But there was more cracking. Bubba was taking out the ribs. Then Bubba went to work on the knees. Bubba crushed the knees in his hands like pine cones mashed in a steel vise.
"Bubba, he be dead a while now, Bubba," said Dice.
Bubba took the legs out of the hip joints. 51
"Bubba," said Dice. "He dead. Time to go, sweet fella."
Bubba went for the head. He liked heads. He liked to press them till the eyes popped out.
"All right now, Bubba. You done the head. Les' go now, big beautiful fella," said Dice. "Good. You got de eyes. You always be hiking de eyes. De eyes finish it. Hmmmm. Yeah, good, Bubba, let's go now, precious big fella."
One of the men who had stepped back and had his head turned because he couldn't stand watching Bubba work suddenly felt his head inside something very big. And when he saw large fingers close over his eyes, he knew his head was in Bubba's hands. He tried to let out a big scream, but there was that finger sticking down his throat, and then he thought he heard a very big crack, but then there was no hearing and there wasn't even a thought.
"Bubba, beautiful fella. We got de car. De new car, baby," said Dice, grinning very hard. Bubba had started on their own men.
"Right," said Bubba.
Dice looked around for a place for Bubba to wipe his hands. There were only two places. Dice's suit or the other man they had picked up for the work.
Dice quickly pointed to the other man.
Bubba wiped and the man screamed. Bubba had wiped too hard. Bubba suddenly realized that he had done a wrong thing. His own man was whimpering softly in his giant hands. Bubba looked to Dice. He knew he could trust Dice.
Bubba was the only man from Roxbury who trusted Dice. If people could get close to Bubba, they would have told him that Dice was no good. But people did not get close to Bubba. Only Dice got close to Bubba, and Dice made a living from the big man. The only problem was that Bubba was a victim of enthusiasm. Once he got started, he was like a long freight train; he took a while to stop. It was not that Bubba was es-
52
pecially vicious, Dice thought. It was that those big hands needed something to do once they got started.
Bubba had been six-foot-two and 240 pounds in junior high school. Naturally, he was the greatest thing in the Tiny Tot Football League, the division for boys fourteen and under.
Bubba's football career started and ended there. He could not realize that the play had been whistled dead. Coaches tried jumping on him to teach him, but Bubba could never stop thinking that a tackle was only the beginning.
An opposing quarterback who would never walk again sued successfully, proving that Bubba did not play football, he mugged.
The junior high tried him with the big boys in high school. Bubba put a fullback into a wheelchair for life, by running after the stretcher to finish him off while the fullback looked helplessly up to the sky.
Bubba never made love to a woman more than once.
He tried professional boxing, but he hated the gloves on his hands. Bubba knocked out his first opponent in fourteen seconds of the first round. His manager was delighted, until the referee couldn't get Bubba up off his prostrate opponent.
Frustrated to agony, Bubba tore off the gloves with his teeth so he could get at the other boxer's skull better with his bare hands.
The referee tried breaking a stool over Bubba's head to stop him. Then someone came into the ring with a lead pipe that he brought smashing down on Bubba's big head. The pipe could have splintered a pier piling, it came down with such force. Bubba looked up and scratched his head. The pipe had caught his attention.
When he concentrated, Bubba realized that he was supposed to stop crushing things with his hands. But the concentration was hard for Bubba.
Now in the kitchen of the white man's Cape Cod home, Bubba realized he had already killed one of his own men and was in the process of killing another. The man was half dead. Bubba looked to Dice. 53
"What we do, Dice?"
"You started it, you finish it, big fella," Dice said. "You leave him here, he gonna be singing all songs to de fuzz. He gonna say you did it."
"No. Won' say nuffin," said the man in Bubba's hands.
"He say he won' say nuffin," said Bubba.
"Dey all say dat when you gots dey head in you hands. He won' say nuffin now. He say it plenty looking at dem Boston blues, dem fuzz. Who you friend anyway?"
"You my friend, Dice."
"Who never lie to you?" asked Dice.
Bubba thought a moment. "Ain't nobody never lie to me. Everybody lie to me," he said accurately.
"Well, who lie to you nicest, then?" asked Dice.
"You be de nices', Dice."
"Den finish what you start, so we don't be doin' no life in Ambrose Prison."
When Bubba heard Ambrose, his hands convulsed instinctively. A loud crack filled the room, and the man spat out his lifeless inanards like a toothpaste tube squashed by a brick.
Bubba did not even notice this. He was thinking of his two years in Ambrose State Penitentiary. Ambrose was where prisoners were sent when all other prisons failed.
Not even Ambrose was strong enough for Bubba. The guards had locked him in solitary confinement one night, and in the morning they found the steel cell door torn in half, the way some men did with telephone books.
He had failed to escape only because he had jammed the secondary door himself. The three-inch steel there had managed to hold.
They built a special open-air prison for Bubba. It was four walls of steel-reinforced concrete, set into the rocky ground. It was a steel-lined pit. One warden from out of state saw it and said it reminded him of a rhino pit he had once seen in the Paris zoo.
54
The Ambrose pit for Bubba had used the same design, the warden was told. Except for Bubba there was an extra layer of steel reinforcement. And with Bubba no one dared enter to clean the cage.
His food was thrown down from above. Bubba knew it was mealtime when lunch landed on his head.
Bubba was lonely. It was the loneliest time in Bubba's life, and it hurt more than anything he knew. He would have given anything just for somebody to talk to him. Even to threaten him would have been all right.
Then Dice entered his life.
Every day someone would lower a bucket to collect the leavings from Bubba's pit lavatory. But this day, someone spoke. None of the others had spoken because they didn't want Bubba to get to know them by name because later, he might want to shake hands with them.
"You a sucker. You know why you down dere and I up here?" said the man.
" 'Cause dey gots to have somebody to haul up de shit," said Bubba.
" 'Cause I realize my potential. I am a potentiator of my life. You don' se« me in ao pit. I don' waste my potential, see?"
"What potential?" asked Bubba to the man with the bucket in his hand.
"Potential be what you can achieve in ufe. I am an achievorator. You an under-achievorator. Dat why you down dere. You bé de under-one. I be de over-one."
"You still haulin' shit, nigger," said Bubba.
"Today. But soon I be outside in a boss hog. You gon' stay dere till de sun dry up. Yessuh. When you die, dey just fill in de hole and dat be you grave."
This thought horrified the big man, and he had dreams of great truckloads of earth coming down on him. The next day, the same man was up above removing the bucket.
"How I use my potential?" asked Bubba.
"Stop breakin ' people's heads for nuffin." 55
"I likes breakin' heads."
"Den stay dere till dey fills it in on you, sucker." "Wait. Don' go. I promise I don' break no head no more. Jus' don' let dem bury me alive."
"I din' say don' break heads. Jus' don' do it for nuf-fin. Now, you willin' to come in wif me, I will use your potential and show you how I uses my potentiorator. It get me what I want, see?"
Bubba nodded.
"But you gotta do what I say. You do what I say, I get you up
here wif me," said Dice, maneuvering the waste pail downwind toward the truck that would carry it away.
He returned to the edge of the pit, and looking up was Bubba's big mournful head.
"What you in for, man?" asked Dice.
"Manslaughter, felonial assault, resisting arrest, rape, molestering a child, armed robbery, three counts of mugging. I din' do one of dem muggin's."
"You left out arson," said Dice.
"Dem matches, dey be too small for my fingers," Bubba said.
"Tomorrow, dere by a lady comin' here, and no matter what dey say you done, you jes' tell her it be revolutionary."
"What dat revolutionary shit?" asked Bubba.
"Revolutionary be you can do anything you want and you can't do no wrong. You sets fire to a nursery and you say it be revolutionary, and it be all right wif lots of folks," Dice said.
"Lots of folks sound like dey be stupid," Bubba said.
"Dey be white," Dice said.
The next day, Bubba looked up and saw many people with the warden at the edge of his pit. The warden was explaining how dangerous Bubba was. But Bubba remembered what the waste collector, Dice, had said, and he yelled up, "It was revolutionary."
A white-haired old woman, hearing that, insisted that a ladder be put down, and despite warnings, she entered the pit. She was, Bubba later found out, an im-
56
portant person from an important family. He did not know she was Wilhelmina Wakefield, the grand dame of support for the Third World wherever she found it, as long as it wasn't in Mamtasket. "Revolutionary," grunted Bubba.
"You're going to free us all," said Wilhelmina Wakefield. "Your revolutionary sensitivity is extraordinary and too complex for the dull white mind."
"Revolutionary," grunted Bubba again. Wilhelmina motioned up to the edge of the pit. Photographers came down. Their strobe lights frightened Bubba and he growled, but he guessed that Dice wouldn't want him breaking the photographers' heads.
The next day, on the second page of The Boston Blade, was a large picture of Bubba. His story covered the entire page. The headline read: "He Only Wanted to Free His People."
Bubba could not read the story, but Dice read it to him. The gist was that Bubba was put into the pit because his revolutionary sensitivities were too difficult for a reactionary warden to deal with.
In a full page of small newspaper type, The Blade never once mentioned one of Bubba's crimes.
When The Blade spoke, politicians listened. The mayor of Boston got on national television and discovered in his own heart, his own gut, sureness that the only reason Bubba was in jail was because Massachusetts was racist. A rally was held at the Boston Common. Religious leaders spoke. Buttons were handed out.
The buttons read: "Free Bubba."
Bumper stickers said more: "His only crime was wanting freedom. Free Bubba."
Finally, the parole board met and not only freed Bubba, but apologized to him. They also freed one Mandranus Rex Smith, alias Dice.
From then on, Bubba knew whom he trusted. What Dice never told Bubba was that he had been told what to tell Bubba. He had never met the man. But it was
57
the same voice he heard on the telephone, telling him who to take care of and where to pick up the money.
So they went to work for that man, that high-class man with that high-class Boston accent, who left them money in Burger-Triumph garbage pails, but whom they had never seen. It was a perfect union. Bubba had Dice's brains and Dice had Bubba's magnificent hands.
Dice looked at his pink and gold Rolex watch as he drove his white Eldorado convertible back to Boston from Cape Cod. It was really too late to visit the other two professors at MUT, the white man and the old Chink.
They could always do that in the morning.
Bubba had had enough fun for one day anyway.
They continued on into Roxbury, where Dice preened his way up to the bar and, as he often did since he had teamed up with Bubba, tried to pick a fight.
And as always, when he had Bubba along, he couldn't manage it.
"Get yo' ugly face outen dis bar," said Dice to a slick pimp with a foxy lady Dice wanted.
"Yeah," said Bubba.
The pimp moved. The fox stayed. Life was good for Mandranus Rex Smith, alias Dice. In the morning, say at noon, he would take care of the other two scientists. Maybe even do one himself, it the one were small.
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Chapter Four
Remo tried to follow The Boston Blade. He had a half-year's issues shipped to his lab. If the contact was going to be through the media, then he might be able to see where other professors dealing with rapid-breeding bacteria had been reached.
They had spent the evening before in an elegant hotel named the Copley Plaza.
Remo had tried to watch three television news shows at once, hoping to see some kind of contact.
He could have taped at least one of the news shows, but Chiun would not let him use the video recorder. Remo had pointed out that CURE had paid for that video recorder before such machines were seen outside of television studios. CURE had developed the technology to make the taping machine portable—just for Chiun. So Chiun should at least allow one show to be taped for one hour.
Chiun had been horrified.
"Blasphemy. How many years have I taught you? And yet you now here say to me that I should take assassin's tribute and return it to the use of the emperor. If I have taught you nothing else about Sinanju, most holy and sacred is the assassin's tribute."
"There we disagree, Little Father," said Remo.
"How can you disagree? I am the Master."
"I just don't think the money is that important."
A moan came from Chiun. "No. Not you, Not you, 59
Remo, who I taught with the golden years of my life. Not you, Remo."
Remo sighed. He had known what was coming. Every time he said that money itself was not important, but the art of Sinanju, the mystery of being that was encompassed in its power, Chiun would accuse him of betrayal to the highest ideals of Sinanju.
"Amateur," Chiun hissed. "Not you, Remo. You cannot think like an amateur. Your country and the world bleeds from amateurs taking weapons into then-own hands, and when you, who have been trained in Sinanju, who have been give Sinanju despite your dead-fish white color, when you talk like the lunatics who perform these services for nothing, you have pierced the very heart of your Master."
"Sinanju now gets tribute from what I do," Remo said. "I work for Smith and I do what he wants, and those ingrates in your village get a shipment of gold to keep them alive and not working. Because of what I do."
"Because I trained you," said Chiun. "It is only just."
"I don't care about tribute," Remo said.
And then Chiun's wailing would not stop. Remo was going to be an embarrassment to Sinanju. Already in the world, people were going around shooting popes. Murdering babies. Now Remo was going to let it be known that he would kill for nothing. That the tribute did not matter.
So many years and so much pain, and now Remo had done this to Chiun.
"Even for a white, this is not gratitude," said Chiun, and Remo had known further arguing was useless. He was not going to get the tape machine. And Chiun would not be speaking to him for a while. Remo had to be careful to notice that Chiun was not speaking to him, however, because if Chiun thought Remo was not noticing how he was being ignored, Chiun would make noises or interrupt in some manner whatever Remo was doing. If there was anything that bothered the
60
Master of Sinanju, it was someone being oblivious to the fact that he was ignoring them.
Remo watched the three TV news shows as best he could, flicking back from channel to channel, and realized that he was going to have to come up with something better.
So the next day at the lab, he ordered the six months of The Boston Blade. He also tried to devise a system for monitoring all the media to see if a contact was being made.
The Blade had one interesting story. A Professor Keating had been killed during a racial incident. Remo remembered that Keating was the one who had promised the contact through the media.
Remo almost missed the story on his death because the headline read: "Racial Killing in Cape Cod." The racial part was two blacks being horribly mangled. There were quotes from community leaders about Cape Cod's shame. Apparently, the professor's body was found in his Cape Cod home, along with those of the two blacks.
There was an editorial in The Blade about this. It called for an end to racial killing and the establishment of a special board to root out the racist nature of Cape Cod, where, as everyone knew, it was impossible for a black welfare family to buy a home.
But neither editorial nor news story carried much information about Keating's death. Remo phoned the newspaper, hoping he could get someone who knew more about it. One could tell from the kill sometimes why it was done.
He finally was connected to a reporter at a Blade bureau on Cape Cod.
"Yeah. He was butchered just before the racial incident," the reporter said.
"How?" asked Remo, glancing over to the window to let Chiun know that he was aware he was not being spoken to. Chiun was by the window, grandly examining the Charles River. It was a saying of Sinanju long before the world had so many great cities that one could
61
never be lost on a river, for wherever it flowed, there was always a city where it entered the ocean.
"I think the guy—what's his name, Keating—had his ribs broken out," the reporter said. "A bloody mess."
"Mangled?" asked Remo.
"Yeah. After his belly had been cut open by some crude kind of knife. I wasn't paying too much attention to that body."
"How did the other two men die?"
"Racially," said the reporter.
"How do you know?" asked Remo.
"It was a white neighborhood."
"Time out," said Remo. "You mean, if a black guy gets killed in a white neighborhood, it's automatically a racial killing? What if they were killed by a black guy? You know, people kill for other reasons than race hatred."
"Some do it for nothing," said Chiun, still looking at the river. "Some give away the finest training in all history."
The reporter told Remo that until proven otherwise, any time a black man was killed by a white or probably killed by a white, then it was racial.
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