Chinese Puzzle

by Warren Murphy

  “I did.”

  “Try harder.”

  Guerner felt a hand on his shoulder and then a vise, crushing nerve and bone, and incredible pain where his right side was and he groaned.

  “Try harder.”

  “Aaaah. That’s all I know. There’s $70,000 in her purse.”

  “Okay. I believe you. Say, how’s the roast duck in this town?”

  “What?” said Guerner, starting to turn, but never finishing. Just a flash. Then nothing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  REMO DROVE OFF THE NEW YORK Thruway on the same route General Liu’s car had taken. It was a typical modern American highway junction with a confusion of signs stretched like meaningless miniature billboards 25 feet above the highway, so that to find a particular sign, one had to read them all.

  It was a tribute to the thoughtlessness of highway planners that if Remo had not been the recipient of extensive training in mind and body control, he would have missed the turnoff.

  The noon traffic seemed alive on the sunny fall day, perhaps a pre-lunch rush or just the normal clogging of an artery feeding a major city of the world.

  Chiun had been making small, gasping sounds since the New York City air, a fume-laden, lung-corroding poison, had first seeped into the car’s air conditioning.

  “Slow death,” Chiun said.

  “Because of the insensitivity of the exploitative ruling class to the people’s welfare. In China, we would not allow air like this.”

  “In China,” Chiun said, “people do not have cars. They eat excrement.”

  “You allow your slave much freedom,” Mei Soong said to Remo. The trio sat in the front seat, Mei Soong between the two men, and Chiun pressed as far against the passenger’s door as he could get. Remo had not bothered to switch cars, and frankly hoped he was being followed. Time was getting short in the search for General Liu and he wanted contact made as soon as possible.

  Remo did not like Chiun sitting near the window in his present mood, although for most of the trip Remo had been careful to avoid cars with peace emblems. Remo had been concentrating on Liu’s disappearance, hoping for a flash of inspiration.

  Then he had heard Chiun humming happily, and snapped to full consciousness, looking around carefully. Nothing wrong. Then he saw what unleashed the joy in Chiun’s heart. A small foreign car with a peace emblem was passing on their right.

  As the car moved by, Chiun, staring straight ahead, shot an arm through the open window, flicking at something. Remo caught sight of it in the rearview mirror. A clinketing sideview mirror going back up the road, shattering in shards of glass, bouncing as it disappeared out of sight.

  It had happened so fast, of course, the driver of the other car never saw Chiun’s wraithlike hand snap out, picking off the mirror. Up ahead, Remo had seen the driver look around in a little confusion and shake his head. Chiun hummed even louder, in joyous contentment.

  So Remo had watched for the peace banner cars all the way back to New York. Once, he had tried to foil Chiun. He came close while passing a car with a peace sign, then turned away at the last moment, seeing how close he could come to fooling Chiun.

  Remo wound up with a sideview mirror in his lap. Chiun loved that, especially when it bounced off Remo and landed on Mei Soong’s hands.

  “Heh, heh,” Chiun had said, his victory complete.

  “Bet you feel proud of yourself,” Remo had said.

  “Only feel proud when you defeat worthy opponent. Not proud at all. Heh, heh. Not proud at all.”

  This putdown had lasted Chiun all the way to the turnoff in New York City, with only an occasional “heh, heh, not proud at all.”

  Remo followed the route he knew General Liu had taken. Under the Jerome Avenue elevated train he drove, past the Mosholu Golf Course, to a crowded business district, shaded in the sunlight of day by the black grimy elevated train tracks, darkening the whole street. Hardware shops, delicatessens, supermarkets, more restaurants, two dry cleaners, laundries, candy and toy stores. Then Remo turned off the avenue two blocks beyond where General Liu had disappeared and prowled the neighborhood with the car. They were clean neat buildings, six stories high at the most, all brick, and all surprisingly quiet for New York City.

  Yet Remo knew that New York City was not really one city but a geographical conglomeration of thousands of provincial neighborhoods, each as far away spiritually from the glamor of New York City as Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  These neighborhoods — and sometimes just one apartment building constituted a neighborhood — enjoyed their own ethnic composition, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Polish; proof that the melting pot didn’t really melt anything, but instead allowed the unmixed particles to go floating around happily in a common stew.

  The houses on both sides of Jerome Avenue, between the Grand Concourse, the main thoroughfare of the Bronx, and the beginning of the elevated train, were the same. Neat, none more than six stories. All brick. Yet there were small differences.

  “Chiun,” Remo said, “do you know what I’m looking for?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Do you see what I see?” Remo asked.

  “No.”

  “What do you think?”

  “This is an outskirt of a larger city.”

  “Notice anything different from one block to another?”

  “No. This is one place all over the place. Heh, heh.” Chiun knew when he created a phrase in English and would punctuate it with a laugh that was not a laugh.

  “We’ll see,” Remo said.

  Mei Soong piped up. “It is obvious that the middle level of your rulers lives here. Your secret police and army. Your nuclear bomber pilots.”

  “The lower proletariat,” Remo said.

  “A lie,” she insisted. “I do not believe the masses live in buildings like these with street lights on corners and shops nearby under that train in the air.”

  Remo parked the car in front of a brown brick building with a tudor entrance and two rows of green hedges cut very thin, bordering the steps that led to the entrance. “Wait here,” he told Mei Soong and motioned Chiun to follow.

  “I’m pretty sure I know how General Liu disappeared,” Remo whispered to Chiun as they walked away from the car.

  “Who do you think you are, Charley Chan?” asked Chiun. “You are not trained in this sort of thing.”

  “Quiet,” Remo said. “I want you to observe.”

  “Right on, Sherlock, heh, heh.”

  “Where’d you pick that up?”

  “I watch television at Folcroft.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know they had TV there.”

  “Yes,” said Chiun. “My favorite shows are Edge of Night and As the World Turns. They are so beautiful and lovely.”

  On Jerome Avenue, it became clear to Chiun also. As they strolled through the busy shopping district, they drew curious glances from passersby, the fruit peddler, students with DeWitt Clinton High School jackets, a policeman collecting his weekly tithe from a bookie.

  They stopped in front of a lot clustered with unmarked gravestones, and an incredibly ornate white marble angel, undoubtedly ordered by a family that had come to its senses too late after the first shock of loss.

  The fresh smell of grass from the municipal golf course came as a blessed gift, telling them that grass was alive and well and living in some sections of New York City.

  The afternoon heat, surprising for September, bore down heavily on the now gummy asphalt.

  A train clattered overhead spraying metal sparks where its wheels met the tracks.

  “Chiun, General Liu never left Jerome Avenue at this point. There were no reports on his being seen, but in this neighborhood there’s no way that a couple of men, one of them an Oriental in uniform, could just walk away. He must have been plopped into another car a couple of blocks from here and taken somewhere.”

  Remo scanned the street. “And you don’t make any turnoff up there,” he said, nodding north, “without meaning to. Not from a
caravan of cars. His driver must have turned off, General Liu realized it and shot him. And perhaps the other man too. But whoever they were working with got the general before the rest of the caravan could catch up.”

  “Maybe he forced his driver to turn off,” Chiun said.

  “No, he wouldn’t have to. They were his own men. He’s a general, you know.”

  “And you know as much about Chinese internal politics as a roach knows about nuclear engineering.”

  “I know a general’s man is a general’s man.”

  “Do you also know why a general in an armored car can shoot two of his own men, and then not fire a shot at somebody who forces him from the car?”

  “Maybe it all happened too fast. Anyway, Chiun… ” Remo stopped. “I’ve got it. That train overhead, you know where it goes? To Chinatown! That’s it. They herded him on a train to Chinatown.”

  “Did no one notice the gang of men boarding the train? Did no one think it was odd to see a Chinese general struggling on a subway?”

  Remo shrugged. “Just details.”

  “Everything seems clear to you because you do not know what you are doing, my son,” said Chiun. “Perhaps General Liu is already dead.”

  “I don’t think so. Why the big effort then to kill us?”

  “A diversion.”

  Remo smiled. “Then they better up the price.”

  “They will,” Chiun said. “Particularly now when the world learns that you are also a famous all-knowing detective.”

  “No more of your snot,” Remo said. “You’re just jealous because I figured it out and you couldn’t. We’re going to Chinatown. And find General Liu.”

  Chiun bowed from the waist. “As you desire, most worthy number one son.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THERE WAS TROUBLE IN CHINA. More rumors of Mao’s death. Newsmen pontificating on the inner struggles in Peking. All of them pontificating, and none of them knowing that a Chinese war faction was spreading the word that America intended to sabotage the peace talks by murdering emissaries. After all, if they could put men on the moon, could they not protect emissaries?

  So the reasoning went in China. So the whispers were whispered. And so, in a nation where important decisions were discovered only after they had been implemented, people began to move before peace happened.

  Remo commented on this, in a taxicab on his way to Chinatown. He had left his rented car at the midtown hotel they had checked into and had hailed a cab.

  He was sure the answer was in Chinatown. He was sure General Liu’s disappearance had something to do with the China turmoil. But he was no longer so confident of finding him. A needle in a haystack and only four days left before the Chinese cancelled the Premier’s trip.

  Remo was sure the Premier should, for safety sake, come to America now, without arrangements. A sudden trip announced only as he was in flight.

  “Thank you, Mister Secretary of State,” said Chiun.

  “Do you think that the people of China will stand for one of their own beloved generals rotting in an American dungeon?” Mei Soong asked.

  “The people in American prisons live better than you rice planters,” commented Chiun to Mei Soong.

  The cab driver knocked on the window. “This is it,” he said.

  Remo looked around. The streets were lit with merry lights and vendors sold pizza and hot sausages and little Italian pastries.

  “This is Chinatown?” Remo asked.

  “San Gennaro Festival. Little Italy spreads out during it.”

  Remo shrugged and paid the driver what seemed to be an excessive fare. He said nothing but he was disgusted. How was he going to find anyone — or be found — in this horde of Italians?

  Now he pressed his way grimly down the middle of the street, squinting to close out the brightness of the overhead strings of lights. Mei Soong followed him, tossing insults back over her shoulder at Chiun, who shouted back at her. Their noise was deafening to Remo, not that anyone should have noticed. Hastily erected plywood booths cluttering the already narrow streets drew crowds of Italians, and the Oriental obscenities Chiun and Mei Soong shouted at each other sounded, in the din, only like warm greetings being exchanged by long-lost cousins from Castellamare.

  None should have noticed the two shouting Orientals, but someone had. A young Chinese man, with long shiny hair, was ahead of them, leaning on the pole holding up the awning of an Italian zeppole booth, openly staring at them. He wore an olive drab Army-type jacket with a red star on each shoulder and a Mao-style fatigue hat, from under which hung a mass of long, sleek hair.

  It was the third time they had passed him in the two-block festival stretch of Pell Street. He waited until all three had passed him and then Remo heard him shout, “Wah Ching.”

  “Wah Ching.”

  The cry echoed down the street, then was picked up by more voices, and shouted back. “Wah Ching. Wah Ching. Wah Ching.”

  Remo slowed his pace and Mei Soong stalked roughly ahead, as Chiun came up alongside him.

  “What does that mean?” Remo asked.

  “What?”

  “Whatever they’re yelling.”

  “They shout Wah Ching. It means China Youth,” Chiun said.

  They had walked through the festival area and the street ahead of them turned abruptly dark. And then Remo saw step out of an alley 40 yards ahead of them, four more young men. They wore the same costume as the man who had been trailing them, red-starred field jackets and fatigue caps.

  They began to walk toward Remo, Chiun and Mei Soong, and Remo could sense the first youth drawing up on them from behind.

  He took Mei Soong by the arm, and quickly but smoothly steered her around a corner into a narrow side street. The street was brightly lighted but silent. Only the hum of air conditioners on the buff-colored three-story brick buildings that bordered the narrow street broke the silence, and the buildings served as a wall to seal out the shouting of the Italian hordes only a block away.

  It had gone better than Remo had hoped. Perhaps they were going to find the fortune cookie among all that fettucini. But he had to keep the girl out of danger.

  They stepped up onto the sidewalk and followed the twisting street, around the curve, when Remo drew up short. The street ended 100 feet ahead, passing through an unlit alley into the Bowery. Behind them, he heard footsteps approaching.

  He pulled Mei Soong up short. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going to eat.”

  “Do you or the running dog have money? I have none.”

  “We’ll bill it to the People’s Republic.”

  The girl had still noticed nothing. She was used to being pulled around by Remo. Chiun, of course, would telegraph nothing, and Remo hoped that he had not, himself, given away their awareness that they were being followed.

  As they walked casually up the stairs to the Imperial Garden restaurant, Remo said to the girl: “When the revolution comes and your gang takes over, pass a law putting all your restaurants at street level. Around here, you’re always walking up a flight or down a flight. It’s like a city under a city.”

  “The exercise is good for the digestion,” she said. Chiun snorted, but said nothing.

  The restaurant was empty, and the waiter was sitting at a booth in the back, going over the racing form. Without waiting, Remo walked to a booth midway down the row on the left side. He slid Mei Soong into a seat, then motioned Chiun in alongside her. He squeezed in on the opposite side of the gray formica table. By turning his body sideways, he could watch both the front door and the doors leading to the kitchen in the rear of the restaurant.

  Chiun was smiling.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “A rare treat. A Chinese restaurant. Have you ever been starved to death in seven courses? But of course a people with no honor have no real need of sustenance.”

  Mei Soong’s answer was cut short by the appearance of the waiter, at their side.

  “Good evening,” he said in precise English.
“We have no liquor.”

  “That’s all right,” Remo said. “We’ve come to eat.”

  “Very good, sir,” he said, nodding to Remo. He nodded also to Mei Soong, and turned his head slightly to acknowledge Chiun. Remo could see Chiun’s eyes look up into the waiter’s face, evaporating the smile that was there. The waiter turned back to Mei Soong and exploded in a babble of Chinese.

  Mei Soong answered him softly. The waiter babbled something, but before Mei Soong could answer, Chiun interrupted their melodic dialogue. In a parody of their Chinese sing-song, he spoke to the waiter, whose face flushed, and he turned and walked rapidly to the kitchen in the rear.

  Remo watched him push through the swinging doors, then turned to Chiun, who was chuckling under his breath, wearing a smirk of self-satisfaction.

  “What was that all about?” Remo asked.

  Chiun said, “He asked this trollop what she was doing with a pig of a Korean.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said we were forcing her into a life of prostitution.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He offered to call the police.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Only the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “That no Chinese woman has to be forced into a life of prostitution. It comes naturally to them. Like stealing toilet paper. I told him too we would eat only vegetables, and he could return the dead cats to the icebox and sell them for pork tomorrow night. That seemed to upset him and he left. Some people cannot face up to the truth.”

  “Well, I’m just glad you handled it so pleasantly.”

  Chiun nodded an acknowledgement and folded his hands in front of him in an attitude of prayer, serene in the knowledge that no untrue or unkind word had passed his lips.

  Remo watched the front door over Mei Soong’s shoulder as he spoke to her. “Now remember. Keep your eyes open for any signal, anything that looks suspicious. If we’re right, the people who have the general are around here somewhere, and they might like to add you to their collection. It gives us a chance of finding him. Maybe just a small chance. But a chance.”

  “Chairman Mao. He who does not look will not find.”