Kill or Cure

by Warren Murphy

  The room was a small office with a desk, extra chairs, and a small table on which sat a portable color television set.

  There were three men in the room. Bazzani apparently was the one behind the desk. He was fattish and red-haired; he had that dumb look that only red-headed Italians are able to master fully. Remo put his age in his late thirties. The other two men in the room were younger, dark-haired, much impressed by being close to Bazzani, who was probably the most wonderful, grandest man they had ever hoped to meet.

  “Hey, this is a private office,” one of the men said.

  “That’s good,” Remo said. “My business is private.” He turned to the man at the desk. “Bazzani?”

  “Shhhh,” said the man. “It’s coming on now.”

  He was staring at the television set. Remo and Chiun turned to watch. The game show emcee said, “We’ll be back in just one minute.”

  “Shhhh now, everybody,” Bazzani said.

  A soap commercial came on.

  “It’s next,” Bazzani said.

  The soap commercial died, there was a moment of blank air, and then on screen came a large sunflower, with a hole in its center. It filled the screen in garish color for a few seconds and then, into the hole in the center popped the head of Mac Polaney.

  Remo winced.

  Polaney seemed fixed there for a moment, then opened his mouth and began to sing, to the plinking of one banjo accompaniment:

  Sunshine is nicer.

  Flowers are sweeter.

  We need a man

  To clean up the town.

  It went on and on and ended with:

  Vote for Polaney.

  Early and often.

  Bazzani had giggled when the sunflower first came on the screen. He laughed aloud when he saw Polaney’s face. At the end of the jingle, he was roaring. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He tried hard to catch his breath.

  The song ended, and over the sunflower and Polaney’s face came a printed legend:

  Sunshine is nicer.

  Vote for Polaney.

  Then the commercial faded and the game show came back on. Bazzani was still convulsed. Through tears and gasps, he managed to sing:

  Vote for Paloney.

  He is a hoople.

  Then off into more laughter, demanding of everybody in the room, “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

  Remo and Chiun stood silently in the middle of the floor, waiting.

  It took a full sixty seconds before Bazzani could catch his breath and regain some of his composure. Finally, he looked up at Remo and Chiun and wiped away the tears of mirth which sparkled on his fat, meaty face.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Remo said. “We’re from Mr. Polaney’s headquarters, and we’ve come to ask your support.”

  Bazzani chuckled as if a partner to a joke.

  Remo said nothing. Bazzani looked at him, waiting for him to say more. But when Remo said nothing, he finally asked in surprise, “Whose headquarters?”

  “Mac Polaney,” Remo said. “The next mayor of Miami Beach.”

  This pronouncement was good for another thirty seconds of general hilarity, this time shared by Bazzani’s two companions.

  “Why do they laugh?” Chiun asked Remo. “Mister Polaney is correct. Sunshine is nicer.”

  “I know,” Remo said, “but some people don’t have any feel for truth and beauty.”

  Bazzani showed no sign of ever letting up. Every time he stopped laughing to catch his breath, he hissed “Mac Polaney,” then he and his two spear carriers were off again.

  Perhaps if Remo got his attention. He stepped forward to the desk which was bare except for a newspaper opened to the race results, a telephone and a metal bust of Robert E. Lee.

  Remo lifted the statue in his left hand and put his right hand on top of its head. He wrenched with his hands and ripped off the bronze head. Bazzani stopped laughing and watched. Remo dropped the rest of the bust and put both hands to the top of the skull in his right hand. He twisted and wrenched, moving his hands back and forth in unfamiliar patterns, his fingers moving individually as if tapping on different keys. Then he opened his hand and let the bronze dust and flakes to which he had reduced the statue dribble between his fingers onto Bazzani’s desk.

  Bazzani stopped laughing. His mouth hung open. He seemed unable to remove his eyes from the pile of bronze metallic dust on his desk blotter.

  “And now that Laugh-In is over,” Remo said, “we’re going to talk about your endorsement of Mac Polaney.”

  The words jolted Bazzani to attention. “Alfred,” he said. “Rocco. Get these two nuts out of here.”

  “Chiun,” Remo said softly, his back still turned to the other two men.

  They moved toward Remo. Behind him, he heard two sharp cracks as if boards were breaking, and then two thumps as bodies hit the floor.

  “Now that we won’t be interrupted,” Remo said, “why have you been supporting Cartwright?”

  “He’s the city leader. I always support the city leader,” Bazzani said. His voice was still loud and blustery, but there was a new note in it now. One of fear.

  “So did Meola and Lt. Grabnick,” Remo said. “But they saw the light. They’re supporting Polaney now.”

  “But I can’t,” Bazzani whined. “My membership…”

  “But you must,” Remo said. “And forget your membership. Are you their leader or not?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “No buts,” Remo said. “Look, I’ll make it clear for you. Support Polaney and you get $5,000 and you keep breathing. Tell me no, and your head’s going to look like Robert E. Lee’s there.”

  Bazzani looked down at the pile of dust again, then sputtered, “I never heard of such a thing. Politics aren’t done this way.”

  “Politics are always done this way. I’ve just eliminated the middle step of beating around the bush. Well? What’s the answer? You want to be with Polaney, or you want to have your skull caved in?”

  Bazzani, for the first time, searched Remo’s eyes and found nothing in there but truth. It was hard to believe that this was happening to him, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out anything to do. He looked past Remo down at the floor, where Rocco and Alfred lay still.

  “They’re not dead,” Remo said, “but they could just as easily have been. All right, time’s up.” He took a step toward the desk.

  “What do you want me to do?” Bazzani said, with a sigh.

  Before Rocco and Alfred regained consciousness, Remo had Bazzani’s signature on an endorsement and Bazzani had Remo’s five thousand dollars in his pocket.

  “A fair trade,” Remo said, “is a bargain for everyone. One last thing.”

  Bazzani looked up.

  “How’d you know Polaney’s commercial was going to be on?”

  “We got a list of all the times they’re running.”

  “From who?”

  “Cartwright’s headquarters.”

  “Okay,” Remo said, with a small smile. “Now don’t cross me. Mr. Polaney’s happy to have you aboard.”

  He turned, stepped over Rocco and Alfred and led Chiun out, through the front clubrooms and out into the street.

  He was worried, but happy. Bazzani had had the list of commercials and they had come from Cartwright. That meant that Cartwright had a pipeline into Polaney’s campaign organization, and that was cause for worry. But it also made Remo happy, because it meant that the Cartwright people were moving. Slowly—true, but they were moving…toward Remo.

  His concentration was broken by Chiun’s voice. He turned. Chiun was singing softly under his breath:

  Sunshine is nicer.

  Flowers are sweeter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “DID YOU SEE THOSE commercials?”

  Willard Farger seemed pained. He sat at his desk in the main room of their campaign headquarters suite, watching his three Playboy bunnies who seemed to be watching their fingernails grow.

>   “Yeah,” said Remo. “What’d you think?”

  “I thought they were terrible,” Farger said. “Who’s going to vote for a guy with his head in a sunflower?”

  “History is full of elections where people voted for guys with their heads in their ass,” Remo said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all been carefully calculated and computed on Madison Avenue. And would they lie to us?”

  Both he and Farger knew the answer to that question so it was not necessary to answer it. Instead, Remo said, “By the way, I don’t mean to tell you your business, but shouldn’t there be more people in headquarters than you and your harem? I mean, aren’t there supposed to be real live voters around here who would die or cheat or rob or kill for our candidate?”

  Farger shrugged his shoulders. “Sure there are. Where do I get them?”

  “I thought they came after we got the endorsements from Meola and Grabnick and Nick Bazzani,” Remo said.

  “Not enough,” Farger said. “We get people when we prove we got a candidate who can win. It’s like farming. You got to have seeds before you have plants. Well, the seeds are the first people. And you’ve got to have them to get in the other people who really work for you.”

  “The plants?”

  “Right,” Farger said.

  “Well, how do you get those first people? The seeds?”

  “You get them usually from the candidate himself. His friends, his family. They’re the start of his organization. Our guy doesn’t even have that. What’s he going to do, staff headquarters with catfish?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Remo said. “We can’t win unless we have people. And we can’t get people unless we prove we can win. Where does it start or end for that matter? What about the commercials? Will they help?”

  Farger shook his head. “Not those commercials.”

  “The newspaper stories and ads?”

  “Maybe a little. But we don’t have time to build an organization by dribs and drabs.”

  “All right,” Remo said. “It’s decided.”

  “What is?” Farger asked.

  “People. We need ‘em. We’re going to hire ‘em.”

  “Hire them? Where are you going to hire people for a campaign?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve got to think about it. But that’s the answer. Hire ‘em.”

  “Hmmm,” Farger said, musing. Then finally, “It might work. It just might.” He paused as Teri Walker stepped out of her office, saw Remo, and smiled her way to him at Farger’s desk.

  “Did you see the commercials?” she asked.

  “Sure did.”

  “And?”

  “The one I saw was so effective a Cartwright ward leader switched over on the spot. Never saw a commercial with more pulling power than that one.”

  “You mark my words,” Teri said. “The whole town will know Mac Polaney by the next forty-eight hours.”

  “What does your mother think?” Remo asked.

  “I’d love to take the credit, but she’s the one who gave me the idea. For the sunflower setting.”

  “And the song?”

  “That came right from the candidate. He wrote it himself. He’s sweet. He really believes it.”

  “So do I,” Remo said. “Sunshine is nicer. We’ve just been talking about our manpower problems. We’re thinking of hiring campaign workers.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” she said.

  Farger said, “Our biggest problem is going to be election day at the polls. If we don’t man every polling place, Cartwright’s people will kill us. They’ll steal our votes.”

  Remo nodded sagely although he had no idea how one would go about stealing a vote in this day and age of voting machines.

  “How many people would you need?” he asked.

  “At least two hundred.”

  “Two hundred people at $300 for the week. Sixty thousand,” Remo said.

  “Yeah. A lot of scratch.”

  “We’ve got it,” Remo said. “Don’t worry about it. All we’ve got to do is figure out where to get two hundred people in a hurry.”

  He left that problem with Farger and joined Teri Walker in her office, where she showed him the layouts for the newspaper ads which would start running the next day. They showed Mac Polaney’s head inside a sunflower, and the simple legend:

  Sunshine is Nicer.

  Vote for Polaney.

  “What about issues?” Remo asked. “Taxes, air pollution, crime?”

  She shook her head, tossing her long blonde hair lightly around her bare shoulders. “It won’t work.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you heard his positions? Take parking, for example. I asked him about parking. He said the whole thing was very simple. Cut down the parking meters and attach springs to their bases, then give them out to the public for use as pogo sticks. This, you see, would stop the theft of money from the meters, the vandalism of the meters themselves, and ease the traffic problem by getting people out of their cars and onto their pogo sticks. And then, there is air pollution. You know what his solution is to air pollution?”

  “What?” Remo asked reluctantly.

  “Zen breathing. He said air pollution is only a problem if you breathe. But if you practice zen breathing, you can cut down the number of breaths you take per minute. Cut them in half. This cuts the air pollution problem in half, without the expenditure of one cent by the public. And then there was crime. Do you really want to hear his position on law and order?”

  “Not really,” Remo said. “Stick with Sunshine is Nicer.”

  “That was my mother’s advice and my grandfather’s too. And they know what they’re doing.”

  Remo nodded pleasantly at the insult, but was glum again as he got into the elevator for downstairs. But his spirits perked up as he heard the elevator operator humming under his breath the melody of Sunshine is Nicer.

  · · ·

  Chiun could tell Remo was worried. “You are bothered?” he said.

  “I need two hundred people to work on Polaney’s campaign.”

  “And you do not know two hundred people?”

  “No.”

  “And you do not know where to get that many strangers?”

  “No.”

  “Can you not advertise in the little print in your newspapers?”

  “Farger says I can’t. It would destroy our image by admitting that we couldn’t get campaign workers.”

  “Truly a problem,” Chiun said.

  “Truly,” Remo agreed.

  “But you will not call Dr. Smith?”

  “No. I’m going to do this myself, Chiun. And that’s one Smitty’s going to owe me.”

  Chiun turned away, shaking his head.

  The next morning, the problem became academic.

  There was a page one story in the Miami Beach Dispatch in which Mayor Cartwright attacked the mysterious forces behind his opposition, and charged that his primary opponent was planning “to import goons—professional, paid political Hessians—to come into our city to disrupt our way of life.”

  Remo crumpled the paper and tossed it angrily to the floor.

  There it was again, proof of Cartwright’s pipeline into the Polaney camp. And this time Remo knew who it was.

  Farger just had not been able to play it straight; he didn’t have the guts to break loose from his old organization, and so he played double agent, taking Remo’s money and tipping off Cartwright on what Polaney was doing.

  Well, enough was enough. Farger would pay for it now.

  So Remo thought. But Farger was to escape punishment at his hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  DR. HAROLD W. SMITH looked at the telephone for the hundredth time that morning, then stood and walked to the door of his office.

  Ignoring his confidential secretary, his administrative assistant, and a string of other project assistants, he walked through their offices, out through a cluster of big open offices, and toward a side door of the main sanitarium
building. Some of the workers at desks in the big offices stared at his departing figure in disbelief. But for a glimpse at lunch, they had never seen him except behind his desk. He was at his desk in the morning when they arrived; as often as not, he ate lunch there; and he worked late into the night, hours past the departure time of the Civil Service personnel who sat in the outer offices doing paper work on educational and medical research projects which served as Folcroft’s cover. Some had never conceived of the idea of Dr. Smith walking anywhere; now to see him ambulating was a shock indeed.

  There were two basic reasons Smith rarely left his desk. First, he was a compulsive worker. Work was his wife, his life, his mistress and his madness. Second, he resented any time spent away from his telephone, because over that telephone he learned of the problems CURE faced, and over that same bank of phones he could set into motion the worldwide apparatus that CURE had slowly accreted to itself over the past decade or more.

  But now, he did not expect the phone to ring. The President was in Vienna at the summit. He would not be back for several more days and Smith had that much time left before the President’s last order to CURE became operational: disband. Not that Smith would need to hear the order spoken. The instant he felt that CURE could not be saved; that its security was irrevocably breached; that its continued existence was a disservice to the country; at that moment, Smith would act. It was a mark of his character that he did not regard his willingness to do that as a mark of character. It was the right thing to do; therefore, it was the kind of thing a man must do.

  But now, as the day grew closer, he found himself asking the question of himself. Would he really scuttle CURE and take his own life in the process? He had never doubted it before, but that was when it had been just an academic possibility. Now, it approached reality. He wondered if he would indeed have the nerve.

  Still, the question might not be put to him. There was still Remo.

  He knew Remo would not telephone. He resisted calling on simple assignments. On this one, where Smith had lifted the need for reporting regularly, Remo would not call at all.

  He was not overly optimistic about Remo’s chances to nip the scandal of the League Papers in the bud. At the subtle cat and mouse games, Remo was as a child. And now, he was in the trickiest of all arenas—urban politics. CURE’s mask had been torn because of politics, the need of Cartwright to block the investigation and indictments of his administration. The problem required a political solution, and Smith could tell, from reading the Florida papers, that Remo had moved into the political arena with a man named Polaney.