"All right. I'll make you. . ." Nobile hesitated as he thought. "You can be from the West Coast, checking out the place before your bosses move any operations here. And Mr. Chiun can be a Chinese connection for cocaine."
"Good," said Remo.
"Not good," said Chiun. "That will never do."
"Why not?' Remo asked.
"I am not Chinese. I am Korean. Do I look Chinese? Would such a story fool anyone? Do I i«ok Chinese?" He looked toward Mayor Nobile for an answer.
"Say no," Remo advised.
"No," said Nobile. "All right. We'll make you a Korean connection for cocaine."
"North Korean," said Chiun.
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"North Korean," amended Nobile.
"Good," said Chiun. "Now that we have the important business out of the way, all that is left are mere details."
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T
CHAPTER TEN
From their car across the street, The Eraser and the Rubout Squad looked at the old loft building on River Street. The Lizzard had left his men's clothing in the trunk of the car yesterday and he could not remember where he had parked the car, so he was still wearing the flowered dress, the gray wig and his makeup from the previous day. His whiskered stubble had grown an extra day longer. He had powdered it to make it lighter.
"This is it?" asked Gregory.
"Absolutely," said Al Baker. He had no idea what the place was. He had conned Gregory out of two hundred dollars the night before to do a little more infiltration work, but when he had gotten to the loft building, it was closed for the night. So when he got back to the motel, he had no choice but to tell Gregory that absolutely and positively, the building housed a major drug operation. Maybe it did. Who knew? Who else would
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move into Bay City except somebody doing something illegal?
"A big narcotics factory, right?" Gregory said again.
"No doubt about it," Baker said. "That's what my sources in the family tell me."
"All right. This is what we do. Lizzard, you go upstairs and case the joint. Find out what they're doing and who's up there. Then come down and tell us and we'll move. We want to be sure it's not a trap."
"Who'd set a trap for us?" Tolan said. "Nobody knows we're even alive, Gregory."
"You can't be too sure, Exterminator," said Gregory. "And please call me Eraser."
Fearful of an ambush, terrified of being killed, Nicholas Lizzard walked across the street and through the ground floor door of the factory building. He looked back toward the car for encouragement and Sam Gregory waved him on.
Upstairs, Lizzard found a small hall sign that read: wo fat fortune cookie company.
While he waited in the hallway, looking around and listening, inside the second floor factory, Mr. and Mrs. Wo Fat and their three children were busy preparing the ingredients for the day's batch of fortune cookies. They were still congratulating themselves on their good fortune. When their factory had been gutted by fire the previous week, none of their heavy bakery machinery had been damaged and they were able to move right into this new loft a block away. They had lost only three days of work in both the fire and the move.
Lizzard pushed open the door and stepped in-
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side. Mr. and Mrs. Wo Fat looked at him and he remembered to hunch over to hide his six-foot-five frame and, smiling winsomely, he walked to a counter just inside the door.
Wo Fat, an oily looking man with white powder on his pudgy hands, came to the counter.
"Yes, Ma'am, I help you?"
"I want to buy some fortune cookies."
"Yes, Ma'am. How many?"
"There are four of us," said The Lizzard.
He looked around. The place looked normal enough but Orientals were devious. Who knew what they were up to? Mrs. Wo Fat walked through a back door into the kitchen area in the back of the loft. Through the open door, on a big butcher block table, The Lizzard saw a large mound of white powder. Heroin. He knew it. Baker had been right. The Lizzard was pretty sure that heroin was white. It was always white on television.
"I get for you," Wo Fat said.
The Oriental walked into the kitchen and chuckled to his wife as she helped their three children measure out the mound of white flour on the table into small stainless steel mixing bowls.
In Chinese, he said, "Strange person. Want four fortune cookies."
"Be careful," his wife said. "That look like woman but is man. Hands too big and bony for woman."
Wo Fat nodded and took four freshly-baked fortune cookies from a tray next to the large ovens. He put them in a small brown bag and went back to the counter. But the old woman was not there. She had gone.
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Wo Fat shrugged, opened the bag and bit into one of the cookies himself. He smiled, as he always did when eating his own wares. The cookies were good. Thirty years in the business and his were the best. He knew it and was proud of it.
He leaned with his back on the counter and through the open door to the spotless kitchen watched his wife and their children at work. His was the smile of the talented craftsman.
In the hallway, The Lizzard pointed to the door.
"That's it."
"Everybody ready?" Gregory asked. He looked around. Mark Tolan had a gun in each hand. In his right hand, he held the Gregory Sur-Shot. In his left, he clutched a .357 Magnum. Al Baker held a 32 caliber revolver delicately by the butt end as if he were afraid it was going to give him a shock. The Lizzard had no gun. Gregory handed him a .45 automatic. The Lizzard didn't want it. He pushed it away. Gregory slapped it into his open hand.
Gregory himself held another Sur-Shot.
"All right," he hissed. "Ready ... get set. . ."
Before he got to go, Mark Tolan had kicked his way through the unlocked door into the fortune cookie factory. Wo Fat turned at the noise and caught a fragmenting bullet in the middle of his forehead. He slumped behind the counter, his hand dragging the bag of fortune cookies onto the floor.
Through the door to the kitchen, Tolan saw the mound of white powder and realized that was the cutting room where the heroin was mixed with pow-
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dered sugar into a smaller, weaker dosage for sale on the streets.
He raced toward the door. Behind him, Gregory, Baker and Lizzard came into the loft. When Lizzard saw Wo Fat's body with his head blown away, he vomited on the floor. Baker put his gun in his pocket, determined not to use it under any circumstances, except to shoot Tolan. They followed Gregory back toward the kitchen where Tolan had entered.
The Exterminator had met the rest of Wo Fat's family coming toward the door to investigate the sound of the first shot.
"Yellow peril," he screamed. "Angels of the Mafia devil. Die!" Firing with both hands, he cut down Mrs. Wo Fat and then their three young children. When the four bodies lay motionless on the floor, Tolan looked down at them, smiling the satisfied smile of the redeemed avenger. He saw the white powder on their hands and for good measure, emptied his guns into their dead bodies.
The three other men joined him.
"Oh, God," said Lizzard, wiping the retch from his mouth.
"Looney," said Baker. "Frigging looney."
Gregory was silent. Tolan pointed toward the pile of powder. "There it is. The heroin," he said. He looked around. "Got to set this place afire," he said. "Destroy that heroin so no one else gets it."
He saw several jars of cooking alcohol and sprinkled it over a pile of paper boxes in the corner. He lit it with a match and the boxes flared and the fire almost instantly began spreading to the old dry wooden walls.
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"It'll go in a flash. Better get out of here," Gregory said.
Behind him, Al Baker touched a finger to the pile of white powder and placed it in his mouth. Just as he had feared. It was flour, used to make fortune cookies. He had been wrong. He felt sick.
He had no chance to mention it because the other men were running back toward the front doo
r.
Suddenly Tolan stopped.
"Forgot something," he said. He reached into the back pocket of his pants and took out a handful of yellow pencils which he had taken from the box he had obtained for Gregory the day before.
He snapped a half dozen of them in his hands and threw the eraser ends at the Chinese bodies in the kitchen doorway.
"There," he said happily. "Let them know The Eraser and the Rubout Squad were here. And The Exterminator."
Then he followed the other three men down the steps. They ran across the street and fled in their rented car.
The mayor's regular driver was still in the hospital having tests made to determine the extent of nerve injury suffered in his right arm, so Remo was driving the limousine. Chiun and Rocco Nobile were in the back seat. Remo had given Chiun strict orders, which he had couched as a humble request from the Emperor to the all-knowing, all-noble personage of the Master of Sinanju that Chiun not tell Rocco Nobile anything about CURE or Harold W. Smith or secret organizations. Without
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knowing it, Rocco Nobile had been working for CURE for almost five years and if he had gone that long in the dark, it was probably best to keep him there. Remo knew that Smith wanted to be sure that, in case Rocco Nobile's cover was ever blown, the man would be in no position to drop anything dangerous about CURE.
Remo had explained all this to Chiun. Chiun had agreed that he would not utter a word to Rocco Nobile.
Now as Remo drove, he heard Chiun in the back seat say to Nobile:
"I know something you don't know."
"Chiun," Remo said.
The car radio crackled on.
"Fire in progress at 612 River Street."
"Let's go over there," Nobile said.
"You like fires?" Remo said, glad to change the subject from what Chiun knew that Rocco Nobile didn't.
"Not really," Nobile said, "but I guess the mayor ought to be around for one."
They parked in the street behind a fire engine. Flames were spitting from the second floor window of the old loft building. Firemen were standing on the street pouring water into the building. Another crew was on top of a cherry picker, fifty feet in the air, pumping water down onto the roof of the low building, and also spraying adjoining buildings to try to stop the fire from spreading to the other old wood structures.
Remo and Chiun followed Nobile up to a fire officer wearing á white helmet with a gold medallion on the front.
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"Anybody in there, Chief?" Nobile asked.
"We don't know. We can't get in yet."
Chiun looked at Remo and Remo nodded. The two men drifted away from the mayor and the chief who stood staring up at the building. Licks of flame began to spit through the roof. The two men moved around the crews of firemen and then darted toward the ground level doorway.
"Hey, you can't. . ." one firemen shouted. But Remo and Chiun were already inside. He turned to the man next to him.
"Two guys went in that building."
"Whaaaa?"
"Two guys went in. You didn't see them?"
"No. I didn't see nothing. You sure?"
"Sure, I'm sure," the fireman said. He thought for a moment of what he had seen. A skinny white man with a black T-shirt and black trousers. A tiny old Oriental wearing a gold brocade kimono.
A gold brocade kimono? At 9 a.m.? In Bay City?
He shook his head. Not likely.
"I think maybe the smoke's gotten to me. I'm getting some oxygen," he said and walked back toward the emergency wagon where oxygen demand tanks with masks were propped up against the rear tire.
Remo and Chiun slid through flame up the sway-backed wooden steps toward the second floor.
"In there," Chiun said, pointing toward Wo Fat's factory. "It started there."
As Remo opened the door, a whoosh of hot air and flames flared out at their faces. After the first surge had subsided, they moved inside and Chiun
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closed the door behind them to seal off the draft. The entire second floor was ablaze. Flames burned up off the wooden floor. The old wooden walls were on fire and tongues of flame poured through the doorway of the kitchen area in the back.
Remo ran toward the kitchen, but as he passed the counter, he. saw Wo Fat's body, so far untouched by flames. On its chest, he saw the broken hah5 of a pencil and picked it up.
Inside the kitchen door, they found the partially burned bodies of Wo Fat's wife and three children. The two men saw where the slugs had bitten into their bodies. Flames chewed around them like some giant insidious dragon tongue.
Remo saw several charred pieces of wood lying near the bodies. He picked them up and stuck them in his shirt pocket.
"We should get these bodies out of here," he hissed at Chiun.
The old man shook his head.
"No. Let them be victims of the fire."
Remo thought for a split second and realized Chiun was right. Five members of a family killed in a fire was a tragedy, but five people shot to death might just blow everything CURE and Smith and Nobile were trying to do in Bay City.
The fire was crackling in the ceiilng over their heads and Chiun looked up. Through the wood panels, he could see a sliver of blue sky.
"We best go," he said. He pointed to the roof.
As Remo looked up, the first of the beams burned through and a large panel of roof ripped loose with a wrenching tear and came down at them, pouring plaster and wood and tons of water at them. The
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two men darted back as the massive pile hit near their feet, shuddering the fire-weakened floor and causing it to creak ominously and tilt.
"Whole building's going, Chiun," Remo said. "Let's go."
They ran back past Wo Fat's body, through the flames that surrounded the door and down the wooden stairs. This time they left the upstairs door open behind them and the flames whooshed out into the hallway as if the door to a huge coal-burning furnace had suddenly been opened in a gas-filled room.
They paused at the bottom of the steps and then slipped out into a mix of firemen milling around the entrance. The fireman who thought he had seen two men enter the building was just coming off the oxygen mask. He looked up. Behind the cluster of firefighters, he saw the two men again. The thin white one. The old Oriental with the golden kimono. He gulped and went back for more oxygen.
In the back seat of the limousine, Remo showed Rocco Nobile the pieces of wood he had picked up in the building.
"Five bodies," he said. "We left them there."
Nobile looked at him as if to question why, then nodded. He understood.
He fingered the pieces of wood. They were tops of pencils.
"The Eraser," Nobile said.
Remo nodded.
"That was a fortune cookie factory run by a Chinese family," Nobile said. "Why would this Eraser hit there?"
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"I don't know. Maybe he thought they were somebody else. You got any cops in this town?
"Of course."
"Real cops?"
"I don't know. I think so. Why?"
"You can read the name on one of these pencil tops. Why don't you send some cops around quietly and find out if anybody bought a box of them in any stores around here?"
"I'll get them on it right away," Nobile said.
Remo drove the mayor and Chiun back to City Hall. The mail was already on Nobile's desk. On top of it was an unstamped envelope with a bulge in it. When Nobile saw it, his stomach sank.
He pointed at it to Remo, who opened the letter.
The broken top of a pencil fell onto the desk. The note was hand printed.
THOSE HEROIN PUSHERS WERE JUST THE FIRST. WE ARE COMING FOR YOU, NOBILE.
THE ERASER.
"I don't understand," Nobile said. "They just made fortune cookies. What heroin?"
Remo was in the doorway talking to the secretary.
"Where'd this letter come from?"
"Somebody gave it to Denise."
Remo talked to Denise, who was happy to talk to Remo. And Denise had a good eye. The envelope was dropped off by a man in drag. "A big tall skinny thing, but he was wearing a wig and woman's clothes. But it was a man."
"Thanks, honey," Remo said. "I owe you."
"When do I collect? Denise said.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
The New York Times didn't carry it. The New York Post didn't carry it. Some of the Jersey papers gave it a couple of paragraphs, and of all the New York newspapers, only the Daily News carried it. Their item read:
BAD FORTUNE
Five members of a Chinese family were burned to death in Bay City yesterday when the family fortune cookie factory, located in a loft building near the city's decaying waterfront, was gutted by flames.
The Eraser read the item and saw instantly that the evil hand of the Mafia had also infiltrated the New York press. Why else would they cover up a story that should have read:
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ERASER AND RUBOUT SQUAD DECLARE WAR ON MAFIA
Five members of an international heroin ring were gunned down yesterday in their secret drug factory in Bay City, New Jersey.
Near their bodies, police found a hundred million billion zillion dollars in uncut heroin. Also found in the building, as a warning to evil-doers, were the eraser ends of a half dozen pencils. This is the trademark of The Eraser and his Rubout Squad, who have vowed to wipe organized crime from the face of Bay City, as their first step toward cleansing America of this insidious evil.
Sam Gregory thought he would give them just one more chance, as he tossed the newspapers to the floor of his motel room.
He called the City Desk of The New York Times first.
"Hello, City Desk."
"This is The Eraser. My Rubout Squad and I killed those five people in Bay City yesterday. This is just the first skirmish in our war to the death against the Mafia."
Following the Times' normal policy for dealing with madmen on the telephone, the copy boy said, "Why don't you write us a letter about it?" before hanging up.
The Daily News was kinder. The man on the City Desk patiently explained that they had already done a story on the tragedy in Bay City.
"But you called it a fire," Gregory protested.
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