"You planning to empty out the trash inside of here, you gonna need a lot more than them six cans you got."
"Depends on how you define trash," said Remo.
"Why don't you keep on stepping before you got problems? You ain't coming in here."
"Sorry. I have business in there."
"Yeah? You buying or selling?"
"Depends. You buying or selling?"
"Selling. You looking to smoke or inject?"
"I gave up smoking years ago."
The man waved Remo in. "Okay, c'mon in. Quick."
"What's the rush? Everybody knows this is a crack house. The police know it's a crack-house. Even the governor knows."
"Yeah. But the police be afraid to come inside and bust us. I do my business on the damn street, they might get brave and grab my ass. Now, come on in, you want to deal."
"Sure," said Remo, picking up one of the shiny new trash cans.
"What you need that for?"
"Trash."
"You talking trash, but come on, fool."
The door shut behind Remo, and he found himself in what had once been an impressive marble foyer. Trash had accumulated in the corners. The walls were now tagged with spray paint graffiti. It was rat heaven.
"Nice," said Remo. "Whoever has to clean this up will be at it till 2000."
"Nobody's gonna clean this place up. Now, pick up your feet."
Shrugging, Remo followed. He carried the can with him. He whistled a happy air.
This drew a sharp rebuke from the hooded man.
"You already high on something?"
"Every breath I take gets me higher."
The black man made an unhappy face, shook his head and kept going.
Beyond the foyer was a stairwell, and Remo followed him up. As soon as the fire door was open, the pungent smell of crack assaulted his nostrils. Remo cycled his breathing down to filter out the deadly smoke.
"This place smell like formaldehyde all the time?" Remo asked.
"You know it. Man can get high just by climbing the stairs. Only don't you try copping any freebies off the air. You want to smoke crack, you smoke the crack I sell you, not the crack hanging in the air. You hear me?"
"Loud and clear," said Remo, who abruptly decided he didn't want to carry this particular trash down more than one flight. He set the can down with a bang.
The black man whirled jumpily at the sound.
"What's the damn holdup?"
"My trash can is empty."
"Of course it's empty. You brought it in empty."
"That's not the problem. The problem is I'm carrying it out full. Those are my orders."
"Orders? Who gave you them orders?"
"That would be telling," said Remo, lifting the lid. He peered inside, frowning with his strong, angular face.
He did this long enough to draw the crack dealer to the lip of the can. He looked in, too.
"What do you see?" Remo asked casually.
"Bottom of an empty damn can."
"Look closer. What else?"
"My own damn reflection."
"Bingo," said Remo, reaching out and stuffing the crack dealer into the can. He went in face first, angry expressions colliding at the bottom. His feet stuck up. They kicked like frog legs.
Remo tapped a spot at the small of the man's back, and both legs wilted like weeds. Then Remo jammed the lid in place.
"Can you breathe?" he asked.
"Lemme out, fool! Lemme out now!"
"I asked if you can breathe?"
"Yeah. I can breathe."
"That's why they're called air holes."
"What?"
"Never mind," said Remo, lifting the can by one handle and marching up the stairs.
The crack smoke came in two flavors-fresh and stale.
Trying not to inhale, Remo followed the thin river of fresh smoke. It led to the third floor, where he found a closed door and an assortment of people sprawled in a corner amid the wreckage of office furniture, passing around a bent and flattened Coke can that emitted thin white smoke.
They were taking turns inhaling from the Coke can's poptop mouth.
"Trashman," Remo sang out.
"Go 'way," some of the smokers said. The others didn't look up. They were so thin from not eating, they might have lacked the strength.
"I've come for the trash," Remo said. "Let's start with that Coke can."
That got everyone's attention. A TEC-22 was produced and pointed at the man holding the Coke can.
"Don't give it up or I'll shoot you dead," said the man with the gun.
"I think you're pointing that in the wrong direction," Remo said agreeably. "You need to point that at me."
"I said give it up," the TEC wielder growled.
"Just now you said don't," the smoker said.
"Changed my damn mind." And changing it again, he pulled the trigger.
The Coke smoker's head became choppy and red, and he fell backward.
Three pairs of hands lunged for the flung Coke can as if scrambling for the last bottle of oxygen on earth.
While a fight broke out on the floor, Remo began collecting refuse.
Bang went the trash-can lid over another tangle of arms and legs. Bang it went again, fast enough to swallow a drug addict but not fast enough to let the previous drug addict climb out.
When the lid went bang for the last time, pieces of cloth and pink and brown flesh oozed from the air holes. A distinct nostril poked out of one. It was rimmed with white powder residue. It pulsed once, as exhaled nitrogen rushed from it, then was still.
"Everyone okay in there?" asked Remo.
There was a low groan of finality, two death rattles and Remo decided all parties were as they should be.
He walked the can over to a plywood panel nailed into a steel window frame, reached under one edge and pulled it loose with the nerve-jangling shriek of nails coming out of metal.
Remo looked down. An open Dumpster sat in the alley, its lid open.
Remo brought the can out, angled it into open space and dropped it straight down. It landed in the Dumpster, collapsing like a telescope.
The loud whang of metal brought a face poking out of a window several floors above.
"What's going on down there?"
"I'm putting out the trash."
"Who you?"
"Sanitation department."
"City taking out the trash for us?"
"No. The taxpayers."
The face grinned broadly. "Well, come on. This place is a damn dump. Ninth floor."
"On my way," Remo sang.
Recovering two other cans from the sidewalk, he carried them up the stairs to the ninth floor.
Rap music pounded against the walls like rubber hammers. Every third word was a four-letter word. The song was about the romance of rape. A woman shrieked inarticulate obscenities into the mike as a kind of human back beat.
Remo decided the music would have to go first.
"In here," a voice called. Another voice laughed and said, "Guess we be taxpayers now. We getting our trash hauled."
Remo stepped into the room. It was a pit. Once it had been a company cafeteria. Now it resembled the aftermath of a cyclone. The charred remains of a chair in one corner testified to the low order of heating-and-cooking facilities.
A tall black man with a serious face glared at Remo. "You! Clean this damn mess up right now."
"Yes, sir," said Remo, walking over to a surviving table and harvesting the pulsing boombox. He flung it over his shoulder without looking, and it landed in the left can with a bang of finality. The music stopped in midcurse.
The laughter stopped too. Grinning faces froze.
"Hey! That wasn't no trash."
"Matter of opinion," said Remo in an unconcerned tone.
"Yeah, well, you see all this nasty refuse. Pick it all up and get it out of my sight."
"Right away," said Remo, stooping to take up the assorted hamburger wrappers, french-fry
containers and rusty used hypodermics that littered the parquet floor.
"Look," the tall man said, "we contribute to the local economy so much we're getting serviced."
"Why damn not?" another chortled. "We be taxpayers."
"Yeah. I paid a tax once. Never saw nothin' for my trouble."
The laughter started up again.
It stopped when Remo straightened with two handfuls of paper refuse and jammed one down the throat of one man and the other down the throat of the other.
While the two danced around clawing at their throats in a futile attempt to clear obstructed windpipes for breathing purposes, Remo switched to harvesting the trash he had come to harvest.
A knife licked out to meet him.
Remo met it with a quicksilver movement of his left hand. The knife tried to parry the hand. The blade lost when it came into contact with the edge of Remo's palm.
It snapped like a plastic birthday-cake knife.
The knife man looked at it with his mouth hanging open.
"That ain't the way it's supposed to work," he muttered.
"Can you say 'comminution fractures'?" asked Remo.
"Say what?"
And Remo brought the heel of the tougher-than-leather hand to his opponent's face with a meaty splat.
The man pitched forward wearing a pinkish brown slab of meat where his face had been.
"Comminution fractures," the second man said hastily, throwing up his empty hands. "See? I can say it fine."
"You can say it, but can you say what it means?"
"Yeah. Fractures of the comminution."
Remo made a buzzer sound in his throat. "Wrong. Comminution fractures are eggshell fractures. When your face hits the windshield at ninety miles per hour, the result is comminution fractures of the facial bones."
The man started backing away. "Thanks but no thanks. Don't want 'em."
"Too late," said Remo, making another meat pattie with his hand and the man's face.
The bodies all fit with a little extra effort. Unfortunately the two with mashed faces began leaking fluid from their damaged facial tissues, which left a trail of blood from the spot where Remo picked up the can to the open window where he dropped the can into the Dumpster with a resounding crash.
It took less than an hour to clear the building. A lot of the addicts were scattered. Remo solved that problem by setting cracktraps. He dumped confiscated crack into open trash cans and left them in strategic areas, the pungent smoke wafting irresistibly from the air holes, now serving a function not intended by the manufacturer.
It worked like cheese set out for rats.
They came sniffing out of their rooms and warrens, and happily crawled in of their own volition.
When a can got full, all Remo had to do was clamp the lid back on and heave the whole thing out the nearest window.
It turned out Remo didn't need the sixth can, so he brought it with him. It should come in handy for loose end number two, he decided.
The elevators didn't work because the electricity had long since been disconnected. It was this that had defeated Friend in the end. Dependent upon electricity, the host mainframe had ceased to function when its power had been shut off.
In the basement Remo found a litter of debris. He looked up. He could see clear to the building's topfloor ceiling.
The center grid of all seventeen floors had collapsed, depositing tons of mainframe computers and office furniture at the bottom. It had collapsed under Remo, who survived the fall. It had been designed as a final death trap, and it hadn't worked because Remo had been trained to kill, not to be killed.
Amid the clutter were tons of loose computer chips. Remo looked around. There were not as many as he remembered. No doubt scavengers had scooped some of them up. Some chips were worth twice their weight in gold.
Just to be sure, Remo began picking up chips, glancing at them with his deep brown eyes before tossing them into the trash.
He knew exactly what to look for. Friend was a VLSI-Very Large Scale Integration-chip. VLSI chip was about the size of a saltine cracker.
The trouble was there were a lot of VLSI chips lying around. And they all pretty much looked the same. Remo was no expert, either.
When he got every VLSI chip he could find into the barrel, Remo carried it up to the top floor.
There he hammered the trash-can lid all the way around the edge until it was so dented it could never be pried open by man or machine.
That done, Remo took up one handle. He began to spin in place. Spinning and spinning, his arm lifted until it hung off his shoulder at a precise right angle, the can straining to tear loose from his grasp by centrifugal force.
With each revolution, the air holes whistled louder and more shrilly. Another unadvertised feature.
When Remo had achieved maximum velocity, he released his grip, aiming the can in the direction of the East River.
The can obliged him perfectly. It took off as if propelled by a mortar.
The splash it made when it hit the water was not loud. But Remo heard it anyway. It was a very satisfying splash.
"Good riddance, Mr. Chips," he said, then started down the stairway to the ground floor.
Before leaving the neighborhood, Remo took the time to drop the Dumpster lid into the down position.
No one noticed him as he boarded an express train at East 116th Street. Why should they? He was an ordinary-looking man of indeterminate age wearing a white T-shirt and gray chinos, and he hadn't any trash can balanced on his head or person.
He felt good. He was back on the team, doing good by doing the work he was good at.
Sometimes that was the only reward an assassin needed.
Chapter 3
Curator Rodrigo Lujan was in his office when the first soul-sickening rumble reverberated up through the foundations of the National Museum of Anthropology at the edge of Mexico City's sprawling Chapultepec Park.
He had lived through the 1985 earthquake, now a fading memory. He would never forget it, but the ruined buildings had long since been cleared and new edifices erected in their place to soothe the awful trauma. It had taken nearly a year to learn how to sleep peacefully once more. That was over ten years ago. Ten years of peaceful sleep despite the knowledge that the earth below was unstable and could crack open at any time.
Every night before he went home, Rodrigo Lujan, who had gone to some of the most prestigious universities in Mexico and wore a coat and tie to work, walked in machine-made leather shoes and ate prepackaged food with modem steel knives and forks, entreated his god to keep the unquiet earth still and quiescent.
"O Coatlicue, Mother of my people, I beseech you to appease the angry ground beneath us."
Coatlicue never responded to that plea. Sometimes she responded to other comments. But if her stone ears heard his prayers, her stone mouth did not reply.
Coatlicue was one of the most propitious gods in the Aztec pantheon. Lujan was Zapotec. On his mother's side. He was proud of his Zapotecness, and although successive generations had lightened the family's mahogany Zapotec skin to the heavily creamed coffee color of the modem Mexican mestizo, he carried his Zapotecness in his heart like a pure, undying flame.
As a Zapotec, he should have worshipped Huehueteod the fire god or Cocijo, Lord of the Rain.
But the more-obscure Zapotec gods had never conversed with him.
Coatlicue had.
The stone statue of Coatlicue, the Mother Goddess of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, had disappeared one night six years before. There were those who said she had bestirred her great stone legs and marched off.
It was true stone footprints had been found on the grass outside the museum. They formed a trail across the Reforma and through Chapultepec Park. This had been documented. This was proved. That much and no more.
But the tracks had ceased at the end of the park, and while some were discovered here and there, no definite trail was discernible.
They say Coatlicue was ul
timately found at the ruined city of Teotihaucan, which had been been built by a race who came before the Aztecs who founded Mexico City, even before the lowland Maya and the highland Zapotecs, Mixtec and other indigenous peoples who roamed the epochs of old Mexico before the cruel Spaniards came.
Coatlicue had been broken in many pieces. It was heartbreaking, for she had survived the ages with only a few nicks and minor weathering from the mighty elements.
Returned to the museum, she was a heartbreak of shattered stone. Lujan had presided over her painstaking reassembly. Bolts had to be used. Holes were thus drilled into the porous shoulders and torso in order for the pins to be inserted.
When the stone masons and metal smiths and others were done, Coatlicue stood as she had for many years in an honored spot in the Aztec wing of the museum, near the precious Aztec Calendar Stone. Still fractured and as broken as Lujan's proud Zapotec heart.
She was imposing even so. Shaped from an eight-foot-tall block of basalt by a master artisan history failed to record by name, her broad, squat womanly figure appeared at first glance to be as wide as tall. Entwined serpents skirted her thick hips, which boasted a skull for a belt buckle. Her breast was decorated by a fan of severed hearts and hands. She stood on thick legs whose feet ended in stone claws. Her hands were blunted talons at her sides.
Coatlicue's head was a wonder. Formed of two serpent skulls at rest so their profiled snouts touched, the flat, sidemounted eyes and joined mouths created the illusion of a scaly, forward-facing countenance.
Lujan shivered just to look upon her brooding mass. Even defiled, she inspired dread, as should the mother of the war god Huitzilopochtli.
The miracle-there was no doubt it was a miracle-had occurred shortly after the restoration.
Coatlicue had miraculously healed herself.
It was no mistake, no hallucination. There existed an entire range of photographs showing her shattered hulk, every stage of the painstaking reassembly, as well her final restored form with the shiny bolts and pins peeping out at different points.
Thus, when Rodrigo Lujan opened the museum one morning to discover the cracks and fissures were no more and the bolts had mysteriously vanished, leaving perfect stone where there should be at least ugly drill holes, his first thought was that the original had been stolen and replaced by a papier-mache replica.
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