The Last Temple td-27

by Warren Murphy

  Ida leaned over and hugged him. "Fine," she said, "I'm sure you have done the right thing." He clung to her. "I'm sure you've done the right thing," she repeated.

  Goldman leaned back. "You are a fine woman, Ida. The kind they do not make anymore. I am proud to be with you. I am old and tired, but you make me feel strong."

  "You are strong," said Ida Bernard.

  "Maybe you are right," Goldman smiled wearily, "maybe things can be good again."

  Ida put her hand on his wet brow and began to wipe the sweat away. "We will have each other," she said.

  Goldman looked at her with a new, dawning awareness. She looked back with tenderness.

  "We'll have each other," he repeated.

  The loneliness and pain of fifty collected years flooded out of them and they collapsed into each other's arms.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Their heads snapped up, one in shock, the other in disappointment. Goldman looked at Ida, who shrugged diffidently, beginning to pat her hair back in place.

  "The Post probably has a nearby Baltimore office," she said.

  Secured by her presence, Goldman nodded and then opened the door.

  A hard-looking man of medium height stood outside in a simple, but expensive suit. Goldman blinked, taking in the hard face and the dark wavy hair. Goldman looked for a press card or a pad and pencil, but saw only empty hands and thick wrists.

  But when the man smiled and spoke, Goldman lost his strength of a moment before and stumbled back.

  "Heil Hitler," the man said and pushed open the door.

  Goldman soiled his pants.

  Dustin Woodman pressed all the call buttons in the foyer of the apartment building on Pennsylvania Avenue and cursed.

  He cursed his parents for not naming him Maurice or Chauncey, or Ignatz. He cursed Warner Brothers for putting up $8 million for a certain movie and cursed the public for making that certain movie a smash hit. He cursed the switchboard girl for thinking it funny to connect every crackpot, weirdo, joker, housewife, or wino who called in for Woodward, Bernstein, Hoffman, or Redford.

  And he also had a gold-plated, solid platinum curse for the editor who made him answer all these calls. "In the paper's interest," he had been told. Up the paper's ass, he thought.

  He got them all, every call to the main office by every dippo who had congressmen dancing naked in his refrigerator or who had uncovered a conspiracy to poison feminine hygiene sprays. Woodman got them all.

  The door buzzed and clicked open. Woodman pushed on it while reaching into his pocket for a stick of sugarless gum, recommended by four out of five dentists for patients who care about their teeth. Woodman was beginning to develop the second of the newspaperman's three curses, a flaccid spare tire, broadening his waist. He had always had the first curse-no suntan-and he was too young yet for the third curse-alcoholism-but he could do something about the second, so he cut out sugar and began to take stairs two at a time for exercise.

  The door buzzed again.

  Woodman took the stairs two at a time until he discovered that hopping up stairs and chewing gum at the same time was a little too much exercise.

  He scratched his earthy blond hair as he rounded the third-floor landing. He felt wetness bounce off his middle finger and slide onto his hair.

  What a place, he thought, stopping. Complete with leaky water pipes.

  Below him, he heard the door buzz again as he brought his hand down and shook off the moisture.

  The floor and his trouser leg were suddenly dotted with red. Woodman brought his hand up and looked at it. Swirled around his middle finger, like the tattoo of a lightning bolt, was a streak of blood.

  He looked up and saw a small trickle of blood dripping over from the fourth-floor landing. Woodman sucked in his breath and grabbed his pencil, although he did not know why. He held it in his right hand as he went up the stairs cautiously. In his mind, he was composing leads for his story.

  "The stink of blood emanated from a peaceful-looking Baltimore flat…"

  He rejected that.

  He reached the fourth-floor landing. He saw that the red stream was coming from the slightly opened door marked A-412. His mind dictated to him: "Acting on a hunch, this reporter fought fear to discover…"

  He pushed the door open and stopped.

  Inside the room were two gory swastikas made from human limbs. One was shorter, hairier than the other, but both fit within the huge pond of blood. But Woodman didn't see that. All he saw was a huge scoop of red. A Book-of-the-Month-Club nonfiction selection or, at least, a Literary Guild novelization heralding his addition to The New York Times Best Seller List.

  That was just the beginning. When Woodman looked in the bathroom and saw the two heads lying together in the bathtub, he really saw the movie, starring Clint Eastwood as him. He saw Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson and Book Beat on PBS and the NBC-TV special production.

  Woodman stood, taking notes furiously. He had no idea that his paper and the paperback publishers would want nothing to do with just another grisly murder. They wanted conspiracy. They wanted something spectacular.

  Woodman's item was buried on page thirty-two of the next day's edition, and he went back to chasing dancing congressmen and poisoned feminine sprays. It was Wednesday before his reporting came to the attention of Dr. Harold W. Smith of Rye, New York.

  And to him the piece of news meant more than any Playboy serialization or Reader's Digest condensation. It meant that there might be no more Middle East soon.

  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo, and the tiny flakes of rust built up under his fingernails like grains of salt. They were not so much dangerous as annoying, and he could hear the packed metal chips click against the steel structure as his fingers kept going higher and higher above his head as if cutting a path in space for his body to follow.

  The body moved without thought and slowly, like a metronome that might not make another click. The breath came deep, holding all the oxygen for another count. The legs were relaxed, but always moving, not really fighting gravity by upward thrust, but ignoring gravity, moving in a time and space of their own.

  The fingertips reached farther overhead, the packed rust touched the metal with a clicking sound, and the legs followed, and the arms stretched again.

  Remo felt the chill of the height and took his body temperature down to meet it. Down below, Paris looked like a great gray tangle of blocks and black wires.

  His arms stretched again over his head, and his fingertips felt the damp top of a horizontal metal bar, and even more slowly, he brought the rest of his body up to the level of the railing, because trying to hurry the last few steps would destroy his unity with the surface, like a skier who makes a great run down a slope and then tries to hurry into the ski lodge to brag about it, falls on the steps, and breaks an arm. Slow was the secret.

  Then Remo's body was up and over the metal bar. He stood on a platform and looked down the sloping sides of the Eiffel Tower at Paris below him.

  "No one told me this tower was rusty," he said. "But you people put cheese in your potatoes. How can you expect anybody who puts cheese in potatoes to keep a tower unrusted?"

  Remo's companion assured the thin, thick-waisted American that that was true. Absolutely true. Definitely, naturally, certainement!

  The Frenchman knew that Remo was thick-wristed, because that was about all he could see from where he hung, suspended over Paris.

  When Remo did not respond, the man gave him a few more "definitelys," his carefully groomed Vandyke beard bobbing up and down.

  "Do you know I haven't had a potato in over ten years?" Remo said. "But when I did have them, I didn't put cheese in them."

  "Only Americans know how to eat," the Frenchman said. Remo's thin body moved into his view as the wind whirled about, and the Frenchman's dangling body twisted, and Remo's thick wrist lay across the vision of his right eye as Remo's hand was wrapped around his neck.

  Remo nodded
. "Steak," said Remo. "Remember steak?"

  The Frenchman on the end of Remo's arm hurriedly reported that he himself could personally take Remo to at least a dozen, make that two dozen, places where he would buy Remo the nicest, fattest, juiciest steak he had ever had. Two steaks, a half-dozen steaks, a herd of steer. A ranch.

  "I don't eat steak anymore either," Remo said.

  "Whatever you like, I will get for you," the Frenchman said. "We can go now. Anywhere you like. We will take my jet. Just put me on the tower. You do not even have to bring me over the railing. Just put me near a rail. I will climb down myself. I saw how easily you climbed up."

  The Frenchman swallowed heavily and tried to smile. He looked like a hairy grapefruit being slit open,

  "Down is even easier than up," Remo said. "Try it."

  He opened his hand and the Frenchman dropped five feet onto a metal crossbar. He tried clasping himself around it, but his hands, which had never done anything more strenuous than lift a rum cooler, would not grip. He felt the wet flakes of rust break loose from the metal and slide away underneath him. His arms, which he himself had never used to lift any of the thousands of kilos of heroin and cocaine he exported each year, did not have the strength to hang on.

  His legs, which were used only to walk from car to building and back to car, did not work right.

  The Frenchman's limbs slid across the metal, desperately searching for an easy grip, but he felt himself sliding down and across. He felt cold air encircle his legs as they slipped loose and swung out over the city. His mouth opened, and the night was filled with a squealing, bleating noise as if a pig had collided with a sheep at sixty miles an hour.

  Suddenly the hand of the American was back under his chin and his body once again hung three feet away from the Eiffel Tower.

  "You see?" said Remo. "If it wasn't for me, you would have fallen. And I don't want that to happen. I want to drop you myself."

  The Frenchman's color left his face and slid down to fill the front of his pants.

  "Oh, hohohohoho," he managed, trying not to move. "Always joking, you Americans, yes?"

  "No," said Remo. He had finished cleaning the rust from the fingernails of his left hand and now he transferred the Frenchman to that hand while he cleaned the nails of his right hand.

  "Ah, you Americans. Always playing so hard to get. I remember. Once, your playful ones slammed my fingers in the top drawer of a desk. But when I gave them something… I will give you something. A piece of the drug action, you leave me alone, no? How much do you want? Half? All?"

  Remo shook his head and started climbing again.

  The Frenchman babbled about how he had always been a good friend of America's. Remo didn't hear him because his mind was on becoming one with the red, flaking iron as his two legs and one arm bent, then straightened, bent then straightened, bent then straightened.

  He tried to avoid thinking of how no one had told him the tower was rusty. He avoided thinking about how simple this project had been. His assignment had been to discourage the drug trade throughout France. But the U.S. government could name no clear-cut criminals, only very likely suspects. Which meant that the Treasury Department and the Drug Abuse Administration and at least a dozen other agencies would be wound all around themselves and each other, trying to uncover incriminating evidence. And, of course, the CIA was no longer any good overseas because it was still busy making sure its fly wasn't open at home.

  So the job filtered down to one very special agent, Remo, who bypassed all the complications with a simple brand of interrogation.

  Talk or die. Simple. Worked every time. And so he had found the kingpin, the Frenchman with the Vandyke.

  The Frenchman was talking about how France was helped by America in World War I, after France had collapsed upon the firing of the first bullet.

  As Remo reached the second tourist level of the closed-for-the-night tower, the French connection on the end of his arm recalled with brilliant clarity how America helped France in World War II when the silly French bastards sat behind the Maginot Line playing bezique while Hitler's forces first outflanked, then overwhelmed, them.

  Even as Remo got halfway up the third level and the going sloped measurably steeper, the Frenchman declared his support of America in its battle over world oil prices.

  "France is a good friend of America," the man declared while trying to get his fingers into Remo's eyes. "I like many Americans, Spiro Agnew, John Connally, Frank Sinatra…"

  Remo looked out over Paris as he came to rest on the sloping arch just above the third sightseeing level, nine hundred and fifty feet above sea level.

  It was a clear night, brightly lit by the homes, outdoor cafes, theaters, discos, and business offices in France's capital. Every light in the city seemed to be on. No energy crises here, no sir, not with their hands in every pocket and their heads kissing every ass in sight.

  The drug merchant started to sing Yankee Doodle. Remo waited until he got to "stuck ze fezzer in ze hat," then dropped him.

  The man hit before he got a chance to call himself macaroni.

  There was a splatting thud that caused night strollers to look up at the tower. All they saw was a man who looked a little like a night watchman standing on the second level looking up as well. After a few seconds, the night watchman continued on his way and the pedestrians paid attention to the squished body in the street.

  The "night watchman" skipped down the remaining stairs, whistling "Frere Jacques." He waited, then hopped over the eight and a half foot wrought iron fence and headed back into town.

  Remo trotted through the early morning crowds of French teenagers trying to be American at their "le discos" and "le hamburger joints" and in their "le blue jeans" and "le chinos."

  Remo was American, and he didn't see what the big deal was. When he was their age, he was not dancing till dawn, eating "le quarter-pounder avec fromage"; he was Remo Williams, pounding a beat as a rookie patrolman in Newark, New Jersey, and dancing with the corrupt administration to keep alive.

  And his honest idealism got him a bum murder rap, and a one-way ticket to the electric chair.

  Except the electric chair hadn't worked.

  Remo wound his way through narrow streets until he found a side entrance to the Paris Hilton. He peeled off his night watchman clothes and dropped them into the garbage can, then brushed the wrinkles from his casual blue slacks and black T-shirt, which he had worn underneath the uniform.

  And that was life and death. A borrowed night watchman's uniform, a climb up the outside of a tower the French were too lazy to keep unrusted, a public execution of a drug dealer to serve as discouragement for anyone planning to step into his suddenly empty shoes, and brush wrinkles from your blue slacks and black T-shirt. Ho hum.

  Remo's "death" in the electric chair had been more exciting. His death had been faked so he could join a super-secret organization. It seemed that all was not well in the United States. One had only to stick one's head out the window, and if one still had one's head when he pulled it back inside, one could see. Crime was threatening to take over the country.

  So a young president created an organization that didn't exist, an organization called CURE, and it drafted a dead man who no longer existed, Remo Williams, to work outside the Constitution to protect the Constitution.

  Its first and only director was Dr. Harold W. Smith and as far as Remo was concerned, he barely existed either. Rational, logical, analytical, unimaginative, Smith lived in a world where two plus two always equaled four, even in a world where children were taught every day on the six o'clock news that tastelessness plus brass equaled stardom.

  Remo strolled through the Paris Hilton lobby, which was filled with smiling, mustachioed bellboys in berets, busy practicing their professional indifference.

  Except for them, the lobby was empty and no one paid the dark-haired American any mind as he walked to "le stairs," and trotted up to "le neuf floor," past "le coffee shop," "le drug store," "l
e souffle restaurant," "le bistro" snack shop, and "1'ascot" clothing store.

  Remo reached "le neuf floor" suite in a couple of seconds and found Chiun where he had left him, sitting on a grass mat in the middle of the living room floor.

  To a stranger entering the room, Chiun would appear to be an aged Oriental, small and frail, with white tufts of hair fluttering out from the sides of his otherwise bald head. This was correct as far as it went, which was approximately as far as saying that a tree is green.

  For Chiun was also the Master of Sinanju, the latest in a centuries-long line of Korean Master assassins, and he had taught Remo the art of Sinanju.

  From Sinanju had come all the other martial arts-karate, kung fu, aikido, tae kwan do-and each resembled it only as a cut of beef resembled the whole steer. Some disciplines were filet mignon and some were sirloin steak and some were chopped chuck. But Sinanju was the whole steer.

  Chiun had taught Remo to catch bullets, kill taxis, climb rusty towers, all with the power of his mind and the limitless resources of his body, and Remo was not sure if he would ever forgive him for it.

  At first, it had been easy. The president of the United States would tap Smith on the shoulder, and Smith would point and say "kill," and Remo would rip up whatever Chiun was pointing at.

  At first, it had been fun. But then one assignment led to another, then another, then dozens more, and he found he no longer remembered the faces of the dead. And as his spirit changed, his body changed. He could no longer eat like the rest of humankind, nor sleep, nor love. Chiun's training was too complete, too effective, and Remo became something more than human, but something less than human too, lacking the great human seasoning of imperfection.

  Alone, Remo could wipe out a given army at a given time. Together, he and Chiun could give the bowels of the earth diarrhea.

  But right now, the Master was giving Remo a headache.

  "Remo," he said in his high-pitched voice that encompassed all misery, "is that you?"

  Remo walked across the room toward the bathroom. Chiun knew damn well it was him and probably had known it was him even before he made it to the seventh floor, But he talked quickly because he recognized the tone in Chiun's voice.