This quiet meditation in a section of empty seats stood out like Stations of the Cross at an orgy. It did not go unnoticed. Gene Jethro, beaming from the platform and waving to supporters, said over his shoulder to Negronski:
“Who’s that?”
“That’s the guy who did the job on the sergeant of arms, guards, and the Arizona delegates.”
“So that’s him,” said Jethro. “When you can get to him unnoticed, tell him I want to see him.”
All this did Gene Jethro say while his face to the crowd beamed happy enthusiasm. He noticed the false lack of concern of his opponent’s face and gave him an extra Gene Jethro grin, this one broader, fuller. The opponent grinned back.
“I’m gonna run you out of the union,” yelled the opponent, his face apparent joy.
“You’re through, old man,” Jethro yelled back, his face even more an explosion of joy and happiness. “You’re dead. Let the dead bury the dead.”
From the floor it looked like a friendly interchange between two friendly rivals. Remo did not watch it. He felt the yelling, felt the movement, felt the excitement, but he did not watch it or listen to it. He thought about himself and knew he had been lying to himself for the past few years. It took a simple, plain, American hamburger, which millions of people ate and he could not, to show him up, to strip him of years of self-deception.
When he had first consented to work for the organization, he had entertained the thought of one day going on assignment and keeping on going. He was always going to quit next month or the month after that. A few times he was going to take the walk in the afternoon.
And these afternoons were followed by months which became years, and years. And each day, the training progressed. Each day Chiun had worked on his mind, and his mind had worked on his body. And he had not noticed the change. He knew that he was a little bit different—a little bit faster than boxers, a little bit stronger than weightlifters, and a little bit more shifty than running backs—and that his body was a little bit more attuned than the best in most of the rest of the world. But he had thought, and had fiercely supported this thought, that he was not really different.
He had believed that some day he might have a family, a home, and maybe even a nine-to-five job somewhere. And if he watched himself carefully, perhaps, although this was doubtful, just perhaps he would have ten or fifteen years before someone from the organization would knock on his door and put a bullet in his face. (If it were a successor, it would be a hand in the face.)
Ten or fifteen years of belonging, of existing, of having people need you in their lives, and of you needing them. The only person he cared about now would kill him on orders—because that was the business. And what bothered Remo now was that he knew he, too, on orders, would kill Chiun—because that was the business. He would do it and, incidentally, find out if he could take the Master of Sinanju, his teacher.
And for knowing that he would do this, he hated himself to his very guts. He was no different from the other assassins of Sinanju except for the color of his skin, and that, he knew, was no difference at all.
The delegates vented their spontaneous joy to the full twenty minutes, as scheduled, and returned, yelling and screaming, to their seats. The New York delegation brushed past Remo and he hardly noticed them. Bludner sat down next to him and handed him the placard. Remo took it without looking.
“You okay, kid?” asked Bludner.
But Remo did not answer. He looked up at the big banner stretched across the roof of the arena, and he automatically thought of the wind currents and the months of becoming attuned to air as a cushion, as a force, as an obstacle and an ally. This thinking was so automatic that he detested it. His mind was no longer his own. Why should he be surprised that his body reacted so independently of his wishes? Why should he be surprised that eating a hamburger containing monosodium glutamate, something a child could do, would be impossible for him? He knew now why he had yelled at Smith, why he had yelled that he was a human being. He had to yell it. Lies always require more energy.
Remo watched the air currents work on the banner. Maybe a beam falling on the speaker’s platform, provided it could be guided to strike one end first… He stood up to check the rows of seats on the platform. If it hit right, just right, it could take the first two rows. That would leave the third row free.
“Abe, give me an agenda,” Remo said.
“How come you’re suddenly interested in this thing, kid?”
“I am. I am. Give me an agenda.”
“Hey, Tony. Give the kid an agenda,” Bludner called out.
A folder with the brotherhood’s emblem was passed down the row.
“Thanks,” said Remo not taking his eyes off the platform. He opened the agenda and went through “the program for Wednesday: acceptance speech, proposed amendment to the bylaws, an address by a senator from Missouri. No good. Thursday: a tribute to drivers’ wives, a speech by the president of the American Legion, a vote on the proposed amendment. No good.
Friday: speeches by the president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Workmen, president of the International Stevedores Association, president of the Airline Pilots Association, and the final address—by the Secretary of Labor. Beautiful.
“Hey, Abe, when people are scheduled to speak, do they come on just when they speak or do they sit there through the whole thing?”
“They gotta sit through the whole thing, kid,” said Bludner. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. It just seems boring, you know.”
“Kid, I didn’t like beg you to come to this thing.”
“I know. I know. But just sitting there in the third row, behind two rows of heads, waiting to give your speech, sounds boring.”
“They don’t sit in the third row, kid. They sit up front. The speechmakers are always some kind of guest of honor. I thought I’d get someone with smarts, kid. You’re pretty, well, I don’t mean to be insulting, pretty thick.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Remo, sitting down. The banner flapped, then ruffled, then dropped and remained still for a moment before flapping again. The beam undoubtedly was bolted, and since the lights were dropped from the ceiling, a person maneuvering along the lattice of the ceiling might not be seen. If the Secretary of Labor were making his speech, the worst he would suffer would be a broken back.
On Friday, before the final meeting, Remo would work his way to that beam. He would loosen it in such a way that vibrations against the supporting beams would loosen it, like a balanced matchstick, only this matchstick weighed thousands of pounds.
Remo gauged the wind currents. While they could not affect so heavy an object to a great degree, they could affect it enough. No. He could not count on it swinging from its other joining. He would have to take off one end and leave the other by a thread of a rivet. Now would the currents working on this Goliath of a beam set vibrations to loosen it before its time? Remo peered at the banner and watched a balloon float up to the ceiling. No. Not enough currents. That would be workable.
He looked again at the platform on which the union leaders would sit, the key man in turning off America’s vital arteries. Well, if Bludner weren’t right about the seating, he would have to rearrange himself.
It was an extreme move, this mass killing, and Remo deemed it risky, both in the purpose of the organization and the execution of it. The news of it would be just too big. There would be too strong an investigation. The investigation might even uncover the organization. But more than that it was the way Smith had explained the operation.
For anyone to get control of transportation, as this projected superunion planned to do, would mean a total rupture of the American economy and ultimately the American way of life. The rising cost of transportation would be passed on where it was always passed on. To the little consumer. Meat, vegetables, and milk, already too high, would rise beyond—way beyond—the pockets of the once best-fed people on earth. Welfare recipients and people on fixed incomes would be reduced
to the diet of a poverty-stricken nation. In response to these rising prices, due in large part to the rising costs of transportation, wages would have to rise. An inflation such as the nation had never before known would ensue. People would bring their American dollars to the supermarket in shopping carts and carry their food home in their purses. During a strike of this superunion, unemployment would be worse than it was in the depression of the thirties. This superunion would kill the nation, if the nation did not enact laws killing the union first. But if that were to happen, then the union movement in America, which had helped give the worker respect as a human being, would also be doomed.
Weighed in the balance against this were the lives of four union leaders. Unless another plan were evolved, they must die. Remo focused on the beam.
“Hey, Abe,” he said.
“Yeah, kid.”
“Why don’t you think Jethro is going to win? Who’s going to stop him?”
“New England, for one. They got a whole bloc. And this guy McCulloch who leads it is anti-Jethro. Hates his guts. Tried to lean on me to switch. I wouldn’t. But McCulloch is gonna swing it against Jethro. Whoever seems to be winning other than Jethro is gonna get McCulloch and New England. Too much to stop.”
Remo looked around the convention hall.
“Point him out to me.”
Without getting up, Bludner pointed, forward right, ostensibly through the wide, white-shirted back of the man just in front.
“About twenty rows that way, in the Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont sections. They’re all lumped together. You won’t be able to see his head, but you’ll see guys going in and out of the aisles towards one spot, leaning down to talk and stuff. In that spot will be a guy six-foot-four, red hair, a good 280, maybe 300 pounds. That’s McCulloch.”
Remo stood on his chair but could not see the action described.
“I don’t see any one special spot guys are going to,” he said.
“It’s there. It’s there. Look.” said Bludner.
“Hey, siddown,” came a voice from behind Remo, “I can’t see.”
Remo peered twenty rows ahead, saw the New England state signs, but no one person was the center of attention.
“Hey, buddy. I asked you nice. Now will you siddown?” came the deep voice.
“Siddown, Remo. You can walk over,” said Bludner. “And you, leave the kid alone. He’ll sit down in a second.”
A ball of a man in white sports shirt and trousers that looked like sheeting for a zeppelin wended his way down the Massachusetts row. Maybe he was going to stop to talk.
“Hey buddy. How about it?” came the voice, and Remo felt a tap on his backside. He caught the hand with his own, splitting the knuckle joints. He wasn’t too interested in what was going on behind him. Up front the ball of a man was about to speak to someone. He was leaning over. No. He was sitting down. Damn. Where the hell was McCulloch? He’d have to go over to the delegation. Remo stepped down from his seat. Bludner was looking at him, funny. A tall rock of a man behind him was clutching his right hand with his left as though cutting off blood and nerves to his knuckles. His face was agony. He jumped from one foot to another. Remo looked at the hand. The knuckles. Someone had split the knuckles. That must be the man who had touched him on the backside. Of course, that was he.
“Put some cold water on it,” said Remo. He excused himself to Bludner, whose large mouth hung open.
“Don’t mess wit da kid,” said Bludner. “Don’t mess wit him.”
Remo wended his way to the Massachusetts delegation. He looked for McCulloch. He called for McCulloch. He even insulted McCulloch. But no McCulloch.
“Hey, where the hell is McCulloch?” asked Remo.
The fat man he had seen move through the row veiled back:
“Who wants to know?”
“Remo Jones. New York delegate.”’
“He ain’t here.”
“Where is he?””
“He’s gone.”
“Is that a Jethro button I see?” said Remo.
“No. It’s a Wendell Willkie button.”
“You’re pretty smart for someone who’s illiterate,” said Remo, lost for a more effective insult.
“I’m not illustrated,” yelled the man. “You’re illustrated. Faghead.”
So much for a dialogue on union politics.
Bludner found the information about the button very interesting. He listened to how nobody would say where McCulloch was; he saw how New England people were now wearing Jethro buttons.
“You know I could have sworn I saw some New Englanders in that Jethro demonstration,” he said. He signaled for the microphone at the end of the row. He jumped up on two chairs to a cracking sound of the wood. He waved an arm above his head.
“Point of order,” he yelled. “Mr. Chairman. Point of order. The New York delegation of joint councils and locals wishes to make a point of order.”
The chair recognized the brother delegate from New York City.
“Mr. Chairman, brothers from all the states, fellow drivers. It is a disgrace. It is an outrage. It is an injustice,” boomed Abe “Crowbar” Bludner, president of Local 529, New York City. “That the picture of one of the greatest union men ever to stand up for the rights of working men is not prominently displayed at this convention. I am talking about the finest, stand-up, all around wonderful guy in the entire International Brotherhood of Drivers, Eugene V. Jethro, the next president of the International…”
Bludner’s voice was drowned in cheers, which precipitated another frenzied demonstration. The chairman banged his gavel, calling the New York delegation and the demonstration out of order, but with little effect.
Abe Bludner sat down proudly, amid the chaos he had instigated.
“Thanks for the info, kid,” he said.
But Remo hardly heard him. He was wondering whether the beam upon which the banner fluttered was new or was installed when the convention hall was built. It made a difference if you were going to drop it on someone’s head.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THREE BRASS BANDS BLARED ROCK HITS six months old. Portly women with lacquered hair and just as stiff faces held the arms of their bulky husbands in black tuxedoes, white formal shirts and black bowties. Here and there someone wore a checkered tux. Here and there a woman wore a black sheath. Here and there people were not middle-aged and middle-class and middle bored. But only here and there.
The Gene Jethro victory celebration was a middle-class, husband and wife party that, with the help of a few horns and a few hats, could have substituted for countless New Year’s Eve parties across America.
For the drivers were family men, and so were their union delegates. Men with homes and cars and television sets and all the worries and comforts of a working class unique in the history of man. No other nation had ever given the worker so much. And in no other nation had the worker taken so much. In return for this hard-won largesse, these workers had put a man on the moon and had won wars on two oceans simultaneously. No other nation had done that either. Some workers would steal a case of whisky from a truckload. A small, very small, fraction would help a hijack. But the flag flew at all conventions, and if you were in trouble, these were the men who would stand by you. They put food on their tables, dresses on their wives, and hands on their hearts when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played.
Few of them, if any, could figure out how a Gene Jethro type had won their presidency. A few privately confessed, but only to close friends, that if they thought he was going to win it, they would have voted for someone else. On the third rye and ginger or bourbon on the rocks, the future of the International Brotherhood of Drivers brightened immeasurably. Jethro had won the presidency. That took brains. He had made good deals. That took brains. He had good press. That took brains. So he talked a bit funny and dressed funny. So what? Didn’t Joe Namath act kind of faggy? But look at him on a football field. This mood of hopefulness lasted until Gene Jethro, the
youngest president in the history of the drivers union, appeared with his mistress at the victory celebration in the Sheraton Park ballroom.
The initial cheers, an automatic response to new power and victory, died on the lips of the driver delegates. It was the wives who stopped cheering first. Gene Jethro was bad enough. He wore a blue velvet one-piece jump suit opened to the navel.
His young, blond mistress’s dress was not opened to the navel. It was open from it. With a see-through fishnet over bare flesh. Her blond hair flowed gloriously long as she blew kisses to the delegates.
Wives nudged husbands. Some with sharp elbows. Others with icy stares. One woman erased her husband’s smile with a champagne cocktail she had been nursing all evening.
“Disgraceful,” said one.
“I thought he would at least marry her once he became president,” said another.
“I don’t believe it,” said another.
It was not that these men or their wives were without natural reproductive drives. Sex, however, was not for mixed company, “mixed” being husband and wife. Almost all the men had their outside arrangements even if it were a local prostitute twice a month. For the women, there were long talks with their girl friends and chocolate candy substitutes. But to bring something like this to a mixed affair—well, that was too much. It just wasn’t done.
“Your president,” snarled Mrs. Sigmund Negronski to her husband. “Your president and his, his tramp. I don’t know what sort of dirty minds have taken over the drivers, but let me tell you, Siggy, it will be a cold day in August before you’ll ever lay one of your filthy hands on me.”
Negronski shrugged. It was not exactly the worst threat in the world. What was bad about it was that his wife would stop talking to him also, as though the two things went together.
Mrs. Abe Bludner saw the thin, vital blossoming body in the fishnet and immediately felt depressed, so depressed that she stuffed another hors d’oeuvre into her mouth. Having felt sufficiently depressed with her age and weight, she reminded her husband of how he had left her stranded on the Narragansett Parkway in 1942 and how she should have known back then, back in 1942, left all alone in the family car, that he would do such a thing as vote for that exhibitionist who should be in jail. Jail was for people who exposed themselves. Forgiveness was for people who broke other people’s heads with crowbars. At least that wasn’t dirty.
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