Oil Slick

by Warren Murphy

  “Why, Mr. Goldberg, you don’t sound like a liberal at all.”

  “To me it always seems as if liberals love people in large masses, and this is the price they pay to hate people individually. I guess I’m not a liberal.”

  “You don’t hate people individually?” asked Jessie.

  “Sure I do,” said Remo. “But I won’t pay the price of having to love everybody in a lump. I reserve the right to decide a bastard’s a bastard, just because he’s a bastard.”

  “All right,” said Jessie. “That makes sense. No ghetto talk. You’ve got a deal.”

  By now, they were within ten feet of the two guards.

  With his hand, Remo signaled Jessie to wait while he approached the guards.

  “Hi, fellas. Remember me?” he said.

  Both guards turned and looked at him, first in surprise then in annoyance.

  “What are you doing here?” they said.

  “I went to get two passes to leave this place.”

  “Yes,” the bigger guard said suspiciously.

  “I have them right here.”

  “Yes?” said the guard again.

  Remo reached his hand into his trousers pocket and brought it out slowly, in a fist. He held it up between the two guards.

  “Right here,” he said.

  They leaned forward to look.

  “Well?” said one of them.

  The two guards were leaning close to each other now, almost head to head, when Remo partially opened his hand, uncoiling the little finger and the index finger. He drove these fingers upward.

  Each one hit into the forehead of one of the guards, right at that delicate point where veins merge to form a Y close under the skin.

  The iron hard fingers like blunted spikes squashed into the veins, closing them for a moment, and bringing on total if short-lived unconsciousness. The two soldiers dropped to the ground, in what seemed, in the darkness, to be a heap of dirty olive drab clothes.

  “Come on, Jessie,” said Remo.

  He helped the girl over the unconscious forms of the two guards. She looked down at them, seemingly unable to look away.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said Remo. “They’ll be all right. Just out for awhile.”

  “Are you always so aggressive?” she asked.

  “I told you, I reserve the right to decide a bastard’s a bastard and deal with him in bastardly fashion. These two qualified.”

  “I have a notion we’re going to have an interesting night.”

  As they walked away from the compound, Remo glanced back over his shoulder to make sure their redheaded companion was following. He was.

  “Yes, an interesting night,” Remo agreed.

  He did not know it would be made even more interesting by the man following the redhead. He was a slight man, an Oriental, in a black business suit. He rarely smiled. His name was Nuihc and he had vowed to kill not only Remo, but Chiun.

  This was the first occasion Jessie had had to sample Lobynian nightlife, which was nonexistent.

  “You can’t get a drink,” Remo said. “Baraka doesn’t allow alcohol.”

  “Well, jazz then. There must be a jazz joint.”

  “Sorry,” said Remo. “Baraka’s closed down nightclubs too.”

  “Can we dance?”

  “Men and women aren’t allowed to dance together.”

  “Baraka?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Baraka.”

  “I should have poisoned his stuffed cabbage when I had a chance,” she said.

  “Excuses, excuses.”

  Remo and Jessie walked along Revolutionary Avenue and finally found one open place, that looked as if it might have once been called a nightclub. It was now labeled a private club “for Europeans only.” Remo became a member of the club by slipping twenty dollars to the doorman. Inside, the place still carried memories of its nightclub days. There was a bar on the right. A large room in the back was full of tables leading up to a bandstand, where a belly dancer sweated to the music of three Lobynians playing unnameable string instruments and an unmentionable horn.

  “Ain’t exactly Birdland,” said Jessie.

  “Sufficient unto the day,” began Remo. Jessie challenged him to finish the quote, but Remo declined since he could not remember the rest.

  Remo insisted to the waitress who came to greet them that they be seated in one of the large booths that bordered the main room. The booths were more like small rooms, big enough to seat eight along padded benches around the U-shaped wall. They were screened off from the rest of the room by beaded ropes which could be pulled back if one wanted to watch the floor show. The ropes were infrequently pulled back, since the booths were favorite meeting places for European men and their young male Lobynian lovers.

  Remo insisted on a booth. The waitress insisted that she did not understand English or his request. Remo insisted upon giving her ten dollars whereupon the waitress insisted that such a fine gentleman and his lady be seated in one of the fine booths that bordered the room.

  As they moved toward the back, Remo glanced behind him and glimpsed the redheaded American moving toward the bar.

  Jessie was upset that there was no alcohol, but finally she shared Remo’s order of carrot juice.

  “You order that like you’re used to it,” she said. “A teetotaller?”

  “Only when I’m on duty.”

  “And what kind of duty is that?” asked Jessie, after the waitress had left and Remo had unfastened the clips on the sides of the beaded ropes allowing them to drop and sealing off their booth from the view of the room.

  “The same kind of duty you’re to,” said Remo. “You know. Uncle Sam. The whole gig.”

  Remo was glad she chose not to be coy. “Then I guess we’ve got to protect each other, especially since we’re being tailed,” she said.

  “You saw him?” She went up nineteen notches in Remo’s eyes.

  “Sure. He’s been eating me up with his eyes ever since I started waiting for you at the gate.”

  “He’s at the bar now.”

  “I know,” said Jessie. She stopped talking when the waitress pushed aside the beads and placed glasses in front of them. When the waitress left and the beads stopped tinkling together, Jessie leaned across the corner of the table and said, “What are you here for?”

  “Clogg,” Remo said. “I’m wondering what he’s up to.”

  “That’s easy,” she said. “He’s got some kind of plan to smuggle Baraka’s oil into the United States. Washington told me before I left.”

  “Why didn’t they tell me?” complained Remo.

  “Easy,” said Jessie, sipping her drink slowly and watching Remo over the top of the glass with shrewd eyes. “Your real assignment’s got nothing to do with Clogg so they didn’t bother to tell you, just as you haven’t bothered yet to tell me what your real assignment is.”

  “All right,” he said finally, “you got me. I’m here to figure out how to get King Adras back on the throne.” Remo did not like the situation he was in; the girl was smart, and he was not used to this kind of give and take lying.

  “Anything else?” she said.

  “Yes. One thing. When are we going to make love?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” she said. Jessie moved next to Remo on the padded bench. Her arms went around his head and her lips came up to meet his.

  Remo responded to her, silently cursing Chiun for the training that had taken all pleasure out of sex and replaced it with discipline and technique.

  Jessie gave a slight moan and then Remo was moving his hand under her thin top, doing things to her upper side under her armpit that she had not felt before.

  She moaned again. Remo felt her hands come away from his neck and she began to work up her white skirt.

  Then in a confluence of bodies and contortions, Remo and Jessie made love on the bench. Her moans and exhortations were buried alive, under the sound of the heavy-hooved belly dancer thumping around on the thin wooden floor to
the music of the wooden whistle and string band.

  When they were done, Jessie just moved away from Remo and sat stock still, unable to speak for moments. She seemed unaware that her short skirt was still up around her hips, and in fact she did not even move when the waitress barged through the beaded screen to ask if they wanted refills.

  Remo nodded yes. When the waitress left, Jessie came to and pulled down her skirt and straightened her sweater.

  “Hey now, holy mackerel, Andy,” she said.

  “I take it that’s a compliment,” said Remo.

  “No, man,” said Jessie, her perfect white teeth shiny and brilliant in the ebony majesty of her happy face. “That’s no compliment. That’s called homage.”

  “If you’re good, I’ll invite you back,” said Remo.

  “I’ll be good. I’ll be good.”

  The waitress interrupted them with their drinks and Remo asked: “There was a redheaded man at the bar. Is he still there?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Remo pressed a bill into her hand. “Don’t mention that I asked.” The waitress agreed, with an appreciative look toward Jessie, indicating that there might be a payment for the service more preferable than cash.

  Remo squeezed her hand lightly, touching a spot between the thumb and index finger, watching her face brighten.

  “Hey, I’m the jealous type,” said Jessie after the girl had left. “Easy now.”

  “Just readying the reserves,” said Remo. “In case you get uppity.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk ethnic,” said Jessie and they both laughed and sipped their drinks until Jessie excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.

  Remo leaned back on the bench, put his toes on the bench on the far side of the table, and concentrated on watching the new belly-dancer through the small cracks between the strands of beads.

  She was an improvement over the first. This, Remo determined, because she seemed to sweat less and she smiled occasionally. The first had danced as if her primary interest were in not putting a heavy foot through one of the thin floorboards. This one danced as if there were something more on her mind than mere survival.

  She finished one dance to scattered applause from the half-empty room and began another.

  And then another.

  And then Remo wondered where Jessie was. He waited a few more minutes, then looked out through the beaded drape into the room. She was not to be seen.

  The waitress stood in the back of the large room, keeping a watchful eye on the small tables and Remo motioned to her.

  She came forward with a smile. “Check, sir?”

  “The lady I was with? Did you see her leave?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Would you check in the ladies’ room and see if she is there? Her name is Miss Jenkins.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  A moment later the girl returned to Remo. “No, sir. She is not in there. The room is quite empty.”

  “Is there another door out of there?”

  “Yes sir, there is a door that leads into a back alley.”

  Remo grabbed bills from his pocket and pushed them into the girl’s hand. “Thanks,” he said. As he moved toward the ladies’ room, he glanced at the bar. The red-haired man was gone.

  Remo went into the ladies’ room, past the single stall and the small mirror table and chair, to a push-bar fire door. He opened it and went outside, finding himself in a narrow dark alley, black at one end where it ended against an old building, bright at the other end where it admitted the light from Revolutionary Avenue.

  And he saw what he had feared, a crumpled pile that looked black against the splash of light from the street, lying against a wall of the alley. He ran forward. It was Jessie.

  She looked up at him, recognized him, and smiled. The blood from her head wound ran slowly down her face.

  He saw the wound was serious.

  “Who was it?”

  “Redhead. From Clogg. Wanted to know about you.”

  “It’s all right,” Remo said. “Don’t talk anymore.”

  “S’okay,” said Jessie. “I didn’t talk at all.” And she smiled at Remo again, and then slowly, almost lazily, her eyes closed and her head drooped off to the side.

  She was dead.

  Remo stood up and looked down at the body of the girl that had only a few minutes ago been warm and bright and loving, and he took pains to remove from himself any feeling of rage or anger that might be found there. When he was sure there was nothing left except cold determination, he simply walked away from her body and went out onto the street.

  In the mercury lights that illuminated the street, red blood looked black, and a black spot on the sidewalk to the right of the alley pointed Remo in the right direction.

  He caught up to the redheaded man in two blocks.

  The man was strolling casually, unconcerned, back toward the hotel where Clogg and Remo both stayed, probably to report, Remo thought.

  Moving silently through the light-bright streets, Remo came up alongside the man. The man wore a dark sports shirt and dark slacks. Remo reached out his right hand, spanning it wide, and caught hold of the man’s back, just above his belt buckle, grasping the two heavy vertical ropes of muscles that ran up and down alongside the spinal column.

  The man gasped in pain.

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said Remo coldly.

  They were passing a tailoring and dry cleaning shop which was closed for the night. Still holding the man’s back, steering him with the painful pressure of five iron-hard fingers, Remo used his left hand to smash open the door.

  He pushed it open, then propelled the man into the darkened store ahead of him. Remo stopped to close the door behind him.

  The man was leaning against the counter, facing Remo, his eyes glinting brightly in the reflected light from the street.

  “What is this, buddy?” he said in an American accent.

  “Do you have a knife? A gun?” asked Remo. “If you do, get them out. It’ll make it easier for me.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t have any weapons.”

  “Then the sap you used on the girl. Get that,” said Remo. His voice was cold and knife-edged, as dark as the store, as empty of feeling as death.

  “All right, jewboy, if you insist,” the man said. He reached into his back pocket and brought out a lead-loaded, policeman’s leather blackjack.

  “What’d Clogg want you to do?”

  “Pump the girl. Find out who you were. I didn’t get a chance. She collapsed too fast.” Remo could see the man’s teeth shine white as he smiled. “You made it easy. Now I can pump you.”

  “Do that,” said Remo. “Do that.”

  “I’ll go easy on you,” said the redheaded man.

  He came toward Remo, the lead club raised professionally at shoulder level in his right hand, his left hand bent up in front of his face to ward off any punches.

  But no punches came. Instead Remo stood there, and allowed him to swing his blackjack toward Remo’s temple.

  But the blackjack missed, and then the redheaded man felt it plucked from his fingers, as if he were no stronger than a child.

  And then his arm was behind his back and he was being propelled toward the back of the store, and he felt a pain in the back of his neck, and the blackness of the store gave way to a greater blackness of his mind and he felt himself fall into unconsciousness.

  He woke up moments later to a strange clinking sound.

  His back was on something soft, but his mouth felt funny. What was it, he wondered as he moaned into consciousness. And his mouth felt really strange. It was filled with something.

  He felt himself choking. His mouth was filled with his teeth. He looked.

  There was Remo Goldberg, standing over him, cracking the weighted lead blackjack down casually, rhythmically, into the red haired man’s face, breaking off his teeth one at a time.

  The redhead spat, spraying the air
with teeth and blood.

  The blackjack came down again. More teeth splintered. The redhead tried to get up, but a finger in his solar plexus locked him in place as if he had been pinned to a board.

  “Stop,” he cried.

  Remo stopped.

  “What’d Clogg want?”

  “He wanted me to pump the girl. Find out who you were. She didn’t say anything.”

  “Why’d Clogg want to know?”

  “He’s got an oil deal with Baraka. Your formula might threaten it. He wants to know who else knows about it.”

  “You have anything to do with those dead oil scientists in the United States?”

  “No, no,” the man protested, and Remo knew he was telling the truth.

  “All right, pal.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” the man asked, frightened to the edge of panic.

  “Kill you,” said Remo.

  “You can’t do that.”

  “There’s an interesting difference there in schools of thought,” said Remo. “You say I can’t, but I say I can. Who’s right? In the morning when they find your body, we’ll see I am.”

  And then he slapped the blackjack down into the redheaded man’s mouth, shoving it into his throat, canceling out any chance the man had to scream, but stopping just short of the point where the sap would have cut off the redheaded man’s breathing.

  Now the redhead recognized where he was and why it was soft. He was lying on an ironing table, the professional kind that dry cleaners used to steam creases into clothes.

  Remo smiled at him in the darkness, then lowered the top half of the table down onto him. The redhead felt the heat begin to sandwich his body.

  Remo grabbed a coat hanger and twisted it through the handles of the top and bottom parts of the ironing table, fastening it together. He went to the bottom of the table and turned the heat up to full burn, and then pressed the button activating the steamer.

  The redhead heard the hiss first, then felt the hot steam begin to blast out of both halves of the board; through his thin summery clothing he felt burning pain as it hit his body.

  “You should be well creased by morning,” said Remo.

  The redheaded man started to talk, tried to say something but couldn’t with the blackjack in his mouth.