The Final Death td-29

by Warren Murphy

  "I would," Remo mumbled.

  The court session, held in a high-ceilinged room on the second floor of the police station, was perfunctory. The two policemen stood before Judge Ambrose, a shiny-headed bald man with big shoulders and thick lips, and told how they had apprehended the perpetrator tearing hubcaps off cars on Madison Street at 3 a.m.

  Judge Ambrose nodded. He looked at Remo with a measuring cold eye.

  "Do you have anything to say before the court pronounces sentence?"

  "Sure do, old buddy," said Remo.

  He jauntily moved forward a few steps until he was standing right before the judge's bench. He reached into a vest pocket and drew out a small piece of paper and handed it up to the judge.

  Judge Ambrose leaned over the paper as Remo moved back. The judge opened the paper. It was a note. It read: "Let's talk in your chambers."

  Wrapped inside the note was a ten thousand dollar bill, the first one Judge Ambrose had ever seen.

  Ambrose looked up and met Remo's eyes. The man's eyes were the blackest Ambrose had ever seen, almost as if they had no pupils.

  The judge swallowed, then nodded. He crumpled up the paper and the bill and stuffed it into the pocket of his long judicial robe.

  "I want to talk to this man in my chambers. Court is recessed for 15 minutes," he said.

  "Twenty," said Remo.

  "For 20 minutes," Judge Ambrose said.

  Inside the judge's chambers, Ambrose sat behind his desk under an ornamental gem-cut crystal chandelier and looked across at Remo who sprawled in a leather lounge chair facing him.

  "All right, Mr. Boffer. What's this all about?" he asked, waving the $10,000 bill at Remo.

  "Call it survivor's benefits," Remo said.

  "Survivor's benefits? I don't understand," Judge Ambrose said.

  "You will," said Remo. "Nice chandelier."

  "Thank you."

  "That's the one you got free from Light City for deciding their way on a zoning case, right?"

  "Who are you?"

  "And the desk. That's from the Gilberstad Furniture Store, right? When you ruled that they could block the sidewalk for their annual sale days. And a kid walked in the street, got hit by a car, and died."

  "I don't like the direction this discussion is taking," the judge said. "Who are you? Why should those things matter to you?"

  "You don't know it, Judge, but you're part of a rich American tradition."

  "Oh?"

  "Right. Every year at this time, the organization I work for picks out the biggest penny-ante chiseler in the United States, and we do a thing with him."

  "What kind of thing?" asked Judge Ambrose.

  "Well, last year it was a zoning commissioner in Newark, New Jersey. We made him into a parking lot. And the year before that, a liquor-board investigator in Atlanta, Georgia. We drowned him in a vat of hooch from moonshiners he'd been protecting for years. And now, this year, it's your great privilege to join the ranks of the famous." Remo smiled, a nasty little thin-lipped smile that had no warmth and less humor.

  "I think this interview is at an end," the judge said, standing behind his desk.

  "I think you lose," Remo said. "Every year we get rid of one chiseler, just as an object lesson to all the other chiselers. Just to let them know that someone, somewhere is watching and someday it may be their turn in the barrel. This year it's yours."

  Judge Dexter T. Ambrose Jr. opened his mouth to yell for the policemen he knew were standing outside the door to his chambers. But before a sound could come from his opened mouth, Remo had put a finger tight into the Judge's adam's apple and the sound had sputtered and died.

  "You'll never have a chance to tell anybody about this," said Remo from a spot next to the judge's left shoulder, "but you really ought to know why you're dying. You see, there's this organization called CURE and we fight evil."

  He released the pressure on the judge's throat.

  "But who are you?"

  "I'm just your friendly old harbinger of spring, better times, and equal justice outside the law," said Remo, hardly moving but planting three stiff fingers into the exact point between the beginning of the judge's brain covering and the beginning of his face, creating a massive hairline fracture that splintered internally, down into the gray pulpy brain.

  The judge nodded, seemed to sigh except no sound came out, flopped off his seat, given him in gratitude by the Aztec Furniture Company which had been given permission to erect a neon sign in a residential zone, and was obsolete before he hit the floor.

  Remo carefully returned the $10,000 bill to his shirt pocket. Dr. Harold W. Smith, his boss, had a tendency to get upset when Remo left money laying around.

  Remo looked around. There was no other door leading from the judge's chamber, except the one back into the courtroom, and Remo knew cops would be standing guard outside. Not that they could stop him, but they could force him into making a mess, and besides the policemen hadn't done anything wrong. No, the door was out.

  So Remo opened the large window of the judge's second-floor office and stepped out. He dropped sharply for a few feet until he slapped back with his hands against the rough red brick of the courthouse building. His heels dug in and found a horizontal groove between the bricks and Remo stopped, leaning backward against the wall, suspended like a fly, and then slowly he let himself drift downward, concentrating on feeling the texture of the bricks under the palms of his hands, counting the grooves of the bricks with his heels, moving slowly until he was only a foot off the ground, and then stepping off the wall onto the sidewalk, as if the wall had been a small kitchen stepladder.

  Tucston, North Dakota, was still too small to have traffic problems and Remo had no problem flagging down one of the town's three taxi cabs for the flight to the airport, and got there with plenty of time to spare.

  Eight hours later Remo stood outside the New Haven Sheraton in Connecticut.

  "Just another hotel in a long line of hotels, motels, inns, guest rooms, and flophouses. Remo had left little bits of himself on registers all across the world.

  Sometimes Remo Boffer, Remo Pelham, Remo Belknap, Remo Schwartz, Abraham Remo Lincoln. Even sometimes his real name, Remo Williams.

  It didn't really make any difference anymore since he was dead.

  Remo Williams had been dead since that hot Newark, New Jersey, night years before when a two-bit drug pusher was found mangled in an alley. The department had slapped a young rookie cop named Remo onto the train to prison and railroaded him to the electric chair.

  It didn't make a difference that the chair didn't really work and Remo woke up afterwards in a sanitarium in Rye, New York. It didn't make a difference that he was to be trained as the enforcement arm of the super-secret agency CURE. It didn't make a difference that he had become a more efficient killing machine than CURE ever had imagined.

  None of those things mattered because what had once been Remo Williams had really died in that electric chair. Ten years of constant, bone-bruising, mind-stretching training had turned him into something else, something beyond human.

  Remo had died so that Shiva, the Destroyer, could live. In the Hindu world, Shiva was the god of death and destruction. In Remo's world, the one man who counted thought that Remo was the reincarnation of that god.

  Remo thought of this as he stood on the deserted, garbage-strewn New Haven street on the coldest evening of the year.

  "Welcome home, Remo," he mumbled to himself. "Happy New Year."

  Remo moved into the painfully lit, nearly empty lobby. He marched up the escalator, feeling the wide grooves through the thin soles of his black handmade loafers, to the mezzanine and the elevators.

  He pressed the "up" button, went into a wide opening elevator, and rode up to the 19th floor, reading advertisements for the Tiki-Tiki Room, the Brunch Room, the Rib Room, and the Top of the 'Ton, which lined the opposed wall.

  The doors opened smoothly onto the 19th floor and artificially chilled air, in which he c
ould detect tiny residues of charcoal used in the filtration process, swept across his face like a plastic cloud. Remo allowed two long days to catch up with him and weigh his limbs down with the luxury of needing sleep. And with his training, that was all sleep was. A luxury.

  He went to the door of his suite, which was never locked, and walked in.

  A tiny, aged Oriental stood on a rice mat in the middle of the room holding several large pieces of parchment in his frail, long-nailed bony hands.

  "What kept you? Must I do everything myself?"

  "Sorry, Chiun," said Remo. "If I had known you were in a hurry, I would have run back from North Dakota."

  "If you had, you would not have that stench of plastic airplane seats dripping from you." The little Oriental's hand swept the air in an arc. "Wash, then return, for I have a matter of the utmost urgency to discuss with you."

  Remo willed himself to move wearily into the bathroom. He stopped at the door.

  "What is it this time, Little Father? Another interruption of your soap operas? Barbra Streisand get a bad review? You have a Chinese bellboy? What?"

  Chiun waved his hand again, like the swoop of a joyous dove before his face. A sign of indifferent patience.

  "A Chinaman is just good enough to carry my trunks, although one must always watch them to be sure they do not steal the paint from the sides. Barbra Streisand's voice is still as clear as Korean sunlight and her beauty is unequalled. As for those other things you mentioned, they no longer warrant my attention."

  Remo took a step back from the bathroom.

  "Run that one by me again. I think it had something to do with your not watching soap operas anymore. Since when?"

  "Since they have failed me," Chiun said. "Will you please wash the filth of plastic from your body? I will wait here for you."

  Remo showered and when he came out of the bathroom wearing a knee-length cotton robe, Chiun was scrawling in Korean characters on the sheets of parchment.

  "Now what's this about the soap operas?" asked Remo.

  "They have turned to violence and have betrayed their own beauty. I have tried to stop this. I had you mail that letter to Norman Lear to warn him. Nothing has gotten better. Things have only declined." Chiun put down the feather pen and stared at Remo. "So I have written a daytime drama of my own." He waved the sheets of parchment. "You see it now, here before you."

  Remo snickered. "You've written a soap opera?"

  "I have written a daytime drama. That is correct."

  Remo laughed aloud and fell back onto the sofa in the suite's living room. "Don't tell me. I know what you're going to call it. Rove of Rife. Right?"

  Chiun transfixed him with a narrow stare. "Unlike some, I do not have any problem pro-nouncings R's and L's. If I had, how could I pronounce your names?"

  Remo Williams nodded.

  "For after all," Chiun continued, "cretin has an R in it and lunatic an L. To pronounce either wrong would be a disservice to your uniqueness as a semi-human being."

  Remo stopped laughing and sat up. "You set me up for that, Chiun."

  "At last I have your attention. Now perhaps we may get down to business."

  "Go ahead," Remo said sullenly.

  "A daytime drama must be seen to be appreciated," Chiun said.

  "Even to be believed," Remo mumbled.

  "Silence. Now there are a number of ways to bring such a work of art to television. But since we do not own our own television station or manufacture baby food in small jars, we must find another way. Pay attention now, because this part concerns you."

  "I can hardly wait."

  "I have researched this question carefully and I find that writers who write things which find their way onto television share one thing in common."

  "Besides talent?"

  Chiun waved a hand as if to brush away the interruption. "They have agents. This is because of your mail system in this country."

  "What does the post office have to do with it?"

  "If a writer just put his story into the mail to send it to a television station, what would happen is what always happens to the mail. It would get lost, just as those lunatics have lost most of the mail that a faithful few have been sending to me for these years. So the writer gets an agent. This agent puts the story in an envelope and then he puts it under his arm and takes it to the television station and hands it to the proper people. This way it is not lost. Trust me, Remo, this is how it's done."

  "That's not what an agent does," Remo said.

  "That is just what an agent does," said Chiun. "Now for this, your professional agent gets 10 percent of what the writer gets. Because you are just a beginner I am willing to pay you five percent."

  Remo shook his head, more in confusion than in rejection. "Now, Little Father, why did you pick me?"

  "I told you. I have studied this carefully. You have the quality that is most necessary to being a successful agent."

  "Yeah? What's that?"

  "You have two first names." Remo looked stunned. "That is correct, Remo. All the big agents have two first names. Why this is I do not know, but it is so. You could look it up."

  Remo opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. He opened his mouth again, then stopped.

  "Good. You have nothing further to say. It is settled. Because I know you so well, Remo, it will not be necessary for you to have a legal contract drawn. I know you would never cheat me."

  "Chiun, this is ridiculous."

  "Do not feel inadequate. You will learn to deliver as well as any agent. I will help you."

  Remo abandoned further protest as useless. "Well, we'll just stay loose on that for awhile. Now this soap opera of yours. What's it about? As if I didn't know."

  "Ah, wait until you hear. It tells the story of this young, honest, noble brave man from…"

  "… the village of Sinanju in North Korea," Remo said.

  "… the village of Sinanju in North Korea," Chiun continued, as if he had not heard Remo. "And it follows this young man as he goes out into the cruel stupid world, plying his traditional art…"

  "… of being an assassin like all the Masters of Sinanju," Remo said.

  Chiun cleared his throat. "Plying his traditional art of personnel management, and how he is misunderstood and not appreciated, but he holds always true to his beliefs, and without fail sends gold back to his village, because it is a poor village…"

  Remo interjected. "And without the gold, the people would starve and have to drown their babies in the bay because they couldn't feed them."

  "Remo, have you been peeking at this manuscript of mine?"

  "No, Little Father."

  "Then let me finish. And our hero, older now, adopts a son of another race, but the son turns out to be a fat ingrate, who smells of plastic airplane seats and denies his father all good things." Chiun stopped.

  "Well?" said Remo.

  "Well, what?"

  "How does it turn out? What happens to our hero and this ungrateful American son whose name probably turns out to be something like Remo Williams?"

  "I have not yet written the ending," Chiun said.

  "Why not?"

  "I want to wait and see how good a job you do as my agent first," said Chiun.

  Remo took a deep breath. "Chiun. I've got something to tell you and… and I'm glad the telephone is ringing because I won't have to tell you."

  The caller was Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  "Remo," he said. "I want you and Chiun to come to Woodbridge, Connecticut."

  "Wait a minute. Don't you want to know how everything went in North Dakota?"

  "It went fine. I heard about it. Did you bring back the $10,000?"

  "I used it to tip the cabbie," Remo said.

  "Please, Remo. Your attempts at humor are disconcerting."

  "You think that's disconcerting, try this. I wasn't joking. He drove me to my hotel and didn't say one word. It was worth every penny of it."

  "I'll pretend that I haven't heard any of that," Smit
h said in his dry, precise voice. "Woodbridge, Connecticut."

  "Can it wait?"

  "No. We are going to a funeral."

  "Your treat or mine?"

  "Be at the Gardner Cemetery at 7 a.m. And Remo?"

  "Yes?"

  "Bring the $10,000," Smith said, and hung up before Remo could tell him again, truthfully, that he had given it to a cab driver.

  Remo replaced the receiver. Chiun was still standing motionless on the rice mats in the center of the room.

  "And the title of this beautiful drama is…" Chiun began.

  "Little Father, I've got bad news for you," Remo said.

  "Oh. How does that make this day different from any other?"

  "Your beautiful drama. I won't be able to deliver it right away, because I have another assignment from Smith."

  Chiun rolled up the sheets of parchment. "That is all right," he said. "I can wait a day or two."

  CHAPTER THREE

  The body of Vincent Anthony Angus was borne to its final rest in the Gardner Cemetery in Woodbridge, Connecticut, by a caravan of Cadillacs.

  The long procession of shiny black cars passed through the heavy iron gates of the cemetery and past three men who stood in the early-morning chill near the cemetery's stone wall. Chiun wore a light-yellow robe, Remo a shortsleeved shirt and slacks. Dr. Harold Smith looked like a fuzzy gravestone, wearing a gray suit, gray overcoat, gray hat, and the grim gray pallor of a man whose universe is bounded by office walls.

  Smith said hello to Remo and Chiun as they arrived.

  Remo said, "Wait a minute," and unbuttoned Smith's topcoat. "Just checking," he said.

  "Checking what?" asked Smith.

  "Same suit, same vest, same white shirt, same stupid Dartmouth tie. I've got this picture in my mind of a closet filled with these same clothes and stretching on to eternity. And in the cellar of the White House, they have this laboratory and it's making dozens of windup Doctor Smiths to fill those clothes. And they're going to keep sending them out, sending them out, to order me around and around and around and…"

  "You're very poetic this morning," Smith said. "You're also late."

  "I'm sorry. Chiun was busy rewriting his great new work."

  Chiun stood behind Remo, his hands up the sleeves of his pale-yellow kimono, his sparse wisps of white hair blowing in the morning breeze like smoke.