“Did you frame me?” Remo asked.
“Yeah,” MacCleary answered without emotion.
“You kill the guy?”
“Yeah.”
“Good job,” Remo said. As Remo inquired if there were any cigars, he wondered casually when MacCleary would find himself headed for an electric chair with a sudden absence of friends.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“IMPOSSIBLE, SIR,” Smith cradled the special scrambler phone between his ear and the shoulder of his gray Brooks Brothers suit. With his free hands, he marked papers, setting up a vacation schedule.
A stiff, gloomy rain whipped across Long Island Sound behind him bringing an unnaturally early nightfall.
“I appreciate your difficulties,” Smith said, counting the days a computer clerk wanted near Christmas. “But we worked out a policy a long time ago about New York. No extensive operations.
“Yes, I know a Senate committee will be investigating crime. Yes. It will start in San Francisco. Yes. And move across the country and we will supply you with background and you will supply the Senate with background; yes, making the Senators look good. I see. Upstairs needs the Senate for many other things. Right. Yes. Good. Well, I’d like to help you, but no, not in New York. We just can’t get a canvass. Maybe later. Tell upstairs, not in New York.”
Smith hung up the receiver.
“Christmas,” he mumbled. “Everyone’s got to have Christmas off. Why not the sensible and convenient month of March? Christmas. Bah.”
Smith felt good. He had just turned down a not-too-superior superior over the scrambler phone. Smith recreated the scene again for the pleasure of his mind: “I’d like to help, but no.” How polite he was. How firm. How smooth. How wonderful. It was good to be Harold W. Smith the way he was Harold W. Smith.
He whistled an off-tune rendition of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” as he denied Christmas vacation after Christmas vacation.
The scrambler phone rang again. Smith answered and casually sang: “Smith, 7-4-4.” Suddenly he straightened, his left hand shot up to the receiver, his right adjusted his tie and he bleated out a snappy “Yes sir.”
It was the voice with the unmistakable accent, giving the code number that no one needed to recognize him.
“But sir, in this area there are special problems…yes, I know you authorized a new type of personnel…yes sir, but he won’t be ready for months…a canvass is almost impossible under…very good, sir, I appreciate your position. Yes sir. Very good, sir.” Smith gently hung up the scrambler, the wide phone with the white dot on the receiver, and mumbled under his breath: “The damn bastard.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“WHAT NOW?” REMO ASKED LISTLESSLY. He leaned against a set of parallel bars in a large, sunlit gym. He wore a white costume with a white silk sash they told him was necessary in order to learn some things he couldn’t pronounce.
He toyed with the sash and glanced at MacCleary who waited by an open door at the far end of the gym. A .38 police special dangled from the hook.
“One more minute,” MacCleary called.
“I can’t wait,” Remo mumbled and ran a wicker sandal across the polished wood floor. It made a hiss and left a faint scratch that buffing would eliminate.
Remo suddenly sniffed the air. The scent of dying chrysanthemums tickled his nostrils. This wasn’t a gym smell. It belonged to a Chinese whorehouse.
He didn’t bother to figure it out. There were many things he gave up thinking about. It didn’t pay to think. Not with this crew.
He whistled softly to himself and stared at the high wide ceiling buttressed by thick metal beams. What would it be now? More gun training? In two weeks, instructors had shown him everything from Mauser action rifles to pipe pistols. He had been responsible for taking them apart, putting them together, knowing where they could be jammed; knowing the ranges and the accuracy. And then there were the position exercises.
The lying down with your arm over a pistol, then grabbing and firing. The guarded sleep where your lids are half shut and you don’t give yourself away by moving your body first. That had been painful. Every time his stomach muscles twitched as they do with anyone trying to move an arm to a certain position while lying down, a thick stick would slap across his navel.
“The best way,” an instructor had said cheerfully. “You really can’t control your stomach muscles so we train them for you. We’re not punishing you; we’re punishing your muscles. They’ll learn, even if you don’t.”
The muscles had learned.
And then the hello. For hours they had him practice the casual hello and the firing of the gun as the instructor moved to shake hands.
And over and over, the same words: “Get in close. Close, you idiot, close. You’re not sending a telegram. Move your hand as if you’re going to shake. No, no! The gun is obvious. You should have three shots off before anyone around you realizes you’re hostile. Now try it again. No. With a smile. Try it again. Now with a little bounce to take the eyes off your hand. Ah, good. Once more.”
It had become automatic. He had tried it on MacCleary once in a strategy session, those classes MacCleary chose to teach himself. Remo came in with the hello, but as he raised the blank pistol to fire, a blinding flash caught his eyes. He didn’t know what had happened, not even when MacCleary, laughing, lifted him to his feet.
“You’re learning,” MacCleary had said.
“Yeah, it looks it. How come you noticed?”
“I didn’t. My muscles did. You’ll be taught that. Your reflex action is faster than your conscious action.”
“Yeah,” Remo said. “I can’t wait.” He rubbed his eyes. “What’d you hit me with?”
“Fingernails.”
“What?”
“Fingernails.” He extended his hand. “You see, I…”
“Never mind,” Remo said and they got down to apartment entrances and locks. When the session was over, MacCleary asked, “Lonely?”
“No, it’s a ball,” Remo answered. “I go to classes. The instructor and me are the only ones there. I go to sleep and a guard wakes me up in the morning. I get up and a waitress brings me my food. They won’t talk to me. They’re afraid. I eat alone. I sleep alone. I live alone. Sometimes I wonder if the chair wouldn’t have been better.”
“Judge for yourself. You were in the chair. Did you enjoy it?”
“No. How’d you get me out anyway?”
“Easy. The pill was a drug to paralyze you into looking dead. We had the chair’s electrical system rewired. When one of our guys pressed a switch, it cut the voltage down just enough to burn, but not to kill. After we left the place, a timer set the whole control panel afire so there’d be no traces. It was easy.”
“Yeah, easy for you, but not for me.”
“Don’t knock it, you’re here.” MacCleary’s constant smile disappeared. “But maybe you’re right. The chair might have been better. This is a lonely business.”
“You’re telling me.” Remo grunted a laugh. “Look. I’ll be going out on assignments sometime. Why can’t I go into town tonight?”
“Because when you pass that gate, you’ll never return.”
“That’s no explanation.”
“You can’t afford to be seen near here. You know what happens if we’re ever going to have to dump you.”
Remo wished the blank gun strapped to his wrist were real. But then he probably couldn’t get a shot off against MacCleary anyhow. Maybe just one night, one night into town, a few drinks. That was a modern lock but it had its weaknesses. What would they do to him? Kill him? They had too much invested. But then with this crew, who knew what the hell they’d do?
“You want a woman?” MacCleary asked.
“What kind, one of those ice cubes that cleans my room or delivers my food?”
“A woman,” MacCleary said. “What do you care? Turn ’em upside down and they’re all the same.”
Remo agreed. And after it was over, he vowed it would be the last time he let CURE
do his procuring for him.
Just before lunch, as he was washing his hands in the small bathroom attached to his room, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Remo yelled. He ran his hands under the cool water to rinse off the non-scented soap CURE had provided.
Drying his hands on the unmarked white towel, he stepped into the room. What he saw wasn’t really bad at all.
She was in her late twenties, a few years younger than Remo. Athletically developed breasts pushed against her blue clerk’s uniform. Her brown hair was set ponytail fashion. The skirt swirled around her rather flattish hips. Her legs were just a bit thick.
“I saw your room number and the time on the board,” she said. Remo recognized the accent as Southern California. At least, that’s what he would have written on one of the speech recognition tests.
“On the board?” Remo asked. He stared at her eyes. There was something missing. They were blue, but deadened like lenses on small Japanese hand cameras.
“Yes, the board,” she said, not moving from the door. “This is the right room?”
“Uh, yeah,” Remo said, dropping the towel on the bed. “Yeah, sure.”
Her face brightened with a smile. “I like to be undressed when I do it,” she said, staring at his broad muscled chest. Remo unconsciously pulled in his stomach.
She shut the door behind her and before she reached the bed she was unbuttoning the blouse. She dropped the blouse over the wooden bedpost and forced her hands behind her back to unhitch the bra.
Her stomach was white and flat. Her breasts dropped gently from the bra’s cups, but not so far as to show she wasn’t firm. The nipples were red and already hardened.
She folded the bra over the blouse and turned to Remo and said, “C’mon, I don’t have all day. I have to be back in codes in forty minutes. This is my lunch hour.”
Remo forced his eyes away, then threw the towel off the bed. He dropped his trousers and his hesitancy.
She was waiting for him under the sheets by the time he unlaced his shoes. Gently he lifted the sheets and got into bed. She forced one of his arms behind her back, the other between her legs, and whispered, “Kiss my breasts.”
It was over in five minutes. She responded with an animal fury strangely without honest passion. Then she was out of bed before Remo was really sure he had had a woman.
“You’re all right,” she said, wriggling into her white panties.
Remo laid on his back and stared at the white ceiling. His right arm was tucked between his head and the pillow. “How would you know? You weren’t here long enough.”
She laughed. “I wish we had more time. Maybe tonight.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” Remo said, “but I usually have instructions at night.”
“What kind?”
“The usual.”
Remo glanced up at the girl. She was putting her bra back on, Hollywood style. She held it in front of her, points down, then bent forward lowering her breasts into the cups.
She kept talking: “I didn’t know what kind of work you do. I mean, I never saw a number like yours on the board before.”
Remo cut her off. “What’s this board you’re talking about?” He stared at the ceiling. She smelled strongly of deodorant.
“Oh. In the recreation room. If you want relationships, you put your room and code number on the board. A man and a woman’s number come up and a clerk just matches them up. You’re not supposed to know who you’ll be doing it with. They say if you know you could get serious and everything. But after awhile, you can figure numbers and wait to put yours in. Like women always have a zero in front of their numbers, men have odd first numbers. You have nine. That’s the first time I ever saw that.”
“What’s my number?”
“Nine-one. You mean you didn’t know that? For crying out…”
“I forgot.”
She chattered on. “It’s a good system. The group leaders encourage it. Nobody gets involved and everybody is satisfied.”
Remo glanced at her. She was dressed again and bounding toward the door in her low-heeled shoes. “Just a minute,” Remo said, smirking. “Aren’t you going to kiss me goodbye?”
“Kiss you?” she said just before she slammed the door. “I don’t even know you.”
Remo didn’t know whether to laugh or just go to sleep and forget about it. He did neither. He vowed never to do his loving in Folcroft again.
That had been more than a week ago, and now he was anxious to get on with the assignments. Not that he relished the work. He just wanted to get out of Folcroft, get out of the cozy little jail.
He rammed the slipper against the gym floor again. There was probably some reason for slippers. There was a reason for everything. But he didn’t give a damn anymore. “Well, how about it?” he yelled over to MacCleary.
“Just a minute now. Ah, here he comes.”
When Remo looked up, he almost laughed. But the figure shuffling in was too pathetic for laughs. He was about five feet tall. A white uniform with a red sash hung loosely over his very skinny frame. A few white wisps of hair floated gently around his emaciated oriental face. The skin was wrinkled like old yellow parchment.
He wore slippers, too, and carried two thick boards that clapped hollowly with his shuffling gait.
MacCleary, almost deferentially, fell in behind the man. They stopped before Remo.
“Chiun, this is Remo Williams, your new student.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHIUN BOWED. Remo just stared. “What’s he going to teach me?”
“To kill,” MacCleary said. “To be an indestructible, unstoppable, nearly invisible killing machine.”
Remo threw his head toward the ceiling and exhaled loudly. “C’mon, Conn. Get off it. Who is he? What’s his line?”
“Murder,” MacCleary said calmly. “If he wanted, you would be dead now, before you could blink.”
The chrysanthemum scent was strong. So it came from the Chink. Murder? He looked like an outpatient from an old age home.
“Want to shoot him?” MacCleary asked.
“Why should I? He’s not long for this world anyway.”
Chiun remained impassive, as if he did not understand the conversation. The large hands folded over the thick wooden planking showed bulging veins. The face, even the slanted brown eyes, revealed nothing but eternal calm. It was almost a violent calm in the face of the recent offer. Remo glanced at MacCleary’s dull gray revolver. Then he looked back into the eyes. Nothing.
“Let me see the .38.” He removed the revolver from MacCleary’s hook. It rested heavily in the palm of his hand. Remo’s mind automatically rolled through the pistol qualifications as they had been drilled into him during training. Range, usual accuracy, percentage of misfires, impact. Chiun would be a dead man.
“Is Chan going to hide behind something, or what?” Remo asked. He spun the barrel. Dark shell casings. Probably extra primer.
“It’s Chiun. And no, he’ll be in the gym chasing you.”
MacCleary’s hook rested on his hip. It was a sign he had a joke in store. Remo had seen the “precede” several times before. They had trained him to look for the precede in every man. Everyone had it, the instructors said, you just had to learn to find it. The hook on the hip was MacCleary’s.
“If I finish him, do I get a week out of here?”
“A night,” MacCleary answered.
“So you think I might be able to do it?”
“No. I’m just stingy, Remo. Don’t want you to get too excited.”
“A night?”
“A night.”
“Sure,” Remo said, “I’ll kill him.” He kept the revolver close to his body, about chest high, where they taught him firing was most accurate and the gun safest from fast hands in front.
He aimed the barrel at Chiun’s frail chest. The little man remained motionless. A faint smile seemed to gild his face.
“Now?” Remo asked.
“Give yourself a
chance,” MacCleary said. “Let him start at the other end of the gym. You’d be dead now before you pulled the trigger.”
“How long does it take to pull a trigger? I have the initiator’s advantage.”
“No, you don’t. Chiun can move between the time your brain decides to shoot and your finger moves on the trigger.”
Remo backed away one step. His forefinger rested gently on the trigger. All .38s of this type had hair firing mechanisms. He lowered his gaze from Chiun’s eyes to his chest. Perhaps it was by hypnosis through the eyes that Chiun could slow down his movements. One instructor had said some Orientals could do that.
“It’s not hypnosis either, Remo,” MacCleary said. “So you can look in his eyes. Chiun. Put down the boards. That’ll come later.”
Chiun lowered the boards to the floor. He was slow, yet his legs seemed to remain motionless as the trunk descended to the floor. The boards made no sound as they touched the wooden floor. Chiun rose, then walked away toward the far corner of the gym where white cotton stuffed mats were hanging against the wall. As Chiun retreated, Remo’s arm extended for accuracy. He did not have to keep the gun close to protect it.
The old man’s white uniform was lighter than the mats. Still the coloring was no problem. The afternoon sun glinted off the red sash. Remo aimed just above it. He would go for the trunk and when Chiun was squirming in a blood puddle on the floor, Remo would take five steps closer and put two bullets into the white hair.
“Ready?” MacCleary yelled, stepping back from what would become the firing pattern.
“Ready,” Remo called out. So MacCleary didn’t bother to check the old man. Maybe this was one of the frequent tests. Maybe this old man, unable to speak English, pitiful in his frailty, was the victim offered to see if Remo would kill. What a pack of bastards.
Remo sighted by barrel instead of the “V”. Never trust the sights on another man’s gun. The distance was forty yards.
“Go,” yelled MacCleary and Remo squeezed twice. Cotton chunks flew from the mats as the shots thunked where Chiun had been. But the old man was coming, moving quickly, sideways up the gym floor, like a dancer with a horrible itch, a funny little man on a funny little journey. End it now.
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