Sweet Dreams Page 2

  Don Salvatore Massello was not around to hear the crack. He was on a plane bound for New York City where he would have something very important to report at the national meeting of the crime families.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and he must have been cheating. James Merrick was praying for strength to complete his twentieth mile and the skinny bastard in blue had just passed him for the second time.

  The next time would be three. Merrick’s mind flitted back to the old sea adage of going down for the third time and he giggled hysterically. Suddenly his mirth turned bitter and he squeezed out, through clenched teeth:

  “Hey, you. You, skinny. You, the guy in the tee shirt.”

  The man who had “Remo” written on his number card with a red magic marker turned his head back toward the huffing Merrick and pointed at himself.

  “Who, me?” he said.

  “Yeah. You. Remo. Wait up.”

  Remo slowed down and Merrick pulled his anguished legs back and forth, back and forth, seemingly faster and faster. But he wasn’t catching up; the distance between the two remained the same, no matter how hard he pushed his aching body.

  “Come on. Slow down,” yelled Merrick, in pain.

  A moment later, Remo was no longer in front of him. He was directly beside Merrick, smiling distantly, running alongside him stride for stride.

  “What do you want?” Remo said lightly.

  Merrick stared at him, his eyes fogged with tears of exertion mingling with salty beads of sweat. The guy isn’t even breathing hard, he thought.

  “What’s your number?” Merrick gasped.

  Remo didn’t answer. He just kept pace as they passed the Danvers town line.

  Dammit, who was this maniac who wasn’t even sweating? “You see this?” Merrick asked, jabbing the blue number six on his chest.

  “Yeah,” said Remo. “It’s nice. That’s called an Arabic number. Roman numbers are like they use for the Super Bowl. You know, X’s and I’s. Why do they call it an Arabic number? If Arabs could count real well, why don’t their wars last more than a few days? Of course, maybe they’d rather lose fast than lose slow. I don’t know.”

  The man was a loon, Merrick realized. “This is my number,” Merrick puffed. “This means…I’m the sixth…person…to sign up for…this marathon. See? Now…what’s your number?”

  Remo did not answer. Suddenly Merrick felt a light touch across his front and then a cool breeze ruffling his graying chest hair. He looked down and saw a hole in his shirt where his number used to be clipped.

  He looked back toward Remo but the man was gone. He had lengthened his stride and was pulling away from Merrick as if Merrick had been standing still. Remo’s hands were busy at the front of his shirt and Merrick knew he was pinning on number six. James Merrick’s number six.

  This was all he needed. Four years of work and this bum was walking away with his race. And his number.

  Merrick had wanted to run in the Boston Marathon ever since he was a youth. But four years before, he had decided to plan for the Bicentennial Marathon. If he won that one, he would be remembered. For the better part of four years, he worked himself into condition. And then, starting in February, he really turned it on.

  Every day after work, he would run the seven miles home, briefcase clutched to his well-tailored chest. He’d arrive to the barely concealed smirk of his wife, Carol, sweat soaking through his Arrow Pacesetter shirt and Brooks Brothers suit.

  Each evening, he practically had to scrape off his jockey shorts. He ruined his Florsheim cordovans the second night, but after that began carrying his Adidas track shoes to work in a paper bag.

  Instead of lunch, he’d run in the men’s room, stopping to wash or comb his hair every time someone came in. Coffee breaks were used for pushups in the utility room.

  Soon his steamy figure became the subject of office chatter and “Merrick” jokes began to circulate.

  When an anonymous caller told Merrick’s wife one night that there was an office pool betting on whether or not Merrick would die of a coronary before his pungent sweat smell claimed its first victim, she decided to have an intimate discussion with him.

  “What the hell are you trying to prove?” she had said. “You’re a Sunday athlete. The most running you should do is from the living room to the kitchen.”

  She liked the way that came out and laughed twice. James Merrick ignored her and kept running.

  The Sunday before the race, Merrick had leaned over to his twelve-year-old son in front of the television set and said: “What do you think of your old dad winning the Marathon tomorrow, David?”

  “Not now, Pop. Kojak is moving in. Who loves ya, baby?”

  Merrick’s head snapped up as if slapped to stare at the fat bald man on the Motorola television and he felt the bile rise. Kojak didn’t have to run any marathon.

  “I’m running twenty-six miles tomorrow, David.” Merrick tried to smile but it was wasted on the back of his son’s head. “Isn’t that pretty good?”

  “Yeah, Dad.” Merrick felt some relief sweep over him.

  “The Six Million Dollar Man did that tonight in an hour,” David said.

  Merrick saw the tide go out.

  “Well, not really an hour, that was what they said it took him, but it was more like five minutes. In slow motion. Wow.”

  As his son ran around the room in slow motion, Merrick pictured himself on a cold beach and his eyes became as vacant as the horizon.

  He’d show them. He’d show them all.

  · · ·

  While Merrick had dressed the morning of the race, feeling everything was going to be perfect, Remo had awakened knowing things were perfect and it disgusted him.

  It was wrong. It was wrong to sleep perfectly. To get up perfectly. To always be in perfect health. Misery, he decided, was the only thing that made life worth living.

  Remo looked into his dark eyes in the bathroom mirror, then let them flick over his tanned face with its high cheekbones. His lean body, even with its extraordinarily thick wrists, gave no hint of the killing machine Remo had become.

  Remo had watched himself shave. No wasted motion, easy smooth strokes.

  Perfect.

  Disgusting.

  Why didn’t he ever nick himself? Why didn’t he get dragon mouth in the morning like everyone else?

  Once upon a time he had. He remembered the cold stinging touch of the styptic pencil when he nicked his face shaving. But that had been years before, back in another life, when Remo Williams was just another patrolman in the Newark Police Department.

  That was before he had been framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and revived after a fake electrocution to work for a secret agency as its enforcer arm-code name Destroyer-in a war against crime.

  That had been a long time ago and suddenly he did not want to look anymore at the plastic hotel room he had been staying in for three days. He did not want to speak to Chiun, the aged Korean assassin who was now motionless, asleep on a mat in the middle of the suite’s living room floor.

  It had been Chiun, the latest Master in centuries of masters from the small Korean village of Sinanju, who had changed Remo.

  There had been ten years of prodding and probing, discipline, guidance, and technique and while Remo had long since stopped hating it all, he had never taken the time to determine if it was good.

  He had climbed the mountain of his soul but forgotten to check whether he liked the view.

  Remo stared at himself in the mirror. If he wanted right now, he could dilate or constrict the pupils of his eyes. He could raise the temperature of any part of his body six degrees. He could slow his heart beat to four a minute or speed it to 108 a minute, all without moving from this spot.

  He wasn’t even human anymore. He was just perfect.

  Remo kicked open the bathroom door and walked quickly to the front door of the suite, past the frail-looking pile on the floor that was Chiun. Remo kicked open the front door
too and since it was built to open inwards, most of the wood and plastic flew across the hall. The knob was later discovered by the manager, lodged in the soda machine three doors down.

  A high squeaky voice stopped Remo halfway into the hall.

  “You are troubled,” Chiun said. “What is it?”

  “I’ve just decided. I don’t like being perfect.”

  Chiun laughed. “Perfect? Perfect? You? Heh, heh, heh. Do not waken me for any more jokes.”

  Remo gave Chiun’s back a silent Bronx cheer, then went downstairs, through the red and brown tiled lobby of the hotel into the crisp April Boston morning.

  Remo leaned against the outside front door of the hotel and started searching himself.

  “Pardon me, sir,” said a bellboy.

  “Don’t bother me,” Remo said. “Can’t you see I’m perfect?”

  “But, sir…”

  “One more word and you’ll be blowing your nose from the back.”

  The bellboy left. Remo thought of the first time he had met Chiun. The old Oriental was shuffling toward him in a gymnasium at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, the secret headquarters of the secret organization CURE. Chiun had at first looked like a skinny skeleton covered with yellow parchment…

  “Pardon me, sir,” said the bell captain, who didn’t particularly want anyone’s pardon. He had been laying his bet on No Preservatives Added in the fifth at Suffolk Downs when the bellboy had made him aware of the man standing outside.

  “Pardon me, sir,” the bell captain repeated, “but what are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” Remo asked.

  The bell captain thought carefully. You never knew what might show up when you had a hotel this close to Huntington Avenue, Boston’s answer to Dante’s Eighth Circle.

  “It looks, sir, like you’re leaning against a building with just a towel on.”

  Remo looked down. The bell captain was right.

  “So?” said Remo.

  “Well.” The bell captain paused. “It’s our towel.”

  “I’m a paying customer,” Remo said.

  “Do you have a key, sir?”

  “I left it in my other towel,” Remo said.

  “How are you going to get back into your room then?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll manage,” Remo said.

  “Aren’t you a little bit cold?”

  “I’m too perfect to be cold,” Remo said and turned away from the man who was making it difficult for him to think.

  The bell captain shrugged and went back to his station. He would give the weirdo five minutes before calling the hotel detective. In the meantime, he called his bookie to put in his bet on No Preservatives Added, who later broke her foreleg coming around the first turn. The bell captain’s bet at the Wonderland dog races in Revere leaped at the automatic rabbit and got electrocuted. The Red Sox lost 17 to 1. The bell captain’s oldest son was booked for possession, his wife got another day deeper into the change of life, and his dog got hit by a car. Looking back on it the next day, he would bet that his run of bad luck began with the warm-blooded guy leaning against the hotel wall with just a towel on.

  Remo was still thinking, trying to remember just when it was that he had become perfect.

  He had met Chiun in the gymnasium, and he had had a gun in his hand and was ordered to kill the old Oriental for a night off from training. For a night off, he would have done anything, and he had fired six shots point blank at Chiun and all of them had missed. He certainly hadn’t been perfect that night.

  “Pardon me, sir,” said a greasy young girl.

  “Don’t bother me,” Remo said.

  “Oh, it won’t be a bother, sir,” the girl said. “Would you like to take a personality test?”

  Remo looked at the girl. She was wearing a pasteboard tag that said, “Hello, my name is Margie from the School of Powerology.” Her hair hung down across her shiny pock-marked face like spaghetti in clam sauce. Through dirty oil-streaked glasses, her eyes were a dull powdery brown.

  “Sure,” said Remo. “I’m trying to find out why I’m perfect.”

  “We can help you to know yourself better, that will be fifty cents, please.”

  “Pardon?” Remo said.

  “You are taking the test?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s fifty cents for my time and the cost of the test paper, sir.”

  “Can I owe it to you?”

  “Don’t you have it on you?”

  “Not so you’d notice,” Remo said.

  Margie stared him up and down, then licked her lips. “I guess you could give it to me later,” she said. She giggled and blushed, and the sudden flush of color combined with her natural pallor to make her look purple.

  “What is your name, sir?”

  “Kay Kyser from the College of Musical Knowledge.”

  “Very good,” Margie said, pulling open a loose-leaf folder she had been holding. “Question number one. Are you happy?”

  “No,” said Remo.

  “Then, sir, you should get our booklet, A Happier You Through Powerology, which is only $3.98 for the first copy and $2.50 for each one afterwards.”

  “I will seriously consider it,” Remo said. “Do you have another question.”

  “Yes, sir. Lots of questions,” she said staring at his chest again. “Question number two. Do you lay, I mean, like your friends?”

  “What friends?” Remo asked.

  “Yes or no,” Margie said. “It has to be yes or no, I can’t fit ‘what friends’ into the space.”

  “Can’t you write smaller?”

  “It’ll come out ‘wha fri.’”

  “Okay,” Remo said. “No.”

  “Oh. Then a must for your library would be the Powerology Guide for Better Friendships or How to Win People to Your Side through Powerology. Right now, you could have it for only $2.95, for a limited time, of course.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Margie was staring at his belly button. “Of course, something could be arranged,” she said.

  “Question three,” Remo said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, shaking her head and sending beads of greasy dirt flying. “How do you rape, I mean, rate your love life on a scale of one to ten?”

  “None,” said Remo. “Minus six. Minus ninety.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame, but nothing that couldn’t be remedied by How to Pick up Girls and Score Through Powerology for only $4.95 or letting me come up to your room.”

  “You’re losing your scientific dispassion,” Remo said.

  “Don’t tell me that. I can see rape in your eyes.”

  “That’s because your glasses are dirty,” Remo said.

  “Look, fella, I’ll knock up…I mean, off the fifty-cent service charge.”

  “Not now.”

  “This is my last offer. I knock off the service charge, throw in a Powerology Book of Massage and pay for dinner afterwards. What more could you want?”

  “Your sudden and complete disappearance,” Remo said.

  “Too bad. I could have helped you find yourself,” Margie said.

  Remo felt sorry for her because she wasn’t perfect like him. He set the time as 10:27. Chiun’s daily ration of soap operas would begin at noon sharp.

  “Look,” Remo said. “Come back in two hours and go up to Suite 1014. You’ll recognize it ’cause it doesn’t have a door. Just go in and make yourself at home until I get back.” He turned her around and patted her behind. “Run along now. Remember. About two hours. Bring your friends. Bring all your friends.”

  Margie giggled and took off toward Kenmore Square like a rocket.

  Remo wandered down across the Christian Science Center and toward the Prudential Building, the second tallest skyscraper in Boston. It used to be the first until another insurance company had built a solid glass monstrosity designed to reflect the sky and hundreds of birds killed themselves every day by flying into it.

&nbs
p; Hundreds of people were milling about in the Prudential Mall. Remo really did not notice them because he was watching his legs move almost perfectly. He was so intent on his feet he almost walked into a middle-aged man bouncing up and down.

  “Hey. Watch what you’re doing,” the man said.

  Remo looked up and saw the crowd milling around him, then looked back to the graying man in his white shorts with red racing stripes, gray sweat shirt, and Adidas sneakers.

  “What are you doing?” asked Remo.

  “Getting set,” the man said.

  “For what?”

  “For what? Are you kidding? Where have you been, man?”

  “Well, I was in Korea for a while.”

  “Oh, yeah. I was in Korea too,” the man said. “What were you doing?”

  “Wiping out most of the standing army,” said Remo, looking out over all the bobbing heads. “What is all this?”

  “It’s the Boston Marathon,” said the man who had been to Korea himself for awhile. “We run to Brickton, Massachusetts, and back.”

  “What for?”

  The graying man looked at Remo as if he were crazy. The towel probably helped, although, among all the shorts, it looked just like an eccentric kilt.

  “How far is Brickton?” asked Remo.

  “Thirteen miles,” the man said.

  “I’ll be right back,” Remo said. Fifteen minutes later, Remo stepped out of a men’s shop dressed like the man he had been speaking to-in white shorts with red stripes, a gray sweatshirt, and Adidas running shoes, all charged to his hotel room and verified by the store clerk with a call to the hotel which informed the clerk frostily that the gentleman from Room 1014 had infinite credit, whether he was wearing a towel or not.

  Remo joined all the runners in the sun of downtown Boston as they gathered around the entrance to the Prudential Building from Boylston Avenue.

  A heavy, red-haired man was waving the starting gun and shouting, “Five minutes. Five minutes.”

  Suddenly, hundreds of people started leaping, breathing deep, stretching, and running in place all around Remo. He felt like laughing. Warm-up exercises were a joke.

  Early on in his training, Chiun had told him: “One must always be ready. We do not practice eating before meals. Why practice running before running?”