"How is Zack anyway?" Ruby said. "Seen him lately?"
"Don't want to talk about it," Flossie said.
"Oh? Why not? What's he gone and done now?"
Flossie screwed up her face in intense concentration as if she were trying to recollect not only what Zack had done but exactly who he was.
"Oh, yeah," she said finally. "He left. He just walks out one night and doesn't come back. Leaves me without nothing to drink or eat. Leaves me alone. Had to go out on the street again to get something to drink and eat."
"When was that?" asked Ruby. The beers came
and she hoisted her glass, clinked with Flossie's and
toasted her impending good luck. "When was that?"
Flossie drained half the glass at a sip. "I don't
know. Not too good on time."
"Two weeks ago?" Ruby said.
Flossie concentrated on the concept of weeks, then
nodded. "Something like that, maybe. Or a month. I
know a month. Thirty days has September, April,
November, and June. All the rest have thirty-six ex-
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cept leap year whicli ends too soon." She finished her beer. "Something like that."
Ruby signalled for another beer for Flossie as she took a small sip of hers. "Was he working on a big case?" "Zack? Zack never had a big case in his life," Flossie said. "Trying to be the big man. Sitting there in my apartment, writing his dumb letter, messing it up, throwing papers on my floor. Is that any way to act? I ask you. Any way to act? Throwing papers on my clean floor. Dumb letter. Trying to be big man." Her beer came and she concentrated on it. "What'd he do with the letter?" Ruby asked. Flossie shrugged, a small movement at the epicenter of her body that sent shock waves careening through the surrounding flesh for seconds after. Starting at her shoulders, the shrug shuddered downward until it reached the seat of the overburdened stool, and then the aftershocks caromed back up so that her shoulders, which started it all, shuddered again.
She drank her beer to calm the earthquake. "What'd he do with the letter?" Ruby repeated. "Who knows? Wrote it. Envelope. My stamp on it. My good stamp. Yeah. I mailed it." "To the President?"
"Thass right. To the President of the United States of Watchamacallit, himself. I mailed it. Me. Zack can't even mail nothing right, I gotta mail it." .
Ruby nodded. So much for the letter. Now the only question left was where was Zack Meadows.
Ruby drank with Flossie until the tavern closed, trying to get a clue on Meadows's whereabouts, but the big woman knew nothing.
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À -
Two barflies offered to walk them home but Flossie told them loudly that ladies like she and her friend Ruby did not have anything to do with lowerr class people like that.
They laughed.
Ruby told them to fuck off.
Flossie led the way toward the door.
Ruby was following her.
One of the men staggered off his stool and grabbed Ruby's left arm.
Her right hand darted into her big oversized pocket-book and brought out a .32 caliber snubnose revolver, which she inserted into the man's left nostril.
His eyes widened in shock and he let go of Ruby's arm. He staggered back to his stool.
Ruby nodded wordlessly and replaced the gun. She met Flossie outside on the sidewalk.
"Gone home now," Flossie said.
"I'll walk with you," Ruby said.
"Don't has to walk with me. 1 walks all time myself."
"That's all right," Ruby said. "I'll walk with you anyway."
"Didden get chancet to clean apartment," Flossie said.
"All right," Ruby said. "Let's walk."
"Yeah. Walk," Flossie said.
The tenement building was the equivalent, in real property, of Flossie herself. It hadn't been much to start with and had decayed steadily. The halls were dark and Ruby regarded herself as lucky because at • least she could not see the dirt.
Ruby went up the steps, placing her feet down delicately, ready to jump instantly if she should step
107
'down on something that squealed or moved. Flossie didn't seem to mind. She stomped up the steps like a Wagnerian soprano marching to center stage to sing about a horse.
Ruby reflected that the worst slums she had ever seen in the United States weren't black people's slums, they were white people's slums. Maybe for a white person to get as poor as a black person required some" kind of extra efíort, some special skill, the kind that could go into making a slum an absolute unliveable hovel.
"Ain't much," Flossie grunted halfway up to the third floor. "But all I can afford right now."
"Zack ever help you with the rent?" Ruby asked. "He only helps racehorses with the rent. Bookies," Flossie said. She liked that so much she repeated it. "He only helps bookies with the rent."
Ruby had thought Zack Meadows's apartment was dirty, but compared with Flossie's, it looked like a Frank Lloyd Wright experiment in open, carefree living.
That the debris and clutter was neither new nor unusual, Flossie demonstrated by picking her way accurately through the piles of rubble, weaving her way to her bed, and collapsing on it in a landslide of moving flesh that rocked the bed.
"Good night, Flossie," Ruby said. "I'll see myself out."
The only answer was Flossie's raucous snoring. Ruby closed the door behind her and looked around the room. If Meadows had written his letter here, he would have done it at the kitchen table. Flossie had talked about his throwing papers on the floor. Ruby looked around under the table and against the wall,
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found three crumpled-up pieces of paper from a yellow legal-size pad.
She read them under the bare kitchen bulb. They represented Meadows's initial attempts to write his report to the President, before he had hit upon the unique literary device of attacking Italian jockeys and all policemen.
Ruby read the three pages and smiled to herself.
"Lifeline Laboratory," she said aloud. "Well, well, well, well, well."
She put the papers in her pocketbook, after first shaking them carefully to make sure there weren't carrying any nonpaying passengers, then let herself out of the apartment, locking it behind her.
Time to sleep. She would look into the Lifeline Laboratory tomorrow.
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CHAPTER TEN
The two men had been following them since they had left the Upper East Side Clinic. Remo had known it without knowing why he knew it. He had not seen them and they had made no sound that any other pair of pedestrians would not have made, but they were not just pedestrians. They were following Chiun and him, and somehow he had just sensed their presence.
It was one of the problems of Sinanju, Remo thought. The discipline changed you, turned you into something else, but it did it without your conscious knowledge. Once, Smith had asked Remo how he had been able to do some special physical thing, and Remo could only tell him: "Because I can."
The question, Remo knew, was like asking an oak: "How did you become such a great tree?"
"I grew from a little acorn."
"But how?"
There was no answer to the how, no explanation, just as there was no explanation that Remo could give anyone about how he did what he did. Including to himself.
"Let's stop and look in this store window," Remo said to Chiun as they strolled down Sixtieth Street in
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New York, near the south entrance to Central Park where horsedrawn hansom cabs were lined up, waiting for passengers. The cabs no longer rode their passengers through Central Park, preferring instead the relative safety of city streets. To ride through the park at night, they would have needed somebody next to the driver riding shotgun.
Chiun ignored Remo's suggestion and continued walking.
"I wanted to look in that store window," Remo said.
"It is not necessary," Chiun said. "There are two of them. Both large, blonde men, bigger than yo
u. They are of the size of your football players and may be that because one of them walks with a slight limp. They are of the weight of seventeen stones. The one on the left moves nicely, smoothly. He is not the one who limps. The one who limps moves more with muscle than with grace."
"How do you know that?" Remo said, realizing he was asking Chiun the kind of question Smith occasionally asked Remo. How?
"How did you know they were following us?" Chiun asked back.
"I don't know. I just knew."
"As birds just fly? As fish just swim?" said Chiun.
"That's right," Remo said.
"Then you have no more sense than bird or fish," said Chiun, "because they have no choice but to fly and to swim, but you have learned to do what you do, and how can you learn something without knowing it?"
"I don't know, Little Father, and if you're going to
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start yelling abuse at me, I don't want to talk about it."
Chiun shook his head. He jammed his hands even farther up into the sleeves of his green and yellow brocaded kimono. The kimono, at the bottom, ballooned out like a child's hoop skirt so that Chiun's slipper-clad feet were not visible, no matter how rapidly he walked.
"You were aware of them, Remo," said Chiun, "because as you live, you move through a field of force. It emanates from you and it surrounds you, and when other people or things move hito that field, they disturb it and send some of that force back to you. That is how you knew they were there, because for thirteen of your blocks they have been moving within your field and finally even your dulled senses picked up thek existence."
"All right," said Remo. "Then how come / don't know how big they are or that one limps or how they move?"
"Because you are like a child with a gun. He thinks that because he knows how to squeeze the trigger, he knows everything there is to know about marksmanship. It is a wise child who learns that he does not know everything and tries to learn more. Unfortunately, it has never been my good fortune to have a student who wishes to learn anything."
"A field of force, hah?" said Remo.
Chiun nodded. "It is why everything works," he said. "Why do you think that women react to you as that nurse did in the hospital? Certainly not because you are the beautiful person of her dreams because you are too tall and your skin is dead pasty white wrong color, and your hair is black and you have too
113
much of it and you have the big nose that all you white people have. No, it is not because of your beauty."
"I have a beautiful heart," Remo said. "When I was in the orphanage, even when I got into trouble, the nuns would tell me I had a beautiful heart and soul."
"Nuns," Chiun said. "These are the ladies who always wear mourning garments, even when no one has died, and always wear wedding rings, even though they are not married?"
"That's right," Remo said.
"They would think you have a beautiful heart," Chiun said. "That child in the hospital was in your field of force and she felt the pressure of it all over her body and she did not know how to deal with it, never having experienced it before. It was like the touching of many hands on her body all at once."
"A psychic massage," Remo said. "You mean I give the little chickies a rubdown without ever raising a hand?"
"If you wish to be gross about it, and of course you do, that is correct," Chiun said.
"And signals rebound back and if I worked harder I could read those signals?"
"Also correct. It is most important that you study and learn this quickly."
"Why?" asked Remo, surprised because Chiun generally gave instructions and lessons as if Remo had another fifty years of study ahead of him.
"Because those two are racing toward us right now," Chiun said, "and if you do not soon defend yourself, I will have to start looking for a new pupil."
Remo spun about as the two men were closing in.
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One ran heavily, favoring his left leg. The other glided smoothly, with the same kind of natural grace that Remo himself had had years ago when he was just an ordinary man. The limper had a knife. The other man had a blackjack. They were wearing plaid lumber jackets over white pants.
The man with the knife raised it over his head as he ran and as he reached Remo, plunged it downward toward Remo's left shoulder.
Remo drew his shoulder back so the knife missed by a fraction of an inch and then spun on his heel into a 360-degree turn. As he spun, he saw Chiun ambling away toward the entrance of a penny arcade.
As Remo finished his spin, he raised his left foot and took the blackjack out of the right hand of the smooth moving one. The blackjack fell to the ground with a thud. The athletic one bent down for it and his hand closed on the grip, just as Remo's heel closed on his hand. There was a sound like chicken bones breaking.
The man yelped. The other man with the knife lifted it again over his head and spiked it down at Remo's face. The knifepoint stopped a quarter inch from Remo's face as the man's arm was halted by Remo's upflung wrist. The Shockwaves sent pain up the man's arm, radiating down into the base of his spine. For the first time in fifteen years, ever since he had been taken out of the National Football League by a crackback block, his left knee hurt. He had only an instant to savor the hurt because suddenly he felt a burning sensation in his stomach and the skinny man's fingers were buried in it, up to his wrist, and the football player could feel his organs
115
mashed and he felt like a windup toy slowing down as the spring played out. The inner tension of his body slowed down.
Slower. Slower. Slower.
Stop.
The man dropped to the sidewalk. The other man yanked his hand out from under Remo's foot, grabbed the blackjack in his left hand and swung again at Remo's head. Remo slipped under the blow, slapped his hand upward against the man's elbow and instead of stopping his blow when it missed the target, the man felt his arm speeding up and the blackjack winging toward his own temple; he did not have the presence of mind to open his hand and drop the weapon before it crushed his temple bone.
The man tried to scream, could not, then sipped air as he fell to the pavement over the body of the other man.
Remo looked down at the two of them. Their jackets had fallen open and he saw that they wore white jackets that matched their white slacks. Like hospital uniforms, he thought. Neither man stirred and Remo cursed his bad luck. If he had thought of it, he would have kept one of them alive to answer questions.
A man and a woman walked down the street toward Remo and the two men at his feet. Without ever really looking, they separated and passed the tableau, one on each side, and then joined hands again on the other side and continued strolling.
A policeman approached. He stood alongside Remo and looked down at the two bodies.
"Dead?" he asked.
"I guess so," Remo said.
"You going to want to report this?" the cop asked.
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"Should I?" asked Remo.
"Well, you can, you know. I mean, two muggers attacked you and you killed them. I know a lot of police departments don't mind getting reports on things like that."
"But you do?"
"Look at it this way, pal," said the policeman earnestly. He leaned close to Remo and Remo read his identification plate.
Patrolman L. Blade said "If you report it, then I'm going to have to make a lot of reports and things, triplicate and like that." As he spoke, pedestrians continued to walk by without stopping, taking great pains not to look directly at the dead men on the sidewalk. "And they'll take your name and address and then you'll have to go before a grand jury and who knows what the hell might happen, maybe they'll indict you."
"For protecting myself?"
"This is New York. You've got to understand how we feel about things like that," said Patrolman L. Blade. "Actually, I'm on your side. I guess, maybe, half us cops are. But if we let people go around getting the idea "that they can protect themselves, that th
ey've got a right to protect themselves, well, where does that leave the patrolmen's benevolent association?"
"In other words," said Remo, "protecting yourself against a mugger without being in the policeman's union is like scabbing the job?"
"That's right," Patrolman L. Blade said.
"I see," said Remo. "I'd like to know who these guys are."
"Let's give them a toss," the cop said. He bent
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over the bodies. Practiced hands moved through their pockets swiftly. Neither man carried a wallet or any type of identification.
"Sorry. No ID," the policeman said.
"If I report this, the bodies go to the morgue?"
The policeman nodded.
"And they identify them from fingerprints, right?"
"In theory," Patrolman L. Blade said.
"What do you mean, in theory?"
"We've got so many bodies that it takes a couple of months to get to them. You want identities, figure sixty to ninety days. If everything goes smooth."
"What happens if I don't make a report?"
"Nothing."
"What do you mean, nothing?" Remo asked.
"You and me, we just go on about our business like nothing happened."
"And what happens to them?" Remo asked, pointing down.
"They'll be gone by morning," the cop said.
"But what happens to them?"
"I don't know. I just know that they're always gone by morning. Maybe medical schools take them for experiments." He winked at Remo. "Maybe per-voes need them for dirty things. I don't know. They ain't my unions."
"God help us," Remo said. "Do what you want." He turned to walk to the amusement arcade.
The cop called him. "Hey, buddy," he said.
"What?"
"Remember. You never talked to me. I don't know nothing."
"Truer words were never spoken," Remo said.
Inside the high-ceilinged arcade, Chiun was nego-
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tiating change of a dollar with the clerk. They both looked up in relief as Remo approached.
"Remo, will you tell this idiot that that dollar bill is a silver certificate and worth more than four quarters?" Chiun said.
"He's telling you the truth," Remo told the clerk.
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