"You nailed it," he told her as they viewed the shot a minute later. "You got it just right."
"Thank you." She smiled like that even when she wasn't being filmed. "It's good working with you again, Hal. I can't wait to see the finished spots."
Hal, the director, was about to offer to show her the finished spots personally, but the proposal, which he had been practicing for weeks, was laid waste by an announcement from the rear of the set.
"I have the president on the phone for the minister of tourism."
Excitement seemed to ripple through the crew. "Bye-bye, Hal. Thanks so much." The woman in the bikini threaded her way through the set, shaking hands and offering her thanks to every one of the crew, all the way down to the Florida State University sophomore who was interning with the sound engineer. "How did I look?" she asked Todd Rohrman.
"You turned me on."
"Come on!"
"Almost. Seriously."
She gave him a doubting look and took the portable phone.
She said, "Minister Summens speaking."
Todd Rohrman strolled away to watch the set teardown.
After all, government leaders needed their privacy when discussing matters of state.
"MINISTER SUMMENS, what's our communications status?"
"Wide open, Mr. President," replied Dawn Summens, professional bikini model and Union Island minister of tourism.
"I see," the President said.
The president always had a hard time improvising on an unsecure phone line.
"How are your visits going with the U.S. officials?" she asked leadingly.
"Good. Yes, productive. Constructive. I would like to discuss them when you have time."
"I'll be available in my office between seven and eight this evening, Mr. President."
"Fine. Talk to you tonight, Minister Summens."
"Goodbye, Mr. President." Summens killed the connection.
"Moron," she muttered under her breath.
Chapter 6
The white man wore only a T-shirt. If he was cold in this unseasonably chilly evening, he didn't show it. If he was concerned about being alone in the worst part of town, he wasn't showing that, either. Maybe, Antoine Jackson thought, he was a crazy man. He'd heard some white men did some mighty stupid things.
But in sixteen years he'd never seen a white man acting this stupid.
He dragged on the front window of his mother's second-story apartment and yelled, "Man, what are you doing here?"
The white man looked right at him as if evaluating him for a moment, but he never slowed his pace. "You ought to stay out of that place! They'll kill you in there!"
The white man ignored him. "I'm just trying to help you out."
The white man waved and went to the door of the crack house without hesitation.
Antoine slammed his window. He tried to be a good kid-Lord knew that was tough enough living in the Nashville slums. He tried to be decent to his fellow human beings. But sometimes people just didn't want your sincere help. Let the white man go get himself killed if that's what he wanted. Nothing more Antoine could do about it.
THE WHITE MAN PUT his hands on the door and waited until he saw the shadow of the young man disappear from the window. The kid was partly right. Somebody was going to get killed.
He felt the movements of people inside the condemned building, and his nostrils were assaulted by the acrid fumes of burning trash.
The quick slap with the flat of his hand looked feeble, but the blow cracked the door at the bolt and sent it swinging open.
"Special delivery!" He stepped inside and nudged the door closed. "Candy-gram! Pizza boy! Anybody home?" The foyer of the condemned apartment building was empty. At the foot of the stairs anyone else would have heard only silence, but he detected activity in the ground-floor rooms and movement upstairs.
The ground-floor inhabitants were his first consideration. But those upstairs might try to make a break while he was otherwise engaged. And he hated to do a half-assed job. He grabbed at a broken steel folding chair and dismantled it into components with a few snaps of his fist, then straightened the longest section of black metal tube and jammed it between the wall and the stair rail six inches off the ground.
That would slow whoever descended from the upper floors.
He strolled through the door of the first ground-floor apartment. The tiny living room was bare, but the burning stench was potent.
"Fire inspector! You need a license for a cookout in this city, you know."
The simmering coals of a fire glowed on a makeshift fireplace of scavenged bricks in what had once been a bedroom. The charred remains of rotted timber, old wooden signs and melted plastic soda bottles littered the floor.
He heard his assailant coming and waited until the noisy footsteps were close, then he intercepted the attacker with movement that looked like quick-seeping mercury.
The attacker was street scum, a crack dealer who used a little too much of his own product. His clothing and hair were filthy; his face had dirt crusted in the creases.
His dirty creases grew when his mouth gaped open. His mouth gaped open because he suddenly found his handgun flying out of his grasp as if it had sprouted wings. The man he thought he was sneaking up on was now holding him by the collar, and there were several inches of empty air between his dangling feet and the floor. "Cleaning service!"
"I didn't order no cleaning service, man!" the drug dealer wailed.
"Somebody did, and man, this place needs it."
"I ain't payin' for no fucking cleaning service!"
"Somebody else is footing the bill:"
Before he protested further the dealer's skull was knocked against the wall hard enough to crack it open-and then he was beyond complaining about anything. The corpse got nudged into the closet as it collapsed.
A buzz-cut man scrambled out of his closet hiding place to escape the cadaver that tackled him.
"Who are you, man?" he demanded.
"I'm the florist," Remo Williams lied.
"You killed Drago, man. Killed him with your bare hands. How'd you do that, man?"
"Even we florists need to know self-defense-they taught judo at the Flower Arranging Academy of Chicago." Remo was lying again. He had never attended the Flower Arranging Academy of Chicago. Or any floral trade school, for that matter.
"You killed Drago. You killed Drago!" The young man snatched a switchblade from his jeans pocket, "You killed Drago!"
"Are you trying to tell me I killed Drago?"
The young man leaped at Remo with a screech like a rabid beast. Remo extended his arm, letting the flying man connect with his fist, cutting off the noise. The knife wielder's nose exploded across his face and his body cartwheeled before he slammed to the floor. Remo made a quick punt and the knifer's head arced through the air.
In the door a straw-haired woman, as clean-cut as Janis Joplin, issued a grunt of horror and bolted. Remo followed her out of the apartment and into another down the hall. Her pig snorts of panic were joined by the howling and grunting of two other people who stormed out of the bedrooms to stand by her side. More addicts-dealers. But there was something else going on here. The three of them stood in the empty apartment living room and screeched and howled wordlessly, crouching like apes, clawing at the air in front of them. Remo came at them slowly, but their howls became throat-tearing screeches.
"Is that all you have to say for yourselves?" Apparently it was.
"You the nice folks that offed a local distributor named Fumar?"
One of them, a tall white man in torn jeans, managed to get words around his howls. "Kill you!"
He bent and charged Remo. Maybe he played football before crack claimed his brain. Remo applied a palm to the top of his head, creating a tremendous amount of force that compressed the attacker's vertebrae into one fused bone-mass.
The other man whirled a crowbar overhead, issuing a catlike yowl. Misjudging his clearance, the crowbar lodged in the cei
ling and he looked up to see what the problem was. Remo drummed his knuckles on the man's chest as if he were knocking on the neighbor's front door.
The druggie forgot the crowbar and concentrated on the fact that his heart had begun pounding as wildly as a rubber ball in a tiny box. He ran blindly into a wall and fell to the floor, dying in spasms.
The woman made singsong wails that came with each exhalation, her mouth pulled back over her teeth like a chimp in a snit. Despite her apparent mania, she calmly leveled the mini-Uzi she had grabbed from somewhere and squeezed the trigger.
Her chemically altered state left no room for skill, and she emptied the entire magazine in a single continuous stream of rounds that crashed into the wall of the room and somehow managed to get nowhere near her intended victim, who slithered away from wherever she directed the fire.
Remo lifted the Uzi out of the crack queen's grasp when she still had a single round left in the magazine and, with a blow to the head, snapped her off like a light.
He heard footsteps and the tumbling of bodies tripping over his booby trap on the stairs. He found two men scrambling to their feet. They were junkyard warriors. One had a piece of old chain, while the other possessed a ragged steel bar. They spotted Remo and instantly began howling, bansheelike.
Whatever was going on here wasn't pleasant, and Remo considered the possibilities as the two howlers came at him. Remo had run into his share of drug users in his day, and none of them made such a racket. It wasn't just ghoulish; it was annoying.
"Oh, be quiet!" He grabbed the iron bar from the first attacker and used it to absorb the blow of the second attacker's chain. The chain looped around the bar and lifted it out of the attacker's hands. Suddenly the bar was descending on them both, the point crashing through the first skull with such momentum it was carried well into the second skull. The first attacker collapsed with a good portion of his brains splattered on the walls and floor around him. The second fell on his back with the bar sticking straight up like a flagpole.
The deaths were witnessed by a group at the top of the stairs and started them all yowling, which got on Remo's nerves. He loped up the stairs in long strides and grabbed the first crack head he came to, hurling him over the railing to the landing below, where his vocalizations stopped with a bony crunch.
A crack head bashed his vodka bottle on the floor. Half the contents spilled out, and the air filled with the smell. Remo lifted the glass weapon out of the crack head's hands and inserted it in his chest, twisting and slicing a perfect circle of empty space where much of his rib cage and heart should have been.
The final crack head ran into an empty apartment and tried to slam the door behind him, only to find his attacker standing right there at his side. His howl died to a curious "Urk?" and he died with it, as his trachea shattered and his breathing apparatus stopped functioning.
There was a rustle from above and Remo drifted up to the third story, following the sounds to the doorless entry to another apartment. A zinc trash barrel stood in the middle of the room, smoking slightly from a fire that had been allowed to die out. A hairy, greasy man was struggling to claw his way through the narrow window, snuffling and grunting like a dog digging its way under the fence.
"Let's talk," Remo suggested. The hairy man's mouth fell open. "Please?" Remo added.
All he got was a high-pitched hyena wail.
"Oh, can it!" Remo swept the metal garbage container across the room, where it slammed into the screamer and crushed him into the window frame, shattering most of his skeletal system and silencing him instantly.
Remo listened. There were no more animal-like howls. More importantly, he could hear no other heartbeats or furtive movement inside the building.
Grabbing the boneless dead man, he tromped to the second floor and collected an armful of corpses. On the first floor he sat all the dead druggies together, rifling their clothing for paraphernalia and coming up with a few large plastic bags of white powder, a few plastic-wrapped rocks of crack cocaine and a couple of syringes. He broke the needles and pocketed everything else.
Down the street was a tiny neighborhood grocery that looked like a miniature prison. The windows were barred. A heavy steel gate covered the door.
Miraculously, the pay phone on the sidewalk functioned. Remo depressed the one button and held it. Somewhere, magic computerized connections were made. A wind blew and his body adjusted automatically to the chill.
"Luigi's Pizza," said a computer-simulated voice on the other end of the line.
"I want an extralarge pepperoni, delivered," Remo said. A scrawny man stalked to the phone booth, wearing so many gang colors and insignias he looked like an Eagle Scout who had gone over to the dark side.
Remo nodded. "Evening. The weather outside is frightful. Dum, dum, delightful."
"Man, what're you doing on my telephone?"
"Remo? What did you say?" said a new voice on the line.
"I'm talkin' to you, boy. What're you doin' on my phone? You know this is my place of business."
"Hold on, Luigi," Remo said, then turned to the gangbanger. "I thought you guys used cell phones these days."
"Usually I do, but there's times I need a public phone, and it's that phone right there. Now you get off my phone."
"You work with those clowns in the big green building down the street?" Remo asked.
"What's it to you, boy?"
"I just took this off them," he said, pulling one of the largest of the plastic bags of white substance out of his coat pocket. The dealer became very still, steam hissing out of his nostrils.
"Remo, what's going on?" Harold Smith demanded.
"Just hold on, Luigi."
"You a cop?" the dealer demanded.
"Just an interested bystander."
"If you ain't a cop, then you're moving in on my territory!" Reaching into the back of his pants, he yanked out a snubby handgun. "Hand it over."
Remo extended the dope and let go of it. In the moment the drug dealer's attention was distracted by the plummeting bag of controlled substance the handgun somehow became turned around in his hands, with his thumb depressing the trigger. He started to shout, and Remo nudged the muzzle of the weapon into his mouth. A great red mess suddenly covered the sidewalk. Remo snatched his bag of drugs before it hit the ground.
"I'm here, Smitty."
"Are you calling me from the middle of a job?"
"No, job's done. I just got tangled in some superfluous details and now they're untangled."
A man in a sleeveless undershirt and a dirty apron stepped out of the front of the grocery, looked down at the corpse and the mess on the sidewalk, then peered quizzically at Remo. Remo shrugged. The grocer retreated inside.
"You get any samples?" Smith asked.
"Got 'em. You were right about the perpetrators. They howled like dogs."
"Get those samples shipped here ASAP and maybe we'll figure out what's making it happen."
The wail of a siren filled the dingy block, and a Nashville Police Department squad car rolled around the corner. As the crowds gathered, Remo slipped through the cops trying to take control of the scene. A scene that appeared, as unlikely as it seemed, to be a suicide. The victim was on the ground with the front end of his handgun wedged squarely in his mouth, hand on the trigger.
If only a few more drug dealers took care of themselves like that, one of the cops observed, the world would be a better place.
The police never even saw Remo slip past them.
Chapter 7
The colors of the late-afternoon sun played over the peaceful community of cookie-cutter duplexes in Stamford, Connecticut, painting bright colors on the windows and lengthening the shadows of hopscotching children. Inside one of the duplexes a phone started to ring.
The ringing lasted twenty minutes. It stopped, then rang again, for twenty more minutes.
The childlike figure in the kimono sat cross-legged on the mat in the empty-looking living room, performing a nearly
impossible feat: ignoring the ringing. Truly ignoring it. The endless electronic jangling did not annoy or even distract him. This was not a child at all, but an old Asian man. So old, in fact, he could have used his age to make himself a celebrity, had he chosen to.
There was a sheaf of empty parchment pages on the mat. There was another such stack on a mat across from him. A quill pen was placed next to each stack of paper. He ignored these as well. He was staring into space, not smiling, but somehow with contentment on a face that was as dry and pale as the parchment but far more wrinkled. When the phone paused and started to ring yet again, the Asian rose and lifted the receiver from its wall mount. He put it to his ear, saying nothing.
"Master Chiun, is that you?"
"Yes, Emperor Smith."
"Were you out?"
"Out of what?"
"Is something wrong, Master Chiun? Were you sleeping?"
"I have been reciting Ung."
"I see. I've been letting the phone ring for the better part of an hour."
"I was reciting Ung. It is an absorbing and beautiful literature."
"I see. Well-"
"The people of the Western world cannot allow their attention to rest on any one thought for long. They are children who become bored with playthings and look for another plaything and then another."
"I suppose that's true-"
"I blame Homer."
HAROLD SMITH HAD been struggling to change the direction of the conversation. He knew little of Ungian poetry, other than it was extremely lengthy and endlessly repetitive, and he knew the old Korean named Chiun could lecture about it for hours, interweaving his diatribe with discourses on the inadequacies of those who didn't enjoy it-a population that likely included everyone on Earth save Chiun himself.
But now the old Master of Sinanju had piqued his interest. Smith studied the classics during his university years, which was decades earlier, and was proud that he retained much of his classical education.
"Surely you don't mean the Greek poet Homer?" Smith asked.
"Of course I mean the Greek poet," Chiun sniffed. "Has there ever been another famous Homer?"
"Not that I know of," Smith agreed. "But Homer penned the great epics." He knew he shouldn't be having this conversation, but somehow he couldn't steer off the subject.
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