Holy Terror

by Warren Murphy

  “If you think I’m flipping cards with you again for lunch, fella, you’re off your num-num.”

  “Mumblety-peg?”

  “I saw you in the park with that penknife. It looked like it had strings on it.”

  “Darts?”

  “You were drunk for a week on darts. You were the only guy on Bourbon Street with cash in his pocket.”

  “Pool? Golf? Tennis? Squash? Skittleball?”

  “Today I eat lunch. Hunt, if I had your talent, I’d turn pro. I’d be out on the golf circuit tomorrow. The tennis circuit. I’d hustle pool.”

  “Can’t. I promised Mother. I can’t use it for money.”

  “You call your talent ‘it.’ I never understood that.”

  “Good,” said Hunt and was glad the conversation was interrupted by a secretary who said he was wanted in the manager’s office.

  “Should I clean out my desk now or after?” asked Hunt.

  “I don’t think ever,” said the secretary, and she brought him to the main office where he recognized two men because he had seen their portraits on the office walls. Winthrop Dalton and V. Rodefer Harrow III. They both wore dark striped suits with vests. Dalton had the gaunt gray-haired probity of old New York State wealth. Harrow was fatter, with delicate jowls and weak blue eyes. He was as bald as a bicuspid.

  “You’re the De Chef lad, aren’t you?” asked Dalton. He sat on the right of the office manager’s desk, Harrow on the left. The office manager was out.

  “Well, sir, yes, you might say so. Except that on my father’s side I’m a Hunt. L. Hunt of Texarkana. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Electrical contracting. Soroptimist’s Man of the Year, 1954. First Exalted Ruler of the Arkansas Elks. Largest distributor in the South for the Vermilion Socket.”

  “Can’t say that I have,” said Dalton. “Sit down and tell us about your mother. Specifically, her father.”

  “Well, he’s dead, sir.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Did he have any other offspring?”

  “Yes, he had a son.”

  Hunt saw V. Rodefer Harrow’s jowls quiver.

  “And where does your uncle live?” asked Dalton.

  “He died as a child. He was three. A hunting accident. It sounds crazy explaining it,” said Hunt, sitting tentatively in one of the fine leather chairs purchased by the office in better days. He sat with his hands on the polished wooden arm rests as if ready to leave instantly on command.

  “Tell us about it. We know the world is made of many strange things. The perfect truth itself is strange.”

  “Well, he was drowned in a feeder stream.”

  “Nothing strange about that,” said Dalton.

  “It was what he was doing at the time, sir. He was hunting, if you can believe it.”

  “I do. And at what age did you start hunting?”

  “Well, grandpa—my mother’s father—started me young, and then he died, and Ma made me promise never to do it again, and I just haven’t hunted since. And when she died, she left me the place up at Plaquemens, his place. Uh, he died of a heart attack. And, well, with the estate, the first mortgage on it, I went into business. I joined Dalton, Harrow, Petersen and Smith. And I don’t hunt.”

  “You said ‘it.’ What’s ‘it’?”

  “Oh, like a talent we have. I’d rather not discuss the subject.”

  “I’d rather you would.”

  “Well, sir, it’s personal.”

  “I can see your reluctance. Both V. Rodefer and I can understand your reluctance. But we’d like you to trust us. As friends.”

  “As friends,” said V. Rodefer Harrow III.

  “As good friends,” said Winthrop Dalton.

  “I’d rather not, sir, it’s really embarrassing.”

  “Friends shouldn’t be embarrassed in front of friends,” said Winthrop Dalton. “Are you embarrassed in front of me, V. Rodefer?”

  “I’m too rich to be embarrassed,” said V. Rodefer Harrow III.

  “My apologies for V. Rodefer. He’s from the coast. Please continue.”

  “Well, we have a special talent in our family. At least on my mother’s side. It has to do with objects. It sounds simple, but it’s really complicated, and its got a sordid history, and my mother made me promise never to pass it on. And it looks like I’m not going to because I don’t have a son.”

  “We know that, but wouldn’t you teach it to someone else?” asked Dalton.

  “It’s not something you can exactly teach. You can only teach it to certain persons, you know. Some people can tell where an object is by feel, and there’s a certain hereditary thing at work here also, if you know what I mean.”

  “You’ve got the ‘it’ then?”

  “Oh, yeah. Just as if my father’s side had been De Chef.”

  Harrow’s jowls jiggled in delight.

  “Could you show it to us, the ‘it’, of course?” said Winthrop Dalton.

  “Sure,” said Hunt rising from the chair. He collected a piece of note paper, a pen, a calendar, popped them once lightly in an upturned palm and, then, announcing “the wastebasket there,” flipped the pen sideways, then the calendar, and then with a skimming slash of his hand hurled the paper aloft. The pen, like a small spear, hit point first and rattled into the bottom of the metal pail. The calendar clunked in on a direct line, and the paper veered up, then around, settled to the right of the basket, and then leaned left and in.

  “With the paper, it’s the air. Paper is the most complicated. Like the real secret is your not working with constants. People only know it when they, say, fire a gun and there’s a stiff cross breeze. I mean like twenty knots. Know what I mean? Or golfers on a muggy day, it’s really got to be muggy though, and then they realize they’re not working with a constant. It’s really a form of sensitivity, knowing where everything is in relationship to everything else and its mass, of course. Most people consider air nothing, but it isn’t. It’s a thing. Like water or that desk. Air’s a thing.”

  “This skill you have works with all objects?” asked Winthrop Dalton. V. Rodefer Harrow leaned forward over his paunch, the light shining on his tightly stretched dome.

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s go to a golf course,” said Dalton. “For a friendly round.”

  “A thousand dollars a hole,” said Harrow.

  “I don’t have—I hate to say it for a man in the market, but I don’t have a thousand dollars.”

  “That’s very typical of men in the market. How much do you have?”

  “I have thirty-five, no, thirty-three cents. I bought a Danish. That’s what I have.”

  “We’ll play for that,” said Harrow.

  “I don’t have greens fees.”

  “We’ll take care of it. Do you have clubs? Never mind, we’ll get you clubs. Don’t think of yourself as poor just because you don’t have money. We suffer reversals too, but the key to our ‘it,’ so to speak, is that we don’t think of ourselves as poor. And we don’t want you to either.”

  “Absolutely not,” said V. Rodefer Harrow.

  If it had not been these two particular men, Ferdinand De Chef Hunt would have been embarrassed to be out on the course with two men in vests and rolled up sleeves and street shoes.

  Dalton had argued with the club pro over the price of rented clubs, something that would have withered Hunt’s pride, if it had not been the Winthrop Dalton who had done it. Dalton asked for the cheapest balls.

  When Dalton teed off on the par four 425-yard first hole, he sliced viciously into underbrush that lined Lake Pontchartrain. He delayed other starts behind him for twenty minutes while looking for the ball, even though he found two others in the process.

  Young Hunt drove a not quite respectable 165 yards, but the drive was ruler-straight down the fairway. The breeze off the lake invigorated him. The grass was freshly cut and smelled good, the sun was warm and Ferdinand De Chef Hunt forgot about the stock market as completely as he could.

  His second shot was 150 yards, again
straight down the fairway, and V. Rodefer Harrow, riding in the cart, commented that he wasn’t seeing anything impressive. Then Hunt hit his six iron a looping long, perfect parabola directly at the pin.

  “Whew,” whistled Harrow.

  “Ah,” said Dalton.

  “Easy,” said Hunt. He tapped in a two-inch putt for a par four.

  “We each owe you thirty-three cents,” said Dalton. “That’s sixty-six cents.” He had Harrow count the change out of his pocket.

  “Let’s play for sixty-six cents each. I want to get my money back,” said Dalton. “Don’t you, V. Rodefer?”

  “Absolutely,” said Harrow, who had scored a nine with cheating. Dalton had a seven with a good putt.

  The next was another par four, which Hunt made with identical shots, including a four-inch putt after a magnificent six iron.

  “Now you’ve got a dollar thirty-two. Let’s go for double or nothing.”

  “This is a par three, 170 yards. I’m super on those,” said Hunt.

  “Let’s see how super.”

  Super was a birdie two, and Hunt found himself playing for $2.64 on the next hole. As they went down fairways and on to putting greens, his new friends asked him about the “it,” each time doubling the bet and saying they had to have a chance to get back their money. By the seventh hole they were playing for $42.24, and Hunt was positively expansive with his new friends.

  His mother, he told them, had made him promise never to use the “it” for a living because of the sordid past of the talent. The talent was not always used in sporting events. Originally it had been used with knives and guns for profit. De Chef was an old French name. It went, back to a servant in the court of Louis XIV. The servant was an assistant chef, but to give him the right to kill royalty, the king had to make him royalty. The whole thing came about when an Oriental murderer—there was no other word for it—came to the court at the request of the king. Hunt didn’t know how much history Dalton and Harrow knew, but at that time the Sun King, as Louis was called, was having trouble with the lords. He wanted to unify the nation. Well, this murderer took some sort of a dislike to France. He wasn’t a Chinaman was the only description that had been passed down in the De Chef family. But he didn’t like France. And the king who had a lot of respect—well, it was probably fear—said he would pay a large amount of money to this guy to teach a few of his loyal lords some of what he could do. The Oriental was supposed to be amazing.

  “We think you’re amazing,” said Harrow, counting out $169 in bills and pushing them into Hunt’s pocket as they stepped off the tenth green and headed back toward the clubhouse.

  “No. This guy was supposed to be. I mean what I’m doing was nothing, or at least not much. In any case, none of the lords could quite pick it up, and this Oriental finds the assistant chef can learn, and the king says a commoner can’t kill royalty, so to solve the problem like they always do in France, they found a bastardy thing somewhere whereby my ancestor had noble blood and therefore, picking up the ‘it’ from the Oriental, he could go out and zonk any nobility the king wished. When the family moved from France, before the revolution, they sort of made their money the same way until my mother. And she said enough is enough and made me promise never to use the talent for money.”

  “A noble thought and promise,” said Dalton. “But if something is wrong and untrue, then it’s not noble, is it?”

  “Well, I guess not,” said Hunt, who, having won $337.92, offered to pay for dinner. And when he did so, when he had paid out nearly $200 for dinner at Maxim’s for three and he had already spent part of his winnings, Winthrop Dalton informed him he had already broken his promise to his mother.

  “But it only started with thirty-three cents. I always used to play for lunches and things and maybe drinks and a few bucks.”

  “Well, it’s now three hundred and thirty-seven dollars and ninety-two cents.”

  “I’ll give it back.”

  “That won’t unbreak the promise, and frankly we don’t want it back. It was a pleasure to see you in action.”

  “It certainly was,” said Harrow. “Probably one of life’s fifteen best thrills.”

  “Does it hurt to have broken that promise?” asked Dalton.

  “It does now,” said Hunt.

  “But it didn’t until you told yourself so. When you had broken the promise without knowing it, the whole thing felt fine, yes or no?”

  “Well, yes,” said Hunt.

  “Are you your own friend or your enemy?” said Harrow.

  “I guess I’m my friend.”

  “Then why do you make yourself feel bad?”

  “I, uh, made a promise.”

  “Right. And in your attitude toward that promise you’re ready to take food out of your own mouth, force yourself to live in a slum—you’re broke—and in general hurt yourself. Do you really think you deserve to hurt yourself?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “I was taught a promise is a promise.”

  “You were taught a lot of things, and so was I, a lot of things that made me miserable and unhappy and, frankly, a hateful person,” said Dalton.

  “You can leave here broke,” said Harrow. “You can return the money. You can even owe us for this meal and go without lunches for a month to repay me with money I don’t need. Will that make you happy?”

  “Of course not,” said Hunt.

  “Then that’s pretty stupid, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Dalton stretched a veined hand out over the youthful shoulder.

  “Tell me, son, aren’t you a little bit tired of being stupid, of hurting yourself, of making your one life miserable. Aren’t you?”

  “I guess, yes.”

  “You guess yes. You don’t know?” asked Dalton. “Are you stupid?”

  “No.”

  “Then stop acting like it,” said Dalton. “What we’re getting at is that you’d be pretty stupid to starve, trying to keep a promise that’s already broken.”

  “I’ll keep the money,” said Hunt.

  “Well, son, there’s just a little bit more. We want you to be rich and happy. Will you join us in making you rich and happy?”

  “Will you?” asked V. Rodefer Harrow III.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ferdinand De Chef Hunt.

  Dalton leaned forward. “We want you to meet the most wonderful person on earth. He’s only fifteen years old, and he knows more than all of us put together about how to make people happy. Important people too. You’d be surprised.”

  “He’s right here in America now,” said Harrow.

  “Praised be his blissful name,” said Winthrop Dalton.

  “All praise be to his perfect blissfulness,” said V. Rodefer Harrow III.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DR. HAROLD W. SMITH looked with pinched eyes at the stapled-together pile of papers on his large plain metal desk.

  “Lease Agreement,” it was headed, and he read through the whereases, which were contradicted by the “be it noted howevers,” and the wherefores, which were watered down by the “except in the event ofs,” and automatically translated them into English to learn that the Divine Bliss Mission, Inc., had leased Kezar Stadium in San Francisco for one night, four days hence “for purposes of a religious meeting.”

  The lease agreement was signed for the Divine Bliss Mission, Inc., by one Gasphali Krishna, also known as Irving Rosenblatt, who bore the title of “Chief Arch-Priest, California district.” A stamped notation on the last page of the lease recorded it as “paid in full.”

  Smith read the lease again. This was it, “the big thing.” He had no doubt about it, but what was a big thing about a revival tent meeting, no matter what kind of stadium it was held in? From Billy Sunday through Aimee Semple McPherson through Father Divine and Prophet Jones and Billy Graham and Oral Roberts, millions of people had been led up to someone else’s vision of God for periods of sometimes as long as two days, and
the country was none the worse for it. What was this Indian juvenile delinquent going to do that was different?

  Of course, there was the list of names that Remo had given Smith of the maharaji’s followers. Some of them highly placed and important people. But so what? What were they going to do that could somehow justify all this effort that Smith’s organization was putting into a teenage Indian boy?

  Smith let his eyes wander off the lease form again. If it had not been for the fact that a number of Americans who had gone to Patna had disappeared, and the Indian government had refused to show any concern about it, Smith realized he would seriously question whether this was any of CURE’s business at all. There was just nothing there in all he had seen so far that represented a threat to the government. And that was, after all, CURE’s one and only mission—the preservation of constitutional government. It was why CURE had been created by a now dead president and why Smith had been put in charge of it, and it was why only two people besides the president in office—Smith and Remo—knew what CURE was and what it did.

  From a standpoint of secrecy, CURE made the Manhattan Project look like a meeting of Greenwich Village Democratic committeemen. And why not? The Manhattan Project had produced only the atomic bomb, but CURE’s secrecy might be even more important, for if CURE should be exposed, it would be an admission that constitutional government hadn’t worked and didn’t work, and it might bring the entire nation down.

  Dr. Smith put aside the lease form. He had made up his mind. Remo was working on the case, and he would let that continue before deciding whether or not to assign Remo to other things. And just as a precaution, he would take Remo’s list of names and see that they were immobilized before the Kezar Stadium Blissathon of the Maharaji Dor. Something, perhaps, under the cover of a required hospital examination. And that would cover all the bases for a while. But he wished he had the names of all Dor’s American followers. Remo had said there were more.

  Smith looked at the computer terminal recessed under a glass panel on his desk, which silently and continuously printed summary conclusions of the data gathered by thousands of agents across the country, agents who thought they were working for the FBI and the tax bureau and as customs inspectors and bank examiners, but all of whose reports wound up in CURE’s computers.