Bay City Blast

Chapter seven

The fishing boat dropped Remo and Chiun off at a private dock jutting out into the ocean, before going back to the main marina where the mate and captain planned to tell everybody about the giant shark that just seemed to die of old age, but slipped the ropes and dropped to the bottom before they could boat it. In a town whose economic survival depended more and more on shark hunters and stories of great whites caught and almost caught, 90 percent of those who heard the story would smile and quietly consider it a lie. The other 10 percent would keep open minds. They themselves had run into great whites and they knew anything was possible.

When they walked across a hundred yards of sand dune and entered their motel room, Remo and Chiun found Dr. Harold W. Smith sitting in a chair. He was not watching television or reading a newspaper. He was simply sitting, as if sitting were an end in itself and he had worked hard to learn the technique of doing it well.

"You should've seen the shark we had, Smitty," Remo said. "Thirty feet." He spread his hands as wide apart as he could to illustrate.

Behind him, Chiun held up his right hand, with thumb and index finger separated by only about three inches. Silently, he mouthed the words to Smith, "A minnow."

"Yes, yes," Smith said. "I'm glad you've both enjoyed your vacation so much."

"Do I detect the past tense there?" Remo asked.

"Actually it was the present perfect," Smith said. "But past will do. I have an assignment."

"Bay City?"

"Yes," Smith said.

"I knew it. I knew it. I knew you were going to change your mind. I knew I should have hit that guy while we were there."

"Please, Remo," Chiun said. "Don't talk about hits. It makes you sound like some kind of killer."

"Sorry, Chiun," Remo said. He turned back to Smith. "All right, I'll finish it tomorrow."

"You don't understand," Smith said.

"What don't I understand?"

"You've got the job assignment wrong. I don't want to dispose of Mayor Nobile."

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to be his bodyguard. Protect him."

"From what? The FBI? An overdose of cavatelli? What?"

"I don't know from whom or from what. He got a threatening letter today from someone who called himself 'The Eraser.' "

Remo sprawled down on the bed and looked over at Smith. Chiun turned on the television set and pulled the vanity chair around so he was sitting six inches from the screen. A sports program was showing the full contact karate championships. Chiun turned off the set in disgust. He had hoped there would be an ice skating show on. He had fallen in love with one of the skaters. When he found out she was married to a football player, he watched football hoping the player would be killed and cursed defensive linemen for their inability to make him into a vegetable.

" 'The Eraser?' " Remo said.

Smith nodded.

"Why should we care if Rocco Nobile gets himself knocked off by The Eraser or by anybody else for that matter? I told you he was turning that city over to the mob. What's it to us?" He put his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling.

Smith cleared his throat. Chiun went into the bathroom to count the bars of soap. If there were extras, they would go into one of his trunks.

"Remo," Smith said, "a number of years ago the CIA had an agent in Europe named Wardell Pinkerton the Third."

"He must have been a winner," Remo said.

"He was. He was one of the best field agents the CIA ever had. Then he developed heart trouble and had to be moved out of active line duty. He came back to the States."

"And today, I believe, that man is a certified public accountant?" Smith looked at Remo in confusion but Remo was rewarded by Chiun's roar of laughter from the bathroom. They had been in New York City one evening to buy roasted chestnuts and they had happened onto a playhouse off the main theater district. The picture in the box office window illustrating the play was so appalling that they went inside to see it. It was a one-actor monologue with lines so deadly dull that half the audience was asleep in the first ten minutes. And when the actor delivered the line about the public accountant, Chiun could contain himself no longer. He leaped onto the stage and chased the actor off it. He was about to leave when he looked out and saw the seventy-five faces looking up at him from the darkness. He delivered one of the shortest of the Ung poems, and an hour later, when everybody in the audience was asleep, he and Remo left.

"Certified public accountant?" Smith said.

"Never mind," Remo said. "You had to be there. What happened to Pinker Waddington?"

"Wardell Pinkerton the Third. He retired to California. Then his wife and daughter were killed in an accident. He got bored and tired and started drinking too much and one day, he decided the only way to pull himself back together was to go back to work."

"So?"

"So he was recruited at the very highest levels of government for a secret mission. Wardell Pinkerton the Third vanished from the face of the earth."

"What has this got to do with me?" Remo asked. There were 266 pressed board tiles in the ceiling. Nineteen rows of fourteen each. Since Remo had never been able to multiply, he had counted each one of them.

"Well, precisely this," Smith said. "Wardell Pinkerton is Mayor Rocco Nobile."

Remo sat up in bed. "Say it again."

"Rocco Nobile, the mayor of Bay City, is Wardell Pinkerton the Third. He's a federal agent. He's working for us on this program, even though he doesn't know it is our operation. After he vanished from California, he had plastic surgery and then showed up again in Miami, where he used money to make mob connections. We were able to help him with that. We've been moving him around inside organized crime for five years. Then it was time to move. We sent him into Bay City to take over the town."

"But why? Why turn it over to thugs?"

"He has given an open invitation to organized crime to move its operations into Bay City. He's opening the piers so that contraband can move in and out easily. So drugs can flow freely. Mob interests are coming from all over the country. Cutting rooms and jewelry factories for stolen diamonds. Printing facilities for counterfeit stock certificates and securities. Major counting rooms for the nation's biggest illegal gambling operations."

"You still haven't told me why."

"Remo, he's turning it into a safe city, so we can get most of America's crime centralized there. And when we do, we're going to go in and shut it all down at once."

"I got it."

"Now you know why Rocco Nobile has to be kept alive. If anything happens to him now, the mob people will leave before we really get a chance to set them up. Remo, we want to get them all. We want to deal crime a blow that it might never recover from. That's why it's imperative you protect Rocco Nobile... er, Wardell Pinkerton."

"The Third," Remo said.

"Yes."

"All right," Remo said.

Smith said, "Of course, he doesn't know who you are or who you work for. He doesn't even know who he works for. He doesn't know CURE exists."

"Does he know we're coming?"

"He knows a government agent is coming to join his bodyguard staff, but you'll have to be discreet. You can't blow his cover. You've got to be a mob member protecting another mob member," Smith said.

"If I have to wear a pinky ring and a pinstripe suit, I quit," Remo said.

"Do the best you can." Smith stood up and picked up his briefcase from alongside the chair. He looked toward the closed bathroom door and lowered his voice to a whisper. "Perhaps it would be best if he did not accompany you. No attention should be called to this operation and he sometimes makes scenes."

"Leave it with me," Remo said.

Smith spoke aloud. "Give my best regards to Chiun."

"I will."

As the door closed behind Smith, the bathroom door opened. Chiun came out with two small bars of soap and a half-filled box of facial tissues. He carefully placed them into one of his trunks at the far end of the room.

Chiun slammed down the trunk lid with a crack that could have been heard even over the disco bands in the nearby town of Southampton. He picked up a small lamp and threw it through the back window of the motel room.

When he turned to Remo, his face was pale.

"Now what did he mean that I sometimes make scenes?" Chiun demanded.

The Rubout Squad had been given their first assignments by The Eraser.

Nicholas Lizzard had been told to rent two secret apartments in Bay City. He asked Sam Gregory to give him rent money in advance. Two months rent money. For two apartments.

"A thousand dollars," he said.

"That means that you're renting $250 apartments," Gregory said. "I don't think there are $250 apartments in Bay City."

"Ah, yes. Beauty must bow always before the invincible onrush of logic. Eight hundred dollars," said Lizzard who had made his mind up beforehand that he would agree to any reasonable compromise. He had figured that four hundred dollars should cover everything and anything over that was gravy. Or Vodka as the case might be.

"Here's six hundred," said Gregory, taking the money from a small leather money purse he carried in his back pocket.

"A mean and small-spirited man," mumbled Lizzard. He left the motel in Jersey City and rode into Bay City using one of the Rubout Squad's rented cars. He parked halfway down the block from Rocco Nobile's Improvement Association headquarters. He planned to get one apartment there and one apartment near the high-rise where Nobile lived.

But first a drink.

When he left the car, he took a small leather suitcase from the back seat. In the first bar he saw, he ordered, paid for and drank a Vodka. It was early in the morning and the bar was empty. He carried his suitcase into the bathroom and locked the door behind him with a hook and eye.

He opened the suitcase over the small iron-stained, scum-crusted sink. Time to go to work. But first a drink. He sipped a little Vodka from a metal flask inside the suitcase, then, almost reluctantly, capped it and put it away. Inside the suitcase was a cheap plastic makeup kit of cosmetics. Lizzard made up his eyes with false eyelashes, mascara and the dark-blue eye shadow favored by old women and prostitutes. He looked at himself. This was the part he liked best, redoing his eyes. He put on liquid makeup, to cover the blotchy broken blood vessels in his nose, then light pink lipstick and red rouge. Atop his thinning hair, he put a gray curly wig, and stepped back from the mirror. He nodded with satisfaction at his image which he thought made him look like somebody's grandmother. Quickly, he removed his sports shirt and trousers and shoes and socks and donned pantihose, nurse-type women's shoes, and a flowered dress with a sewn-in Polyurethane bosom.

He stood in front of the mirror again, checking himself as he stuffed his male clothing into the suitcase. He was satisfied. One of his best jobs yet. That certainly called for a drink as a reward. He took a long slug out of the Vodka flask, then replaced it under his clothing and snapped the suitcase shut. Done. No one would ever know that one of America's greatest male actors hid underneath that woman's clothing and behind that painted woman's face.

He unlocked the bathroom door and peeked out. The bartender was at the end of the bar, washing glasses, his back to Lizzard, who walked quickly out the front door without looking back. He locked his suitcase in the trunk of his car.

Almost directly across the street from the Bay City Improvement Association, he found a tenement building with a for rent sign. Before ringing the super's bell, he slouched over, changing himself from a six-foot-five man to a six-foot-four woman. He rejected the idea of using a limp. It wouldn't be necessary. His disguise was already perfect. To talk to the superintendent, he used his woman's voice, a high squeaky rattle, punctuated by chuckles.

"Got a lot of apartments," the superintendent said.

"The highest one," Lizzard said. "Me and my boys, we like to be up high."

The front windows of the apartment looked down at the Nobile headquarters.

"How much, sonny?" Lizzard said.

"A hundred a month, includes heat and hot water. What's your name, Mrs.?"

"Mrs. Walker," Lizzard said. "I'll take it." He looked at the superintendent and wondered if he should come on to the burly man. He would swear the superintendent was already infatuated with Mrs. Walker from the way he was staring at "her."

"Two months in advance," the super said.

"Good," said Lizzard. He paid with two hundred in bills that had come from Sam Gregory's roll.

"Me and my boys, we'll be moving in slow over the next couple of days. We gotta wait for our furniture to come."

"Oh? Where's it coming from?"

"Chicago," Lizzard said. "But you know how movers are." He batted his false eyelashes at the superintendent who seemed very anxious to give Mrs. Walker the keys and to leave. Probably realizing that his passion was boiling almost out of control, Lizzard thought. The super went back to his first-floor apartment, where his wife asked him who had looked at the apartment.

"Some old transvestite," the super said. "Wearing women's clothes but he forgot to shave. He looks like hell."

"Pay in advance?"

"Two months."

"Good. Maybe we can attract a colony of transvestites."

Upstairs, Lizzard looked around the apartment and was satisfied with it. He decided that such a good start on the day's work entitled him to a drink or two before he went to rent the second apartment. A real drink, not some kind of hurried sip from a flask.

He was in such a hurry to get to a bar that he forgot to keep slouched over. After four Vodkas, he forgot to use his woman's voice.

No one seemed to mind.

Al Baker had been directed by Sam Gregory to use all his mob contacts to find out just who was moving into Bay City, where they were moving and what they were up to.

The only problem with that assignment was that Al Baker had no mob contacts. He had run numbers in Brooklyn for five years back in the mid-Fifties, and then given it up when his brother got arrested. Since then, he had worked in a laundry, as a used car salesman, a liquor-truck driver and a dram and sewer cleaner.

He was carrying five hundred dollars of Sam Gregory's money in his pocket.

"Mafia informants don't come cheap," Baker had said. Gregory had nodded and paid.

When he had been running numbers, Baker had dreamed of working his way up through the ranks until he was the head of America's underworld. Along the way and before taking his first step up, he realized that those who reached the top didn't necessarily have to be smart. But it certainly helped if they were lucky and bullet-proof. Since he had never been lucky and he was afraid of bullets, he had lost his zeal for living the mob life. But he had never lost the fascination that came from thinking about it and talking about it, which was how he had come to Sam Gregory's attention.

Baker parked his car near River Street and wondered what to do next. "Use all your mob contacts," Gregory had said. All Al Baker knew about illegal was how to run numbers, which gave him an idea when he saw a newsstand on the corner.

Baker knew how to make people talk. To make the newsie talk, he first had to convince him that he wasn't an undercover police agent. The simplest way to do that was to badmouth politicians at every level, for cops, even undercover cops, never spoke ill of politicians who might control their destiny. The stories of what they said just might get back and they might wind up walking traffic posts in the meadows in winter.

Five minutes after going to the newsstand, Al Baker had placed a bet on a number — a small bet because he was counting on keeping most of the money Gregory had given him. He found out from the newsie that there had been a shake-up in the numbers business, that City Hall was more deeply involved now and was taking a bigger piece for protection. To stay in business, the numbers bank had had to cut the amount paid on a winning hit from 600-to-1 down to 550-to-1 and the people who bet on numbers were growling.

"Can't be much of a business anyway?" Baker said.

"Nickel and dime stuff. Every newsstand. Every candy store. Every saloon. This town so rotten, what else to do but play numbers," the newsie said. "Hope you hit it big and go to Florida 'cause this town's crap."

Baker rolled up his newspaper and began to walk away. It would do no good to spend too much time at the newsstand. Sooner or later the newsie would start asking him questions and if the cop on the numbers run saw him and didn't recognize him, he might start asking questions too. Baker waved back at the newsie.

"You're not going to Florida, are you?"

"Not that lucky," the newsstand owner said.

"Me neither. I'll be back tomorrow for my winnings."

As he walked away, Baker was framing the report to Gregory in his mind. "A massive infiltration of the illegal gambling industry by Rocco Nobile and his power-mad henchmen."

He walked along River Street for a while and jotted down the addresses of loft buildings which had obviously had work done on them recently or which had gotten new tenants.

In his small notebook, next to the addresses, he put a crime. He had no idea, what crimes, if any, were being perpetrated in those loft buildings so he made them up.

When he was done with his walk, his notebook read:

#358. Loansharking.

#516. Counterfeit operation.

#612. Heroin drug factory.

#764. Hq. of national auto theft ring.

He put his notebook back in his pocket. That was one side of the street. The next day, he would come back and do the other side, but first Sam Gregory would have to give him another five hundred dollars to buy off more Mafia informants.

Driving out of town, he stopped at the Bay City Bank to open a savings account. He was going to start it with $498, but he changed his mind at the last minute and only deposited $493. The other five dollars was for admission, just in case he passed a theater where The Godfather was playing.

Mark Tolan had also spent the day in Bay City but he was not interested in renting apartments or in who was running the numbers operation. His job was to try to clock schedules so that when The Eraser and the Rubout Squad were ready to launch their war against the Mafia, they would know what targets were vulnerable and when.

Gregory had tried to talk Tolan out of taking weapons on the mission.

"If you get picked up, it's the end of you," he had warned.

"I feel naked without a weapon," Tolan had said. "And who knows? One of those bastards may lip off to me. I want to be able to pay him back."

"We don't want random violence," Gregory said. "This is a military operation. I'm your leader. Remember the chain of command." He held up the piece of cardboard with the boxes drawn on it.

Tolan's dark eyes had blazed. "Screw the chain of command. When you're out there, alone on the streets with the beasts, you have to take care of yourself. I'm not going unarmed."

"Well, only take one gun then."

"No. I'm taking what I need. Three. The .32 caliber automatic for my jacket, the Gregory Sur-Shot for my hip and a Derringer taped to my left leg. You want me to be defenseless?"

Gregory sighed. Mark Tolan might yet prove to be difficult.

Tolan spent much of his day walking around the streets of Bay City, bumping against people as he walked, hoping against hope that one would turn and badmouth him. He crossed the street three times to try to bump into men wearing pinstripe suits, but nobody seemed to want to shoot it out in the street.

He knew that Lizzard was supposed to rent apartments to be used as sniper posts against Rocco Nobile but sniping was no fun. Tolan liked his killings up close and personal, as they had been in Nam when he had wasted everybody left behind in that VC village. He liked to see the horror on the faces. He liked to see the pain when the bullet hit home. He liked to see the movements that turned slowly to still death.

When Rocco Nobile's time came, it wouldn't be from sniping. It would be from a bullet between the eyes, fired from no more than a few steps away. By Mark Tolan.

He felt good walking along, feeling the gun on his hip and in his pocket bumping against his body. He went into the lobby of the Bay City Arms and asked about renting an apartment. He was told that all the apartments had been rented.

He was not much good at small talk so he asked the doorman, "Mayor live here?"

"Yes."

"When's he go to work?"

"Who wants to know?"

Tolan really had to draw a tight rein on himself so he didn't shoot the doorman. When he came back from Rocco Nobile, he'd pay that debt too.

He walked into City Hall and found the mayor's office on the second floor. The City Commission was meeting when he arrived and he could hear their amplified voices out in the hallway. He wondered for a moment what it would be like to jump into the room, guns blazing, and level the whole commission. That would be fun, he thought. But the real fun would come from getting the boss.

The mayor's receptionist was a pretty young brunette named Denise. He asked her how to go about getting an appointment with the mayor. He was told to write a letter or he could leave a telephone number and she would get back to him. Of course, she'd have to know what the meeting concerned.

"Mayor here every day?" he asked.

"Every day."

"I'll spell everything out in my letter." Before leaving he glanced to his left. Through a leaded glass window, he could see another secretary at a desk. Sitting in a chair, leaning against the wall, was a man reading a paper. The man looked like a bodyguard.

Tolan thought how easy it would be. One shot in the head on this young twit, Denise. Push through the door. Two more bullets to take care of the other secretary and the bodyguard. He would not even have to break stride. He could be in the mayor's office before the mayor would have a chance to react. He could put a bullet in the ginzo's brain before anybody could do anything.

He reached under his jacket to feel the cold butt of the gun on his right hip. Then he withdrew his hand, slowly, reluctantly. He didn't want it to be a surprise shot. He wanted Nobile to know he was in danger, that there was a killer after him, and when the time came, he wanted to see Nobile squirm a little bit before he finished him off. It was the fright on their faces that he really liked.

As he left City Hall, he hoped to himself that Rocco Nobile had friends. Gregory had said that they were going to live huge, but all he wanted to do was to kill huge.

It was going to be fun and it was going to be easy. And anybody who got in his way was going to be hurt. Terminally.

Yeah, he thought. Yeah.