Kill Or Cure

Remo sighed. Another history lesson.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘Here‘s your first two,’ said Remo, tossing the endorsements on Farger’s desk at campaign headquarters.

Farger picked up the papers, read them quickly, double-checked the signatures, then looked up at Remo with renewed respect.

‘How’d you do it?’ he asked.

‘We reasoned together. Teri still here?’

‘Inside,’ Farger said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Busy as a beaver.’

Teri Walker sat behind a large metal desk, its top festooned with pads, pencils, paper, sketches. She wore large, owlish dark-framed eyeglasses, pushed up on top of her head and she smiled at Remo as he came in the door.

‘I met the candidate,’ she said. ‘You know we’re going to win?’

‘All that confidence from one meeting with the candidate? What did he say?’

‘He said I had beautiful ears.’

‘Ears?’

‘Ears. And he said if I’d run away on his houseboat with him, he’d retire from public life and spend the rest of his days showering my feet with catfish.’

‘That’s truly touching,’ Remo said. ‘And that proves we’re going to win the election?’

‘Don’t you see, Remo, I believed him. That’s what we’ve got with our candidate. Believability. And he’s….well, nice is the only word for it. So our advertising is going to be all about that—a nice, sweet guy that you can believe. Studies show that in politics, the voter, taken as a group overall and not subdivided into its minor ethnic or socio-economic components, well, that average voter wants…’

‘Sure,’ Remo said. ‘When do we start our commercials, our advertising?’

‘Well, we don’t have time to do anything really fancy with either. But mother is flying down two staff people. We’re going to go with just one TV commercial for the whole campaign. That starts tomorrow. Absolute saturation. The newspaper ads start the next day. How much do we have to spend, by the way?’

Remo said, ‘I’ll send over a couple of hundred thousand. When that’s done, ask for more.’

She looked at him quizzically but approvingly. ‘When you go, you go,’ she said.

‘Anything for honest government,’ Remo said.

‘Is it your money?’ she asked—just a little too casually, Remo noted.

‘Of course,’ Remo said. ‘Who’d give me money to spend on Mac Polaney? Only somebody as nutty as Mac himself and people that nutty aren’t rich, or if they are, all their money is tied up in hospitals for homeless cats.’

‘There’s a logical nonsequitur there, but I can’t figure it out,’ she said.

‘Don’t try. If I were logical, do you think I’d be financing Mac’s campaign? Where is the next mayor, by the way?’

‘Oh, he went back to his boat. He’s repairing some rods for the annual catfish contest next week.’

‘Next week? It’s not on election day, is it?’

‘I don’t think so. Why?’

‘If it is, Mac might not even get his own vote,’ Remo said.

She smiled, slightly patronizing, as if she were able to read depths in Mac Polaney’s soul that eluded a crass beast like Remo, and went back to work. Remo watched her for awhile, grew bored and left.

Farger still sat at the front desk, but he had an unhappy look on his face. Remo did not know whether that was because the three so-called secretaries had left for the day, or because tragedy had befallen the campaign. So he asked.

‘We got trouble,’ Farger said. ‘The paper won’t use these endorsements.’

‘Why not?’

Farger ran his fingertips together indicating money. ‘The same reason the paper only used one line about me becoming Polaney’s campaign manager. Me… who is front page news around the country. It’s the political reporter. Tom Burns. He’s on Cartwright’s pad. His wife’s a no-show crossing guard and he’s a no-show truant officer.’

‘No-show?’

‘Yeah. He gets the paycheck but doesn’t show up for work. Anyway, the little bastard told me the endorsements weren’t news. He forgets that last week, when the same people endorsed Cartwright, they were front page news.’ He slammed a pencil down on his desk. ‘If we can’t get the endorsements in, how are we going to create any movement?’

‘We’ll get them in,’ Remo said.

He found Tom Burns in a cocktail lounge around the corner from the editorial officers of the Miami Beach Dispatch, the city’s biggest and most influential paper.

Burns was a little man with graying hair that he touched up to keep black. Thick horn-rimmed glasses covered his vague-looking eyes. He wore cuffed pants and a jacket with frayed sleeves. Although the bar was crowded, he sat by himself, and Remo knew enough about reporters to know that if Burns had been even bearable, he would have had a crowd of publicity-seekers around him, particularly in the middle of an election campaign.

So much for Burns’ personality.

He was drinking Harvey’s Bristol Cream on the rocks. He couldn’t drink either.

Remo slid into a stool at his left, and said politely, ‘Mr. Burns?’

‘Yes,’ Burns said, coldly, distantly.

‘My name is Harold Smith. I’m with a special Senate Committee investigating coercion of the free press. Do you have a minute?’

‘I suppose so,’ Burns said laconically, trying to mask his pleasure about being asked for his opinion on encroachment on news gathering, the right of a reporter to conceal his sources, the necessity of protecting the First Amendment. But how could he say all that in a minute?

He turned out to have more than a minute, and he didn’t talk at all. He only listened. He listened as the man explained that the Senate was interested in cases where politicians had tried ‘to buy’ members of the press, in order to insure favourable news coverage. ‘Do you know, Mr. Burns, that there are newspapermen who not only have themselves but their relatives on public payrolls, drawing salaries without doing work?’ This Harold Smith seemed horrified at the thought. Burns learned that Mr. Harold Smith was tracking down just such a reporter in the Miami Beach area, and Mr. Harold Smith was going to subpoena that reporter to testify before a public Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., and maybe, even, indict him. No, Mr. Burns it would not be difficult to find him, because all Mr. Harold Smith had to do was to read the local press and find out which reporter is not giving fair coverage to the opponents of the incumbent. That would be the right reporter.

Oh, Mr. Burns had to go? Oh, he had to write several stories about new endorsements of Mr. Mac Polaney? Oh, tell it like it is, had always been his motto?

Well, that’s really wonderful, Mr. Burns. More reporters should be like you. That was Mr. Harold Smith’s feeling. He looked forward to reading Mr. Burns’ wonderful coverage of Mr. Mac Polaney for the remainder of the campaign.

Burns left without leaving a tip for the bartender. Remo shovelled a five dollar bill onto the bar. That was the cheapest he’d gotten off in anything he’d done in this campaign.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The newspaper the next morning had headlined the defections from Cartwright’s camp to Mac Polaney. Under Burns’ by-line, the story said that what appeared to have been merely a coronation ceremony for the incumbent mayor might now grow into a horse race.

Another story quoted Gartwright in another attack on the federal government, for trying to interfere with the municipal election. Cartwright said that ‘vast sums’ of money had been shipped from Washington for use by his opponents, in an effort to beat him because he would not be Washington’s toady. From the start, Cartwright said, with the infamous League Papers, it was apparent that Washington was trying to dictate to Miami Beach its choice of a mayor.

Another story on Page One was datelined Washington. It quoted the President’s press secretary as saying that a full investigation was underway into the League papers, and that a report should be on the President’s desk when he returned from his Summit meeting next week. The story cheered Remo; it meant he had a few more days in which to bail out CURE.

Remo put down the paper and chuckled to Chiun, ‘We’re going to win this thing.’

Chiun sat, in his blue meditative robe, and looked slowly and quizzically at Remo.

‘That is your opinion?’ he asked.

‘It is.’

‘Then heaven help us, because the fools have taken over the asylum.’

‘Now, what’s eating you?’

‘What do you know of politics, my son, that you can say now we will do this, or now we will do that? Why do you not understand the simple wisdom of finding a new emperor? It is as if you were one of those Chinese priests in that terrible television tale, dedicating yourself to social work.’

‘You know very well, Chiun, I’m involved in this to try to save Smith and the organization that pays the freight for you and me.’

‘I have watched you now. You have this Mr. Farger, who is as imperfect a human being as could be found. You have this Miss Walker, who is practicing at your expense. So I say to you, if you must do this thing, why do you not call in an expert?’

‘Because Chiun, in this country no one knows anything about politics. The experts least of all. That’s why there still is an American dream. Because the whole system is so nutty that every nut has a chance to win. Even Mac Polaney. Even with me running things for him.’

Chiun turned away. ‘Call Dr. Smith,’ he said.

‘What would you have me call him?’

‘Do not fear, my son, that you will ever drown in your arrogance. For surely, before that day arrives, you will have choked on your ignorance.’

‘You stick with me, Chiun,’ Remo said. ‘How’d you like to be city treasurer?’

But Chiun’s remarks rankled. Remo had gotten into politics to force Cartwright’s people to come after him, since he was unable to attack Cartwright head-on. And yet, nothing had happened. No one had moved, and it forced him to wonder, against his will, if he was even in the ball game. He would not take many more pitches, he thought, before he started swinging.

The big name on Remo’s list for the day was Nick Bazzani, who was the leader of the Miami Beach northern ward. Remo and Chiun found him in his ward club, snuggled into a side street under a large red and white sign that proclaimed ‘Cartwright for Mayor. North Ward Civic Association, Nick Bazzani, Standard-Bearer.’

‘What’s a standard-bearer?’ Remo asked Chiun.

‘He carries the flag in the annual parade of ragamuffins,’ Chiun said, looking with distaste around the main clubroom where men in tee shirts sat in wooden chairs, drinking beer and talking.

‘What can I do for you?’ one man asked Remo, looking curiously at Chiun.

‘Nick Bazzani. I want to see him.’

‘He’s busy now. Make an appointment,’ the man said, jerking his thumb toward a door that apparently led to a back room.

‘He’ll see us,’ Remo said, brushing past the man and leading Chiun through the door, into the backroom.

The room was a small office with a desk, extra chairs, and a small table on which sat a portable colour television set.

There were three men in the room. Bazzani apparently was the one behind the desk. He was fattish and red-haired; he had that dumb look that only red-headed Italians are able to master fully. Remo put his age in his late thirties. The other two men in the room were younger, dark-haired, much impressed by being close to Bazzani, who was probably the most wonderful, grandest man they had ever hoped to meet.

‘Hey, this is a private office,’ one of the men said.

‘That’s good,’ Remo said. ‘My business is private.’ He turned to the man at the desk. ‘Bazzani?’

‘Shhhh,’ said the man. ‘It’s coming on now.’

He was staring at the television set. Remo and Chiun turned to watch. The game show emcee said, ‘We’ll be back in just one minute.’

‘Shhhh now, everybody,’ Bazzani said.

A soap commercial came on.

‘It’s next,’ Bazzani said.

The soap commercial died, there was a moment of blank air, and then on screen came a large sunflower with a hole in its center. It filled the screen in garish colour for a few seconds and then, into the hole in the center, popped the head of Mac Polaney.

Remo winced.

Polaney seemed fixed there for a moment, then opened his mouth and began to sing, to the plinking of one banjo accompaniment:

‘Sunshine is nicer.

Flowers are sweeter.

We need a man to clean up the town.’

It went on and on and ended with:

‘Vote for Polaney.

Early and Often.’

Bazzani had giggled when the sunflower first came on the screen. He laughed aloud when he saw Polaney’s face. At the end of the jingle, he was roaring. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He tried hard to catch his breath.

The song ended, and over the sunflower and Polaney’s face came a printed legend:

‘Sunshine is Nicer.

Vote for Polaney.’

Then the commercial faded and the game show came back on. Bazzani was still convulsed. Through tears and gasps, he managed to sing:

‘Vote for Polaney,

He is a hoople.’

Then off into more laughter, demanding of everybody in the room, ‘Did you see that? Did you see that?’

Remo and Chiun stood silently in the middle of the floor, waiting.

It took a full sixty seconds before Bazzani could catch his breath and regain some of his composure. Finally, he looked up at Remo and Chiun and wiped away the tears of mirth which sparkled on his fat, meaty face.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Remo said. ‘We’re from Mr. Polaney’s headquarters, and we’ve come to ask your support.’

Bazzani chuckled as if a partner to a joke.

Remo said nothing. Bazzani looked at him, waiting for him to say more. But when Remo said nothing, he finally asked in surprise, ‘Whose headquarters?’

‘Mac Polaney,’ Remo said. ‘The next mayor of Miami Beach.’

This pronouncement was good for another thirty seconds of general hilarity, this time shared by Bazzani’s two companions.

‘Why do they laugh?’ Chiun asked Remo. ‘Mister Polaney is correct. Sunshine is nicer.’

‘I know,’ Remo said, ‘But some people don’t have any feel for truth and beauty.’

Bazanni showed no sign of ever letting up. Every time he stopped laughing to catch his breath, he hissed ‘Mac Polaney,’ then he and his two spear carriers were off again.

Perhaps if Remo got his attention. He stepped forward to the desk which was bare except for a newspaper opened to the race results, a telephone and a metal bust of Robert E. Lee.

Remo lifted the statue in his left hand and put his right hand on top of its head. He wrenched with his hands and ripped off the bronze head. Bazzani stopped laughing and watched. Remo dropped the rest of the bust and put both hands to the top of the skull in his right hand. He twisted and wrenched, moving his hands back and forth in unfamiliar patterns, his fingers moving individually as if tapping on different keys. Then he opened his hand and let bronze dust and flakes to which he had reduced the statue dribble between his fingers onto Bazzani’s desk.

Bazzani stopped laughing. His mouth hung open. He seemed unable to remove his eyes from the pile of bronze metallic dust on his desk blotter.

‘And now that Laugh-in is over,’ Remo said, ‘we’re going to talk about your endorsements of Mac Polaney.’

The words jolted Bazzani to attention. ‘Alfred,’ he said. ‘Rocco. Get these two nuts out of here.’

‘Chiun,’ Remo said softly, his back still turned to the other two men.

They moved towards Remo. Behind him, he heard two sharp cracks as if boards were breaking, and then two thumps as bodies hit the floor.

‘Now that we won’t be interrupted,’ Remo said, ‘why have you been supporting Cartwright?’

‘He’s the city leader. I always support the city leader,’ Bazzani said. His voice was still loud and blustery, but there was a new note in it now. One of fear.

‘So did Meola and Lt. Grabnick,’ Remo said. ‘But they saw the light. They’re supporting Polaney now.’

‘But I can’t,’ Bazzani whined. ‘My membership…’

‘But you must,’ Remo said. ‘And forget your membership. Are you their leader or not?’

‘Yeah, but…’

‘No buts,’ Remo said. ‘Look, I’ll make it clear for you. Support Polaney and you get $5,000 and you keep breathing. Tell me no, and your head’s going to look like Robert E. Lee’s there.’

Bazzani looked down at the pile of dust again, then sputtered, ‘I never heard of such a thing. Politics isn’t done this way.’

‘Politics is always done this way. I’ve just eliminated the middle step of beating around the bush. Well? What’s the answer? You want to be with Polaney, or you want to have your skull caved in?’

Bazzani, for the first tune, searched Remo’s eyes and found nothing in there but truth. It was hard to believe that this was happening to him, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out anything to do. He looked past Remo down at the floor, where Rocco and Albert lay still.

‘They’re not dead,’ Remo said, ‘but they could just as easily have been. All right, time’s up.’ He took a step toward the desk.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Bazzani said, with a sigh.

Before Rocco and Albert regained consciousness, Remo had Bazzani’s signature on an endorsement and Bazzani had Remo’s five thousand dollars in his pocket.

‘A fair trade,’ Remo said, ‘is a bargain for everyone. One last thing.’

Bazzani looked up.

‘How’d you know Polaney’s commercial was going to be on?’

‘We got a list of all the times they’re running.’

‘From who?’

‘Cartwright’s headquarters.’

‘Okay,’ Remo said, with a small smile. ‘Now don’t cross me. Mr. Polaney’s happy to have you aboard.’

He turned, stepped over Rocco and Alfred and led Chiun out, through the front clubrooms and out into the street.

He was worried, but happy. Bazzani had had the list of commercials and they had come from Cartwright. That meant that Cartwright had a pipeline into Polaney’s campaign organization, and that was cause for worry. But it also made Remo happy, because it meant that the Cartwright people were moving. Slowly—true, but they were moving… toward Remo.

His concentration was broken by Chiun’s voice. He turned. Chiun was singing softly under his breath:

‘Sunshine is nicer.

‘Flowers are sweeter.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

‘Did you see those commercials?’

Willard Farger seemed pained. He sat at his desk in the main room of their campaign led headquarters suite, watching his three Playboy bunnies who seemed to be watching their fingernails grow.

‘Yeah,’ said Remo. ‘What’d you think?’

‘I thought they were terrible,’ Farger said. ‘Who’s going to vote for a guy with his head in a sunflower?’

‘History is full of elections where people voted for guys with their heads in their ass,’ Remo said. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s all been carefully calculated and computed on Madison Avenue. And would they lie to us?’

Both he and Farger knew the answer to that question so it was not necessary to answer it. Instead, Remo said, ‘By the way, I don’t mean to tell you your business, but shouldn’t there be more people in headquarters than you and your harem? I mean, aren’t there supposed to be real live voters around here who would die or cheat or rob or kill for our candidate?’

Farger shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sure there are. Where do I get them?’

‘I thought they came after we got the endorsements from Meola and Grabnick and Nick Bazzani,’ Remo said.

‘Not enough,’ Farger said. ‘We get people when we prove we got a candidate who can win. It’s like farming. You got to have seeds before you have plants. Well, the seeds are the first people. And you’ve got to have them to get in the other people who really work for you.’

‘The plants?’

‘Right,’ Farger said.

‘Well, how do you get those first people? The seeds?’

‘You get them usually from the candidate himself. His friends, his family. They’re the start of his organization. Our guy doesn’t even have that. What’s he going to do: staff headquarters with catfish?’

‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ Remo said. ‘We can’t win unless we have people. And we can’t get people, unless we prove we can win. Where does it start or end for that matter? What about the commercials? Will they help?’

Farger shook his head. ‘Not those commercials.’

‘The newspaper stories and ads?’

‘Maybe a little. But we don’t have time to build an organization by dribs and drabs.’

‘All right,’ Remo said. ‘It’s decided.’’

‘What is?’ Farger asked.

‘People. We need ’em. We’re going to hire ’em.’

‘Hire them? Where are you going to hire people for a campaign?’

‘I don’t know. We’ve got to think about it. But that’s the answer. Hire ’em.’

‘Hmmm,’ Farger said, musing. Then finally, ‘It might work. It just might.’ He paused as Teri Walker stepped out of her office, saw Remo, and smiled her way to him at Farger’s desk.

‘Did you see the commercials?’ she asked.

‘Sure did.’

‘And?’

‘The one I saw was so effective a Cartwright ward leader switched over on the spot. Never saw a commercial I with more pulling power than that one.’

‘You mark my words,’ Teri said. ‘The whole town will know Mac Polaney in the next forty-eight hours.’

‘What does your mother think?’ Remo asked.

‘I’d love to take the credit, but she’s the one who gave me the idea. For the sunflower setting.’

‘And the song?’

‘That came right from the candidate. He wrote it himself. He’s sweet. He really believes it.’

‘So do I,’ Remo said. ‘Sunshine is nicer. We’ve just been talking about our manpower problems. We’re thinking of hiring campaign workers.’

‘Sounds like a good idea,’ she said.

Farger said, ‘Our biggest problem is going to be election day at the polls. If we don’t man every polling place, Cartwright’s people will kill us. They’ll steal our votes.’

Remo nodded sagely although he had no idea how one would go about stealing a vote in this day and age of voting machines.

‘How many people would you need?’ he asked.

‘At least two hundred.’

‘Two hundred people at $300 for the week. Sixty thousand,’ Remo said.

‘Yeah. A lot of scratch.’

‘We’ve got it,’ Remo said. ‘Don’t worry about it. All we’ve got to do is figure out where to get two hundred people in a hurry.’

He left that problem with Farger and joined Teri Walker in her office where she showed him the layouts for the newspaper ads which would start running the next day. They showed Mac Polaney’s head inside a sunflower, and the simple legend:

‘Sunshine is Nicer.

‘Vote for Polaney.’

‘What about issues?’ Remo asked. ‘Taxes, air pollution, crime?’

She shook her head, tossing her long blonde hair lightly around her bare shoulders. ‘It won’t work.’

‘Why?’

‘Have you heard his positions? Take parking, for example. I asked him about parking. He said the whole thing was very simple. Cut down the parking meters and attach springs to their bases, then give them out to the public for use as pogo sticks. This, you see, would stop the theft of money from the meters, the vandalism of the meters themselves, and ease the traffic problem by getting people out of their cars and onto their pogo sticks. And then, there is air pollution. You know what his solution is to air pollution?’

‘What?’ Remo asked reluctantly.

‘Zen breathing. He said air pollution is only a problem if you breathe. But if you practice zen breathing, you can cut down the number of breaths you take per minute. Cut them in half. This cuts the air pollution problem in half, without the expenditure of one cent by the public. And then there was crime. Do you really want to hear his position on law and order?’

‘Not really,’ Remo said. ‘Stick with "Sunshine is Nicer".’

‘That was my mother’s advice and my grandfather’s too. And they know what they’re doing.’

Remo nodded pleasantly at the insult, but was glum again as he got into the elevator for downstairs. But his spirits perked up as he heard the elevator operator humming under his breath the melody of ‘Sunshine is Nicer’.

Chiun could tell Remo was worried. ‘You are bothered?’ he said.

‘I need two hundred people to work on Polaney’s campaign.’

‘And you do not know two hundred people?’

‘No.’

‘And you do not know where to get that many strangers?’

‘No.’

‘Can you not advertise in the little print in your newspapers?’

Farger says I can’t. It would destroy our image by admitting that we couldn’t get campaign workers.’

‘Truly a problem,’ Chiun said.

‘Truly,’ Remo agreed.

‘But you will not call Dr. Smith?’

‘No. I’m going to do this myself, Chiun. And that’s one Smitty’s going to owe me.’

Chiun turned away, shaking his head.

The next morning, the problem became academic.

There was a Page One story in the Miami Beach Dispatch in which Mayor Cartwright attacked the mysterious forces behind his opposition, and charged that his primary opponents were planning ‘to import goons—professional, paid political hessians—to come into our city to disrupt our way of life.’

Remo crumpled the paper and tossed it angrily to the floor.

There it was again, proof of Cartwright’s pipeline into the Polaney camp. And this time Remo knew who it was.

Farger just had not been able to play it straight; he didn’t have the cuts to break loose from his old organization, and so he played double agent, taking Remo’s money and tipping off Cartwright on what Polaney was doing.

Well, enough was enough. Farger would pay for it now.

So Remo thought. But Farger was to escape punishment at his hands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dr. Harold W. Smith, looked at the telephone for the hundredth time that morning, then stood and walked to the door of his office.

Ignoring his confidential secretary, his administrative assistant, and a string of other project assistants, he walked through their offices, out through a cluster of big open offices, and toward a side door of the main sanitarium building. Some of the workers at desks in the big offices stared at his departing figure in disbelief. But for a glimpse at lunch, they had never seen him except behind his desk. He was at his desk in the morning when they arrived; as often as not, he ate lunch there; and he worked late into the night, hours past the departure time of the Civil Service personnel who sat in the outer offices doing paper work on educational and medical research projects which served as Folcroft’s cover. Some had never conceived of the idea of Dr. Smith walking anywhere; now to see him ambulating was a shock indeed.

There were two basic reasons, Smith rarely left his desk. First, he was a compulsive worker. Work was his wife, his life, his mistress and his madness. Second, he resented any time spent away from his telephone, because over that telephone he learned of the problems CURE faced, and over that same bank of phones he could set into motion the world-wide apparatus that CURE had slowly accreted to itself over the past decade or more.

But now, he did not expect the phone to ring. The President was in Vienna at the Summit. He would not be back for several more days and Smith had that much time left before the President’s last order to CURE became operational: Disband. Not that Smith would need to hear the order spoken. The instant he felt that CURE could not be saved; that its security was irrevocably breeched; that its continued existence was a disservice to the country; at that moment, Smith would act. It was a mark of his character that he did not regard his willingness to do that as a mark of character. It was the right thing to do; therefore, it was the kind of thing a man must do.

But now, as the day grew closer, he found himself asking the question of himself. Would he really scuttle CURE and take his own life in the process? He had never doubted it before, but that was when it had been just an academic possibility. Now, it approached reality. He wondered if he would indeed have the nerve.

Still, the question might not be put to him. There was still Remo.

He knew Remo would not telephone. He resisted calling on simple assignments; on this one, where Smith had lifted the need for reporting regularly, Remo would not call at all.

He was not overly optimistic about Remo’s chances to nip the scandal of The League Papers in the bud. At the subtle cat and mouse games, Remo was as a child. And now, he was in the trickiest of all arenas—urban politics. CURE’s mask had been torn because of politics, the need of Cartwright to block the investigation and indictments of his administration. The problem required a political solution, and Smith could tell, from reading the Florida papers, that Remo had moved into the political arena with a man named Polaney.

It was the right strategy, but Remo was the wrong tactician. Politics was a game with just too many finesses for the one-time cop.

Still, what else could Smith do but wait? When all was said and done, when its millions of dollars and thousands of secret workers were counted and recounted, CURE was two people—Smith, the head, and Remo, the hand. Nothing else. No one else.

Smith strolled to the shore of the sound, where the ground gently broke away and leaned down into the water, baring stones polished smooth by the pounding of the water, glistening now gold and silver in the morning sunlight.

The waves lapped gently at the incline, and Smith looked at the nearest wave, then one behind it, then one farther out, until finally he was looking out across the broad expanse of Long Island Sound. He had looked at it for years: when CURE was just an idea, and when it was a reality; when its missions were simple and when they were complex. The water gave him the feeling of permanence in a jerry-built world. But now he understood that the permanence of the water belonged only to the water. CURE had come and CURE could go. Dr. Harold W. Smith had lived and Dr. Harold W. Smith would die. But the waves would roll, and more and more pebbles would go smooth and round, to be polished gold and silver by the waves.

If the sea never changed, was CURE worth having created? Was it worth it for Dr. Harold W. Smith to have left a lifetime of honoured government service to head the mission, because a now-dead president had told him he was the only man for the job?

Smith asked himself that question as he looked now at the water, but he knew his answer. It was the answer that had sustained him for years, through all the pushing of buttons that had somehow cost other men their lives. Each man does what he can and each man’s effort counts. There was no reason for life if a man did not believe that.

Perhaps even Remo knew that. It could explain why he had gone to Miami Beach instead of fleeing, which was what Smith expected him to do. And if he had gone on the assignment… well, then he might just call.

Smith scaled a rock at the water, then turned and went back inside, to sit at the telephone.

But Remo had other things on his mind, besides Dr. Harold W. Smith. For one, Willard Farger.

Farger was not at campaign headquarters. Roused long enough to be coherent, one of the bunny-secretaries confided to Remo that Farger had come in uncharacteristically early, gotten a phone message and left.

‘He ain’t gonna be late getting back, is he?’ she said, snapping her gum as she talked. ‘I was going to use today’s check to go shopping at lunch hour?’

‘Today’s check?’

She nodded. ‘Farger pays us by the day. He thinks that’s the only way we’d show up. But I’d show up anyway, just to see you. You’re cute.’

‘You’re cute, too,’ Remo said. ‘Do you know who the phone message was from?’

The girl looked at a pad on her desk. ‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘This party called early, and left the number. When Farger came in, he called it and left.’

She gave Remo the number and turned away, humming, ‘Sunshine is Nicer’.

Remo went to Farger’s desk and dialled the number. ‘Mayor Cartwright’s headquarters,’ a female voice answered. Even though it was early in the day, in the background Remo could hear the buzz of excited voices, typewriters pounding, other telephones ringing. Remo held the phone to his ear for a moment, listening, and ruefully contemplating the three bunnies in the Mac Polaney Campaign Hutch. Then, angrily, he hung up.

Double-agent Farger. Gone, no doubt, to report to Cartwright how he was taking the smartass easterner’s money and was sinking the Polaney campaign.

Why had he ever gotten involved in this? Remo wondered. Why? What did he know about politics? The dumbest green kid from a ward club would have handled himself smarter than Remo had. His first impulse had been right. Knock off Cartwright. Stick to what he knew. And what he knew was death.

First, Farger’s.

Cartwright’s headquarters were in another hotel on the Miami Beach strip, five long blocks away.

‘He was here earlier,’ a bright-faced, young girl told Remo, ‘but he left.’

The office was a maelstrom of activity and people and noise,

‘Think you’re going to win?’ Remo asked the girl.

‘Certainly,’ the girl said. ‘Mayor Cartwright is a fine man. It takes one to stand up to the fascist pigs in Washington.’

Suddenly, Remo realized a great truth. There were no real reasons why anyone supported a political candidate, not logical ones anyway. People voted their stupidities, and then justified them by seeing in their chosen candidate what they wanted to see.

Like the girl. A government-hater, she cast Cartwright in that mold, and made it the most important part of his makeup. Logic, obviously, had no part in it because if it had, she would certainly have supported Polaney, whose election was a guarantee of instant anarchy.

Democracy was a statistical accumulation of stupidities, which cancelled each other out, until they produced the public will. The most insane thing of all was that the public will generally was the best choice.

Remo returned the girl’s smile and she turned away with a shout. ‘Charlie,’ she called. ‘Get those brochures down into the truck.’

‘What truck?’ a much whiskered young man said.

‘On the side driveway. A green panel. It’s taking the brochures to our other clubs around town.’

‘All right,’ Charlie said. He moved toward a half dozen bulky cartons of brochures that were on a four-wheeled hand truck. Remo walked over to give him a hand. He helped Charlie steer the car to the service elevator, then rode down with him, and helped Charlie load the brochures on the back of a green truck. They had just finished when the driver walked out of a saloon across the alley.

‘You know where this stuff goes?’ Charlie asked him.

‘Got the list right here, kid,’ the driver said, patting his shirt pocket.

Charlie nodded and went back toward the hotel.

‘I’ll ride with you,’ Remo told the driver. ‘Help unload.’

‘Suit yourself.’

The driver was humming ‘Sunshine is Nicer’ all along the way. He turned on the radio and in Polaney’s clear, resonant voice, they heard the same song on a commercial.

Two miles down the strip, the driver turned off Collins Avenue and began heading for the clubhouse in the northernmost section of Miami Beach. After a few blocks, the traffic thinned out to an occasional car.

‘You for Cartwright?’ Remo asked the driver, still humming the Polaney jingle.

‘I voted for him last time,’ the driver said, in what Remo realized was a non-answer.

‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Remo said. ‘Pull over here.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Just pull over. I’ve got to check the load.’

The driver shrugged and pulled the truck to the side of a small roadway bridge that crossed a slimly built river. He stopped and turned to look at Remo who put him out with a knuckle to the neck.

The driver crumpled forward over the wheel. He would be out for a few minutes.

Remo hopped down from the truck and opened the side door in the little truck. Shielded from the highway by the body of the truck, he began to remove the cartons.

One at a time, he drove his steel-hard fingertips into the boxes of brochures, perforating them with big jagged holes. Then, one at a time, he tossed them over the railings and into the water below. The holes would let the water flow in and destroy the printing.

Remo stuck a fifty dollar bill into the driver’s shirt pocket, left him sleeping, went across the road and hitched a ride back into town.

So much for political counterespionage. Tonight, he thought, he might get a garden rake and go tear down the Cartwright billboards which were beginning to blossom around the city.

But first there was Farger.

Willard Farger, fourth deputy-assistant commissioner of elections, finally came to Remo. He came in a box, addressed simply ‘Remo’ and delivered to the Polaney campaign headquarters. He came with an ice pick jammed into his right ear.

Remo looked down at Farger’s body, scrunched up into the reinforced carton. A faint scent rose to his nostrils and he leaned forward, his face close to the box. He had smelled it before. It was floral. Yes. The same scent had come from the ice pick that he had seen jammed into the right ear of City Manager Moskowitz. It was lilac. A lilac-scented ice-pick.

Remo just looked at the ice pick in disgust. On its point had been skewered, not only Farger but the entire Polaney campaign. The only person in the whole campaign who knew anything at all, and he was dead.

It was the ultimate insanity, Remo thought. CURE, which had been created to use violence to help save the nation and its political processes, was now being destroyed by the most basic of the political processes—a free election—in which its opponents were free to use violence while Remo wasn’t.

And he just did not know what to do about it.

For a moment, he thought of the phone. Smith was only a telephone call away. His hand began to move for the phone and then he shook his head, and began to lug the carton containing Farger’s body to one of the back rooms.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

After Remo had disposed of the body, he told of Farger’s death to Teri Walker, who broke down and wept real tears.

‘I didn’t know politics was going to be like this,' she cried. ‘That poor man.’

‘Well, we’re not going to say a word about it,’ Remo said. ‘We’re just going to go on campaigning.’

She nodded and wiped her very wet eyes. ‘That’s right. We’ve got to go on. He would have wanted us to.’

‘That’s right,’ Remo said. ‘You go on. Do your commercials and your advertising. Do your thing.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m going to do mine.’

‘We’ve got that television special Monday night,’ she said. ‘That might just win it for us.’

‘Good,’ Remo said. ‘The opposition’s going to know they’ve been in a fight anyway.’

Poor Teri. Her first campaign, and she was raising exuberance to an art form. But no matter what she did, there was no way to win. Remo conceded that now. There were no workers. And even if there had been workers, there was no work for them to do. Farger had kept everything in his head. Without him, Remo could not find the printing, the brochures, the bumper strips, the buttons, all the necessary paraphernalia of a political campaign.

He confided this to Chiun back at their hotel room.

‘I do not understand,’ Chiun said. ‘You mean that people vote for one person, rather than another, because they prefer his button?’

‘Well… sort of,’ Remo said.

‘But you told me earlier that people would vote the way that police lieutenant told them to,’ Chiun said.

‘Well.. . some people will.’

‘How can you tell the people who follow the police lieutenant from the people who follow the buttons?’ Chiun asked;

‘You can’t,’ Remo said.

Chiun spattered the room with Korean, of which Remo could recognize a phrase or two, most dealing with the stupidity of democracy and how it was, therefore, the only form of government which white men deserved.

Finally, Chiun stopped. In English, he said: ‘What do you do now?’

‘We can’t win. But I can make things uncomfortable for them.’

‘But you told me that you could not kill your opponents.’

‘That’s right. I can’t. But I can rough them up a little, them and their campaign.’

Chiun shook his head sadly. ‘An assassin who is not permitted to kill is like a man with an unloaded revolver who takes solace in the fact that at least the gun has a trigger. The risks are very great.’

‘But what else can I do? No workers, no equipment, no nothing,’ Remo said. ‘Let’s face it, Chiun. The political campaign is over for us. We’ve lost.’

‘I see,’ Chiun said and watched as Remo changed into dark slacks and shirt and shoes.

‘And now?’ Chiun asked.

‘I’m going to drop a little rainfall in the lives of our opposition.’

‘Do not be caught,’ Chiun said. ‘Because if you are, I will tell investigators everything I know. I understand it is the way of your country.’

‘Feel free,’ Remo said. ‘I won’t be caught.’

Remo got to the hotel headquarters of Mayor Tim Cartwright’s campaign shortly after midnight. He left shortly before dawn, seen only by one person, and that only fleetingly, as that person decided it would be good to sleep until noon.

Behind him, Remo left a record of accomplishment, on which he would have been glad to campaign for a second term as campaign burglar.

He ripped out the telephone connections and rewired the junction boxes, until they were tangled mazes of coloured cables. The telephone instruments themselves were carefully taken apart, their innards mangled, and then reinserted. Remo took apart the electric typewriters and re-jiggered the connections so that when struck, different keys produced the wrong letters. For good measure, he also bent the typewriter rollers.

He tore thousands of bumper strips in half. Thousands of copies of a campaign newsletter were dumped down the incinerator shaft, followed by three crates of lapel buttons. He painted moustache and beard on printed pictures of Mayor Cartwright, and as his last act, dropped a match down the incinerator shaft and waited for the flame to start with a muffled puff.

Remo decided to walk back to his hotel and he stopped in the early morning warmth and swam in the ocean. He swam strongly, powerfully slipping through the water in the way of Sinanju, his mind churning in marked contrast to the smooth moving of his body, and when his anger had waned and he turned in the water, the shoreline was out of sight. He had swum miles out to sea.

Slowly he returned to land, padding ashore in his briefs, then sitting in the sand and slipping on his clothes, under the startled eye of a beach boy who was setting up the chaise lounges for the day’s invasion of freckled, pale-skinned New Yorkers.

He got back to his apartment by mid-morning. Chiun should be up, he thought, and stuck his head into the old man’s room. The cocoa mat on which Chiun sometimes slept was rolled up and neatly stored in a corner. The room was empty.

On the kitchen table, Remo found a note.

‘A matter of urgency has taken me to Mr. Polaney’s headquarters.’

Now what? Remo decided he had better go and see.

Outside Polaney headquarters, the noise in the hall was deafening. What the hell was going on inside, Remo thought. Perhaps one of Farger’s bunnies had lost her nail polish.

He pushed open the door to step inside, then stopped in amazement.

The place was overrun with people. Women. Middle-aged and elderly women. All moving, all working.

At Farger’s desk sat Mrs. Ethel Hirshberg. She was shouting into a telephone.

‘I don’t know nothing from labour problems. You want to get paid, you deliver in an hour. Otherwise, you and your lovely family can eat the paper you used.

‘That’s right. One hour or no cash. Don’t tell me about arrangements. This operation is under new management. That’s right. One hour. And be sure you have somebody carry them upstairs. Us ladies have bad backs.’

She hung up the phone and pointed to Remo. ‘Your father’s inside. Now don’t just stand there. Go inside and see if there’s anything you can do to help, even though you’re not much good for anything.

‘Rose,’ she screamed. ‘You have that list of North Ward volunteers yet? Well, step on it. Get this show on the road.’ She turned to Remo again. ‘Hard,’ she said derisively. ‘After 40 years in the fur business, I’ll teach you hard. Hard like you don’t know hard. Why are you standing there? Report in to your father and see what it is you can do to help him. Poor old man. You should be ashamed of yourself, leaving this job to him until the last minute. And him so upset and all, for fear you might get hurt. And nice Mr. Polaney, that he shouldn’t be stuck with someone like you.’

Her phone rang and she picked it up before the first brrrrng had ended. ‘Sunshine is Nicer headquarters,’ she said, listened a moment, then barked, ‘I don’t care what you promised, you’re going to have those sound trucks here in one hour. One hour. That’s right. Oh, no? Now listen. Do you know Judge Mandelbaum? Yes, well, he would be very interested to know that you are not willing to rent your trucks to anybody who calls. Did you know that’s a violation of the federal fair election laws?’ She shrugged at Remo. ‘Yes, that’s right, and Judge Mandelbaum knows it, who is the husband of my cousin, Pearl. And anytime you shouldn’t think that blood is thicker…’ She put her hand over the phone and shook her head at Remo again. ‘Inside,’ she hissed. ‘Help your father.’ Then she was back on the phone.

Remo shook his head in astonishment. There were fifty women working in the office, and more arriving each minute, brushing by Remo with a brusque ‘Unblock the door,’ tossing floppy flowered hats on tables, and without being directed, sitting down at desks and tables to begin working on what apparently were voter registration lists.

Mrs. Hirshberg hung up. ‘I got rid of your three playboy bunnies,’ she told Remo. ‘For campaign work, they are like zero. Maybe after the election, we find a nice place for them in a massage parlor somewhere.’

Remo finally left the doorway and walked to the back office where Teri Walker usually worked. Inside, Chiun was seated behind her desk. He smiled when he looked up and saw Remo.

‘My son,’ he said in greeting.

‘My father,’ said Remo, bowing deferentially. ‘My resourceful, astonishing, devious, worry-about-me sneak of a father.’

‘Just so you shouldn’t be forgetting,’ Chiun said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

By noon, three hundred women were on the streets of the city. They went door to door with literature. They assaulted the shopping centers. They broke into song at random moments:

‘Sunshine is nicer.

‘Vote for Polaney.’

People who refused literature or who made nasty comments about Mac Polaney were subjected to cajolery. The easy abuse with which they dealt with each other had been left in campaign headquarters. On the street, under Mrs. Hirshberg’s guidance, it was all sugar. ‘So, it wouldn’t hurt you to vote for Mr. Polaney. So what’s wrong with having a nice guy as mayor for a change. Look, I know how you feel, being Mayor Cartwright’s sister and all, but why not be giving an honest man a chance. You can trust Mr. Polaney.’

This was underway in full force at 12 noon. At 12:01 p.m., the Cartwright headquarters were aware of what was happening. At 12:35 p.m., countermeasures were underway.

It would be very simple, Marshal Dworshansky explained to Cartwright. These are volunteers who therefore have no real stake in Tuesday’s election. Make an object lesson of one or two of them and the others will quickly find very good reasons to return to their Mah Jongg games.

This was subsequently explained to Theophilus Pedaster and Gumbo Jackson, who were assigned by a friend of theirs to deliver this object lesson.

‘Women, you say?’ said Theophilus Pedaster, giggling. ‘Young women or old women?’

‘Old women.’

Pedaster looked disappointed. Gumbo Jackson, however, did not. He was the smarter of the two and had already taken the four hundred dollars offered for the job and placed it in his pocket. ‘Young women, old women,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter. Just a leeetle lesson.’ And he grinned because it had all been carefully explained to him.

Unfortunately, someone had forgotten to explain it nearly that carefully to a little old Oriental in orange robes, who was accompanying the first group of ladies that Pedaster and Jackson confronted.

‘Give us all them leaflets,’ Pedaster had said.

‘You get one each,’ said the big-busted woman in the blue dress, who was leading the group.

‘Ah wants them all,’ Pedaster repeated.

‘You get one.’

Pedaster pulled a knife from his pocket. ‘You don’t understand. Ah needs them all.’ He looked at Gumbo Jackson who also pulled a knife.

‘Protect Chiun,’ the bosomy woman yelled, and then swung her purse up over her head, down onto Pedaster’s skull. Three women joined her, swinging their heavy pocketbooks. It was bad, man, and finally Pedaster decided he better cut somebody.

But that didn’t work either. In the mix of bodies and arms and pocketbooks, he saw an orange-robed arm flash, and his knife was gone. Worse yet, his arm was disabled. He turned toward Gumbo, just in time to see an orange flash bury deep into Gumbo’s stomach. Gumbo splatted onto the sidewalk like a fresh egg.

Pedaster looked at his lifelong closest friend there, unconscious on the ground, the women hovering over him, and he did what he had been trained to do since childhood. He fled.

Behind him, he heard the women babbling: ‘Is Chiun all right? Are you okay? These shvartzes didn’t hurt you?’

It was only when he got three blocks away that Pedaster realized Gumbo had the four hundred. Oh well, let him keep it. If he lived, he deserved it. Pedaster would have no need for it, since he was going to visit his family in Alabama. Right away.

By nightfall, every hand in the city had held a piece of Polaney Literature. The next day, every house was visited by a team of women who explained why all decent, self-respecting persons would vote only for Polaney. There were so many Polaney volunteers on the street that Cartwright workers began to feel oppressed, skulking across streets, ducking into bars, chucking their remaining literature down sewers rather than risk the wrath of the sharp-tongued women who somehow had gotten onto Polaney’s bandwagon.

And over the entire city rang the noise of the sound trucks:

‘Sunshine is Nicer.

‘Vote for Polaney.’

In the taverns and the living rooms, whose air conditioning sealed out the sound truck noises from the street, the message came pouring out of televisions and radios, saturating Miami Beach.

Vote for Polaney.

The message even found its way onto a cabin radio in a large white and silvered yacht, bobbing gently a half mile off the shore of the city.

Marshal Dworshansky angrily flipped the radio off, and turned to his daughter, immaculate and cool in a white linen pants suit.

‘I had not expected this,’ Dworshansky said, beginning to pace, his heavily muscled arms bulging under a tight blue tee shirt.

‘What?’

‘That Polaney would be able to put together such a campaign. I had not expected,’ he said reproachfully, ’that your work for him would be quite so productive.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Dorothy Walker. ‘I personally approved the commercials and the advertising because they were the worst I had ever seen. The best way for them to waste their money.’

‘Waste money? Hah,’ said the old man who, at that moment, looked old and mean. ‘That money might buy the election. We must find something else.’

Dorothy Walker stood up and smoothed the front of her pants-suit jacket. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘it is a thing I think I must do for you. We will find if this Remo has a weak spot.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘I want a hundred in a package,’ Mrs. Ethel Hirshberg told Remo. ‘Not ninety-nine. Not one hundred one. I want one hundred. So count them.’

‘You count them,’ Remo said. ‘There’s one hundred in these packages.’

‘How can there be one hundred when you don’t count them? Just reach in and grab, pull out anything and tell me it’s one hundred? I shouldn’t be like you in business, thank heavens.’

‘It’s one hundred,’ said Remo stubbornly. Ethel Hirshberg had had him at the job for over an hour now, breaking down vast boxes of brochures into stacks of 100 for wrapping and distribution to volunteers. Remo did it like a card trick, running his fingers down the side of a stack until he knew there were 100 brochures there. ‘It’s one hundred,’ he repeated.

‘But you count,’ Ethel Hirshberg said.

Chiun came out of Teri Walker’s office. He was wearing his heavy black brocaded robe and his serenity was like a force of nature.

‘Chiun,’ Remo yelled.

Chiun turned, looked at Remo without expression, and then smiled as his face came to rest on Mrs. Hirshberg.

‘Come here, will you,’ said Remo.

Mrs. Hirshberg shook her head. ‘Your father. Your father, yet, and you talk like that. Come here. No respect at all for your elders. Or your betters.’

Chiun approached them.

Remo and Ethel both tried to state their own case first.

‘I want piles of one hundred…’

‘These are piles of one hundred…’

‘So it shouldn’t hurt to count them. Just to make sure we don’t waste them…’

‘I don’t have to count them if I know there’s a hundred here.’

Chiun raised a hand on Remo’s dying words: ‘How many are in this pile, Chiun?’

Chiun looked at the pile of leaflets in front of Remo, lifted it into his hand, and said magisterially, ‘This pile contains 102 brochures.’

‘See,’ Ethel said. ‘Count them from now on.’ She walked away, and Remo said, ‘Chiun, why did you say that? You know there’s only one hundred in that pile.’

‘You are so sure? The infallible one cannot make a mistake?’

‘No, I can make a mistake, but I didn’t. There’s one hundred here.’

‘So? For two brochures, you argue with volunteer labour? Does one win war by losing all battles?’

‘Dammit, Chiun, I can’t let that woman browbeat me any more. I’ve been working here forever. One hundred is one hundred. Why should I count them when I can finger-weigh them?’

‘Because if you do not count them, all our ladies will walk out the door. Then what will you do? Go back to foolish child’s plan of partial violence against the enemy? A plan that will most likely destroy you? And your Mr. Polaney? Does he just go back, quietly, to losing?’

‘Chiun, I liked it better when we were losing.’

‘Losers always like it better when losing. The act of winning takes not only discipline but morality.’

‘The morality of saying one hundred is really one hundred and two?’ Remo asked.

‘The morality of saying it is two hundred and fourteen if that is necessary.’

‘Chiun, you are despicable.’

‘You are sloppy and that is worse. While this pack does contain one hundred, that one contains only ninety-nine.’

He pointed to another stack of brochures, seven feet away on the long table.

‘Wrong, Chiun. One hundred.’

‘Ninety-nine.’

‘You’ll see,’ Remo said. He leaned over, snatched up the suspect pile, and began to count them loudly onto the table. ‘One. Two. Three.’

As he counted, Chiun walked away, back toward Mrs. Hirshberg’s desk.

‘He understands now,’ Chiun said gently. ‘You see, he is not really bad. Just lazy.’

Over the room came Remo’s voice.

‘Seventeen.

‘Eighteen.

‘Nineteen.’

‘Like so many young people today,’ Ethel Hirshberg said, consoling Chiun. ‘I never thought to ask. Can he count to one hundred?’

‘He needs only to reach ninety-nine with that pile,’ Chiun said.

‘Twenty-five.

‘Twenty-six,

‘Twenty-seven.’

Dorothy Walker seemed to exude cool breezes as she came through the door, crisp and fresh in a white suit, and paused at Mrs. Hirshberg’s desk.

‘Is Remo in?’ she said.

Ethel Hirshberg raised a finger to her lips. ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘He is busy right now.’

‘Forty-seven.

‘Forty-eight.

‘Forty-nine.’

‘Will he be done soon?’ Dorothy Walker said, looking at Remo, whose head was down over the table in intense concentration.

‘He’s only got fifty more to count,’ Mrs. Hirshberg said. ‘For him, another fifteen minutes?’

‘I’ll wait.’

‘Please do.’

‘Sixty-four.

‘Sixty-five.

‘Sixty-six.’

As Dorothy Walker waited, her eyes roamed the headquarters, quietly impressed by the efficiency and organization with which more than two dozen volunteers were carrying out logistical work.

‘Ninety-seven.

‘Ninety-eight.

‘Ninety-nine.

‘NINETY-NINE?’

Remo looked up and saw Dorothy Walker. He smiled toward her and approached.

‘Yes?’ Chum said.

‘Yes, what?’

‘You have nothing to say?’

‘What’s to say?’

‘There were how many?’ Chiun asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Remo said.

‘You don’t know?’

‘I don’t know. I got tired and stopped counting at ninety-nine.’

Of the next words, Remo recognized a few. He would ignore Chiun. Remo, at least, would not stoop to petty bickering.

Dorothy Walker smiled at him. ‘I thought I’d see how the winner lives,’ she said.

‘You think so?’ Remo said.

‘You can’t miss.’

‘Just so long as Albert Einstein here doesn’t count the votes,’ Mrs. Hirshberg interrupted.

‘Come on,’ Remo said to Dorothy Walker. ‘These lower-echelon types don’t understand us creative people.’

‘Is Teri around?’

‘She said everything was in the can for tomorrow’s commercials and advertisements. She was going out of town to stay with a friend, and she said she’d see us tomorrow night at the TV studio,’ Remo said.

Dorothy Walker nodded. ‘I’ll talk to her tomorrow,’ she said.

She let Remo lead her out. He enjoyed it. She looked good and smelled even nicer—a fresh, crisp floral scent.

The scent was even stronger in his nostrils later, in Dorothy Walker’s apartment, when she took from his hand the glass she had put there, pressed her body against his and planted her mouth on his.

She stayed locked there a long time, exuding her clean aroma into Remo’s nostrils. He watched a tiny pulse in her temple increase its speed.

She stopped, and led Remo by the hand out onto the balcony of the penthouse. Up there, above the lights of the strip, the night was black. She still held Remo’s hand as, with her other hand, she stretched out far to the left and then swept around past the sea in front of them, then further on, until her hand swung in front of Remo and came up onto his shoulder. She leaned her head against his upper arm.

‘Remo, this could all be ours,’ she said.

‘Ours?’

‘I’ve decided that my firm is going to open a political division, and I want you to head it.’

Remo, who knew that he had obvious political skills and was pleased that they were recognized, paused a moment, then said, ‘Sorry. That’s not my line.’

‘Just what is your line?’

‘I like to move from place to place, doing good wherever I go,' he said, feeling for a moment that it was true, and sensing the satisfaction the same lie always gave Chiun.

‘Let’s not fool each other, Remo,' she said. ‘I know you feel the same attraction for me that I do for you. Now how can we be together? To satisfy that attraction? How and where and when?’

To which Remo replied, ‘How about here and now? Like this.’

He had her there, on the smooth tile of the balcony, their own body smells mingling and strengthening the cool flowered smell of Dorothy Walker. To Remo, it was a parting gift. She would go on to become a political manager; Remo, he knew, would go back to doing what he did—being the second-best assassin in the world. It would have been heartless of him, not to give her some way to remember him in those empty years she faced ahead.

So he gave of himself, until she shuddered and lay, smiling still, beneath him.

And later, she said, ‘This is a dirty business, this politics, Remo. Let’s forget Polaney. Let’s go now.’

Remo watched the stars blink in the blackness overhead and said, ‘Too late now. There’s no turning back.’

‘Just an election?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Not just an election. First, I elect Polaney. And then I do what I really came to do.’

‘It’s that important?’ she said. ‘This thing that you do?’

‘I don’t know whether it’s important or not,’ he said. ‘But it’s what I do, and so I do it. I guess it’s important.’

And then he had her again.

When the door clicked shut behind him, Dorothy Walker rose and went to the telephone. Her number came through quickly.

‘Papa,’ she said. ‘This Remo is your government man, and I don’t think there’s any way to make him back off. He believes in what he’s doing.’

Then: ‘Yes, Papa, I suppose there is always that way. It’s just truly a shame. He is a man like you, papa.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

‘For my next number, I would like to play Nola. I would also like to play the Flight of the Bumblebee. Since I can’t play either of them, I’ll try to play My Old Kentucky Home.’

Mac Polaney was wearing frayed bottom shorts, sneakers with no socks, a red shirt, and a baseball cap with a script B on it that looked like an old Brooklyn Dodger issue.

He sat on a wooden stool, braced his long woodcutting saw against one foot, and began to stroke it with a violin bow. The wailing the ramin sound it made was a reasonable facsimile of My Old Kentucky Home.

In the wings Remo winced.

‘This is terrible,’ he hissed to Chiun. ‘Where’s Teri?’

‘Her whereabouts are not my campaign assignment,’ Chiun said. ‘Besides, I think he plays his strange instrument extremely well. It is an art alien to my homeland.’

‘And to mine,’ Remo said. ‘We must be losing hundreds of votes a minute.’

‘One can never tell,’ Chiun said. ‘Perhaps Miami Beach is ready for a saw virtuoso in City Hall. He may be an idea whose time has come.’

‘Thank you, Chiun, for consoling me.’

Remo and Chiun watched in silence as Mac Polaney hammed it up for the television camera. But where was Teri Walker? She was supposed to have been there.

Perhaps, she could have gotten Mac Polaney to talk about the campaign a little. Particularly with what this three-hour extravaganza was costing Remo. And she certainly would have known how to handle that out-of-town television crew. They had told studio people and Remo that they were from a New York-based network and were filming a special on election techniques. After some haggling, they were allowed to set up their camera in the opposite wing of the stage, and now the two men manning it kept it fixed on Polaney running off miles of film. They made Remo uneasy, but he chalked it off to his longstanding feeling that disasters would be kept in the family and not filmed for posterity.

Chiun was saying something to him.

‘Shhhh,’ said Remo. ‘I want to see if he reaches the high note.’

Polaney almost reached it. Chiun insisted, ‘There are other vibrations you might consider.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as those two gentlemen of television over there. They are not authentic.’

‘Why?’

‘Because for the last five minutes, their picture machine has been aimed at that stain on the ceiling.’

Remo looked. Sure enough, the camera was pointing away from Polaney, its film grinding rapidly away. The two cameramen were kneeling down next to their equipment box. As Remo and Chiun watched, they came up standing, guns in their hands, focused on Polaney.

All the people out there in what Mac Polaney had called ‘television land’ missed the most exciting part of his campaign special. Remo moved for the gunmen, but Chiun was already there. Viewers had seen only a green swish as the robed Chiun moved across the stage, past Polaney, and then, as Polaney finished his number with one last dying note, they heard shots, then sharp thwacks, then screams.

The cameraman surrendered to his instinct and turned the camera off Polaney and swung it to the side. Chiun hopped nimbly back behind the drapes and the camera saw only the bodies of the two bogus cameramen, lying there on the bare wooden floor, unmoving, dead.

The camera froze there a moment, then began moving back to Polaney. With horror, Remo realized he was standing directly between Polaney and the camera, ready to present his face to the audience for posterity and all he could think of was how Dr. Smith would resent it. Remo turned his back to the camera and said into the overhead microphone:

‘Do not be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen. An attempt has just been made on Mr. Polaney’s life, but our security guards have the situation well in hand.’

Then, still without turning, without showing his face to the camera, Remo sidled off the stage, leaving framed in the center of the camera lens Mac Polaney, holding his saw by the handle, looking off toward the side of the stage where the dead men lay.

Finally Polaney turned back toward the camera.

Slowly he said:

‘They were trying to silence me. But people have tried to silence me before, and they all have failed. Because only death would silence me.’

He stopped. A cameraman cheered. In the control booth, an engineer applauded.

Polaney waited a moment, then said: ‘I hope you will all vote for me tomorrow. Good night.’

And with his saw under his arm, he moved away, off camera, into the wings where Remo stood, now joined by Chiun. The music of ‘Sunshine is Nicer’ came up and over.

‘That was quick thinking,’ Remo said.

‘Quick thinking? About what?’ Polaney asked.

‘That bit about people trying to silence you. Real good politics.’

‘But it’s true,’ Polaney said. ‘Every time I play the saw, someone’s trying to keep me quiet.’

‘You were talking about the saw?’

‘Well, of course. What else?’

‘Where’s Teri?’ Remo bawled.

Teri Walker was not in the small apartment she kept in the hotel which housed Polaney’s campaign headquarters, but something else was.

On her desk Remo found a note. It read: ‘Teri. Under no circumstances, go to the studio tonight. This is important. Mother.’ The note was fresh and fragrant and Remo lifted it to his face. It even smelled like Dorothy Walker. It had that clean… and then he realized it. It had the smell of lilacs. The same smell that had been on the ice picks he had found in Willard Farger and City Manager Clyde Moskowitz.

Dorothy Walker. She had been the leak from the Polaney campaign, taking Remo’s money and playing both sides against the middle. And the night before, she had tried to use him.

Remo walked to Dorothy Walker’s nearby penthouse apartment, forced the door, and sat on the soft brown arm chair in the living room and waited. He waited through the night and until the sun was high. No Dorothy Walker. And finally the phone rang.

Remo picked it up.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, who’s this? Remo?’ said Teri Walker.

‘Right.’

She giggled. ‘So my mother finally trapped you. I knew she would.’

‘Afraid not, Teri. Your mom’s not here. She hasn’t been here all night.’

‘Oh. She must be out on Grandpa’s boat. Probably talking about the campaign. He’s very interested.’

‘What boat?’ Remo said.

‘The Encolpius,’ she said. ‘It’s tied up in the bay.’

‘Thanks,’ Remo said. ‘By the way, why didn’t you show up at the studio last night?’

‘Momma left me a note and told me not to. When I talked to her on the phone, she said there was a chance of violence, and that you said it was best I stayed away. So I stayed at my friend’s house again. But I watched. I thought it was wonderful.’

‘If you think that was good, watch what comes next,’ Remo said.

He hung up and left the apartment building, walking toward the water.

‘You’ve lost, poppa,’ Dorothy Walker was wearing a green cocktail dress in the main sitting room of the yacht, talking to Marshal Dworshansky.

‘I know, my dear. I know. But who would have thought our men would miss? And such good men. Sasha and Dmitri. They would have done anything for us.’

‘Yes, but miss they did. And now there is no way that Mr. Polaney is not going to win the election. You failed to consider the public reaction if your men missed.’

‘That is true.’ Dworshansky smiled sadly. ‘Perhaps I am just growing old. Too old to have my own city. Well. There are other fish in the sea.’

‘Maybe now, papa, you’ll retire as you should have years ago. Losing, you always told me, is the only sin.’

‘Do I detect a note of exultation? You may have lost something too,’ he said.

‘No, papa, I’ve won. Polaney will be the mayor. Teri and I will be his closest advisors. Inside of six months, I will own the city. And then I will give it to you. I owe you that gift.’

As Dworshansky listened, he understood that Dorothy Walker’s offer of a gift was not made in love, but as full payment of an annoying debt. He looked at her and said, ‘Perhaps we both have lost something.’

‘That’s right,’ came a voice. Remo stood in the doorway. ‘You’ve both lost.’

‘Who are you?’ Dworshansky demanded. ‘Who is this man?’

Dorothy stood up and smiled at Remo. ‘This is Remo, my associate from Mr. Polaney’s campaign. The only other person with enough vision to see that Mac Polaney was what Miami Beach needed.’

‘Save it for your next dog food commercial,’ Remo said. ‘I finally wised up. When I found out why Teri wasn’t at the studio. Did you do it just to capture the city?’

Dworshansky nodded. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Can you think of a better reason?’ He talked easily, almost happily.

‘But why kill Farger?’

‘Farger? Oh yes. That was just to remind Mayor Cartwright’s people that we did not look kindly upon defections. Of course, when you disposed of Farger’s body and kept the killing quiet, that eliminated any value we might have gotten from it.’

‘And Moskowitz?’

‘Moskowitz was weak,’ Dworshansky said. ‘I think he would rather have gone to jail than to play in this high-stakes game. We could not chance somebody on the inside cracking.’

‘And you dragged the federal government and the League papers into the campaign because…’

‘… Because it was the only way to keep Cartwright and his thieves out of jail and to get Cartwright re-elected. You see, I figured that the government would be afraid to act against Cartwright if it was, itself, under fire from him.’

‘Good plan,’ Remo said. ‘It tied my hands for a long time, made me afraid to do what should have been done to Cartwright and to you. Too bad you finally lost.’

Dworshansky smiled. A deep white smile in his dark tan face. ‘No, my friend. I have not lost. You have lost.’

He lunged for a small box on top of the sitting room’s piano and answered Remo’s last question.

When he drew out the ice pick, Remo realized that he not Cartwright, not Dorothy Walker, not any of the hired hands—this muscled old man had been the killer. He had wanted to clear that up.

Remo grinned.

Dworshansky charged him. As he got close to Remo, Remo could smell the overpowering aroma of the lilac cologne. Dworshansky wasted no time on preliminaries. He aimed a roundhouse at Remo’s temple, hoping to drive the ice pick in to the hilt. Remo slid back, just out of the pick’s range, then moved forward again, slamming the hell out of his left hand against Dworshansky’s right arm, forcing the pick to continue its giant arc, until it buried itself deep into the left side of Dworshansky’s own throat. The man gurgled, looked at Remo in shock and surprise, then dropped to the floor.

Dorothy Walker stood. She cast only a fleeting glance at her father, then said: ‘Oh, Remo. We can do it. You and I. First this city and then the state.’

‘Not even one tear to shed for your father?’

She moved close to Remo, insinuating her body against his. She smiled. ‘Not even one,’ she said. ‘I’ve always been too busy living… and loving… to weep.’

‘We’ll see what we can do to correct that,’ Remo said. Before she could move or react, her scream was frozen in her throat as Remo calmly shattered her temple. He let her down softly on the floor, next to her father, and closed the sitting room door behind him.

Remo found the yacht empty of crew. He moved the big boat down to the southern tip of Miami Beach and anchored it two hundred yards off shore. The crew, who had been given the afternoon off by Dworshansky, was not likely to happen upon it there. Remo swam into the beach. The next stop on his schedule was Mayor Tim Cartwright.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Mayor Timothy Cartwright opened his upper right desk drawer. Where there would be an opening on a normal desk, here there was a metal slide. Cartwright un-dipped his keychain from the back of his belt, and with a thin steel key unlocked the slide.

He took from the drawer piles of bills, twenties, fifties, hundreds and shoveled them into his briefcase.

How many times, he thought, had losing candidates delayed their appearance before their supporters at campaign headquarters? And how many times had they been too busy to speak, because they had first had to go to their offices to collect the money and get rid of the evidence?

Well, it didn’t matter. He had come in honest and poor; he would go out dishonest and rich. The money in safe deposit boxes around the country; the jewellery and bonds overseas. He would never have to worry about the future. The city had chosen Mac Polaney, so that was their problem. Let the voters live with it. He would be far away.

And when police protection fell apart, when city services became first negligible, then non-existent, when the town was an open city for hoodlums, bums and hippies, and the public clamoured for Tim Cartwright to come back and straighten things out, they could hold their hands on their asses. He would be long gone.

He visualized his headquarters now, awash with tears. How strange. There were more tears shed by one rabid supporter than by all the losing incumbents in the history of the world. Not strange at all, he then realized. The losing incumbent had already gotten his; what did he have to cry about?

‘Going somewhere?’

The voice broke Cartwright’s reverie.

‘How did you get in here?’ he said, knowing that the building was locked and Sheriff Clyde McAdow stood guard at the back entrance of the municipal building.

‘The sheriff decided to take a nap. A long nap. Now it’s your turn.’

‘You’re that Remo, aren’t you?’ Cartwright said. His hand moved stealthily toward a desk drawer.

‘That’s right,’ Remo said. ‘And if your hand reaches that drawer, your hand’ll come off.’

Cartwright froze, then said casually, ‘Why? What have you got against me?’

‘A few things. Farger. Moskowitz. The attempt on Polaney?’

‘You know they were all the marshal’s idea, don’t you?’ Cartwright said. ‘Not mine. His.’

‘I know,’ Remo said. ‘Everything was his idea. The League papers. Killing poor Bullingsworth. Attacking Folcroft. The federal government.’

Cartwright shrugged his shoulders and grinned, the kind of grin mastered best by Irish politicians caught with their hands in the till.

‘So? It was true, wasn’t it? You’re here.’

‘That’s right,’ Remo said. ‘We’re both here.’

‘Now what?’

‘Here’s what. You sit down at that desk and write what I dictate.’

Cartwright nodded. ‘Okay. That’s what you get out of it. What do I get out of it?’

‘You live. That’s one. That briefcase of money. That’s two. A free ride out of the country. That’s three.’

‘Do you mind if I call the marshal?’

‘Yes,’ Remo said, ‘I do mind. He told me he would not accept your call.’

Cartwright measured Remo again with his eyes, then with an almost imperceptible shrug, sat down at the desk, took Mayor’s Office stationery from the center drawer and a pen from the ebony desk set in front of him. He looked up at Remo.

‘Address it,’ Remo said, ‘to the people of Miami Beach.’

Mac Polaney held the paper up in his hands.

To celebrate his new found eminence as mayor-elect of Miami Beach, he had dressed in a pair of full length blue jeans. His white tennis sneakers had given way to open toed leather thong sandals. In place of a red boat-neck shirt, he was wearing a long sleeved pink silk shirt with Catfish Corners Bowling Team embroidered on the back.

‘Copies of this paper are being made ready for you members of the press,’ he said. ‘In it, Mayor Cartwright tells how he tried to confuse the citizenry about the League papers. They were all a fraud, he said. The only purpose was to draw attention away from his shakedowns and extortion, which he freely admits to in the letter.

‘He apologizes to the people of Miami Beach and as the next mayor, I accept the apology for the people of Miami Beach and cordially invite soon-to-be former Mayor Cartwright to the annual Catfish-in-June festival, which will award a hundred dollar prize for the catch of the largest catfish, even if I warn him not to think about winning the money, because I am going to be entered and will probably win. In addition, according to Mayor Cartwright’s statement which I have here in my hand, he doesn’t need an extra hundred dollars. He’s got enough money.’

‘Where is the mayor now?’ one reporter asked.

Mac Polaney wiped his brow in the heat of the overhead TV lights. ‘You’re looking at him, bub.’

‘To what do you attribute your landslide victory?’

‘To clean living and eight hundred international units of Vitamin E each and every day.’

Remo turned from the television set. ‘All right, let’s go,’ he said. He pushed Cartwright out of the dingy waterfront bar and led him to the end of the dock where they boarded a small outboard motor boat. In two minutes, Remo was at the Encolpius, following Cartwright up the gangplank to the main deck. Cartwright still clutched his money-filled attaché case.

‘Where is the marshal?’ Cartwright asked.

‘Right in here,’ Remo said, pushing open the door to the main sitting room. Cartwright walked past Remo, saw on the floor the bodies of Dworshansky and his daughter, and turned back to Remo. ‘You promised,’ he said.

‘Never trust a politician’s promise,’ Remo said, just before his hard, iron-wedge hand crashed against Cartwright’s skull. As Cartwright dropped, Remo said: ‘You peaked too early.’

Remo moved to the bow of the boat, started the yacht’s engines, and set the automatic pilot on a low-speed course heading due east. Then he went down below into the engine room, emptied out one of the diesel tanks, and spilled its contents all over the engine room. On top of that, for good measure, he emptied another twenty gallon drum of regular gasoline, setting a small trail of saturated rags and papers out into the passage-way.

He dropped a match into the rags which lit with a puff, as Remo ran up the stairway to the main deck and slid down the steps into his motor boat which was being pulled along by the powerful yacht. He untied the ropes lashing him to the yacht, let his boat drift away for a hundred yards, then started his own motor and aimed the small outboard back to shore.

Halfway to the shore, he heard a loud thump behind him. He turned around and saw a flash of fire. He cut his motor and watched. The flames burned brightly, slowly reduced themselves to a glow, and then exploded with a crashing thump that resounded in Remo’s ears. Seconds later, the sea was again still.

Remo stared at the spot for awhile, then turned his attention and his boat back to shore.

Later that night, Remo watched the television news.

It was a tapestry of complicated story after complicated story. Reporters hinted that Mayor Cartwright had fled after submitting his confession to Polaney. They speculated that Cartwright himself had killed Bullingsworth and Moskowitz because they had unmasked his thefts, and then had killed Sheriff Clyde McAdow, whose body was found in the city hall parking lot, because McAdow had tried to prevent his escape.

And then of course there was Mac Polaney’s overwhelming election victory, and the television film of his press conference, at which he announced his first appointment, Mrs. Ethel Hirshberg, as city treasurer.

Mrs. Hirshberg grabbed the microphone from him and said, ‘I vow to watch city money like it was mine and to keep an eye on the mayor and to treat him like my own son, for which I have plenty of time since my son never even calls me.’

Remo could take no more. He flipped off the television and dialed the 800 area-code number.

It rang. Once. Twice. Three times. And then it was picked up.

‘Yes?’ said the lemony voice.

‘Remo here.’

‘Yes,’ said Dr. Smith. ‘I recognize the voice. Even if it has been a long while.’

‘I’ve pulled your irons out of the fire,’ Remo said.

‘Oh? I was not aware I had any irons in the fire.’

‘Have you seen the news? Polaney’s election. Cartwright’s confession that the League papers were all a fake.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen the news, I wonder where Mayor Cartwright has gone, by the way?’

‘He’s gone to sea,’ Remo said.

‘I see,’ Smith said. ‘I will carry your report to Number One. He returns tonight, you know.’

‘I know,’ Remo said. ‘We political types keep on top of the news.’

‘Is that all?’ Smith asked.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Good-bye.’

Smith hung up and Remo replaced the telephone, feeling disgusted. He looked at Chiun.

‘Does one expect thanks from an emperor?’ Chiun said.

‘I wasn’t expecting to have my feet kissed if that’s what you mean. But maybe, just a thank you. Just saying it wouldn’t have been hard.’

‘Emperor’s do not thank,’ Chiun said. ‘They pay for and expect the best. Just consider yourself blessed that you were almost the city treasurer of Miami Beach.’