Death Therapy

by Warren Murphy

  “This is my last day, as you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I’m not cured.”

  “Well, cured is a very relative term.”

  “That helps me a lot.”

  “You’ll be able to come back regularly. At least once a week.”

  “Once a week is not enough, Dr. Forrester.”

  “We must do the best we can with what we have.”

  Burton Barrett clenched his fists. “Oh, dammit, Lithia, I love you. I love you. And don’t give me that crap about it being normal to love your therapist. I’ve been in therapy before and I never, never loved Dr. Filbenstein.”

  “Let’s deal with your needs for love. Dr. Filbenstein is a man. You’re heterosexual. I’m a woman.”

  “No tiddypoo? Really, Lithia, you’re really a woman. I dream about you. Do you know I dream about having you?”

  “Let’s talk about your love needs. When was the first time you felt your needs were not being met?”

  Burton Barrett stretched back onto the couch and closed his eyes. Back he went to the nurse, his mother, his father. His red wagon. He liked his red wagon.

  It was a good wagon. You could get a good head start with a foot push. You could whack it into the fat maid’s balloon legs. The maid’s legs were like pier pilings. Her name was Flo. She would scream and yell.

  Burton Barrett was told never to ram the wagon into the maid again. So he did.

  Then he was told if he did that again, his wagon would be taken away. So he did, and it was.

  And Burton Barrett cried and wouldn’t eat lunch and promised if he ever got his wagon back again, he would never ever ram the maid with it again. Never. He promised.

  So he got his wagon back and rammed the maid again. She hit him and was fired. He felt bad about that. And he did not complain when the wagon was taken from him, for good that time.

  “Why did you ram her with your wagon?” Lithia Forrester asked.

  “I don’t know. Why do people climb mountains? Because she was there. Anyway, what does my wagon have to do with it? I’m going back to my shitty job in a shitty office in a shitty city and dammit, Lithia, I love you. And that’s my problem.”

  “You love me because I represent something to you.”

  “You represent, Lithia, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “Was your mother beautiful?”

  “No. She was my mother.”

  “That doesn’t preclude her being beautiful.”

  “In my family it does. We all marry ugly women. Me too. If it weren’t for my affair with that artist in New York, I’d go nuts.”

  “Do you think going to bed with me would help you, Burton?”

  Burton Barrett sat up on the couch as though goosed with a cattle prod. He looked over at Dr. Lithia Forrester. She was smiling. Her lips were moist.

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Do you think I mean it?”

  “I don’t know. You said it.”

  “What I said was, do you think it would help?”

  “Yes,” said Burton Barrett, very honestly.

  Dr. Lithia Forrester nodded.

  “Then we’re going to make love?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Dammit, Lithia, why do you keep coming back with these stupid cutesy answers that don’t say anything. If anyone else were that smartass with me, outside, I’d smash them in the face. I really would. Right in the face. Now, let’s deal with my aggressions. Well, sweetie, fuck my aggressions. Deal with this.”

  And with that, Burton Barrett, regional director for the intelligence network of the most powerful nation on earth, unzipped his fly.

  “I fully intend to deal with that,” Lithia Forrester said. “I fully intend to. But first you’re going to have to do a few things.”

  Burton Barrett blinked, grinned, then in surprise and shame, he zipped up his fly.

  “You didn’t have to do that, Burton, but we’ll deal with that later. First, we’re going to have a little drink and then I want you to hum a little tune with me.”

  “That sounds silly,” he said.

  “Those are my requirements. If you really want to sleep with me, you’ll meet them.”

  “What’s the tune?” asked Burton Barrett.

  “It goes da da da da dum da dum dum da da da da dum dum,” she said.

  “Hey, I know that song,” he said. “It’s from the movie… ”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Now hum it with me,” she said, as she stood and walked slowly toward the couch where Burton Barrett had again stretched full length.

  · · ·

  He was still humming the catchy little melody the next afternoon when he walked into the National Press Club headquarters in Washington, D.C., jumped onto a stage and told the assembled press of the world that he had a few things to say.

  And then he announced that the United States government had seven ex-Nazis on its C.I.A. payroll in South America. He mentioned their names, their home addresses in South America and also the names under which they had been sought for years by the Israelis.

  He promised the press photographs of the men.

  He also listed the names of four agents working undercover in Cuba. And just to convince the reporters that he knew what he was talking about, he tossed his identification badge to a reporter from the Washington Post, sitting in the front row.

  “Why are you disclosing this? Have you been ordered to?” asked the reporter.

  “Why does anyone do anything? I just felt like it, that’s all.”

  Then Burton Barrett said, “Look, check out what I told you. It’s all true. But I’ve got to be going, because they’ll be after me soon.”

  He jumped off the stage and walked leisurely through the audience, ignoring the reporters who tried to question him, carefully humming to himself a catchy little tune.

  Burton Barrett was right. The C.I.A. was after him within minutes. They did not find him in his office in Langley, Va., or in his small apartment, nor back at Human Awareness Laboratories.

  He turned up after dark in one of the small reading rooms in the Washington public library’s main building. He had bought a pack of thick leather shoelaces, and had tied them together into a long string. Then, he wet them, sopping wet, in a washroom sink. He wrapped the stretchy wet leather several times around; his neck and tied it tightly with a knot. As the minutes passed, the leather dried and began to contract. As it contracted, it cut deeper and deeper into Burton Barrett’s throat.

  Witnesses reported later that he did not seem to mind. He just sat there, humming to himself, reading a large illustrated picture book of Mary Poppins, and then sometime after 4:30 p.m., he fell forward onto the table, dead.

  Burton Barrett’s self-strangulation had repercussions. It was front-page news in the papers of the world. The United States received strongly worded notes of protest from both Israel and the Latin American country which housed the seven ex-Nazis. Four U.S. agents in Cuba were killed.

  In Zurich, a Swiss banker from the House of Rapfenberg received word that yes, France was definitely interested in bidding.

  Burton Barrett’s life story went into the computers at the CURE headquarters at Folcroft, and it was mixed and matched against Clovis Porter and General Dorfwill, and back out came a sentence:

  “Check Human Awareness Laboratories for possible link.”

  The people who would destroy America had opened a door. Through it would walk the Destroyer.

  CHAPTER TEN

  REMO HAD JUST PICKED UP THE telephone to call Smith when there was a knock on his hotel room door. He put the phone back down and was about to yell “Come in, it’s open,” when the door flung open and Chiun stood there. Behind him were two bellhops and Chiun’s luggage. Three large steamer trunks.

  Chiun could travel for a year with a manila envelope if he had to. If he didn’t have to, he could fill two baggage cars. So when Remo had phoned Miami to tell Chiun to follow, he had limite
d the luggage to three trunks. No more.

  Chiun left as soon as the soap operas were over, not even waiting to play his special TV tapes of the simultaneous programs. He would wait, he told Remo, until he reached Washington.

  Remo had thanked him, knowing Chiun considered this truly a sacrifice.

  Because of American stupidity, as Chiun put it, all the good shows ran at one time, so that a person could not watch them all. To compensate for the gross obtuseness of American television functionaries, Chiun therefore would watch Dr. Lawrence Walters, Psychiatrist-at-Large, while on two portable machines he would tape Edge of Dawn and As the Planet Revolves.

  Chiun allowed the bellboys to precede him into Remo’s hotel suite. Remo stepped away from the phone, reached in his slacks pocket and unpeeled two single dollar bills. This would ease the departure of the bellboys. China never tipped. He considered “the bearing of loads” a hotel service, not to be unduly recompensed. In lieu of a tip, he would grade the bellboys on their chores from inadequate to good. He had given one good in his lifetime and many inadequates. Today the two bellboys got adequates. They stared at the frail Oriental in disbelief. Remo waved the money at them and they left shaking their heads.

  “Throw money hither. Throw money yon. Spend, spend, spend until pauperdom. You, Remo, are truly an American.”

  The voice was mild but it was Chain’s ultimate insult. Next worst was “you are a white man.”

  When Remo was first in training, a basic training that had never before been seen outside Chiun’s village of Sinanju, Korea, Chiun had explained to him the formation of the world and its peoples.

  “When God created man,” Chiun had said, “he put a lump of clay in the oven. And when he took it out, he said, ‘It is underdone. This is no good. I have created a white man.’ Then he put another lump of clay in the oven, and to compensate for his error, he left it in longer. When he took it out, he said, ‘Oh, I have failed again. I have left it in too long. This is no good. I have created a black man.’ And then he put another lump of clay in the oven, this time a superior clay, molded with more care and love and integrity, and when he took it out, he said: ‘Oh, I have done it just right. I have created the yellow man.’

  “And then to this man in whom he was pleased he gave a mind. To the Chinese, he gave lust and dishonesty. To the Japanese, he gave arrogance and greed. To the Koreans, he gave honesty, courage, integrity, discipline, beauty of thought, heart and wisdom. And because he had given them so much, he said, ‘I shall also give them poverty and conquerors because they have been given more already than any other man on earth. They are truly the perfect people in my sight, and in their wonderfulness, I am well pleased.’”

  Remo was still recovering physically from his electrocution. He had been only half listening but he had caught the direction of the lesson.

  “You’re Korean, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said the smiling old man. “How did you know?”

  “I guessed,” Remo said.

  The lesson, in all its variations, had been repeated many times during Remo’s training all those years ago. Once when Remo had done a particularly difficult exercise without flaw, Chiun had shrieked, “Excellent.”

  “Excellent, little father?” Remo had said in pleasant surprise.

  And recovering, Chiun had said: “Yes. For a white man, excellent. For a Korean, good.”

  “Dammit,” Remo had said, “I know I can take just about any Korean around. I’d say almost everyone, except you.”

  “How many Koreans do you know, oh, open-mouthed shouter of an American white man?”

  “Well, just you.”

  “And you can defeat me?”

  “Not you, probably.”

  “Probably? Shall we find out?”

  “No.”

  “You are afraid of hurting me?”

  “Well, blow it out your ears,” Remo had said.

  “Here, we see American logic. You are sure you can defeat any Korean except one. And that one is the only Korean you know. And in response to his efforts and teachings to try to make something of the undercooked lump of clay which is yon, he receives ‘Blow it out your ears.’ Oh, perfidy.”

  “I’m sorry, little father.”

  “Do not be sorry afterwards. Be sorry before. Then you will be a man who uses his mind to make his way instead of to repair it.”

  Remo had bowed and Chiun had said: “You can defeat any Korean, except probably one.”

  “Thank you, little father.”

  “For what? You thank me, for an observation that my skills at teaching are so powerful that I can even impart some of them to a white man. I will accept your admiration, not your thanks.”

  “You have always had my admiration, little father… ”

  Chiun had bowed.

  And Remo had never let Chiun know that when Chiun saved him from the Chinese conspirators, Remo had, in a mind that functioned even while he was near death, heard Chiun scream in his search for Remo: “Where is my child whom I have made with my heart and my mind and my will?”

  Remo never let him know he had heard because that knowledge brought to light would have embarrassed Chiun, exposing that he now thought of Remo as a Korean.

  Remo picked up the phone while Chiun was unpacking. First out came the TV tape players and then from the folds of his golden robe, Chiun removed the tapes of Edge of Dawn and As the Planet Revolves.

  Chiun did not trust the tapes to luggage. Luggage could be lost. He plugged in his portable tape receiver deck and then, sitting down on one of the trunks that blocked passage in the suite, he began intently watching Laura Wade disclose to Brent Wyatt that she feared the famous nuclear physicist Lance Rex would suffer a nervous breakdown if he discovered that his Tricia Bonnecut really loved the Duke of Ponsonby who had just inherited the main salmon and silk factories in Mulville.

  Remo heard the phone being picked up at the other end. “Seven-four-four,” Smith said.

  “Open line,” said Remo.

  “Yes, of course. You’ve read in the papers about our friend in the library?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was part of it too.” Smith changed his tone, becoming conspiratorial. “I would think you need a rest. A very good place to rest is the Human Awareness Laboratories, about fifty miles outside Baltimore. Go there and rest up. Register as a patient. They might be interested in having Mr. Donaldson as a patient.”

  “Anything I should specialize in?”

  “I imagine you might jump the line,” Smith said.

  Remo grunted and hung up. Jumping the line meant that Remo should allow himself to be the target of attack, then follow the attack back to its source and then kill the source. It was effective and dangerous, an easy way to get killed. Still an open telephone line in Washington, D.C., was not the worst way to attract attention. Besides, Remo was already a target for someone, as the Silver Creek Country Club had proved.

  Remo began to strip for his exercises, which would begin after As the Planet Revolves. He would wear a blue uniform today. The colors meant something to Chiun, if not to Remo, and Chiun always seemed to be in a better humor when Remo wore blue.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHIUN DIDN’T EVEN TURN AWAY from the television when the knock came. Remo was showering.

  “Will you get it, Chiun?” said Remo, throwing a towel around his waist and puddling out of the shower stall, already knowing that his comfort versus As the Planet Revolves was a certain loser.

  He hopped a bed, and making dark wet marks on the gray rug, made it to the door.

  “Yes,” he called out.

  “FBI,” came the voice from the other side of the door.

  “I’m showering.”

  “We’ll only be a minute,” came the voice.

  Remo glanced back at Chiun. The master had been restive lately and Remo didn’t want people in the room when the Master of Sinanju was involved in Mrs. Vera Halpers confessing to Wayne Walton that Brace Barton and Lance Rerto
n may have spent Thanksgiving in a motel with Lysetta Hanover and Patricia Tudor.

  That interruption could end up with eye sockets on the wall.

  Remo opened the door a crack. “Look,” he whispered. “See, I’m wet. Can you come back in an hour?”

  There was a group of three men, all wearing brown snap-brimmed hats, shined cordovans, gray lightweight summer suits, white shirts and conservative ties. They were all clean-shaven and not one of them appeared to have a cavity or a tooth defect.

  It had amused Remo that this uniform, this sparkling advertisement of membership in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was called plainclothes. If they wanted to be inconspicuous, they might have done better in an increasingly permissive society by being more permissive with themselves.

  As Chiun had said, “When the fish climb trees, you do not go swimming to hide as a fish.”

  The apparent leader of the group offered a little two-piece wallet device which exposed an FBI identity card in plastic. It was his face, showing roundish, somewhat aging, symmetrical features. A smile could have made it a nice face.

  It was not a nice face now.

  “Can we come in?”

  “Get a warrant,” said Remo.

  “We have one,” said the man whose name on the card was Supervisor Bannon. Remo shrugged.

  “Okay, but be quiet,” he said and opened the door. The three men entered. The two behind Bannon masked tension. Remo could see it in their eyes. They took off their hats and opened the distance between them, almost making the base of a triangle for Bannon’s point.

  They were watching Bannon more closely than Remo. Absently, they showed their cards to Remo, who saw they were a Winarsky and a Tracy and they were duly authorized to do whatever duly authorized people were authorized to do.

  Which didn’t help Remo’s goosebumps as he stood with a towel wrapping his groin. He was slightly shorter than the men and his body would not necessarily disclose his skills. Undressed, he looked like a relatively healthy tennis player. Bannon looked like an ex-tackle for the Rams. The other two could have been tennis players, twenty pounds on the wrong side of thirty-love. Bannon sat down in a soft chair, his hat still on his head.