Lost Yesterday td-65

by Warren Murphy

  Remo didn't even bother to explain anymore that Smith was not an emperor. He had explained to Chiun too many times already that the organization served a democracy which decided its emperor by voting, not be an assassin's hand or marching army or accident of birth. This Chiun not only thought of as a foul abomination, but also impossible in the affairs of men, and Remo was only a fool to believe it, like our Western fairy tales such as Santa Claus, or that God decreed who would rule. The saying in Sinanju had always been, “The divine right of all kings is crafted by the hand of the assassin.”

  It had been a good selling point in the Ming and Chang Dynasties of China, and the court of Charlemagne.

  “Is that Chiun there? Send him our regards and tell him the tribute shipment arrived on time,” said Smith.

  “He knows that, Smitty.”

  “How? I only found out this morning.”

  “I don't know how he knows. There was a problem once with a delivery and the accumulated treasure of the house, and ever since, he has kept an eye on the accounts.”

  “He doesn't trust us anymore?”

  “Sort of,” said Remo. How could he explain it to Smith? Chiun didn't trust anyone beyond the suburbs of Sinanju proper and did not have all that much use for everyone inside those boundaries either. He trusted Remo because he knew Remo. He most certainly was not going to trust a client.

  “We have a minor court reinforcement in California,” said Smith. There wasn't too much more to be said, except for the name and place.

  Remo had done it many times. Made sure witnesses didn't clam up. It was part of the original purpose of CURE, as the organization was called, to make sure the nation could survive within the Constitution. That meant making the courts work. But so many witnesses had been bought off or frightened off that in entire states the justice system barely creaked along. It was the one thing Remo could say CURE had actually improved. The rest of the work was keeping the world from falling apart, and he was fairly certain that in that area, CURE was losing.

  “You're not ready yet,” said Chiun.

  “For you, no. For what I have to do, yes.”

  “The first step into eternity is a missed breath.”

  “I'm good enough.”

  “Good enough? Good enough?” said Chiun. “Good enough would be to hit someone over the head with a brick. Good enough would be to use a gun. You are Sinanju, not some... some white gangster in a uniform.”

  “I'm still white, Little Father.”

  “You sound it.”

  “Didn't you say that emperors couldn't tell perfection from duck dung? That all they cared about was putting a head on a wall?”

  “Yes, but we care. That is who we are. Besides, in this country they do not put heads on walls. They are crazy. They are ashamed of their assassins.”

  “Right, Little Father. We're a secret organization.”

  “See. You are ashamed of what you do. And that is the fault of the mad Smith. In any civilized country he would have used me to openly declare himself emperor. He would hang all his enemies' heads on the palace wall to show his strength. But no, we must skulk around like criminals.”

  “Right, Little Father. Secret,” said Remo pleasantly.

  “Only a worm is pleased to live under a rock,” said Chiun.

  “No time to argue, Little Father. I've got to get going.”

  “To do what? To remove a rival for a great throne, adding honor to the history of Sinanju? What should I write down now that you do? Deliver packages? Watch over machinery like a slave at a water wheel? What new misuse for the talents of Sinanju?”

  “I am going to make sure a witness testifies.”

  Chiun rolled up the scroll and capped the ink.

  “You are all crazy. All crazy. If Emperor Smith wants a decision from a judge, why doesn't he buy the judge like in any civilized country?”

  Remo had packed everything he needed for the trip. Everything was a wad of cash in his pocket.

  “That's what we're fighting against,” said Remo.

  “Why?” said Chiun.

  “It has to do with the Constitution, Little Father, and I don't have time to explain it now.”

  Chiun shrugged, folding his long delicate fingers underneath his robe. He would never be able to explain it in the histories of Sinanju. Here was a piece of paper Smith and Remo held sacred. The very existence of what they called the organization violated that piece of paper, but the organization was created to protect it. And therefore everyone had to be secret about what they did. Even for whites, this was puzzling. Remo denied Smith had plans for becoming the emperor, which they called the President here. But if that were not his real plan, what was it? It certainly could not be protecting a sacred piece of paper. There weren't even any jewels on it. He had seen it once in a glass case.

  “That's it?” Chiun had asked, looking at the simple old parchment.

  “That's it, Little Father,” Remo had said proudly. “A lot of men died for that.”

  “Who killed them?”

  “Lots of people. People who would destroy America mainly.”

  “You mean if that piece of paper burned up, America would no longer exist? It is magic then. The magic paper that holds America together.”

  “Yes. In a way. In a definite way, yes,” said Remo. Chiun remembered how happy he had been when he said that. Actually happy. He wasn't lying either. Remo didn't lie. A frightening characteristic in a human being, like an inability to blink one's eyes, but nevertheless a characteristic of Remo.

  And so there was Chiun standing before the glass case in a white man's building, listening to Remo happily explain a fairy tale about a piece of paper, claiming its words ran America.

  But nowhere in the document was there any mention of king or emperor. Nowhere. All it talked about was what the government could not do to its subjects. Remo had read through about a half page of citizens' rights when Chiun had asked to be excused. He was going to vomit if he heard any more.

  To the service of this nonsense was the awesome magnificence of the power of Sinanju now dedicated. Chiun thought about that as Remo, happy, left the apartment.

  Chapter 3

  Gennaro “Drums” Drumola weighed four hundred and thirty pounds and when he laughed his stomach stayed still and the room shook.

  It didn't help that he was in a small wood frame house. But the U.S. attorney wanted him there, wanted him miles away from downtown Los Angeles or any city. He wanted to make sure Drums's friends could not reach him. The best military guards were posted at the edges of the woodlands. Electronic sensors were hidden in a necklace of warning underneath the ground behind the human shield. And above them all, aircraft constantly patrolled. Gennaro Drumola by his testimony alone could bring down most of the narcotics trafficking and protection rackets operating in California.

  Drums had been more than willing to do this for his government. Drums had an aversion to gas chambers, and his government had told him he could live, albeit in prison, if he would help them build their case against the people he used to work for.

  “You mean break my oath of silence?” asked Drums.

  “Mr. Drumola, we have ironclad evidence that will convict you of crushing three people to death for money. Have you ever seen anyone in a gas chamber? Have you ever seen how they die?”

  “You ever see how people die who sing against the mob?”

  “We'll put you in a camp protected by the military. We'll have planes overhead. Your friends won't be able to reach you where we'll put you.”

  “Will I eat good?”

  “Like a king, Mr. Drumola. And that's your choice: you can either choke to death in a gas chamber or eat like a king.”

  “You make it simple,” said Drums. “Still, you got to get a conviction first.”

  “We have video film of you sitting on a little old lady. Do you know what you see on that film? Two little old arms and two little old legs and you on top. You see the legs move a lot, Mr. Drumola. Then you d
on't see the legs move at all.”

  “Ey. She was a deadbeat. A bum. She owed.”

  “She owed three thousand dollars on a two-hundred dollar loan, Mr. Drumola. The court is not going to look very favorably on your motives. They're allergic to loansharking.”

  “How'd they get the tape?”

  “Some kids with a home video camera and a telephoto lens. Not even grainy. Maybe your friends will kill you if you testify against them, but with us there's no maybe. No lawyer is going to get you off when a jury sees this videotape.”

  And so Gennaro Drumola began explaining to the U.S. attorney who did what and when in California and where the bodies were. Gennaro's testimony ran three hundred pages. It was so complete that all he had to do was appear in court and testify that he had said all those things he had said to the U.S. attorney, and the mob would be broken from Oregon to Tijuana.

  And then one day, Drums looked at the pages and pages of testimony stacked on a table in the center of the cabin, and said:

  “What's that?”

  “Your ticket out of the gas chamber, Drums,” a guard answered. He refused to call him Mr. Drumola.

  “Yeah, what gas chamber?”

  “The extra-strength gas chamber they'll build just for you if you forget to testify.”

  “Hey, no. I'll testify. What do you want me to say? What do you want me to talk about?”

  “Me? Nothing. I just work here,” said the guard. “But the U.S. attorney wants you to talk a lot.”

  “Sure,” said Drums. “About what?”

  When the U.S. attorney heard about Drums's new attitude, he came to the cabin himself and promised Gennaro Drumola that if it were the last thing he ever did on earth, he would make sure Drumola would die in the gas chamber.

  “What are you talkin' about?” asked Drumola.

  “You're going to die, Drumola.”

  “What for?”

  “Murder one.”

  “Who?”

  “The little old lady we have tapes of you killing.”

  “What tapes?”

  The U.S. attorney stormed out of the little cabin. His case was over. Somehow, some way, someone had reached the turncoat, and now all they had was volumes of testimony that could not be backed up in court by the witness.

  He did not know that others were watching the case or that when he filed his report about the sudden bad turn of events, it automatically would be picked up by computer terminals he was unaware of. He did not know that there was an organization specializing in making sure, among other things, that United States justice remained justice.

  Remo arrived outside the holding tank and easily moved past the guards in those moments when their bodies said their minds were wandering. It was not the greatest trick to recognize the moment when attention flagged; the body fairly screamed it. There would be a stillness in the person, and then movement. That stillness was when the mind took over.

  Remo could also sense distraction. Most people, at least as children, could sense others, but they had been trained out of it; Sinanju had trained this perception back into Remo.

  He moved through the forest, aware that the soil had been disturbed and there were strange things in it. He did not know that they were sensors, just that these alien objects were to be avoided. The land told him that. He spotted the cabin in a dense grove of trees. A guard sat in front of the door with a carbine on his lap and a telephone behind him.

  Remo moved to the rear of the cabin and found a window that he could open quietly by forcing the wood evenly upward without the slightest jerk. A large man with a belly that heaved with each breath slept on a cot. Drumola.

  Remo moved through the open window and across the wood floor. He sat down next to Drumola.

  “Good morning, Drums,” he said. “I hear you have a problem with your memory.”

  “Wha?” grunted Drumola.

  “I'm here to help you remember,” said Remo.

  “Good,” said Drums. “You know I just don't remember nothin' anymore. It's like a page has been ripped out of my life. Whack. Out.”

  “I'm going to reinsert it,” said Remo. He took Drumola's large hamlike fists and compressed the fingers so that the nerves felt as though they were being pulled out from his hand. Not to disturb the guard, he pressed shut Drums's lips.

  The huge body convulsed. The face reddened. The black eyes grew wide with the scream that could not escape his mouth.

  “Well, sweetheart, does this remind you of anything?” asked Remo.

  Drums convulsed again.

  “You may not know it, sweetheart, but we have this down to a science. First the pain. Now the terror. I'd hang you over the side of a building,” said Remo, “but the ground floor isn't that frightening. What about smothering as an alternative? You into that, Drums?”

  Remo released the now reddened fingers and slid his own hand under the sweaty bulk of Drumola's back. Like a nurse with a hospital sheet, he turned Drumola, but unlike a nurse he did it in an instant, sending the man spinning upward and then landing on his face. The cabin shook.

  “You all right, Drums?” called out the guard.

  “Uh-huh,” said Remo.

  “Well, don't go flyin' around or nothin', okay?”

  And that was it from the guard. Remo forced Drumola's rib cage up toward his chin, not hard enough to separate the ribs, which could puncture the lungs, but with enough force to make Drumola feel as though he were being crushed under a mountain.

  “Just a little bit more, Drums, and you are no more,” said Remo. Then he released everything.

  Gennaro Drumola quivered and then began crying.

  “Shh,” said Remo. “Do you remember now?”

  “Anything,” said Drumola.

  “What do you remember?”

  “What do you want me to remember?”

  “Your testimony.”

  “Yeah. Yeah,” said Drums. “I did that. I did whatever. I remember whatever.”

  “Good. Because if you forget, I'll be back.”

  “I swear by my mother's grave, I remember,” said Drums. His anal sphincter had released, so Remo left before the odor got to him.

  But the next day, Smith was reaching out for Remo again.

  “It didn't hold,” he said. He had come down in person to the Miami Beach apartment. “Are you all right, Remo?”

  “Yeah. I'm fine. I'm great.”

  “Chiun says you're not correct yet,” said Smith. Chiun sat in a gray presentation kimono, one worn before emperors, a dull color to show that the assassin was there to glorify the emperor and not himself. Sometimes a presentation kimono was bright gold, and Remo asked why that wouldn't be a detraction. Chiun had said that was for the occasions when the assassin's glory added to that of the emperor. Remo always felt, however, that Sinanju Masters wore what they felt like and made up reasons for it afterward.

  Smith wore his usual three-piece gray suit and lemon-faced frown.

  “You don't understand. When Chiun says I am not ready, it means that I can't do things that a Master of Sinanju can do. It's got nothing to do with the needs of the organization.”

  “What can't you do, Remo?”

  “I can't harmonize with cosmic forces on a level that is continuous and smooth.”

  Chiun nodded. There. Remo had said it. Openly admitted it. Of course, one should never admit anything in front of an emperor, but in this case it served Sinanju well. Remo needed more rest and more retraining.

  Smith heard the answer and looked blank. Chiun was nodding and Remo was shrugging, each indicating that he had won an argument that Smith didn't even understand.

  “I'm sorry, I don't understand,” said Smith.

  “I can move up and down walls. I can put my hand through solid objects, and I can take any dozen men who need to be taken.”

  “Not Masters of Sinanju.”

  “There's only one of you in the world, Little Father,” said Remo.

  “There was the evil Master. What if y
ou should meet him again?”

  “I'll call you.”

  “That is not being a Master of Sinanju. Our noble emperor Harold W. Smith has paid tribute for the services of a Master of Sinanju and you must perform as a Master. Otherwise you are robbing him. I will not allow it.”

  “How am I robbing him if I am working for him, for us, for the organization, instead of resting?”

  “By giving insufficient measure.”

  “He doesn't even know what I'm talking about when I mention the cosmos.”

  “Well, it certainly has affected your performance, Remo, I am sorry to say,” said Smith.

  “How can it? When you harmonize with the cosmic forces it only means enhancing your source of energy and balance. If you have enough energy to move up and down buildings, you don't generally need more.”

  “Well, you certainly needed something more with that witness, Drumola.”

  “I turned him back.”

  “Well, he didn't remember a thing last night,” said Smith, taking a sheet of paper out of a thin briefcase he had on his lap. It was a memo from a U.S. attorney regarding one Gennaro Drumola.

  It read:

  “This afternoon, subject had a sudden change of heart. As in so many of those cases where witnesses have turned against their testimony and then suddenly turn back, it was mysterious. We have been having many of these mysterious reversions in the last few years, and I saw no need to press an investigation of it at this time. But in the case of this subject, his reversion didn't seem to take hold. He seemed willing enough to cooperate, but when I pressed him for details he didn't remember anything about the testimony he now suddenly said he remembered. Moreover, a medical examination showed he was in a state of high anxiety.”

  Remo returned the copy of the memo.

  “I don't know what happened to him. I know I had him. I know when I have someone.”

  “You see, little mistakes always lead to big ones. I am glad that you have decided to wait until Remo can glorify you instead of fail,” said Chiun.

  “I didn't fail. I know when someone has been turned. You, Little Father, know that I know.”