Sweet Dreams td-25 Page 3

  The best Remo could do was to find a red magic marker and to scrawl "remo" on the back of a parking ticket he lifted from a windshield. And then the gun sounded and Remo was off like a speeding bullet. James Merrick saw him pulling away and smiled to himself. Marathons were filled with people like that-people with no serious thought of completing the race, who broke like sprinters, ran a mile as fast as they could, then dropped out and spent the rest of their lives bragging about how they had led the Boston Marathon for awhile.

  That had been at the race's start, but now Remo had passed Merrick for the second time, twenty miles later, and to add insult to injury he had just stolen Merrick's big number six.

  Merrick tried to cling mentally to the slim thick-wristed figure but Remo soon disappeared over a hill.

  Merrick plugged on, no longer sure whether he was winning or losing the race, his mind growing as fatigued as his body, and as he crossed the Charlestown line, he saw Remo again, this time passing him with a bright blue six on his shirt.

  Merrick tried to scream, come back with my number, you frigging maniac who isn't even sweating, running circles around me with your frigging red Remo. But the exertion would have been too much.

  Crossing into Danvers, he started to cry tears of frustration when the broadly-smiling Remo passed him for the fourth time. James Merrick wanted to beg, please, please, crazy person, don't you know how much this means to me? Win the race if you want to, but leave me alone. Please?

  Finally Merrick crossed into Boston. He felt renewed. Only two hours had passed. He had pushed himself and his time was better than had ever been seen in the Boston Marathon. This he knew. He swept forward with new vitality. His second wind had arrived.

  And left as Remo passed him for the fifth time a second later.

  James Merrick collapsed with an anguished gasp. He later didn't remember how long he huddled, head in his arms on the side of the road into Boston with his dirty sneakers and ripped sweat shirt, but when he looked up it seemed darker. He didn't see people pass him. He didn't care. Instead he stumbled to a bus stop, caught a bus, and got off three blocks from home.

  What would he say? Should he stay in a hotel? No, he hadn't any wallet with him. What the hell. Probably no one had even noticed he was gone. Carol had still been asleep when Merrick left that morning and David had been watching Speed Racer and hadn't even turned when his father said "So long."

  James Merrick slowly plodded up the steps, fighting tears. It wasn't his loss of the race that got him: it was his own failure. He walked into the house.

  "Jim, is that you?"

  "Yes," he croaked.

  "What are you doing here?" his wife cried, running down from upstairs, "Everybody's been looking for you. I've been getting calls since two o'clock."

  "I don't want any calls," Merrick said miserably.

  Carol's face became stern. "Now I know you're tired but you go right back to Copley Square and accept your trophy." Merrick managed "Wha?"

  "They've been looking all over for you. Nobody ever ran that fast. Like a sprinter they said. Going so fast all they could see was your number six." She looked down at his sweatshirt.

  "Oh, you poor thing. It must have gotten ripped off. You go up and lie down. I'll call the athletic committee and tell them you're here."

  "Where's David?" Merrick asked. "Out telling all his friends that you won. Now, go lie down, will you?"

  Merrick heard and obeyed. He didn't care how long his nirvana lasted. If it only lasted a moment, it was still one moment of perfection, more than most men had.

  A moment before he reached his personal cloud nine, he thanked all his lucky stars for a gray-dressed, non-perspiring figment of his imagination named Remo.

  At that moment, Remo was rejecting an assignment and, because he was perfect, trying to do it in a nice way.

  "Blow it out your ears," Remo said on the telephone to Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of CURE. "I don't care how many Mafia thugs are meeting in New York. You do something about them."

  "Remo," Smith said, "I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm alerting you to stay ready in case something comes up on short notice. There hasn't been a meeting like this since Appalachia."

  "Well, I don't like to deal with the Mafia anymore," Remo said.

  "Why not, pray tell?" Smith asked, his voice even over the telephone a citric acid bath.

  "Because I'm perfect and I don't like to dirty my hands on the unworthy."

  And for the second time that day, someone laughed at Remo's claim to perfection.

  "Funny, huh?" Remo said. "If that gives you a laugh, watch the TV news tonight about the Boston Marathon. I ran the course five times and still won. Let's see one of your dipwiddle computers do that."

  "I'll call you when an assignment presents itself," Smith said in a resigned voice.

  "Whatever makes you happy," Remo said breezily.

  "I liked you better when you were imperfect," Smith said, but Remo did not hear him. He had already hung up and, still wearing his track clothes, trotted away from the street corner telephone booth and headed back toward his hotel.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Don Salvatore Massello was angry and disgusted with himself.

  He sat in the back of his chauffeured limousine as it picked its way through Manhattan's late afternoon traffic, and hid himself behind clouds of cigar smoke and reflected that organized crime looked organized only because everything else in the country was so disorganized. How could one attach the label of "organized" to what had gone on this afternoon?

  Massello had been sure of himself as he sat with the twenty-seven other leaders on the Mafia's ruling council in the string of suites in the Hotel Pierre, overlooking New York's Central Park.

  And when it had come his turn, he had reported glowingly on the progress the organization was making in the Midwest, and then had turned his attention to the marvelous television invention he had learned about.

  What he wanted, he explained, was authorization to spend "any amount of money" to obtain the machine and its inventor.

  He had expected routine and immediate approval and was startled when Pietro Scubisci of the New York families, a seventy-five-year-old man with a rumpled collar and a grease-stained suit said, "What amount is any amount, Don Salvatore?"

  Massello had shrugged, as if the amount was the least important of things. "Who knows?" he said. "I know it is important that we have the inventor with us, so that we and we alone control this new device. Any amount is a cheap amount, Don Pietro."

  "I do not like people who spend their time watching television," Scubisci said. "Too many today, too much time looking at pictures."

  The other men around the table had nodded, and Don Salvatore Massello had realized his proposal was in trouble and that he had made a mistake bringing it here to ask approval. He should just have gone ahead and bought the invention himself.

  "You know who likes television?" said Fiavorante Pubescio of the Los Angeles family. "Your Arthur Grassione likes television."

  "Arthur is a nice boy," said Scubisci with finality.

  "He watches television," said Pubescio gingerly.

  "Yes, but he is a nice boy," said Scubisci, defending his nephew. "Don Salvatore," he said, "you go ahead for us and try to buy that television picture machine. But any amount is too much. Five hundred thousand is enough for a college professor. And when you go there, take Arthur Grassione with you. He knows all about television." Scubisci looked at Pubescio. "Arthur watches television so he will know what people are saying about us," he said triumphantly.

  "I know, Don Pietro," said Pubescio.

  "And if your professor will not sell you his television set, well, then Arthur will take it from him," Scubisci told Don Salvatore Massello. The old man looked around the table. "Agreed?" he asked.

  No one spoke, but twenty-six heads nodded toward him.

  "Done," said Scubisci. "Who is next?"

  And that had been that and now Don Salvatore Massello was hea
ded downtown to meet a man he had met many years before and had detested immediately: Arthur Grassione, the chief enforcer for the national organization.

  Felix the Cat had been the first. Mickey Mouse was originally supposed to be but there had been some last-minute problems with the Disney studios and the cat was brought in.

  So, if not for some minor trouble in an office in Southern California, Mickey Mouse would not only have had his face plastered across a garden, decorated millions of wrist watches and made it with Minnie Mouse on dirty posters, but he would have been the first thing seen on national television for eight and one-half minutes at the New York Worlds' Fair in 1939.

  Instead, it was Felix and at that time Felix had been a miracle.

  All the people there had oohed and aahed and said "amazing" and "wonderful" and then forgot all about it. But 19-year-old Arthur Grassione had seen and understood and never forgot. And since then he had watched many other miracles.

  At thirty, Arthur, a rising soldato in the New York crime families, watched Uncle Miltie in drag. At thirty-eight, Grassione, rising Mafia star, watched Your Show of Shows. At forty-one, he watched the live, unrehearsed murder of a Presidential assassin, and at forty-six, he watched the Vietnam war in thirty-minute slots with several sixty-minute segments. At fifty, he was the mob's number-one enforcer in the country and he watched men walk on the moon.

  Television had been Arthur Grassione's major educational experience and through it he had learned that blacks were co-stars, Italians made great heroes, fat men were always funny, and Chinese were spies, servants, or gardeners except for Charlie Chan who was really Hawaiian.

  And now the fifty-five-year-old Arthur Grassione was watching another miracle and he was not happy. He was watching the closing of another of Uncle Pietro's numbers rackets.

  Grassione sat with his back to Vince Marino, his number-one flunky, and stared at the big Sony set as a sickly green announcer told of the major gambling bust by the Manhattan district attorney's office.

  Grassione spun in his chair and stared at Marino, then pounded his fists on his huge oaken desk.

  "You know that 154 chinks worked two hours each to make all the works in that frigging thing so I could see our own boys get arrested in living green and white?"

  Marino noticed that the color contrast was moved all the way over to green. He got up and moved toward the set.

  "The color dial, boss. It's a little off. I'll get it."

  Grassione screamed at him. "Hands off. There's nothing wrong with the frigging set. The gooks made it that way. The gooks can't make anything right. Sit down."

  During his tirade, a small bit of saliva had spiraled out of Grassione's mouth onto his left lapel. Grassione desperately tore at his jacket as if it were trying to eat him. He ripped it off and hurled it across the room.

  As Marino slid back into his straight-backed chair, Grassione yelled, "Grease ball! Grease ball! Where the hell are you? Get in here!"

  A door on the left hand side of the office opened slowly and a short, thin, pop-eyed Oriental shuffled in and stood still before Grassione, his eyes buried in the floor.

  "Grease ball," Grassione cried again. His voice had the happy intensity of a Doberman pinscher chancing upon an injured bird. "About time you're here. Get my jacket and clean it."

  The small Oriental began to turn toward the jacket heaped on the floor.

  "And not…" Grassione began.

  The Oriental turned.

  "And not at your goddam Chink laundry either. Get it to an Italian Laundry. There you'll see clean. But you don't know what clean is, do you, you yellow slob?"

  Vince Marino fidgeted in his chair as he always did when Grassione was abusing Edward Leung. The chair creaked and Grassione shot Marino a vicious look while Leung began to shuffle toward the jacket on the floor.

  Grassione's eyes moved back to the moving Chinese.

  "Slower, you stupid coolie," he screamed.

  Edward Leung slowed down and carefully slid his left foot in front of his right, rocked, slid his right food forward, rocked, left, rock, right, rock, left…

  "That's better," Grassione said.

  Leung reached the jacket and leaned forward, almond eyes narrowing, his hand opening slowly, as if waiting for something to happen.

  Marino looked away. He didn't like Chinese any more than the next guy-unless the next guy happened to be Chinese-but this disgusted him.

  Grassione stood still, mouth open in anticipation, until Leung's hand was an inch from the jacket on the floor.

  "Your gloves," he yelled. "Where are your gloves? You ain't getting my clothes full of your yellow germs."

  Edward Leung closed his eyes and sighed inwardly as he reached to his back pocket for his thick gardener's gloves. He had never worked in a garden, not even when he was growing up in Columbus, Ohio, but Grassione wanted to believe that all Chinese worked in gardens so Leung carried gardener's gloves.

  He picked up the jacket gingerly between right thumb and index finger.

  "Now you get that cleaned," Grassione said. "And hurry it up. I've got an important guest coming and I don't have no jacket and it's your fault, you dumb, stupid, frigging yellow gook chink."

  Grassione stared at Edward Leung until the door closed behind the small yellow man. Then Grassione moved to a closet behind his desk. Slamming it open, he pulled a perfectly cleaned and pressed jacket from a bright wooden hanger.

  As Grassione slid on the dark silk jacket, a perfect match to his trousers, Marino looked back at the Sony where two people were talking happily in their sunny playroom about how wonderful it was not only to get their clothes soft but to keep the colors bright as well. The black man was just asking his TV wife, in soothingly pleasant tones, how she got his shirts so white when Grassione's hand shot up to smack the set off. As the green dot in the middle of the screen began to fade, Grassione whirled back to Marino.

  He leaned forward over the oak desk and said with a smile: "What do you think, Vince? What's Massello going to want?"

  Vince Marino desperately searched the thick pile rug for the right words. "I don't know, Chief. I guess he wants us to hit somebody."

  He looked up and saw Grassione rise to his full five-feet-nine, and walk tightly around to the front of the desk. He stopped in front of Marino, smiling inwardly as he approvingly gauged his effect on his lieutenant.

  "Yeah," Grassione said. "But not just anybody. Massello got his own people in St. Louis that can do hitting."

  Marino shrugged. "Who then?"

  "Massello's pretty smart," Grassione said. "Smart enough that some people figure someday he's going to be capo of capos. The way I figure it is he's got a special hit for us."

  "Special?" said Marino, realizing at that moment that his boss with his shiny suit, his grease-slicked hair, and his oily skin looked like a plaster doll that had been deep-fried.

  "Yeah. Special. Like maybe that guy who's been messing us up around the country. The one who got Johnny Deuce and Verillio and Salvatore Polastro. The guy who's been devastating us."

  He pronounced the word as dee-vastating, but Marino did not correct him because Grassione had once told him he had spent "a lot of bucks learning to talk good." So he nodded.

  But later when Marino had left the room, and Don Salvatore Massello had arrived, Grassione was disappointed to find out that the hit was only a maybe-hit, if the man wouldn't deal, and the man was only a college professor. He stayed depressed until Massello explained to him that the man had invented a new kind of television machine which Grassione took as an insult because he liked television just the way it was.

  "Sure, we'll hit him, Don Salvatore," he said.

  Massello smiled and shook his head. "No. We will hit him only if he will not deal with us. Those are Don Pietro's instructions."

  "Whatever he wants," Grassione said. "Whatever you want, Don Salvatore."

  "Good," Massello said. He made arrangements to meet Grassione later, then hurriedly left the lower Br
oadway office. He felt in desperate need of a shower.

  After Massello had left, Grassione turned on the television set, just in time to catch an independent station's sports report. But it was showing a film clip of some stupid guy winning some stupid race in Boston and because Grassione was not interested in sports on which he could not bet, he turned from the set and pressed a buzzer.

  A moment later, Edward Leung entered his office. He paused inside the door of the darkened office, his almond eyes looking first at Grassione, then at the green-imaged television set.

  "Tell me, wise one, what do you see?" Grassione asked.

  "I see nothing," Leung said.

  Grassione half-rose in his chair. "Hey, I don't pay you for 'I don't see nothing's.' "

  "That is what I see."

  "Get outta here, you Chink bastard."

  Leung shrugged and opened the door behind him. He turned one more time to look at Grassione, then at the television screen which showed the winner of the Boston Marathon, racing past the finish line so fast he was only a blur on camera.

  "All of life ends in death and dreams," Leung said.

  "Get outta here. Go pack your rickshaw, coolie. We're going to St. Louis."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fourteen people fell in love with Remo as he returned to the hotel.

  Several women on the outskirts of the marathon crowd where it thinned out two blocks from the finish line tried jogging alongside him, gasping as they tried to give him their telephone numbers. He got rid of them by telling them mincingly, "My woommate Bart would never approve."

  One woman passenger in a car saw Remo and grabbed her boyfriend so hard he almost drove into the entrance of the Todd Private High School. A cashier and a candy girl in a theater, along with an usher whose sexual preferences were somewhat unclear, followed him with their eyes.

  So did a black airlines reservation clerk who decided she would grow her hair back long and uncurl it from its Afro. She'd move from Dorchester and walk no more in South Boston. She'd gain a little weight and stop being such a tease. She'd meet him one night in the reading room of the library and from that night on be his slave, cook, cleaner, maid, fox, and mammy. Screw the movement. Screw women's lib. His. Now, then, and forever.