Firing Line td-41 Page 2

  spoke. "What do you mean, your fire? This is a bought

  and paid-for job."

  He and Flammio took a step forward.

  "I don't want to hurt you," Solly Martin heard the boy say. It was a child's voice, too small and too thin to carry the threat that was in the words.

  Flammio laughed.

  "That's a gas," he said. "You hurt us? What are we gonna do with this creep, Moe?"

  "I think we're gonna have to leave him here," Moscalevitch said.

  Martin watched as the two men walked slowly toward the youth. The boy said again, "I'm warning you."

  Flammio laughed again.

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  r

  The boy spread his arms far out to his sides, as if he were planning to fly away.

  If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, Solly Martin would never have believed it.

  The young boy put his arms out to his side, just as Flammio and Moscalevitch charged toward him.

  Then the boy started to shine. Right before Martin's eyes, he started to shine, first giving off a faint blue glimmer as if a gas flame were surrounding his body. The glow grew in intensity, enveloping the thin young body like a spiritual aura. Moscalevitch and Flammio stopped charging. They stood rooted in the middle of the store, and then the boy pointed his arms and fingertips forward at the two men, and the blue aura surrounding him began to change in color. First, it turned violet, and then as the blue vanished, more redness appeared—more and more, brighter and brighter. Then there was an orange glow around the boy, the throbbing color of a poker heated in a coal fire, and it pained Solly's eyes to stare at it. But he continued to stare, and through the orange haze, he could see the boy's face, and the boy's eyes were narrowed and glinting, and his mouth was wide open and his teeth shone in a broad smile of pure joy.

  Then, as if the two men were the negative poles of a battery and the boy a giant positive generator, flashes of orange light darted across the room and enveloped the men's bodies. Solly Martin stifled a scream. The men's clothes were burned off their bodies instantly, and the orange flame was consuming them, and before Martin's eyes, they seemed to be melting, sinking slowly toward the floor.

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  They never screamed, and Martin knew they were dead, and then the can of gasoline Flammio had been carrying exploded and splashed flame all over the store, and instantly papers and PLO banners began to burn.

  At the back of the store, young Lester McGurl was still glowing. He spun around and pointed his hands toward the far wall, and flashes of flame jumped forward from his fingers. Where the long sparks of flames hit the wall, the dried old wood began to burn immediately.

  The boy looked around. He nodded. The two arsonists' bodies in the middle of the floor were still burning, fat sputtering from their carcasses, and where the splashes touched the wood of the floor, the floor began to burn. The rest of the store was burning, too, and the young boy began to change color slowly, backing from orange to red to purple to blue, and then back to bis normal color, almost as if he were a battery and the last drop of juice had been drained from him.

  Lester McGurl ran toward the rear door. Solly Martin made one of those judgments that, later, he would ask himself where he got the courage to

  make.

  As the youth ran by him, Solly grabbed him around his skinny shoulders and before the startled boy could fight, Solly hissed, "We've got to get out of here. Come on. I'm your friend. I'm not going to hurt you."

  He was surprised at the frailty of the boy's bones. It felt as if he had a bird in his hands. The boy offered him no resistance, almost as if he had no energy left. Solly Martin led him quickly down the alley toward his waiting car.

  15

  He wanted to get out of there before the police arrived. He knew that, in the crook of his arm, he had the commercial commodity he had always been looking for.

  He had never in his life been able to make a dollar selling anything to the general public, but he was going to have a different clientele now. He was going to be selling fires to people who wanted fires, and in Lester McGurl he had the commodity that separated him from anyone else peddling arson in the United States.

  Lester McGurl let himself be put into the front seat of the car.

  When Solly got in behind the wheel, he saw that Lester was staring at him.

  "You going to hit me?" McGurl said.

  "No," said Solly. "I'm going to feed you."

  The boy shook his head. "You're going to beat me," he insisted.

  "No, I'm not," said Solly. 'Tm going to make you rich. And I'm going to give you all the fires you want. How's that sound?"

  "I'll believe it when I see it," Lester McGurl said.

  "Believe it," said Solly Martin.

  They were gone before the fire engines arrived.

  16

  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo, and the sand that landed on his belly was damp and cold.

  He opened one eye to look at the three-year-old blonde girl who squatted over a long ditch she was digging in the sand of the beach.

  "Why are you throwing sand on my belly?" Remo asked her. He was in a bathing suit, lying on his back on a Mickey Mouse towel in the bright summer heat of Point Pleasant Beach at the New Jersey shore.

  "I'm digging a moke," the girl said without looking up. Her little tin shovel—the first Remo had seen in years because he thought only plastic shovels were being made—flashed down into the sand without pause, digging up a small spoon-sized scoop and throwing it past her left shoulder, where most of it landed on Remo's stomach again. Her lips were pressed together tightly as she concentrated on her dazzling feat of earth-moving. "What's a moke?" Remo asked. "It's what you dig around a cassoo," the little girl said. "My big sister Ardaff told me all about it."

  "That's not a moke," Remo said. "It's a moat." He wiped the sand from his stomach. "And besides,

  18

  where's your castle? Why are you building a moat around a castle when you don't have a castle? I think it's just a trick to throw more sand on my belly."

  The girl kept digging. More sand kept landing on Remo's stomach. Some of it, dryer than the rest, landed in his face. "I'm making the moke first 'cause it's easier to make the moke," she said.

  "Moat," Remo said.

  "Moke," the girl agreed. "Then I'll make the cassoo." She had long blonde pigtails, dotted with fresh wet sand that glistened like diamond chips. Her body was pink, not yet burned by the sun, and it seemed made of ovals—curvy, round, and soft with no discernible muscles.

  "Why'd you decide to build it next to me when you've got this whole beach to build it on?" Remo asked. He spread his arms wide to indicate the expanse of beach and got a shovel full of sand in his unprotected face for his trouble. He turned over on his side and propped himself up on one arm to look at the girl.

  "'Cause I thought if dragons comes, you gonna defend my cassoo," the girl said. For the first time, she looked at him and smiled. Her eyes were sky blue, and her little baby teeth were even and sparkled white like pearls.

  "Why me?" Remo said. "You ever see a dragon?"

  "'Cause you looks nice," the girl said. "And my big sister Ardaff told me all about dragons, and they're bigger than me."

  "You think I look nice?" Remo said. He looked down at his hands. They had been responsible for hundreds of deaths, and while the bloodstains weren't visible, they were there—in his mind. Remo

  19

  wondered when anyone had last thought he was nice.

  "Sure, you're nice," she said with the un-self-consciousness of the very young. "Very nice." She was back to digging, tossing sand over her shoulder at Remo.

  "I'm not nice."

  "Yes, you are."

  "Will you marry me?"

  "Not until I build my cassoo," she said.

  "I guess I'll just have to help you build it, won't I?" Remo said.

  The girl had dug a ditch in a roughly square pattern, four feet on a side. Remo knelt alongside
her, and the hands that had been trained to kill became as gentle as a surgeon's but more precise than any surgeon's ever had been.

  Using the girl's water bucket, Remo wet sand and scooped it up into large rectangular shapes. Using fingertips as punches, he knocked out window holes in the sides of the large walls. Then, atop the base, he built twisting towers and battlements, piling sand on top of sand as the girl sipped her breath, knowing the towers must fall. But Remo could feel through his fingertips the internal tension of the sand, and just at the moment when he knew it would collapse of its own weight, he backed off and began working on another turret.

  The castle was a creation from Oz, mock stone towers reaching into the sky, standing taller than the little girl herself. People on the beach began to watch the structure, now almost six feet tall, something from a fairy tale.

  Remo stepped back away from the castle, ringed

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  by its dismal meandering excuse of a moat and said, "There we go. Marry me now?"

  "After I play a little bit. You're really nice." She grabbed his hand and pulled him down to her so she could kiss his cheek. As Remo stood up, he saw all the people on the beach watching them, and he felt self-conscious and embarrassed.

  "Always the way," he said. "Always my luck to fall in love with a woman who wants to play a little bit first."

  Behind the crowd, he saw the person he had been waiting for—a tall, spare man with thinning gray hair, wearing a gray three-piece suit even in the summer heat of the Jersey shore. He was standing on the narrow boardwalk, looking down toward Remo, and when their eyes met, he nodded. Remo nodded back.

  "I'll be back in a little while," he told the girl. He squeezed her hand and then walked across the hot sand to where Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of the super-secret agency CURE, waited on a bench for him. Remo walked slowly, oblivious to the scorching heat underfoot.

  Remo sat next to Smith, brushing dried sand from his chest and stomach. Remo was tall and lean, and his body was that of an athlete, trim and trained but not exceptional. The only thing that might have called attention to him were his thick wrists, which he kept working by rotating his fists, as if his wrists were sore. He had dark hair, as dark as his midnight pools of his eyes, which were buried deep behind high cheekbones that sometimes made him seem almost Oriental.

  "I'm glad to see you're maintaining your usual low profile," Smith said.

  21

  "You think the kid's an enemy agent?" Remo said. "Wait here, I'll go kill her." He started to rise.

  Smith sighed. "Sit down," he said. "Why does every conversation start off the same way?"

  "Because you're always dumping on me right at the start because I'm not hiding behind a bush or something," Remo said. "Hey, this is the Jersey shore. Half those guys on the beach are Jersey politicians. They're watching the ocean trying to figure out a way to steal it. The other half are federal agents, watching the politicians. Nobody's watching me."

  He looked at Smith, then back at the little blonde girl in the red bathing suit. She was squatting next to her sand castle. Her lips were moving, busily engaged in play conversation with herself. Remo smiled. It was nice to do something nice for someone. Maybe he was nice after all.

  "What's on your mind?" he asked Smith.

  "It's Ruby," Smith said.

  Ruby was Ruby Jackson Gonzales, the light-skinned black woman who was Smith's assistant. Except for Smith, Remo, and whoever was president of the United States at the time, she was the only person who knew of the existence of the secret agency CURE, which had been set up years before to fight crime without paying too much attention to the niceties of the law. Remo was its killer arm. Remo thought of Ruby, then remembered her screeching rock-splitting voice and told Smith, "I don't want to hear about it. She's your problem. You hired her. What's she trying to do, overthrow you and sell stock in the organization?"

  "She wants to quit," Smith said softly. He folded his hands across the attaché case on his lap. Remo

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  realized he could not remember ever seeing Smith without an attaché case, and he wondered what was in it that Smith kept so close to him all the time. It was as if the CURE director wore a four-piece suit: trousers, vest, jacket, and attaché case.

  "Good," Remo said. "Let her quit. I'm tired of listening to her yell at me all the time anyway."

  "It's not that easy," Smith said. And of course it wasn't. Remo knew that. Someone out there who knew about CURE but did not work for it was too big a problem and too big a threat to endure.

  "Why does she want to quit?" Remo asked.

  "She says she's bored. The work is dull. She wants to go back to her wig business and make some real money."

  "Try giving her a raise?" Remo asked.

  "I tried that."

  "What'd she say?"

  "She said there wasn't enough money in the world to make the job less boring."

  "That doesn't sound like Ruby," Remo said. "That woman likes money. She must really be bored." He watched the little girl moving her tiny arm in and out of the windows of the sand castle, playing some fantasy adventure scripted in her mind. "You want me to talk to her?" Remo asked.

  "No," Smith said.

  "What then?" Remo asked.

  "I want you to . . . to remove her."

  Remo wheeled about and looked at Smith's face. It was as impassive as ever, staring out at the gray» sea.

  "Ruby?" Remo said. "You want me to kill her?" He studied Smith's face, but it was unchanged,

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  chartless, as smooth as the waveless ocean. But he nodded curtly.

  "That's right," Remo said bitterly. "You just sit there and nod, but what we're talking about is killing somebody. One of our own. Did you forget? Ruby saved me and Chiun once. And you sit there like some kind of gray mummy and shake your head up and down and to you, that's shaking your head, but to me that means go kill somebody, go kill a friend."

  "Remo, I know how you feel. But she knew the risks when she signed on. I don't know why you think I like this."

  "Because you do like it, you bloodless . . ."

  Remo stopped. He had been looking toward the water, and he saw it coming. A big tanned blond man with shoulder-length hair, carrying a surfboard under his arm, was running along the beach, and maliciously, he plowed through the sand castle that Remo had built. Even a hundred feet away, Remo could hear his happy exultant laugh. The little girl in the red bathing suit looked at the running man in surprise and shock, then looked at the wreckage of her dream castle, then sank slowly into a squat, crying. Even from his distance, Remo could see her back racking with sobs.

  "Excuse me," Remo told Smith. "Wait here." He jumped lightly over the boardwalk railing, down onto the hot sand, and ran over to the little girl and the wreckage of the castle.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks. She looked at Remo with hurt in her face.

  "You were 'upposed to watch out for dragons," she said. "And now look what happened."

  24

  "Don't get on my case," Remo said. "We're not married yet. Anyway, we'll fix it up again."

  "We will?"

  "You betcha," Remo said. He sent the girl to fill her pail with water, and with skilled hands, he quickly rebuilt the castle, even taller and grander than before. As he worked, the girl rocked from foot to foot, watching him, barely able to contain her happiness.

  When he was done, she looked at him with love, and he brushed the tears from her eyes. She said, "You know I'm not allowed to get married. My big sister Ardaff said I'm too little."

  "I know," Remo said.

  "But when I'm bigger, I'll marry you."

  "I hope so," Remo said.

  "Because you're nice," the girl said.

  "Thank you," Remo said. He stood up. "Now, you play here and have a nice time, because I have to go."

  "Do you want to go?"

  "No," said Remo. "But I've got something to do."

  "Will I see you again?"

  "No,"
Remo said.

  "Oh," she said, accepting that with the resignation of children to whom most of Ufe is still a sad surprise. "I love you."

  "I love you, too," Remo said.

  He walked away from the girl, down toward the next beach where a cove created by two long rock jetties caught the waves and created enough turmoil from the usually placid ocean to allow for minor-league surfboarding.

  The big blond surfer stood on a small hillock of

  25

  sànd overlooking the beach, like a Greek god surveying his domain. His surfboard was stuck in the sand in front of him like a Persian shield.

  Remo walked .around in front of him. The young man was bigger than Remo and huskier. He looked as if he drank suntan oil for sustenance. .

  "You're in my sun," he said unpleasantly.

  "You knocked down that little girl's sand castle," Remo said.

  "She shouldn't build things in the traffic lane," the blond said.

  "That's not why you knocked it down," Remo said.

  "Oh? Why then?"

  "Because you're not a nice person," Remo said. "Now, I am. I have it on the very highest authority that I am a nice person."

  "Nice guys finish last."

  "Not anymore they don't," Remo said.

  He lifted the surfboard out of the sand, raised it a foot above the level of the beach, then slammed the fiberglass panel back down into the sand. To get there, it had to pass through the toes of the young man's right foot. It did.

  The man looked down at his foot. He lifted the front of it and saw that his toes were missing.

  "My foot, my foot," he yelled. "My toes." He looked at Remo. "What . . . ?"

  Remo smiled.

  "Hang five," he said casually, as he walked off.

  He walked straight back to the boardwalk, where Smith still sat on the bench.

  "Smitty," said Remo, "I've got something to tell you, but first I'm going to do you a favor. Does Ruby know you're meeting with me?"

  26

  Smith said, "Yes."

  "Then she knows what's on your mind," Remo said. "She knows what you came here to tell me. I'd suggest you make sure that she didn't plant a bomb in your car."

  "It's all right," Smith said. "I came down on the bus."