"Oh, God," sobbed Mrs. Walters. "No. No. No. No."
She reached out for the loose head of her baby but she could not keep her balance while kneeling and slipped again.
The ambulance that was supposed to have taken Dr. Feinberg to the hospital was found with its front twisted around a tree trunk on Storrow Drive. One driver dead with his throat torn out and the other babbling.
Detectives pieced together that the last passenger was Dr. Feinberg. She had been in a coma, but now she was not in the wrecked ambulance. Whoever had killed the driver had taken her. There was blood in the front seat. There was no blood in the back. The attendant who lived had a single deep gash near his forehead.
The forensic surgeon asked if they were going to return the attendant to the zoo. He said the attendant should go back because if he carried that fear of animals with him for long, the animals would know it.
"He'd better go back tomorrow or he'll never go back at all. He'll be too afraid. That's what I'm saying. I've treated claw wounds before," the surgeon said.
"He didn't work in no zoo," said the detective. "He was an ambulance attendant who was knifed. He didn't work in no zoo."
"That on the head is a claw mark," said the doctor. "No knife cuts like that. A knife doesn't rip like that. That's puncture, then rip."
When the corpse of baby Ethel came in on another case, the doctor was sure there was a big cat loose in the city.
"Look at the belly," he said.
"There isn't any belly," said the detective.
"That's what I mean. Big cats eat the belly first. It's the best part. If you ever see a calf, the big cats will eat the belly. The humans eat the steaks from the rump. That's why I say it was a big cat. Unless, of course, you know somebody who's going around collecting human intestines."
In a dark loft in Boston's North End, Sheila Feinberg trembled, clutching a rafter. She did not want to think of the blood on her and the horror of someone else dying and that there was somebody else's blood on her body. She did not even want to open her eyes. She wanted to die, right there in the dark, and not think about what happened.
She was not a religious person, never understanding the language in which her father had prayed. Even if she had, by the age of twelve she felt quite secure in believing there was an order to things and people should be moral because it was right, not because they had to do right to be rewarded later on.
Thus, she did not know how to pray. Until this night, when she prayed that God, or whatever there was that ran the universe, would take her from this horror.
Her knees and forearms rested on the rafter. The floor was fifteen feet below. She felt safer on this perch, almost invulnerable. And she could see very well now, of course.
A small movement in the corner. A mouse. No, she thought. Too small for a mouse.
She cleaned her hands of the blood by licking them and a feeling of goodness came upon her body.
Her chest and throat rumbled.
She purred.
She was happy again.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and the man was throwing a punch at him. He was actually throwing a punch. Remo watched it.
Years before, a punch had been something fast that you ducked or blocked or saw suddenly at the end of a fist banging into your head with hurt.
Now it was almost ridiculous.
There was this very big man. He was six feet-four inches tall. He had big shoulders and big arms, a very big chest and drive-hammer thighs. He wore oil-covered dungarees, a checkered shirt and thick hobnailed boots. He worked driving cut-down trees, forest to mill in Oregon, and no, he wasn't going to stay for another twenty minutes at the Eatout Diner stop just so some old gook could finish writing some letter. The faggy guy in the black T-shirt had better haul that dinky yellow car out of the way or he would run it over.
No?
"Well then, skinny man, I'm going to pulverize you," said the log driver.
And then the punch started. The man was much bigger than Remo, outweighing him by more than a hundred pounds. The man awkwardly set his balance and started his bulk toward Remo, bringing a big, hairy fist ponderously around from behind him, driving with his legs and throwing his whole body into the blow. People from the diner ran out to see the skinny fellow with the foreigner get murdered by Houk Hubbley who had already put more men in the hospital than you could shake a Homelite chain saw at.
Waiting for the punch, Remo pondered his options. There was nothing miraculous about it. A few top hitters could see the seams of a baseball as it whizzed toward them from the pitcher. Basketball players could feel hoops they could not see. And skiers could hear the consistency of snow they had not yet skied on.
These people did it with natural talent that had accidentally been developed to a minor degree. Remo's skills had been worked, reworked, honed, and blossomed under the tutelage of more than three thousand years of wisdom so that while average persons with deadened senses saw blurs, Remo saw knuckles and bodies moving, not in slow motion, but almost in still photographs.
There was big Houk Hubbley threatening. There was the crowd coming out to see Remo get pulverized and then began the long, slow punch.
In the back of the yellow Toyota, Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, with skin as wrinkled as parchment and wisps of white hair gracing his frail-appearing head, leaned over a writing pad, his long-plumed goose quill pen scratching away. He was creating a great saga of love and beauty.
Chiun had trained Remo. He therefore had every right to expect peace and quiet and that undue noise should not be made while he was composing his thoughts. First he imagined the great love affair between the king and the courtesan and then he penned the words.
The only thing he wanted from outside the car was quiet. Remo realized this and as the punch came, like a slow train rumbling into a station, Remo gently put his right hand under the oncoming arm. So that the man would not grunt loudly, Remo compressed the lungs evenly by thrusting his left arm across the stomach and his left knee behind the back so that big Houk Hubbley looked as if he suddenly had a skinny human pretzel wrapped around him.
Houk Hubbley felt explosively peaked. He had swung and now he was out of breath. With his right fist held up in the air, and like a statue that could not move, he was falling on that hand, and by jiminy, the hand was being forced open, changing from a fist, to catch his body, and he was rolling on the ground, out of breath, and there was a foot on his throat, a black loafer with green gum on its sole to be exact, and the guy in the gray flannels and the black shirt was standing over him.
"Shhhh," whispered Remo. "You get air for quiet. Quiet for air. It's a trade, sweetheart."
The man didn't say all right but Remo knew he meant all right. His body meant it. Remo let some air into the man's lungs as the big face reddened. Then like kicking on an engine, Remo compressed the lungs gently once more and they opened full, sucking in a large and blessed supply of oxygen for Houk Hubbley, who lay there still on the diner driveway.
Hearing the sucking gasp of air, Chiun looked up from his writing pad.
"Please," he said.
"Sorry," said Remo.
"Not everyone can write a love story," he said.
"Sorry," said Remo.
"When a man gives the wisdom of the ages to a coarse gruntling, the least the gruntling can do is keep a certain quiet about places where important things are being done."
"I said I'm sorry, Little Father."
"Sorry, sorry, sorry," mumbled Chiun. "Sorry for this and sorry for that. Propriety does not require a sorry. Correctness means never having to say you're sorry."
"So I'm not sorry," said Remo. "I'm out here tending this guy so he won't make noise, stopping him from starting his truck so it won't make noise, because I want you to be disturbed. See? I'm cunning about it. I'm not sorry at all. Never have been. I'm inconsiderate."
"I knew that," said Chiun. "Now I cannot write."
"You haven't written for a month o
n that thing. You just stare at it, day after day. You're using everything for an excuse. I stopped that track and this guy just so you'll face the fact that you're not a writer."
"There are no good love stories around today. The great day dramas of your television have degenerated into nothing. They have violence, even sex. This is a pure love story. Not cows and bulls reproducing. But love. I understand love because I know and care enough not to disturb people at productive work."
"Not for a month, Little Father. Not a word."
"Because you make noise."
"No noise," said Remo.
"Noise," said Chiun and tore up the pad with a flurry of his sharp fingernails. He slid his hands into the sleeves of the opposite arms of his kimono. "I cannot compose while you carp."
Remo massaged Houk Hubbley's chest with his foot. Hubbley felt a lot better. Well good enough to get to his feet. Good enough to take another poke at the skinny guy.
Skinny guy hardly noticed him. Just a little bit. Enough to be where the punch was not.
It was the strangest thing. Skinny guy didn't duck, didn't dodge, didn't block a punch. Just wasn't there when the fist was.
"Even if you got it down on paper, which you won't, nobody's interested in love stories in this country. They want sex."
"There is nothing new to sex," said Chiun. "Sex does not change from emperor to peasant, from Pharaoh to your cab drivers. Babies are made very much the same as they have always been made."
"Well, still Americans like to read about it."
"Why? Can't they do it? You people seem to breed well enough. There are so many of you. Almost all of you with meat on your breath and insults on your tongue, making noise."
"You want to sell a book, Little Father, write about sex."
"That takes up less than one page," said Chiun, his eyebrows furrowing in worry. "The seed meets the egg and a baby happens. Or the seed does not meet the egg and a baby does not happen. This is a subject for a book? The white mind is mysterious."
Remo turned back to Hubbley who was still throwing punches. The crowd on the diner steps now was cheering Remo on and laughing at Hubbley.
"Enough. No more games," said Remo to Hubbley.
"All right, you sumbitch, I'll show you what no more games is."
Big Houk Hubbley went to the cab of his truck. From underneath the seat, he pulled out a sawed-off shotgun. It could shiver a telephone pole in two. Or mutilate a wall. At close range, sawed-off shotguns made people chopped liver.
The folks on the porch stopped laughing at Houk Hubbley. That made him feel better. That was what he wanted. Respect. And he was going to get it from that skinny fellow too.
"Put that away," said Remo mildly. "You can hurt with that. That's not nice playing."
"Apologize," said Houk Hubbley. So he would do a few years in the state pen if he had to for sausaging the guy. So what? Lots of loggers had done time. Time didn't make a man no different. Time nowadays was just about the same as not doing time, now that they had you out in the forests working. You could also get yourself a woman in prison if you had the right connections and you kept your smarts. So why not kill the guy? Unless, of course, he apologized.
But then an even stranger thing happened. Sure, it was mighty peculiar that the skinny guy couldn't be hit by a punch. Not even right up close, sometimes so close the knuckles felt the black T-shirt and they had the chest right there in the path of a good punch and then it was gone. That was peculiar enough, but now something even weirder happened. And Houk Hubbley would swear for many a year afterward that this thing really happened.
As soon as he had decided he was going to pull the trigger, without saying anything different, without making any special move, the old Oriental lifted his head as if he were a mind reader. The skinny white guy stopped his conversation with the Oriental and also looked. At the very same time, as if both of them knew instantly what had gone on inside Houk Hubbley's mind.
"No," said the white guy. "Better not."
Houk Hubbley didn't threaten, didn't smile, just stood there with his right trigger finger cradling that deadly strip of metal that could send a wall of shot out at the yellow Toyota and the two men.
It was a quiet moment. Then suddenly the old gook wasn't in the seat anymore and Houk Hubbley could swear all he did was try to get a peek at where the old guy was and then he didn't see anything.
There was this bright light up above and this fellow with a green mask and the place smelled of ether. If this was the diner driveway, why was there a ceiling above him? His back was on a very hard thing and someone was talking to a nurse, and there were now three people with green masks and green caps looking down at him and someone was saying something about a local anesthetic and someone was coming to.
Houk Hubbley realized that it was he who was coming to. The people looking down at him were doctors. He could hear their problem. Something about rectal canals. And two unfired shells in the chamber. And the trigger guard being inside. They would have to cut to it, because a yank might explode the shells.
And then a doctor noticed Houk was aware of what was going on.
"Mister," he said, "would you mind telling us how you got a sawed-off shotgun, loaded, into your intestinal tract? I mean, how did you do it without the thing going off? I know this model. It's got a hair trigger. How did you do it?"
"You won't believe it but I think it was because I had a nasty thought."
In downtown Portland, Remo waited by a telephone booth, looking at his watch. He did not need it to tell time but he needed it to make sure that upstairs was telling time correctly. In one hand he had a dime and in the other hand he had a telephone number. He was no good at this code thing and the only time it worked for people was when they were code people themselves. Remo suspected that every intelligence agency or secret organization had a code nut. Nobody else understood what the code nut was up to, except other code nuts, often in competing services. These code nuts made their codes more and more complicated to prevent other code nuts on the other side from understanding them.
Meanwhile, the people who had to use those things went stumbling along, guessing at what was what. If Remo understood what upstairs wanted, then the third number in the telephone number was the number of times he should let the number ring before phoning back and the fourth number was the time of day he should phone. The third number was two and the fourth number was five.
Remo made a mental bet with himself. The bet was three to one he would not reach upstairs correctly.
A man with a blue snap-brimmed hat and eyeglasses was using the phone. He carried a cane over his arm.
"Sir," said Remo. "I'm in sort of a rush. Would you let me use the phone, please?"
The man shook his head. He said to someone on the other end of the line to go ahead, he was in no hurry.
Remo hung up for him. He wedged the head and the hat between phone box and wall. The eyeglasses popped up to the man's eyebrows. He grunted. He could not make clear sounds because his jaw was wedged open. He sounded like he was in a dentist's chair.
Remo dialed the number, waited for two rings, hung up and dialed again. He was sure it wasn't going to work.
"Yes," came the acidic voice. It had worked.
Remo unwedged the man's head.
"Sorry," he said. "You're going to have to hobble away. I need privacy. I didn't think I'd reach my party, but you know, I did. Thanks."
He gave the man back his cane and told him to work his jaw and the pain would go away.
"Who was that?" asked the voice on the other end of the line. The voice was that of Harold W. Smith, head of CURE, and to Remo, a man who worried too much about too many things.
"Somebody who got his head caught between the phone and a wall."
"This is not the sort of conversation that should be carried on in public."
"I'm alone. He's gone."
"Did you kill him?"
"What is this? C'mon. What's the message?"
"Yo
u might not want to leave so many bodies around."
Remo quickly scribbled on a pad. This new system for messages was supposed to have been simplified so that he could understand it. By transposing words instead of letters and every word at a different integer on his card, to be translated into another word, he was now supposed to be able to get quickly and easily a coded message that no one else could interpret.
He had the card and his pencil out, along with a piece of notepaper.
He put the message together.
"What do you want me to do in Albuquerque?"
"That wasn't the message," said Smith. "Here is the message."
"Jerk," mumbled Remo.
"Blue bellies Boston Globe 19 and Zebra. Got it?"
"Yep," said Remo.
"Does it make sense?"
"Not at all," said Remo. "Not even slightly."
"All right. Fifty-four dancers break three dowels."
"Gotcha," said Remo. "I'll be there."
He hung up and put the code card in his rear pocket. It looked like a bank calendar with descriptions of very peculiar loan rates. He was to meet Smith at the Logan Airport shuttle room in Boston.
Chiun was in the Toyota. He was busy not writing his tale of the king's love. How could he be expected to compose beauty with Remo ramming dimes into a telephone?
"We're going to Boston," said Remo.
"That is the other side of your country."
"Right."
"How can I write when we go shifting from one side of this country to another?" asked Chiun.
On the flight to Boston, he mentioned seven times how a true artist could not write while travelling, how if he were not travelling he would have completed his novel by now, how this was the very best time to write and it might never come again. If it weren't for this trip and its chaos, he would have done the book. Now it was over forever. Because of Remo.
Not that Chiun was in the habit of blaming, he mentioned. He just wanted things understood. He was not blaming Remo but Remo might just as well have set fire to Chiun's manuscript, a manuscript that probably was superior to William Shakespeare's, a famous white writer. Chiun mentioned famous white writers because if he mentioned Hak Lo, Remo would ask who Hak Lo was.
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