Kill or Cure

by Warren Murphy

  It was the right strategy, but Remo was the wrong tactician. Politics was a game with just too many finesses for the one-time cop.

  Still, what else could Smith do but wait? When all was said and done, when its millions of dollars and thousands of secret workers were counted and recounted, CURE was two people—Smith, the head, and Remo, the hand. Nothing else. No one else.

  Smith strolled to the shore of the sound, where the ground gently broke away and leaned down into the water, baring stones polished smooth by the pounding of the water, glistening now gold and silver in the morning sunlight.

  The waves lapped gently at the incline, and Smith looked at the nearest wave, then one behind it, then one farther out, until finally he was looking out across the broad expanse of Long Island Sound. He had looked at it for years: when CURE was just an idea, and when it was a reality; when its missions were simple and when they were complex. The water gave him the feeling of permanence in a jerry-built world. But now he understood that the permanence of the water belonged only to the water. CURE had come and CURE could go. Dr. Harold W. Smith had lived and Dr. Harold W. Smith would die. But the waves would roll, and more and more pebbles would go smooth and round, to be polished gold and silver by the waves.

  If the sea never changed, was CURE worth having created? Was it worth it for Dr. Harold W. Smith to have left a lifetime of honored government service to head the mission, because a now-dead president had told him he was the only man for the job?

  Smith asked himself that question as he looked now at the water, but he knew his answer. It was the answer that had sustained him for years, through all the pushing of buttons that had somehow cost other men their lives. Each man does what he can and each man’s effort counts. There was no reason for life if a man did not believe that.

  Perhaps even Remo knew that. It could explain why he had gone to Miami Beach instead of fleeing, which was what Smith expected him to do. And if he had gone on the assignment…well, then he might just call.

  Smith sailed a rock at the water, then turned and went back inside, to sit at the telephone.

  · · ·

  But Remo had other things on his mind, besides Dr. Harold W. Smith. For one, Willard Farger.

  Farger was not at campaign headquarters. Roused long enough to be coherent, one of the bunny-secretaries confided to Remo that Farger had come in uncharacteristically early, gotten a phone message and left.

  “He ain’t gonna be late getting back, is he?” she said, snapping her gum as she talked. “I was going to use today’s check to go shopping at lunch hour?”

  “Today’s check?”

  She nodded. “Farger pays us by the day. He thinks that’s the only way we’d show up. But I’d show up anyway, just to see you. You’re cute.”

  “You’re cute, too,” Remo said. “Do you know who the phone message was from?”

  The girl looked at a pad on her desk. “Here it is,” she said. “This party called early, and left the number. When Farger came in, he called it and left.”

  She gave Remo the number and turned away, humming Sunshine is Nicer.

  Remo went to Farger’s desk and dialed the number. “Mayor Cartwright’s headquarters,” a female voice answered. Even though it was early in the day, in the background Remo could hear the buzz of excited voices, typewriters pounding, other telephones ringing. Remo held the phone to his ear for a moment, listening, and ruefully contemplating the three bunnies in the Mac Polaney Campaign Hutch. Then, angrily, he hung up.

  Double-agent Farger. Gone, no doubt, to report to Cartwright how he was taking the smartass easterner’s money and was sinking the Polaney campaign.

  Why had he ever gotten involved in this? Remo wondered. Why? What did he know about politics? The dumbest green kid from a ward club would have handled himself smarter than Remo had. His first impulse had been right. Knock off Cartwright. Stick to what he knew. And what he knew was death.

  First, Farger’s.

  Cartwright’s headquarters were in another hotel on the Miami Beach strip, five long blocks away.

  “He was here earlier,” a bright-faced young girl told Remo, “but he left.”

  The office was a maelstrom of activity and people and noise.

  “Think you’re going to win?” Remo asked the girl.

  “Certainly,” the girl said. “Mayor Cartwright is a fine man. It takes one to stand up to the fascist pigs in Washington.”

  Suddenly, Remo realized a great truth. There were no real reasons why anyone supported a political candidate, not logical ones anyway. People voted their stupidities, and then justified them by seeing in their chosen candidate what they wanted to see.

  Like the girl. A government-hater, she cast Cartwright in that mold, and made it the most important part of his makeup. Logic, obviously, had no part in it because if it had, she would certainly have supported Polaney, whose election was a guarantee of instant anarchy.

  Democracy was a statistical accumulation of stupidities, which cancelled each other out, until they produced the public will. The most insane thing of all was that the public will generally was the best choice.

  Remo returned the girl’s smile and she turned away with a shout. “Charlie,” she called. “Get those brochures down into the truck.”

  “What truck?” a much whiskered young man said.

  “On the side driveway. A green panel. It’s taking the brochures to our other clubs around town.”

  “All right,” Charlie said. He moved toward a half dozen bulky cartons of brochures that were on a four-wheeled hand truck. Remo walked over to give him a hand. He helped Charlie steer the car to the service elevator, then rode down with him, and helped Charlie load the brochures on the back of a green truck. They had just finished when the driver walked out of a saloon across the alley.

  “You know where this stuff goes?” Charlie asked him.

  “Got the list right here, kid,” the driver said, patting his shirt pocket.

  Charlie nodded and went back toward the hotel.

  “I’ll ride with you,” Remo told the driver. “Help unload.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The driver was humming Sunshine is Nicer all along the way. He turned on the radio and in Polaney’s clear, resonant voice, they heard the same song on a commercial.

  Two miles down the strip, the driver turned off Collins Avenue and began heading for the clubhouse in the northernmost section of Miami Beach. After a few blocks, the traffic thinned out to an occasional car.

  “You for Cartwright?” Remo asked the driver, still humming the Polaney jingle.

  “I voted for him last time,” the driver said, in what Remo realized was a non-answer.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Remo said. “Pull over here.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just pull over. I’ve got to check the load.”

  The driver shrugged and pulled the truck to the side of a small roadway bridge that crossed a slimly built river. He stopped and turned to look at Remo who put him out with a knuckle to the neck.

  The driver crumpled forward over the wheel. He would be out for a few minutes.

  Remo hopped down from the truck, and opened the side door in the little truck. Shielded from the highway by the body of the truck, he began to remove the cartons.

  One at a time, he drove his steelhard fingertips into the boxes of brochures, perforating them with big jagged holes. Then, one at a time, he tossed them over the railing and into the water below. The holes would let the water flow in and destroy the printing.

  Remo stuck a fifty dollar bill into the driver’s shirt pocket, left him sleeping, went across the road and hitched a ride back into town.

  So much for political counterespionage. Tonight, he thought, he might get a garden rake and go tear down the Cartwright billboards which were beginning to blossom around the city.

  But first there was Farger.

  Willard Farger, fourth deputy-assistant commissioner of elections, finally
came to Remo. He came in a box, addressed simply “Remo” and delivered to the Polaney campaign headquarters. He came with an ice pick jammed into his right ear.

  Remo looked down at Farger’s body, scrunched up into the reinforced carton. A faint scent rose to his nostrils and he leaned forward, his face close to the box. He had smelled it before. It was floral. Yes. The same scent had come from the ice pick that he had seen jammed into the right ear of City Manager Moskowitz. It was lilac. A lilac-scented ice pick.

  Remo just looked at the ice pick in disgust. On its point had been skewered not only Farger but the entire Polaney campaign. The only person in the whole campaign who knew anything at all, and he was dead.

  It was the ultimate insanity, Remo thought. CURE, which had been created to use violence to help save the nation and its political processes, was now being destroyed by the most basic of the political processes…a free election—in which its opponents were free to use violence while Remo wasn’t.

  And he just did not know what to do about it. For a moment, he thought of the phone. Smith was only a telephone call away. His hand began to move for the phone and then he shook his head, and began to lug the carton containing Farger’s body to one of the back rooms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AFTER REMO HAD DISPOSED of the body, he told of Farger’s death to Teri Walker, who broke down and wept real tears.

  “I didn’t know politics was going to be like this,” she cried. “That poor man.”

  “Well, we’re not going to say a word about it,” Remo said. “We’re just going to go on campaigning.”

  She nodded and wiped her very wet eyes. “That’s right. We’ve got to go on. He would have wanted us to.”

  “That’s right,” Remo said. “You go on. Do your commercials and your advertising. Do your thing.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m going to do mine.”

  “We’ve got that television special Monday night,” she said. “That might just win it for us.”

  “Good,” Remo said. “The opposition’s going to know they’ve been in a fight anyway.”

  Poor Teri. Her first campaign, and she was raising exuberance to an art form. But no matter what she did, there was no way to win. Remo conceded that now. There were no workers. And even if there had been workers, there was no work for them to do. Farger had kept everything in his head. Without him, Remo could not find the printing, the brochures, the bumper strips, the buttons, all the necessary paraphernalia of a political campaign.

  He confided this to Chiun back at their hotel room.

  “I do not understand,” Chiun said. “You mean that people vote for one person, rather than another, because they prefer his button?”

  “Well…sort of,” Remo said.

  “But you told me earlier that people would vote the way that police lieutenant told them to,” Chiun said.

  “Well…some people will.”

  “How can you tell the people who follow the police lieutenant from the people who follow the buttons?” Chiun asked.

  “You can’t,” Remo said.

  Chiun spattered the room with Korean, of which Remo could recognize a phrase or two, most dealing with the stupidity of democracy and how it was, therefore, the only form of government which white men deserved.

  Finally, Chiun stopped. In English, he said: “What do you do now?”

  “We can’t win. But I can make things uncomfortable for them.”

  “But you told me that you could not kill your opponents.”

  “That’s right, I can’t. But I can rough them up a little, them and their campaign.”

  Chiun shook his head sadly. “An assassin who is not permitted to kill is like a man with an unloaded revolver who takes solace in the fact that at least the gun has a trigger. The risks are very great.”

  “But what else can I do? No workers, no equipment, no nothing,” Remo said. “Let’s face it, Chiun. The political campaign is over for us. We’ve lost.”

  “I see,” Chiun said and watched as Remo changed into dark slacks and shirt and shoes.

  “And now?” Chiun asked.

  “I’m going to drop a little rainfall in the lives of our opposition.”

  “Do not be caught,” Chiun said. “Because if you are, I will tell investigators everything I know. I understand it is the way of your country.”

  “Feel free,” Remo said. “I won’t be caught.”

  Remo got to the hotel headquarters of Mayor Tim Cartwright’s campaign shortly after midnight. He left shortly before dawn, seen only by one person, and that only fleetingly, as that person decided it would be good to sleep until noon.

  Behind him, Remo left a record of accomplishment, on which he would have been glad to campaign for a second term as campaign burglar.

  He ripped out the telephone connections and rewired the junction boxes, until they were tangled mazes of colored cables. The telephone instruments themselves were carefully taken apart, their innards mangled and then reinserted. Remo took apart the electric typewriters and re-jiggered the connections so that when struck, different keys produced the wrong letters. For good measure, he also bent the typewriter rollers.

  He tore thousands of bumper strips in half. Thousands of copies of a campaign newsletter were dumped down the incinerator shaft, followed by three crates of lapel buttons. He painted mustache and beard on printed pictures of Mayor Cartwright, and as his last act, dropped a match down the incinerator shaft and waited for the flame to start with a muffled puff.

  Remo decided to walk back to his hotel and he stopped in the early morning warmth and swam in the ocean. He swam strongly, powerfully slipping through the water in the way of Sinanju, his mind churning in marked contrast to the smooth moving of his body, and when his anger had waned and he turned in the water, the shoreline was out of sight. He had swum miles out to sea.

  Slowly he returned to land, padding ashore in his briefs, then sitting in the sand and slipping on his clothes, under the startled eye of a beach boy who was setting up the chaise lounges for the day’s invasion of freckled, pale-skinned New Yorkers.

  He got back to his apartment by mid-morning. Chiun should be up, he thought, and stuck his head into the old man’s room. The cocoa mat on which Chiun sometimes slept was rolled up and neatly stored in a corner. The room was empty.

  On the kitchen table, Remo found a note.

  “A matter of urgency has taken me to Mr. Polaney’s headquarters.”

  Now what? Remo decided he had better go and see.

  Outside Polaney headquarters, the noise in the hall was deafening. What the hell was going on inside, Remo thought. Perhaps one of Farger’s bunnies had lost her nail polish.

  He pushed open the door to step inside, then stopped in amazement.

  The place was overrun with people. Women. Middle-aged and elderly women. All moving, all working.

  At Farger’s desk sat Mrs. Ethel Hirshberg. She was shouting into a telephone.

  “I don’t know nothing from labor problems. You want to get paid, you deliver in an hour. Otherwise, you and your lovely family can eat the paper you used.

  “That’s right. One hour or no cash. Don’t tell me about arrangements. This operation is under new management. That’s right. One hour. And be sure you have somebody carry them upstairs. Us ladies have bad backs.”

  She hung up the phone and pointed to Remo. “Your father’s inside. Now don’t just stand there. Go inside and see if there’s anything you can do to help, even though you’re not much good for anything.

  “Rose,” she screamed. “You have that list of North Ward volunteers yet? Well, step on it. Get this show on the road.” She turned to Remo again. “Hard,” she said derisively. “After 40 years in the fur business, I’ll teach you hard. Hard like you don’t know hard. Why are you standing there? Report in to your father and see what it is you can do to help him. Poor old man. You should be ashamed of yourself, leaving this job to him until the last minute. And him so upset and all
, for fear you might get hurt. And nice Mr. Polaney, that he shouldn’t be stuck with someone like you.”

  Her phone rang and she picked it up before the first brrrrng had ended. “Sunshine is Nicer headquarters,” she said, listened a moment, then barked, “I don’t care what you promised, you’re going to have those sound trucks here in one hour. One hour. That’s right. Oh, no? Now listen. Do you know Judge Mandelbaum? Yes, well, he would be very interested to know that you are not willing to rent your trucks to anybody who calls. Did you know that’s a violation of the federal fair election laws?” She shrugged at Remo. “Yes, that’s right, and Judge Mandelbaum knows it, who is the husband of my cousin Pearl. And anytime you shouldn’t think that blood is thicker…” She put her hand over the phone and shook her head at Remo again. “Inside,” she hissed. “Help your father.” Then she was back on the phone.

  Remo shook his head in astonishment. There were fifty women working in the office, and more arriving each minute, brushing by Remo with a brusque “Unblock the door,” tossing floppy flowered hats on tables, and without being directed, sitting down at desks and tables to begin working on what apparently were voter registration lists.

  Mrs. Hirshberg hung up. “I got rid of your three playboy bunnies,” she told Remo. “For campaign work, they are like zero. Maybe after the election, we find a nice place for them in a massage parlor somewhere.”

  Remo finally left the doorway and walked to the back office where Teri Walker usually worked. Inside, Chiun was seated behind her desk. He smiled when he looked up and saw Remo.

  “My son,” he said in greeting.

  “My father,” said Remo, bowing deferentially. “My resourceful, astonishing, devious, worry-about-me sneak of a father.”

  “Just so you shouldn’t be forgetting,” Chiun said.