Kill or Cure

by Warren Murphy

  As Chiun had taught him so long ago, Remo focused the power on his right hand and welding the fingers and palm into an almost straight line, slashed down into the thin metal roofing, creating a three-foot long scar. He ripped the thin topping off and Farger scrambled through the hole, his face red with sweat and tears.

  “I just want you to know I’m not fooling around,” Remo said. “Now take me to see Moskowitz.”

  “Sure, sure,” Farger said. “I always considered the press my friend. You know, you conduct one hell of an interview.”

  When Remo and Farger hitched a ride into the city, Remo said he would reimburse Farger for the car.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Farger said. “Insurance will cover it. You certainly do conduct one whale of an interview.”

  In the city Farger phoned Moskowitz. The city manager had just arrived home.

  “One whale of a newsman wants to see you, Clyde,” said Farger.

  But the interview never took place. When Remo got to City Manager Clyde Moskowitz’s house, the door was opened, the lights were on and Moskowitz was staring at a television set with a half-smile on his lips. His eyes were clouded. The lacquered wooden handle of an ice pick stuck out of his right ear. Remo stood near Moskowitz, looking at the ice pick, sensing the strange floral smell that it seemed to give off.

  And then he felt very helpless. For the first time, Remo feared that the art of the assassin might not be enough.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “MARSHAL DWORSHANSKY, YOUR LILAC cologne, sir.” The valet offered the thin, silver bottle on the silver tray as the yacht lurched in the growing hurricane winds.

  Marshal Dworshansky shook seven drops of the greenish cologne on his hand, and rubbed it between his open palms. Then he gently slapped his face and neck.

  “Shall I have the cook select the meat, Marshal?”

  Dworshansky shook his head. “No, Sasha, the important things a man must do himself. To my sadness, I have found out that to entrust others with a major task is to put your life in their hands.”

  “Very good, Marshal. The captain wishes to know when to return to port.”

  “Tell him to stay out here. Let us ride out the storm, Sasha, like seamen of old. How is my daughter taking the sea?”

  “Like a true sailor, Marshal.”

  Dworshansky chuckled. “Ah. If she were a man, Sasha. If she were a man, she would show them a thing or two, eh, Sasha?”

  “Yes, Marshal Dworshansky.”

  With two quick passes of a brush, Dworshansky formed his graying hair into a neat, presentable style—not quite a crew cut, but not flowing either. He dressed in white silk shirt and white cotton pants and white deck shoes. Neat, presentable and functional. He looked at himself in the mirror and slapped his hard stomach. He was in his sixties, yet still well-muscled and fat free.

  When the captain signed on new, young crew members, Dworshansky would offer them $100 if they could throw him in a wrestling match. When none achieved this, he would offer $200 if two men could do it as a team. That failing, he offered $300 for three and $400 for four. He would stop at four, never winded or even flushed with effort.

  “Five of you might make me work up a sweat,” he would say.

  Now Dworshansky entered the ship’s galley like a general on inspection. “The meat, Dmitri,” he ordered. “It must be special tonight. Very special.”

  “Your daughter, Marshal?”

  “Yes. And her daughter, my granddaughter.”

  “It is good to serve your entire family again, Marshal.”

  Dmitri, a short wide man with thick Slavic features and hands like soup bowls, hoisted a boar’s carcass to the cutting block. With obvious pride, he waited for Marshal Dworshansky to inspect the provision. He was not disappointed.

  “Dmitri, in a desert you could find ice water, and in Siberia, you could gather warm mushrooms, but in America you are even more magnificent. Where did you ever get a piece of real meat, hard meat without the heavy marbling of fat? Tell me how you did it, Dmitri. No. Don’t tell me, for then your magic would be lost.”

  Dmitri dropped to one knee and kissed Marshal’s hands.

  “Up, up, Dmitri. None of that.”

  “I would die for you, Marshal.”

  “Don’t you dare,” said Marshal Dworshansky, lifting the man to his feet. “And leave me to starve among these savages without my beloved Dmitri?”

  “You will have boar in wine as none of your ancestors’ ancestors has ever had,” said Dmitri, and despite protestations, insisted upon kissing Marshal’s hands again.

  In the stateroom, Marshal Dworshansky saw his daughter and granddaughter reading fashion magazines, the mother scarcely older-looking than her college-senior daughter, both with the fine high Dworshansky cheekbones, both with stunningly clear blue eyes, and both the joy and the light of his life.

  “Darlings,” he called out, opening his arms. His granddaughter leaped into his arms as though she were still a toddler, laughing and showering kisses on his cheeks.

  His daughter approached him with more mature steps, but the embrace was deeper and stronger, a mature woman’s love for her father.

  “Hello, papa,” she said, and this would have surprised many people in Manhattan, who knew her as Dorothy Walker, president of Walker, Handleman and Daser, the queen of the cold bitches of Madison Avenue, the woman who had battled the giants and won.

  One reason for Dorothy Walker’s success was not, as many rumored, her ability to find the right bed at the right time, but her superior business sense, and another fact unknown to anyone outside this calm stateroom in a turbulent sea. Her little advertising agency was never little at all. It opened its doors with more than $25 million in assets, the personal dowry returned by her husband before he disappeared two decades before.

  Unlike other little shops that begin with creative talents and hopes, Walker, Handleman and Daser began with the ability to go ten years without a client. Naturally, not needing business for survival, the agency found business ganging up at its front door.

  “Have you been a good boy, papa?” asked Dorothy Walker, patting her father’s flat stomach.

  “I have not looked for trouble.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” said Dorothy Walker.

  “Oh, grandpa. Are you doing exciting things again?”

  “Teri is under the impression that your life has been a romantic one, papa. I wish you had never told her those stories.”

  “Stories? They are all true, my dear.”

  “Which makes them worse, papa. Now, please.”

  “Oh, mommy. You’re so out of it. Grandpa is so cool, so with it, and you keep putting him down. Really, mommy.”

  “Cool and with it, I can buy for $25,000 a year, take your choice of weight, size and hair styling. Your grandfather is too old and too mature to be out adventuring around the world.”

  “Enough controversy,” said Marshal Dworshansky. “Tell me the good things that are happening to you.”

  Teri had a basketful of good things and she explained them in detail, each with a tense crisis and each of great import, from a new boyfriend to a professor who hated her.

  “Which professor?” asked Marshal Dworshansky.

  “Never mind, papa—and Teri, don’t you tell him.”

  “Ah, my daughter is so fierce. Listen to your mother.”

  After the late dinner was over and after the granddaughter had gone to bed, Dorothy Walker, née Dworshansky, spoke seriously to her father.

  “All right. What is it this time?”

  “What is what?” asked Marshal with great innocence.

  “Your happiness.”

  “I am happy to see my loved ones again.”

  “Papa, you can bullshit prime ministers and governors and generals and oil sheiks. But you can’t bullshit me. Now there is one happiness for seeing me and Teri, and another when you’ve been out in one of your street fights.”

  Marshal Dworshansky stiffened. “
The Spanish Civil War was not a street fight. World War II was not a street fight. South America was not a street fight, nor was the Yemeni campaign.”

  “Papa, this is Dorothy you’re talking to. I know, no matter how you plan things, you always wind up doing the dirty work yourself. And it makes you very happy. What is it this time? What is it that would make you break your promise to me?”

  “I didn’t break my promise. I did not seek this out. I was truthfully minding my own business,” said Marshal Dworshansky, and then he told her about having cocktails with Mayor Cartwright in Miami Beach when he got some bad news. And all Marshal Dworshansky had said was a mere: “If I were in your shoes, I would not panic. I would…”

  And like so many other campaigns, this one had begun like that. A bit of good advice, then a promise of reward from those he served. Unlike other soldiers of fortune, however, Marshal Dworshansky was not a penniless beggar who would settle for jewels or money. Like his daughter, he always went for bigger game. Not needing money, he demanded and got much more than money.

  “I’ve never had a city before,” he said. “And besides, the campaign is all over. Mayor Cartwright cannot lose.”

  “And how many ice picks have you left in how many ears?”

  “Some things, as you know, are necessary to do, even when we do not take pleasure in them. But it should be over now. The enemy is stumped.”

  And when Marshal Dworshansky outlined who he thought the enemy was, his daughter looked away from him in anger.

  “You know, papa, I used to resent those Polish jokes. But now, after hearing this, after listening to you so incredibly happy about your wonderful new enemy, I’m beginning to wonder if those jokes did not make us look a bit too intelligent.”

  Dworshansky was curious. He had never heard of a Polish joke.

  “If you’d leave this yacht other than to cause mayhem or stick an ice pick in someone’s ear, papa, you’d find out what the world is up to.”

  Intrigued, Marshal demanded to hear Polish jokes and to his daughter’s reluctant good humor, he laughed uproariously at each.

  “I’ve heard them before,” he said, slapping a knee gleefully. “We used to call them Ukrainian jokes. Did you ever hear about the Ukrainian who went to college?”

  Dorothy shook her head.

  “Neither has anyone else,” said Dworshansky and exploded in a booming laugh that reddened his face and brought him near helplessness every time he repeated:

  “Neither has anyone else.”

  “That’s a horrible joke, papa,” laughed Dorothy Walker, not wanting to encourage her father, but his laughter was too contagious for her to resist.

  For the rest of the night he told Ukrainian jokes and would not stop even when his ship’s radio operator interrupted to tell him Mayor Cartwright was trying desperately to reach him.

  “An urgent problem, Marshal,” said the radio operator. “Someone named Moskowitz is dead.”

  “Wladyslaw,” said Marshal Dworshansky. “Have you ever heard about the Ukrainian who went to college?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  HURRICANE WARNINGS WERE SOUNDED in the Miami Beach area, and a shaky Sheriff McAdow met with Mayor Cartwright in the mayor’s spacious one-story ranch house, as dark winds whipped through palm trees on the lawn.

  Cartwright turned away from his shortwave radio, his face flushed. He wore Bermuda shorts and a white tee shirt. An open bottle of bourbon sat on top of the set.

  McAdow, ashen-faced, leaned forward.

  “Nothing? Nothing?”

  Cartwright shook his head.

  McAdow, in white shirt with shining star and light gray pants with black leather holster, rose from his seat and went to the window. He shook his head.

  “Your idea, Tim. Your idea.”

  Cartwright poured himself a half-tumbler of bourbon and downed it in two gulps. “Good. I confess. My idea. Sue me.”

  “Jesus, what did you get us into, Tim? What did you get us into?”

  “Will you relax? Just relax. Marshal says we’re in good shape.”

  “And he won’t answer your radio message.”

  “He said we should sit tight and we’re in good shape. Now damn it, until we hear from him or reach him, that’s what we’re going to do.” Tim Cartwright filled the tumbler half-full again.

  “We’re in great shape. Great shape. Moskowitz is dead. Just like Bullingsworth got it. Farger is shitting in his pants because he says he met some guy who rips off car roofs, and we’re sitting tight with orders to do nothing until further orders. Great shape. There’s Farger out there carrying the ball, and he’s as loose as lambshit, and Moskowitz is dead.”

  “I trust Dworshansky.”

  “So why are you drinking so heavy?”

  “I’m celebrating early. My victory next week in my bid for re-election. ‘Mayor Timothy Cartwright last night won an overwhelming victory in his re-election effort as he trounced one lunatic, 99 percent to one percent.’”

  “You’re so sure? Just because Dworshansky said so? Your great friend, military, political, organizational genius Dworshansky. The man countries bid for. Your friend.”

  “You agreed,” Cartwright said.

  “Everything happened so damned fast.”

  “Something else is damned fast,” the mayor said. “You forgot damned fast that the feds were going to stick your ass in jail, and Dworshansky’s maneuver has blown that all to hell.”

  “I’d rather do a stretch in jail than end up with an ice pick in my ear.”

  “We don’t know if Dworshansky did it.”

  “And I don’t know that he didn’t.”

  “And if he did, so what? He told us, maybe some people had to die. I don’t like it. You don’t like it. But even worse, I don’t like being poor and in jail.”

  Sheriff McAdow turned from the window. “I’ll see you. I’m going back to headquarters. The lines will be buzzing like crazy in this weather.”

  “Go to it, Clyde. That’s what you were elected for. Protect the people.”

  When the sheriff had left, Tim Cartwright filled his tumbler full and turned out the lights in the room. He watched the hurricane grow, the rain coming in torrents now, the city preparing to survive nature.

  What had gone wrong? He hadn’t run for office to be on the take. He had run because he wanted to be somebody. He had come home from the second world war with the government owing him an education under the GI bill and a lot of thoughts about democracy and that way of government being the best for people to live under.

  So how did he end up with a big fat bank account in Switzerland, scheming to stay out of jail? Even as a councilman, he wouldn’t take. Sure, he needed campaign contributions and contractors who were helpful got a little extra consideration, but nothing out of the ordinary.

  Was it the first time that the campaign treasury had a surplus, and he took the overage for himself? Or was it doing favors for nothing, and then wondering why he didn’t do them for something?

  Tim Cartwright could not place the first step toward actively seeking extraordinary profit from his office, but he knew the later ones. And they could send him to jail.

  And so, not to go to jail, he entrusted his future to a man who claimed he knew how espionage worked. It had seemed very simple at first. Well, not really simple, but kind of daring-brilliant.

  The fed spies had Cartwright and McAdow and Moskowitz. They knew the bank accounts and the graft and the shakedowns. So instead of trying to deny it and defend themselves, they were told to go on the attack. Make it impossible for the government to use its information.

  And it had worked. An expendable piece of equipment, Willard Farger, had been sent off on a fool’s errand—to attack the government—and it had worked. Cartwright was going to be re-elected next week, and the government would be afraid to move against him. And by the time the feds had gotten their wits back about them, well, Mayor Tim Cartwright might just have resigned his office and decided to go live out his twili
ght years in Switzerland.

  “I promise you a long and happy life, free of jail,” Marshal Dworshansky had said.

  And there was only a small price. Give him the city. Whatever the Marshal wanted in greater Miami Beach, Cartwright had to provide. Cartwright hoped that Dworshansky would ask for the narcotics business. Cartwright had never wanted to be in on it, but the money was just too much to refuse.

  Protect the people. Tim Cartwright downed the last of the tumbler and wanted to cry. He would have given anything at that moment not to have taken that little bit of campaign overage many years before.

  · · ·

  In Folcroft Sanitarium, a Dr. Harold Smith appeared bewildered. Did the FBI men really believe someone with a Folcroft educational grant was doing some sort of political espionage?

  Yes, was the answer.

  Well, Dr. Smith’s books and records were completely open to the FBI. Imagine someone doing something illegal with an educational grant. What was this world coming to?

  “You’re either naive or a genius,” said an FBI agent.

  “Neither, I’m afraid,” Dr. Smith said. “Just an administrator.”

  “Just one question. Why are those windows one-way glass?”

  “They were like that when the foundation purchased the estate,” said Smith, who remembered how the dating on the billing had been changed more than a decade ago in preparation for just such an investigation. The whole organization had been set up to work just that way, from the computer tapes to the billing on the one-way glass.

  The secret of CURE was holding. If it could hold just a little longer, Remo might be able to pull off the little miracle. Somehow, figure out a way to defuse the Miami Beach bomb that was blowing the cover off CURE. It was a slim chance, but it was CURE’s only chance. Just wait. Wait for an all-clear from Remo.

  · · ·

  In Miami Beach, nothing was clear. Hurricane Megan had seen to that. Even Chiun had been helpless, as his daytime serials were interrupted by static. The Master of Sinanju looked heavenward in anger and then to Remo’s surprise, turned off the television.