Funny Money td-18

by Warren Murphy

  It took thirty seconds. When Chiun was done, Forsythe's nose had been broken so that it looked as if it might have once been Remo's nose. Extra flesh had been compressed off Forsythe's cheeks and jowls to resemble Remo's high, protruding cheekbones. The bones of the eye sockets were broken so Forsythe's eyes, in death, sagged deeper into the sockets resembling Remo's brooding, deep eyes.

  The ears. The ears were not right, Chiun thought as he looked down at the bloody lump on the floor. He glanced toward the bed where Remo slept. Remo had almost no lobes at all. Forsythe had long full ear-lobes which Chiun decided was characteristic of Americans and rightfully so, since if they were all going to act like jackasses, they might as well share with them not just intellect but ears. With his hardened fingertips and nails, he began to shave the excess flesh away from Forsythe's earlobes. He leaned back to inspect. Still not right.

  With two slashes of his right hand, he took off the excess flesh, rendering Forsythe lobeless. It might not be perfect, but it was the best he could do. It would have to do. He hoped it would do.

  Chiun removed a plastic tablecloth from the lamp table and wrapped the head inside it tightly, then stuffed the whole lump into a pillowcase he ripped from one of the pillows on his bed. He put the pile onto the sofa and looked around the room. Forsythe's headless body still lay in the middle of the floor. That would not do. The whole point of the deception would be lost if Forsythe's headless body were found and the press reported it, as they reported all such trivia to this nation of trivia collectors.

  Chiun went to the window leading to the fire escape. He hit the heels of both hands simultaneously against both sides of the window, then with his right index finger pushed upward. The window slid smoothly and easily upward and Chiun leaned out to see the garbage pail down below the fire escape.

  Easily, he hoisted Forsythe's body through the window and onto the fire escape. He removed the man's wallet from his pocket, then held the body over the edge of the fire escape and dropped it. It slid down into the garbage pail smoothly, not touching the side before the feet hit bottom, like spitting into a sink.

  Chiun looked down satisfied. If there were one of those insidious newspaper articles, it would talk about the headless body found outside Mr. Remo's room. That was fine for what Chiun had in mind. He went to the bathroom and flushed Forsythe's wallet down the toilet. The gun on the floor was another problem. Using his hand as a knife, Chiun slashed open one of the couch cushions and stuffed the gun deep inside it.

  Then he picked up the pillowcase bundle, took one last look at Remo sleeping, and left the room, locking the door behind him, lest burglars sneak in and disturb Remo's rest.

  "Heh, heh, heh, old timer. Delivering your Christmas packages early this year?"

  The airport guard chuckled as he addressed Chiun, who was wearing a red robe and carrying his pillowcase over his shoulder like Santa's sack.

  "Do not labor yourself with attempts to be funny. Where is the Eastern Airlines resignation desk?"

  "Resignation desk?"

  "Where they write many copies of tickets because you need only one to get on a plane."

  "Oh, the reservations desk. Heh, heh," the sallow-faced guard said. "Down there, old-timer." He waved toward the other end of the terminal's main passenger building.

  Chiun wordlessly walked away from him.

  He saw the litter basket in front of the Eastern Airlines desk.

  And then his senses told him Mr. Gordons was near but he did not know why. He sensed people because people had a living pulse, a rhythm of their own. Machines vibrated. Mr. Gordons vibrated; Chiun had recognized only lately that they were not human vibrations. He felt those vibrations now. They grew stronger as he approached the trash basket.

  Glancing around him cautiously to see that no one was watching, and satisfied that no one was, Chiun dropped the little white sack into the top of the basket.

  The vibrations that were Mr. Gordons were so strong, they almost made Chiun's flesh quiver.

  Wherever he was, he was watching Chiun now. Chiun made sure that his face showed only sorrow, the appropriate look for an old man surrendering his pupil's head, then turned and walked away from the basket, softly along the hard terminal floor, toward the door through which he had entered.

  Twenty-five yards from the ticket counter, the vibrations had almost vanished. Chiun turned. He was just in time to see the back of Mr. Gordons, stiffly carrying the white pillowcase at his side, disappear through a revolving door at the other end of the terminal.

  Chiun looked toward the Eastern Airlines reservation desk.

  The litter basket was gone. Where it had stood, there was only a small pile of papers, pop cans, and cigarette butts on the floor. But the litter basket itself was gone, nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Back in the hotel room, Chiun awakened Remo from his sound sleep.

  "Come, we must find different lodgings," he said.

  "What happened to Forsythe?" asked Remo. He looked around the room and saw the ubiquitous blood stain. "Never mind," he said. "Where have you been? What have you been up to?"

  "Just getting your head together," said Chiun with a high-humored cackle. He felt this so good, it deserved repeating. "Getting your head together. Heh, heh, heh, heh."

  "Oh, knock it off," said Remo rolling out of bed. Once on his feet, he saw the blood-slicked plate in the corner of the room.

  "I guess my plates came in handy," he said. "Aren't you glad I thought of them?"

  "I've changed my mind," Chiun said.

  "About what?"

  "Nobody can get your head together. Heh, heh, heh, heh."

  In a small room across the city, a room with not one piece of furniture, Mr. Gordons sat on the floor. He grasped the pillowcase package between his two hands and gently, with no sign of strain or exertion, pulled his hands apart. The pillowcase ripped and the plastic tablecloth inside pulled apart with little strands of fluff from its flannel back fluttering onto the floor.

  Mr. Gordons dropped the two halves of the package binding and looked down at its grizzly, blood-soaked contents.

  "Very good," he said aloud. Since he had reprogrammed himself with the elementary creativity program developed by Dr. Vanessa Carlton's laboratory, he had taken to speaking his thoughts aloud. He wondered why he did this, but he was not quite creative enough to figure out that five-year-olds spoke to themselves, not because it had anything directly to do with their creativity, but because their growing creativity made them for the first time realize that they were but specks in a giant, unfathomable world and that made them lonely.

  These thoughts were still beyond Mr. Gordons, and not having them, he did not even know that it was possible for him to have them.

  "Very good," he repeated, putting his two hands down and touching the face. The head certainly looked like Remo's head. And the old Oriental, high probability name of Chiun, had certainly looked unhappy. Unhappy was what one was supposed to look like when one lost one's friend or had to make him give up his life. He had been told about such friends; the ancient Greeks had had many of them. Mr. Gordons was not quite sure what friend meant but if a friend worried about your loss, then was it not logical that a friend might help you to survive? It was, he decided. Very logical. It was also creative. Mr. Gordons was pleased with himself. See: he had already become more creative. Creativity was a means of survival and survival was the most important thing in the world. A friend would also be a help to survival. He would have to get a friend. But that would have to wait.

  For now, he would have to look more closely at this head. From the electronic circuits that coursed through his man-like body he withdrew the image of high probability name Remo. There it was. High cheekbones. This head had such cheekbones. Dark brown eyes sunk deep into the head. Mr. Gordons reached out a hand and pried open an eyelid. These were dark brown eyes and they appeared deepset, although his finger could tell that the bones were broken around the eye sockets and it was diff
icult to be sure. Dark brown hair.

  He ran his fingers over the pulpy face of the severed head on the floor between his legs and worked out a correlation between his tactile impressions and the picture analysis of Remo he held in his head. There was no difference. Every dimension his fingers felt were the same dimensions his mechanical brain had measured in those times that he had seen high probability Remo.

  Mr. Gordons slid his fingertips off the cheeks to the ears. The ears were badly mangled. Remo must have waged a gigantic struggle not to die. Perhaps he had fought with the old yellow-skinned man, high probability name Chiun. Mr. Gordons felt a desire to have seen that battle. That would have been worth seeing.

  When first they had met, Remo had damaged Mr. Gordons. Mr. Gordons had thought for a time that Remo too might be an android. But no longer did he feel that way. After all, here was his head between his feet, the one eye that had been pried open staring up at Mr. Gordons blankly, unseeing. The other eye remained tightly closed.

  Mr. Gordons felt where the earlobes would have been.

  The ears were twisted, cut, and bloodied. Why should ears be cut like that? The blow to the nose would kill a human. The blows that broke the eye socket bones would kill a human. The blows to the earlobes would not kill a human. They were mutilating wounds. Would the old man who looked sad have mutilated the head of high probability Remo? No. They were friends. He would someday have his own friend, thought Mr. Gordons. Would he mutilate the ears of his friend? No. Perhaps someone else had mutilated the head of Remo. Mr. Gordons thought about this for a moment. No. No one else could mutilate Remo. No one else but the aged yellow person could have killed him.

  Why the mutilation?

  Mr. Gordons brought all his creativity to bear upon the problem. He could not think of an answer. There must be danger in it. Danger to Mr. Gordons's survival. He must think about this more. More investigation. More data. More creativity.

  He reached a pair of fingers into the matted flesh on the underside of the right ear. He felt something that did not belong there. It was of the wrong weight and mass and density. He extracted it. It was a small piece of skin. He felt it between his fingertips. It felt like the skin from the rest of the head. He held it close to his eye sensors and counted the pores per square millimeter on the small piece of skin, then lowered his head and made a random check of the number of pores per millimeter at three different locations on the head. All were within chance tolerances. High probability, the piece of skin was from the ear of the dead person's head between his legs.

  He carefully checked the ear to see where the piece of skin had been detached. He saw a little V-shaped cutout in the ear from which the skin had been removed. The pointed end of the scrap of skin in his hand fit into the V exactly. He held it in place with his left hand and extended the skin, down under and around the flesh to try to find where at the back of the ear the skin fit. He found it and held it there with his other hand. The piece of skin formed a U-shaped loop, but the loop was not fully filled with flesh from the ear. There was a space. Three and a half millimeters of space. The ear had been made smaller. Some of the flesh had been removed. He looked again at the loop of skin, correctly anchored in front of and in back of the ear. If that skin had been filled with flesh, as in life it had, that much flesh would have created an earlobe. But high probability Remo had no earlobes.

  Therefore this was not the head of high probability Remo.

  It was logical. He was correct. While he had no instincts to sense correctness, he knew he was right because his sensory apparatus was infallible.

  He left the head on the floor and stood up, looking down at it.

  It was not Remo's head. As he looked at it again, he tried to decide whose head it might be, but he did not know. Never mind; he knew it was not Remo's.

  The old yellow-skin had tried to deceive him. He had said that he would not challenge Mr. Gordons's survival but now he was doing that by trying to deceive Mr. Gordons. Now he too must die. High probability Chiun must die along with high probability Remo. Mr. Gordons would see to that.

  But there were other things he must do. He must drop money on a city as he said he would.

  And he must find a friend.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  "If you will be my friend, I will give you a drink. Will you be my friend?"

  The pilot of the Pan Am jet looked with amusement at the ordinary-looking man standing in front of him, holding a large cardboard carton in his arms.

  Captain Fred Barnswell had a date. The new stew on his flight had made it very clear that she had the hots for him and he had just finished filing his flight reports and was on his way to his Manhattan apartment where she would be joining him for a late dinner.

  He had no time for aviation groupies, particularly middle-aged male variety.

  "Sure, buddy, sure. Whatever you want. I'll be your friend for life."

  The ordinary-looking man smiled with gratitude but he did not move. He still stood in Captain Barnswell's way in the narrow corridor leading from the pilots' offices toward the main terminal at Kennedy Airport outside New York City.

  "Okay, buddy?" said Barnswell with a smile. He was in a horny hurry. "Now what do you say, you move along."

  "Good," said the man. "Now that you are my friend, you will do a favor for me, correct?"

  Here it comes, thought Barnswell. Another bum putting the bite on. Why him all the time? He must have a kind face.

  "Sure, buddy," he said reaching into his pocket. "Now much do you need? Quarter? Buck?"

  "I need your aircraft."

  "What?" said Barnswell, wondering if perhaps he should call airport security right away.

  "Your aircraft. It is not too much for a friend to ask."

  "Look, buddy, I don't know what your game is, but…"

  "You will not give me your aircraft?" The smile vanished from the man's face. "Then you are not my friend. A friend would care about my survival."

  "All right, enough's enough. Why don't you get out of here before you get into trouble?"

  "Is there another pilot here who will be my friend and who will lend me his aircraft?"

  I don't know why I bother, thought Barnswell. Maybe I am kind. Patiently he said, "Look, friend, the planes don't belong to us. They belong to the airlines. We just work for the company. I can't lend you my plane because I don't own a plane."

  The smile returned to the man's face. "Then you really are my friend?"

  "Yes," said Barnswell.

  "Does no one have his own aircraft?"

  "Only private pilots. The small planes you see. They're privately owned."

  "Will one of them be my friend? Can a person have more than one friend at a time?"

  "Sure. All of them will be your friends. Pick any six." What a story Barnswell would have to tell that stew while he was getting her drawers down.

  "You are a real friend," said the man, still smiling. "Have a million dollars. See, I will be your friend, too." He put down the cardboard carton and opened the top. It was filled to the brim with hundred-dollar bills. There must be millions in the box, thought Barnswell. Maybe billions. It had to be fake. There wasn't that much cash on hand in a bank, much less in a cardboard box being carried around by some brain-damage case.

  "That's all right, buddy," said Barnswell. "I don't need your money to be your friend. Where'd you get all that anyway?"

  "I made it."

  "Made it like manufactured or made it like earned?"

  "Like manufactured, friend," said the man.

  "Well, buddy, I think you ought to turn it over to the authorities."

  "Why, friend?" asked the smiling man.

  "Because it'll go easier with you if you turn yourself in. The government just doesn't like people printing money on their own."

  "They will arrest me?"

  "Maybe not right off, but they would want to question you."

  "And you say I should do this?" asked the smiling man.

  "Sure should
, pal. Come clean. 'Fess up."

  "You are not a true friend," said the smiling-faced man who was suddenly no longer smiling. He swung his right arm through the air and where the side of his hand struck Captain Barnswell's head, the temple bones shattered and Captain Barnswell left instantly for that big stewardess hutch in the sky.

  Mr. Gordons looked down at the body with no feeling but puzzlement. Where had their friendship gone wrong?

  The next man he met was small and wiry with bad teeth and a faded blue pilot's cap with a fifty-mission crush. He owned an old DC-4 and he was delighted to be Mr. Gordons's friend and he did not suggest that Mr. Gordons turn his money over to the authorities, this most especially after satisfying himself that the box was really full of money, and if it was counterfeit—and he had had some experience in moving fake money—it was the best counterfeit he had ever seen.

  Sure he would be glad to take Mr. Gordons for a plane ride. Anything for a friend. Cash in advance. Two thousand dollars.

  Airborne, Mr. Gordons asked him where the place of greatest population density was.

  "Harlem," said the pilot. "The jungle bunnies there are like rabbits. Every time you turn around, they've bred another one."

  "No," said Mr. Gordons. "I mean dense with people, not with bunnies or rabbits. I am sorry I do not make myself so clear."

  "You're clear enough, pal," said the pilot to Mr. Gordons, sitting in the co-pilot's seat next to him. "Next stop, 125th Street and Lenox Avenue."

  When they were homing in over Harlem, the pilot asked Mr. Gordons why he wanted to see such a dense area from the sky.

  "Because I want to give my money away to the people there."

  "You can't do that," the pilot said.

  "Why not can I?"

  "Because those blooches'll just buy more Cadillacs and green shoes with it. Don't waste your dough."

  "I must. I promised. Please, friend, fly low over this Harlem rabbit preserve."