Murder Ward Page 2

  She forced herself to wait until nine-thirty in the morning before phoning the family physician. The doctor’s receptionist-nurse answered, and she made an appointment for that day. She only needed five minutes, she said. Actually, she needed less.

  “John’s heart was in good shape, wasn’t it, doctor?” she asked before he could offer his sympathy.

  “Well, yes. For a man of his age, his heart was functioning well. He took care of himself properly.”

  “Should his heart have failed on the operating table?”

  “Well, Mrs. Boulder, an operation puts an incredible strain on the body.”

  “Should it have failed?”

  “Robler has some of the finest surgical teams in the country, Mrs. Boulder. Many of the nation’s highest officials go there. If there were any way for them to save your husband…”

  “He shouldn’t have died of a heart failure, should he, doctor? Tell me. You’re our family physician.”

  “Mrs. Boulder, I sent my own daughter to the Robler Clinic.”

  “But John shouldn’t have died of heart failure in his condition at his ago, should he?”

  “There are many things in medicine that we can’t explain,” he said. But Mrs. Boulder wasn’t listening to him; she was already composing her letter to the American Medical Association and the medical societies. By afternoon she was outlining her strategy to the family lawyer. He was more blunt than the family doctor.

  “Save your money, Mrs. Boulder. The only way we can get the Robler people for malpractice is to get another physician to testify against them.”

  “Well, let’s do that.”

  “It’s a fine strategy, Mrs. Boulder. But it won’t work.”

  “Why not?” she asked, her voice sharp and angry.

  “Because if your own family physician wouldn’t back you up in private, what do you expect from some impartial doctor in the courtroom? Doctors don’t testify against doctors. That’s not in the Hippocratic oath, but it’s one rule doctors follow faithfully.”

  “You mean doctors can kill patients and get away with it?”

  “I mean sometimes they don’t perform well, or even properly, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

  “I read of a doctor out west who was convicted of malpractice just last…last…last year, I think it was.”

  “That’s right. You read of it. When a doctor is convicted of malpractice, it’s news. And I believe that doctor was an oddball who had made waves and was fighting the medical societies. Did you read about the auto accident in Phoenix where the driver was found guilty of careless driving and reckless endangerment?”

  “No, I don’t think I did.”

  “Neither did I. That’s because people are regularly convicted of careless driving. Policemen testify. For doctors, there are no policemen.”

  “But there are medical boards, laws, the American Medical Association.”

  “The AMA? That’s like asking the National Association of Manufacturers to investigate excessive profits. Mrs. Boulder, I’m your friend, and I was John’s friend. And as your friend and as a good lawyer, which I am, I’m going to give you some excellent professional advice. And by the way, I’m going to charge you for it, so you’d better listen to me. To bring a malpractice suit against the Robler Clinic or Dr. Demmet is a waste of your time and your money and your emotions. I won’t let you do it because you can’t win.”

  “What about an autopsy?”

  “We can get one.”

  “Well, won’t that prove our case?”

  “It will probably prove Robler’s case.”

  “The coroners are part of the club, too? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It’s not what I’m saying. They’re not. But doctors, like everyone else, learn to cover themselves properly. If they say heart failure was the cause of death, then that’s just what the coroner is going to find. A medical career is worth more than a million dollars. Doctors don’t risk that lightly. Now, I will do something else. If you promise not to pursue this, Mrs. Boulder, I’ll forget the bill for this appointment. I’m sorry. I grieve with you, and if there were some way we could bring John back, even on the longest chance, or make amends for his death, I would go with you on this thing despite the odds. But there’s nothing we can do. I’m sorry.”

  “We’ll see,” said Mrs. Boulder, who was not thanking people for their services anymore.

  Her letters were answered politely, giving the impression that the correspondents had looked into the matter. But when she reread them and analyzed each sentence carefully, she realized that all the authorities had said was how wonderful the profession of medicine was and how thorough doctors were in their concern.

  And there she finally let the matter drop. The only time she ever saw Dr. Demmet’s name again was in the sports pages when he won the low gross in the Fair Oaks Scotch Foursome winter tournament.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and the Bay winds out of the Pacific whipped at him with all the fury gathered over the vast stretch of ocean. The Golden Gate spun out before him to Marin County, the gateway to the northwest. Behind him was San Francisco and going east, the rest of America.

  He stood on the guardrail, where four hundred and ninety-nine others had plunged to their deaths in suicides marking otherwise insignificant lives.

  The man was about six feet tall, normal in build. Only extra-thick wrists suggested he might be more than just an ordinary man, but there was nothing in the wrists to suggest that he could be standing there with the soles of his bare feet just touching the round railing of the bridge.

  For one thing, Volkswagens crossing the bridge in the pre-dawn darkness tended to shift as the cross-gusts buffeted them. For another, his dark pants and dark shirt whipped like flags in a hurricane. And for another, he stood upright, very casual as if doing nothing more enervating than contemplating a change of television channel in his living room.

  He smelled the salt Pacific breeze and felt the December cold that kept car windows closed and left many rear windows clouded with steam.

  The cold he handled simply, by letting his body become one with it, as he was taught. The wind he handled another way. It was not that his body fought the wind; it was that his body became stronger than the wind by becoming part of the bridge, connected by his very thoughts to the support driven deep into the bedrock that bordered the Bay.

  “Are you waiting for applause?” came the squeaky Oriental voice from behind him. “Or are you about to make a great production of a simple exercise?”

  “Thank you for distracting me. I really needed a distraction. If there’s one thing I needed standing two hundred feet above open water with a winter wind whipping at me, it’s a distraction,” said Remo, turning around to the wispy Oriental in a dark black kimono, whose strands of white hair flew in the wind like vagrant silk threads, but who stood just as securely on the pedestrian walk as Remo did on the railing.

  “If your mind is a slave to every noise, do not blame the noise for your subservience,” said Chiun, the Master of Sinanju. “It is not a master that makes a slave, but a slave who makes those about him a master.”

  “Thank you for a very merry Christmas, Little Father.”

  “If your heart remains with a white man’s holiday, then perhaps I should stand on that bar with you lest you fall, for truly, not even the House of Sinanju can overcome treasured bad habits.”

  “Well, I’m not going ga-ga over the Feast of the Pig.”

  “It is not called the Feast of the Pig,” said Chiun. “It is a day when those who feel obligated to someone who has given them much wisdom return some small little offering of thanksgiving.”

  “You’re not getting Barbra Streisand,” Remo said. “We don’t give women like that around here.”

  “She would be good for bearing children. And seeing your shoddiness of performance, the House of Sinanju needs another male.”

  “She’s not Korean, Little Father. She’s as wh
ite as I am.”

  “For beauty, one makes an exception. The blood of Sinanju should overcome any inadequacies. And then I would get a pupil without learned bad habits and arrogance and talkativeness. Even the greatest of artists has difficulty molding hardened clay.”

  Remo turned back to the cold wind. He knew its sound was there but he did not hear it. He knew the cold was there but he did not feel it. He knew the bridge was beneath him and around him but he did not sense it. He was moving along a thin bar at an outside angle above dark waters and his thoughts and feelings were the center of his balance. He could run for days like this, he felt, and though he was aware of the lights of cars moving at him and beside him, they were not in his world. His world was passing them faster and faster and as his world approached the far side of the bridge, he reversed it in a spin that stopped not with his feet because his bones could not support that sort of jarring pressure, but with the very stopping of his world. And then he was moving back toward Chiun, the Master of Sinanju.

  It had all started so simply a decade before with exercises that caused pain that he had never known his body could endure. But then the pain became different and the exercises that were at first difficult became easy, until his body knew what to do from distant memory and his mind moved on to other things.

  It was more than a change in the quality of his skills; it was a change of his very nervous system and his being. And if he had been truthful with Chiun, he would have admitted that most of his loneliness at Christmastime had left years before and he was now in his soul more a descendant of Sinanju, that tiny village in North Korea which had through the centuries produced assassins for the kings and emperors whose gold supported the rocky village where nothing seemed to grow.

  Remo was the first Caucasian to be taught the secrets of Sinanju. For in hiring himself to “Upstairs,” Chiun had agreed to train, instead of perform, and Chiun once admitted that he had given Remo more than what he called “the little tricks” of kung fu, aikido, and tae kwan do. He had given Remo the source of them all—Sinanju. And Upstairs had its white assassin who could move freely in a white society. Neat.

  Remo’s world moved back to Chiun, standing almost invisible on the walkway, and then Remo stopped, still motionless, still in perfect harmony with the deep-sunk bridge supports.

  “You may begin,” said Chiun.

  “Begin? I’ve finished, Little Father.”

  “Did you really? I was not watching. I was thinking about my home across the waters. In the cold mornings, I think of Sinanju. I think of how there would be a gift waiting for me if I were home. I do not know what the gift would look like, or if she would be as gracious as the singer of songs, but it is not the size of the breast or hip, but the thought that counts. Oh, if I were but home.”

  “I can’t give you a human being, Little Father.”

  “Who am I to expect a little nothing of a remembrance from one who has received so much from me?”

  “If you want something warm, I’ll get you a cow,” said Remo.

  “I already have a cow. He talks back to me,” said Chiun, and Remo heard that cackle that indicated this saying would be coming back at him for several days. Along with the cackle.

  “I have a cow already. He talks back to me,” Chiun repeated. As much to get away from the tinkly laugh as anything else, Remo ran the Golden Gate again. This time he heard voices yelling, intruding into his moving world.

  “That’s him. Stop him. My God. He’s going sideways. I don’t believe it. Look at how fast he’s going. He’s going to jump. There. That guy on the bridge. Stop him.”

  When he returned to Chiun, he received a nod of recognition and hopped down from the railing.

  “In Persia, the shah would have given a Master of Sinanju his own daughter. In Rome, the emperor once made an offering of a captured queen. In the great Seleucid empire, ah, the great Seleucid empire, they knew truly how to treat a Master of Sinanju. In Africa, the Loni showed before your very eyes the proper respect paid to a Master of Sinanju. But in America, in America, I get a cow. A cow who talks back to me.”

  “Fish again for the meal, Little Father,” said Remo, referring to the day meal that was several hours away, but might change the subject.

  “If the fish does not talk back to me,” said Chiun. “Heh, heh, heh.”

  A patrol car, its bubble light flashing, dashed past them toward the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “I attracted some attention back there, Little Father.”

  “Clumsiness always wins an audience. True perfection is a quiet, hidden thing.”

  “Thank you once again, Little Father, for a merry Christmas.”

  When they returned to the Marina apartment overlooking the Bay that Upstairs had rented for them during this rest period, Remo found one of the shrubs in the front yard had been uprooted and was sitting in the middle of the rug, scattering dirt around the carpeting. On the branches of the shrub hung two punctured tennis balls, a golf ball popped open with incredible pressure and a slice of an apple. A bare yellow anti-bug light topped it all.

  Chiun smiled. “For you. For your remembered customs.”

  “What is it, Little Father?”

  “I made it for you. Since you cannot overcome your past, you might as well enjoy some of it”

  Remo pointed to the cluttered bush.

  “What is that thing?”

  “Do not make witticisms with me. It is a Christmas tree. For your enjoyment.”

  “That’s not a Christmas tree, Little Father. A Christmas tree is a pine tree and the decorations are made of glass and the lights are colored and…”

  “It looks like a Christmas tree to me,” said Chiun. “It looks just like a Christmas tree to me. It is green. It has things hanging on it. It has lights. It is a Christmas tree. I see no difference between that tree and the ones in the stores, except that I improved the form somewhat.”

  “Take my word for it. If you were an American, you would see it’s not a Christmas tree.”

  “If I were an American, you would still be a fattened senseless glob shooting guns at people, dropping explosives hither and yon and creating the chaos that is so typical of your culture. That is as good a Christmas tree as ever was, improved even, to take the discordancy away from the poor designs you seem determined to worship.”

  The telephone rang, interrupting the dispute. Remo answered it. It was Western Union. His Aunt Mildred was going to visit at 9 a.m. She was on her way already.

  “Damn,” said Remo.

  But Chiun ignored him. How could one help someone who failed to appreciate an improved design? How could one reason with such a person? How could one teach such a person? If he wanted one of those ill-formed glaring obscenities sold in stores, then he would have to purchase one himself. It was like giving diamonds to a duck. The duck would prefer grains of corn. Well, let the duck buy its own corn. The Master of Sinanju was not in the duck-feeding business.

  “Just got the code from Smitty. We’re interrupted again. Our rest period’s probably over. Chiun, do you hear me?”

  “I do not answer quackings,” said the Master of Sinanju and sat, lotus position, in a silence that Remo knew he could never break.

  “I’m sorry,” said Remo. “Thank you for the tree. It was very kind of you. Thank you again, Little Father.”

  But there was no answer, and Remo went into the bedroom and lay down for a nap, his last word before dozing being “crap.”

  He heard the outside door open and was awake as if an alarm had rung. There was some conversing outside in the living room and then a lemon-faced man in gray suit and white shirt with striped green Dartmouth tie entered, carrying a worn leather briefcase. He sat down in a chair.

  “What have you done to Chiun? How have you insulted him?” asked Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  “I didn’t insult him, and what goes on between us is none of your business, Smitty. So what’s the urgency?”

  “I’d like to advise you again,
Remo, how valuable a resource Chiun is and how truly necessary it is for you two to work well together.”

  “Smitty, you don’t understand and I don’t think you ever will. Now what’s up?”

  “It is not nearly as important as your relationship with Chiun. Now, as I gather it, he gave you an important and significant gift which you not only did not receive graciously, but then you refused him some small item which he wanted very much.”

  “Did you see the bush with the junk on it in the living room?”

  “Yes. What happened? It looks like a tornado threw a shrub and some junk through the window. Don’t you have maid service? You have the money.”

  “That’s the important and significant gift. Now, have you heard of Barbra Streisand?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the small item he wants in return,” said Remo.

  “For certain things,” Smith said drily, “we have no dearth of money. And considering how limited we are in personnel on our enforcement arm, we might be able to spare some small amount for Chiun’s personal pleasures. Actresses sometimes can be convinced to provide a private service. Not Miss Streisand, of course, but someone comparable.”

  “He doesn’t want to rent her, Smitty.”

  “He wants to marry?”

  “No.”

  “Then what does he want?”

  “He wants to own her.”

  “Impossible,” Smith said.

  “Right. Now stick to the things you understand, like everything else.”

  “Just a minute. You’re not going to kidnap her. I mean…”

  “No. I’m not going to kidnap her. Now what’s the latest foul-up I have to compensate for?”

  “You know, you’re getting as inscrutable as Chiun, and you were never as pleasant.”

  “Thank you,” said Remo, and he sat up to listen. It had been more than a decade since he had gotten his first assignment from this sparse, vinegary man, and in that time, unlike Chiun, he could no longer imagine working for anyone else. He had tried it once and it was a disaster.