Assassins Play Off td-20

by Warren Murphy

  Remo felt the quiet of the snow and saw gusts of sparks come out of the chimney of the yellow-lit cabin far off.

  Snow was very light water, water with more oxygen in it, and if you let your body into it, moving level with the ground and it was all around you and you were part of its whiteness, not an intrusion on top of it, but every portion of your body moving through it, then it became light water and you moved quickly, not breathing, but with fingers darting forward and flattened palms pushing back and the body going level and quickly toward where the cabin had last been seen above the snow.

  Remo stopped and his knees automatically lowered, packing the snow beneath them. He lifted his head above the opaque whiteness and smelled the fresh burning hickory and the heavy, fatty odor of meat cooking. Two figures moved behind the steamed windows. One jerky and the other with the hollow float of a woman, probably young. The assistant attorney general did have a girlfriend, Smith had told Remo, and of course there could be no living witnesses. From what Remo had gathered, the assistant attorney general had the incredible misfortune to come into certain cases prepared badly. Prosecution witnesses wound up proving a defendant's innocence; legal procedures fouled up so that so many criminals' rights were violated that they never went on trial.

  Many, many mistakes which Assistant Attorney General Dawkins would blame on the courts for being too soft. And while other lawyers grew rich by preparing their cases, James Bellamy Dawkins became even richer by not preparing his.

  It was when a mousy title clerk who thought she earned her side income from the National Real Estate Annual filed her yearly report with the magazine—which somehow rarely published anything she sent—that James Bellamy Dawkins was on his way to targethood.

  A computer in a Long Island sanitarium on Long Island Sound spit out these coupled facts: Lost cases increased riches. In the instance of James Bellamy Dawkins, the worse he did in court, the more land he owned.

  It was put to him somewhat gently at first. Perhaps, having two more years to serve and having already accumulated a sizeable fortune, he might want to devote his full energies to convicting certain perpetrators. He was shown a list that remarkably coincided with his benefactors.

  He rejected the suggestion with a warning that should anyone attempt to remove him from office, he would immediately indict everyone on that list for abundant crimes they could not have committed, and when the charges were dropped, let them sue the state of Minnesota silly.

  Better yet, indict them for murdering his caller and once they were acquitted, they could go out and do the real thing because a man couldn't be tried for the same crime twice.

  In brief, Assistant Attorney General James Bellamy Dawkins was not going to change his ways nor was he going to resign, and God help the state if anyone tried to push him out.

  That response ultimately reached the Folcroft computer and gave all those facts to Dr. Harold W. Smith, who decided immediately that America could do without James Bellamy Dawkins.

  So Remo's eyes rose above the snowline and he saw the two figures and smelled the cabin smells and lowered his head back into the whiteness where his knees rose and he moved forward, not packing the very light water in which he went, but moving through it as if he belonged to it.

  Remo heard the dogs bark and the cabin door open crisply and a man's voice say, "What is it, Queenie?" And Queenie barked.

  "I don't see anything, Queenie," came the voice again.

  And just because he felt like it and just because he had seen a horror movie recently and possibly because it was Halloween, Remo poked a little hole up through the snow and moaned:

  "James Bellamy Dawkins, your days are numbered."

  "Who the hell is that?"

  "James Bellamy Dawkins, you will not live through the night."

  "You there. Wherever you are. I can blow your head off."

  "Trick or treat," said Remo.

  "Where are you?"

  "Trick or treat," said Remo.

  "Go get him, Queenie."

  Remo heard the barking approach and Dawkins, a paunchy man with hollow face and a .30-30 rifle at rest in front of him, saw his bull mastiff streak through the snow, her body leaving a beveled path, her feet churning cones spaced at the outside of the bevel. When Queenie grabbed hold of whatever it was, she would get a good piece of him and Dawkins would shoot away the rest. The man obviously had come to kill him and all Dawkins had to do to show self-defense was to make sure a weapon was found on the body. If it didn't have one, he would supply it. The man was already on his property and that would suffice as circumstantial evidence supporting intent. The weapon would do the rest.

  But a strange thing happened to Queenie, who had already devoured her fill of fall rabbits and had even come out on top against a family of raccoons. The path she made suddenly ended and she disappeared in the snow. Vanished.

  Dawkins raised the gun to his shoulder and blasted around the area the dog had silently disappeared into. He heard a moan and he fired the lever action rifle again and the next shot showed the snow darkening and he chuckled to himself.

  "What the hell are you shooting at, Jimmy?" came a woman's voice from inside the cabin.

  "Shut up, honey," said Dawkins.

  "What you shooting at this time of night?"

  "Nothing. Shut up and go to bed."

  Dawkins aimed at the spot where the red darkness was beginning to spread and he saw a small convulsion under the snow. Somehow the man had made his way under the fresh snowfall, but he saw no declivity leading to the blood, just Queenie's trail.

  He watched and the snow was still, and then he tramped out from the cabin to inspect his kill. But when he was almost to where Queenie had gone out of sight, he felt something tugging at the back of his pants and he found his body sitting down. Then a hand was smacking snow into his face and he could not hold onto his .30-30 and he tried desperately to get the snow out of his face.

  He tried to stand, but just when a foot seemed to get firmness underneath it, it somehow slid out. When he tried brushing the snow from his mouth, his hand seemed to go out in strange directions. Then the horror of it overtook him.

  He was going to drown in snow and he could neither stand nor get the cold air-draining stuff out of his mouth. Then, in one last desperate life-grabbing thrust, he threw his whole body away from the force that seemed to be holding him down. And he moved nowhere and swallowed another handful of snow.

  Everything became white and then he was no longer cold. Only his body was. When he was discovered the next morning by his horrified mistress, the county coroner labeled his death suicide. As he figured it, Dawkins had "flipped his giggy," shot his dog, then rolled around swallowing snow until he drowned and froze.

  In Minnesota, the incident made immediate headlines:

  ELECTED OFFICIAL DEAD IN LOVE NEST

  By the time the story was in print, Remo's plane had landed at Raleigh Durham Airport in North Carolina where he took a taxi to a motel outside Chapel Hill.

  "Out all night?" winked the desk clerk.

  "Sort of," said Remo.

  The desk clerk chuckled. "You must have spent it indoors. Nights can get chilly here in late autumn."

  "I wasn't cold," said Remo honestly.

  "Oh, I wish I were young again," said the clerk.

  "Young has got nothing to do with it," said Remo, taking three keys because he had rented three adjoining rooms.

  "There was a call for you from your Uncle Marvin."

  "At what time?"

  "'Bout ten-thirty this morning. Funny thing happened. The phone went dead almost as soon as I rang your room. I went to your door and yelled that there was a phone call but all I heard was the television on inside, and I didn't push it."

  "I know you didn't push it," said Remo.

  "How's that?"

  "You're breathing, aren't you?" said Remo and when he slipped into the middle room he was very quiet because a frail, elderly Oriental with a wispy beard sat on the floor
in lotus position, golden kimono draped immaculately around him.

  The television set with the taping device to catch the other channels and then run the concurrent shows consecutively so that not one second of one soap opera would be missed was on.

  Remo sat down quietly, not even rustling the couch. When Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, was enjoying his daytime dramas, no one, not even his pupil Remo, disturbed him.

  In the past, some, by accident, had thought this was just an old man watching soap operas and had failed to treat this moment with reverence. They were no longer among the living.

  So Remo sat as Mrs. Lorrie Banks discovered that her young lover loved her for herself and not her new face lift operation performed by Dr. Jennings Bryant, whose eldest daughter had run away with Morton Lancaster, the noted economist, who was being blackmailed by Doretta Daniels, the former belly dancer who had purchased the controlling shares in the Elk Ridge Cancer research hospital, and was threatening to close it down unless Lorrie disclosed where Peter Malthus had parked his car the night Lome's eldest daughter was run over and crippled for weeks, during the night of the flood when Captain Rambough Donnester had run away from the dark incident in his past, leaving the entire city of Elk Ridge exposed to the elements without the protection of the Air National Guard.

  Lorrie was talking to Dr. Bryant, wondering whether Peter should be told about his mother. It occurred to Remo that just about two years earlier the actress was discussing whether someone else should be told some other gloomy thing about a relative, and what made these dramas different from reality was not so much what happened but that everyone was so all fired concerned about it. To Chiun, however, this was beauty and, as much as anything could be, a justification for American civilization. He was further convinced that this was the epitome of American culture when, in an exchange program with Russia, America had sent the New York Philharmonic—as Chiun said, "keeping the good things home." In exchange, Russia had sent the Bolshoi Ballet, which Chiun knew was also second-rate because their dancers were clumsy.

  It was four-thirty in the afternoon when the last commercial on the last show was finished, a movie came on, and Chiun turned off the set.

  "I do not like your breathing," he said.

  "My breathing is the same as yesterday, Little Father," said Remo.

  "That is why I do not like it. It should be quieter within you today."

  "Why?"

  "Because today you are different."

  "In what way, Little Father?"

  "That is for you to understand. When you do not know how you are each day, then you lose sight of yourself. Know this, no man has ever had two days alike."

  "Did we get a phone call from upstairs?"

  "There was a rude interruption, but I did not hold it against the maker of the telephone call. I endured the rudeness and the callousness and the lack of consideration for a poor old man enjoying the meager pleasures in the quiet twilight of his life."

  Remo looked for the telephone to return the call. He found a hole where the cord had been snapped clean from the wall. He looked for the detached phone and not until he saw a dark hole in the white wood dresser did he realize where the phone had gone. The cracked body of the instrument was imbedded in the back of the dresser, welding the entire piece of furniture to the wall.

  Remo went into an adjacent bedroom and dialed a number. This number did not activate a telephone directly, instead it sparked a series of connections across the country, so that there was no single line making up the connection by the time a phone finally did ring in the office of the director of Folcroft Sanitarium.

  "Hello," said Remo. "Uncle Nathan called."

  "No," said Dr. Smith. "Uncle Marvin called."

  "Yeah, right," said Remo. "I knew it was somebody."

  "I tried to reach you before, but we were disconnected and I thought you might have been clearing something up at the time."

  "No. The phone rang while Chiun was watching his shows."

  "Oh," said Smith heavily. "I have sort of a special problem. An accident happened to someone in a rather strange way and I thought you and Chiun might be able to shed some light on it."

  "You mean he was killed in a way you don't know and you'd figure Chiun or I would know."

  "Remo, please. There's no such thing as a completely secure telephone line."

  "Whaddya going to do? Send me a matchbook with invisible ink on it? C'mon, Smitty, I've got more important things in my life than playing security games."

  "What is more important in your life, Remo?"

  "Breathing correctly. Do you know I'm breathing the same today as yesterday?"

  Smith cleared his throat and Remo knew it was the sound of unhappiness, that Smith had heard something he did not wish to deal with because he was afraid that further answers might confuse him more. He knew that Smith had recently given up trying to fathom him and was beginning to accept Remo like Chiun. An unknown quantity that served well. It was a major concession by a man who loathed anything he could not put in some order, well-labeled and perfectly filed. Mysteries were anathema to the head of the organization.

  "On second thought," said Smith. "Send your Aunt Mildred a birthday greeting. She's fifty-five tomorrow."

  "That means I'm supposed to meet you at O'Hare Airport information at three in the afternoon. Or is it three in the morning? Or is it Logan Airport?"

  "Morning. O'Hare," said Smith dourly, and Remo heard the receiver go dead.

  On the flight from Raleigh-Durham to Chicago's O'Hare Airport, Chiun suddenly marveled at the hidden skills of Americans. Chiun acknowledged that he should have known that there must be other areas of excellence.

  "Any nation that could produce As the Planet Revolves or The Young and the Daring must have other isolated pockets of worth," said Chiun.

  Remo knew that Chiun thought airplanes were very close to soundly designed flying objects, so he commented that America was the leader in aircraft and that he had never heard of a Korean-designed plane.

  Chiun ignored that comment.

  "What I am talking about," he said grandly, producing two torn pieces of white paper between his long graceful fingernails, "is here. This. And in America, too. What a pleasant surprise to find such an art so well performed in a place so far away as America."

  Remo looked at the sheets. They were filled single space with sloppy typing.

  "This, one can trust. I sent him my birthday and place and time of birth to the exact minute, and I sent him yours."

  "You don't know for sure when I was born. Neither do I," said Remo. "The orphanage records weren't that exact."

  With a flurry, Chiun's hands dismissed Remo's reservations as inconsequential.

  "Even with an inexact date, such excellence of accuracy," said Chiun.

  Remo looked closer. On the other side of the papers were circles with strange signs in them.

  "What is it?" asked Remo.

  "An astrology chart," said Chiun. "And in America, too. I am most pleasantly surprised that the great art, so poorly practiced by so many, is done well and in, of all places, America."

  "I don't buy that stuff," said Remo.

  "Of course, because in America little machines do everything in quantity. But you forget that men of brilliance and insight still exist. You do not believe in the forces of the universe because you have seen fools and charlatans represent them. But there is in America at least one true reader of the planets."

  "Dippy dong," said Remo and winked at a passing stewardess, who almost dropped her tray in pleasant surprise. Remo knew he should not have done that because invariably the stewardess would be at him all trip for coffee, tea, milk, pillow for his head, magazines, and anything else that would get her close to him. At New York's Kennedy, two years before, a Pan-Am lassie had followed him from the plane crying that he had left a Kleenex in the seat.

  "You may say that," said Chiun, "but let me read to you in your own language the keen insights of this reader of the forces
of the universe."

  And Chiun read in the manner of story-telling with his voice rising on the significant points and lowering at the serious ones.

  "You," read Chiun, "are in tune with the gentleness and beauty of your world. Few realize your wisdom and kindness that is concealed by your desire for humility. You are troubled by the incessant badgering of those close to you who cannot publicly acknowledge your awesome magnificence."

  "Pretty good," said Remo. "And what did he write about you?"

  "That is me," said Chiun, and he read from the other paper: "You have a tendency to self-indulgence and are wont to function on whatever thought passes through your mind. You do not think things through, but run through days as if you have no tomorrow."

  "That's me, I take it," said Remo glumly.

  "To the letter," said Chiun. "Oh, does he know you. There is more. 'You do not appreciate the great gifts given you and squander them like duck droppings.'"

  "Where?" said Remo. "Let me see where he said that. Where did he say 'duck droppings'?"

  "He didn't say that exactly. But he would have if he knew you better."

  "I see," said Remo, and asked for the two papers. True. All but the duck droppings was there. But Remo noticed something else. Chiun's chart started under the heading "positive" and then was torn off midpage. Remo's began under "negatives" and did not have a top of the page.

  "You took my negatives and your positives," said Remo.

  "I kept that which was correct. There is enough misinformation in the world. Let us be grateful that, in a country like this, we have found at least what is half correct."

  "Who is this guy?"

  "He is the Ke'Gan of the mountains. The mountains always have the best seers. A Ke'Gan. Here in America. That is why I first chose to write him, telling him of our birth signs." Remo looked at Chiun's chart which still had the astrology service's masthead.

  "Ke'Gan?" he said. "The guy's name is Kegan. Brian Kegan. Pittsfield, Massachusetts."

  "The Berkshire Mountains," said Chiun.