"What do you know about the Mafia, you clown?" Tolan said. Gregory realized they were the first words Tolan had said since arriving, except for "Bang, bang" under his breath.
"Enough. Enough," Gregory said. "You see what I mean? You men, all of us, we're so bored, we don't have anything better to do than to pick on each other. Picky. Picky."
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"Dicky doo,"' said Tolan.
Gregory ignored him. He pointed at each of the three men, in turn, with his Eberhard Faber Mongol 482 #1 yellow pencil.
"But that's all over now. We've got something to live for. We're going to live big lives. They're going to know we were here. We're going to live huge."
"Ah, life, its sweetness challenges me," said Lizzard, who had returned his head to his hands and was drifting off to sleep.
"How we gonna live?" Baker said. "I'm giving up a good job union organizing."
"Money's not your worry anymore," Gregory said. "We're an army and we're a well-financed army. And the enemy is the Mafia in Bay City. We're going after them, boys."
"Good," said Tolan. "Kill 'em all. Blow their eyes out. Shoot their brains all over the street. Gut shoot them so they die slow. Fill them up with compressed air and let them blow up. Skin them alive before we shoot them. Toss their guts in the street. Set fire to their intestines.
Lizzard retched. Baker covered his mouth with his hand so he wouldn't throw up on the table.
"Well, something like that," Gregory said. He pointed with his pencil at the table of organization. "This is it. Our army. We need a name."
"What for?" said Baker nervously. He did not want anyone to find out he was connected with these loonies.
"If we don't have a name, how will we get fan mail?" Tolan said.
"That ain't funny," said Baker.
"We need a name because we want them to know
55
who's after them. We want them to fear the dark," Gregory said. "To know that each step could bt their last. To know that each person they pass on the street might live only to see them die. We want them to be afraid as they have made others afraid. That's why . . ." He pointed with his pencil. "That's why we need a name." To emphasize the point, he grabbed the pencil in both hands and snapped it. He looked at the broken piece in his right hand, then looked around the table. Tolan was looking up toward the sky, pointing his index finger at birds, going "Bang, bang" under his breath. Liz-zard seemed asleep. All Gregory could see was the thinning hair on the top of his pink head. Baker was looking around nervously as if expecting the backyard to be raided.
"That's it," Gregory said. He held up the rubber-tipped end of the pencil.
"From here on in, I'm The Eraser." He waved the eraser over his head. "And you're . . . you're all ... The Rubout Squad."
"Who do I kill first?" asked Tolan.
"Can I have the Vodka back now?" asked Liz-zard without raising his head.
"You was talking about us getting paid," Baker said. "How much and when?"
"We're going to get them all," said Gregory. "The goons and the gunsels and the ginzos. And most of all, that corrupting mayor, Rocco Nobile."
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CHAPTER FIVE
"The climate is very good here," Mayor Rocco No-bile said into the telephone.
"It's good here too," came back the gruff voice. "It was in the eighties yesterday and we ain't getting no rain at all."
Nobile looked away and sighed. "I mean the business climate," he said.
"Oh yeah. That. Okay. Well, we was talking about it yesterday and everybody kinda thinks it's a good idea, moving and all."
"Sure," Nobile said. "Centralize your operation. It's just good business."
"That's the word they used yesterday too. Centralize. They said it was like General Motors, they don't go building cars everyplace, except they stay in that grubby frigging Detroit."
"Right. And what's good for General Motors is good for you," Nobile said.
"Exactly. Count on us, Rocco."
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"Okay. Take care." Nobile hung up the telephone in his apartment and sighed again. He had been on the telephone all morning to the West Coast suggesting to certain independent businessmen that their business operations might be more soundly run in Bay City. He described the beautiful location, just minutes away from the New York metropolitan area, the world's prime market for everything legal and illegal. He pointed out the city's natural harbor, which he was now having cleaned up to reopen the channels and allow ships to move in and out from foreign countries, more or less freely. There would be, he emphasized, no federal money involved in the harbor cleanup and therefore no federal personnel hovering around, watching things that didn't concern them.
He had held this discussion before with many other independent businessmen and all had told him they might be interested once he had proven he could get control of Bay City. Now he had it and he could deliver it to them.
On his way to his office, Rocco Nobile felt satisfied that within the next few weeks more of the vacant lofts along River Street would soon have new tenants, new and thriving businesses.
Nobile arrived at his office at 9:15 A.M. in the old dilapidated City Hall, where he had specifically rejected a suggestion that the building be repainted. The last thing he wanted was to give some kind of signal that might drift to the outside world that things were changing in Bay City. The city had, for years, been ignored by the world and the press and he would be happy to keep it that way. He only wished the harbor cleanup work could be done
58
at night so no one would notice that it was underway.
At 11:30 a.m., he met with his five-member City Commission, three of whose members had voted to install him as mayor and whose other two members had abstained. They talked about the impending city budget, about which Mayor Nobile knew nothing and cared less and they talked about the prospect of payroll cuts and Nobile told them to do whatever they wanted. When the meeting was over, he asked the three councilmen who had voted him into office to stay for a few minutes and when the two abstentions had left the room, Nobile handed the councilmen fat envelopes filled with cash.
"More where that came from, fellas," he said.
"Good," said Walter Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde. "Keep it coming."
Outside the mayor's office, the three councilmen found reasons to burrow themselves into corners so they could look into the envelopes and make sure they hadn't been handed coupons from the newspaper instead of cash.
At noon, Rocco Nobile began to look through the day's mail, a boring task which annoyed him because all the good mail was never sent by mail. It was hand-delivered to his apartment at the Bay City Arms.
He looked quickly through the stack of letters. Employee unions, state environmental agencies, federal bureaus, fan mail. One letter was unopened. There was a lump in the middle of the brown envelope and on the outside his name had been printed in ink along with a warning: personal, confidential.
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The letter was handwritten on lined yellow paper. It was printed in block letters. It read:
MAYOR NOBILE. YOU ARE A BLOT UPON THE FACE OF AMERICA. THE ERASER RUBS OUT BLOTS. YOUR TIME IS COMING SOON.
It was signed: the eraser.
And Scotchtaped to the bottom of the letter was half of a broken pencil, the eraser end.
Nobile scratched his head under the blue-black hair and, as was customary, looked at his fingertips as he withdrew his hand. Then he read the letter again.
On his private telephone h'ne, he dialed a number he had never called before but had committed to memory. He did not know who was on the other end of the line.
When the dry voice answered, he said simply, "I'm in trouble."
There was this little store off Canal Street in New York City that sold pure silk blouses from Hong Kong at half the price you could buy them anywhere else, so Ruby Gonzalez was going to go there and spend some time. But first she had to get out of Bay City, which was ugly.
She w
anted to get to the store early so she had no time to waste.
She walked around the back of the Bay City Arms apartment building. It was a warm day and Ruby wore a white halter top and black slacks. Her coffee-with-milk skin seemed a perfect middle ground between the light and dark of her clothing.
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There was a ramp behind the building leading to an underground garage, and whistling lightly and swinging her purse, Ruby walked down the ramp. It was cool and airless under the building. Forty cars were parked in numbered slots and she had no trouble picking out the black Cadillac with the New Jersey MG—meaning municipal government— license plates which belonged to Mayor Rocco No-bile.
She stood behind the Cadillac for a moment, looking around. There was no one else in the garage. She rooted into her purse and found a large Idaho baking potato. She bent over and jammed it into the end of the exhaust pipe.
It could just as easily have been a bomb.
As she was walking from the garage, a man came out the door at the far end of the building.
Ruby made a sharp turn and walked rapidly toward him.
"Hold the door," she called. She smiled at him.
He held the door open for her as she brushed by him.
"Thanks," she said.
"Have a nice day," he said.
She waited until the heavy metal door swung shut behind her, then got her bearings and went to the elevator.
Inside she pressed the top-floor button. When the door opened, she was in a carpeted hall, facing four doors. One of the central doors had potted plants on each side of it. That would be the main entrance to Rocco Nobile's apartment.
Ruby fished in her purse and found a thin strip of steel, the size of a credit card.
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She listened at the door at the far left end of the hall. There was no sound from inside. She slipped the thin strip of metal under the wood molding of the door frame near the lock. She pressed hard, and felt the lock slip open. She pulled the door out a half-inch to satisfy herself there was no other lock. She pushed the door closed and removed the metal strip, quietly relocking the door.
She did the same thing at the door at the far right side of the hall.
Then she rode back down on the elevator.
In the lobby, she waved at the doorman who waved back. She smiled at him as he opened the door for her. Breezily, she walked across the street and got behind the wheel of her white Lincoln Continental.
So far, she thought, it was a joke.
She kept her eyes on the front door of the apartment building, occasionally checking behind her in the rearview mirror.
Fifteen minutes later, she saw the mayor's black limousine turning the corner. Ruby picked up a grocery bag off the back seat of the car. In her mind, it could very easily have contained a submachine gun.
She got out of her car and walked across the street just as the mayor's car, bucking and puffing, pulled up to the front door of the Bay City Arms.
As she drew close to the front entrance, the door opened and a man she assumed was the mayor stepped outside. Another man followed behind him. The mayor smiled at Ruby. The bodyguard scowled, then held the door to the rear seat open for Rocco Nobile.
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The car sputtered. Ruby walked toward it. If she had carried a machine gun, she would simply have taken it out now and used it.
Instead, she said to the bodyguard still standing next to the car, "There's something stuck in your exhaust pipe."
He looked at her suspiciously.
She smiled and pointed to the rear of the car. "The exhaust pipe," she said. "Something's stuck in it."
The man growled. Ruby shrugged. She turned away from the building. Rocco Nobile saw her and smiled and gave her a small wave. She waved back.
The potato was removed from the exhaust and the mayor's car had driven away, before Ruby drove her own car out of Bay City toward the Holland Tunnel to New York.
She stopped to use a telephone in a booth alongside the roadway.
"Doctor Smith?" she said. ¦
"Yes," answered Harold W. Smith. ¡
"Ruby. That mayor got no security at all."
"As bad as that?" Smith asked.
"Yeah," Ruby said. "I coulda put a bomb under his car and no one would have noticed. I got into his building with no trouble at all. I slipped two of the locks into his apartment. And when he came out to go to work, I walked right up to him and I coulda blown him away. His bodyguards are hopeless."
Smith sighed on the other end of the phone.
"Thank you, Ruby."
"I think if you got some reason to want to keep
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that man alive, you better send in somebody. Send in the dodo. He can do it."
"All right, Ruby," Smith said. "When will you be back?"
Ruby pictured those half-price silk blouses in her mind. "Take a few hours," she lied. "I'm having me some car trouble."
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CHAPTER SIX
The forty-foot-long wooden boat drifted aimlessly through the Atlantic Ocean. It had dieseled out at dawn from Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island, only forty miles away, but its direction was northeast, and when the boat's motors were turned off, it lay in 450 feet of water 120 miles due east of Manhattan.
Remo and Chiun sat atop a wooden locker on the back deck. Remo had peeled off his usual black T-shirt and was wearing only his black chinos and a pair of white leather running shoes with black diagonal stripes across the top. Chiun wore a white brocaded kimono which Remo estimated weighed at least fifteen pounds.
Over his bare chest, Remo had put a thick leather harness, cut Like a short vest. Hooked below his belt was a padded metal gimbal, a cup-like device that looked as if it was designed to hold a flagpole.
"I do not understand this," Chiun said. He had
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I; 11
said it half a dozen times on the three-hour trip out into the ocean and Remo ignored it as he had the earlier five times.
He watched the rear of the boat as Mickey, the mate, cut up herring and threw slices out Into the oily chum slick the boat was trailing through the water. Two-inch-thick fishing poles angled out from the side of the boat, their heavy nylon lines pulled out at almost 90-degree angles from the perpendicular.
"Why do you want to kill a fish that isn't doing anything to you and that you do not eat?" Chiun said. "What did a shark ever do to you?"
"I'm getting even for Jaws," Remo said. "That shark scared a hundred million people."
"Is that shark here?" Chiun asked.
"That was a mechanical shark. Plastic and metal."
"And you are going to get your revenge by attacking a flesh and blood shark?" Chiun said.
"Absolutely. I kill thirty people last week and you don't care. I come out here to kill a shark and you get all bent out of shape. I don't understand you, Chiun."
Remo pointed toward Mickey. The big husky blond mate leaned over the rear of the boat toward the water. "Come on, sveethots," he called out softly. "Mickey is here to kill all you bastards." He shook his fist at the quiet water and fingered the knife in the leather scabbard at his waist.
"You should have got him for training," Remo said.
"At least he has the right attitude," Chiun said, "even if he does waste it on a poor harmless fish."
Remo started to answer but there was a scream-
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ing whistle as the Une began to unreel off one of the rods. Even though the reel was on full drag and a grown man would have had trouble pulling line off it, this line was whistling out at top speed.
"Hit," Mickey yelled out. "Hit."
Remo jumped up and ran to the fishing rod. He lifted it from its holder and pushed it into the metal cup he wore on the belt across his groin. He fastened two leather clips from the leather vest to the sides of the pole. He was now securely fastened to the rod and reel. If they went overboard, so did he.
As they had motored out to the fishing grounds th
at morning, Mickey had told Remo, "A lot of people think that's so they don't get hurt, but that's bullshit. We clip them to the rod and reel so they know if they drop it, they go over with it."
"You lose a lot of fishermen that way?" Remo asked.
"Frig 'em. Anybody lets a shark slide deserves what he gets."
Remo moved to the stern of the boat and began reeling in the Une. He knew the deUcate point of the operation—the weak link in this hookup between man and fish was the thin nylon Une that connected them. The fish had the power to snap the line and .so did Remo and the skill was in bringing the fish into the boat without breaking the line and losing the fish.
The boat rocked back and forth in the water on the soft Atlantic waves. As it rocked backward, away from the fish, Remo held the pole taut. Then as the boat rocked forward, Remo reeled down quickly to take up slack in the Une. Slowly, foot by foot, he was bringing the fish in closer to the boat
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"Can you see it?" Remo asked Mickey, who stood alongside him, his gray-green eyes squinted, scanning the water for the sign of fins or a telltale glimpse of the shark.
"Don't know. Keep reeling." He paused, then whistled. "Son of a bitch. Look at that."
A dorsal fin cut through the water toward the boat. The fin stuck three feet up out of the water.
"It's a great white!" Mickey yelled. "The big bastard. Reel, you sucker. Reel in that line."
There was no pressure now on the line as Remo reeled. The fish swam toward the boat faster than Remo could pull in the slack line.
"Chiun, come look at this," Remo called.
"Away with you," Chiun said in disgust.
The fish was only fifteen feet from the boat when it surged. Its giant head came up out of the water, its knife-like nose cutting above the bubbly white-green foam, its round marble eyes staring insanely at Remo on the side of the boat. The shark opened its mouth and Remo looked down into the yawning tan-and-pink chasm, at row after row of needle triangular teeth. The mouth stretched two feet across from side to side and, involuntarily, Remo leaned backward and the fish dropped back into the water and passed under the boat.
Mickey pushed Remo toward the stern of the boat so Remo could pass the line around under the boat to prevent it from snagging under the old vessel's hull and breaking.
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