Brain Drain Read online

  “There was an entry, but I’m not sure it refers to him.”

  “What was it?” asked Remo.

  “Recalcitrant, unstable, and idealistically confused.”

  “Who fed that into the computer?”

  “I’m not sure. I could do further checking, although I haven’t been at Folcroft for a week. You see, I’m supposed to be on vacation.”

  “That’s all right,” mumbled Remo. “What’s your solid proof of this thing?”

  “Ah, glad you asked,” said the man. “In Tucson, there is a real estate office. At least everyone there thinks they work for a real estate office. They don’t know the information they file is beyond the usual. Well, in this manila envelope is the payroll which corresponds exactly to the Tucson payroll of this organization. Let me show you.” And he took a small computer sheet, perhaps three folds, out of the envelope, along with a canceled check stub and placed them on the white paper and drew lines between corresponding figures.

  “Now this,” said the man, pointing to the Tucson code number, “uncovers this.” He pointed to a name. “Which relates to this.” He pointed to B277-L(8)-V. “Which assigns this to another program.” He pointed to the name uncovered by the Tucson bureau. The name was Walsh.

  “So?” said Remo.

  The man grinned a fudge sundae sort of smile and produced a newspaper clipping about a Judge Walsh falling or jumping to his death in Los Angeles. Judge Walsh, the clipping pointed out, had given fewer and lighter sentences to suspected drug pushers than any other district court judge.

  “How do I know you haven’t made a photocopy of the printout?” asked Remo looking closely at the edges of the green–striped computer paper. “I mean you could give a photocopy to the Washington Post or the Kearny Observer or Seneca Falls Pennysaver or something, and there goes our exclusive. And your money.”

  “Ah, glad you asked. You see this paper? You see the edges? Well, when any photocopy is made of this paper, it turns red at the edges.”

  “How do I know you didn’t use a camera instead of some machine? A camera wouldn’t show.”

  “Look. Do you want it or don’t you?” said Brother Ché.

  “I suppose that’s it,” said Remo to Brother Ché, turning with a relaxed smile. “And you, Arnold,” he said to the pallid man who had never mentioned his name, “will tell me the truth shortly.”

  Brother George brought up his Kalashnikov, the trigger finger already squeezing. But Remo spun from his chair in a motion so smooth that for the fraction of life the others had left, they would have sworn it was slow. But if it were slow, how did he get behind Brother George and so easily swing the Kalashnikov toward Brother Ché? The burst of fire mottled Brother Ché’s gray face with red splotches the size of broken grapes. Sister Alexa tried to get a shot at the man, but all she saw was Brother George protesting his love for her. He was her man.

  “I love you,” screamed George. “I don’t want to kill you,” But his finger moved without his control, a hand so placed on his wrist that the hand, not his mind, had control of his fingers. Brother George’s first shot clipped off her shoulder because George managed to jerk. It threw her back and, terrified, she unloaded her .45 at her lover. Remo got the arm just right on Brother George and this time he put her away with a burst through the chest. George’s stomach was an oozing red cavity where soft .45 slugs cut a churning crazy path.

  Arnold Quilt backed into the corner, shaking, not because he had been hit but because he feared he would be. He covered his groin with his hands for protection.

  “Arnold,” said Remo, holding up Brother George’s body with a grip just above the left ribcage and controlling the Kalashnikov with his right hand, “give me any photographs of the Tucson program.”

  “There are none.”

  “Then you’ll die.”

  “I swear there are none. None.”

  “All right,” said Remo and since Brother George’s right hand no longer responded to the nerves, Remo dropped him, catching the rifle himself. He put Arnold Quilt away with one dull shot. And dropped the gun.

  He hated guns. They were so, so… he had no word for it in English. But in Korean it would be “out of natural control and an intrusion upon grace.”

  However work was work, and upstairs wanted it to look like a relatively simply homicide. Brother George had gone berserk and killed Arnold Quilt, Brother Ché, and Sister Alexa, who, dying, managed to get her slayer. Remo had not been informed that Brother George and Sister Alexa were lovers, which annoyed him. Upstairs was slipping.

  Remo put the gun back in George’s still hand and took the tipped section of the Tucson program. He felt sorry for Quilt. Working for Smitty at Folcroft could lead a man to do anything. Then again, he should have gotten along with Smith fine. Computers and Dr. Harold Smith had the same emotional quotient. What did computer expert Arnold Quilt expect from human beings anyway? Humanity?

  There would be no trouble with fingerprints. The police might find a strange set on the gun, but no cross reference ever devised could dig up the prints of a man certified dead more than a decade ago, certified by the drunken doctor at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where the man once known as Remo Williams had been electrocuted. After, of course, being neatly framed for a murder he didn’t commit. And when Remo Williams came to in a sanitarium, he was offered a new life and he took it.

  The name of the sanitarium was Folcroft.

  Remo ran out of the hotel room, the computer program safely folded in his pants pockets, screaming: “Murder. Murder. There’s been murder. There, down the hall. Murder.”

  He got into a down elevator with four startled men who were wearing Kiwanis buttons introducing themselves as Ralph, Armand, Phil, and Larry. The buttons said they were glad to meet anyone looking at the buttons.

  “What happened?” asked Armand.

  “Horrible. Murder. Twelfth floor.”

  “Any sex in it?” asked Ralph, who was in his late fifties.

  “Two of them loved each other.”

  “I mean, you know, sex,” said Ralph.

  “You ought to see the bodies,” said Remo with a big wink.

  When the elevator reached the lobby, Remo left. The four Kiwanians stayed. Ralph pressed twelve.

  Remo strolled out into the lobby of soft leather chairs, bathing in the new spring light that beamed through tall street windows. A confused patrolman was talking at the desk to a hysterical clerk.

  “Twelfth floor,” said Remo. “Four guys saw it all. Big sex scene. They’re wearing buttons. They’re Ralph, Armand, Phil, and Larry.”

  “What happened?” asked the patrolman.

  “I don’t know,” said Remo. “Those four guys were just yelling ‘murder.’”

  · · ·

  An hour and a half away by car was Cape Cod, not yet blossomed into its full tourist season, a town built for summer pleasure and populated during the winter by people who served that pleasure and complained about those who enjoyed it.

  Remo saw that the driveway to a small white cottage overlooking the dark foaming Atlantic was empty. He jammed the brakes and let the car skid into the driveway. He did not like using a gun and his body felt and resented it. What police technicians could pick up only with a paraffin test, his body could sense through its nervous system, now so acute that even food seasoned with monosodium glutamate would have the effect of knockout drops. A few years before, when he had still hungered for meat, he had eaten a chain–food special and been hospitalized. The attending physician discovered medically what Remo had known only philosophically: that when something becomes very much different, it becomes something new.

  “You don’t have a human being’s nervous system,” the doctor had said.

  “Blow it out your stethoscope,” Remo had said, but he knew the doctor was right. He had eaten the hamburger not out of the hunger of his body but out of a remembered hunger, and had found what writers always seemed to learn first—you can’t go home again.


  Remo opened the door to the Cape Cod cottage. The guns still bothered him.

  In the center of the living room sat a frail man in lotus position, his golden morning–kimono flowing down around him. Wisps of white hair, like smooth gentle strands of silk, played from his temples and chin. The television set was turned on and Remo sat respectfully waiting for As the Planet Revolves to come to a commercial so he could speak his mind to the old man, Chiun.

  Fourteen ancient lacquered trunks stood packed against a far wall, seeming almost to wait their own turn to speak.

  “Disgusting,” said Chiun when a commercial came on. “They have ruined great dramas with violence and sex.”

  “Little Father,” said Remo, “I don’t feel very well.”

  “Did you breathe this morning?”

  “I breathed.”

  “Properly?”

  “Of course.”

  “It is when one says ‘of course’ to anything that one loses what he takes for granted,” said Chiun. “It is not uncommon for one to squander the greatest wealth in the world by not watching it. You alone have been given the teaching of Sinanju and therefore the powers of Sinanju. Do not lose them through improper breathing.”

  “It was proper. It was proper,” said Remo. “I used a gun.”

  The two long–fingered hands opened in an offering of innocence. “Then what would you want of me?” Chiun asked. “I give you diamonds, and you prefer to play with mud.”

  “I wanted to share my feelings with you.”

  “Share your good feelings. Keep the bad for yourself,” said Chiun and in Korean he spoke about the inability of even one so great as the Master of Sinanju to transform mud into diamonds or a pale piece of pig’s ear into something of worth, and what was even the Master to do when an ingrate came back with handfuls of mud and complained that it did not sparkle like diamonds?

  “Shared feelings,” mumbled Chiun in English. “Do I share a belly ache? I share wisdom. You share stomach pains.”

  “You never had a belly ache,” said Remo, but he stopped talking as soon as As the Planet Revolves resumed. The shows were basically the same as a few years before, but now they had blacks and abortions and people no longer looked longingly at each other; they shared a bed. Yet it was still attenuated gossip, even though its star was none other than Rad Rex, whose autographed picture Chiun carried wherever he went.

  Remo saw a country cleanup crew ride past in a pickup truck. A banner announcing a bicentennial art exhibit fluttered from the side panels. Chiun got along with the local people well. Remo felt like an outsider. Chiun had told him that he would always be an outsider until he recognized that his true home was Sinanju, the tiny village in North Korea from which Chiun came, and not America, where Remo was born.

  “To understand others you must first realize they are others, and not just you with a different face,” Chiun had said. They had been living in the house only a week when Chiun explained the hostility local people always felt toward tourists.

  “It is not their wealth they resent or that they come for the most pleasant of seasons. It is that a tourist will always say goodbye and goodbyes are little deaths. So they cannot like anyone too much for they will be hurt. The problem is not that they dislike tourists but that they are afraid to like them, for fear of hurt when parting.”

  “You don’t understand Americans, Little Father.”

  “What is there to understand? I know they do not appreciate fine assassins, but have amateurs practicing hither and yon, and their great dramas have been ruined by evil men who wish only to sell things to wash garments. There is nothing to understand.”

  “I have seen Sinanju now, Little Father, remember. So don’t go talking about the wonders of North Korea and your own little bit of heaven by the bay. I’ve seen it. It smells like a sewer.”

  Chiun had looked surprised.

  “Now you tell me that you don’t like it. You loved it when you were there.”

  “Loved it? I almost got killed. You almost got killed. I just didn’t complain is all.”

  “For you, that is loving it,” Chiun had said, and that had closed the subject.

  Now Remo sat back waiting for a commercial. He looked out the window. Down the road came a dark green Chevrolet with New York license plates. The car drove exactly at a thirty–five miles per hour speed that would bore most people into sleeping at the wheel. The speed limit was thirty–five miles per hour. The exact speed of the car, around curves as well as on straightaways, never varying, told Remo who was driving it. He went outside to the driveway shutting the door quietly behind him.

  “Hi, Smitty,” said Remo to the driver, a lemony–faced man in his fifties, with pursed tight lips and a dehydrated face that had never been moistened by emotion.

  “Well?” said Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  “Well what?” said Remo, stopping him from entering the cottage. Smith could not enter quietly enough not to disturb Chiun while the shows were on, for although he was still athletically trim of body, his mind let his feet clop in the normal Western walk. Chiun had often complained to Remo about these interruptions after Smith had left. He did not need the aggravation of verbal abuse from Chiun today; he felt bad enough about using a gun.

  “The job,” Smith said. “Did it come off well?”

  “No. They got me first.”

  “I don’t need sarcasm, Remo. This one was very important.”

  “You mean the other jobs were vacations?”

  “I mean if you didn’t do this one right we will have to close shop, and we’re so close to success.”

  “We’re always close to success. We’ve been close to success for more than ten years now. But it never comes.”

  “We’re in the social tremors preceding improvement. It’s to be expected.”

  “Bullshit,” said Remo, who a decade before had come out of a coma in Folcroft and been told of the secret organization named CURE, headed by Dr. Harold W. Smith, designed to make the Constitution work, a quiet little group that would insure the nation’s survival against anarchy or a police state. At first Remo had believed. He had become CURE’s killer arm, trained by Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, the world’s greatest assassin, and he had believed. But he had lost count now of the people he had eliminated who would have made the quiet little group known as CURE into an unquiet big organization. The four in the Bay State Motor Inn were just the latest.

  Remo handed Smith the Tucson program.

  “Good,” said Smith, putting it in his jacket pocket.

  “It hasn’t been photographed either,” said Remo. “You forgot to mention photograph copy.”

  “Oh, they can’t photograph this kind of paper.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Can’t be done.”

  “How do you do that?” asked Remo.

  “None of your business.”

  “Thanks,” said Remo.

  “It has to do with light waves. Are you happy now?” said Smith. He wore an immaculate gray suit with starched white shirt and that gruesome Dartmouth tie that never seemed to collect a grease spot. Then again, Smith didn’t eat grease. He was a turnip and boiled cod kind of person.

  “Okay,” said Remo. “The commercials are on.”

  “Can you really hear through walls?”

  “None of your business,” said Remo.

  “How do you do that?”

  “You refine quietness. Are you happy now?” said Remo.

  Chiun rose to greet Smith, his arms outstretched in salutation.

  “Hail, Emperor Smith, whose beneficence and wisdom accommodates the very universe of man. May you live long forever, and may your kingdom be feared throughout the land.”

  “Thank you,” said Smith, looking at the trunks. He had long ago given up trying to tell Chiun that he was not an emperor and not only didn’t wish to be feared throughout the land but didn’t even want to be known. To this, Chiun had responded that it was an emperor’s right to be known
or not known as he wished.

  “Well, I see you’re packed,” said Smith. “I wish you and Remo bon voyage, and I will see you again in two months, correct?”

  “You will see us with more love for your awesome wisdom, oh, Emperor,” said Chiun.

  “Where are we going?” said Remo.

  “You should know. It’s your illness that’s sending you there,” said Smith.

  “Where? What illness?” said Remo.

  “You do not remember how badly you felt this morning?” asked Chiun. “You have so quickly forgotten your ill feelings?”

  “Oh, that. Well, that was because of the gun thing,” said Remo.

  “Do not mask pain, lest you deceive your body of proper warnings,” Chiun said.

  “That was this morning. Those trunks have been packed for a week,” Remo said.

  “You ought to see Iran if you want to go so badly,” Smith said.

  “I don’t want to go to fucking Iran,” Remo said. “It’s Chiun who’s always talking about Persia.”

  “You see how his memory is beginning to fail,” Chiun said. “He even forgot the other day how he loved Sinanju.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Remo said.

  “Bon voyage,” said Smith. “I see Chiun’s show is resuming.”

  “It is nothing compared to your beauty, Emperor Smith.”

  “Well, thank you,” said Smith, succumbing briefly to the flattery that Sinanju assassins had been applying for centuries to many emperors around the globe.

  “What’s going on here?” Remo asked.

  Chiun returned to watching television and Smith left—the Tucson program, the dangerous link to the secrets of CURE, safely in his jacket pocket. Smith drove into the quaint heart of the seashore resort town and stopped by a large aluminum statue that was somehow appealing to him. Everyone else seemed to think it lacked life. Lacked, there was no other phrase for it, a sense of creativity. Smith thought it was just fine. He went closer to look. He saw only the flash of light. He did not see the shards of exploding metal which tore into his insides and made everything very yellow before the world became black.

  The explosion was heard in the little white cottage Smith had just left.