Death Check Read online

  Remo nodded. “I’d like to see the body.”

  “She’s a shrink. Would you believe it? A shrink OD’ing on horse? What a bunch of dingalings. Hey, watch it with those stoves, fella. You look awful.”

  “The body.”

  “Sure. But she’s wrapped.”

  “Just a look?”

  “Sure. Hey, don’t start up yet.”

  The driver shook his head. “Where do you think I’m rushing to, man?”

  When they got to the rear, the patrolman confided that the driver’s entire race was lazy. He opened the doors and with the affected cynicism of young policemen, said: “That’s it.”

  Remo saw the sheet covering the being on the folding stretcher. He knew it was Deborah. He reached into the ambulance and carefully, very carefully, folded back the sheet, controlling every nerve lest his hands break away. He could feel the tremble of energy course through him, and he channelled it into the precision he knew he needed, and he felt something rise in him, something trained and yet beyond training.

  And he saw the still face and the closed eyes and the freckles which had lit his night of loneliness and the lips which were now still and the arms that would never move again. He reached in and held her hand. In the light from the overhead bulb he saw on her arm something that was being surrendered, either by the chemicals he knew were in her or by the life that was no longer in her. The faint blue rectangle which looked as though drawn by a robin’s egg crayon. They had been neat little numbers once that the master race used to catalog the human beings they considered subhuman, even precious children who, for a brief moment, would light up a life, and having lit it, could set in motion that which would settle an old, old score.

  He squeezed her hand. It was hard, unyielding. Tenderly, he opened the fingers and removed the object that she clutched. He looked at it, then put it in his shirt pocket. Deborah was supposed to lead our agents to the killer. Now, in death, she would lead Remo to the master race who thought they were supermen.

  Well, then, he would let them know what one was. One who was not sure of where he had come from because he was left at a Catholic orphanage, one who, for all he knew, contained the seeds of all races. He might even be a pureblood German. If that should be, thought Remo, should they hold some special lien on viciousness, let that enjoy itself within him now. Chiun’s ancient scripture flashed through his mind: “I am created Shiva, the destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds.” They would come to know the destroyer.

  And then Remo covered the stars for the last time and could have sworn that he gently shut the ambulance doors. He had been very precise about it, doing it very slowly to appear casual.

  But the bang and the crack of the door and the caved-in red cross, and the ambulance settling on its wheels brought the driver running from the cab. The patrolman yelled and Remo shrugged his shoulders.

  “These fuckin’ nuts they got here,” the patrolman yelled to the driver, while he stared at Remo angrily. “They’re all screwballs. Even the cop. What’d you do that for, huh?”

  But he made no move toward Remo. And Remo again apologized, and walked away. He hoped he would arrive before the FBI. He had nothing against the FBI.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  THE MAN ONCE KNOWN AS Dr. Hans Frichtmann sat at his chessboard, staring at an endgame whose outcome was a foregone conclusion. Chess was a balm for the mind, the mind that could appreciate it.

  He had donned his smoking jacket and wore slippers, befitting a man who had done a hard day’s work. Who could have expected that the little Jewess worked for that vengeful gang that did not know World War Two was over? They were insane. And now that she was dead, another would be coming for him. But he would be gone. The pictures would enable the Russians to control the scientists at the Forum, and that had been his mission. He had done his job. Naturally, it would not be adequately appreciated, but appreciation was for the days as a young man.

  He looked at the board again. Only a king left, against his black king, queen, two knights, a rook, and a bishop. But before the drug took effect the Jewess had said that no matter how bad things looked, there was a way. There was no way, of course.

  He was about to reset the pieces for a new game when the door to his study was pushed open. It swung back on noiseless hinges, then the knob cracked into the wall.

  It was the Brewster Forum security officer, looking as though he had climbed out of an oven.

  “Hello, Stohrs,” Remo said to the man who was Brewster Forum’s chess instructor. “I’ve come for my game.”

  “Well, not right now,” Stohrs said.

  “Oh, yes. Now is fine.” He walked in and closed the door behind him.

  “What do you want?” the chess instructor asked. “This is nonsense at such a late hour. You look terrible.”

  “I want to play chess.”

  “Well,” said Stohrs with a sigh, “if you insist. Let me take your jacket.”

  Remo took it off himself and as he did, the frail fibers separated and a sleeve was torn. He noticed that his arms were red and swollen.

  In the center of the room was the chess board on a metal stand on a bare parquet floor. Two heavy-armed oak chairs were attached to the table.

  “Sit down, Mr. Pelham, I will set the board.”

  “No, this end game is fine. I will take white.”

  “You cannot win with only a king.”

  Remo reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew the white queen that Deborah’s hand had surrendered to him in death. “I have a queen,” he said. “That will be enough.”

  Remo rested his arms on the chair arms. Under his right forearm, he could feel the chill of metal conducting heat from his arm into the chair. He picked up his king to examine the piece and as he did, looked down at the chair arm. He saw three small metal rings buried in the wood, with small holes, the diameter of needles, in the centers. That was it, Remo thought. A knockout injection.

  Stohrs had taken his seat opposite Remo. “An interesting conclusion,” he said. “It was reached through the Sicilian opening. Are you familiar with the Sicilian?”

  “Yes, of course. He fought on the side of the Nazis. It was his responsibility to count the number of baby rapes committed by Hitler’s thugs.”

  Remo smiled, and resisted the impulse to reach forward and to crush Stohrs’ adam’s apple between his fingers. Time for that. Deborah had been here. She had sat in this chair, and looked in Stohrs’ eyes, loathing him and what he stood for, but there because duty demanded it. She had lost the game. And then her life. The life was gone. But Remo could salvage the game. And he could give her life and her death at least that much meaning.

  “Your move, Stohrs,” Remo said, and Stohrs slid a pawn one space forward.

  “The pawns,” he said. “The little men of the chess board. But they can become fighting pieces, the most dangerous in the game.”

  “Particularly when, like Nazis, they fight against women and children. They then are truly devastating.”

  Stohrs’ face was red. He was about to speak when his daughter walked into the room. She wore a short red skirt and a white sweater with no bra. The darkening of her nipples was visible through the material. When she saw Remo, she licked her upper lip and her eyes took on a wild glint as if an interior light had flashed on, and pinpoints were shining through tiny openings in her eyeballs.

  “Anna, we have an unexpected guest. Please prepare some refreshment.”

  “Of course, Father,” she said, and looked again at Remo. “What would you like?”

  “Anything you have in the house will do. Baby’s blood. Lampshade chips with cyanide dip. A heroin fizz. Whatever you’re used to.” Confusion painted her face with stupidity. Stohrs said, “Our guest is a very funny man. Just prepare the usual. And hurry.”

  “You seem, Mr. Pelham,” Stohrs said after his daughter left, “to want to talk about Nazis.”

  “I have always been fascinated by insanity,” Remo said.

  “
Our only insanity was that we lost.”

  “I’m glad to see that it’s we,” Remo said. “You lost because you wasted your energies attacking unnecessary targets. That’s a sick toughness. The real toughness comes from Americans who don’t go stoking ovens from hatred. That’s why we win. The shits like you, the insane haters, always lose.”

  “That, my dear Mr. Pelham, is because the winners write history,” Stohrs said, and Remo saw him reach his index finger forward to touch a button on the arm of his chair. Needles, he knew, would shoot up now into Remo’s forearm, drugging him, putting him under.

  How many had they done it to? Had they ever done it to a man who could respond quickly enough to pluck flies from the air between thumb and forefinger? It had come down to this: to Remo Williams and his terrible talents, against this evil man, this evil product of monstrous wrongs.

  Stohrs’ hand squeezed over the end of the chair. Remo focussed his perception on his right forearm. He felt the pinpricks against his skin. The act seemed frozen in slow motion. First, the three needles touched the skin. The skin bent before them like a marshmallow refusing a stick. The needles insisted. Then the skin collapsed and gave way, surrounding the tips of the needles. The needles should now continue into the arm and give their narcotic juices. Then the victim should react by rubbing his arm.

  That was the script for a victim. But Remo Williams was in the chair and he was no man’s victim. His arm rose imperceptibly, then yanked away and he rubbed the inside of the right forearm. He felt slightly woozy and increased the speed of his body rhythms to absorb what could only have been a trace dose. His head sank forward onto his chest.

  “So you will beat me, will you?” he heard Stohrs say. Stohrs’ chair slid back from the table. Remo could hear him walking around toward him. He was a doctor. He would look into Remo’s eyes. Lids closed tightly, Remo focussed his eyes on a jet plane in the sky of his imagination, miles away. He felt the practiced thumb press his eyelid up. The sudden light should have contracted the pupil. But the jet plane in that bright noon sky had already done that and Stohrs let the eyelid drop with a grunt of satisfaction.

  “He’s under,” Stohrs yelled. “I’m keeping my promise to you.”

  “Stand up,” he told Remo. It was a command and Remo stood. “Open your eyes and follow me.” With confident arrogance, Stohrs turned his back on Remo and walked away. He pulled aside a long velvet drape, exposing a door. He turned the knob and walked in, stepping aside to let Remo pass.

  Remo’s eyes were fixed straight ahead, but his peripheral vision swallowed the room in a glance. He had seen the room before. In the sex photos. A metal bed stood against the left wall, covered with white satin sheets. At the right side of the small room stood a camera on a tripod, and reflector-covered lights. Behind the bed stood Anna. Her chest heaved, disturbing the fabric of her sweater as she looked at Remo. “I’ve waited for you a long time,” she said.

  Stohrs pushed the door shut and locked it. “Take off your clothes,” he commanded. “All of them.” Remo mechanically removed his clothes, watching straight ahead as Anna pulled her sweater off over her head, her blonde locks splashing through with difficulty. Her pendulous breasts bounced when released from the sweater. She returned Remo’s stare as she reached behind her and snapped loose the top button of her skirt, hooked her fingers inside the waistband and slid it slowly down over her hips, until it dropped soundlessly on the floor. She wore no undergarments, only long black stockings, held up with a black garter belt, and black patent leather boots that reached above the knee.

  Remo was naked, his clothes in a pile on the floor in front of him. “Lie on the bed,” Stohrs ordered and Remo sprawled across the cot on his back. Anna walked to the bed alongside him, and leaned over him, the nipples of her breasts just touching his bare chest. “I have something special for you,” she said. She stepped to a small table alongside the bed, then back into Remo’s view. She held a black wig in her hands. She trailed the long strands of hair across Remo’s stomach, his genitals, then down his legs. Then she placed it on her head, tucking her blonde hair under it.

  She sat on the bed next to Remo and took a tube of lipstick from the table. She slid the end of the closed lipstick into her mouth, then leaned over Remo and let spittle from her mouth dribble onto his chest. Then she uncased the lipstick and painted deep red lips over her own pale color. She reached again for the table.

  Now the whip, Remo thought.

  Kill them now? It would be easy. But he wanted them to savor their victory, before he twisted it into death.

  “Father, are you ready? I can no longer wait.”

  Stohrs, who had been loading the camera, said “Go ahead. But quickly. We have spent much time.”

  The whip now. It flashed expertly across Remo’s stomach and snapped a red welt into his skin. Again. This time closer to his maleness. And again. Then she dropped the whip across the bed, and lowered her head over Remo. The dark strands of hair played across his body, and then she was on him, greasy lipstick working on him, moaning with passion.

  Remo allowed himself to respond. He wanted this woman. Not to enjoy her. But to punish her. He had learned the secrets from Chiun. This twisted Nazi beast was infatuated by a husky young policeman, but she was going to be destroyed by the surrogate for an eighty-year old Korean who believed that women were no more complicated than guitars. The wrong strings produced disharmony. It is simply a matter of plucking the right strings.

  The strings for the black-haired woman in boots were pain and suffering and torture. That was her enjoyment. Remo would give her that until she was in ecstasy, and then give her more until the ecstasy turned to pain, and more yet until the soft erotic touch became the bitter rasp of a rawl.

  Her voluntary act of debasement was lighting the fires. “He’s ready. Tell him to take me.”

  “Take her,” Stohrs said.

  “I want rape,” yelled the daughter.

  “Rape the woman,” Stohrs said.

  And that was all Remo needed, and he banged her down into the bed so hard that her wig flew off and plowed into her, twisting her body so that her spinal column wrenched.

  She moaned and Stohrs kept snapping pictures. What process had brought him to this, Remo thought, where he could stand taking photos and living out his daughter’s perversions? Remo knew. It was like any other horror. It was done imperceptibly, step by step, individual meaningless actions being built into the habit pattern, demanding compliance, until the final act… the final sum… was demanded by the parts. Until there was no way to stop it.

  “Harder.” Anna’s voice insinuated itself into his mind. Harder. Faster. Deeper. He considered his fingers. Then his toes. While his body forced blood to pump, his mind denied that blood and thought of other parts, other functions. It was Chiun’s secret.

  “More,” she yelled. “More.”

  He ground into her, pressing with his knees, lifting her and dropping her down. She groaned in ecstasy.

  Remo moved harder. Faster.

  She groaned. Ecstasy again.

  Harder. Faster. Concentrate on kneecaps.

  She groaned continuously now. But ecstasy was giving way. It was surrendering to pain.

  Remo moved on. Harder. Faster. His mind sensed the heavily calloused skin on the tips of his fingers.

  Her groans grew in intensity, raised in pitch. She was in pain now. Suffering. She would soon shout stop and Remo, under drugs, would have to obey.

  He leaned forward heavily onto her body and smashed his heavily muscled shoulder down into her mouth, chipping her front teeth. Hard. Stopping her from calling out the command to stop.

  Her voice was muffled under his shoulder.

  And Remo kept on. Harder. Harder. The toes now. He felt them digging into the wooden floor for a firm footing. She was using her hands now. Trying to push him away. He pressed her harder.

  Stohrs had stopped taking pictures. He was now just a spectator. The Nazis had killed by gang rape. Stohrs
was watching that fate overtake his daughter, a death administered by a one-man gang.

  Then Stohrs called out, “Stop.”

  Remo stopped. And the bitch lay semi-conscious, bleeding from the mouth and groin.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Stohrs asked.

  She sat up slowly, hatred in her eyes. “Let us kill this bastard, father. Painfully.”

  “We shall. But first, Mr. Pelham and I must finish our game. Develop the film. I will call you.”

  Remo was ordered to dress, and then Stohrs led him back to the chess room. He ordered Remo to sit down and then took his seat on the other side of the table.

  He spoke to Remo: “Who are you?”

  “Remo Pelham.”

  “Who told you about me?”

  “Deborah Hirshbloom.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That you were Nazi.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “For money. I could get money from you.”

  “All right. We will play a little game. You will wake up and show me how you can win, and then you will go back to sleep. Repeat after me. You will wake up to play the game and then you will go to sleep.”

  “I will wake up to play and then go back to sleep.”

  “Back to sleep when I snap my fingers. Wake up when I snap my fingers.”

  And Stohrs snapped his fingers.

  “A fast game,” he said, smiling.

  “A fast game,” Remo said.

  “Still think you can win?” Stohrs asked, confident in his skills, assured of his victory.

  “Yes,” Remo said. He picked up the queen from the board. Deborah’s queen. “Watch the queen,” Remo said.

  “I am watching.”

  “It is my move,” Remo said, as he lifted the queen, standing it on its green felt base in the palm of his hand. His fingers curled down to hold it by the base, against his palm. Then his deep brown eyes that seemed to have no pupils burned into Stohrs’ eyes and Remo said, “It is mate in one.” Remo turned the queen over in the palm of his right hand, and then, with a roll of the wrist, moved it forward. His move, the greatest move in the history of chess, put the white point into Stohrs’ right eye, and then a push through the socket into the brain, and there was Stohrs with a green felt monocle where his right eye should be, and red ribbons beginning to hang from it. Stohrs’ body twitched convulsively and his fingers went snap, snap, snap, because that was the last message his brain had sent before Remo had moved, white queen to the bastard’s eye.