Brain Drain Read online

  “Yes?” he said.

  “You are not Rad Rex.”

  “No, I’m not. He’s inside.”

  “I am to see him.”

  “Please come this way.” The man led Chiun toward the back room, where Rex sat staring into the mirror, intently examining a nonexistent pimple over the left side of his mouth. He saw the Oriental in the mirror, and smoothing his medical coat over his hips, rose and turned with a slight smile.

  “It is you, it is you,” said Chiun.

  “I am Rad Rex.”

  “You look just as you do on the picture box.”

  With a wink at the young man, Rad Rex said, “People are always saying that.”

  “I will never forget how you saved Meriweather Jessup from a life as a woman of the night.”

  “One of my better moments,” said Rad Rex, still smiling.

  “And the ease with which you cured the cocaine addiction of Ranee McAdams was also most impressive.”

  As he spoke, Chiun rocked back and forth on his feet, like a young boy called into the principal’s office for the first time in his school career.

  “The difficult I do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer,” conceded Rad Rex graciously.

  “What do you think was your most famous case?” asked Chiun. “Was it your saving the unborn child of Mr. Randall McMasters? Or the emergency operation you performed on the husband of Jessica Winston, after she had fallen in love with you? Or the time when you found a leukemia cure for the lovely young daughter of Walker Wilkinson after she had gone into a depression over the death of her prize–winning colt?”

  Rad Rex looked at Chiun with narrowed eyes. This was a setup. Maybe “Candid Camera.” How did this old geezer know so much about a show whose characters changed so fast the hardest thing an actor had to do was to keep the names straight? How did he remember names and incidents that Rad Rex had forgotten the moment after they had happened? It was a setup. Wanda Reidel had booked Rad Rex for “Candid Camera.” Rex glanced at the dark–haired young man but saw nothing on his bland face. At least he wasn’t in on it.

  Rex decided if he was going to be on film, he’d better look good.

  He ignored Chiun’s questions. “I’ve told you my name, but you haven’t told me yours.”

  “I am Chiun.”

  Rex waited for more, but nothing else was volunteered.

  “Just Chiun?”

  “It is enough of a name.”

  “Chiun? Chiun?” Rad Rex mused aloud, and then the name came back to him. “Chiun! Do you have an autographed picture of me?”

  Chiun nodded in agreement, happy that Rad Rex had remembered.

  Rex sat down cautiously. Maybe it wasn’t “Candid Camera.” Maybe this old guy was a front man for the Mafia, and they wanted to produce a picture. He had always thought you had to be Italian to be in the Mafia. Best to be cautious.

  “Won’t you please sit down and tell me something about yourself?” he asked.

  “I think I’d better leave,” the young dark–haired man said. “I’ll see you later, Mr. Rex. Mr. Chiun.”

  Rex waved an impatient hand in dismissal. Chiun declined to acknowledge the young man’s existence. He sat in one smooth motion in a chair across from Rex’s couch.

  “I am Chiun. I am the Master of Sinanju. I am employed to make sure that the Constitution of the United Sates continues to fail to work in exactly the same way it has failed to work for two hundred years. It is a most important job I have, and its only real reward is that it leaves my daytimes free to watch yours and other beautiful poems on the television.”

  “Very interesting,” said Rad Rex. Who said you had to be sane to be in the Mafia? This ninny was probably the head of the Mafia’s Far East office.

  “What is your nationality?” Rad Rex asked shrewdly. Maybe the man had some Italian blood.

  “I am Korean. There is an old story that when God first made man, he put the dough in the oven and… ”

  · · ·

  After Mr. Gordons had left her, Wanda Reidel snuggled down deeper into her leather–strapped beach chair and reached for more Nubody oil.

  She poured a gob of it onto her right palm, replaced the bottle on the tile–topped table next to her, and began to rub the oil into her abdomen and down onto her thighs.

  It was all right for Mr. Gordons to tell her to run away from Remo but that was because Mr. Gordons had not been in her office the day Remo showed up there. Mr. Gordons had not seen the look Remo had given her, had not felt his touch on her wrist. If Gordons had seen or felt that, he would have realized that this Remo posed no threat to anybody’s plan. He was so hot for Wanda’s body nothing else mattered to him.

  She rubbed even bigger gobs of the cream into her elbows and knees and neck.

  And why shouldn’t Remo be? It was amazing the way most men fell all over themselves at the sight of a young, pretty woman and there was no shortage of that type in Hollywood. But that told you more about the man than about the woman. Those women were crap, just crap in Wanda’s book, even though she had built a career on them. Crap. A real man wanted a real woman. How odd that someone like Remo, an outsider, could come to town and on first meeting recognize the real woman, the beauty that reposed beneath the mass of sinew, muscles, fat, suet, and lard that was Wanda Reidel.

  And he had. She knew. She had seen that look.

  So when Remo called soon after Mr. Gordons left, she did not bother to hide from him. Not really. And when Remo came, they would make wild magnificent love. She would allow him her body. And then the two of them would sit and they would make plans for the disposal of Mr. Gordons who had outlived—make that outlasted—his usefulness.

  Wanda finished the oiling ritual and began to apply rouge to the mounds of her breasts and a slightly darker–than–natural skin makeup into the crevice between her breasts and around the bottom and sides of them.

  She lifted each breast and examined it carefully as she worked, glad that no purplish veins were visible. She hated those young actresses with those breasts that stood up straight, pert and perky as their little bobbed noses.

  Wanda’s bosom could do the same thing if that was all she had to worry about during the day, just making sure her breasts were firm. But Wanda told herself that she was a working woman and didn’t have time for such frills. Oh, for the day when she would be able to do nothing except exercise and keep her body lean and tan. And diet, too. Perhaps one of those all–protein diets. They seemed to work. She thought of cheese Danish and strawberry Danish and apple Danish and decided that when her great days of leisure came, protein diets were basically unhealthy. The body needed carbohydrate. Without carbohydrate, there was no blood sugar. Without blood sugar, resulting stupidity was followed immediately by death.

  No. No fad diets for her. She would simply go onto a careful calorie–counting regimen that she could be sure would be healthful and sound. There was no reason that a diet had to deprive you of all the things you liked. A diet was supposed to make you feel better, not miserable.

  After her triumphant move into the New York television market, after that, she definitely would find time to diet.

  And to exercise. But not tennis. She hated tennis. It was a mindless insipid game played by mindless insipid twits who just wanted to show off their young, lean, tanned bodies. Like an advertisement that they were all good in bed. As if the body alone had anything to do with that.

  When Wanda had first come to Hollywood, she had been the part–time girlfriend of an assistant producer. Later, when she became well–known on her own, he had said at a cocktail party that “screwing Wanda Reidel has all the excitement of a stroll through an unused railroad tunnel. All the excitement and half the friction.”

  The assistant producer was now working as the assistant manager of a restaurant in Sumter, South Carolina. Wanda had seen to that. But the remark had outlived his career. It was one of the crosses Wanda had had to bear. Often when making love to her, men—even men who w
anted something from her—would stop in the middle and laugh and she knew what it was. That goddamn ‘railroad tunnel’ comment. And it wasn’t true. God, it wasn’t true. She knew it wasn’t true. She was warm and loving and tender and sensuous and worldly, and she would prove all that to Remo today when he arrived.

  She continued oiling her body. She heard a throat cleared behind her.

  Because of the silence of the approach, she knew it was Mr. Gordons returning.

  “Don’t get upset,” she said without turning. “I was just getting ready to go, so cool it.”

  She hoped he would leave right away. She didn’t want him there when Remo arrived. She didn’t want Gordons in the way of the monumental orgy that she envisioned for Remo.

  “Why don’t you pick up and beat it, love?” she said, still without turning.

  “Whatever you want, love.”

  The voice wasn’t Mr. Gordons, but before Wanda could turn around in her chair the way she had planned, thinning out her middle by making it longer with a languorous stretch, before she could do that, she found herself being lifted, still in the leather–strapped chair, and tossed into the deep end of the kidney–shaped purple–tiled pool.

  She hit with a splat. The heavy–framed chair sunk away beneath her, and she floundered. Water got into her nose and eyes. She coughed. She could feel mucus running out of her nose, down her upper lip.

  Through her teared vision, she saw Remo standing at poolside, looking down at her.

  “You bastard,” she sputtered as she moved toward the side of the pool. “For that, you’ll never get into films.”

  “Ah well, another promising career shot to hell. Where are the papers?”

  “Papers?” asked Wanda as she started to pull herself out of the pool. She stopped when Remo’s leather–shoed foot pressed lightly on the top of her head.

  “The computer papers. The secret organization you’re going to make a movie of. Gordons gave them to you, remember?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know, you wise bastard? They’re going to be in the hands of the press in just an hour.”

  “Oh?”

  Remo pressed down with his foot. Wanda felt her hands slip from the smooth glazed tile and her head was again underwater. She opened her eyes. She saw black swirls drifting past her eyes like a ghostly vapor. That goddamned eye makeup. It was running. It wasn’t supposed to run. She’d do something about that.

  The pressure lessened on her head, and she popped upward out of the water like a fishing bobber when the line below it has been snapped by a large fish.

  “Where is it, dearest?” said Remo, leaning over poolside. “You may be getting a clue by now that I’m not fooling.”

  He smiled. It was the same smile he had smiled in her office, but this time she recognized it. It wasn’t the smile of a lover; it was the smile of a killer. It was a professional smile. On a lover’s face, it meant love because love was his job; on this man’s face it meant death because death was his job.

  “They’re in my briefcase. Just inside the door,” she gasped, frightened and hoping that Mr. Gordons would find a reason to come back.

  Remo gave her a wait–there–awhile push under the water with his foot. She felt her toes hit bottom. She spluttered and splashed. By the time she had struggled back to the surface, Remo was trotting out of the house. He had a pile of papers in his arms and was looking through them.

  “This is it. Where’d you have the copies made?”

  “Mr. Gordons made them.”

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know. He gave me eight and the original.”

  Remo shuffled through the large stack of papers. “Seems right. Nine here. Any more? Stick one in the files at your office?”

  “No.”

  “Press releases? About your new movie?”

  Wanda shook her head. Her sparse hair, all the lacquer washed out of it, shook around her head like wet strands of rope.

  “I always work verbally with the press. I’m going to do that today.”

  “Correction love. You were going to do that today.”

  As Remo walked by her again, he used his foot to press her head down under the surface of the water. He went to a large baker’s oven in the rear of the patio, California’s nouveau riche version of a barbecue, its only concession to American style being that the giant oven was set atop a mass of red bricks. He found an electric on–off switch, kicked it on, and opened the oven door. Inside gas jets flamed and began to bring a glow to ceramic imitation charcoal. He waited a few seconds until the fire was sizzling, then began to throw in the batches of computer paper, a few sheets at a time, watching them flare and burn orange in the bluish glow of the bottled gas.

  When all the paper was in and burned, Remo took a poker, designed to look like a fencing sword, and shuffled up the ashes and incompletely burned clumps of blackened paper. They flashed into fire all over again. Remo stirred up the remainder, turned the oven onto high, and closed the door.

  When he turned, Wanda Reidel was standing behind him. He laughed aloud.

  Her skin was pasty and dry looking, because the unaccustomed dousing had washed off all the Nubody oil. Her breasts sagged, forming a perfect two–pointed tiara for her stomach which sagged too. Her hair hung in loose strands down around her face, a pasty mass of uncooked dough in which her eyes, shorn of makeup, looked like two unhealthy raisins. Her legs rubbed together from top of thigh to knee, even though her feet were apart.

  She had a pistol in her hand.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  Remo laughed again. “I saw this scene in a movie once,” he said. “Your breasts are supposed to be straining against some kind of thin gauze, struggling to be free.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “I saw that movie. It was a doggo.”

  “Funny. I sort of liked it,” Remo said.

  “The ending didn’t work. It needed a new ending. Like this one.” Wanda raised the pistol in both hands up in front of her right eye, squinted down the barrel and took aim at Remo.

  Remo watched her leg muscles, waiting for the tell–tale tensing that would announce she was ready to fire. The almost hidden muscles in her calves tightened.

  Remo looked up.

  “Die, you bastard,” Wanda yelled.

  Remo’s right hand flashed forward. The sword–like poker moved out in front of him. Its point slammed into the barrel of the gun and Remo jammed it in, deep, just as Wanda pulled the trigger.

  The hammer hit the shell casing, and the bullet, blocked by the poker from leaving the barrel, exploded, backwards, all over Wanda’s face. She stumbled back, her face pulp. Her foot hit the wet edge of the pool and she stumbled back into the water, holding the pistol in a death grip, sword still protruding from the front. And then the gun and poker dropped away, under the water, and Wanda floated limply atop the pool like a dead fish, staring up toward Remo with eye sockets blown empty by the exploding gun.

  “All’s well that ends well,” said Remo.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE CONVERSATION COULD HAVE BEEN DULL, but it hadn’t been, since the old man talked about the thing Rad Rex considered most important in the world: Rad Rex.

  “But I must confess,” Chiun said, “there is one aspect of your shows that I find distasteful.”

  “What’s that?” asked Rex, truly interested.

  “The excessive violence,” said Chiun. “In shows of such rare beauty it is a terrible thing to let violence intrude.”

  Rex tried to think of what violence the old man might be talking about. He could remember no fights, no shootings. Dr. Witlow Wyatt ran the only absolutely bloodless operating room in the world, and the most violent thing he had ever done was tear up a prescription blank.

  “What violence?” he finally asked.

  “There was a show. A nurse struck you.” He looked at Rad Rex carefully to see if the man would remember.

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, precisely. That. It is a b
ad thing, this violence.”

  “But it was only a slap,” said Rex, regretting almost instantly having said it. From the pained look on Chiun’s face, he could understand how the old man might regard a slap as the equivalent of World War III.

  “Ah yes. But a slap may lead to a punch. And a punch may lead to an effective blow. Before you know it, you will be dodging guns and bombs.”

  Rad Rex nodded. The old man was serious.

  “Don’t worry. If it ever happens again,” he said, “I’ll take care of her.” The actor rose to his feet and assumed a karate stance, arms held high and away from his body. “One blow to the solar plexis and she will never strike a physician.”

  “That is the correct attitude,” said Chiun. “Because you allowed her to deal you a bad blow. Badly done, badly aimed, badly stroked. It can only embolden her.”

  “When I get her, I’ll fix her. Aaaah. Aaaah. Aaaah,” shouted Rex, slashing imaginary targets with karate hand swords.

  “I can break a board, you know,” he said pridefully.

  “That nurse did not look like a board,” said Chiun. “She might strike back.”

  “She’ll never have the chance,” said Rad Rex. He wheeled on an imaginary opponent. Out darted his left hand, fingers pointed like a spear; over his head came his right hand, crashing down as if it were an axe.

  He saw a wooden pool cue in a rack in a far corner of the room and whirled toward it, yanking it from the rack. He brought it back and placed it between the end of the sofa and the dressing table, stared at it, took a deep breath, then slashed his hand down onto the cue, which obediently cracked and clattered to the floor in two pieces.

  “Aaaah, aaaah, aaaah,” he yelled, then smiled and looked at Chiun. “Pretty good, eh?”

  “You are a very good actor,” said Chiun. “Where I come from you would be honored for your skill as an artificer,”

  “Yeah, yeah. But how about my karate, huh?” Rad Rex went into another rapid series of hand slashes. “How about that?”

  “Awe–inspiring,” said Chiun.

  The telephone rang before Rad Rex could show Chiun any more of his martial arts skill.