Mugger Blood td-30 Read online

  Chiun nodded to Remo silently and kept speaking.

  "Now try this," he said. "I will obey the law."

  The three black youths spoke in unison. "Ah will obeys de law."

  "No, no, no," Chiun said. "With me. I, not Ah."

  "I," the three men said slowly, with difficulty.

  "Very good," Chiun said. "Now. I will obey. Not obeys. Obey."

  "I will obey."

  "That's correct. Now. The law. Not de law. The. Your tongue must protrude slightly from your mouth and be touched by your upper teeth. Like this." He demonstrated. "The. The. The law."

  "The law," the men said slowly.

  "Fine. And now the whole thing. I will obey the law."

  "Ah will obeys de law."

  "What?" shrieked Chiun.

  Remo laughed. "By George, I think they've got it. Now try them on the rain in Spain."

  "Silence… honkey," Chiun spat. He fixed the three youths with hazel eyes that seemed cut from stone. "You. This time, right."

  "I. Will. Obey. The. Law." The three men spoke slowly, carefully.

  "Again."

  "I will obey the law." Faster this time.

  "Very good," Chiun said.

  "Can we go now, massa?"

  "It is not massa. It is Master. Master of Sinanju."

  Tyrone said, "Brothers," and the three black men wheeled and stared at him. Their eyes were alive with terror and not even seeing Tyrone standing next to Remo alleviated it.

  "Repeat your lessons for the nice gentleman," Chiun said.

  As if they were all on one string, the three heads jerked around to face Chiun.

  "I will respect the elderly. I will not steal or kill. I will obey the law."

  "Very good," Chiun said.

  Remo jerked his thumb toward the body in the corner. "Slow learner?"

  "I did not have a chance to find out. To teach them, first it was necessary to get their attention. He happened to be the best way to do it, since he had touched my person."

  Chiun looked down at the three youths.

  "You may stand now."

  The three got slowly to their feet. They appeared ill at ease, unsure of what to do with themselves. Tyrone, not having undergone Chiun's good manners school, solved the problem by engaging them in a complicated round robin of hand-slapping greetings, hands apart, hands together, palms up, palms down, palms sliding across other palms. It looked, Remo thought, like pattycake class at a mental institution.

  The three young men collected with Tyrone in a corner and whispered to him. Tyrone came back to give the message to Remo as they watched suspiciously.

  "De Revin Wadson, he wanna talk to you."

  "Who? Oh, yeah. The fence."

  "Right. He wanna see you."

  "Good. I want to see him too," Remo said.

  "Dey say he know somefin' about de Missus Mueller," Tyrone said.

  "Where do I find him?" Remo asked.

  "He gots de big 'partment up in Harlem. Dey takes you dere."

  "Good. You can come too."

  "Me? Whuffo?"

  "In case I need a translator. And you three, get rid of your garbage," Remo said, pointing to the body of the Saxon Lords' Leader for Life, who, since touching Chiun, no longer led. Or lived.

  Ingrid did not like the Reverend Josiah Wadson, so at random moments during the day, she jogged the toggle switch on the little black box controlling the strangulation ring. And she smiled when she was rewarded with a roar of pain from wherever in his apartment Wadson was trying to rest.

  Before setting foot in Wadson's apartment the night before, she had guessed what she would find. Loud, grotesque, expensive furniture, paid for with money that should have gone to the poor whose case he was always talking up.

  But Wadson's life style was lavish, even for her expectations. And unusual.

  He had two live-in maids, both young and white, both paid by the federal government as program coordinators for Affirmative Housing II. They looked as if they had majored in Massage Parlor. They dressed like burlesque queens and they were both holding crystal tumblers of whiskey when Ingrid and Wadson returned to the apartment on the fringes of Harlem.

  The main living room of the apartment was crammed full, like a junk drawer in a kitchen sink. Statuary, oil paintings, metal sculptures, gold medallions, jewelry were everywhere.

  "Where did you get all this dross?" she asked Wadson, after she dismissed the two maids and told them to take the rest of the week off, a gift for loyal service from a grateful government.

  "Deys gifts from faithful followers who join me in de Lawd's woik."

  "In other words, from poor people you fleeced."

  Wadson tried to engage her with a "that's life" grin, wide enough to show every one of his thirty-two teeth and most of the gold that lined the biting surfaces.

  "I thought as much," she said in disgust. To emphasize the point, she pushed the toggle switch on the black box a millimeter forward. The pain in his groin brought Wadson to his knees.

  But she was truly surprised when she saw the rest of the apartment. The living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms were in use. But there were six other rooms in the apartment and each was filled, from floor to ceiling, with television sets, radios, pots and pans, stereo record players, hubcaps. As she went from room to room looking at the treasure trove, it dawned on her what Wadson was. He was a fence for the goods stolen by the street gangs.

  It was a suspicion and she asked him if it were true.

  Lying was out of the question, he knew. He grinned again.

  She left him groaning on the floor of the living room and went into the kitchen to make herself coffee. Only when the coffee had been made and cooled and half consumed, did she return and lighten the pressure on the strangulation ring.

  It took an hour of rooting around for Wadson to find the device that had been stolen from the Muellers' apartment. He handed it to Ingrid, hoping for some sign of approval.

  "You go to bed now," she said.

  She stayed in a chair alongside the bed until she was sure Wadson was asleep. Then she telephoned Spesk and described to him the secret device and they shared a laugh.

  She spent the night sitting in the chair next to Wadson's bed.

  She stood alongside him when he talked to the Saxon Lords about how important it was to find the thin American and the Oriental, and they both learned that the two targets had kidnapped one of the Lords, Tyrone Walker. Wadson was at his unctuous worst in talking to the Lords and it gave her pleasure to toy with the little switch and bring the sweat out on his forehead and cause him to stumble over his own words.

  She was still at his side now, as he sat in a chair facing the thin American and the ancient Oriental, and the tall thin black boy who had accompanied them.

  "Why he here?" Wadson asked, motioning to Tyrone. "Why is this child here involved in the business of men?" He winced as the pain reminded him of Ingrid standing behind his chair. "And women."

  "He's here because I wanted him here," said Remo. "Now what do you want with us?"

  "You interested in de Missus Mueller, I hear."

  "You hear good," said Remo.

  "Well," said Tyrone.

  "What?" asked Remo.

  "You say he hear good," Tyrone said. "Dat wrong. You sposed say he hear well. Ah learns dat in school."

  "Shut up," Remo said. "I'm interested in two things," he said to Waclson. "The person that killed her. And to get some kind of device she may have had."

  "Ah gots de dee-vice," said Wadson.

  "I wants it," Remo said. "Dammit, Tyrone, now you've got me doing it. I want it."

  "Very good," Chiun said to Remo.

  "I'll get it for you," Wadson said.

  He rose slowly to his feet and walked toward a far corner of the room. Chiun caught Remo's eyes and nodded slightly, calling his attention to Wadson's labored walk and obvious pain.

  Ingrid watched Wadson with the shrewd suspicious eyes of a chicken farmer looking in the
barnyard for fox tracks. Remo watched Ingrid. He guessed her as the source of Wadson's pain but he could not tell what kind. The black minister walked heavily, planting one foot in front of the other delicately, as if he suspected the floor was land-mined.

  Wadson opened the drop front of an antique desk and took from inside it a cardboard box almost a foot square. From the box, he lifted a device that looked like a metronome with four arms. Three wires led out of the machine.

  He brought it back and handed it to Remo. Wadson walked back to his chair. Ingrid smiled as he raised his eyes to hers in an unspoken appeal to be allowed to sit. She nodded slightly and, shielded from the view of the others by the backs of the large chair, lightened the pressure on the toggle switch slightly. Wadson's sigh of relief filled the room.

  "What's it do?" Remo asked, after turning the metronome over and over in his hand. He had never understood machinery. This looked like just another dippy toy.

  "Dunno," Wadson said. "But that's it."

  Remo shrugged. "One last thing. Big-Big somebody. He killed Mrs. Mueller. Where is he?"

  "I hear he's in Newark."

  "Where?" asked Remo.

  "Ah'm lookin' for him," Wadson said.

  "If he's in Newark, how'd you get this?" asked Remo.

  "Somebody left it outside my door with a note dat the government was looking for it," Wadson said.

  "I think that's crap, but we'll let it pass," Remo said. "I want this Big-Big."

  "What'll you do for me?" Wadson said. "Iffen I find him?"

  "Let you live," Remo said. "I don't know what's wrong with you, Reverend, but you look like you're in pain. Whatever it is, it'll be nothing compared to what I've got for you, if you're not straight with me."

  Wadson raised his hands in a gesture that might have been protest, or the instinctive movement of a man trying to hold back a brick wall that was ready to fall on him.

  "I'm not jivin' you," he said. "I got peoples all over de street. I find out soon."

  "You let me know right away."

  "Who are you anyway?" asked Wadson.

  "Let's just say I'm not a private citizen."

  "You got family? Mrs. Mueller you family?"

  "No," said Remo. I'm an orphan. The nuns raised me. Chiun here is my only family."

  "Adopted," Chiun said, lest anyone get the idea that he had white blood in him.

  "Where'd you learn to do what you do?" Wadson asked.

  "Just what is it I do?"

  "I heard you kinda cuffed around de Lawds de other night. That kind of do."

  "Just a trick," Remo said.

  Tyrone was walking about the room, looking at the statues and the small pieces of crystal and jewelry on the shelves.

  "Don' you go liftin' none of them," Wadson yelled. "Dey mine."

  Tyrone looked miffed that anyone might think him capable of theft. He stepped away from the shelf and continued walking around the room. He stopped near Ingrid, saw what she was doing, and with the quick practiced hands of a purse snatcher, reached over and snatched the black box from her hand.

  "Look at this," he said, holding it forward to Remo.

  "Boy, don' touch that switch," Wadson said. "Please."

  "Which switch?" said Tyrone. "Dis one here?" He put his fingers on the toggle switch.

  "Please, boy. Let go of it."

  "Give it back to me, Tyrone," Ingrid said coolly. "Just hand it back to me."

  "What's it do?" Tyrone asked.

  "It's a pain-killing device for people with migraine headaches," she said. "The reverend suffers greatly from that feeling of tightness around his head. That relieves it. Please give it back to me." She extended her hand for the little black box.

  Tyrone looked at Remo who shrugged. "Give it back to her," he said.

  "I do," said Tyrone. He started to extend the little box, but couldn't resist giving the switch a tiny push.

  "Aiieee!" screamed Wadson.

  Ingrid snatched the box from Tyrone's hands and quickly moved the switch back. Wadson sipped air in relief, so deeply it sounded as if someone had turned on a vacuum cleaner. He was still hissing when they left. Ingrid stood behind him smiling.

  In the hallway walking downstairs, Remo asked, "What do you think, Little Father?"

  "About what?"

  "About Reverend Wadson?"

  "There is less there than meets the eye," said Chiun.

  "And about this machine of the Muellers?"

  "It is a machine. All machines are alike. They break. Send it to Smith. He likes to play with toys."

  The device was delivered to Smith's office in Rye, New York at two a.m. by a cabdriver who had been paid with half of a hundred dollar bill and a grinding brief pain in his right kidney. He was told to deliver it fast and he would get the other half of the hundred at the Hotel Plaza desk and would not get the rest of the pain.

  It was the middle of the night and Tyrone was asleep in the bathroom when there was a knock on the door.

  "Who is it?" Remo called.

  "The bellboy, sir. There's a phone call for you. And your phone is out of order."

  "I know. I'll take it in the lobby."

  "I received the package," Smith told Remo when he picked up the telephone downstairs.

  "Oh, Smitty. Nice to hear from you again. You recruit my replacement yet?"

  "I only hope that if I do he will be more reasonable to deal with than you are." Remo was surprised. Smith never showed temper. Or any other emotion for that matter. The realization that this was a first chastened Remo.

  "What's with the device?" he asked. "Any value?"

  "None. It's a lie detector that runs on induction."

  "What's that mean?"

  "They don't have to attach wires to the subject. So it's useful in questioning a suspect whom you don't want to know he's a suspect. You can ask him questions and hook that device up to the bottom of his chair and it'll register whether he's telling the truth or not."

  "Sounds good," Remo said.

  "Fair," said Smith. "We've got better stuff now. And with pentothal, nobody in tradework uses devices much anymore."

  "Okay, so I'm done here and now I can get about my other business?"

  "Which is?"

  "Finding the man who killed that old lady to steal a machine that didn't have any value."

  "That'll have to wait," Smith said. "You're not done."

  "What else?" Remo asked.

  "Don't forget. I told you about Colonel Speskaya being in the country and two other weapons he was trying to get his hands on."

  "Probably more lie detectors," Remo said.

  "I doubt it. He's too good to be fooled. So that's your job. Find out what he's after and get it for us."

  "And when I'm done with that?"

  "Then you can do anything you want. Really, Remo, I don't know why this is so important to you."

  "Because somebody out there put an icepick in an old lady's eye just for fun. Killing for sport cheapens the work I do. I'm going to keep the amateurs out."

  "Making the world safe for assassins?" Smith asked.

  "Making it unsafe for animals."

  "You do it. I just hope you can tell the difference," said Smith before the telephone line clicked in Remo's ear.

  Remo put down the telephone with the same faint feeling of unease that conversations with Smith always gave him. It was as if, without saying a word, Smith entered a continuous moral judgment against Remo. But where was the immorality since it had been Smith who virtually kidnaped Remo from his straight middle-America life to make him a killer? Were moral judgments only valid for what other people did, and expediency the only yardstick one used on himself?

  Chiun noticed the puzzled look on Remo and was about to speak when they heard the scratching on the bathroom door. Simultaneously, they decided to ignore Tyrone.

  "You worry, my son, because you are yet a child."

  "Dammit, Chiun, I'm no child. I'm a grown man. And I don't like what's going down. Smith's
got me running around looking for two more secret weapons and I just… well, I'm just not interested in it all anymore."

  "You will always be a child if you expect men to be more than they are. If you are walking through the woods, you do not get angry at a tree that happened to grow up directly in your path. The tree could not help it. It existed. You do not sit on the ground in front of that tree and lecture it. You ignore it. And if you cannot ignore it, you remove it. So you must act with people. They are, for the most part, like trees. They do what they do because they are what they are."

  "And so I should ignore all those that I can and remove those that I can't?"

  "Now you are seeing the light of wisdom," Chiun said, folding his hands in front of him with a movement as smooth as that of an underwater plant.

  "Chiun, the world you give me is a world without morality. Where nothing counts for anything except keeping your elbow straight and breathing right and attacking correctly. You give me no morality and that makes me happy. Smith gives me a shitpot full of morality and it disgusts me. But I like his world better than yours."

  Chiun shrugged. "That is because you do not understand the real meaning of my world. I do not give you a world without morality. I give you a world of total morality but the only morality you totally control is your own. Be moral. You can do no greater thing in your life." He moved his arms around in a large slow circle. "Try to make other people moral and you are trying to ignite ice with a match."

  Tyrone stopped scratching. "Hey, when ah gets out of here?" his muffled voice called. Remo looked toward the locked bathroom door.

  "And him?"

  "He is what he is," Chiun said. "A candy wrapper on the street, an orange peel in the garbage. A man who decides to worry about everyone will have no shortage of things to keep him busy."

  "You say I should let him go?"

  "I say you should do whatever makes you a better person," Chiun said.

  "And what about the man who killed Mrs. Mueller? Let him go too?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because you need that one if you are to be at peace with yourself. So find him and do what it is you wish with him."