Union Bust

by Warren Murphy

  “Yes sir,” said Dr. Smith.

  “It seems as if nothing has happened to delay what I feared,” came the voice famous to millions of Americans, the voice they heard in State of the Union messages, on national addresses, the voice that told them their nation had a leader.

  “It will not come to pass, sir.”

  “I would have hoped that it would have been stopped by now.”

  “Anything else, sir?”

  “No. That’s all.”

  “If it will make you feel any better, sir, we will have the danger removed before the planned announcement tomorrow.”

  “Then they are going to create that union, aren’t they?”

  “Sir, goodbye.”

  Dr. Smith hung up. He checked his watch. Two more minutes. He flicked on the computer readout. The first paragraphs dealt with a stock swindle by a major corporation. In all his years as director of the organization, he privately estimated that big business stole more than seventeen times the amount that outside organized crime did. But business was easier to handle. A leak to a newspaper columnist would stop the richest and most powerful business in the country. A set of engineering plans for a faulty car that one corporate giant had failed to recall, hoping the flaw would not be exposed, lest the callback cut into profits. That one had been fun. It was addressed to a famous muckraking columnist but delivered to the desk of the motor company president. He scarcely had the envelope open before he ordered the callback.

  In the sight of the organization, a faulty car was mass murder.

  The telephone rang.

  “Hello there, fella,” came Remo’s voice, brimming with new joy. “Did you catch the evening news?”

  “I did,” said Smith dryly.

  “I have to say it. I was fantastic. I had them eating out of my hands. What did you think of the speech?”

  “Routine,” said Smith.

  “Routine, hell. A standing ovation of seven minutes. The head of the American Legion only got three minutes and Jethro himself barely got eight minutes on his inauguration speech yesterday. You see the way Jethro hugged me on the podium. He had to. Couldn’t let me walk away with the convention.”

  “If I may interrupt your political career for a moment, how do we stand on the survival of the nation?”

  “Oh, that. Don’t sweat. Will do. They have yet to present a problem which our resources cannot overcome. They have yet to build the barricade we cannot storm, the wall we cannot scale, the weapon we cannot smash. We are a new generation, born in…”

  “You have until tomorrow,” said Dr. Harold Smith and slammed down the phone. Remo had gone from assassin to politician without ever stopping at human.

  Remo heard the click of the phone. He hung up the receiver and looked at Chiun. Chiun had thought his song was beautiful, confessed that when he was young in Sinanju he had daydreamed of becoming a great political leader. Chiun rose and mounted a hotel bed. His arms waved and he began an oration, the rough translation being, “Drive the villainous oppressors from sacred Korea.”

  “That’s pretty good,” said Remo. “Did you give it often?”

  “I gave it not at all. You see we assassins of Sinanju usually worked for the oppressors. My father heard me once in a field, practicing, and he explained that the oppressor put food on our table. The oppressor put a roof over our head. Without discord and violence, the entire economy of Sinanju would be bankrupt. In many ways, Sinanju is a little corner of the rest of the world.”

  “The greatest assassins who have ever lived, Master of Sinanju,” said Remo.

  Chiun bowed politely, accepting the accolade which was naturally due from anyone wise enough to perceive such a truth.

  “I got work tonight. I’ll be out. You want me to bring back something?”

  “Bring back victory in your teeth,” said Chiun, and Remo laughed. They would sometimes watch movies on television and the violent ones were the funniest. One of the lines in a war movie was, “Bring back victory in your teeth.” It was so amateurish, Chiun never forgot it.

  “I’ll bring back some wild rice, perhaps. And maybe some cod.”

  “Cod is oily,” said Chiun. “Try and do some work with the elbows tonight.”

  “Why, am I losing something?”

  “No. It’s just good to work the elbows from time to time. Try haddock. Don’t forget. We had halibut Monday.”

  “Yes, little father.”

  And Remo left Chiun orating to himself on the bed, about the poor man throwing off the shackles of the oppressor until all men walked in peace and freedom and beauty.

  · · ·

  The building was not hard to find. It was surrounded by an electric fence twelve feet high, lit by yellow floods in a muggy gray night, smelling of fresh-turned sod and new-planted trees. Remo set the double-wrapped bag of fish behind a small bush, and upjumped, right hand high, to one of the pole tips supporting the fence. He balanced on the tip, his right arm straight beneath him, his legs outstretched to avoid the electric current. It was the nature of electric fences that the supporting poles were insulators, thus making the fences effective barriers against only those people who did not normally practice getting through them. An electric fence, thought Remo, was a filter to keep out the harmless.

  He surveyed the bottom ground with a practiced eye. No planted little device on the other side, but to be sure, he single hand jumped a good twelve feet out and landed like a cat, quick, smooth and moving. Over a little knoll he saw the building. It rose, metal glinting into the moonlight like four vertical aluminum coffins with brass trimming. Its base was floodlit.

  Remo moved over the new, fresh earth, with the smooth silence of many years of practice, hardly thinking, letting his body do what it knew how to do. He crossed the cement driveway with the feet themselves looking for the pebbles that could cause the attention-getting scrape, then on to the base of the building, behind the floodlight, where he stood in darkness. Ten stories it was, and the windows without grips or ledges but set flush into the wall like a smooth carpenter’s joint.

  Not bad. Remo sidemoved to the corner, scampering over a hose left carelessly for the morning dew. The air reeked of fresh paint and acids used to polish the building wall.

  If he couldn’t get in from the bottom, then he would enter from the top. No one defended an isolated building from a top entrance. He wrapped himself around the corner, placing the ridges of his open palms against the cool metal and pressing his knees directly into, not downward but into, the metal walls. While the hands uplifted the knees maintained.

  Simultaneously his body moved, one simple complete jerk of all the appropriate muscles, then another. In and out, in and out, he began to rise like a jigsaw going through wood. Rapidly to the point where extra energy decreased upward speed and then more slowly for the maximum rise, keeping the rhythm perfect and the momentum going up, press in, release, in, release, in, release, hands bringing up, legs holding, the smell of the wall against his cheek, the cool metal going down along his stomach, the top of the building coming closer and then, the edge of the gutter, grab up, and over, feet up, and leaning against the gutter, and looking down at the floods ten stories below him.

  Let’s hear it for me, he said, wishing Chiun had been there. Of course, Chiun would never admit the quality of the rise. But just his negation of it would be a compliment. Remo brushed off his hands. The palms were slightly burned. Damn. He certainly didn’t want to have to go down with burned palms. The descent was far more difficult.

  Remo swung down from the gutter and felt the top of the topmost window with his feet. Smooth. No ledge. No opening. Impossible. He worked his way along the gutter, a spider-gliding man ten stories high, his feet feeling for window ledges, openings, something. At the corners of the building, he kicked around and still no openings. The four sides, ten stories high, were like the front, defended. He would have to kick in.

  He selected the center of the closest window and tapped it for sound. The glass sounded s
oft, no sharp hard response to the sole of his shoe. He was afraid of that. It might be glass. It might not be glass. He did not want to come into a window and bounce back ten stories high. Too chancy.

  There were old assassins and bold assassins, as Chiun had said. But there were no old bold assassins. It was the mark of amateurism to risk one’s life unnecessarily. Remo pulled his body up to the roof. He felt along the sloping metal. Nothing. He shimmied to the apex. Nothing.

  He would have to descend with damaged palms, the key instrument in wall movement. Or he could wait, he thought, until next day someone said:

  “What is that idiot doing on that roof ten stories high and how did he get there?”

  Remo blew on his palms and swung down over the gutter. Here we go, he thought, and taking extra precaution, pushed too hard and felt himself go away from the building and free-fall momentarily until he glided his body back to the metal edge. He would have to friction cut the fall until he got a grip or landed. The way to get killed was to try to stop the fall completely, as a normal person might.

  About the third story, he lost the friction cut completely and had to take the fall with a decompression of the legs. He landed in the soft earth, but with a stinging, sharp pain in his ribs and chest. The feet were buried to the ankles. Remo eased himself out, limping.

  He would have to risk a door where he could be seen. He tried the door. It was locked, naturally, but when he tried to smash his way through, he discovered that the doors were not metal but a yielding latticework that surrendered to his hands, then repelled them. He tried the windows from the ground. Lucky he had not tried them fully from the roof. No entrance.

  At the fence, a guard was waiting by Remo’s package of fish.

  “Enjoying yourself?” asked the guard.

  “What are you doing with my haddock?”

  “What are you doing on restricted grounds?”

  “Looking for my haddock,” said Remo, snatching the bag from a guard who could have sworn he had a secure grip on it.

  “I’m going to have to take you in.”

  “Do not bother me,” said Remo. “I am frustrated at this moment and I do not wish to be bothered. I must confess failure to the one person in the world to whom I hate to confess failure.”

  “You got other problems, sonny. Breaking and entering, trespassing and if I say so, assault upon my person.”

  “What?” said Remo, trying to formulate an explanation for Chiun.

  “Assault upon my person,” said the guard.

  “Okay,” said Remo. He broke the guard’s face and trotted back into the city.

  Chiun smiled at first when he heard of Remo’s failure. He laid this to early, impure eating habits, to disrespect for the master, to failure to understand the beauty of the great American art form. But as Remo went over detail by detail his approach to entering the building and as Chiun nodded that each step was correct, a deep grimness appeared on the old man’s face.

  “So what did I do wrong?” asked Remo.

  Chiun was silent a moment. Then very slowly he spoke.

  “My son. It is with heavy heart, great sadness, and shame for the Master of Sinanju that I must tell you, you have done nothing wrong. You have done right, and the wisdom given you was inadequate for the task. The disgrace is upon me and my family.”

  “But it’s just a building. You had me practice on atomic installations.”

  “Those installations were designed to prohibit the entrance of people who used guns and cars and tanks and various implements of Western technology. This building was designed to repel us.”

  “But who the hell in this country knows the methods of Sinanju?”

  “Some know Ninji,” said Chiun, referring to the Japanese art that teaches people to move at night and penetrate castles.

  “But the teaching of Ninji is only part of Sinanju.”

  Chiun was silent. “I myself must look. That’s all we need from the building for now.”

  I’ll work it from the other end, from Jethro,” said Remo. “And, little father…”

  “Yes?” said the Master of Sinanju preparing to darken his face and don the robes of the dark so that he could become part of the night.

  “Bring home victory in your teeth,” said Remo.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE HARDWARE STORES WERE CLOSED. Remo had to open one. He went through the front door of a little shop around the corner from his hotel, because it had a special kind of burglar alarm that held a special kind of guarantee for Remo. If the door were snapped open very quickly and then closed again just as quickly, the alarm turned itself off and one could walk right in.

  Remo selected a Stanley crowbar about three feet long, $4.98. He forgot whether there was a sales tax in Chicago or how much that tax would be, so he left $5, assuming that he had saved the owner a salesman’s fee. He wrapped the crowbar in brown paper, careful not to touch it with his bare hands. Then he slipped from the shop, resetting the alarm, and went to Abe Bludner’s room.

  Bludner had a suite in the same hotel as Remo and Chiun.

  Remo knocked on Bludner’s door.

  “Who is it?” came Stanziani’s voice.

  “Remo.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to see Bludner.”

  “He’s not in.”

  “Open the door.”’

  “I said he’s not in.”

  “Either you’ll open the door, or I’ll open the door, but the door is going to open.”

  “You want a table in your face?”

  “If you have to open the door to throw it, yes.”

  The door opened and a heavy, lacquered coffee table came flying through it. Remo caught the table’s center with his free left hand. A little chop down its center. Split.

  Stanziani stood in the doorway in gray slacks and sports shirt. He looked at the left side of the table against the far wall, and the right side near the door. Then he looked at Remo and smiled weakly. A dark stain began to spread in the crotch of his grey slacks.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” said Remo.

  “Wanna come in?” asked Tony.

  “Yeah,” said Remo. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  A voice bellowed from another room.

  “Did you let in the kid? I told you I didn’t want to let in the kid.” It was Bludner.

  Remo followed the voice to the bedroom. Bludner was part of a three-handed card game. The door to another living room was open. Three middle-aged, matronly women, obviously the wives, were playing cards.

  “You must be Remo,” called out one of them. “I’m Mrs. Bludner. Did you eat? Why didn’t Abe tell me you were so cute. Hey, Abe, he’s cute. He’s the first cute official you’ve ever had. The rest look like gangsters. Answer me, Abe.”

  Bludner shot Remo a baleful look.

  “What is it, Dawn?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me he was so cute? I don’t think he’s faggy at all. Some weight you could use, however. Did you eat?”

  “I ate. Thank you, ma’am. Abe, why didn’t you tell me your wife was so attractive?”

  Giggles from the living room.

  “What do you want, kid?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” said Bludner.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s this, you come in the driver’s union because I say so and then you’re national recording secretary without I even know? What’s this?”

  “Abe, you know I’m loyal to the local,” said Remo, the politician,

  “Loyal to the local, you don’t even know the local.”

  “Abe, you should be happy. Now the local’s got a national officer.”

  “I should have been asked. Jethro should have cleared it with me. How does that make me look to my own men, Jethro appointing someone from my local without it being cleared by me.”

  “Jethro is a sonuvabitch and I don’t trust him,” said Remo, the pol
itician. “But you can trust me. I’m your man in there,” said Remo the politician.

  “Trust you, kid? I don’t even know you.”

  “Are your feelings hurt?” asked Remo.

  “Hurt? How the hell could two young punks like you and Jethro hurt me? I’ve spit better men than you two out of my mouth. Hey, Tony. Am I hurt?”

  “No, boss,” answered Stanziani. He was in the other room, changing.

  “Hey, Paul. Am I hurt?”

  “No boss,” came a voice from a far off bathroom.

  “He’s hurt,” came a woman’s voice from the living room. Abe Bludner left the cards and shut the door to the living room.

  “You really know how to hurt, kid,” said Abe “Crowbar” Bludner.

  “I’m sorry,” said Remo.

  “That for me?” asked Bludner.

  “This. No. It’s for me. It’s a crowbar. I’m going to hang it in my office to remind me forever that I owe my career to Abe “Crowbar” Bludner.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s such a good idea,” said Bludner. He reached for the crowbar, and Remo slipped off the paper. Bludner grabbed it and took a few practice swings, like a batter warming up. Then he brought the crowbar a hair from Remo’s head with a great swishing of air.

  “Scare you, kid?” asked Bludner.

  “No” said Remo. “I knew you wouldn’t hit me, Abe. We’re from the same local.”

  “Don’t you ever forget it, kid. You hear?”

  Bludner returned the crowbar and Remo carefully wrapped it without getting his own fingerprints on it. They shook hands and Remo departed. No, Remo did not care to make a pinochle foursome.

  He hid the crowbar under the mattress of his hotel bed, careful not to smudge the prints any more than he had to. The crowbar would be for the extreme plan, if all else didn’t work.

  Jethro now had a whole floor in the posh Delstoyne Hotel across town. The elevators did not stop there unless permission was granted by telephone from the top floor where Jethro was staying. The stairwells were locked. When the recording secretary, Remo Jones, asked permission to see Jethro, this was surprisingly denied because Jethro wasn’t in.

  “Where is he?” asked Remo.