"As a figure of speech," said the minister, suddenly panicked by having wagered his life.
"Of course," said Corazon. His voice was soft. He liked the very big house of the minister of justice, and while it looked shabby on the outside there were marble floors and baths on the inside, and pretty girls who had never left the minister's compound.
And they were not even his own daughters. It was a fact of life that any family with a pretty daughter let her be deflowered by El Presidente or one of his cronies, or kept her forever behind closed doors. Now Corazon was a reasonable man. If a man prized his daughters, he could understand that man hiding them. But not the daughters of other men. That was sinful. To keep a girl from your leader, from El Presidente, was immoral.
So the minister of justice brought this thing that was supposed to be better than bullets. A missionary from the hill hospital came with a very heavy box. It was a two-foot cube and required great effort to move it.
The missionary was a doctor and a preacher and had been in Baqia several years. Corazon gave him the usual flowery praise due a messenger of God, then told him to perform his magic.
"Not magic, El Presidente. Science."
"Yes, yes. Go ahead. Who you going to use it on?"
"It's a health device and it failed. It failed to help
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and it ..." Dr. Plumber's voice crackled and faltered with his great sorrow. "It killed and it did not cure."
"Nothing more important than health. When you have health, you have everything. Everything. But let us see how it does not work. Let us see how it kills. Let us see if it is better than this," said El Presidente, and drew a shiny .44-caliber chrome pistol with mother-of-pearl handles, inlaid with the seal of the presidency and a good luck charm that, according to some of the voodoo priests, helped make the bullets go straighter, bullets having a mind of their own and at times defying the will of El Presidente.
Corazon pointed the shiny big-barreled pistol at the head of his minister of justice. "There are some who believe your box there better than bullets. There are some who bet their lives on it, no?"
The minister of justice had never realized how big, how truly big the barrel of a .44 was. It loomed like a dark runnel. He imagined what a bullet might look like coming from it. If there were time to see. He imagined there would be a little explosion down at the other end of the barrel and then, thwack, he would not be thinking anymore because .44s tended to take out very big pieces of the brain, especially when the slugs were of soft lead with little dumdum holes in the center. There was a bullet waiting at the other end of that barrel.
The minister of justice smiled weakly. There was another element here, too. There were Western ways and island ways. The island ways were rooted in the hill religion known to the outside world as voodoo. Anyone bringing in the Western magic of science was pitting it against the island magic of voodoo.
Western magic was the plane. When the plane crashed, that was island magic. The island had won.
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When the plane landed safely, it had won, especially when it landed safely with gifts for El Presidente.
So what was pitted now between the old reliable pistol and the machine of the missionary doctor was island magic in Corazon's hands and gringo industrialized magic in the hands of the bony, sad Dr. Plumber.
A pig was brought into the presidential chamber, a huge, domed, marble-floored formal room for giving medals, receiving ambassadors, and sometimes, when El Presidente had drunk too much, sleeping one off. He could lock the thick ironclad doors here and not be murdered in a drunken sleep.
The pig was a sow and reeked of recent mud, which was dried gray on her massive sides. Two men had to poke her with large sharp sticks to keep her from trampling everything in sight.
"There. Do it," said Corazon suspiciously.
"Do it," said the minister desperately.
"You want me to kill the pig?"
"It have no soul. Go ahead," said Corazon.
"I've only done it once," said Dr. Plumber.
"Once, many times, always. Do it. Do it. Do it," said the minister of justice. He was crying now.
Dr. Plumber turned the switch on the battery that started the ignition on the small generator. Three, quarters of the device was devoted to producing electricity which, in a civilized country, could be gotten with a wire cord and a plug and a socket. But here in Baqia, everything had to be overcome. Dr. Plumber felt very sad and while it was only two days since the awful accident with Sister Beatrice, she became more beautiful with each passing minute. His mind had even achieved what breast cream, exercise, and suc-
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tion cups had failed at: He imagined her with a bosom.
Dr. Plumber checked the mung supply. He checked the level of power. He pointed a small lenslike opening in the front of the box at the pig and then released the electrons.
There was a zap like a tight piece of cellophane snapping and then a smell of roasting rubber and the 350-pound pig smoked briefly, crackled once, and settled into a greenish black glop that spread across the marble floor.
Not even the hide was left. The wooden poles that had been poking the pig were cinders, but the metal points were there. They had hit the floor as soon as the pig melted. And the goo rolled over them.
"Amigo. My blood friend. My holy man friend. I really like Christ," said Corazon. "He one of the best gods there ever was. He my favorite god from now on. How you do that?"
Dr. Prescott Plumber explained how the machine worked.
Corazon shook his head. "Which button you push?" he asked.
"Oh, that," said Dr. Plumber and showed Corazon the red button that started the generator and then the green one that released the electrons.
And then a horrible accident ensued. Corazon accidentally killed his minister of justice just as Plumber had accidentally killed beautiful Sister Beatrice. The room smelled like a smoldering garbage dump.
There were goose bumps on Dr. Plumber's skin. The rays created vibrations in people standing too near a target.
"Oh, God. This is awful," sobbed Dr. Plumber. "This is horrible."
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"Sorry," said Corazon. And he said "Sorry" again when he accidentally put away a captain of the guard whom he suspected of blackmailing an ambassador from another country and not giving his president a cut. This was at the palace gate.
"Sorry," said Corazon and the driver of a car disappeared from the window of a sedan and the car went crazily off the dusty main road of Ciudad Natividado and into the veranda of a small hotel.
"I believe you did that on purpose," sputtered Dr. Plumber.
"Scientific exploration has its price, yes?" said Corazon.
By now his guards were hiding, no one was in a window, and everywhere Corazon lugged the heavy thing, people hid. Except for tourists in the Hotel Astarse across the street. They watched, wondering what was going on, and Corazon did not zap them. He was no fool. He was not going to frighten away the Yankee dollar.
And then his luck changed. He found a soldier sleeping on duty in the palace.
"Punishment is needed," Corazon said. "I will have discipline in my army."
But by now Dr. Plumber was sure the machine had fallen into the hands of someone who killed on purpose. He put himself in front of the snoring Baqian corporal, who was sprawled in the island dust like a dozing basset hound.
"Over my dead body," said Dr. Plumber, defiantly.
"Okey-dokey," said Corazon.
"Okey-dokey what?" demanded Dr. Prescptt Plumber, American citizen and missionary.
"Okey-dokey over your dead body," said Corazon, and with a bit of English-for with his natural talent
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Corazon had found the rays took English somewhat like a billiard ball-he threw a little curve into the bony Dr. Plumber. A gold-covered bible suddenly appeared, resting on the metal part of a zipper, all atop a dark smelly puddle where Dr. Plumber had stood.
The Bible sank into th
e slop, pushing the strand of zipper beneath it. There were little bumps at the edges. Dr. Plumber had worn old-style shoes with nails in the heel. The nails remained.
When word reached the American State Department that one of its citizens had been coldly murdered just for the fun of it by the Mad Dog of the Caribbean, Generalissimo Sacristo Corazon, and that Corazon had in his sole possession a deadly weapon he alone understood, the decision was clear:
"How do we get him on our side?"
"He is on our side," explained someone from the Caribbean desk. "We've been putting about two million a year into his pocket."
"That was before he could turn people into silly putty," said a military analyst.
He was right.
Generalissimo Sacristo Juarez Banista Sanchez y Corazon called a special third world resource conference at Ciudad Natividado and, in unison, 111 technological ambassadors voted that Baqia had "an inalienable right to glycolpolyaminosilicilate" or, as the chairman of the conference said, "that long word on page three."
The world response was eight books on how Corazon had been slandered by the industrialized world's propaganda, a resurgence of interest in the deep philosophical meaning of the island's voodoo religion, and an international credit line for Corazon of up to three billion dollars.
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The ships were stacked up outside Natividado harbor for miles.
In Washington, the President of the United States called the top representatives of his intelligence, diplomatic, and military establishments together and asked, "How did that lunatic down there get hold of something so destructive and what are we going to do to get it out of his hands?"
To this call for help, the answer was generally contained in long memos, each declaring, "You can't blame this department."
"All right," said the President, opening another meeting on the subject. "What can we do about this maniac down there? What is that weapon he's got? Now I want to hear suggestions. I don't care whose fault it is."
The gist of the meeting was that each department didn't have to handle it because it wasn't their responsibility, and no, they didn't know how the gizmo worked.
"There are only two things you people know. One, you're not guilty and two, don't ask you to do anything lest you become guilty of something. Have all these Congressional hearings made you into cowards?"
Everybody looked at the CIA director, who cleared his throat for a long time before replying. "Well, Mister President, if you don't mind my saying so, the last time somebody in my job tried to protect America's interests like that, your Justice Department tried to send him to jail. It doesn't exactly inspire us all with extracurricular zeal. No Congressional hearing ever blamed anybody for what he didn't do. None of us wants to go to jail."
"Isn't there anyone who cares that an American cit-
18
izen has been killed? In all the reports, that was the least important thing," said the President. "Is there no one who is worried that a mad dog killer is on the loose with a dangerous weapon we have no defense against because we don't know how it works? Doesn't anyone care? Will someone speak up?"
Generals and admirals cleared their throats. Men responsible for the nation's foreign policy looked away, as did the chiefs of intelligence.
"To hell with you all," said the President in a soft Southern drawl. His face flushed red. He was as angry at the defense establishment as he was at himself for swearing.
If there wasn't any legal organization that could take care of this mess, then there certainly was an illegal one.
Midday, he retired to the Presidential bedroom in the White House and, reaching into a bureau drawer, put his hand on a red telephone without dials. He hated this phone and hated what it represented. Its very existence said his country could not operate within its own laws.
He had thought of abolishing the organization to which this one telephone was attached and which operated in emergencies, doing things he didn't want to know about. He thought at first he could quietly put the organization to rest. But he found he could not.
In a pinch, there was only one group he could count on and he sadly realized that it was illegal. It represented everything he hated.
It had been created more than a decade earlier, when covert operations were standard. And so deadly and so secret had been this organization, called CURE, that it alone, of all America's intelligence net-
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work, had escaped public inquiry without ever coming to light.
The CIA and military alike were open books, while no one but the President knew of CURE.
And, of course, its director and two assassins. The government, his government, supported two of the deadliest killers who ever existed in all the history of mankind and all he had to do was say to the director of CURE: "Stop."
And the organization would cease to exist. And the assassins would not work in America anymore.
But the President had never said stop, and it bothered his righteous soul to its deepest roots.
Even worse, he was about to find out that day that now he no longer had that illegal arm.
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CHAPTER TWO
His name was Rerno and the lights went out all around him. To most people in New York City, it was light, then suddenly blackness, in the summer night. The air conditioners stopped, the traffic lights disappeared, and suddenly people out on the street noticed the dark sky.
"What?" said a voice from a stoop.
"It's the 'lectricity." And then frightened noises. Someone laughed very loud.
The laughter did not come from Remo. He had not been plunged into sudden darkness. The lights did not go out for him in a split second.
For him there had been a flutter of light and then it died, in the street bulb above 99th Street and Broadway. It was a slow giving up, quite obvious if your mind and body rhythms were attuned to the world around you. It was only an illusion that there was
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sudden blackness. People helped this illusion, Remo knew.
They were engrossed in conversation, tuning out other senses to concentrate on their words, and they only tuned back the senses when they were already in darkness. Or they were drinking alcohol, or had loaded their stomachs with so much red meat that their nervous systems devoted all energies to laboriously processing it in an intestine designed for fruits and grains and nuts, and in a bloodstream that had ancient memories of the sea and could absorb quite well those special nutrients that came from fish. But never hoofed meat.
So it was dark and he had seen it coming and someone shrieked because she was afraid. And someone else shrieked because she was happy.
A car came up the block and lit it with its headlights and there was a noise in the streets of the city people, a mingling of nervous voices trying to establish contact in what they thought was a suddenly unnatural world.
And only one man in the entire city understood what was happening, because he alone had reawakened to his senses.
He knew that young men were running up behind him. It was not strange to listen for that or to know where their hands were and that one had a lead object he was trying to crack down on Remo or that the other had a blade. They moved their bodies that way.
You could explain it in a few hours to someone, using motion pictures of how every person gave obvious signs of their weapons by the way they moved their bodies. Some you could even tell what sort of weapon they had by looking at their feet alone. But the best way was feel.
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How did Remo know? He knew it. Like he knew his head was on his shoulders and that the ground was down. Like he knew he could slow-catch the force of the lead object and readjust the boy's momentum to send him down into the concrete sidewalk so that he cracked his own ribs on collision.
The blade was simpler. Remo decided to use force.
"You're going to kill yourself with your own knife," Remo said softly. "Here we go."
He clasped the young man's hand around the knife so it
could not let go and pressed it into the stomach, and feeling the blade had a sharpness to it he very slowly brought it up to where he felt the heart muscle throb against it.
"Oh, God," said the young man who knew now he was going to die and had not expected anything like that. He had done hundreds of stickings in New York City and no one had ever given him trouble, especially not when he worked with someone who used lead.
Sure, he had been arrested twice, once for cutting up a young girl who wouldn't give him any, but then he only spent a night in youth detention and he went back and settled with her.
He got her in an alley and he cut her up good. So good that they had to bury her in a closed coffin and her mother wept, and asked where justice was, and pointed a finger at him, but that was all she could do. What was she going to do? Go to the police? He'd cut her up worse then. And what would they do? Give him a lecture? Put him up for a night in jail?
There was nothing that was going to happen to you for sticking someone in New York City. So it came as a great surprise to this young man that there would
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be some sort of violent objection from this person about to be mugged.
After all, he wasn't wearing a gang jacket, or riding around like he was connected to the mob, or wearing a gun. He had looked like a simple citizen of New York City, the kind anybody could do anything to. So what was this great pain he felt in his body? Was the guy a cop? There was a law against killing cops, but this guy didn't look like a cop.
They had been watching him just before the lights went. They had seen him buy a single flower from someone on Broadway and give the old woman a ten-dollar bill and tell her to keep the change.
And he had bills in his pocket. Then the guy took the flower, smelled it, and tore off two petals. And he chewed the damned things.
He was about six feet tall but skinny, and he had high cheekbones, as if he might have been part Chink or something. That's what one of the guys said. He had real thick wrists and he walked funny, like a shuffle. He looked easy. And he had money.
And when he turned into 99th Street, where it was not as well-lit and where no other citizens would come to his aid, where he was just beautiful pickings, the lights went out. Beautiful.
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