“Listen, Maria. You’ve got probably a touch of flu or virus or something.”
“A virus,” she said. “Americans always have the virus.”
“Right,” Remo said. “A virus. Anyway, you shouldn’t stay here alone until you’re well. I want you to come with me.”
“Aha. A Yankee plot. Get Maria away from her room and then throw her in a dungeon.”
“We don’t have dungeons. Except in New York, and there they call them apartments.”
“All right. A jail cell.”
“No. Just a clean hotel room where you can get some rest.”
“Alone? With you? That is not moral.”
Remo thought this strange for a girl who forty–eight hours before had gone to the lengths, but he shook his head. “No. We’ll have a chaperone. Chiun.”
“The gracious Oriental?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Then I will go. He is a man of much wisdom and kindness and he will protect me from you.”
In the lobby, Remo sat Maria in the only chair that might have won even conditional approval from the city’s building department and approached the oily clerk.
“I owe you something,” said Remo.
“Well, don’t look on it as owing. I did a favor. You’re going to do me a favor.”
Remo nodded. “Fifty favors if I remember right.”
“You remember right.”
Remo leaned on the desk casually. On a table behind it he saw a small cashbox.
“Want to play double or nothing?” Remo asked.
The clerk’s eyes narrowed warily. “Actually, no.”
Remo reached into his pocket and pulled out a fifty. He held it away from his body in his right hand. “It’d be easy,” he said. He manipulated his fingers, almost as if playing an imaginary piano with a vertical keyboard, and the bill vanished. “Just tell me what hand it’s in,” he said nodding toward his right fist.
“That’s all?” said the clerk, glancing quickly at Remo’s left hand, resting on the counter, four feet away from the fifty. “That’s all?” he repeated.
“That’s all.”
“Double or nothing?” said the clerk.
“Double or nothing. What hand’s it in?”
“That one,” said the clerk with a sheepish smile, pointing to Remo’s right hand.
“Look and see,” said Remo. He extended his right hand toward the clerk. As he did, his left hand was over the counter, opening the cashbox and flipping through the bills there. With his fingertips, he felt for the twenties and peeled off eight, curled them into a tube, closed the box, and put the $160 into his left pants pocket. Meanwhile, the clerk was trying to pry open Remo’s right hand.
“How can I tell if I won?” he asked plaintively.
Remo relaxed his fingers and opened his hand. Curled up in the palm was the fifty–dollar bill.
The clerk grinned and snatched up the bill. “Terrific,” he said. “Now you owe me another fifty.”
“You’re right,” said Remo. He dug into his right–hand pocket but brought his hand out empty. From his left pocket, he pulled out the tube of twenties.
He unrolled them and counted off three. “I’m out of fifties. Here. You’ve been such a good guy. Take sixty.” He handed the bills to the clerk who set them on top of the fifty and quickly jammed them all into his pocket.
“Thanks, old buddy.”
“Anytime,” said Remo. He walked away, the hotel’s other five twenties in his pocket, offsetting the two fifties of his own he had given away. He whistled as he escorted Maria from the building.
She felt worse when Remo reached his hotel and he quickly put her into bed. Chiun was sitting in the middle of the living room floor when they entered but he did not speak, not even to acknowledge their greetings. When Maria was sleeping, Remo came back outside.
“You’re a real charmer when you want to be, Chiun.”
“I am not paid to be charming.”
“Good thing.”
“Remo, how could they do it? How could they do violence to the beautiful daytime dramas? I have sat here this night and asked myself that and I do not know the answer.”
“It was probably a mistake, Little Father. Start watching again. You’ll see. It was probably just a thing they did once and won’t do again.”
“You really think so?”
“Sure,” said Remo, feeling very unsure.
“We will see,” said Chiun. “I will hold you personally responsible for this.”
“Hold on, hold on, hold on. I’m not in charge of the television shows. Blame somebody else.”
“Yes. But you are an American. You should know what goes on in the minds of the other meat–eaters. If not you, who?”
Remo sighed. He looked in on Maria who was sleeping deeply then went into the living room to sleep on the couch. Chiun meanwhile had unrolled his sleeping mat in the middle of the floor and, reassured by what he would forever regard as Remo’s personal word that the daytime dramas would not again be sullied by violence, had fallen instantly asleep. For five seconds of sleep, he seemed like a normal man, breathing normally; for the next ten seconds he was the Master of Sinanju, breathing deeply and almost silently; and then he turned into a flock of geese.
Honnnnk, he snored on the intake. Hnnnnnnk, he snored on the exhaust.
Remo sat up on the couch. He was about to make the decision, one he had made often before, that sleep this night would be impossible, when the telephone rang.
Chiun’s snoring stopped abruptly but he slept on. Remo was at the phone halfway during the first ring. He picked it up.
“Hello.”
He was answered with the click of someone hanging up.
Remo shrugged, and went back to the couch. Wrong number probably. If a man answers, hang up. At least the phone had stopped the snoring.
He lay back down on the couch.
Hooonnnnnnk. Intake.
Hooonnnnnnk. Exhaust.
“Shit.” Remo.
He left the suite, went downstairs out into the early morning air of Dayton, filled his lungs deeply, and immediately wished he hadn’t. There were trace elements of arsenic, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, cyanic gas, hydrochloric acid, swamp gas, and methane.
And then he forgot the air as he sensed something else, an unconscious pressure on him as if he were living inside a dark, opaque balloon and a giant was squeezing the sides. He stopped for a moment, not breathing, not moving, just sensing and knew he felt it.
He turned toward the left, began to step in that direction, then wheeled and came back toward the right. Behind him, he heard a soft spat, a click, and a thud.
He did not turn to see what it was. It was a bullet. The pressure had been a marksman zeroing in on him. From the way the bullet had hit behind him, smacking the hotel wall then a water outlet pipe and then the sidewalk, Remo judged it came from the roof of a building across the street.
That was the phone call. To try to get him outside.
Remo moved along the sidewalk, apparently walking casually. To a passerby, he would seem to be another insomniac out for an aimless early morning stroll. But to Anthony Polski, atop the roof of an old apartment building across the street, Remo seemed to be moving like a squirrel. A burst forward, a pause, a burst, a pause. It was as if Remo were in darkness and was illuminated only by the flashing of a strobe light at random intervals.
Polski sighted down the barrel of his silencer–equipped rifle, peering carefully through the light–gathering scope. There he was. Moving ahead slowly. He led Remo just a hair with the rifle, then softly squeezed the trigger. But even as he squeezed and the rifle softly fired, he knew he had missed. In the scope he saw Remo stop, pause, then start again at a slightly different angle.
The bullet splatted almost quietly against a wall ahead of Remo. Angry now, Polski fired again, allowing for Remo’s pause, allowing for his stopping, leading him, but then stopping the lead and shooting right at where Remo stood. When he fi
red, he knew he had missed again. The bullet hit into the wall behind Remo.
On the street, Remo had learned enough. Only one marksman up there. If there had been more, shots would have bracketed him by now. He moved into a doorway. Across the street, Polski saw him move into the doorway. He circled the edges of the doorway with a slight movement of the tip of his rifle barrel. Sooner or later, the bastard’d have to come out of that doorway and it wouldn’t be any stop–and–go movement then. He would have to come straight out and when he did, Polski would let him have it right in the chest. He lay there, arms propped up on the slight roof overhang, the tip of the rifle moving back and forth gently, and waited.
“Pardon me, boy, is this the Pennsylvania Station? I’m the Minister of Silly Walks.”
The voice came from behind Polski. He rolled onto his back, wheeling the gun around, pointing it at the other end of the roof. There he was. The bastard was standing there, thirty feet away, smiling.
“No. This is the morgue,” said Polski grimly and he jerked down on the trigger of the rifle.
The shot missed. The bastard wasn’t there. There he was, six feet off to the side and closing.
“Son of a bitch,” Polski yelled and fired again. But he missed and Remo kept moving, sideways, frontwards, skittering crablike across the roof and Polski had but one more chance and even before he fired that shot, he knew, with a sickening thump deep into inside his stomach, that it would miss too.
Polski felt the rifle come loose from his hands and then he was standing there, smiling down at Polski, the rifle held loosely across his two hands. He had thick wrists, Polski saw.
Polski kicked up at the man standing above him, aiming a hard leather–clad toe toward the groin, but that missed too and Polski gave up and just lay there.
“Who sent you here, fella?” asked Remo.
“Nobody.”
“Let’s try again. Who sent you here?”
“Shoot and get it over with,” said Polski.
“No such luck, junior,” said Remo. Then Polski felt a pain in his shoulder, as if a shark had just bitten out a large chunk of it.
He wanted his shoulder back. “A contract. I got it by phone,” he hissed, through pain–distorted lips.
“From who?”
“I don’t know. It came on the phone and the money came by mail. I never saw nobody.”
“Money? Tell me. What am I worth these days?”
“I got five thousand for you and they told me how to do it. From up here on the roof.”
Remo squeezed, Polski pleaded, and Remo knew he was not lying. He released the shoulder. Polski cringed against the small brick wall atop the roof.
“What are you gonna do to me?”
“What would you do if you were me?”
“Yeah,” said Polski. “But that was a contract. I didn’t mean anything against you.”
“Well, don’t you go thinking that this means I don’t like you,” said Remo and then Polski saw a flash and then, not stars but one single bright star and then he felt nothing more, not himself being lifted up, not himself being dropped off the edge of the building, not himself getting tangled in the rope of the building’s ancient metal flagpole. He came there to an abrupt stop, hanging off the flagpole like a pennant for a long–ago World Series.
Remo looked down on Polski. “That’s the biz, sweetheart.”
He put the rifle back onto the roof and trotted lightly toward the back of the building and the drainpipe he had clambered up.
Even though he had learned nothing, he felt good. A little exercise was good for both the body and spirit. And then he did not feel quite so good anymore. His senses told him Polski had not been alone. There was someone else.
Remo went over the edge of the roof and started down the drainpipe. The pipe was warm in places under his hands. The rough–painted cast iron did not draw the heat from his hands the way it should. As he went down, he felt the warmer spots on the pipe. The spread between them was sixteen inches. That meant a small man had climbed the pipe after Remo.
As he neared the ground, Remo glanced back up.
Against the dark shadow of the roof overhang was an area of slightly darker shadow and Remo forced the pupils of his eyes to open even wider, absorbing light from darkness, giving up the precise and narrow but light–robbing focus, and he was able to make out a head peering over the roof. It was wearing a black hood.
A black hood?
Ninja. The ancient Oriental art of deception, invisibility, hiding, and then attacking out of darkness.
At the end of the alley, the dark walls on both sides ended in a bright rectangle of light, illuminated by the street beyond.
Remo sensed movement to the left of him, in the shadows. He breathed deeply, then paused, saturating all his tissues with oxygen. He did it again. And then stopped breathing, so the sound of his breathing did not interfere with his senses. Behind him he heard the faint rustle of linen—the black linen night–fighting suit of the Ninja—and he knew it was the man coming down the drainpipe. It would probably be an attack from the rear. He took a step toward the front of the alley, slowly. There was a faint rustling to the right also. They had him boxed, left, right, and back. The exit from the alley, brightly lighted, might be a trap also. They could have men waiting there for him.
He kept strolling casually toward the light at the end of the alley, and then, casually still, without seeming to change stride or direction, he melted into the shadows along the right side of the wall. There, in pitch blackness, he paused. He heard breathing near him. He worked his eyes again, and saw an Oriental man in a full black costume. He had not yet seen Remo, although they were close enough to kiss. Remo reached out his right hand and grabbed the man’s thin neck through the linen.
He touched the exact spot with the exact amount of pressure required. The man neither moved nor made a sound. Remo held on and waited. He heard the rustle of footsteps moving down the alley, following the path he had taken. Then all sounds stopped. Their quarry had disappeared. Where had he gone?
And then the small man at the end of Remo’s right hand went flying out into the alley and hit the man who had come down from the roof, in the midsection. The second man crumbled with a noisy “ooooof.”
Remo was out of the darkness and into the parallelogram of light, silhouetted against the brightness of the street beyond.
The first Ninja man was finished; he would never again skulk down an alley. The second scrambled to his feet, unaccustomed to the bright flash of light that shone in his eyes over Remo’s shoulder as Remo moved out of the light.
Remo took him out with an index finger to the right temple, and then decided he should have used a back elbow thrust. He did and was rewarded with a satisfying bone–crushing crunch.
Chiun should have been there to see that, he thought, but then he thought no more as he moved into the shadows on the left where one more was hiding, and he stopped, and cut off his breathing, and he heard the tiny sip of air characteristic of Ninja, as if the man were breathing through a straw, and Remo followed the sound and was on him.
But the man darted away, slipping into the darkness, and across the silence and the blackness the two men faced each other as if it were high noon in Dodge City.
The Ninja waited, as was traditional, for Remo to make a move, a mistake that would open him to the Ninja’s counter–thrust, but Remo made a move that was no mistake and the back of his left foot was deep into the muscle and gut of the man’s stomach.
As the man fell, he gasped: “Who are you?”
“Sinanju, buddy. The real thing,” Remo said.
Remo left the bodies behind and walked out onto the sidewalk. He looked upward over his right shoulder, toward the roof, where Anthony Polski dangled by his neck from the flagpole and Remo threw him a snappy military salute.
He paused again and behind him he heard a faint sound…a tiny repetitive clicking…but he sensed it as machinery and not a weapon and he decided to ignore it a
nd go back to his room. Perhaps now, having exercised, he could sleep.
Above the alley, on the roof of another nearby building, Emit Growling quickly packed away his camera loaded with infrared motion picture film and headed home for a long night’s work in his darkroom.
Not that he minded. He was being paid a great deal of money to have those films processed by morning. And later when he saw the films, he would realize he might have been witness to something special. Even though he had barely been able to see what was happening while it was happening because of the darkness, the films were sharp, almost seeming brightly lighted, and as he watched the thin white man with the thick wrists move, he was glad that the infinitesimal clicking of his motion picture camera had not given him away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
REFRESHED AND INVIGORATED by the night’s exercise he had given his adenoids, Chiun was awake before Remo.
Remo found him sitting in the middle of the floor, right hand pressed up against the right side of his nose, breathing in through one nostril and exhaling through the other.
“You look in?” said Remo. “How’s the girl?”
“Dead,” said Chiun without interrupting his exercise.
Remo sat up on the couch. “Dead? How?”
“She died in the night. After you went out and left me here all alone, I lay here listening to her breathe and one moment she was there and there was the breath of life and the next moment there was no breath and she was dead.”
“Didn’t you try to help her?”
“That is unkind,” said Chiun, lowering his right hand from his nose. “She was a very nice lady and I tried to help her. But she was beyond help. This is a very bad thing.”
“When did you start worrying about bodies?” asked Remo.
He got up and walked past Chiun into the bedroom. Maria Gonzales lay peaceful in death, covers pulled up tightly to her neck.
Remo stood alongside the girl, looking down at her body. Her right hand rested on the pillow next to her head and the blister on the tip of her index finger seemed larger than it had the day before. Remo pulled down the sheet. Maria’s body made him shake his head. Yesterday so white and creamy it had seemed like freshly stirred wall paint, it was now covered with red and yellow oozing blisters that seemed to weep like rheumy tired old eyes.
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