Fool's Gold

by Warren Murphy

  Crazy, Smith thought. Hollywood had gotten to this one's brain, whoever he was. There was nothing left. What was he going to ask for now?

  "Well, what is it you want?" Smith said.

  "I've been giving it a lot of thought. I want three hundred fifty thousand and thirteen points."

  Smith hesitated a moment. If he offered it, what would this madman want next? He thought for a split second, then reverted to his tight-fisted New England roots.

  He slammed his fist on the desk.

  "Not a chance," he shouted. "That's it. No three hundred fifty and no thirteen points. And no two hundred fifty or ten points either. The offer's now two hundred and eight points. Take it or leave it. You've got five seconds. One. Two— —"

  "Hold on; wait."

  "No wait," Smith snarled. "I'm not going to be jerked around forever. Three. Four. Five— —"

  "Okay, okay," whined Barry Schweid. "You got a deal. Two hundred and eight points. I'll throw in a free rewrite. Don't tell the union."

  "I don't know," Smith said. "It's a lot of money."

  "One-ninety. I'll take one-ninety."

  "Okay," Smith said after a pause. "now who the hell are you? You're not playing games with me anymore."

  "All right. I'm Barry Schweid."

  "Address and phone number. My lawyers will need it," Smith said.

  Schweid rattled off the numbers and said, "I don't know much about you, you know. Just who are you?"

  "The person who's going to pay you one-ninety and eight points. I want that script in my hands the day after tomorrow." Smith gave him the number of a postal box in Manhattan. "Without fail. You got it?"

  "Now you sound like a producer," said Schweid. "It'll be there."

  "And I don't want a lot of copies floating around either," Smith said, and then hung up.

  As he hung up the telephone, Smith smiled. Maybe he should start treating Remo that way. It might be more effective than trying to reason with him. It was a thought he decided to hold for a while.

  And three thousand miles away, Barry Schweid replaced his telephone receiver. By trying to negotiate on his own, he had cost himself sixty thousand dollars and two points.

  It wasn't fair. Producers were always taking advantage of writers. He decided he needed help, and the longer he thought, the more sure he was that he had exactly the right people to deal with one thieving producer.

  Two thieving producers.

  Bindle and Marmelstein.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The crowd sounded far away, but when they shouted "Olé," even the walls seemed to vibrate.

  Remo groused, "This is getting absurd. Can't you take us anyplace without cows?" but Terri answered only with an annoyed "Shhhhh."

  She was walking through a darkened tunnel, playing a flashlight on the walls. The only other illumination came from a single small lightbulb fixed to the stone ceiling of the tunnel thirty yards behind them and from a thin sliver of sunlight that snaked in under some kind of large wooden door twenty yards in front of them.

  "Olé! Olé!" The crowd roared again.

  "It's here somewhere," Terri said in exasperation, waving the flashlight angrily along the sweating stone walls. The air was musty, filled with sour dampness and the sweet decaying animal smell that reminded Remo of hamburgers. From back in the days when he was able to eat hamburgers.

  Remo noticed that Chiun, standing alongside the woman, was rubbing the toe of his sandal in the white powder deposits on the stone floor, which years of dampness had washed from the tunnel's limestone walls. Chiun's toe scored the powder along the base of the walls, as if he were idly marking time, but Remo could tell, by the concentrated hunch of Chiun's shoulders, that he was not idling.

  As Terry Pomfret continue to play her light on the walls, feeling the stone with her free hand, looking for something, anything, Chiun turned away to the other side of the tunnel and began to examine the powder on the floor there.

  Toe pushed through the powder. Step. Toe again through the powder.

  Remo was bored. He slumped down into a sitting position on the floor. The wall was cold and unyielding against his back and he felt its dampness through his thin black t-shirt. He watched Terri wandering around, shining her light, and Chiun wandering around, dragging his toe, and realized he was tired. Tired of the assignments, tired of the travel, tired of the same damn dullness of it all. He tried to think back to the days, so many years ago, before he had become one with Sinanju.

  He had never thought of being an assassin then. He had been just a cop, his head filled with cop's ideas and cop's goals and cop's ambitions, most of which involved staying alive, not letting the bastards put a bullet in your belly, and getting out at age 55 after twenty years minimum service and spending the rest of his life fishing. He never even thought of assassins and didn't know that they existed.

  But suppose he had thought about being an assassin, what would he have thought? That it was an exciting glamorous life? The spies who came in from the cold? James Bond with exploding suitcases and poison pellets and a license to kill? One-man battles against the Mafia? Women sniffing around?

  And what was the truth?

  It was all of those things and none of them. It was Smith, always with a new assignment for him, always worrying about the end of the world, the end of civilization as we know it, the end of CURE. And Remo would grumble and take the assignment and almost all the assignments were wait, wait, wait. A few minutes of exercise and then more waiting. Only the exercise, the chance to use his skills, kept him happy and busy. The waiting just made him bored.

  He watched Chiun push his toe through the dust.

  Was Chiun bored too? Had thousands of years of Masters of Sinanju spent their lives in boredom and desperation, wishing something, anything, would happen?

  No. It was the difference between Chiun and himself; the difference between the real Master of Sinanju and the young American who would someday be the next reigning Master of Sinanju.

  Chiun could take each day as it came, each part of life as it happened, his being filled with an inner peace and kindness that came from knowing who and what he was. Remo was still unsure, confused, torn between the worlds of the West where he was born and the East where his spirit now lived. But Chiun was at rest with himself, and it made Remo envy his peaceful composure.

  Chiun, still shuffling his feet through the limestone powder, had reached Remo. His sandaled foot touched Remo's.

  "Move your feet, retard," Chiun said.

  Remo looked down. His feet were in Chiun's way.

  So much for inner peace, Remo thought. Give me confusion every time.

  Chiun kicked him to make him move his feet.

  Commander Spencer was among the first passengers to leave the plane in Madrid, but he had stopped short inside the boarding area when he saw another metal detector he would have to pass through.

  He had no more mock doctors up his sleeve, but he allowed himself a smile when he thought of what he actually had up his sleeves: two heat-seeking portable missiles, designed for hand firing.

  He turned back to the ramp to reboard the plane. The last passengers were leaving, giving the obligatory thanks to a male flight attendant of spurious goodwill and indeterminate sexual preference, whose primary contribution to the flight's bonhomie was to refuse anyone who asked a second bag of peanuts.

  Spencer brushed by him.

  "Left something on my seat," he said apologetically.

  "Someone always does," the steward sniffed.

  Spencer went toward the back of the plane, past his seat and into the small restroom where he locked the door, leaned against the sink, prepared himself and waited.

  Five minutes later, the steward knocked on the door.

  "Are you in there? You really shouldn't be in there. There are restrooms in the airport terminal. I must ask you to leave the plane now."

  The restroom door opened and a strong arm reached out and yanked the steward inside.

 
; With one smooth motion, Spencer cut his throat, then leaned the dying body over the sink, so that the blood from the wound would run into the sink and not down onto the steward's uniform.

  Cramped in the close quarters, Spencer stripped the steward's uniform.

  "Bloody look like bleeding pilots they do," he mumbled to himself. The uniform was not much of a fit, particularly over his blue pinstriped suit. But it would do.

  He opened the door and peered out. The passenger cabin was empty. He shut the door behind him, ripped the lid from one of the passenger seat's ashtrays and jammed it as a wedge into the base of the door. It wouldn't keep anyone out, but it would hold long enough to convince somebody that a tool kit was needed to fix the recalcitrant door. By that time, Spencer would be gone.

  A few moments later, he fell in with a group of blond stewardesses who had just gotten off a Pan-American plane. He listened to them chatter in some dogbark accent about the best places in Madrid to snare rich men. They all walked past the airport's metal detector and Spencer waved to the young woman on duty there. She smiled back at him and winked.

  Boring, he thought. It was all so deadly boring. He hoped that the Yank and the Chink would at least be a moderate challenge, something to lift his flagging interest.

  "Young woman, it is here," Chiun said.

  Remo saw Chiun standing in front of a section of wall that looked to Remo no different from any other section. Terri, thirty feet away, hurried down to Chiun.

  She shone the flashlight on the section of wall and said, "I don't see anyth... oh, there. Under the dirt."

  "Yes," said Chiun.

  With a handkerchief from her back pocket, Terri began to rub away at the gritty grime on the wall. Remo saw the first faint glimmering of gold begin to appear, reflecting dully in the beam of her flashlight.

  Chiun backed away, toward Remo, to watch.

  "How'd you know it was there?" Remo asked.

  "The powder on the ground."

  "Yeah? What about it?" Remo asked.

  "You are really dense sometimes," said Chiun. "There was not as much of it there as elsewhere."

  "What does that prove?"

  "Is it not enough that I found the golden plaque? Must I be subjected always to this merciless cross-examination?" Chiun said.

  "I just want to understand how you think," Remo said. "That's not merciless. Except to me."

  "It is intrusive," Chiun said. "Everything is there for you to see. Why do you not see it?"

  "Because I don't know what I'm supposed to see," Remo said.

  "And if a man with his eyes screwed tightly closed asks what color the sky is and someone tells him, does that mean he can see the next sky with his eyes still closed?" asked Chiun.

  "I don't know what the hell that means," said Remo.

  "That is your problem, Remo. That is always your problem and it is why you will never amount to anything. You do not know what anything means."

  "I'm not that bad. You're just ticked off because that Jap didn't have a Space Invaders game for you to play."

  "Yes, you are that bad. But because it will be the only way I will ever have any peace on this earth, I will explain it to you. There is less of that lime powder on the wall here than there is anywhere else. What does that mean?"

  "Probably that something disturbed it," Remo said. "Somehow removed the powder."

  "Correct. Now since that is the only place in this godforsaken tunnel that is different, is it not reasonable to expect that there is a reason for its being different? A reason such as that plaque being on the wall?"

  "I guess that's logical," Remo allowed.

  "But that's not all," Chiun said.

  "It never is," Remo said.

  "Why would that plaque being there..." Chiun pointed to the wall where Terri Pomfret, oblivious to both of them, had finished scrubbing the encaked dirt from the golden plaque, "... Cause any change in the amount of powder there?" Chiun pointed to the floor at Terri's feet.

  "Little Father?" Remo said.

  "What?"

  "Damned if I know," said Remo. "Or care."

  "You are hopeless," Chiun said and walked away down the tunnel.

  And because he didn't want Chiun to think he was hopeless, Remo tried to think, really think, about the significance of less powder on the floor. What could it mean? Had someone removed the powder? But why had they removed it in that spot? If they had, didn't it mean that someone knew the plaque was there?

  He tried to think about it but his mind kept drifting away. Even in the semidarkness of the tunnel, he could see clearly because his eyes opened wide, like a cat's, to pull in every mote of available light. It was a matter of simple muscular control to one of Sinanju, a thing that even cheap cameras and binoculars were able to do, but that most people, whose eyes contained the most brilliantly devised lenses ever seen on earth, found impossible to imitate.

  With his light-absorbing vision, he watched Terri Pomfret's rear end jiggle as she scrubbed away at the plaque and he soon forgot to think about the plaque and pleasantly thought about Terri's rear end.

  He felt no guilt. It had often been his experience that when he tried to think about things, he could never think his way through them, but when he allowed himself to forget them, then the answer to the problem often jumped into his mind of its own accord. As if it were just waiting there, ready to solve itself, but it just wouldn't do it until he stopped bothering it.

  Maybe that would happen now and he would impress Chiun. But it wouldn't happen if he kept staring at Terri Pomfret's rear end, clad tightly in faded blue denims whose softness seemed only to hint at the softness under them, whose velvet texture he could almost feel under his fingers, whose....

  He concentrated on the limestone powder on the floor. He saw Chiun coming back down the tunnel toward them. And he heard Terri say, "Oooohhhh." It was a long, sad, disappointed sound and when she turned to face Remo, her face was sitting Shiva.

  "What's the matter?" he said.

  "It isn't here," she said.

  "What's new?" Remo said. "It hasn't been anywhere we've gone."

  "This is new," Terri said. "It's not here and it's not anywhere."

  Bullfights were really rather dull. Oh, perhaps they were all right for Spanish heathen who liked to see miniature men in tights and ballet shoes dancing around in front of a dumb beast, but somehow it left Spencer's blood unmoved.

  "Olé, indeed," he muttered to himself. The crowd hushed as the matador drew the short curved sword from under the muleta. Slowly, holding the small cape at waist height and peering down the length of the sword which he held near his shoulder, the torero advanced on the poor confused bull, which stood in the middle of the arena, bleeding, sweating, tormented. If the beast had had a brain to wonder with, he would be wondering why he was being taunted by this young jackrabbit, Spencer thought, even as the bull, with the bravery born of stupidity, charged the red cape one more time and the matador plunged the curved blade down behind the bull s neck, and rolled off to the left to escape the bull's right horn. The blade curved down, severing the spinal cord and piercing a lung before cutting into the beast's giant heart.

  The bull stopped leadenly in its tracks, and then, like a newsreel film of an exploded building collapsing, seemed to come apart in sections. First it dropped to its knees and then its rear legs collapsed and then it coughed, a hacking spray of blood that spotted the sand for fifteen feet in front of his body, and then it pitched onto its side and quietly, heroically, stupidly died.

  The crowd leaped to its feet cheering for the torero who now strutted around the ring, looking up at the spectators, waving his hat to the ladies, curiously mincing in his walk, as the fans shouted their approval of his bravery in the face of death.

  And Commander Hilton Marmaduke Spencer, O.G., K.L.M., D.S.C., thought it was all kind of disgusting and pointless, fit only for the brutish unwashed, and got up from his chair and started downstairs to kill people.

  Terri looked away from
Remo to Chiun. "It says there's no gold," she said. She turned back toward the plaque and illuminated it with the flashlight in her hand. "It says— —"

  Chiun spoke softly. "It says 'Look no further. The gold is no more. You will not find it.' "

  Terri wheeled around. "How did you know?"

  "It was many years ago," Chiun said, "in the time of the Master Hup To. He came to Hamidia to do something for the chief of the golden people there. That master learned the language of the people and masters pass these things along." He looked at Remo. "Except some masters who are so unfortunate as to have no one to pass wisdom along to. The life of some is spent in having to shout into cracks in mountains, wishing they were ears."

  "I've got it," Remo yelled.

  "Keep it," Chiun said.

  Terri asked Chiun, "Why didn't you tell me you read ancient Hamidian?"

  "Because it was not necessary. You have translated all correctly and have missed nothing. Until now," Chiun said.

  "No, I've really got it," Remo yelled again. He got to his feet.

  "Be quiet," Terri said. She asked Chiun, "What have I missed?"

  "Do you not notice something strange about the carvings that made these letters?" Chiun asked.

  "No," Terri answered slowly. "They're all the same. Wait."

  "That's it," Remo said. "they're all the same." He talked fast so no one would interrupt. "They're all the same because they were all written by the same person. That's why there's less powder on the ground under the plaque. Because somebody disturbed it when he came here to hang the plaque. That's why. It was probably the same guy who hung the plaques all over. That's how it was. I figured it out. Me." He looked at Chiun, who ignored him and looked at Terri. Then Remo looked at Terri, who ignored him to look at Chiun.

  Terri said, "The writing's exactly the same. That shouldn't be. There should be differences if the plaques were engraved by different people at different times. They were all written by just one person."