Balance of Power

Chapter Three

The phone rang twenty times. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.

When he was certain it would ring until he either answered it or succumbed to massive brain damage from the noise, Barney Daniels stumbled over an obstacle course of empty tequila bottles to pick up the receiver.

"What do you want," he growled.

A woman's voice, laced with southern honey, answered. "You didn't call."

"I don't love you any more," Daniels said automatically. That one usually worked with unidentifiable women.

"You don't even know me."

"Maybe that's why I don't love you."

He hung up, satisfied with a romance ended well. He should drink a toast to that romance, whoever it was with. It had probably been a glorious night. It might even have been worth remembering, but there was no chance of that now. He would give that romance a proper posthumous tribute with a drink of tequila.

Barney rooted through the mountain of empty bottles. Not a drop.

Booze-guzzling bitch, he thought. No doubt the unrememberable woman, selfish wretch that she was, had sucked up the last ounce of his Jose Macho, callously unconcerned about his morning cocktail. The whore. He was glad he was rid of her. Now he would drink a toast to having gotten rid of her. If he could only find a drink.

His eagle eye spotted an upright bottle in the corner of the room with a good half-inch left inside. Ah, the queen, he said to himself as he lumbered toward it, arms outstretched. A woman among women. He raised the bottle to his lips and accepted its soul-restoring contents.

The phone rang again. "Yes," he answered cheerfully.

"The CIA is going to kill you," the woman said.

"Was it wonderful for you, too?" Barney crooned.

"What are you talking about?"

"Last night."

"I've never met you, Mr. Daniels," the woman said sharply. "I called you last week, but you said you were too busy drinking to talk. You said you'd call me back."

"Call... me... unreliable," Barney sang in a shaky baritone, snapping his fingers.

"I am trying to tell you, Mr. Daniels," the woman shouted, "that you have been marked for death by the Central Intelligence Agency, your former employer."

Barney rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "You woke me up to tell me that?"

"I am calling to offer you sanctuary."

"Do you have a bar?"

"Yes."

"I'll be right over."

"In return for that sanctuary, I would like you to perform a small task for me."

"Shit," Barney said. The world was right. There was no such thing as a free lunch. He was about to hang up when the woman added, "I will pay you a thousand dollars."

"Well, well," he said, suddenly interested. There was still the better part of a month to go before his next Calchex pension check. All that remained of Snodgrass's last payment to Barney were the empty bottles on the floor.

"For one day's work," the woman continued tantalizingly.

"Provided it is very legal and above board and does not involve politics or espionage," Barney said.

Who knew that the woman wasn't a secretary in Snodgrass's office? Sneaky Snodgrass wouldn't be above doing that.

"I will discuss your work when you get here."

She gave him detailed instructions on how to reach a large brownstone building on the northern end of Park Avenue, a building just across the socially acceptable line that separates the very poor from the very rich in Fun City.

"You will arrive between midnight and one A.M. by taxi. When you get out of the taxi you will place a white handkerchief over your mouth three times. Pretend to cough. Then lower the handkerchief and walk up the stairs and stand at the door. I warn you. Don't try to approach the house any other way."

"I'm just glad we're not involved in anything illegal," Daniels said.

The woman ignored him. "Do you understand everything I've said?"

"Certainly," Barney answered. "There's only one problem."

"You'll be paid very well for your problems," the woman said.

"This problem requires money. You see, I've invested very heavily in American Peace Bonds and I am without liquid capital."

"That will be straightened out when you get here."

"That's the problem. If it's not straightened out first, I won't get there."

"You're broke?"

"Said brilliantly."

"I'll have a boy at your home in two hours."

He was the biggest boy Barney had ever seen, six-and-a-half feet tall with a shaved black head shaped like a dum-dum bullet without a crease. He was muscular and the muscles apparently did not stop until they reached his toes, which were encased in golden slippers with toes curling up to a metallic point.

In the lapel button hole of his black suit he wore a gold crescent with the title Grand Vizier stamped on it in ersatz Arabic lettering.

"I am to escort you," said the giant.

"Where are you from?"

"The woman."

"I was supposed to receive money, not an escort," Barney said.

"I have my orders."

"Well, I don't move without cash, Ali Baba, so just hop back on your flying carpet and go tell her that."

"Will you come with me if I give you money?" The giant's eyes dripped hatred at the thought of negotiating with the white devil.

"Of course. That will indicate your good faith. That's all I'm interested in. It's not the money, naturally."

The Grand Vizier of the Afro-Muslim Brotherhood took from his jacket pocket a hundred-dollar bill. He offered it to Daniels coldly.

"One hundred dollars?" Daniels screamed, edging back into his foyer. "One hundred dollars to go all the way from Weehawken to New York? You must be out of your mind. What if I have to stop for something to eat?"

The Grand Vizier's eyes kept hating. "One hundred dollar too much for a little ride across the river. It only cost you thirty cent on the bus and another sixty cent for the subway. Maybe six buck by cab."

"That's for peasants," Daniels said and shut the door.

The gentle knocking almost shook the timbers of the large house. Daniels opened the door.

"I give you two hundred dollar."

Daniels shrugged. A man had to earn a living, and anyhow everybody cribbed on their expenses.

The Grand Vizier handed over another hundred-dollar bill. "Here," he said, and the tone of his voice made it clear that he felt Barney had come cheap, that he was just another piece of chattel whose price the Grand Vizier carried as pocket money.

Catching the implication in the Grand Vizier's voice, Barney looked into his fierce eyes and then tore the second hundred-dollar bill in half with the finesse of a courtier.

"That's what I think of your money," Barney said. He made a mental note to buy Scotch tape on the way back. Two little strips, and the bill would be good as new. "I just wanted to see how bad you needed me." When the Grand Vizier wasn't looking, Barney stuffed the two halves of the bill into his pocket. One never knew.

Their co-equal relationship established, Barney opened the door to leave with the Grand Vizier. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a shiny object inadequately concealed in the shrubbery. Sunlight glinted off the object, which Barney recognized as a microphone. Only one man, Barney knew, would be stupid enough to place metal equipment in the one spot of shrubbery accessible to morning sunlight. Max Snodgrass undoubtedly found the best reception there, and the CIA surveillance manual, which Snodgrass wrote, insisted that equipment be placed in an area of maximum reception.

"Meet me in Mickey's Pub," Barney said quietly. "Two blocks east, turn left. The right hand side."

"I permit no alcohol to enter my body," the Grand Vizier said disdainfully.

"Mickey's Pub, or I keep the two bills and don't show," Barney whispered. "And you can tell the Avon company that men's cosmetics are for faggots," he yelled for Max Snodgrass's benefit.

America, thy name is perfidy, Barney lamented as he hoisted his bulky frame through the back bedroom window and dropped fifteen feet into the overgrown tomato garden below. He landed crouched on his feet, then rolled into an easy somersault to absorb the shock. Casting off your unwanted veterans, he thought bitterly, forcing them to ply their trade for a pittance to the highest bidder. Only the vision of the woman's well-stocked bar kept him going as he crawled through the jungle of his back yard into the woods behind.

While relieving himself behind a tree, he noticed a car with two men parked near his house. One was a thin, youngish man. The other was a tiny, ancient Oriental. Max's henchmen, he thought, with no particular emotion. He would doubtless see them again.

He ambled off into the woods to take the scenic route to Mickey's Pub.

"This thing must be Emperor Smith's informant," Chiun said as Max Snodgrass, hair plastered tightly to his head, tiptoed into view from behind the shrubbery. Snodgrass looked toward the car and nodded crisply.

"Dipshit," Remo said, nodding back. "He ought to be the target instead of that poor used-up drunk inside. Anybody who combs his hair like that deserves to work for the CIA."

"It is not your duty to criticize our Emperor's commands, incompetent one," Chiun said, his papery face bland.

"Lay off, Little Father," Remo said irritably. Together they watched Snodgrass swagger up the steps to Daniels's door and ring the bell. "I hope Daniels shoots this nincompoop."

Chiun whirled around in his seat to face him. "Remo, you are indulging yourself in a dangerous game. There is nothing more deadly to an assassin than his own emotions."

"All right. Then you tell me. Why should I kill this guy?" Remo asked, his voice rising. "All he ever did was to expose the CIA as the clowns they are. Look at that cretin." Max was tapping his foot on the doormat impatiently, his hands on his hips.

"Yes. I can hear his breathing from here." Chiun clucked dispiritedly. "Nevertheless, it is not your place to ask why. You must perform the task you have been trained for, so that Emperor Smith will continue to send his yearly tribute of gold to Sinanju. Otherwise, the poor people of my village will starve and be forced to send their babies back to the sea."

"Sinanju has got to be the richest village in Korea by now," Remo said. "How many submarines full of gold does it take to keep those beanbags in your hometown from tossing their kids into the ocean, anyway? Why don't they just use the Pill?"

"Do not make light of the plight of my village," Chiun said. "Were it not for the Master of Sinanju, they would be destitute. We will do our work without complaint, difficult as that must be to one whose fat white being is marbled with willfulness and discontent." He snapped his jaws shut and was still.

Max Snodgrass shrugged after ten minutes in front of the door and headed toward the car. Remo revved up the engine.

"I suppose James Bond is going to come over for a little chat now," Remo said. "He probably wants to let us in on the top secret information that Daniels isn't home." Remo waited. He wanted to peel away just as Snodgrass approached the car, so that the wake of gravel and dust would splatter over Sriodgrass's expensive suit.

But Snodgrass stopped halfway, looking intently at Daniels's mailbox. He opened it. There was a letter inside, a big thick one in a chartreuse-colored envelope. Gingerly he whisked it out. From the car, Remo could see a name in the upper left corner.

A look of shock came over Snodgrass's face as he stared at the name. His face seemed to say it couldn't be. It couldn't be.

The name on the envelope was important to Max Snodgrass, because it was to be the last thought he ever had. At the very moment when the synapses in Max Snodgrass's brain were vibrating the language code for that name, the green envelope in his hand was exploding with the force of two sticks of dynamite and sprinkling the flesh of Max Snodgrass across the lawn like pieces of shish kebab.

"Daniels, you old rummy, you did it," Remo said. He turned on his windshield wipers to clean the red debris off the window.

"Very sloppy," Chiun said, his nose wrinkled in disgust. "A boom destroys the purity of the assassin's art. This Daniels is also a loutish white fool, I see."

"You mean bomb," Remo said. "And I hear the police." He dropped the car into gear.

"One moment." Chiun opened the door and rose slowly. "Sitting in an automobile is most unpleasant for the hip joints."

"This is no time to stretch your legs, Little Father. We don't want to have to murder the entire Weehawken police force."

"The police are still a quarter-mile away," Chiun said, and then whirred through the mess of Snodgrass's remains with a speed so fast even Remo could not follow all of his moves. "The police are now two hundred yards in the distance," Chiun said, returning to the car. "Let us leave, Remo."

Remo tore down the street and onto the highway, the sirens growing faint behind him.

"What'd you do back there, Chiun?" Remo asked as he turned onto a dirt road and slowed to ninety.

The old Oriental uncurled his delicate hand, revealing a pile of small pieces of green paper, their edges charred brown. "These are from the envelope which contained the boom." He turned the pieces over, one by one. "Some have writing on them. This one has a name. It says 'Denise Daniels.' Who is that?"

"I don't know," Remo said, "but it sure seemed important to Snotlocker or whatever his name was. We'll send it to Smith. And it's bomb." Chiun put the pieces inside the folds of his robe.

"This looks like the place," Remo said as he and Chiun entered the side door of Mickey's Pub, its windows decorated with dirt and neon shamrocks.

"The stink of it assaults the nostrils," Chiun said. "I shall slow my breathing so as to inhale as little of this unwholesome odor as possible."

Inside, a dozen fat, pink-faced men were entertaining themselves at the bar with jokes about the unusual footwear of a tall black man standing at the other end of the bar, drinking ginger ale.

Remo and Chiun wound their way across the floor, littered with peanut shells and broken pretzels, to a sticky table in the far corner.

"Is this indeed the restaurant at which this American person, Daniels, partakes of his meals?" Chiun asked, incredulous.

"That's what Smitty says. But he doesn't eat. He just drinks."

"How long must we wait in this iniquitous sink?"

"Till he shows up, I guess."

"Perhaps I will return to the car."

"Hold it, Chiun, that's him coming in now. The one in the white suit." Remo indicated Daniels, whose appearance was only slightly more presentable than it had been in the newspaper photograph taken after he had emerged from three months in the Hispanian jungle.

Daniels sat next to the Grand Vizier. The men at the bar stared. They were dressed in rough checkered shirts, with short jackets and dirty fedoras whose years of internal sweat had clearly overwhelmed their sweat bands and stained the hats a darker shade. They all drank beer, slowly enough so that the foam was left in rings down toward the bottom of the glass where the beer looked dead and yellow.

As the Grand Vizier stared stonily into his glass of ginger ale, the white men discussed the worthlessness of some persons who only liked to drink, fornicate and fight. That was all some persons were good for.

This concept intrigued Barney and he asked if any of the gentlemen at the end of the bar had personally developed a polio vaccine, discovered penicillin, invented the radio, discovered atomic power, invented writing, discovered fire or made any great contributions to the thought of man.

The men at the other end of the bar disclosed that the late President John F. Kennedy was not black.

Barney informed them that not only was President Kennedy not black, he was not related to the men at the end of the bar any more than he was to Barney's tall black friend.

They said that perhaps the president was not related to them but that Barney obviously was related to his dark friend. This, they thought, was very funny. So did Barney, who said that for a minute the men had given him a fright because he thought he might have been related to them instead of to the Grand Vizier, who knew how to dress like a human being, which they did not. Then he inquired of them which ditches they had dug and if any of them had seen their wives sober in the last decade.

For some reason the discussion seemed to end there with someone throwing a punch in the cause of Irish womanhood, honest labor and killing the dirty nigger lover. It was a magnificent fight. Bottles, chairs, fists. Fast. Furious. Destruction. Courage.

Barney watched every minute of it, and the Vizier did himself proud. Single-handedly, he seemed to be able to fend off the entire population of the establishment. Chairs broke over his head, fists smashed into his nose, broken bottles drew blood. But the Vizier did not fall, and continued to drop men with single strokes of his oaken arms.

Barney would have liked to have seen the finish of the fight and to tell the Grand Vizier what a magnificent man he was, but this was impossible since he was already out the front doors of the saloon, and knew that it was only a matter of seconds before the thin young man and the old Oriental seated in the far corner would be able to fight their way through the melee to get to him.