Firing Line td-41

by Warren Murphy

  Sparky walked quietly up the five flights of stairs. He set his first fire in the top floor left, then sparked off one more on each landing on his way back down. Before the. fire was discovered, the stairwells would be burning good, he thought.

  Remo walked across the narrow street in front of his hotel, into a park that had been constructed over an underground parking garage.

  When he was a child, the nuns of the orphanage would, once a month, take their classes to the Newark museum, but the highlight of the day was stopping later to eat a picnic lunch in this park. It had been elegant then, spotlessly clean, filled with families and students and businessmen.

  But it too had succumbed, as had the city itself. As he stepped into the park, Remo felt cheated. Very little of his childhood belonged to him; very little of it had any meaning; but he had remembered this park fondly, and it saddened him to see it now.

  Winos sat sprawled on the benches, under the sharp glare of the overhead night lighting. Back in the bushes, Remo could hear young couples giggling in the dark. He walked farther into the park and saw a black drug pusher, wearing almost as much gold around his neck as he had in his mouth, leaning against a small maintenance building.

  A pack of youths stood about twenty yards away from the pusher, watching him, and Remo realized they were waiting their turns. First one would come up to the pusher, hand over some money, and

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  get a small package in return. As soon as he started to walk away, another would come up from the waiting group to take his place. Remo wondered if the pusher gave them numbers, as in a bakery, and they had to wait for their number to be called before they could come up to buy their drugs.

  Remo looked at three benches before he found one that wasn't broken, then sat down and watched the pusher. He saw the folding money flash white under the overhead light, and he saw the glitter of the little bags the pusher handed out, after first inspecting the money and stuffing it into his pocket. He wondered where the police were, and he was glad that Sister Mary Margaret had not lived to see this happen in their park. Something began to bubble deep down inside Remo, and at first he thought it was anger, but then he realized it was deeper than anger. It was sorrow. He had, thought to get away from the sick world in which he made his living and return to this city and the innocent days of his youth. But the sick world had invaded here, too, and he wondered, just for a fleeting moment, if there were anyplace left in America that was clean, any parks where children still played and didn't have to worry about junkies or winos or pushers.

  The pusher saw Remo watching him. He showed no fear, only curiosity, and Remo thought if it had happened years before, when the pusher still had his own teeth and Remo was still a Newark policeman, then the man would have felt fear.

  Remo wondered how long he would be able to sustain sorrow before it turned into a compulsion to do something about the cause of that sorrow.

  He watched the pusher call the small pack of waiting youths over to him. They were conferring;

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  the pusher was pointing at Remo, and the sorrow went, replaced by a cold, bitter anger. Remo got up from the park bench.

  "All right," he said aloud. "Everybody out."

  Eight faces turned toward him in surprise.

  "You heard me. Everybody out of my park," Remo said. He walked toward the group. They looked at the slim white man, then at each other, exchanging winks and grins.

  "Yoah park?" the pusher asked.

  "Yeah. My park. Clear out," Remo said.

  'This be the people's park," the pusher said. Remo was closer to him now, and the pusher slid back until he was separated from Remo by a wall of young men.

  The wall wasn't thick enough. Remo's hand reached in between the youths, grabbed the pusher by the gold chains around his neck and yanked. He flew toward Remo like a ball flying out of a pin-ball machine chute.

  "Hey, don't do that. He be our main man."

  "Yeah," grumbled another voice.

  But before they could charge Remo, he had the pusher upside down, holding him by his ankles, shaking him. Nickel bags of powder and packages of grass fell from his pockets. Remo shook harder. Money, bills and coins dropped out onto the ground. Every time Remo shook, the pusher's head hit the pavement and he groaned.

  "Help me," he moaned. "Free iffen you helps."

  "Shut up, you," Remo said. "It's free anyhow." He kicked with his toes at the drugs and money and skittered them across toward the seven young

  men.

  "There. Take what you want. Just get out of my

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  park." He kept shaking the pusher, and more drugs and money fell. Remo kept kicking them toward the group. They seemed to confer with themselves silently, then together, they made a lunge for the drugs and the cash. Within fifteen seconds, the ground was clear again, and the last of their footsteps could be heard vanishing into the night. "I get them for that," the pusher said. "It's terrible to realize you're all alone," Remo said, "isn't it?"

  "Who are you?" the pusher demanded. "What you want? Stop hitting my head."

  Remo turned the pusher right side up. He was as tall as Remo but even thinner.

  "Just another student of Sister Mary Margaret,"" Remo said. "She doesn't like what you're doing to her park."

  The pusher was busy straightening his clothing. "I told you, this the people's park." The pusher rubbed his head with his left hand. His right hand reached inside the rear waistband of his trousers and came out with a switchblade knife, which he clicked open and pointed toward Remo. In the overhead light it was brittle and glassy looking.

  Remo shook his head. "Too bad," he said. "And I was going to let you go."

  "You let shit," the pusher said. "You cost me and I taking it back, sucker. Slice by slice."

  He waved the knife at Remo's throat. Remo leaned back. The knife passed harmlessly in front of his face. Then Remo had the pusher, upside down again, dragging him across the pavement toward the park bench. He lifted him up, then dropped him head first into a litter basket. The pusher's head hit with a glassy clunk against the

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  bottles that filled the basket. The pusher didn't fit. Remo pressed down until he did. The cracking of bottles was the only sound after one strong initial groan. Finally, he fit. Only his shoes stuck out of the basket. They were ugly yellow shoes with soles and heels two inches high. Remo bent the man's legs until the shoes fit into the basket, then gave one last push down for good measure. Everything fit now. He wiped his hands over a job well done and went back to sit on the bench.

  Ten minutes later, he heard footsteps approaching him. They were loud, heavy footsteps, meant to be loud and heavy. To Remo that spelled cop. Young cop.

  Remo looked down at the pavement when the policeman spoke. "What are you doing here, mister?" There was a frightened quaver in his voice.

  "Just sitting in my park," Remo said.

  "Your park?"

  "Yeah. Mine and Sister Mary Margaret's," Remo said.

  The patrolman relaxed a little, as if deciding that Remo was a harmless nut case.

  "You going to keep sitting there?" he asked Remo after a pause.

  "Yes."

  "This park is dangerous for a white man," the cop said.

  For the first time, Remo looked up from his feet and his eyes met the patrolman's eyes.

  "Not tonight," he said. "Not tonight."

  Ruby had smelled it before she heard it or saw it. She snapped up into a sitting position in bed. She took a deep breath. There was no mistaking

  it; it was a smell that she had lived with since childhood.

  Fire.

  Ruby jumped out of bed and shook her sixteen-year-old cousin awake.

  "Lenora, wake up. The place is on fire."

  The teenagers was groggy, slow to respond, and Ruby slapped her hard across the cheek.

  The girl woke, shaking her head, her hands going involuntarily to her cheek.

  She looked at Ruby, who was al
ready moving toward the door. "The place is on fire," Ruby called over her shoulder. "We've got to wake everybody up."

  Working together, the two roused the Jacksons. Almost as if it were a fire drill, the children moved toward the doorway leading to the stairs, each one of the older children taking responsibility for one of the younger children.

  Ruby handed eighteen-year-old Molly her suitcase.

  "Take this downstairs," she ordered. "Lock it in the trunk of my car and drive my car around the corner, so it doesn't get burned." Without waiting for a reply, she ran along the hallway and began banging on every door she reached. "Fire," she called. "Everybody awake. It's a fire." She noticed that the steps leading upstairs were burning, walls and floor ablaze, but she noticed no smell of gasoline or fuel and saw no sign of paper or other tinder that might have been used to start the fire.

  She heard footsteps on the steps, and when she looked up, she saw the young man with the huge Afro who had been hanging around outside today.

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  He was wearing jockey shorts and a T-shirt and was jumping down the steps four at a time.

  He started to pass Ruby without slowing, but she reached out her left arm and grabbed him around the waist.

  "Where you going?" she said.

  "Fire. This place on fire."

  "Right," she said. "Do people live upstairs?"

  "Sure. Leave me be."

  He strained against her left arm and just as he broke loose, Ruby reached into the right pocket of her blue chenille bathrobe and pulled out a small snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver. She put it against his head, between his eyes.

  "Upstairs and wake them up."

  "Sheeeit."

  Ruby shrugged. "Do that or die here. Whatever makes you happy." She cocked the gun.

  The young man gulped. "Sheeeit," he repeated. Ruby pressed the gun against his forehead, and he turned and ran up the steps, through the flames, shouting at the top of his voice, 'Tire! Fire! Firel"

  Ruby glanced upward and saw flames at the top of the steps. The fire had been set, she realized. It was not one fire, but a string of individual fires set in different places. But who would want to torch this building, except for nutty kids?

  No point wondering. She looked around. People were beginning to stream out of the apartments, and she had the fleeting feeling that she was at the circus watching two dozen people get out of one Volkswagen. They marched out of the apartments by handfuls, two and two, four and four, rubbing sleep from their eyes, their tiredness slowing their steps.

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  Ruby listened for a moment to the continuing bellow of "Fire" on the fifth floor. Then she pushed her way through the stream of kids going downstairs and hopped down to the third floor, where she pounded on more doors and roused more families.

  She worked her way down through the building until she was out on the sidewalk. She was glad to see her car had been moved.

  Down the street, Ruby could hear the whoops of fire engines. Flames were now licking out through the windows on all five floors of the tenement.

  Aunt Lettie ran to her and said, "Oh, girl, I thought you was caught."

  "I'm all right," Ruby said. The fire engines were only a block away. "Is everybody out?"

  Her aunt looked around at the crowd clustered on the sidewalk. "I think," she said. "Lemme see."~ She looked again, pointing her finger, ticking off people. "I don't see the Garigles."

  Ruby fingered a golden medal around her neck. "Where they live?" she asked.

  "Top right, in the front," her aunt said. The fire engines drew nearer. Ruby ran off. Her aunt's voice echoed after her. "Girl, don't go back in there."

  The Garigles came out. Ruby didn't. They told Aunt Lettie that they had not seen her niece.

  The firemen could not save the building and, ten minutes after they arrived, the roof went, collapsing down into the building like a surrendering soufflé.

  The occupants of the house had been pushed back across the street, where they were being interviewed by bored policemen.

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  When she saw the roof go, Aunt Lettie covered her face with her hands. "Oh, God," she cried. "Oh, my poor Ruby. Oh, child." The Reverend Horatius Q. Witherspool, dressed in an Italian suit of nubby gray silk, put his arm around her in consolation. "It'll be all right, Mrs. Jackson," he said. Even as he spoke, he looked around at the other tenants of the building, as if counting.

  An hour later, the walls tumbled in. Firemen working from the middle of the street and the buildings on each side pumped thousands of tons of water into the apartment building. They were not able to enter the ruin for another two hours. They poked around the rubble, but it wasn't until daylight that a rookie fireman found the body. He was rooting around in what had once been the basement. Accompanying him was a photographer from the Newark Post-Observer, which had recently been accused of insensitivity to the black community and had therefore posted a standing assignment to get photos of substantial housing fires in the black neighborhoods. It had taken the editorial board two weeks to decide what kind of fires they should take pictures of. Were they insensitive if they ignored fires with fatalities—as if black corpses had no news value? Or were they insensitive if they published fires with fatalities—as if blacks were only newsworthy when dead? The editor-in-chief made the decision: no pictures of fatal fires, unless three or more people were killed at once.

  This was a fire without apparent fatalities, so the young photographer was in the basement with the rookie fireman, looking for an interesting picture. The photographer tripped over something that skit-

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  tered away from him. It was long and about as wide around as a baseball bat. It was dark brown and charred. The photographer bent over to look more closely.

  Then he threw up.

  It was an arm.

  The fireman called for help, and they removed the rubble from over the human remnants.

  The photographer told everybody who would listen, "I tripped over his arm. Over there. That's his arm."

  "It's not his arm," one fireman said.

  "It is. It's his arm. I tripped over it," the photographer said.

  "It's not a his. It's an its. Until we identify the body, it ain't a him or a her, it's an its."

  When they dug down to the body, there was no way to tell if it had been a man or a woman, so total was the destruction of flesh by fire.

  The photographer was in a quandary. Now there was a body found. One dead made this fire no picture for the Newark Post-Observer. But if he went back to his office without a picture and later they found two more bodies in the rubble, that would make it a three-fatality fire and that was a picture and he wpuld be chewed out for not getting one.

  He was saved from a decision by the fireman who turned over the body. Something under it glittered. It was a golden medal—a narrow trapezoid with a slash mark angling through it

  The photographer took a picture of the medal. No more bodies were found in the fire, but the mystery of the golden medal intrigued the city editor and he ran the picture on page one. No one,

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  police or civilian, had interviewed Lettie Jackson. The corpse was unidentified.

  Remo awoke with ths sun shining brightly in his fourth-floor window overlooking the park. He went to the window. He could see the bench where he had spent most of the night sitting and thinking. The trash basket next to the bench was still filled, and he could see a glimpse of the yellow shoes still jammed into the basket. The sight made him feel wann all over. Nothing like a glimpse of beauty to begin a day.

  Even though he wasn't hungry and generally ató very little, Remo called room service and ordered a half-dozen scrambled eggs, two rashers of bacon, home fries, toast, and a large pot of coffee. As an afterthought, he ordered a pitcher of bottled water and a bowl of rice, unflavored. And a newspaper.

  Was that what normal people had for breakfast? Why not? He had thought about it a lot during the night, and there was no reason he was not a n
ormal person. So, some of his childhood memories had turned sour and a lot of his life had been spent working for a government agency he wasn't too fond of, but he didn't need to be an assassin as Chiun needed to be an assassin. Remo could be a lot of things. He avoided trying to name any of those things.

  He had showered by the time the food arrived on a big rolling tray with the newspaper neatly folded alongside his plate. He tipped the bellboy ten dollars, looked longingly at the eggs and bacon and coffee, then put the rice onto his plate and began to chew it tenaciously into a liquid before swallow-

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  ing it. He opened the newspaper and was startled by a photograph on page one.

  It was a photo of a golden medal, and the medal was the symbol of Sinanju—a trapezoid intersected at an angle by a long slash mark.

  Quickly, he read the story about a fire gutting a tenement building in the Central Ward. The body that had been found had been identified as that of an unknown woman; the medal was found lying underneath her. The fire was arson, firemen said, because separate fires had begun at four different locations in the building.

  A Sinanju medal. But who? And how? He had never seen such a medal, and only he and Chiun knew the Sinanju symbol. Only he and Chiun . . . and . . . perhaps Ruby.

  Remo pushed the rice away from him and sat on the bed next to the telephone.

  He dialed the number of the Norfield Inn at the New Jersey shore.

  When the desk clerk answered, Remo said, "Is the old Oriental gentleman, Mister Chiun, still registered there?"

  'Tes," said the clerk. "Shall I ring him?"

  "No, no, no," said Remo. "I want you to take him a message."

  "Why don't I just ring him and you can give him the message yourself? I just saw him go up to his

  room.

  "Because if you ring his phone, you're going to have one phone crunched into powder. Look, just do it my way. It's worth twenty dollars to you."

  The clerk's voice became suspicious. "You going to send it to me over the phone?'

  "Chiun will give it to you. Just do what I say. If I