Kill or Cure

by Warren Murphy

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  BY NOON THREE HUNDRED women were on the streets of the city. They went door to door with literature. They assaulted the shopping centers. They broke into song at random moments.

  Sunshine is nicer.

  Vote for Polaney.

  People who refused literature or who made nasty comments about Mac Polaney were subjected to cajolery. The easy abuse with which they dealt with each other had been left in campaign headquarters. On the street, under Mrs. Hirshberg’s guidance, it was all sugar. “So, it wouldn’t hurt you to vote for Mr. Polaney. So what’s wrong with having a nice guy as mayor for a change. Look, I know how you feel, being Mayor Cartwright’s sister and all, but why not be giving an honest man a chance. You can trust Mr. Polaney.”

  This was underway in full force at 12 noon. At 12:01 p.m. the Cartwright headquarters were aware of what was happening. At 12:35 p.m. countermeasures were underway.

  It would be very simple, Marshal Dworshansky explained to Cartwright. These are volunteers who therefore have no real stake in Tuesday’s election. Make an object lesson of one or two of them and the others will quickly find very good reasons to return to their Mah Jongg games.

  This was subsequently explained to Theophilus Pedaster and Gumbo Jackson, who were assigned by a friend of theirs to deliver this object lesson.

  “Women, you say?” said Theophilus Pedaster, giggling. “Young women or old women?”

  “Old women.”

  Pedaster looked disappointed. Gumbo Jackson, however, did not. He was the smarter of the two and had already taken the four hundred dollars offered for the job and placed it in his pocket. “Young women, old women,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. Just a leeetle lesson.” And he grinned because it had all been carefully explained to him.

  Unfortunately, someone had forgotten to explain it nearly that carefully to a little old Oriental in orange robes, who was accompanying the first group of ladies that Pedaster and Jackson confronted.

  “Give us all them leaflets,” Pedaster had said.

  “You get one each,” said the big-busted woman in the blue dress, who was leading the group.

  “Ah wants them all,” Pedaster repeated.

  “You get one.”

  Pedaster pulled a knife from his pocket. “You don’t understand. Ah needs them all.” He looked at Gumbo Jackson, who also pulled a knife.

  “Protect Chiun,” the bosomy woman yelled, and then swung her purse up over her head, down onto Pedaster’s skull. Three women joined her, swinging their heavy pocketbooks. It was bad, man, and finally Pedaster decided he better cut somebody.

  But that didn’t work either. In the mix of bodies and arms and pocketbooks, he saw an orange-robed arm flash, and his knife was gone. Worse yet, his arm was disabled. He turned toward Gumbo, just in time to see an orange flash bury deep into Gumbo’s stomach. Gumbo splatted onto the sidewalk like a fresh egg.

  Pedaster looked at his lifelong closest friend there, unconscious on the ground, the women hovering over him, and he did what he had been trained to do since childhood. He fled.

  Behind him, he heard the women babbling: “Is Chiun all right? Are you okay? These shvartzes didn’t hurt you?”

  It was only when he got three blocks away that Pedaster realized Gumbo had the four hundred. Oh well, let him keep it. If he lived, he deserved it. Pedaster would have no need for it, since he was going to visit his family in Alabama. Right away.

  · · ·

  By nightfall, every hand in the city had held a piece of Polaney literature. The next day, every house was visited by a team of women who explained why all decent, self-respecting persons would vote only for Polaney. There were so many Polaney volunteers on the street that Cartwright workers began to feel oppressed, skulking across streets, ducking into bars, chucking their remaining literature down sewers rather than risk the wrath of the sharp-tongued women who somehow had gotten onto Polaney’s bandwagon.

  And over the entire city rang the noise of the sound trucks.

  Sunshine is nicer.

  Vote for Polaney.

  In the taverns and the living rooms, whose air conditioning sealed out the sound truck noises from the street, the message came pouring out of televisions and radios, saturating Miami Beach.

  Vote for Polaney.

  The message even found its way onto a cabin radio in a large white and silvered yacht, bobbing gently a half mile off the shore of the city.

  Marshal Dworshansky angrily flipped the radio off, and turned to his daughter, immaculate and cool in a white linen pants suit.

  “I had not expected this,” Dworshansky said, beginning to pace, his heavily muscled arms bulging under a tight blue tee shirt.

  “What?”

  “That Polaney would be able to put together such a campaign. I had not expected,” he said reproachfully, “that your work for him would be quite so productive.”

  “I don’t understand it,” said Dorothy Walker. “I personally approved the commercials and the advertising because they were the worst I had ever seen. The best way for them to waste their money.”

  “Waste money? Hah,” said the old man, who, at that moment, looked old and mean. “That money might buy the election. We must find something else.”

  Dorothy Walker stood up and smoothed the front of her pants-suit jacket. “Father,” she said, “it is a thing I think I must do for you. We will find if this Remo has a weak spot.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “I WANT A HUNDRED IN a package,” Mrs. Ethel Hirshberg told Remo. “Not ninety-nine. Not one hundred one. I want one hundred. So count them.”

  “You count them,” Remo said. “There’s one hundred in these packages.”

  “How can there be one hundred when you don’t count them? Just reach in and grab, pull out anything and tell me it’s one hundred? I shouldn’t be like you in business, thank heavens.”

  “It’s one hundred,” said Remo stubbornly. Ethel Hirshberg had had him at the job for over an hour now, breaking down vast boxes of brochures into stacks of 100 for wrapping and distribution to volunteers. Remo did it like a card trick, running his fingers down the side of a stack until he knew there were 100 brochures there. “It’s one hundred,” he repeated.

  “But you count,” Ethel Hirshberg said.

  Chiun came out of Teri Walker’s office. He was wearing his heavy black brocaded robe and his serenity was like a force of nature.

  “Chiun,” Remo yelled.

  Chiun turned, looked at Remo without expression, and then smiled as his face came to rest on Mrs. Hirshberg.

  “Come here, will you,” said Remo.

  Mrs. Hirshberg shook her head. “Your father. Your father, yet, and you talk like that. Come here. No respect at all for your elders. Or your betters.”

  Chiun approached them.

  Remo and Ethel both tried to state their own case first.

  “I want piles of one hundred…”

  “These are piles of one hundred…”

  “So it shouldn’t hurt to count them. Just to make sure we don’t waste them…”

  “I don’t have to count them if I know there’s a hundred here.”

  Chiun raised a hand on Remo’s dying words: “How many are in this pile, Chiun?”

  Chiun looked at the pile of leaflets in front of Remo, lifted it into his hand, and said magisterially, “This pile contains 102 brochures.”

  “See,” Ethel said. “Count them from now on.” She walked away, and Remo said, “Chiun, why did you say that? You know there’s only one hundred in that pile.”

  “You are so sure? The infallible one cannot make a mistake?”

  “No, I can make a mistake, but I didn’t. There’s one hundred here.”

  “So? For two brochures, you argue with volunteer labor? Does one win war by losing all battles?”

  “Dammit, Chiun, I can’t let that woman browbeat me any more. I’ve been working here forever. One hundred is one hundred. Why should I count the
m when I can finger-weigh them?”

  “Because if you do not count them, all our ladies will walk out the door. Then what will you do? Go back to foolish child’s plan of partial violence against the enemy? A plan that will most likely destroy you? And your Mr. Polaney? Does he just go back, quietly, to losing?”

  “Chiun, I liked it better when we were losing.”

  “Losers always like it better when losing. The act of winning takes not only discipline but morality.”

  “The morality of saying one hundred is really one hundred and two?” Remo asked.

  “The morality of saying it is two hundred and fourteen if that is necessary.”

  “Chiun, you are despicable.”

  “You are sloppy and that is worse. While this pack does contain one hundred, that one contains only ninety-nine.”

  He pointed to another stack of brochures, seven feet away on the long table.

  “Wrong, Chiun. One hundred.”

  “Ninety-nine.”

  “You’ll see,” Remo said. He leaned over, snatched up the suspect pile, and began to count them loudly onto the table. “One. Two. Three.”

  As he counted, Chiun walked away, back toward Mrs. Hirshberg’s desk.

  “He understands now,” Chiun said gently. “You see, he is not really bad. Just lazy.”

  Over the room came Remo’s voice.

  “Seventeen.

  “Eighteen.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Like so many young people today,” Ethel Hirshberg said, consoling Chiun. “I never thought to ask. Can he count to one hundred?”

  “He need only reach ninety-nine with that pile,” Chiun said.

  “Twenty-five.

  “Twenty-six.

  “Twenty-seven.”

  Dorothy Walker seemed to exude cool breezes as she came through the door, crisp and fresh in a white suit, and paused at Mrs. Hirshberg’s desk.

  “Is Remo in?” she said.

  Ethel Hirshberg raised a finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she said. “He is busy right now.”

  “Forty-seven.

  “Forty-eight.

  “Forty-nine.”

  “Will he be done soon?” Dorothy Walker said, looking at Remo, whose head was down over the table in intense concentration.

  “He’s only got fifty more to count,” Mrs. Hirshberg said. “For him, another fifteen minutes?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Please do.”

  “Sixty-four.

  “Sixty-five.

  “Sixty-six.”

  As Dorothy Walker waited, her eyes roamed the headquarters, quietly impressed by the efficiency and organization with which more than two dozen volunteers were carrying out logistical work.

  “Ninety-seven.

  “Ninety-eight.

  “Ninety-nine.

  “NINETY-NINE?”

  Remo looked up and saw Dorothy Walker. He smiled toward her and approached.

  “Yes?” Chiun said.

  “Yes, what?”

  “You have nothing to say?”

  “What’s to say?”

  “There were how many?” Chiun asked.

  “I don’t know,” Remo said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know. I got tired and stopped counting at ninety-nine.”

  Of the next words, Remo recognized a few. He would ignore Chiun. Remo, at least, would not stoop to petty bickering.

  Dorothy Walker smiled at him. “I thought I’d see how the winner lives,” she said.

  “You think so?” Remo said.

  “You can’t miss.”

  “Just so long as Albert Einstein here doesn’t count the votes,” Mrs. Hirshberg interrupted.

  “Come on,” Remo said to Dorothy Walker. “These lower-echelon types don’t understand us creative people.”

  “Is Teri around?”

  “She said everything was in the can for tomorrow’s commercials and advertisements. She was going out of town to stay with a friend, and she said she’d see us tomorrow night at the TV studio,” Remo said.

  Dorothy Walker nodded. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow,” she said.

  She let Remo lead her out. He enjoyed it. She looked good and smelled even nicer—a fresh, crisp floral scent.

  The scent was even stronger in his nostrils later, in Dorothy Walker’s apartment, when she took from his hand the glass she had put there, pressed her body against his and planted her mouth on his.

  She stayed locked there a long time, exuding her clean aroma into Remo’s nostrils. He watched a tiny pulse in her temple increase its speed.

  She stopped, and led Remo by the hand out onto the balcony of the penthouse. Up here, above the lights of the strip, the night was black. She still held Remo’s hand as, with her other hand, she stretched out far to the left and then swept around past the sea in front of them, then further on, until her hand swung in front of Remo and came up onto his shoulder. She leaned her head against his upper arm.

  “Remo, this could all be ours,” she said.

  “Ours?”

  “I’ve decided that my firm is going to open a political division, and I want you to head it.”

  Remo, who knew that he had obvious political skills and was pleased that they were recognized, paused a moment, then said, “Sorry. That’s not my line.”

  “Just what is your line?”

  “I like to move from place to place, doing good wherever I go,” he said, feeling for a moment that it was true, and sensing the satisfaction the same lie always gave Chiun.

  “Let’s not fool each other, Remo,” she said. “I know you feel the same attraction for me that I do for you. Now how can we be together? To satisfy that attraction? How and where and when?”

  To which Remo replied, “How about here and now? Like this.”

  He had her there, on the smooth tile of the balcony, their own body smells mingling and strengthening the cool flowered smell of Dorothy Walker. To Remo, it was a gift, a parting gift. She would go on to become a political manager; Remo, he knew, would go back to doing what he did—being the second-best assassin in the world. It would have been heartless of him, not to give her some way to remember him in those empty years she faced ahead.

  So he gave of himself, until she shuddered and lay, smiling still, beneath him.

  And later, she said, “This is a dirty business, this politics, Remo. Let’s forget Polaney. Let’s go now.”

  Remo watched the stars blink in the blackness overhead and said, “Too late now. There’s no turning back.”

  “Just an election?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not just an election. First, I elect Polaney. And then I do what I really came to do.”

  “It’s that important?” she said. “This thing that you do?”

  “I don’t know whether it’s important or not,” he said. “But it’s what I do, and so I do it. I guess it’s important.”

  And then he had her again.

  When the door clicked shut behind him, Dorothy Walker rose and went to the telephone. Her number came through quickly.

  “Papa,” she said. “This Remo is your government man, and I don’t think there’s any way to make him back off. He believes in what he’s doing.”

  Then: “Yes, Papa, I suppose there is always that way. It’s just truly a shame. He is a man like you, papa.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “FOR MY NEXT NUMBER, I would like to play Nola. I would also like to play the Flight of the Bumblebee. Since I can’t play either of them, I’ll try to play My Old Kentucky Home.”

  Mac Polaney was wearing frayed bottom shorts, sneakers with no socks, a red boat-neck shirt, and a baseball cap with a script B on it that looked like an old Brooklyn Dodger issue.

  He sat on a wooden stool, braced his long woodcutting saw against one foot, and began to stroke it with a violin bow. The wailing theremin sound it made was a reasonable facsimile of My Old Kentucky Home.

  In the wings, Remo wince
d.

  “This is terrible,” he hissed to Chiun. “Where’s Teri?”

  “Her whereabouts are not my campaign assignment,” Chiun said. “Besides, I think he plays his strange instrument extremely well. It is an art alien to my homeland.”

  “And to mine,” Remo said. “We must be losing hundreds of votes a minute.”

  “One can never tell,” Chiun said. “Perhaps Miami Beach is ready for a saw virtuoso in City Hall. He may be an idea whose time has come.”

  “Thank you, Chiun, for consoling me.”

  Remo and Chiun watched in silence as Mac Polaney hammed it up for the television camera. But where was Teri Walker? She was supposed to have been there.

  Perhaps, she could have gotten Mac Polaney to talk about the campaign a little. Particularly with what this three-hour extravaganza was costing Remo. And she certainly would have known how to handle that out-of-town television crew. They had told studio people and Remo that they were from a New York-based network and were filming a special on election techniques. After some haggling, they were allowed to set up their camera in the opposite wing of the stage, and now the two men manning it kept it fixed on Polaney, running off miles of film. They made Remo uneasy, but he chalked it up to his long-standing feeling that disasters should be kept in the family and not filmed for posterity.

  Chiun was saying something to him.

  “Shhhh,” said Remo. “I want to see if he reaches the high note.”

  Polaney almost reached it. Chiun insisted, “There are other vibrations you might consider.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as those two gentlemen of television over there. They are not authentic.”

  “Why?”

  “Because for the last five minutes, their picture machine has been aimed at that stain on the ceiling.”

  Remo looked. Sure enough, the camera was pointing away from Polaney, its film grinding rapidly away. The two cameramen were kneeling down next to their equipment box. As Remo and Chiun watched, they came up standing, guns in their hands, focused on Polaney.

  All the people out there in what Mac Polaney had called “television land” missed the most exciting part of his campaign special. Remo moved for the gunmen, but Chiun was already there. Viewers had seen only a green swish as the robed Chiun moved across the stage, past Polaney, and then, as Polaney finished his number with one last dying note, they heard shots, then sharp thwacks, then screams.