Sweet Dreams

For the first time since he'd boarded the boat, he heard the sound of the Muzak that was piped gently all over the yacht.

It was playing "Love Will Keep Us Together."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"I wish I knew where the girl was," Remo said.

"She is no longer on this rumpus," Chiun said.

"Campus. How do you know that?"

"She is on somebody's boat," Chiun said. "I know that because I am the Master."

"Yeah, but how do you really know?"

"The nice man with the television set said so."

"What nice man?"

"I don't know his name," Chiun said. "All those names sound alike."

"What boat is Leen Forth on?" Remo asked.

"Who knows? All boats look alike."

"You must have some idea," Remo said. He looked around at the trees that bordered the grassy field in front of Professor Wooley's house and wished that he were conducting this interrogation with a scarlet-crested titwillow. At least he could get an answer.

"Come on, Chiun, think," Remo said. "That little girl's life may be in danger."

"She is a Vietnamese," Chiun said. "A South Vietnamese at that. But never mind. I will do this for my country. She is on marshmallow's boat."

"Marshmallow?" Remo asked.

"Yes. Something like that."

"Massello?" Remo asked. "Was that the name? Massello?"

"Yes. Marshmallow. As I said. And another thing. She has the dream machine with her."

"The nice man told you," Remo said.

"Right."

"Was that nice man's name Grassione?" Remo asked.

"Yes. That was it."

"Chiun, that man is the leading contract killer for the crime syndicate in the United States."

"I knew there was something about him I liked."

It took Remo a telephone call to the local St. Louis Power Squadron to find out that Mr. S. Massello's yacht was docked in the Captain's Cove Marina in the southern part of the city, near Point Breese, and a few minutes later, in a car that might generously be called borrowed, they were zipping south along Route 55.

The gate to the boat yard was closed and bolted when Remo and Chiun arrived. The late afternoon sun was behind them and the Mississippi looked flat and black in its dying rays.

Chiun snapped the chain on the gate and he and Remo trotted quickly toward the back of the marina, when Remo saw the boat: Il Avvocato.

"It is strange to name a boat after a fruit," said Chiun.

"That's Italian for lawyer," Remo explained.

"And it is English for fruit," Chiun said. "Do not lie to me. I have not forgotten about electrical Washington."

The guard who had earlier been posted on the front gate had been pressed into service by Arthur Grassione after the "unfortunate accident" that had claimed the lives of Don Salvatore Massello and his two bodyguards, and now he patrolled the deck of the yacht with Big Vince Marino. The guard was the first to see Remo and Chiun as they came up the steps of the gangplank.

"Hold it," he called. "You can't come up here.

"Not even if I answer a riddle?" Remo said.

"Get out of here," the man said. He took his gun from a shoulder holster and waved it at Remo for emphasis. "G'wan. Beat it."

Remo nodded to Chiun who stood alongside him.

Just then Marino came around from the port side of the boat. "What's going on here?" he called.

"Trespassers, Vince," the other guard said.

Marion pulled his revolver and approached them at a lope. He stopped at the top of the gangplank and said, "What do you two want? Hey, it's the old guy with the television. What do you want?"

"Is this all of you?" Remo asked. "Are we all here?"

Marino pointed the gun at him in threatening concentric circles that narrowed until the muzzle was fixed directly on Remo's stomach.

"You better beat it, pal."

"Just what I had in mind," Remo said. Without tensing his legs, he was airborne, moving toward the top of the gangplank. He clapped a hand over the young guard's face. The man fell back; his gun dropped helplessly to his side; he looked at Marino with two gaping cavities where his eyes had been, and then fell over the rail into the brackish waters of the river where he sank like a stone.

Marino tried to squeeze the trigger at Remo, but his finger wouldn't close on the ridged metal. The old Oriental had come up the gangplank and now his hand was around Marino's hand, and there was something wrong with the bones of Marino's hand, they wouldn't work anymore, and he looked down to see what was wrong, and he saw the old man's thin bony yellow hand close around the barrel of his gun and he saw the barrel bend toward the deck, as if it were made of summer tar.

"Where's the girl?" Remo said.

Marino shrugged.

"One more time," Remo said. "The girl."

"Dead. Dead. They're all dead," Marino gasped. The pain in his right hand where the old man held it was now radiating up his arm.

"Who killed her?" Remo asked.

"The boss," Marino gasped. "Grassione."

"You're not Grassione?" Remo said.

Marino shook his head vigorously. "No. No."

"You know what that makes you?" Remo asked.

"What?" Big Vince Marino gasped.

"Lucky. 'Cause you die fast."

He nodded to Chiun and then Marino felt the pain in his right hand, wrist and arm move upward to his shoulder. It spread outward, like the ripples of a rock in a stream, and when the small, almost gentle vibrations reached his heart, it stopped.

The man dropped heavily at Chiun's feet. Chiun looked down at him.

"What are you posing for?" Remo asked.

"Just basking in the excellence of technique," Chiun said.

"Well, bask around this boat and see if there are any more of these goons aboard. I'm going to look for Grassione."

"If you find him…"

"Yes," Remo said.

"Tell him thank you for lending me his television set today," Chiun said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Arthur Grassione had the Dreamocizer on.

He was sitting in the downstairs lounge of the yacht, Il Avvocato, alone but for the bullet-shattered body of Don Salvatore Massello which lounged against the room's fireplace wall.

Grassione had used the telephone in the lounge to call Uncle Pietro in New York who had awarded his nephew warm congratulations on a job well done, and a promise that he, Pietro Scubisci, himself would call St. Louis now to inform people that Grassione had been working on the instructions of the national council and that any attack upon him would be regarded as an attack upon the national council itself.

"I got the machine too, Uncle," Grassione had said.

"What machine, nephew?"

"The television thing. They call it a Dreamocizer."

"Oh, that. Well, I do not watch much television anymore," Pietro Scubisci said. "Not since they take off the Montefuscos. That was a funny, that show. Like the old days with Mama and Pappa."

"Uncle, I think you should see this machine. I think we can make much money with it," Grassione said.

"How is that?" Scubisci asked quickly. "How is this different from the television set Cousin Eugenio got for me off the truck?"

And Grassione explained how Professor Wooley's Dreamocizer telecast a person's dreams, his wishes.

"You mean, I watch this television, I can see myself with lots of money, young again, with feet that don't hurt? Your aunt no longer has the boobies like two loaves of bread?"

"That's right, Uncle Pietro," Grassione said. "And it works for anybody. Whatever anybody wants, he can dream it on this machine."

"You be sure to bring this crazy machine home with you, Arthur," Scubisci said. "This I got to see. Me with hair, and feet that don't hurt." He laughed, a high tenor giggle.

"I will, Uncle, I will," said Grassione, but he hung up, not sure that his uncle had really grasped the significance of Professor Wooley's invention, the first major breakthrough in television since Grassione, as a boy, had first seen Felix the Cat at the 1939 World's Fair.

He remembered the demonstration that Wooley had given at the cafeteria. The little gook broad thinking about a Vietnam with no war.

Grassione had hooked up the Dreamocizer to the aerial connections of Don Massello's large-console, and then had attached the electrodes as he had seen it done, two to his forehead, two to his neck.

He sat back in the soft leather chair in the room and thought of what he wanted to dream about.

He knew.

He wanted to dream about that bastard who had been going around the country, tearing up some of the organization's best people.

But he had trouble. All he could think of was Edward Leung's warning to him: "All life ends in dreams and death."

He shook his head to clear it of those thoughts. He was Arthur Grassione. He was on the trail of the man who was attacking the organization. He was going to find him and kill him. Destroy him.

Slowly the fuzzy image on the television set cleared.

He had first heard of this character on a drug run in New Jersey a few years ago. Then the presence had been felt after the organization almost became involved in a union dispute. Before the syndicate could influence anyone, the dispute was no more. Neither were most of the disputers.

Then there was that election in Miami. The papers were crying about a governmental kill squad, but nothing seemed to stop whoever it was who was wiping out the organization's men.

And finally again, just a short time before, with a famous Mafia home movie. Few had seen it and most of them were dead. It showed one dark-haired young man wipe out two teams of assassins. With his hands and nothing else.

Grassione had not seen the movie. He had been told though that the man was thin, with dark hair but had thick wrists, and moved fast.

There were more places that Grassione had felt the unknown man's movements vibrating through the mob.

And so now for sport, for relaxation, for relief, he was going to kill the man with the thick wrists.

The Sony TV showed a bright landscape. There was a man running across a field. He was a thin, dark-haired man. He had thick wrists. Grassione had seen him before. He knew it. But where?

Right. He had seen him run across the campus at Edgewood University.

The man kept running. Running.

Grassione had seen him somewhere else, too. Where? On television. Once before. Running in the Boston Marathon.

The man was running faster and faster now, but the ground around him was covered with a growing shadow. And then the man took one last step and a giant foot came down and squashed him like a hard-backed bug. Juicy.

Grassione laughed and clapped his hands together.

The picture suddenly changed. It was a romantic, dimly lit apartment. The dark-haired young man was sitting at a small round table, raising a glass of wine to a dark-haired beauty across from him. She was small and delicate, with Oriental eyes. The door of the room burst open and Grassione appeared with a submachine gun and opened fire.

Grassione watched and sat smugly in his chair aboard Il Avvocato, smiling his pleasure with himself.

The picture began to jump again. But instead of a new shot, the colorful landscape returned. Grassione frowned. The giant foot was still there, but it was slowly rising.

Grassione sat up and looked closer as the foot rose.

The shadow under the foot receded until the dark-haired man, now looking gentler than Grassione had pictured him, had lifted the foot an arm's length above him.

Grassione thought about the foot pressing down, crashing down on this peacefully smiling man with the thick wrists. Except the foot didn't. It began to crack.

The harder Grassione thought, the more cracks appeared and the wider they grew. Suddenly, the foot, as if made of plaster, crumbled around the young man's hands.

Grassione cursed and thought about himself machine-gunning this man, and the picture shifted back to the dimly lit apartment. Grassione was still firing the machine gun but the bullets were hitting nothing. They crashed into the table and the walls. The girl wasn't even there.

Grassione saw a blue shadow alongside his image on the television screen, and then his own machine gun was in his mouth and the bullets were smashing off the back of his skull, blood, brain, and bone flying off to color the walls.

Grassione shouted in spite of himself, twisting in the leather chair. The picture lost the vertical, then the horizontal. Grassione tried to rise but could not.

A new scene came on the television. It was a devastated town street. A gray, dusty moonscape lined with craters and bullet holes. Sifting through the wreckage were dozens of Grassiones, all dressed in Nazi uniforms and carrying automatic rifles.

They would poke around a bit, then one would fire at a small animal, a rat, a shadow. They all seemed frightened.

The real Grassione sat sweating in his chair, riveted, wanting to rise but feeling unable to.

A wall fell down on the television screen atop several Grassiones. A human whirlwind hit the desolated town. The Nazi Grassiones started firing wildly. They succeeded in chipping wood and concrete as well as killing two more Grassiones, and then the blurry human form moved among the others, and where he moved, they died. Seemingly without touching them, he sent Grassiones flying all around him. His limbs were dark blurs and his head bobbed like a baloon in a cross current. He would seem trapped in the sights of a rifle, then the gun would be gone and his hand or foot would fill the television screen, then there would only be red.

Finally there was only one frightened Grassione left on the screen. He backed off slowly now from what finally had come into focus as a dark-haired young man with thick wrists. The television Grassione tried to run.

But the dark-haired man was on him, Grassione's head between his hand. With what looked like simple pressure, Grassione's head split open like a walnut shell.

Arthur Grassione screamed in his seat.

The picture wavered, then disappeared in a maze of vertical lines and a wash of red, then went black.

Grassione tried to get up. He tried to pull the electrodes off. But his hands couldn't reach his face. His head wouldn't move. He felt locked in the big soft leather chair.

Then a picture began to take shape before him. The dark television screen seemed to become a mirror. Grassione saw himself sitting in his chair with only one electrode on his temple and one on his neck. There were still four black wires coming from the Dreamocizer box on the back of the television set, but two of the wires were leading above him, over his chair.

Grassione concentrated on the screen. He bent a little so he could see better.

Standing behind the chair, arms crossed atop the back, was the thin, dark-haired man. He had thick wrists.

Grassione stared in wonder as the man reflected on the television set reached down to him.

He felt something on his chest.

He felt the pain.

He felt the air go out of him and his ribs crack and his heart pushed up against his spine. His blood vessels burst like popping corn, and his brain clouded, and he felt no more and saw and heard and did no more.

Remo let the two electrodes in his hand drop to Grassione's lap.

He sensed someone at the door and turned to see Chiun enter.

"There is no one else on this boat," Chiun said. "I found the girl. What he did to her was not nice."

"What I did to him wasn't much better, Little Father," said Remo.

He smiled at Chiun, then waved to the television set.

"Want to try it, Chiun?"

"A man should not come too close to his dreams," Chiun said.

"Oh, hogwash," Remo said. For the first time in days, he felt good. "Can't you just see it? Little hazel-eyed yellow men lusting after shining, black-haired almond-eyed beauties?"

"No," said Chiun.

"Of course you can. Tales of Sinanju starring Lad Lex. When we last left our story, Ming Hong Toy, playful research scientist and part-time song stylist, was about to marry Clark Wang Yu, gardener and part-time Godzilla impersonator, when her drunken father, Hing Wong, interrupted her joy with the news that her half-brother, Hong Kong, had been hit by a laundry truck while he was on a mercy mission, trying to smuggle soap back to the women of North Korea…"

"You are not funny," Chiun said. "You mock an old man's simple joys and you, yourself, go through life diminishing your skills by worrying about such things as home and duty and patriotism and country."

Remo recognized the hurt in Chiun's voice and said, "I'm sorry, Little Father."

"But who is the fool? Is it me with my moments of pleasure, my fantasies which I do not try to live? Or is it you, trying always to catch dreams you do not understand, and always failing?"

"Chiun, I'm sorry," Remo repeated, but Chiun had turned and left the cabin and all Remo's happiness of a few moments before had vanished in the wake of the hurt he knew he had caused the old man.

Later Remo went up on the deck and found Chiun leaning over the rail, staring across the wide Mississippi to the twinkling of lights from the other side of the river.

"Thinking of home, Little Father?"

"Yes," Chiun said. "It is like this on some nights. There are cool breezes and the water moves gently and as a boy I would stand on the shores and watch boats sail by and I would wonder where they were going and dreamed someday to go too."

"Now you've been to most places," Remo said.

"Yes. And none of them live up to the dreams I had in childhood. Dreams are like that."

Remo watched the lights of a passing boat twink on and off in signal to another boat.

"I'm going to call Smitty later tonight," Remo said. "I'm going to tell him to forget that house."

Chiun nodded. "That is wise, my son. You already have a home. I gave it to you as my ancestors gave it to me. Sinanju is your home."

Remo nodded.

"Not the village," Chiun said. "The village is just a dot on the map. But Sinanju itself. The art, the history, the science of all I have taught you, that is your home. Because that is what you are, and every man must live inside himself. That is every man's home."

Remo was silent.

Later, as he and Chiun started to leave the boat, Remo paused and went back aboard. Down in the lounge, he looked at the bodies of Grassione and Massello, men who had tried to live their dreams but had found that in death all men were the same, no matter-what their dreams.

He walked toward the Dreamocizer thinking of all the people who had died in two days because one man had tried to harness dreams. He thought about Chiun. He thought about the house he would always want, but never again ask for, because men were kept alive by unfulfilled dreams. Dreams were to dream, not to realize.

Remo brought his arm up over the plastic box of the Dreamocizer.

"That's show biz, sweetheart," he said aloud.

He brought his arm down.