Last Drop td-54

by Warren Murphy

  Remo sighed. "No. No thanks, Chiun. I'll make some tea."

  "Tea?" Chiun asked acidly.

  "Water, then. Don't worry, I won't soil any of the plastic glasses here with my undeserving lips. I'll just hold my head under the faucet and slurp."

  "Mockery. Count on an unmannered white lout to make mock of the graciousness of others," Chiun grumbled.

  "Little Father, I know you went to a lot of trouble—"

  "Silence," the old Oriental said, picking up his quill. "I have no time to bandy about words with you. My writing now is of utmost importance."

  Remo peered over Chiun's shoulder at the parchment. On it he saw the Korean characters for "lout" and "ungrateful."

  "Writing about me again?"

  "It is the history of Sinanju that I write. From the time of the first Master, whose village was so poor that the fishermen had to send their babies back to the sea."

  "Do tell," Remo said, feigning interest in the story he had heard at least a thousand times before. "And I'll bet the Master hired himself out as an assassin to help the village out."

  "Hmmph. That is just the beginning. My work follows all the Masters up to and including myself." He read aloud as he formed the careful strokes with his quill. "Chiun was the name of the last Master of Sinanju, with whom the unbroken line ended because there was no one to succeed him except for a loutish white person who refused to practice the arts of Sinanju which are taught to but a handful of beings in the whole of history, an ungrateful wretch who did not even possess the manners to arrive on time for dinner. Seeing the qualtities of leadership sorely lacking in his pupil, the Master was forced to tell the people of Sinanju that there would be no further Master after him."

  "And cut off the submarines full of gold bullion that Smitty sends Sinanju every year so that nobody in town ever has to work a day in his life? Oh, the villagers'll love you for that."

  Without changing expression, Chiun drew a line through the last sentence and scribbled another. "Chiun, Master of Sinanju, who in the twilight of his years, at last found a pupil worthy of his kindness and goodwill. A pupil of proper color," he recited.

  "So you're writing me off, is that it? Sending me to the unemployment line without dinner."

  "And lo, the loutish white person, after a long search, found employment suitable to his character," Chiun orated. "Biting the heads off chickens in public places."

  "Oh, that's good, Chiun. Insightful. Rich prose style."

  Chiun continued, unruffled. "Thus did the ungrateful pupil learn too late that a dinner invitation by the Master of Sinanju was not to be ignored."

  "I said I was sorry."

  "That is what all chicken-biters say."

  The phone rang. "Yeah?" Remo said.

  Smith's voice sounded alarmed. "It's all the coffee," he said. "Every brand. Every location. Whole beans included."

  "Whole beans? But that's impossible."

  "The computers don't say it's impossible."

  "Why not? How do you get heroin into a bean?"

  "I don't know. But if it were impossible, the Folcroft computers would have said so. The answer is in the beans."

  "Where does that leave me?"

  "We're still in the dark, I'm afraid. But you have to start somewhere. There's a coffee warehouse in Port Henry, about thirty miles northwest of where you are. Get there the first thing in the morning and find out what you can. If you can't find any information, you'll have to investigate other warehouses in different parts of the country. It's a slow process, but that's all we can do."

  "What about the coffee already in the stores?"

  "It will all have to be recalled. Of course, as soon as that's done, the perpetrators will no doubt halt their operation."

  "What are my chances of catching anyone, then?" Remo asked.

  The computers beeped and clicked. "Now that's impossible," Smith said.

  Remo hung up. "I've got to go to a coffee warehouse. Want to come along?"

  "I will be quite busy conducting auditions for my new pupil, thank you," Chiun said crisply.

  "Fine. That's just terrific. I'm sure you'll find somebody who's perfect in every way."

  "I will only audition Koreans," Chiun said. "It will eliminate the chaff from the beginning."

  "Okay. But I'll be home for dinner tomorrow night. Honest. I'll even cook."

  "For both of us?"

  "You and me? Sure."

  "I mean myself and my new pupil. We will expect to dine at five o'clock."

  Remo sighed. "All right. If that's the penance you want, I'll do it."

  Chiun smiled tightly and resumed his writing. Remo left, ate a bowl of tepid rice at a Chinese restaurant, and spent the night walking to Port Henry.

  ?Chapter Six

  The warehouse was operating at full tilt. Dozens of hustling workers glistening with sweat scrambled around the long, low cement block building, loading large burlap bags fragrant with the rick dark scent of coffee beans onto forklifts or into shipping crates. Remo went directly to the small office just inside the truck entrance.

  A harried-looking man with hands that looked like they were used to rough work was frowning as he poked a stubby index finger onto the keys of an adding machine. Smoke from a fat, worry-chewed cigar steamed around his face like a curtain.

  "You the manager?" Remo asked.

  "Yeah." The man looked up briefly. "Name's Sloops. You looking for work?"

  "Sure am," Remo said.

  Sloops puffed at his cigar hurriedly. "You got it."

  He rose, shoving a piece of paper toward Remo. "Put down your name and stuff there, so we can pay you. And make it fast. We got more work than we know what to do with."

  "Business looks good around here," Remo said conversationally as he filled in the blanks.

  "Never been better. Strange thing. People out of work all over the country, and we're turning over more business than we can handle." He puffed out a little laugh. "Well, I ain't complaining. I guess coffee's the only thing people can afford to drink these days."

  "When did the boom start?"

  "Oh, I dunno, not too long ago." Sloops stood and smoked for a few minutes, ruminating. Then he spoke softly, as if to himself. "Last Thursday."

  "What happened last Thursday?"

  The smoke from his cigar rose in thick curls. "I just remembered, Thursday was the first crazy day we had here. It started right after the new beans came."

  "What new beans?"

  Sloops puffed in silence for a few more moments, then turned irritably toward Remo. "What's it to you, what beans? You want work or not?"

  "Sure," Remo said. "I was only—"

  "Then quit jawing so much. That thing filled out?" He snatched the form away and scanned it. "What's this crap? Under 'address' you have the Happy Rest Motel."

  Remo shrugged. "I've got to live someplace."

  With a grunt the man tossed the card onto his desk and opened the door. "Don't make no difference to me, long as you can do the work." He appraised Remo's thin body as they walked toward the far end of the warehouse. "No offense, but you don't look that strong, kid. You got to be able to lift those hundred and fifty-pound bags."

  "I'll do my best, sir."

  He was put to work beside a handsome young man with bulging biceps. The young man looked Remo over condescendingly as he hoisted up one of the big bags of coffee beans. The effort made his muscles stand out ostentatiously beneath the thin straps of his wet-look tank shirt. He hesitated as the bag was at its zenith, admiring the contours of his own physique.

  "Ty," he said, sounding for all the world as if he'd spent his teen years watching Nelson Eddy movies.

  "Tie what?" Remo asked.

  The young man tossed the bag onto the skid they were loading and smiled. "That's me. Ty. Stands for Tyrone."

  Good, Remo thought. A talker. It always saved time when people were willing to talk, even if they were as dumb as Ty seemed to be.

  "Remo," he said, extending his hand
.

  Ty declined the handshake with a modest wave. "Nah. I might hurt you. Sometimes I don't know my own strength."

  "Oh. Thanks for warning me," Remo said.

  "I lift."

  "So I noticed."

  "Nah, not this crap. This is nothing. I lift weights, real weights. It's the only way to build up your delts."

  "I'll keep that in mind," Remo said, controlling his movements to look as if the coffee bags required more than one finger to move.

  "You know, you could do something with yourself with a little work. You got good wrists. Put on some weight, work out for maybe a year at a good gym, you could have potential." He winked patronizingly at Remo between displays of musculature.

  "Gee, thanks," Remo said.

  "Nothing great, of course. But you could be okay."

  Remo nodded. "Have you been working here long?"

  "Yeah. A while. They're grooming me for management here," he said proudly.

  "Then you must know a lot about coffee."

  "Everything," Ty agreed. "Believe me, there's nobody here knows more than I do about this place. You know why? 'Cause I make it my business to know. Perfection of the body and the mind, too, that's what the Greeks said. You know about the Greeks?"

  "Any particular Greeks?"

  "The old Greeks. They believed in body building and thinking. All at the same time. Not the new Greeks, though. The old ones. Most of them are dead now. They built a lot of statues."

  "What happened last Thursday?" Remo asked.

  "Huh? Oh, Thursday. Yeah, it got real wild here. Busy. Ten new guys got hired since then. Overtime six nights a week. We've been making out good. What's good for business is good for me, you know?"

  "Did the Greeks say that, too?" Remo muttered, thudding one of the bags onto a flat wooden square.

  "The Greeks? Nah. They didn't speak English. They were only into foreign stuff. Hey, did I tell you they're grooming me for management here? I fill in for Sloops when he can't make it in."

  "Yeah, yeah," Remo said. "Sloops said something about some new beans."

  "Damn good thing we had them, too," Ty said belligerently. "Sloops almost chewed my ear off when I bought them, but he's glad now."

  "You bought them?"

  "Yeah. Well, I'm not supposed to buy anything, really, just kind of mind the store when Sloops is sick. He's got this kidney problem or something—"

  "Where'd the beans come from?"

  "Colombia. Good beans. The best beans come from Colombia. That's why most American blends are mostly Colombian beans. Now, you have your African beans, they're kind of small and bitter," he rambled pedantically. "Then there's your Jamaican bean—"

  "Who sold them to you?" Remo interrupted.

  "A guy named Brown."

  "American?"

  "Yeah. Said he represented a new company, and he'd sell me the beans cheap. Sort of a get-acquainted discount."

  "Did this Brown give you a card?"

  "Sure. 'George Brown,' it said. 'North American Coffee Company,' or something like that. Which is funny, since coffee don't grow in North America. Anybody who knows beans from bongos could see those beans came from Colombia."

  "Where was the company located?"

  Ty searched his pockets. "I still got the card here someplace." He extracted a fat wallet and leafed leisurely through dozens of photographs. "Now this," he said, pointing to a picture of himself oiled and straining, "is from the regionals. I took second. There's one that shows my lats real good."

  "Skip the lats," Remo said. "Where's the card?"

  "Oh that, yeah," Ty said, remembering. He pulled out an embossed business card.

  George Brown

  North American Coffee Company

  Saxonburg, Indiana

  "Indiana?" Remo mused. "There's no phone number here. No post office box, no street address."

  "That's what I mean," Ty said, chortling. "I figured it was a scam. Hot beans. You know, stolen from some other warehouse. It happens all the time in this business. But I figure, who cares? Satisfaction guaranteed, the man says. We don't pay a cent if we can't move the beans."

  "And if you can?"

  "Then he says he'll come by to collect the money himself."

  "Did he?"

  "That's the funny part. When I told Sloops I bought the beans, he just about wet his pants, he was so mad, but what could I do, I says. The deal was too good to pass up. I says, 'Okay, Sloops. If you don't want the beans, you don't have to pay for them. The next time this Brown fella shows up, you just give the beans back to him.' Only Brown never showed up again. Just more beans."

  "What do you mean, more beans?"

  "I mean shipments of beans started coming in to beat the band. Beans out the gazoo. No bills, nothing, just beans. Sloops just about had a heart attack, what with all the beans coming in, and no invoices or anything to go with them. We were going wild just trying to keep track of them. And then Thursday."

  "What happened on Thursday?"

  "That's when the orders started coming in. Orders from all over the country. It's like the coffee business went through the roof overnight. Suddenly everybody wanted coffee. Me, I don't drink the stuff personally. It's bad for your kidneys. Look at Sloops. He can't touch the stuff anymore. But the public suddenly got crazy for coffee, you know what I mean?"

  Remo nodded as he loaded the last bag onto the skid and motioned for a man on a forklift to pick it up.

  "At first Sloops wasn't going to use the new beans," Ty said, starting on another skid. "He said he didn't like the whole setup, what with no bills and all these beans. It was almost as if this George Brown was forcing them on us. But the orders kept coming in so fast that we ran out of our regular stock in two days. Sloops called the next closest warehouse— that's in Washington, D.C. There are only a handful of coffee warehouses in the whole country, you know. It's a limited field. Lots of chances for advancement, if you know what you're doing. It's like the Romans said. You know who the Romans were?"

  "Forget the Romans," Remo said testily. "What did Sloops call the Washington warehouse for?"

  "To see if they'd sell us some beans. Like I said, Sloops didn't want to use the new beans, on account of he thought they was hot."

  "So did you get more beans from Washington?"

  "Hell, no. They were in the same situation as us. More orders than they knew how to fill. But they were filling them. You know what with?"

  "George Brown's beans from Indiana," Remo said.

  "You got it, buddy."

  Remo loaded the bags in silence, grateful that the loquacious Ty had finally run out of conversation.

  "What'd Sloops do?" Remo asked finally, throwing a bag onto a high pile.

  Ty grinned. "He admitted I did right in making the deal on the new beans. That's all we're shipping out now."

  Startled, Remo snatched back the bag he had just loaded. "These are the beans?"

  "All of them. And more coming in every day."

  A thin line formed across Ty's brow as his eyes fixed on the 150-pound bag suspended between Remo's thumb and forefinger. "How are you doing that?" he asked suspiciously.

  Remo wasn't paying attention. With his left thumb nail, he sliced open the heavy burlap. A cascade of fragrant coffee beans spilled out.

  "With your thumb," Ty gasped. "Man, how'd you ever get hands like that? You squeeze tennis balls or something?"

  Remo tasted one of the beans and quickly spat it out. It was exactly what he was looking for. "Where do these come from?"

  "Colombia, I told you. I knew all along, even before I seen the proof. See, I can spot beans—"

  "Where in Colombia?" Remo yelled.

  Ty walked over to the rows of bags stacked eight deep across the length of the block-long warehouse. "Lemme see," he said. "There's a stamp on the first bag of every shipment. Colombian government stamp. It gives the location."

  He pushed at the stacks. "Sorry, buddy. There can't be more than six or seven stamped bags in the who
le place. We'd never find... What the hell are you doing?" he whispered, rubbing his eyes.

  Remo was going through the stacks like a crazed ferret. He lifted them two at a time, scanning their fronts and backs, then tossed them over his shoulders with exactly enough force so that they rapped lightly against the opposite wall and slid into place in high piles.

  "Here's one," Remo said, throwing the other bag in his hand casually onto the skid.

  Ty walked over to him, his gaze still riveted on the far wall as he counted the bags. "Thirty-eight, thirty-nine... Mister, you just moved six thousand pounds in fifteen seconds," he said, astonished.

  "Peruvina," Remo read, pointing to the blurry green stamp on the bag. "Is that the place?"

  "Yeah," Ty said, poking a tentative finger into Remo's unspectacular-looking forearm. "I looked it up. It's about a hundred miles north of Bogota. Good coffee country. Must be a private plantation."

  Sloops's voice called from near the office at the end of the warehouse. "Hey, Remo." His footsteps clacked slowly across the concrete floor. "I got some bad news. There's been a nationwide recall of all the coffee on the market. Some tampering scare. Everybody except me and Ty's laid off until further notice. You want me to send your wages to the Happy Rest Motel?"

  "Keep them," Remo said, heading toward the door.

  "Hey, wait a minute," Ty called, running after him. "I got to ask you something."

  "About how I moved the bags so fast?" Remo never missed a step.

  "Yeah. How'd you do it? I mean, you're not even built. You got no delts to speak of. You work out with isometrics or something?"

  "Pins," Remo said.

  "Pins?"

  "Every night I stick a hundred pins all over my head."

  "Ouch." Ty swallowed. "Any special kind?"

  "Long. With blue tops. They've got to be blue. And eat a lot of rotten cabbage. Keeps your skull hard."

  "Sounds like a weird workout," Ty said, testing his skull for tenderness.

  "It was used by the ancient Glods. Ever heard about the Glods?"

  "Uh, they make statues or something?"

  "That's the Glods, all right."