless to the underdeveloped nations as they had been at the first tick of noticed time.
As Chiun had so well taught, there was only competence and incompetence.
Willoughby happened to be one of the ones taking a free ride. Nearly one hundred pages of written testimony and the man only suspected that he was stumbling onto the greatest man–made disaster in history.
“I don’t know how,” concluded Willoughby’s written statement, “but these peculiar investment patterns forebode, I believe, a master plan of destruction. The depression of the winter wheat market futures at planting appear computer–timed to highest impact for maximum potential in minimizing food growth.” Whatever the neon wool that all meant. All the testimony lacked was advice to get into this wonderful thing with your money while the getting was good.
Willoughby had made eighty thousand dollars a year as a commodities analyst, according to Smith’s information.
· · ·
In East St. Louis, you could see the heat rising from the cracked sidewalks of Ducal Street, a row of two story wooden buildings and storefronts, most of them empty. Pete’s Pool Parlour had its windows painted green halfway up. It wasn’t empty. A very large red–blotched face with shiny grease and rheumy black eyes stared over the green paint line. The garbage pail of a face rested dully under an immaculate bright red hat with pompon. Inside, Remo and Chiun saw it had a body: large hairy arms like girders with fur transplants hanging out of a worn leather vest. The hands ended at the denim–covered groin where they occupied themselves with scratching.
“Where’s Pete?” asked Remo. The face did not answer.
“I’m looking for Pete.”
“Who are you and dinko?” said the garbage pail of a face.
“I’m the spirit of Christmas Past and this is Mother Goose,” said Remo.
“You got a big mouth.”
“It’s a hot day. Tell me where Pete is, please,” said Remo. Chiun examined the strange room. There were green rectangular tables with colored balls. The white ball did not have a number. There were sticks with which young men pushed the white ball into other balls. When certain of these other balls went into holes at the sides of the table, the man hitting the white ball into the colored balls was allowed to continue or, in some cases, collected paper money, which, while not gold, could be used to purchase things. Chiun went over to the table where the most money was changing hands.
Meanwhile, Remo finished his business.
“Just tell me where Pete is.”
The hairy hand left the groin to rub thumb against forefinger, indicating money.
“Give me something,” said the garbage pail of a face. So Remo gave him a shattered collarbone and, true to his word, the garbage pail of a face told him that Pete was behind the cash register and then he passed out from the pain. Remo nudged the man’s face with his shoe. There was a grease spot on the floor.
Pete was holding a weapon behind the cash register when Remo got there.
“Hi, I’d like to speak to you privately,” said Remo.
“I saw what you did there. Just stay where you are.”
Remo’s right hand fluttered with his fingers almost braiding themselves. Pete’s eyes followed the hand for a fraction of an instant. Which they were supposed to do. In that moment, just as the eyes moved, Remo’s left hand was behind the counter in simultaneous flow, thumb into metacarpals, pressuring the nerves into a gel of compressed bone. The gun dropped on a box of pool chalk. Pete’s eyes teared. A crazy pain–racked smile came across his otherwise bland face.
“Wow, that smarts,” Pete said.
A lounger whiling away his twenties and thirties would have seen only the thin man with the thick wrists go over to Pete and walk with him to a back room, holding Pete’s arm in some sort of friendly embrace. A lounger, however, would have been more interested in the strange elderly Oriental with the funny robes.
Waco Boy Childers was playing Charlie Dusset for a hundred dollars a game and no one was talking, excepting that funny Oriental fella. He wanted to know the rules of the game.
Waco Boy lowered his stick and sighed.
“Pops, I was shooting,” said Waco Boy down to the old squint of a gook. “People do not talk while I am shooting.”
“Do you perform so well that it robs others of breath?” asked Chiun.
“Sometimes. If they got enough money on it.”
This brought laughs.
“Like, watch Charlie Dusset,” said Waco Boy. Chiun cackled and both Waco Boy and Charlie asked what he was laughing about.
“Funny names. Your names are so funny. ‘Dusset.’ ‘Waco Boy.’ You have such funny names,” and Chiun’s laughter was infectious for those crowding around the table laughed also, except Waco Boy and Charlie Dusset.
“Yeah? What’s your name, feller?” said Waco Boy.
And Chiun told them his name, but in Korean. They did not understand.
“I think that’s funny,” said Waco Boy.
“Fools usually do,” said Chiun and this time even Charlie Dusset laughed.
“You want to put your money where your mouth is?” said Waco Boy. He set his hand bridge on the green felt top and with a smooth–honed stroke put away the seven ball in the side pocket, the eight ball on a bank the length of the table, which left the cue ball right behind the nine at a corner pocket. He put the yellow nine away with a short stroke that left the cue ball dead where it hit. Charlie Dusset paid out with his last bill.
“I presume you wish me to gamble?” said Chiun.
“You presumes correctly.”
“On the outcome of this game?”
“Correct,” said Waco Boy.
“I do not gamble,” said Chiun. “Gambling makes a person weak. It robs him of his self–worth, for a man who places his fate in luck instead of in his own skills surrenders his well–being to the whims of fortune.”
“You’re just a talker then?”
“I did not say that.”
Waco Boy grabbed a roll of bills out of his pockets and threw them on the green felt table. “Put up or shut up.”
“Do you have gold?” said Chiun.
“I thought you didn’t gamble,” said Waco Boy.
“Defeating you in any contest of skill is not gambling,” said Chiun and this remark almost leveled Charlie Dusset with laughter.
“I got a gold watch,” said Waco Boy and before he could get it off his wrist, the long fingernails of the Oriental had it off and then back on while Waco Boy’s stubby fingers seemed to grub hopelessly.
“It is not gold,” said Chiun. “But since I have nothing else to do at this moment, I shall play you for that paper. This is gold.”
From his kimono, Chiun took out a large thick coin, shiny an
d yellow. And he put it on the edge of the table. But the people around allowed they didn’t know if it were real gold.
“It is an English Victoria, accepted the whole world over.”
And the folks around the table allowed it sure was a fine–looking coin and someone said he had read about British Victorias and they were sure worth a lot of money. But Waco Boy said as he didn’t quite know if he wanted to risk $758 against a single coin, no matter how much it was worth.
Chiun added another coin.
“Or even two,” said Waco Boy. “Maybe a hundred against one of them.”
“I will offer two against your paper of what you think is a hundred valuation.”
“Better watch out, Mister,” said Charlie Dusset. “Waco Boy’s the best in the whole state. All Missouri.”
“All of Missouri?” said Chiun, clasping a long delicate hand to his chest. “Next you will tell me he is the best in all America and then the continent.”
“He’s pretty good, Mister,” said Charlie Dusset. “He cleaned me out.”
“Ah, what formidableness. Nevertheless, I will take my poor chances.”
“You want to break?” asked Waco Boy.
“What is break?”
“Taking the first shot.”
“I see. And how is this game won? What are the rules?”
“You take this cue stick and you hit the white ball into first the one ball and you knock that in. Then the two and so on until the nine. When you get the nine you win.”
“I see,” said Chiun. “And what if the nine should go in on the first stroke?”
“You win.”
“I see,” said Chiun as Waco Boy placed the nine balls in a diamond formation at the other end of the table. And Chiun asked to hold the balls to see what they felt like and Waco Boy rolled him one and he lifted it and asked to see another, but Waco Boy said they were all identical. To this, Chiun answered no, they were not all identical. The blue one was not as perfectly round as the orange one and the green one was heavier than all the rest and although those around him laughed, Chiun persisted in feeling every one of the balls, and had they noticed that when he rolled them back they stopped on the table exactly where they had been in the rack, they might have expected what would happen next.
Deadly Seeds Page 4