Last Call td-35

by Warren Murphy

  "That woman could broadcast from the ocean floor with no instrument but her mouth," Chiun said.

  "I know," said Remo. "Maybe if we stood across the street?"

  "That will not do," said Chiun. He reached out

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  a long-nailed index finger to riffle the pages of a magazine. "Her voice crosses continents."

  "Maybe if I wadded up some bread and shoved it into the earpiece of the phone?"

  "Her voice would harden it into cement," Chiun said. He moved his hand to another magazine and, with the long fingernail, flipped the pages. "So many books you people have and none of you read. Maybe you should just do whatever it is she wants you to do."

  Remo sighed. "I suspect you're right, Chiun," he said.

  Hands clapped tightly over his ears, he ran back to the telephone booth. He pressed the door open with his shoulder. Without uncovering his ears, he yelled into the mouthpiece, "Ruby, stop yelling. I'll do it. I'll do it."

  He waited for a few seconds, then released his hands from his ears. Only blessed silence came from the receiver and Remo picked it up, sat on the small stool in the booth and closed the door.

  "I'm glad you turned that buzzsaw off, Ruby, so that we can talk," he said. Before she could answer, he added quickly, "Just kidding, Ruby. Just kidding."

  "I hope so," said Ruby Gonzalez.

  "Why is it these days that whenever I call Smith, I get you?" Remo asked.

  "Because that man work too hard," Ruby said. "So I make him go out and play golf and get some rest. I handle all the routine stuff, like you."

  "And what about me? Don't I deserve any rest?" asked Remo.

  "Your whole life be one vacation," Ruby said.

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  "Ruby, will you go to bed with me?" Remo asked.

  "I'm not tired."

  "I don't mean to sleep," Remo said.

  "Why else would I go to bed with you, dodo?"

  "Some women find me attractive," Remo said.

  "Some women put cheese in their potatoes," Ruby said.

  "You know, Ruby, this used to be just one big happy family. Just me and Chiun and Smitty. And then you came along and ruined everything."

  "You be the white man and I be the white man's burden," Ruby said.

  Remo could picture her smile, even over the telephone. Ruby Gonzalez was not beautiful but her smile was quick and happily blinding, a flash of white in her light chocolate face. She would be sitting in her office outside Smith's, intercepting phone calls, making decisions, lifting his workload to something small enough for four men to handle, instead of the ten-man duties Smith had handled since Remo had known him.

  "All right, Ruby," Remo said. "Tell me what dirty rotten job it is this time."

  "It be them Nazis. They got that march there tomorrow and you got to stop it. It going to make America look bad in the world, we let Nazis be marching all around."

  "I'm not a negotiator," Remo said. "I don't talk people out of doing things." "You just do it," Ruby said. "How?" "You think of something."

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  "You know, Ruby, in six months you're going to be running the country," Remo said.

  "I figured five myself but I can live with six," Ruby said. "Call me, you need anything." Her abrasive voice turned instantly to softly rippling chocolate milk with cornstarch thickeners. "Be good, Remo. Give my love to Chiun."

  Remo waited until he was sure she had hung up before he snarled at the telephone, "You don't have any love to give, you hateful thing."

  When Remo came out of the telephone booth, the luncheonette operator looked at him with open curiosity. This was Westport, Connecticut, and he was used to having strange people wander in, but someone yelling at a telephone booth across the room would be strange anywhere.

  Not that Remo looked strange. He was about six feet tall, with dark hair and deepset dark eyes. He was as lean as a rope and he moved smoothly. Not quite like an athlete, but more like a ballet dancer, the owner thought. Come to think of it, he was kind of built like a ballet dancer in that black T-shirt and black chinos, but he had wrists that seemed as thick around as tomato juice cans. Remo had been coming into the store almost every day for three months to buy newspapers and a copy of the Daily Variety, the show business newspaper. The store owner didn't think much of his looks but one day his twenty-five-year-old daughter had been working in the store when Remo was there, and when he left, she ran after him to give him change from a ten-dollar bill.

  "I paid with a five," Remo had said.

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  "I'll give you change for twenty."

  "No thanks," Remo had said.

  "Fifty? A hundred?"

  But Remo had just driven away. His daughter had now taken to parking her car near the luncheonette to catch a glimpse of him, so the store owner guessed that even if he wasn't really handsome, he had something about him that women liked.

  "You done with the phone?" he called to Remo.

  "Yeah. You want to use it?"

  The store owner nodded.

  "Let the earpiece cool for a few minutes," Remo said. He walked to where the old Oriental continued to flick through magazines with his fingernails.

  "I have looked through all these magazines," Chiun said, glancing up at Remo. The Oriental was aged, with white wisps of hair flitting out from his dried yellow skin. He was barely five feet tall and probably had never seen the fat side of one hundred pounds. "There is not one story in any of them that was written by a Korean. It is no wonder that I cannot sell my books and stories."

  "You can't sell your books and stories because you don't write your books and stories," Remo said. "You sit there staring at a piece of paper for hours and then you complain that I'm stopping you from writing because I'm breathing too heavy."

  "You are," said Chiun.

  "When I'm out in a boat in the middle of the sound?" asked Remo.

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  "I can hear your asthmatic snorting halfway across the country," Chiun said. "Come. It is almost time."

  "You going back there again today?" "I will go there every day for as long as it takes," Chiun said. "I can get nowhere with all your publishers prejudiced against Koreans, but that will not stop me from writing a movie. I have heard about your Hollywood blacklist. Well, if they have a blacklist to make sure that blacks get work, they can start a yellow list and I can get work."

  "That's not what they mean by blacklist," Remo said, but Chiun was already out the door heading toward their car, which was parked illegally along the curbside of the busy Boston Post Road.

  Remo shrugged, took his morning quota of papers, and tossed a five-dollar bill on the counter. Without waiting for change, he joined Chiun in the car.

  "This is a natural for Paul Newman and Robert Redford," Chiun said. "It is just what they need to make them stars."

  "I know I'm never going to read it or see it, so I suppose you better tell me about it. Otherwise, I'll never have any peace," Remo said.

  "Fine. There is the world's foremost assassin, the head of an ancient house of assassins."

  "You," Remo said. "Chiun, reigning Master of the House of Sinanju."

  "Shush. Anyway, this poor man finds himself, against his will, working in the United States because he needs gold to feed the poor and the suf-

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  fering of his small Korean village. But do they let him practice his noble art in the United States? No. They make him become a trainer, to try to teach the secrets of Sinanju to a fat, slothful meat-eater."

  "Me," Remo said. "Remo Williams." "They found this poor meat-eater working as a policeman and they fixed it up so that he went to an electrical chair but it didn't work because nothing in America works except me. So instead of being killed, he was saved so he could go to work as an assassin for a secret organization which is supposed to fight crime in America. This organization is called CURE and is headed by a total imbecile."

  "Smitty," Remo said. "Dr. Harold W. Smith." "And the story tells of the many misadventur
es of this meat-eater and the many tragedies that befall him as he bumbles and stumbles his way through life and how the Master, unappreciated and unloved, always manages to save him at great risk to his own valued person, until one day the Master's contributions are finally recognized by a grateful nation, because even stupid countries can be grateful, and America showers him with gold and diamonds and he returns home to his native village to live out his few remaining days in peace and dignity, loved by all, because he is so gentle."

  "That takes care of you," Remo said. "What happens to me? The meat-eater?"

  "Actually, I have not worked out all the minor details of the movie yet," Chiun said.

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  "And for this you want Paul Newman and Robert Bedford?"

  "Absolutely," Chiun said. "This is socko for Newman and Bedford."

  "Who plays who ?" asked Remo.

  "Newman will play the Master," Chiun said. "We can do something about those funny pale eyes of his to make them look right."

  "I see. And Redford plays me."

  Chiun turned in his seat and looked at Remo as if his disciple had begun speaking in tongues.

  "Redford will play the head of this super-secret organization who you think resembles Smith," Chiun said.

  "Then who plays me? Remo asked.

  "You know, Remo, when they make a movie, they hire a woman and they call her the casting director, and she is in charge of finding actors to play all the small, unimportant parts."

  "A bit part ? That's me ?"

  "Exactly," Chiun said.

  "You got Newman and Redford starring as you and Smith and I'm a bit part?"

  "That is correct."

  "I hope you meet Newman and Redford," Remo said. "I just hope you do."

  "I will. That is why I go to this restaurant, because I hear they eat lunch there when they are in town," Chiun said.

  "I hope you meet them. I really do."

  "Thank you, Remo," Chiun said.

  "I really hope you meet them," Remo said.

  Chiun looked at him with curiosity. "Your feelings are hurt, aren't they?"

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  "Why shouldn't they be? You got two stars playing you and Smith. And me, I'm a bit part."

  "We'll get somebody good. Somebody who looks like you."

  "Yeah? Who?"

  "Sidney Greenstreet. I saw him in a movie on television and he was very good."

  "He's dead. And besides, he weighed three hundred pounds."

  "Peter Ustinov," Chuin said.

  "He doesn't talk like me. His accent's wrong."

  "If you're going to pick at everything, we're never going to get this movie in the can," Chiun said.

  "I don't want anything to do with this movie," Remo sniffed.

  He was still sulking when he stopped his car in front of the YMCA in the center of town. It was almost noon and, across the street, the luncheon line for a small restaurant extended to the corner.

  "See that mob?" Remo said. "They're all waiting to see Newman and Redford and they've all got movies to sell."

  "None as good as mine," Chiun said. "Raymond Burr?"

  "Too old. He can't play me," Remo said.

  "Well, if you're going to be difficult," Chiun said. He got out of the car and started across the street for the restaurant's front entrance. While the line extended to the corner, Chiun did not have to wait in line. His own table was reserved for him every day in the back of the restaurant. He had resolved this, on the very first day, with

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  the restaurant owner by holding the man's head in a kettle of seafood bisque.

  Halfway across the street, Chiun stopped, then walked back to the car. His face was illuminated with the joy of one who is about to perform a great and good deed.

  "I have it," he said.

  "Yeah?" growled Remo.

  "Ernest Borgnine."

  "Aaaaah," Remo said and drove away.

  Through his open window, he heard Chiun calling. "Any fat white actor. Everybody knows they all look alike."

  The head of the American Nazidom Party called himself Obersturmbannfiihrer Ernest Sche-isskopf. He was twenty-two years old and still had pimples. He was so skinny, the swastika armband kept sliding down the sleeve of his wash-and-wear brown shirt. He wore his black trousers bloused into the tops of his shiny high boots, but his legs were like sticks, without discernible thigh or calf muscle, and the impression the lower half of his body gave was of two pencils shoved vertically into two loaves of shiny black bread.

  There was sweat on his upper lip as he faced the television cameras for his daily news conference. Remo watched, lying on the couch in the small house he had rented near Westport's Compo Beach, looking at the television.

  "We understand that you dropped out of high school in the tenth grade?" a television reporter said.

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  "As soon as I was old enough to find out that the schools were trying to stuff everybody's head with Jew propaganda," Scheisskopf said.

  His voice was as thin and boneless as he was. Two more Nazis in uniforms stood behind him, against a wall, their arms folded, their narrowed hating eyes staring straight ahead.

  "And then you tried to join the Ku Klux Klan in Cleveland," another reporter said.

  "It seemed like the only organization in America that wasn't ready to give the country to the nigger."

  "Why did the Ku Klux Klan reject your membership?" he was asked.

  "I don't understand all these questions," Scheisskopf said. "I am here to discuss our march tomorrow. I don't understand why this town is getting so upset about it. This is a very liberal community, at least when the rights of Jews and coloreds and other misfits are concerned. Tomorrow we are marching to celebrate the first urban renewal project in history and the only one that is known to be an unqualified success. I think all those liberals that like projects like urban renewal ought to be on the streets with us."

  "What urban renewal project is that?" he was asked.

  Lying on the couch, Remo shook his head. Dumb. Dumb.

  "In Warsaw, Poland, twenty-five years ago," Scheisskopf said. "Some people call it the Warsaw Ghetto but all it was was an attempt to improve the living conditions of subhumans, just as all modern urban renewal projects try to do."

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  The room shuddered as Chiun came in and slammed the front door behind him.

  "Do you want to hear what happened?" he demanded of Remo.

  "No."

  "They did not show up again."

  "Who cares? I'm watching the news."

  Chiun turned off the television.

  "I am trying to talk to you and you are watching creatures in brown shirts."

  "Chiun, dammit, that's my assignment for tonight."

  "Forget your assignment," Chiun said. "This is important."

  "Can I tell Ruby you told me to forget my assignment?"

  Chiun turned the television back on.

  "Being an artist among the Philistines is the cross I have to bear," he said.

  The American Nazidom Party was holed up in a house on narrow, twisting Greens Farms Road. They had been talking for weeks about a massive march of thousands, but so far only six had arrived. They were holed up in the house.

  They were outnumbered forty to one by the people milling around outside. Thirty of them were pickets protesting the planned march. The other thirty were volunteer lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, who were busy showing the protestors restraining orders they had gotten from the Federal circuit courts, which said that everybody had to behave and let the Nazis march as an exercise of free speech.

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  The picketers and lawyers were also outnumbered by the state police and Westport local police, who ringed the house on all four sides to make sure no one got at the Nazis inside.

  And all together, they were outnumbered by the press, who milled around in abject confusion, interviewing each other on the deeper philosophical ramifications of this latest display of white Am
erican racism. They all agreed it was bad, but typical, because what else could you expect of a country that had once elected Richard Nixon.

  At 10 P.M., the television crews left, followed thirty seconds later by the print media. At 10:02, the protestors left, followed at 10:03 by the ACLU lawyers. At 10:04, the police left. Remaining behind were two tired Westport policemen who sat in a prowl car.

  At 10:05, the Nazis looked at the window and saw that the coast was clear, so they sent a guard named Freddy outside to stand on the porch with a nightstick and look threatening. The other five stayed inside. Obersturmbannfuhrer Ernest Scheisskopf swept the chess pieces off the board and onto the floor. They had set up the chess board in case anyone should look through the window, and he could report that the intellectual Nazis spent their time at an intellectual game like chess. But none of them could play chess; they couldn't remember how the knights moved. One of them now got out the checker pieces and they set the board up to play checkers. Two of them knew the moves and were giving lessons to the others.

  At 10:06, Remo arrived and leaned his head into the Westport police car. The two cops looked

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  at him in surprise. They had not seen or heard him coming.

  "Long day, huh?" Remo said with a grin.

  "Better believe it," the cop behind the wheel said.

  "Get some rest," Remo said. His two hands darted out. Each touched one of the policemen in the small hollow between the neck and the shoulder collarbone. Both policemen opened their mouths, as if to yell, then their heads dropped forward as they lost consciousness.

  Remo shuffled down the flagstone path to the neat frame house.

  Freddy, in full uniform on the porch, stiffened to attention as Remo approached.

  "Who are you ?" he demanded.

  "I'm from the Jewish Standard. I want an interview," Remo said.

  "We give no interviews to the Jewish press," Freddy said. He jabbed at Remo's midsection with the nightstick.

  The dark-eyed man did not move, but inexplicably, the nightstick missed his belly.

  "Don't do that," Remo said. "That's not nice."

  "In the new day to come, we will not be nice to you people either," Freddy said. "Get used to it."

  He pulled back the nightstick and this time jammed it full force at Remo's stomach. Still Remo did not move, but somehow the nightstick missed his stomach and slid by alongside his hip.