Death Check

by Warren Murphy

  So Remo Williams stood silently in the gymnasium feeling his conditioning leave him. He breathed deeply, then slid through the dark, in almost imperceptible movements, and was in the balcony. He wore black tennis shoes so that he could not see his feet, a tee shirt dyed black so that the white of the shirt in the dark would not throw off unbalancing brightness. His shorts were black. Night moving in night.

  He moved from the balcony rail to the top of the basketball backboard. He seated himself carefully, with his right hand between his legs and his legs stretched out over the hoop below. Funny, he thought. When he was a policeman in his twenties, he would have been puffing if he ran a block, and probably would have had to engineer a desk job by thirty-five or face a heart attack. It was nice then. Just walk into any bar you wanted when off duty. Have a pizza for supper if you wished. Get laid when you had a chance.

  But that was when he was alive. And when he was officially alive, there were no such things as peak periods with rice and fish and abstinence. Actually, he didn’t really have to follow the regimen. He thought about that often. He could probably do very well at less than full capacity. But a wise Korean had told him that deterioration of the body is like a stone rolling down a mountain. So easy to start, so hard to stop. And if Remo Williams couldn’t stop, he would be very dead.

  He lowered his shoes to the rim, getting the feel of its grip into the backboard. If you know the feel of objects, the feel of their mass, their movement and their strength, you could use that as your strength. That was the secret of force. To not fight it. And to not fight it was the best way to fight people when you had to.

  Remo stood up on the rim and gathered the where of the floor into his balance. He should have changed the height of the hoop, because sooner or later he would be performing muscle memory instead of proper use of balance and judgment. When he had first learned the exercise, he watched a cat for a day and a half. He had been told to become the cat. He had answered that he would prefer to become a rabbit so he could get laid, and how long was this dingaling training going to go on?

  “Until you are dead,” he was told.

  “You mean fifty years.”

  “It might be fifty seconds, if you are not good enough,” said the Korean instructor. “Watch the cat.”

  And Remo had watched the cat and for a few moments thought, really thought, he could become the cat.

  Now Remo Williams indulged his own private little joke which signalled the start of the exercise.

  “Meow,” he whispered in the silent, dark gym.

  He stood on the rim, straight up, and then his body fell forward, shoes gripping the rim by pressure, head going forward, shoes flipping up, rim adding force, body heading straight down, hair and head aiming straight at the floor, like a dark knife dropping into a dark sea.

  His hair touched the varnish of the floor and triggered a body trunk flip, the dark form in the blackened gym spinning in space, the sneakers coming around quick, rocket fast, arching and down steady standing on the wooden floor.

  Blat. The sound echoed in the gymnasium. He had held for the last hair-touching instant and then let the muscles take over, the muscles of a cat which shifted the body in air and put the feet on the floor. An exercise the body could do only when the mind was trained, trained to steal the balance of another animal.

  Remo Williams had heard the blat in the gym, the sound of his sneakers hitting the floor. He was not purring.

  “Shit,” he mumbled to himself. “The next time it’ll be my head. That dumb bastard is gonna get me killed yet, with his goddam peak period.”

  And he returned to the balcony and the backboard, this time to do it right. Without a sound when his sneakers hit the floor.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SUN REFLECTED ON THE SCALES of the fish and played on the water and warmed the covered wood pier of Giuseppe Bresicola’s wholesale fish market which jutted out into San Francisco Bay like dirty toy sticks on a blue plate.

  Bresicola’s did not smell of fish: it breathed of fish and sounded of fish, from the splat of mackerel piled on mackerel to the scrape of steel across scales. Entrails in giant barrels in seconds began the inevitable decay. Fresh seawater squooshed over the scale-caked wood. And Bresicola smiled because his friend was again visiting him.

  “I no tella you the orders today, Mr. Time-Study man. Not today.” He made a playful stab at his friend’s head. How nice this boy moved. Like a dancer. Like Willie Pep. “You don’t get the orders today.”

  “What do you mean, not today,” asked the friend who was six feet tall and husky. He scraped his brown shoes playfully on the wood, a small dance without motion. They were good shoes, $50 shoes. Once he had bought ten pairs of $100 shoes and then heaved them out into the Bay, but the next day all he did was draw money from his account and buy new shoes. So, he had gotten that out of his system and throwing shoes away meant only that you had to take the trouble of buying more.

  “It’s abalone,” said Bresicola. “We got another order from New York. Just now.”

  “So?”

  “So the last time I tell you about abalone, I no see you for a month.”

  “You think abalone has something to do with my work here?”

  “You think maybe Giuseppe is stupid, Mr. Time-Study man?”

  “No. Many people are stupid. Especially back east. But not you, paisan. Not you.”

  “It’s something maybe to do with the stock market, yes?”

  “If I said yes, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “I believe anyting you say. Anyting.”

  “It’s the stock market.”

  “Not for a minute does Giuseppe believe that.”

  “I thought you said you’d believe me?”

  “Only if you makea sense. Stock market makea no sense.”

  “Abalone makes no sense? Time studies make no sense?”

  “Nothing makes no sense,” Bresicola insisted.

  Very good, thought the time study man, because now was no time to be giving out signals. It would be a very nice way to get oneself killed. First, loss of your vibrations, then your awareness, then your balance, and before long, you were just a normal, cunning, strong human being. And that would not be enough. Not nearly enough.

  He shared with Bresicola a glass of sharp red wine, made plans for dinner with no definite date, and when he left, had decided it was long past time to eliminate the time-study man.

  He would exist until a plane ticket had been purchased with his American Express card and until $800 in travelers’ checks were cashed. He would exist all the way from San Francisco to Kennedy Airport in New York City. He would walk into the men’s room closest to the Pan American counter, look for a pair of blue suede shoes indicating that the wearer was reposing on the commode, wait till the room was clear, then mention that the urinals never worked and that he hoped some day the Americans could learn plumbing from the Swiss.

  A wallet would come out from under the closed commode door and the time-study man’s wallet would go in as exchange. The man inside would not open the door to see who got the wallet. He had been told that to open the door was to lose his job. There was even a better reason. If he should even glimpse the man who got the wallet, he would lose his life.

  Remo Williams flipped the time-study man’s wallet into the hand coming from beneath the door and snatched the other wallet in a motion so fast the person in the commode only knew there had been a switch by the change in the shade of the leather.

  So much for the time-study man. Remo Williams left the men’s room for a small cocktail lounge on the second level, from which he could look back down to make sure the blue suede shoes left the terminal without looking around.

  The bar was dark, hiding the afternoon, a perpetual womb, a dispenser of nerve killers that Remo Williams was not allowed to have because he was on peak. He ordered ginger ale, then checked the wallet.

  The seals were unbroken. He checked the credit cards and the wallet flap for the needle
he had been assured would bring instant death. With the credit cards was a small card with phone numbers that were not phone numbers. By adding the numbers in the series, Remo learned that:

  1) The Reach-Me-Urgent was the same. A Chicago dial-a-prayer. (That would have to be changed because of deteriorating phone service.)

  2) The next training checkout with Chiun, his Korean teacher, was scheduled six weeks later at Plensikoff’s Gym on Granby Street, Norfolk, Va. (Dammit, Chiun could stay alive long.)

  3) The assignment meeting was at the Port Alexandria at 8 p.m., a face-to-face, with, oh no, Harold W. Smith himself.

  4) He was now Remo Pelham. A former policeman. Born and raised in the Bronx. DeWitt Clinton High School, where he remembered only the football coach, Doc Wiedeman, who would not remember him. An M.P. in Vietnam. Chief of industrial security at a Pittsburgh mill. No family. No furniture, but books and clothes would be arriving in two days at Brewster Forum, which had just named him director of security at $17,000 per year.

  He scanned the sheet and committed it to memory. Then he folded it up and dropped it into the remnants of his ginger ale. In ten seconds, it had dissolved, making the drink murky. It had been the intention of someone that Remo should be able to dispose of the paper by swallowing it. There were two reasons he would not swallow it; one, it tasted like glue; two, he didn’t swallow things sent to him by anyone.

  He took a cab into New York City with a woman who didn’t like New York City, didn’t know why she was visiting it and would never visit it again. So many people with only one thing on their minds. Not like Troy, Ohio. Had Mr. Pelham heard of Troy, Ohio?

  “Yes, I know Troy, Ohio,” said Remo Pelham. “It has an intelligence quotient of two hundred. That’s cumulative for everyone.”

  Mr. Pelham did not have to be insulting. Mr. Pelham might have told her he was from New York City instead of becoming abusive. After all, she was sure not everyone in New York City had only one thing on their minds.

  Mr. Pelham informed the woman he was born in the Bronx and took to heart things said about New York City. He loved his home town.

  Mrs. Jones loved New York City also, she was only teasing and what hotel was Mr. Pelham staying at?

  “Not sure yet. I’m going to Riverside Drive.”

  “Is it pretty?”

  Remo turned to the woman for closer scrutiny. He should get rid of her. Now he was deciding whether he wanted to.

  She was a full-bodied woman with strong clean features, a blonde with brown eyes under heavy blue eye shadow. She wore a neat suit, whose sewing and material Remo estimated at $250 in a large Cleveland store or $550 in New York City. The ring was three karats; if flawless, a fine stone.

  The shoes oozed the subtle richness of expensive leather. Wife of manufacturer or leading citizen, on shopping trip to New York, and if convenient, uncomplicated lay for herself.

  Estimating clothes and accoutrements had been one of his poorer programs during training. But he was good enough to trust himself. As much as indicating wealth, clothes tell you what a person wants you to believe. Invariably, that could give you a handle.

  Remo Pelham answered the question: “Riverside Drive overlooks the Hudson. It’s pretty.”

  “Where on Riverside, Mac?”

  “Anywhere,” Remo told the driver.

  “You, too, lady?”

  “If I wouldn’t be bothering anyone,” she said.

  Remo Pelham said nothing. He said nothing as he paid the driver at 96th Street and Riverside Drive and got slowly out of the cab. He did not turn around nor offer to help the woman with her luggage.

  Remo Pelham did not need luggage. Neither did a half dozen other names he lived by. He walked to the low stone wall and stared out across the Hudson, glimmering in the hot September day.

  Across that river and beyond the decaying docks of Hoboken, in the city of Newark, a young policeman had been tried, found guilty of murder and executed at the state penitentiary. A young policeman who swallowed a pill from a priest who had offered last rites and promised him not eternal life, but life. He had taken the pill, passed out in the electric chair, and awakened to hear a story from a man with a hook for a hand. The story was this:

  The American constitution didn’t work and was working less each year. Criminals, using the safeguards of the constitution, daily increased in number and strength. The next step was a police state. Machiavelli’s classic perception of chaos and then repression.

  Should the government scrap the constitution? Or allow the country to come apart? There was a third choice. Suppose an organization outside the government evened the odds? An organization which could not transcend the constitution because the organization would never exist?

  If it never existed, who could say the constitution didn’t work? And when the odds were more even, the organization which did not exist would quietly close shop. Closing shop would be very easy. Only four people knew for sure what CURE did; the highest elected official; Harold W. Smith, who was the operations head; Conrad MacCleary, the man with the hook who was the recruiter and now, the latest addition, the young policeman Remo Williams who had officially died the night before in an electric chair.

  It was the high elected official who had given the go-ahead for what Remo would do. What he would do was kill. When all else failed, he would kill.

  “But why me?” Remo had asked.

  “A lot of things,” MacCleary, the recruiter, had answered. “I saw you in operation in Nam. According to a shrink who didn’t know why he was testing young policemen, you have a compulsion to mete out punishment, a vengeance fixation, he called it. Frankly, I think he’s a bag of wind. I want you because I’ve seen you move.”

  It was a good explanation. Incredibly complex training followed at the hands of Chiun, an aged Korean, who could kill with a fingernail and in whose parchment hands anything became a lethal weapon. And then Remo saw the man with the hook again. He saw him dying and he had orders to kill him.

  That had been eight years ago and now he didn’t even have an old jacket. Everything was new; nothing had worth. The Hudson breathed its stink of civilization out into the Atlantic, a giant sewer from a civilization that made everything a sewer.

  “It certainly is a lovely river,” said the woman.

  “Lady,” said Remo Pelham, “you’ve got taste up your ass.”

  As he began to walk away, she shrieked, “What about my luggage? You can’t leave me here with this luggage. I came with you. You’re the man! You’ve got to do something about this luggage.”

  And Remo took care of the luggage, a large heavy suitcase and a small modeling box, by flipping them over the dark stone wall to the West Side Highway forty yards below where they burst on the roof of a passing Cadillac.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BITTER-FACED MAN SAT sat just beyond the spotlight’s reach, his legs crossed, his left elbow on the small round table, his right hand resting in the crook of the opposite elbow. He wore a gray suit, white shirt and gray tie. His rimless glasses occasionally reflected the light as did his precision combed hairline with its micrometer-straight part.

  He did not move from this position for fifteen minutes, not when the voluptuous dancer strained in sweaty ecstasy against the confines of her beads, or when joyful enthusiasts threw dollar bills onto the floor or stuffed them in her jeweled breast cups. Smoke curled to the ceiling. Sweets-loaded trays hovered over the heads of scurrying waiters. The plinking excitement of the bouzoukis caught the audience in its rhythms and joys and shrieks of life. The man did not move.

  One man moved, almost floating through the dark crowd to the table of the bitter-faced man.

  “You’re as obvious as a bowl of garbage in Tiffany’s,” said the man known as Remo Pelham.

  “Good to see you. I want to congratulate you on your selection as director of security for Brewster Forum.”

  “You’re sitting here like a stone. Don’t you think someone might wonder what a man who acts like a
n embalmer is doing in the Port Alexandria? Isn’t it obvious you’re here to meet someone?”

  “So what?”

  “So look as if you’re having some fun. After all, aren’t we playing the sex-frustrated executive who frequents places like this for voyeuristic thrills?”

  “Something like that. Even better, the noise levels here have been checked out.”

  “You don’t look like a voyeur,” Remo insisted. “You aren’t even interested in the women.”

  “I’m interested in getting out of here. Now listen, Dammit, why the hell do I have so much trouble with you? Listen.” Smith leaned forward as a new dancer came center floor to heavy applause.

  “You look upset.”

  “I am. Listen. You will meet a man on the Staten Island ferry leaving the Battery at 11 a.m. tomorrow. He will be wearing a blue and red striped tie and carrying a gray wrapped package the size of a briefcase. It’s heavy because it’s a water case around water soluble documents. Pictures and biographies. You can get the documents out dry using the Oriental string puzzle Chiun says you know.”

  “How is Chiun?”

  “Dammit, will you listen?”

  “Will you tell me how Chiun is?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “He was worried about his arteries.”

  “I don’t know about his arteries. He’s always fine. Now listen. Major point. Brewster Forum is of utmost importance to the country, maybe the world. Your predecessor was one of ours at a low level. He was murdered, even though it was covered as a suicidal overdose of heroin. He stumbled onto something.”

  “What?”

  “We’re not sure. Pornographic photos of the top staff at the forum. The photos are genuine. But still the whole thing doesn’t ring true. You’ll see that when you meet the staff. And check resume four against pictures 10, 11, and 12.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it’s in my line,” Remo said.

  Smith ignored the interruption. “Ordinarily, we’d suspect blackmail. But that doesn’t cut either. Why would a blackmailer be working on the whole staff at Brewster Forum? There are other wealthier, more obvious, victims. No, there’s something more to it.”