Skin Deep td-49

by Warren Murphy

  After some time, the voice on the other end said, "I see."

  "It is Ung poetry. The finest since Wang."

  "Hmmm," Smith said. "Chiun, is it you?"

  Chiun's lips tightened in annoyance. "Of course I am I, Emperor," he said. "Who else would I be? Who else would call to sing your praises?"

  "Well, uh... may I ask why you're calling on this line? Is Remo all right?"

  "Remo is Remo," Chiun said indifferently. "He has remained with the lepers."

  "The what?"

  "He is on an island of great white birds which attack like locusts. With a road that sends those upon it into the depths of the sea."

  Smith tallied this information. "Could you explain that more clearly, please?"

  "What is to explain?" Chiun answered, already beginning to feel the annoyance that always accompanied conversation with Smith. He sighed. "Remo and I found the place where your airplane may be. An island. It is inhabited by lepers from the island of Molokai."

  There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end. "Molokai?" Smith asked softly. "Are you sure?"

  Chiun sputtered. "Of course I am sure. It is one of the chain of Hawaiian islands."

  "Did you see the plane there?"

  "How can one see underground?" Chiun answered grouchily. "But there is a cave, guarded by soldiers and birds."

  "What kind of soldiers?"

  "Who knows? White men. They all look the same."

  "I see. Anything else?"

  "No. There was a minor incident, but surely it does not warrant your valuable time, mighty Emperor Smith."

  "I'd like to hear it anyway."

  "It is of no consequence. It concerns Remo."

  "I'd like to hear it," Smith repeated patiently.

  Chiun sighed. "Very well. As usual, my ungrateful pupil, in pursuit of a woman, incurred the wrath of the leader of the soldiers, and has been momentarily detained on the island."

  "Oh. Is that serious? Can he escape?"

  "Of course he can escape. He is my pupil. He has remained of his own will, in order to speak with someone called Zoran."

  This time the silence was of some duration. "Zoran?" Smith asked finally, his voice breathless. In the background, the Folcroft computers began to bleep and chatter. "Zoran?"

  "Yes, Zoran," Chiun said, shifting the phone from one ear to the other. "Emperor, if you wish no other service, I will continue the insignificant things which make up an old man's life..."

  "Don't move," Smith commanded in a tone Chiun had never heard before. "Where are you?"

  "I am speaking from a telephone in Florida," Chiun answered archly.

  "Where? Key West?"

  "I believe that is the place."

  "Go to the naval base there and wait for me. Chiun, are you listening?"

  "Yes," he said, yawning.

  "This is very important. More important than I can tell you. Please do as I say."

  "Your wish is my command, Emperor," Chiun said enthusiastically. "Naturally, for my extra effort, I assume my humble village of Sinanju will receive further tribute beyond our agreed fee."

  "Well see. Wait for me."

  "One moment, Emperor. You see, I am an old man. I fear my powers of recall are not what they once were in the flowering of my youth. This island, it is so far and difficult to find—"

  "Okay," Smith said. "Additional tribute."

  "South by southwest, latitude eighty-two degrees by twenty-four degrees longitude."

  "Wait for me," Smith said. "And once and for all, I am not an emperor."

  "You are too modest, O generous and illustrious one," Chiun said.

  He left the receiver dangling from its cord and walked out into the street, wondering. The crazy Emperor Smith was becoming crazier every day. Was he actually seeking to go along on Remo's mission? A middle-aged white man with a business suit and a briefcase?

  He shrugged once and dismissed it from his thoughts. If Smith felt like getting killed on a jungle island, that was his business. As long as the extra tribute was paid in advance.

  ?Chapter Ten

  LUSTBADEN, ZORAN

  B. 1912, BERLIN, GERMANY

  B.S. UNIV. HEIDELBERG, 1928

  M.D. HEIDELBERG, 1932,

  SUMMA CUM LAUDE

  OCC: PHYSICIAN (GENETICS)

  UNMARRIED

  BACKGROUND: PRECOCIOUS GENETICIST RECRUITED PERSONALLY BY ADOLF HITLER IN 1938 TO SERVE UNDER JOSEF MENGELE AS ASSISTANT FOR GENETIC EXPERIMENTS WITH CONCENTRATION CAMP INMATES AT AUSCHWITZ, PRESENTLY WANTED BY WAR CRIMES COMMISSION FOR DIRECT PARTICIPATION IN TORTURE AND DEATH OF 40,000 PERSONS AS RESULT OF EXPERIMENTS WITH PITUITARY MALFUNCTIONS. SUBJECT IS ADEPT WITH TECHNIQUES OF HYPNOSIS. UNVERIFIED SIGHTING OF SUBJECT 11/21/55, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA. UNVERIFIED SIGHTING OF SUBJECT 6/1/62, MOLOKAI, HAWAII. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DETAILS IN CIA REPORT #36121055.

  The supersonic test plane that had taken Smith on as a passenger by direct order of the President of the United States screamed at 60,000 feet toward the Key West Naval Station.

  He folded the printout. He didn't need to see file #36121055. He had written it.

  Molokai, 1962. It was one of his last assignments for the CIA, and he had failed then, as he had failed in Buenos Aires in '55. Lustbaden had eluded him all his professional career.

  But Zoran Lustbaden had had help. SPIDER, the network of Nazi officers organized just before the end of the war to aid their members in escaping justice for their crimes, had everything: money siphoned from the Third Reich's remaining funds after Hitler's death, escape routes through Europe and South America and the little-known, practically unexplorable islands of the Pacific, and bodies— young, secret recruits from all over the western world who had been brainwashed into believing Hitler's ideal of Aryan supremacy. These young men willingly left their homes, jobs, and families to serve SPIDER's exiled leaders as bodyguards, drivers, servants, consultants, and, when necesary, soldiers.

  SPIDER's chain was unbreakable. For thirty-six years it had protected Josef Mengele himself, the white-gloved "Angel of Death" whose experiments with children at Auschwitz had caused the world to wail in horror and grief. And Mengele's face was well known, photographed often and reprinted in publications from Berlin to Shanghai.

  Zoran Lustbaden, Mengele's assistant, was less visible. Or perhaps just smarter. Conspicuous in the Nazi ranks for his modesty among a group of officers famous the world over for their arrogance, Lustbaden always declined to be photographed, even on state occasions. Likewise, his name was rarely mentioned in Mengele's numerous reports to Hitler and Goebbels. He had no wife and no children to write to, no one Smith could use as leverage against him. Lustbaden was the perfect SPIDER protégé: No ties, no records, no one to remember him.

  No one but the few concentration camp survivors who still carried scars from the wounds Zoran Lustbaden had inflicted.

  Smith opened his briefcase, placed the computer printout inside, and extracted a yellowed print of a photograph taken nearly fifty years before. It was a blowup of one face in a group portrait of the 1932 graduating class of the Heidelberg University Medical School.

  The face was that of a boy. The young genius Lustbaden had been only twenty when it was taken. He had stood, with typical self-effacement, at the far edge of the group, his face darkened by shadows and turned slightly inward toward the rest of the class, so that he was in three-quarter profile.

  Still, it was a face Smith had stamped indelibly into his brain: the pale, cold eyes, eerily translucent in the grainy black and white photograph, the stooping shoulders, the stocky body already going to fat, the sly half-curve of the mouth. A man who smiled without his eyes.

  The Prince of Hell.

  That was how Lustbaden was known at Auschwitz, where his victims, convulsing from his injections into the glands in their throats, watched the cold eyes and the half-moon smile as they listened, in the spaces between their own screams, to his soothing lies.

  Smith closed his eyes. They burned from
fatigue. Except for a few scattered moments on the sofa in his office, he had not slept in two days. CURE was becoming so big, so complex. The small secret organization that had been formed to deter crime had become a massive responsibility. Even with a human weapon like Remo at his disposal, Smith needed the skill of a magician, the patience of a monk, and a brain as tireless as the computers at Folcroft to get through each day. There was simply too much crime, and Smith was feeling his age. Tasks that had once seemed effortless were becoming monumentally difficult, and his reflexes were slowing.

  He had possessed enviable reflexes once. Not like Remo's, of course, but as good as those of any man in the OSS, which had its share of good men. In the blurry red images of nearsleep, Smith saw himself running, running through the gutted, Nazi-infested streets of Warsaw in January of 1943, with the twang of bullets at his back and the acrid smell of spent gunfire all around him. His cover had been blown sky high in the middle of a delicate maneuver with a group of Polish Resistance fighters.

  One of them had been working for the Nazis all along. By the time Smith found out about it, every member of the tough little group had been killed, and the SS was closing in on him fast.

  It had been pure chance that had brought him to the dead-end alley strewn with the clotheslines and garbage of the poor. A wall stood— inexplicably, he remembered thinking— at the far end of the alley. The gunshots at its open end were too close for escape. There was nowhere to go.

  Above him, a wiry, small man in black trousers and a ragged overcoat, with a face like so many Poles in those days— thin, creased, bearing a permanent expression of crushing anxiety— sat smoking on the fire escape of a crumbling brick building. Without a word, Smith had held his hand up to him. The man saw the gesture, stood up, and walked into the building.

  It was Smith's last, desperate card, and he had drawn a joker. There was nothing left to do but wait for the Luger that would fire the first shot at him. And hope that first shot killed him.

  Then, out of the sky, a rope fell within inches of him. The man on the fire escape, his handrolled cigarette dangling from his mouth, was tying his end around his waist. When he was done, he clasped the rope with his powerful, slender hands and nodded to Smith.

  The man moved with the calm swiftness of one who'd grown accustomed to the necessities of war. He helped Smith over the landing and pushed him into the building while he yanked up the rope with ease.

  Inside the shabby apartment, a woman and three children, a teenage girl and twin boys around six years of age, accepted him without question, even though he was not in uniform and had not spoken a word. The woman wrapped a blanket around him. Till then, Smith hadn't even realized he was cold.

  Once safe in the shadows of the dark apartment, however, he allowed himself to shiver. The woman adjusted the threadbare blanket around him more tightly and gave him a motherly smile at the end of her ministrations. Like her husband, she was thin, but Smith could see from the excess skin around her face and neck that thinness was not her proper state. In better times she would have been one of those women who complain good-naturedly about needing to go on a diet while serving platters heaped with piroghi and halupki.

  The girl, a breathtaking beauty even at her young age, with blonde hair and enormous seagreen eyes, brought him soup. Smith refused it, guessing it was all they had, but the mother insisted. He drank it gratefully and, afterward, slept.

  He awoke in a cold sweat, uncertain for the moment where he was, confused by the darkness of the tiny apartment. He must have cried out in his sleep because, as soon as his panic subsided, he noticed the man's arm on his.

  "Whoever you are, you are safe," the man said in Polish.

  "Why did you help me?" Smith asked.

  "Because the Nazis were after you."

  "Is that why you used a rope?"

  The man nodded. "I do not trust the neighbors on the ground floor."

  "Do you belong to the Resistance?" Smith asked.

  The man looked Smith squarely in the eye. "We are Jews," he said.

  Smith stayed with them— their family name was Jevsevar— for five days. During the day, Dimi, the man who had saved his life, and Smith, disguised in Dimi's rags and passed off to family acquaintances as a visiting cousin, went foraging for food among the few shops still operating in the city.

  Dimi expressed his admiration for Smith's abilities as a thief. Smith himself was not particularly proud of stealing, for whatever reason, and in later years would never mention the episode to anyone, not even his wife.

  At night, the Jevsevars amused themselves with stories while Smith pored over maps, seeking an escape route out of Poland for himself and the Jevsevars.

  On the sixth day the Nazis came.

  Their unmistakable footsteps pounded up the rickety stariway. The beating at the door began. Dimi shoved Smith out the fire escape and up onto the roof.

  "Run," he said. "Over the rooftops, toward the river. Most of the buildings are abandoned there."

  "Get your family. Well all go."

  Dimi shook his head. "My boys are too young, and Helena is not strong. My place is with them. Hurry."

  Smith watched the wiry man with the strong hands walk back to the fire escape. "Thank you," he said. He never knew afterward if Dimi had heard him or not.

  The Jevsevars were taken to Auschwitz. From his post as an OSS strategist in London over two years later, Smith was able to book passage on an army convoy headed for Poland amid the Allied victory celebrations. After weeks of false leads, he finally tracked down Dimi Jevsevar in a seamy rooming house outside the town of Piekielko.

  He was still wiry, but his calm strength had been replaced by a haunted emptiness. His hands trembled, and he had difficulty remembering. He knew Smith, but had forgotten the circumstances, mistaking him for a distant relative. His hair had turned white.

  Dimi's family was gone. The twin boys were the first to die, courtesy of Mengele's and Lustbaden's experiments with chromosomal alteration. His wife, Helena, neither healthy nor particularly beautiful, outlived her usefulness shortly afterward. She was claimed by the gas chambers. The girl with the sea-green eyes, Dimi's daughter, was used as Zoran's private prostitute until she took her own life with a jagged piece of a discarded liquor bottle across her wrists.

  There was nothing left. A trace in Buenos Aires... too late. SPIDER had reached Lustbaden before Smith. A whisper near the leper colony at Molokai seven years later... He was gone, fled with a group of patients from the colony and his SPIDER corps.

  And then, for twenty years, nothing. The Prince of Hell had vanished.

  Smith awoke with a start, surprised to hear the roar of jet engines. His fingers had plastered themselves to the photograph on his lap, and when he removed them, they left prints over Lustbaden's half-moon smile.

  I have known you for too long, Smith thought, looking at the picture and seeing only the face of pure evil.

  The search would end soon. One of them was going to die.

  He opened his briefcase, arranged its contents, and set the photograph carefully inside.

  ?Chapter Eleven

  And so it came to pass that the elderly Chiun, regarded by his employer as a bizarre, if competent, adjunct to the enforcer arm of CURE, and Harold W. Smith, notable among his employees as the most boring man in the world, set out together for the Valley of the Damned.

  Smith had commandeered a Navy speedboat, and was at the helm. As usual, the two men had little to say to each other, since both despised small talk. Smith steered the vessel toward the island, following Chiun's terse directions. Chiun reveled silently in the exhilarating wind that shot into their faces in the open boat.

  Locking his briefcase in a watertight compartment, Smith moored the craft at a deserted, rocky spot some distance from the concealed path. Careful not to disturb the birds gathered there, they made their way through the jungle brush to the airstrip.

  "We think it is here that Zoran brought your missing airplane,"
Chiun said.

  "I see," Smith answered noncommitally.

  Chiun yawned and moved on. Nothing interested Smith. Nothing. Chiun vowed he would write an Ung poem about Smith one day, if he could keep from falling asleep while composing it.

  The residents of the valley were holding some sort of ceremony. As far distant as the shore, Smith and Chiun could hear the tribal chant of the whole village.

  Timu, garbed in ceremonial robes and a high feather headdress, looked at the two men in surprise when they approached.

  "Master," he said, bowing low to Chiun. "You live. We were certain the birds had killed you— with these others." He gestured toward a stack of long objects the size of human beings, swathed in black cloth.

  "These are your dead?" Smith asked.

  The chief eyed him suspiciously.

  "He is the Emperor of my son's tribe," Chiun whispered to the chief. "He brings no harm."

  Solemnly Timu bowed to Smith. He raised a carved wooden staff. The villagers, chanting in front of their huts, moved slowly toward the pile and picked up the black-draped bundles.

  "These represent our dead," Timu explained. "They are only sticks wrapped in cloth. We are not permitted to keep the bodies of our murdered people." His mouth curved down bitterly. "Zoran needs the corpses for his own purposes.

  The villagers formed a double-circle, chanting as they carried the effigies high over their heads.

  "How were they murdered?" Smith asked.

  "The birds," Timu said wearily. "Again," He turned to Chiun. "We thought you were among our losses today. Portions of your boat were found, smashed to pieces."

  Timu shouted something in an ancient Hawaiian dialect, and an old man stepped out of the double-circle of mourners. He was carrying a black-shrouded effigy set apart from the others by a gold stripe. "This was your effigy, O Master of Sinanju. I am pleased to remove it from our funeral." He unwrapped the black cloth slowly and scattered the sticks on the ground. "You were brave and kind to return to us."

  "We wish to help you," Chiun said. "Only you must no longer be afraid to tell us the truth."

  Timu looked at the villagers, helplessly grieving over their families and neighbors. In the distance, beneath the high-domed rocks, the bodies of those dead were awaiting Zoran's mutilation. The Master of Sinanju's own son was somewhere in that cave, possibly already under Zoran's knife with the others.