Kill or Cure

by Warren Murphy

  Meola moaned through the fish gag. He shook his head from side to side, his eyes widened in fear. Then he tried to run, but the two men stopped him. Somehow, they stopped him with just one finger each.

  And then Meola found himself being lifted by the shirt collar and held out over the deep pool. He looked down and between his suspended feet, he could see the sleek brown and gray bodies of the sharks, slipping back and forth noiselessly through the water, searching.

  He heard the white man talking. “Mac Polaney is a decorated veteran. He has broad political experience. He is incorruptible. He is just the man our city needs to lead it through these perilous times. Don’t you agree?”

  Meola failed to nod.

  He felt his body dip and then water slipped into his shoes, before he was yanked upward again, a foot above the water.

  “All our loyal government employees want is decent government, a chance to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Isn’t that right?”

  Meola nodded and as reward felt himself lifted a few inches higher.

  “Upon reconsideration, as president of the employees’ union, you feel that Mac Polaney’s election will be a great step forward for the people of Miami Beach. Do I quote you accurately?”

  Meola nodded frantically. How long could this guy hold him out over the water, before his arm tired and Meola was dropped?

  Meola nodded. Again and again.

  He felt himself being lifted effortlessly, swooped up over the railing and placed back on the ground.

  The white man pulled the fish from his mouth.

  “I’m glad you saw it our way,” he said. “Mac Polaney’ll be glad to have you aboard.”

  Remo reached into his pocket and took out a stack of papers that Farger had prepared. He leafed through them, found the one he wanted and replaced the others.

  Remo glanced over it, then nodded to himself. “Sign here,” he said. “It’s an endorsement. You want to read it?”

  Meola shook his head. His voice came back, but his throat still hurt. “No, no,” he said. “Anything you want.”

  “Good,” Remo said. He took Meola’s pen, clicked it and handed it to him. “Sign.”

  Meola tried to reach for the pen, but his arms would not move. “My arms,” he said.

  “Oh,” Remo said. He reached forward with his right hand and pressed Meola’s wrists, first the right, then the left. Immediately, Meola felt control and strength moving back into his arms.

  “Now sign,” said Remo, handing forward the paper and pencil.

  Meola signed and handed them back. Remo checked the signature, folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He replaced the pen in the breast pocket of Meola’s blue work shirt.

  Remo met his eyes. “All right,” he said, “now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that as soon as we leave, you’re going to call the cops. Or else you’re going to retract the endorsement, and call it a hoax. That’s what you’re thinking. But that’s not what you’re going to do. Because if you do, we’re going to come back and feed you to your playmates. Count on it. That’s solid gold. Chiun.”

  Remo nodded to Chiun and the old man leaned forward and picked up one of the fish from the pail. As Meola watched, the delicate Oriental tossed the foot-long fish into the air. As it came down, his hands flashed through the air, glinting in the sun like golden knife blades. When the fish hit the ground, it had been cut into three pieces by Chiun’s hands.

  Meola looked at the fish, then at the old man, who had again folded his hands inside the sleeves of his robe.

  “We’ll dismember you like that fish,” Remo said. “Piece by piece, and then we’ll feed the pieces to the sharks.”

  He put a hand on Meola’s shoulder and for the first time, Meola noticed how thick the man’s wrists were. “Are you afraid?” Remo asked.

  Meola nodded.

  “Good,” Remo said. “You’d better be scared to death.”

  He took his hand from Meola’s shoulder, took a piece of yellow paper from his shirt pocket and looked at it. “Come on, Chiun,” he said, “we’ve got more visits to make.”

  They turned to walk away, but Remo stopped and turned back to Meola. “I’m glad you saw it our way. Rest easy. You’re doing the best thing for the city. Cross us and there won’t be enough left of you to get a hook into.”

  Remo turned, put his arm around Chiun’s shoulder and walked away. Meola heard him say, “See, Chiun. Reasonable minds can always reach political compromises.”

  Meola looked at them, then down at the fish which the Oriental’s flying hands had slashed into bits.

  Why not Mac Polaney, he thought. After all, he was a decorated veteran with broad political experience; he was incorruptible; and he had some kind of campaign volunteers.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LIEUTENANT CHESTER GRABNICK, HEAD of the Uniformed Officers Association, was an honest cop.

  In seventeen years as a policeman, he had not taken money from gamblers, he had not protected narcotics dealers, he had not indulged in brazen brutality.

  There had been just one tiny little mistake.

  “When you were a rookie patrolman, you used to steal reports from the detective bureau and turn them over to a defense lawyer.”

  The man who brought him this news was in his thirties and he had a hard face. He tried to turn the face softer now as he said, “It would be a shame to ruin a good career for that sort of youthful indiscretion.”

  Grabnick was silent, thinking.

  Finally, he said, “You got the wrong guy.”

  “No, I haven’t,” his visitor said. “I have an affidavit from the lawyer.”

  Chester Grabnick, who was the lawyer’s best friend and who bowled with him every Wednesday night, said, “You do? How could you get a thing like that?”

  “It was easy,” the man said. “I broke his arm.”

  Without much more discussion, Lt. Chester Grabnick decided that the election of Mac Polaney would be the best thing that could ever happen to Miami Beach and its loyal, dedicated force of men in blue.

  “Will your membership go along?” his visitor asked.

  “They’ll go along,” Grabnick said, sure of himself. His success had been built upon the reputation of “Honest Chet.” So long as nothing happened to damage that reputation, he could get the uniformed officers to back anybody he wanted.

  “Good,” his visitor said. “Make sure you do.”

  In the car outside Grabnick’s home, Remo slid behind the wheel and said to Chiun, “All right. We got him. That’s two. A good day’s work.”

  “I do not understand,” Chiun said. “Will people vote for your candidate because this policeman tells them to?”

  “That’s the theory,” Remo said. “Get the leaders and the peasants fall in line.”

  “But one can never tell about peasants,” Chiun said. “That is why they are peasants. I remember once…”

  Remo sighed. Another history lesson.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “HERE’S YOUR FIRST TWO,” said Remo, tossing the endorsements on Farger’s desk at campaign headquarters.

  Farger picked up the papers, read them quickly, double-checked the signatures, then looked up at Remo with renewed respect.

  “How’d you do it?” he asked.

  “We reasoned together. Teri still here?”

  “Inside,” Farger said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Busy as a beaver.”

  Teri Walker sat behind a large metal desk, its top festooned with pads, pencils, paper, sketches. She wore large, owlish dark-framed eyeglasses, pushed up on top of her head and she smiled at Remo as he came in the door.

  “I met the candidate,” she said. “You know we’re going to win?”

  “All that confidence from one meeting with the candidate? What did he say?”

  “He said I had beautiful ears.”

  “Ears?”

  “Ears. And he said if I’d run away on his houseboat with him, he’d
retire from public life and spent the rest of his days showering my feet with catfish.”

  “That’s truly touching,” Remo said. “And that proves we’re going to win the election?”

  “Don’t you see, Remo, I believed him. That’s what we’ve got with our candidate. Believability. And he’s…well, nice is the only word for it. So our advertising is going to be all about that—a nice, sweet guy that you can believe. Studies show that in politics, the voter, taken as a group overall and not subdivided into its minor ethnic or socio-economic components, well, that average voter wants…”

  “Sure,” Remo said. “When do we start our commercials, our advertising?”

  “Well, we don’t have time to do anything really fancy with either. But mother is flying down two staff people. We’re going to go with just one TV commercial for the whole campaign. That starts tomorrow. Absolute saturation. The newspaper ads start the next day. How much do we have to spend, by the way?”

  Remo said, “I’ll send over a couple of hundred thousand. When that’s done, ask for more.”

  She looked at him quizzically but approvingly. “When you go, you go,” she said.

  “Anything for honest government,” Remo said.

  “Is it your money?” she asked—just a little too casually, Remo noted.

  “Of course,” Remo said. “Who’d give me money to spend on Mac Polaney? Only somebody as nutty as Mac himself, and people that nutty aren’t rich, or if they are, all their money is tied up in hospitals for homeless cats.”

  “There’s a logical non sequitur there, but I can’t figure it out,” she said.

  “Don’t try. If I were logical, do you think I’d be financing Mac’s campaign? Where is the next mayor, by the way?”

  “Oh, he went back to his boat. He’s repairing some rods for the annual catfish contest next week.”

  “Next week? It’s not on election day, is it?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “If it is, Mac might not even get his own vote,” Remo said.

  She smiled, slightly patronizing, as if she were able to read depths in Mac Polaney’s soul that eluded a crass beast like Remo, and went back to work. Remo watched her for a while, grew bored and left.

  Farger still sat at the front desk, but he had an unhappy look on his face. Remo did not know whether that was because the three so-called secretaries had left for the day, or because tragedy had befallen the campaign. So he asked.

  “We got trouble,” Farger said. “The paper won’t use these endorsements.”

  “Why not?”

  Farger ran his fingertips together indicating money. “The same reason the paper only used one line about me becoming Polaney’s campaign manager. Me…who is front page news around the country. It’s the political reporter. Tom Burns. He’s on Cartwright’s pad. His wife’s a no-show crossing guard and he’s a no-show truant officer.”

  “No-show?”

  “Yeah. He gets the paycheck but doesn’t show up for work. Anyway, the little bastard told me the endorsements weren’t news. He forgets that last week, when the same people endorsed Cartwright, they were front page news.” He slammed a pencil down on his desk. “If we can’t get the endorsements in, how are we going to create any movement?”

  “We’ll get them in,” Remo said.

  He found Tom Burns in a cocktail lounge around the corner from the editorial offices of the Miami Beach Dispatch, the city’s biggest and most influential paper.

  Burns was a little man with graying hair that he touched up to keep black. Thick horn-rimmed glasses covered his vague-looking eyes. He wore cuffed pants and a jacket with frayed sleeves. Although the bar was crowded, he sat by himself, and Remo knew enough about reporters to know that if Burns had been even bearable, he would have had a crowd of publicity-seekers around him, particularly in the middle of an election campaign.

  So much for Burns’ personality.

  He was drinking Harvey’s Bristol Cream on the rocks. He couldn’t drink either.

  Remo slid into a stool at his left and said politely, “Mr. Burns?”

  “Yes,” Burns said, coldly, distantly.

  “My name is Harold Smith. I’m with a special Senate Committee investigating coercion of the free press. Do you have a minute?”

  “I suppose so,” Burns said laconically, trying to mask his pleasure about being asked for his opinion on encroachment on news gathering, the right of a reporter to conceal his sources, the necessity of protecting the First Amendment. But how could he say all that in a minute?

  He turned out to have more than a minute, and he didn’t talk at all. He only listened. He listened as the man explained that the Senate was interested in cases where politicians had tried to “buy” members of the press, in order to ensure favorable news coverage. “Do you know, Mr. Burns, that there are newspapermen who not only have themselves but their relatives on public payrolls, drawing salaries without doing work?” This Harold Smith seemed horrified at the thought. Burns learned that Mr. Harold Smith was tracking down just such a reporter in the Miami Beach area, and Mr. Harold Smith was going to subpoena that reporter to testify before a public Senate hearing in Washington, D. C., and maybe, even, indict him. No, Mr. Burns, it would not be difficult to find him, because all Mr. Harold Smith had to do was to read the local press and find out which reporter is not giving fair coverage to the opponents of the incumbent. That would be the right reporter.

  Oh, Mr. Burns had to go? Oh, he had to write several stories about new endorsements of Mr. Mac Polaney? Oh—Tell It Like It Is had always been his motto?

  Well, that’s really wonderful, Mr. Burns. More reporters should be like you. That was Mr. Harold Smith’s feeling. He looked forward to reading Mr. Burns’ wonderful coverage of Mr. Mac Polaney for the remainder of the campaign.

  Burns left without leaving a tip for the bartender. Remo shoveled a five dollar bill onto the bar. That was the cheapest he’d gotten off in anything he’d done in this campaign.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE NEWSPAPER THE NEXT morning had headlined the defections from Cartwright’s camp to Mac Polaney. Under Burns’ by-line, the story said that what appeared to have been merely a coronation ceremony for the incumbent mayor might now grow into a horse race.

  Another story quoted Cartwright in another attack on the federal government for trying to interfere with the municipal election. Cartwright said that “vast sums” of money had been shipped from Washington for use by his opponents, in an effort to beat him because he would not be Washington’s toady. From the start, Cartwright said, with the infamous League Papers, it was apparent that Washington was trying to dictate to Miami Beach its choice of a mayor.

  Another story on page one was datelined Washington. It quoted the President’s press secretary as saying that a full investigation was underway into the League papers, and that a report should be on the President’s desk when he returned from his Summit meeting next week. The story cheered Remo; it meant he had a few more days in which to bail out CURE.

  Remo put down the paper and chuckled to Chiun, “We’re going to win this thing.”

  Chiun sat, in his blue meditative robe, and looked slowly and quizzically at Remo.

  “That is your opinion?” he asked.

  “It is.”

  “Then heaven help us, because the fools have taken over the asylum.”

  “Now, what’s eating you?”

  “What do you know of politics, my son, that you can say now we will do this, or now we will do that? Why do you not understand the simple wisdom of finding a new emperor? It is as if you were one of those Chinese priests in that terrible television tale, dedicating yourself to social work.”

  “You know very well, Chiun, I’m involved in this to try to save Smith and the organization that pays the freight for you and me.”

  “I have watched you now. You have this Mr. Farger, who is as imperfect a human being as could be found. You have this Miss Walker, who is practicing at your
expense. So I say to you, if you must do this thing, why do you not call in an expert?”

  “Because, Chiun, in this country no one knows anything about politics. The experts least of all. That’s why there still is an American dream. Because the whole system is so nutty that every nut has a chance to win. Even Mac Polaney. Even with me running things for him.”

  Chiun turned away. “Call Dr. Smith,” he said.

  “What would you have me call him?”

  “Do not fear, my son, that you will ever drown in your arrogance. For surely, before that day arrives, you will have choked on your ignorance.”

  “You stick with me, Chiun,” Remo said. “How’d you like to be city treasurer?”

  But Chiun’s remarks rankled. Remo had gotten into politics to force Cartwright’s people to come after him, since he was unable to attack Cartwright head-on. And yet, nothing had happened. No one had moved, and it forced him to wonder, against his will, if he was even in the ball game. He would not take many more pitches, he thought, before he started swinging.

  · · ·

  The big name on Remo’s list for the day was Nick Bazzani, who was the leader of the Miami Beach northern ward. Remo and Chiun found him in his ward club, snuggled into a side street under a large red and white sign that proclaimed “Cartwright for Mayor. North Ward Civic Association, Nick Bazzani, Standard-Bearer.”

  “What’s a standard-bearer?” Remo asked Chiun.

  “He carries the flag in the annual parade of ragamuffins,” Chiun said, looking with distaste around the main clubroom where men in tee shirts sat in wooden chairs, drinking beer and talking.

  “What can I do for you?” one man asked Remo, looking curiously at Chiun.

  “Nick Bazzani. I want to see him.”

  “He’s busy now. Make an appointment,” the man said, jerking his thumb toward a door that apparently led to a back room.

  “He’ll see us,” Remo said, brushing past the man and leading Chiun through the door, into the backroom.