Kill Or Cure td-11

by Warren Murphy

  ‘We are assassins; these people are little dancers.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Dr. Smith would have been delighted with a dancer, but I gave you Sinanju, to a white man I gave it honestly, and made even the walls of stone but powder in the wind before your steps. These things—I, Master of Sinanju, gave you.’

  ‘Yes, Little Father.’

  ‘And now you throw them aside like so much old clothing.’

  ‘I will never forget what you have…’

  ‘Forget. How dare you say you will not forget? Have you learned nothing? Each day you fail to remember, you forget. Knowing is not a question of not forgetting, it is a question of remembering with your body, with your mind and with your very nerves. That which is not remembered every moment is lost.’

  ‘Little Father, I don’t want to kill any more.’

  Stricken with the statement, Chiun was silent for a moment, and Remo knew he could get the full treatment of the benevolent master and the ungrateful student. He would get the history of Sinanju, how this poor village, unable to support itself, rented its assassins out to the emperors of China, and how if a Master of Sinanju failed, the babies of the village would be drowned, because drowning was better than starving. It was called sending the babies home and Remo had heard it countless times. It came down to whether you killed your assignments or the innocent babies of Sinanju.

  Remo heard it all and when Chiun was finished, he said:

  ‘I don’t like to kill people, Little Father. Not really, not always and not often.’

  ‘Drivel,’ said Chiun. ‘Who likes to kill? Does a surgeon like or dislike a liver? Does one of your mechanics like or dislike a motor? Of course not. And I would just as soon sit in peace with the world and give love to one and all who passed.’

  ‘That’s hard to believe, Chiun. I mean, what with what happens to anyone interrupting your shows and everything, know what I mean.’

  ‘I am not discussing my meagre pleasures,’ said Chiun angrily. Remo knew that when Chiun was imagining himself as a sweet, delicate blossom, to remind him that he was the world’s most deadly assassin was a breach of etiquette.

  ‘I too would like never to raise my hand again,’ Chiun said. ‘But this cannot be so, and so I do what every man should do. His job as well as he can. That is what I do.’

  ‘We’ll never agree, Little Father. Not on that.’

  And the matter appeared decided, until a late night newscast where Remo saw why the condition red. He watched the reporter question the Presidential aide, and when the word Folcroft came up, Remo became hysterical.

  ‘I wish I could have seen Smitty’s face when he heard that,’ said Remo laughing. But he did not laugh long for he did see the face of Dr. Harold W. Smith. Television cameras had been denied admittance to the grounds of Folcroft Sanitarium but a telephoto lens had captured a look at Dr. Smith as he walked, hands behind his back, toward the waters of Long Island Sound. His face was his usual mask of calm, but Remo knew that underneath it was a great sadness. And seeing the head of CURE weak and helpless like that, Remo felt a rage he never knew he possessed. It was all right for him to hate, possibly even to verbally abuse Smith, but he didn’t like to see anyone else do it, particularly a country which would never know the debt it owed to Smith. He watched the TV set until Smith vanished behind the back of the sanatorium’s main building.

  Then he called out: ‘Chiun, I want to talk to you about something. I’ve got a little surprise for you.’

  ‘I am already packed,’ said the Master of Sinanju. ‘What took you so long to change your mind?’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Getting off the plane at the Dade County Airport was like walking into a hot towel.

  ‘Eccchhh,’ said Remo but Chiun said not a word. He had made it clear that so long as Remo got him to a television set by 11.30 a.m., he did not care where they stayed or how they travelled. He did not like to talk before his shows.

  Remo carried all his clothes in a fat attaché case. For Chiun, they had to wait at a luggage wheel inside the airport. A chute vomited the luggage contents of each plane onto a revolving belt, around which passengers stood, waiting, looking for their suitcases and boxes and packages.

  In the general jostle at the luggage wheel, Chiun made his way to the lip of the revolving belt, and although he looked like a frail feather in a herd of cattle, nevertheless he managed neither to be pushed aside nor ignored.

  ‘Who’s helping that poor old man?’ asked a hefty woman with a Bronx accent.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Chiun. ‘I will manage.’

  ‘He doesn’t need your help, lady,’ said Remo. ‘Don’t fall for it.’

  'That is my strong young son who makes aged father bear heavy burdens,’ Chiun confided to the woman.

  ‘He doesn’t look like you,’ said the woman.

  ‘Adopted,’ whispered Chiun.

  A large red lacquered trunk with shiny brass trimmings came forth from the chute.

  ‘That is ours,’ said Chiun to the woman.

  ‘Hey, you. You gonna help your father with the luggage?’ the woman cried out angrily.

  Remo shook his head. ‘No. But you will.’ He turned his back on the luggage wheel and strolled to a newsstand and it was here that he realized how much he had come to rely upon CURE in his assignments.

  There would be no reports waiting for him on who was where or doing what or who was vulnerable because of something in his past. There would be no new name with new credit cards and a secure house. There would be no analysis of the problem by Smith, and as he purchased the two local newspapers, he realized how alone he really was.

  The eyes and ears of CURE had been put to sleep. Remo read the headlines. It was now called ‘The League Affair’.

  What Remo gathered from the newspapers was that somehow, notes on what the Greater Florida Betterment League had really been doing had gotten into the hands of a minor local politician, a functionary in the election bureau. He was making all the charges.

  According to the local politician, the secret notes proved that a secret organization called Folcroft was conducting political espionage in Miami Beach. The espionage was financed by the federal government and its goal was to indict the mayor and current city administration.

  ‘Worse than Watergate,’ said the local politician who said he had access to the secret notes and would release them at the proper time. The politician’s name was Willard Farger. Remo put down the papers. All he knew was that the papers had printed that a lot of people said a lot of things.

  There was no scale of verification, no scale of probability, none of the intensive checks and counter-checks that had gone into the knowing of something. What did he really know?

  That a Willard Farger, who was a political cohort of the present administration, had said a lot of things and probably had access to the notes compromising CURE. Remo shrugged. It was a good enough beginning.

  He picked up the paper again. A League employee had been murdered. The sheriff did not deny that it could be Folcroft agents. There was an editorial. ‘Government by Assassins?’

  Remo would have to show that one to Chiun, who had once reasoned that the ideal form of government was that where the ablest assassin ruled. Remo smiled. The Master of Sinanju, in his governmental philosophy, was not unlike businessmen who believed government should be run by businessmen, or social workers who believed governments should be run as a social program, or generals who thought that military men made the best presidents, or even like the philosopher Plato who, while outlining the ideal form of government, said its leader should be, surprise, surprise, ‘a philosopher king’.

  Willard Farger, thought Remo, if you have ever talked in your political career, you will talk to me. You’re a good beginning, Remo folded the papers under his arm. If CURE were still working, he could have had press identification if he wanted.

  ‘Hello, Mr. Farger, I want to interview you.’ Wham. Bam.

  Press
identification. Remo mulled the thought, and discarded immediately his first idea of a pre-dawn approach to Farger’s bedroom. Farger himself would be deluged with reporters. He looked at the paper again. On Page 7, there was a picture. The Farger family at home. And there was pudgy-faced Mrs. Farger, sucking in her cheeks and angling in at the camera to look slimmer, leaning forward, in front of her husband. In front of him, Remo thought. The way to Willard Farger, he realized, would be through Mrs. Farger.

  Remo threw the papers into a waste basket and looked over to the luggage wheel. Sure enough, five vacationers were sweating and groaning under the large trunks which contained Chiun’s kimonos; his television taping machine; his sleeping mat; his autographed picture of Rad Rex, star of As the Planet Revolves; his special rice. In all there were 157 kimonos and six trunks. Remo had told Chiun to pack light.

  The hefty woman, perspiring under one of the trunks, said to a young boy: ‘That’s him. That’s the old man’s adopted son. Won’t even help the old man after all the old man has done for him.’

  She put down the trunk.

  ‘Animal,’ she yelled at Remo. ‘Ungrateful animal. Look at him, everyone. The animal who would make his aged father do heavy lifting. C’mon over and see the animal.’

  Remo smiled pleasantly for one and all.

  ‘The animal. Look at him,’ said the woman, pointing to Remo, Chiun stood off to the side, innocent of the commotion, a mere aged Korean hoping to enjoy the golden years of his life. Chiun could have, if he had wished, taken the trunks and the volunteer porters to boot and hurled them all back up the luggage ramp. But Chiun considered carrying things to be ‘Chinamen’s work’, meaning work unworthy of a Korean. It was for Chinese or whites or blacks.

  He had once complained that Japanese did not like to carry things because of arrogance. When Remo had pointed out that Chiun was not known to like lifting, Chiun had responded that there was a difference between the Korean and Japanese attitudes.

  ‘Japanese are arrogant. They think the work is beneath them. Koreans are not arrogant. We know the work is beneath us.’

  Now Chiun had a gaggle of tourists doing Chinamen’s work.

  ‘C’mon over here, sonny, and help your father,’ yelled the woman.

  Remo shook his head.

  ‘C’mon, lazy bastard,’ joined in other volunteer porters.

  Remo shook his head again.

  ‘You animal.’

  At this, Chiun shuffled to center stage just a bit more slowly than usual. He raised his thin hands, the long fingernails pointing upward as if in prayer.

  ‘You are good people,’ he said. ‘So good and kind and thoughtful. So you not realize that everyone is not so good as you, that their decency is not so great, that it can never be as great. You are angry because my adopted son does not share your goodness. But you do not realize that some people from birth are denied this goodness. I have tried so hard to teach him, yet for a flower to grow from the seed, that seed must be planted in good soil. It is my great sadness that my son is rocky soil. Do not yell at him. He is incapable of your goodness.’

  ‘Thanks, Little Father,’ said Remo.

  ‘Animal. I knew it. He’s an animal,’ snarled the woman. Turning to her husband, a giant of a man that Remo estimated at six-feet-five, 325 pounds, the woman said, ‘Marvin, teach the animal some decency.’

  ‘Ethel,’ said the gigantic Marvin, in a surprisingly timid voice, ‘If he doesn’t want to help his old man, that’s his business.’

  ‘Marvin. How could you let that animal get away with what he’s doing to this sweet, old, precious lovely mensch?’

  Ethel, overcome by warmth, dashed to Chiun and hugged him to her overly ample bosom. ‘A mensch. A pure mensch. Marvin, teach the animal some manners.’

  ‘He’s half my size, Ethel. Come on.’

  ‘I’m not leaving this poor soul with that animal, Marvin. What an ungrateful son.’

  Marvin sighed and Remo watched him approach. He would not hit him hard. Maybe just take the wind out of him.

  Remo looked up at Marvin. Marvin looked down at Remo.

  ‘Hit the animal,’ yelled Ethel, clasping the world’s deadliest assassin to her chest, while her husband faced the second deadliest.

  ‘Look, buddy,’ said Marvin softly, reaching into his pocket. ‘I don’t want to get into your family business, know what I mean?’

  ‘Are you going to hit him or are you going to talk?’ yelled Ethel.

  ‘You are such a sensitive woman,’ said Chiun, who knew that gross-sized people liked to be called sensitive because they were called that so rarely.

  ‘Break his head or I will,’ yelled Ethel, hugging tighter her precious bundle.

  Marvin pulled out of his pocket some bills, which was probably the luckiest thing his hand had ever done for itself.

  ‘Here’s twenty bucks. Help your old man with his suitcases.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Remo. ‘You don’t know him and you’re not the first he's hornswoggled into doing his heavy lifting. So put away your money.’

  ‘Look, buddy, it’s my family problem now. Help him with the suitcases, will ya?’

  ‘If you don't slam that animal right now, Marvin, you'll never know my bed again.’

  Remo watched Marvin’s face light up in joyous surprise.

  ‘Is that a promise, Ethel?’

  Remo saw this as a good opportunity to disengage, but Chiun, ever the gallant, said to the woman: ‘He is un­worthy of you, precious flower.’

  The precious flower had always known this and putting Chiun down, she hurled herself at her brute of a husband, slamming his head with her pocketbook.

  Remo ducked out of the way and left them squabbling with a crowd forming to watch the family fight.

  ‘Proud of yourself, Chiun?’ asked Remo.

  ‘I brought happiness into her life.’

  ‘Next time, get a porter.’

  ‘There were none to be found right away.’

  ‘Did you look?’

  ‘People who do Chinamen's work should look for me, not me for them.’

  ‘I’ll be out tonight. I've got some work.’ said Remo.

  ‘Where are our quarters?’

  Remo looked astonished. ‘I forgot that,’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Chiun. ‘See how valuable an emperor can be?’

  Chiun was right of course. But what he did not realize was that their ‘emperor’ - CURE—was in danger of being destroyed and only Remo could save it. If—and it was a big if—if he could straighten out the mess of the ‘The League Affair’.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Willard Farcer, fourth deputy assistant commissioner of elections, woke up with the first rays of sun glinting from his swimming pool into his bedroom, the telephone receiver whining away. It had been taken from its cradle so he could get a night’s sleep. Willard Farger couldn’t be bothered by just any reporter anymore.

  It had taken him exactly one hour and fifteen minutes, or approximately his third interview with the press several days before, to forget how he would formerly hound reporters to include his name in stories about picnics, Boy Scout festivals and party fund-raising suppers.

  Then he would personally deliver press releases from party headquarters, try to tell jokes to anyone in the city rooms of the Miami Beach Dispatch and the Miami Beach Journal, and excitedly await the next edition home or office.

  Sometimes on a slow news day, he would get: ‘Also in attendance was Willard Farger, fourth deputy assistant-commissioner of elections.’ On those days, he would ask his colleagues at the county administration building if they had read the papers that day. He would wait around the press room to see if reporters wanted anyone to go out for sandwiches, and he never passed up a chance to buy a reporter a drink at a bar.

  These chances did not come often, since reporters thought of him as a publicity hound and a nuisance. To be bought a drink by Willard Farger, fourth deputy assistant-commissioner of elections, meant you had to spea
k with him while downing it, and possibly longer.

  With one television press conference, all this changed. Willard Farger now stood against the government with ’proof of the most insidious danger to our freedoms in the history of the nation.’ He was news, growing national news, and only at the insistence of his political bosses did he begin to talk to reporters from the local papers. After all, hadn’t he made the front page of the New York Times?

  ‘You can’t ignore the Dispatch and the Journal,’ the sheriff had told him.

  Secretly Farger suspected the sheriff was jealous. Did the Washington Post ever do a profile on a mere Dade County sheriff?

  ‘I can’t localize my image either,’ Farger had said. ‘In one two-minute network newscast, I reach twenty-one percent of all the voters in the nation. Twenty-one percent. What do I get from the Dispatch and the Journal, a fiftieth of one percent?’

  ‘But you live in Miami Beach, Bill.’

  ‘And Abraham Lincoln lived in Springfield. So what?’

  ‘Bill, you’re not president of the United States. You’re just another guy who’s trying to re-elect Tim Cartwright as mayor next week. So I think you’d better talk to the Dispatch and the Journal.’

  ‘I think it’s my business, not yours, Sheriff,’ said Willard Farger, who a week earlier had offered to sweep out the sheriff’s garage and had been refused, because it might be construed as using public employees for personal purposes.

  Sheriff Clyde McAdow had thrown up his hands, given a last warning that when the national reporters left, the Dispatch and Journal would still be in Miami Beach, and all of this reached Willard Farger not at all.

  Men who were on national television did not go taking advice from local sheriffs. Willard Farger kept the telephone off the hook so that local reporters couldn’t reach him. He would have to get an unlisted telephone, he thought as he rolled out of bed. Maybe send the number to the presidents of CBS, NBC and ABC. Perhaps Times and Newsweek also. He couldn’t leave out the New York Times or the Washington Post either, even though their circulations nationally were not as heavy as the magazines. Important in the intellectual communities, however.