At the head of the classroom, seated at a desk, bent over a pile of papers, was an iron-haired woman wearing a small-size version of a man's wrist watch and a severe black dress. There was a little nameplate screwed into the teacher's desk. It read Miss Feldman.
The teacher did not look up and Remo stood alongside her desk, watching what she was doing.
She had a stack of sheets of lined paper in front of her. On the top of each sheet was rubber-stamped the name of a student. Most of the papers she looked at were blank, except for the rubber-stamped name. On the blank papers, Miss Feldman marked a neat 90 percent in the upper right hand corner.
An occasional sheet would have some scratched pencil scrawls on it. Those Miss Feldman marked 99 percent with three lines under the score for emphasis and carefully glued a gold star to the top center of the sheet.
She went through a dozen sheets before she realized someone was standing at her desk. She looked up, startled, then relaxed when she saw Remo. "What are you doing?" he asked. She smiled at him but said nothing. "What are you doing?" Remo repeated. Miss Feldman continued to smile. No wonder, Remo thought. The teacher was simple. Maybe brain damaged. Then he saw the reason. There were tufts of cotton stuck into Miss Feldman's ears.
Remo reached down and yanked them out. She winced as the rock and roar of the classroom assaulted her eardrums.
"I asked what are you doing?"
"Marking test papers."
"A blank is a 90, a scratch is a 99 with a gold star?" Remo said.
"You must reward effort," Miss Feldman said. She ducked as a book came whizzing by her head, thrown from the back of the room.
"What kind of test?" Remo asked.
"Basic tools of language art," said Miss Feldman.
"Which means?"
"The alphabet."
"You tested them on the alphabet. And most of them turned in blank pages? And they get 90s?"
Miss Feldman smiled. She looked over her shoulder as if someone could sneak up behind her in the three inches she had left between her back and the wall.
"How long have you done this kind of work?" Remo said.
"I've been a teacher for thirty years."
"You've never been a teacher," Remo said. And she hadn't. A teacher was Sister Mary Margaret who knew that while the road to hell was paved with good intentions, the road to heaven was paved with good deeds, hard work, discipline, and a demand for excellence from each student. She had worked in the Newark Orphanage where Remo had grown up and whenever he thought of her, he could almost feel the bruises her ruler raps on the knuckles had given him when she felt he was not trying hard enough.
"What do you make here?" Remo asked.
"Twenty-one thousand, three hundred, and twelve dollars," Miss Feldman answered. Sister Mary Margaret had never seen a hundred dollars at one time in her whole life.
"Why don't you try teaching these kids?" Remo asked.
"You're from the community school board?" Miss Feldman said suspiciously.
"No."
"The central school board?"
"No."
"The financial control board?"
"No."
"The state superintendent's office?"
"No."
"The federal office of education?"
"No. I'm not from nobody. I'm just from me. And I'm wondering why you don't teach these kids anything."
"Just from you?"
"Yes."
"Well, Mister Just-from-You, I've been in this school for eight years. The first week I was here, they tried to rape me three times. The first marking period, I failed two-thirds of the class and the tires were slashed on my car. The second marking period, I failed six kids and my car was set on fire. Next marking period, more failures, and my dog's throat was cut in my apartment while I slept. Then the parents picketed the school, protesting my racist, antiblack attitudes.
"The school board, those paragons of backbone, suspended me for three months. When I came back, I brought a bag of gold stars with me. I haven't had any trouble since and I'm retiring next year. What would you have expected me to do?"
"You could teach," Remo said.
"The essential difference between trying to teach this class and trying to teach a gravel pit is that you can't get raped by a gravel pit," Miss Feldman said. "Rocks don't carry knives."
She looked down at the papers in front of her. One paper had five neat rows of five letters each. Twenty-five letters. Miss Feldman marked it 100 percent with four gold stars.
"The valedictorian?" Remo asked.
"Yes. She always has trouble with the W's."
"If you tried to teach, could they learn?" Remo asked.
"Not by the time they reach me," Miss Feldman said. "This is a senior class. If they're illiterate when they get here, they stay illiterate. They could be taught in the early grades though. If everybody would just realize that giving a failing mark to a black kid doesn't mean that you're a racist who wants to go back to slaveholding. But they have to do it in the early grades."
As Remo watched, a small tear formed in the inside corner of Miss Feldman's left eye.
"And they don't," he said.
"They don't. And so I sit here putting gold stars on papers that twenty years ago would have been grounds for expulsion, black student or white student. What we've come to."
"I'm a friend of Tyrone's. How's he doing?"
"As compared to?"
"The rest of the class," Remo said.
"With luck, he'll go to prison before he's eighteen. That way he'll never starve to death."
"If you had it in your power to decide, would you keep him alive? Would you keep any of them alive?"
"I'd kill them all over the age of six. And I'd start fresh with the young ones and make them work. Make them learn. Make them think."
"Almost like a teacher," Remo said.
She looked up at him sadly. "Almost," she agreed.
Remo turned away and clapped Tyrone on the shoulder. He woke with a start that nearly tipped over the desks.
"Come on, clown," Remo said. "Time to go home."
"Quittin' bell ring already?" Tyrone asked.
CHAPTER NINE
The fact that Tyrone Watson had made one of his infrequent appearances in class was quickly noted by one Jamie Rickets, alias Ali Muhammid, alias Ibn Faroudi, alias Aga Akbar, AKA Jimmy the Blade.
Jamie talked briefly to Tyrone, then left Malcolm-King-Lumumba School and jumped the wires on the first car he found with an unlocked door and drove the twelve blocks back to Walton Avenue.
In a pool hall, he found the vice counselor of the Saxon Lords and related that Tyrone had mentioned he spent the night at the Hotel Plaza in Manhattan. The vice counselor of the Saxon Lords went to the corner tavern and told the deputy subregent of the Saxon Lords who repeated the message to the deputy minister of war. Actually, the Saxon Lords had no minister of war who would have a deputy. But the title "deputy minister of war," it was decided, was longer and more impressive sounding than minister of war.
The deputy minister of war repeated it to the sub-counselor of the Saxon Lords, whom he found sleeping in a burned-out laundromat.
Twenty five minutes later, the subcounselor finally found the Saxon Lords' Leader for Life, sleeping on a bare mattress in the first-floor-left apartment of an abandoned building.
The Leader for Life, who had held the job for less than twelve hours since the sudden schoolyard demise of the last Leader for Life, knew what to do. He got up from his mattress, brushed off anything that might be crawling on him, and walked out onto Walton Avenue where he extorted ten cents from the first person he saw, an elderly black man on his way home from the night watchman's job he had held for thirty-seven years.
He used the dime to phone a number in Harlem.
"De Lawd be with you," the phone was answered.
"Yeah, yeah," said the Leader for Life. "Ah jes finds out where dey staying."
"Oh?" said the Reverend Josiah Wadson. "W
here's that?"
"De Hotel Plaza down in de city."
"Very good," said Wadson. "You knows what to do?"
"Ah knows."
''Good. Take only yo' best mens."
"All my mens be my best mens. 'Ceppin Big-Big Pickens and he still in Nooick."
"Don't mess things up," Wadson said.
"Ah doan."
The Leader for Life of the Saxon Lords hung up the pay telephone in the little candy store. Then because he was Leader for Life and leaders had to display their power, he yanked the receiver cord from the body of the telephone.
He chuckled as he left the store on his way to round up a few of his very, very best men.
CHAPTER TEN
"Where we goin'?" asked Tyrone.
"Back to the hotel."
"Sheeit. Whyn't yo' jes' leave me go?"
"I'm making up my mind whether to kill you or not."
"Dass not right. Ah never did nuffin' you."
"Tyrone, your presence on this earth is doing something to me. You offend me. Now shut up, I'm trying to think."
"Sheeit, dat silly."
"What is?"
"Try'n-to think. Nobody try to think. Yo' jes' does it. It be natural."
"Close your face before I close it for you," Remo said.
Tyrone did and slumped in the far corner of the cab's left rear seat.
And as the cab driver tooled down toward Manhattan, four young black men walked along the hallway of the sixteenth floor of the Hotel Plaza toward the suite where a blood brother bellboy had told them a white man was staying with an old Oriental.
Tyrone stayed quiet for a full minute, then could stay quiet no more. "Ah doan lahk staying in dat place," he said.
"Why not?"
"Dat bed, it be hard."
"What bed?"
"Dat big bed wiffout de mattress. It be hard and hurt my back and everyfing."
"The bed?" Remo asked.
"Yeah. Sheeit."
"The big hard white bed?"
"Yeah."
"The big hard white bed that curves up at both ends?" Remo asked.
"Yeah. Dat bed."
"That's a bathtub, plungermouth. Close your face."
And while Remo and Tyrone discussed the latest in bathroom furniture, the Leader for Life of the Saxon Lords put his hand on the doorknob of Suite 1621 in the Plaza, turned it slightly, and when he found the door unlocked and open, presented a pearly smile of triumph to his three associates who grinned back and brandished their brass knuckles and lead-filled saps.
The cab came across the bumpy, rutted Willis Avenue bridge into northern Manhattan, and as the cab jounced up and down on the pitted road surface, Remo wondered if anything worked anymore in America.
The road he was riding on felt as if it hadn't been paved since it was built. The bridge looked as if it had never been painted. There was a school system that didn't teach and a police force that didn't enforce the law.
He looked out at the buildings, the geometric row after row of city slum buildings, factories, walkups.
Everything was going to rack and ruin. It sounded like a law firm that America had on a giant retainer. Rack and Ruin.
Nothing worked anymore in America.
Meanwhile, the Leader for Life opened the door of Suite 1621 wide. Sitting on the floor in front of them, scribbling furiously on parchment with a quill pen, was an aged Oriental. Tiny tufts of hair dotted his head. A trace of wispy beard blossomed below his chin. Seen from behind, his neck was thin and scrawny, ready for wringing. His wrists, jutting out of his yellow robe, were delicately thin, like the wrists of a skinny old lady. He must have used a stick the other night in the schoolyard when he hit one of the Lords, the new Leader for Life thought. But they were all little kids anyway. Now he was going to see the real Saxon Lords.
"Come in and close the door," Chiun said without turning. "You are welcome to his place." His voice was soft and friendly.
The Leader for Life motioned his three followers to move into the room, then closed the door and rolled his eyes toward the old man with a smile. This was gonna be easy. Dat chinky mufu was gonna be a piece of cake. A twinkie even.
Inside the cab as it turned south along the Franklin D. Roosevelt East Side drive, Tyrone's mouth began to work as he tried to formulate a sentence. But Remo was close to something. There was a thought gnawing at him and he didn't want it interrupted by Tyrone so he clapped a hand out across Tyrone's mouth and held it there.
It had only been a few years before that a liberal mayor the city's press had loved had left office and soon after one of the city's major elevated highways had fallen down. Even though millions had been spent allegedly keeping the road repaired, nobody was indicted, no one went to jail, no one seemed to care.
A little bit later it turned out that the same administration had been underestimating the cost of the city's pension agreements by using actuarial tables from the early twentieth century when people's average lifespan was a full twelve years shorter. Nobody cared.
In any other city, there would have been grand jury probes, governor's investigations, mayor's task forces looking into the problem. New York City just yawned and went about its business, its politicians even trying to promote the same mayor, the most inept in a long tradition of inept mayors, into the presidency of the United States.
Who could get upset in New York about just a few more indignities? There were so many indignities day after day.
Remo wondered why, and then a thought came to him.
Was it really America that was so bad? That was falling apart? Out there, across a land of three thousand miles, there were politicians and government officials who tried to do a good job. There Were cops more interested in catching muggers than in running classes to teach people to be mugged successfully. There were roads that were paved regularly so that people could drive on them with a good chance of getting to their destination at the same time as their auto's transmission. There were teachers who tried to teach. And often succeeded.
It wasn't America that had failed. That had fallen apart. It was New York, a city of permanently lowered expectations where people lived and surrendered to a lifestyle worse than almost anywhere else in the country. Where people gave up their right to shop in supermarkets at low prices and instead supported neighborhood delicatessens whose prices made the OPEC oil nations look charitable. Where people calmly accepted the fact that it would take forty-five minutes to move five blocks crosstown. Where people surrendered the right to own automobiles because there was no place to park them and no roads fit to drive them on and the streets were unsafe even for automobiles. Where people thought it was a good thing to have block patrols to fight crime, never considering that in most cities, police forces fought crime.
And New Yorkers put up with all of it and smiled to each other at cocktail parties, their shoes still reeking of the scent of dog-doo that covered the entire city to an average depth of seven inches, and clicked their glasses of white wine and said how they just simply wouldn't live anyplace else.
When New York City went bankrupt every eighteen months in one of its regularly scheduled bursts of Faroukian excess, its politicians liked to lecture the country, while begging for handouts, that New York was the heart and soul of America.
But it wasn't, Remo thought. It was the mouth of America, a mouth that never was still, flapping from television stations and networks and radio chains and magazines and newspapers, until even some people living in the Midwest began to believe that if New York City was so bad, well, then, by God, so was the rest of the country.
But it wasn't, Remo realized. America worked. It was New York City that didn't work. And the two of them weren't the same.
It made him feel better about his job.
"You can talk now," Remo said, releasing Tyrone's mouth.
"Ah forgot what ah was gonna say."
"Hold that thought," Remo said.
And as the cab pulled off the FDR drive at Thirty-fourth St
reet to head west and north again to the Plaza Hotel-its driver figuring to clip his passengers for an extra seventy cents by prolonging the trip-the Leader for Life of the Saxon Lords put his heavy hand on the shoulder of the aged Oriental in Suite 1621 at the Plaza.
"Awright, chinkey Charley," he said. "Yo' comin' wi£ us. Yo' and that honkey mufu you runs 'round wif." He shook the seated man's shoulder for emphasis. Or tried to shake the shoulder. It seemed to him a little odd that the frail, less than one-hundred-pound body did not move when he tried to shake it.
The old Oriental looked up at the Leader for Life, then at the hand on his left shoulder, then up again and smiled.
"You may leave this world happy," he said with a gracious look. "You have touched the person of the Master of Sinanju."
The Leader for Life giggled. The old gook, he talk funny. Like one of dem faggy honkey perfessers that was always on de television, talking, talking, all de time talking.
He giggled again. Showing de old chink a ting or two was gonna be fun. Real fun.
He took the heavy lead sap out of his back pants pocket, just as a cab pulled up in front of the Plaza on Sixtieth Street sixteen floors below.
Remo paid the driver and steered Tyrone Walker up the broad stone staircase into the lobby of the grand hotel.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There were always sounds in a hotel corridor. There were people with the television on and other people singing as they dressed. Showers ran and toilets flushed and air conditioning hummed. In the Plaza, everything was fudged over with the traffic noise of New York City. The secret in sorting out the different noises was to focus the ears as most people focused their eyes.
When Remo and Tyrone came off the elevator on the sixteenth floor, Remo immediately heard the voices in Suite 1621. He could hear Chiun's voice, and he could hear other voices. Three, perhaps four.
Remo pushed Tyrone into the room first. Chiun was standing near a window, his back toward the street. The afternoon sun silhouetted him dark against the bright light pouring through the thin drapes that ran almost all the way up to the fourteen-foot-high ceiling.
Sitting on the floor facing Chiun were three young men wearing the blue denim jackets of the Saxon Lords. Their hands were neatly in their laps.
Stuffed off in a corner of the room was another young black man and Remo could tell from the awkward splay of his limbs that it was too late for him to worry about holding his hands properly. Sprinkled haphazardly about his body was a collection of blackjacks and brass knuckles.
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