"I do not understand your colloquialism, 'out of your head,'" said Mr. Gordons.
"First off, I don't kill people. Second off, if I did, I wouldn't do it for some bimbo who comes in off the street, and third off, who the fuck are you?"
"I am not sure that your expressions are accurate. That is, I think you are saying things for your protection and not because they are true. This I have found to be commonplace, so do not take offense as people often do when they are exposed in inaccuracies. I have something you want."
"What I want is you should get out of here while you can still walk," said Alstein.
"Not necessarily," said Mr. Gordons and from his jacket pocket, he took a fresh stack of fifty $100 bills. He placed it on the table between them. Then he put a second package on top of the first package. And a third and a fourth. And a fifth. Moe wondered how the man kept his suit so neat with all that money stashed in the pockets. When the pile was ten stacks high, Mr. Gordons started a second pile. And when that was ten high, he stopped.
"That's a hundred grand," said Moe Alstein. "A real hundred grand. No government frame ever offered a hundred grand."
"I assumed you would think that."
"No hit ever paid a hundred grand. I mean, not a regular contract, sort of," said Alstein.
"And these bills are valid," said Mr. Gordons. "Examine the silk fiber, the engraving around the face of Franklin, the clarity of the serial numbers which are sequential and not all the same."
"Real," said Moe Alstein. "But you know, I can't move right away. To take off a capo is a tough thing. I got to spread some of this around."
"This is not for your usual work of helping an ethnic group settle disputes among members of their crime families. This is for a simple hitting."
"Hit," said Moe.
"Hit. Thank you. It is now hit," said Mr. Gordons. "This hit is simple. I will personally show you where he is."
Moe Alstein's head jerked back in shock.
"Whaddya paying me for, if you're gonna be there? I mean, the point of getting someone else to make the hit is that you're not there. Unless you want to watch the guy suffer?"
"No. I hope to watch you kill him. There are two people. They are very interesting. Especially an elderly yellow man who is most interesting. Every movement of his is most natural and seen in people, yet it accomplishes much more than other people's movements. Him I wish to see. But I cannot observe properly if I must also perform."
"Oh, two hits," said Alstein. "It'll cost you more."
"I will provide you more."
Alstein shrugged. "It's your money."
"It's your money," said Mr. Gordons and pushed the two piles of bills across the table.
"When do you want these guys hit?"
"Soon. First I must get the others."
"Others?"
"There will be others with us. I must get them."
"Wait a minute," said Moe, backing away from the table. "I don't mind you watching. You're as guilty as me before a court, probably more so. I'm just doing a contract. You'd, for sure, do life, know what I mean? I got something over you. But strangers, witnesses, they got something over me. And you. Know what I mean?"
"Yes, I understand," said Mr. Gordons. "But they will not be only witnesses. I am hiring them too."
"I don't need help. Really. I'm good," said Alstein and told the bartender to get up on the stage with a glass.
The bartender, a balding black man who had become very good at the Chicago Tribune's crossword puzzle, rarely having anyone but Alstein to serve, looked up from his paper and winced.
"Make it two glasses," called Alstein.
"I quit," said the black man.
Moe Alstein's right hand went into his jacket and came out with a whizbang of a .357 Magnum, chrome plated like a big shiny cannon. It went bang like a roof coming off. The heavy bullet blasted a shelf of glasses and shattered a mirror above the bartender's head. Shards scattered over the inlaid floor like shiny pieces of sharp-edged dew under a morning sun.
The bartender went under the bar. A black hand with a long champagne glass at the very end of its fingertips came up over the bar.
Boom went the .357 Magnum. Splat went the plywood backing where the mirror had been. The hand now held only a champagne stem.
"See, I don't need no help," said Moe Alstein, and raising his voice, he yelled, "you can come out now, Willie."
"I'm not Willie," said the voice, still beneath the bar. "Willie quit."
"When?" asked Alstein, his eyes squinting, personal hurt all over his face.
"When you had to order the last mirror. The one that's on the floor now."
"Why'd he quit?"
"Some people don't like to be shot at, Mr. Alstein."
"I never hit anybody I didn't plan to. Never fucking hit anybody. You anti-Semites are all alike," said Moe Alstein, and confided to Mr. Gordons that it was the same virulent anti-Semitism that had ruined his bar business.
"People might feel endangered even though you did not physically hurt them," suggested Mr. Gordons.
"Bullshit," said Moe Alstein. "An anti-Semite is an anti-Semite. You Jewish? You don't look Jewish."
"No," sad Mr. Gordons.
"You look WASP."
"WASP?"
"White Anglo-Saxon Protestant."
"No."
"Polish?"
"No."
"German?"
"No."
"Greek?"
"No."
"What are you?" asked Alstein.
"A human being."
"I know that. What kind?"
"Creative," said Mr. Gordons with what sounded like pride.
"Some of my best friends are creatives," said Moe Alstein and wondered if creatives had a history of anti-Semitism and how someone who spoke English without an accent and seemed so knowledgeable didn't know the term "WASP."
But as he left, Mr. Gordons knew the term and would never forget it, filing it under the ethnic divisions whereby American people told themselves apart, sometimes for purposes of social intercourse, and sometimes not. It was a high variable without any real constant, decided Mr. Gordons.
The next person to see him that day was a United States Marine sergeant at a recruiting booth in down town Chicago. Mr. Gordons had many questions for the sergeant in Marine dress blue with shirt and ribbons and a face that gleamed with the red puffiness of too many whiskeys and beers.
"Do you know how to use a flamethrower?" asked Mr. Gordons.
"And you will too if you're a Marine. How old are you?"
"What do you mean by that?" asked Mr. Gordons.
"When were you born?"
"Oh, I see what you mean. I guess I don't look one year old."
"You look twenty-nine. You're twenty-nine, right. That's a good age," said the sergeant who had a quota to fill and could not fill it with people who were forty years old.
"Yes, twenty-nine," said Mr. Gordons, and the sergeant, thinking this recruit might be a little light on the intelligence, insisted he take the standard mental test before the sergeant went any further.
What happened left the sergeant shaken and wide-eyed, which might have accounted for his susceptibility to the offer that ensued.
The sergeant saw the recruit fill in the question forms, click, click, click click, without a pause, without apparently even reading the questions while he continued to ask the sergeant about skills with flamethrowers. If that wasn't bad enough, when the sergeant looked at the answers, all were correct but for one requiring identification of some common tools. It was the highest score the sergeant had ever seen. No one had ever filled out the test that accurately and that quickly before.
"You only missed one," said the sergeant.
"Yes. I do not recognize those tools. I have never seen them before."
"Well, this one here is a common grease gun."
"Yes. Because of the very high tolerance of many machines like cars here on earth, grease would be used to make metal parts, let us say, slid
e without friction. The grease is anti-friction, correct," said Mr. Gordons.
"Yeah," said the sergeant. "You know everything but what a grease gun was."
"Yes. But I am more secure knowing that I could have figured out what a grease gun might be used for. I could not have done that just a week ago. But I can now. Have you ever thought of becoming wealthy and leaving the Pitulski Marines?" said Mr. Gordons.
"Pitulski's my name," said Sergeant Pitulski. "You're looking at my name. That's not my unit," he said, tapping the black plastic rectangle with white lettering that he wore over his right shirt pocket.
"Ah, yes. The name. Well, not everything is perfect. Would you like to be wealthy?" said Mr. Gordons, and before Sergeant Pitulski could gather his wits, he was agreeing to meet Mr. Gordons the next night at the Eldorado Spa owned by Moe Alstein and he was sure he could bring a flamethrower with him. Guaranteed. In fact he wished he had the flamethrower now so he could protect the "you-know-what" Mr. Gordons had just given him in two stacks and which Sergeant Pitulski had quickly shoved into his top desk drawer which he locked. In his stunned daze, he had only one sort of well, silly, question: Why did Mr. Gordons apologize for not offering a drink when he entered?
"Isn't that what you're supposed to do upon meeting?"
"No. Not necessarily," said Sergeant Pitulski.
"When is it appropriate?"
"When someone comes to your home or office if your office is allowed to serve alcohol."
"I see. What do you ordinarily say?"
"'Hello' is all right," said Sergeant Pitulski.
One hour and seven minutes later, Mr. Gordons entered a sports store near Chicago's Loop. Black rubber suits and yellow air tanks hung on the walls. Underwater spear guns were racked behind the counter. A glass case was filled with diving masks.
"Can I help you?" said the salesman.
"Hello is all right," said Mr. Gordons, and twenty minutes later the salesman took the one opportunity of his life to be rich. In fact, when he told the store-owner that the owner was a "stupid sonuvabitch who didn't know sales from his rectum," he was already a rich man. Before he showed up the next night at the Eldorado Spa on Chicago's South Side, he had deposited his riches in ten separate banks under ten different names, because he thought a hundred-thousand-dollar cash deposit might raise some questions.
His name was Robert Jellicoe and when he walked into the Eldorado the next night, he was staggering under his load of tanks and rubber suits and three spear guns. He had been unable to make up his mind as to which gun to take. He had only shot fish before. So he decided to take all three.
Mr. Gordons and two other men sat around a table. The only other sound in the empty bar was the light hum of an air conditioner. Jellicoe wondered why someone would spend so much money on furnishing the spa, as someone obviously had, and then use a long section of plywood across the whole back of the bar. Particularly when a mirror would have fit just perfectly.
"I got a question," said Sergeant Pitulski, wearing a green suit, white shirt, and blue tie. "How We gonna get this past customs at the airport?" He patted the khaki-colored double tanks of his flamethrower.
"And my gun," said Moe Alstein, patting his shoulder holster.
"My diving gear won't have any trouble," said Jellicoe. "Lots of people bring skin-diving gear on vacations. I have. Many times."
"You are bringing none of your equipment," said Mr. Gordons. "In its present form."
"I gotta have my special gun," said Alstein.
"My gear is broken in," said Jellicoe. "I can't use new gear."
"I can get along with any old shit," said Sergeant Pitulski. "I'm a Marine. The worse the equipment, the better I use it."
Mr. Gordons quieted all. He bade them wait outside. Alstein said he should stay because it was his place. Mr. Gordons took Alstein by the neck, turned him upside down, moved him easily to the door, righted the flailing man on his feet, then motioned for the others to follow. They did. He locked the door and thirty minutes later returned with a package for each.
The largest went to Jellicoe. It was the size and shape of a large suitcase, but it weighed almost as much as a trunk. In fact, it weighed just as much as his tanks and wet suit and spear guns had. The next largest went to Sergeant Pitulski. His was almost as large, very heavy, and something sloshed around inside. Alstein got the smallest, a box fit for a necklace.
At O'Hare, boarding for St. Thomas, when customs opened all packages, Jellicoe saw in his a metallic engraving with a small yellow sun in a corner as if someone had melted the yellow from the covering of his tanks. Around the engraving was a black rubber frame, and Jellicoe, who had failed in the second year of engineering at college, recognized the materials of his scuba gear. But in different form.
It was not possible, but that was what it was. He knew. He knew that somehow Mr. Gordons had been able to condense the materials and compress them into that small engraving. Jellicoe felt his stomach flutter and then his knees become weak. There was that silly smile on Gordons's face, and Jellicoe said he was all right. He waited by the doorway that scanned boarders for metal, watched Alstein's surprise when he realized he was carrying a perfect likeness of the statue of Abraham Lincoln—in chrome—and Pitulski stared dully ahead when the customs inspector opened a large steel bust of George Washington and five steel vials of liquid.
"What's in these bottles?" asked an inspector.
"No flammable liquids," said Mr. Gordons, moving to the customs table. "More importantly, pressure drops will not affect them in the air."
"Yeah, but what are they?"
When Jellicoe heard the answer—the basic elements that went into the flammable liquid of a flamethrower—he swallowed hard. He rested his arm on an adjacent knee-high ashtray, steadied himself, told Mr. Gordons he was ill, and was allowed to go out through the doorway metal scanner by both Mr. Gordons and the customs people.
He moved, feet shuffling like a sick man, until he was out of sight of the boarding gate, and then ran. His feet were weak, but his lungs could go a mile, he thought, just to run and breathe, run past the incredible fear that had filled him, the horror of who he had agreed to do murder for. He did not know who the man was but he knew this man was beyond any in skill he had ever heard of. And if this man, Mr. Gordons, needed help in carrying off a killing, well then, God help them all.
At the Braniff counter, he cut toward a stationery stand, then ducked into a dark bar, ordered a drink, went into the bathroom, into a john with a door, stood on the toilet seat, crunched down his body, and waited. He glanced at his watch. It was twenty minutes to flight time. It was a good thing, he thought, that all flights going near Cuba were checked for possible hijacker weapons. It was a good thing he had had a chance to see what he was dealing with.
With only ten minutes left there came a knock on the toilet door. Which was strange because no one could see his feet resting on the toilet seat.
"Robert Jellicoe. Come out. You will miss your plane."
It was Mr. Gordons's voice.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Caribbean sun is hot and its waters aquamarine. Its islands are rock clusters rising from the sea where men scramble for a living on the poor soil and where long brown furry mongooses scurry in the underbrush, the descendants of the rodents imported from India to rid the islands of green snakes. There are no more green snakes but the mongoose has become a problem.
Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, thought on this and on other things he had heard.
"These are islands of survivors," he said. "The sun is good for your shoulder. The salt water is good for the air you breathe. It is a good place to heal."
"I don't know, Little Father," said Remo. He reclined on the porch of the house they had rented overlooking Magen's Bay, a wood and glass house with three porches and a living room that extended out over a ledge, so one felt he could look anywhere and be surrounded by the sea below. Water dripped from Remo's swimming trunks, the result of a four-mile swim, two
out and two back, taken under Chiun's watchful eye. It had been that way every day and when Remo had protested that his shoulder needed rest to heal, not exercise, Chiun had sneered and said, "Like your fraction back, I suppose."
"Like my what?"
"Like your fraction back. Every year he hurts his knees and they give him a year's rest, and then he comes back and hurts his knees even worse."
"Who are you talking about?" said Remo. "And if you can't answer that, what are you talking about will do."
"The fraction back on your television games. You know, where all those fat men knock each other down and jump on each other."
"Football?"
"Correct. Football. And the fraction back. The funny looking one, who talks funny and wears ladies' stockings in the selling moments on television."
Remo nodded. "He's a quarterback."
Chiun nodded. "Correct. A fraction back. Anyway, we do not want your shoulder like his knees. So you exercise."
And that was that, and now Remo lounged in a chair, dripping, and heard Chiun say that this island of survivors was a good place to heal.
"I don't know," said Remo. "I get the feeling I don't belong here. It's like I'm not attuned to it. Shouldn't I, for healing, return to where I was born?"
Chiun slowly shook his head, his wispy beard caught by a southwest breeze blowing in across islands they could not see.
"No. On these islands, only the invaders survive, like the mongoose. Where are the Caribbe Indians, you should ask yourself."
"I don't know. Drunk in Charlotte Amalie," said Remo, referring to the shopping district of St. Thomas where liquor, because of the tax-free status, was almost as cheap as soda. Every other store in this duty-free port seemed to sell Seiko watches which were also a major attraction for cruise passengers who left their money there along with the paleness of their skins.
"The Caribbe Indians who lived here are no more," said Chiun. "They lived full and happy lives here until the Spanish came and so cruel were the new overlords that all the Caribbe Indians climbed to a cliff and threw themselves off. But before they died, their chief promised the gods would avenge them."
"And did they?"
"According to the story that is told widely here, yes. An earthquake destroyed a city, killing thousands, thirty thousands."
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