Murder Ward Page 4

  “How did you do that with the balls? Shoot them out of your hands that way? Like little bullets, and your fingers didn’t even seem to move.”

  “Do you wish to be a juggler or an assassin?”

  “And that ball that came back to you? Did you have reverse English on that or what?” Remo had asked.

  “It is not the ball that I wish you to understand but the method. Some day you may learn.”

  “Do you think if I grew my fingernails longer I could do that with those balls?” asked Remo.

  Chiun sighed.

  Remo babbled on. “If I’m going to make a hit on someone, and I’m not sure that I’m ever going to, I’m going to use the biggest gun I can get. Now show me how you do that thing with the balls. Is it with your wrist?” Remo had said. It was later, as he began to understand Chiun’s training and as his body came to be a different kind of instrument, that he found one day he could do with the balls just what Chiun had done. It came not from trickery, but from knowledge and feel of the essence of the balls. And Remo never forgot Chiun’s lesson on the Western and Eastern assassination techniques.

  Now as Remo and Wilberforce approached Wilberforce’s 1957 Volkswagen, Remo had little concern for the evening. Wilberforce might even have two days, but at this moment, he was as safe as he was ever going to be. Western assassination attempts came one at a time.

  Wilberforce opened the hood over the rear engine.

  “If you remember those three men who came in earlier today, they were bodyguards and they always checked the rear of my car. I really don’t know what to look for. Perhaps you do.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Remo, getting into the front of the car.

  Wilberforce left the engine open and unlocked the driver’s door and poked his head into the front seat.

  “Well, take a look then. Come on out and look.”

  “I know without looking. Whatever those bodyguards used to look for is not there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Remember the men at the bottom of the elevator shaft?”

  “Don’t remind me of that.”

  “Well, their eyes weren’t slanted.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that your engine is as safe now as it is ever going to be. C’mon, shut the trunk, and let’s take a look at your house.”

  On the way to the Wilberforce home, a seven-room white Colonial with green shutters and an infinitesimal lawn now occupied by a strip of gray Scranton snow, Wilberforce wanted to know from his new employee what he had meant by the men’s eyes and how he got into the car when the door was locked.

  “The lock doesn’t work,” said Remo. And this was slightly honest because the lock no longer did work, now that Remo had broken it.

  “Now about the eyes?”

  “It has to do with multiple attacks as opposed to singular, which allow defensive reaction time. The men were Western and therefore singular.”

  “I see. That explains it,” said Wilberforce. He had spent eighteen years working for the government and had become expert at appearing to understand things.

  Mrs. Wilberforce took one look at her son’s companion, standing there in the snow without an overcoat, and asked Nathan David where he had met this person.

  “Sort of an employee, Mummy. He’s making a study of my department in an effort to determine why we do things so well.”

  “He does things well,” said Mrs. Wilberforce, looking down at Remo, “because he was brought up well. If everyone were brought up well, this country would work well.”

  “May I come in?” asked Remo, skirting the massive person in front of him.

  “You there,” barked Mrs. Wilberforce. “You did not have permission to enter. Go back to the doorway.”

  Remo checked the living room, an overly neat expanse of overstuffed furniture, unworn old rugs, ugly ceramic lamps and doodads.

  “I said, out of my house until you have permission. You there, you’re not listening to me.”

  The dining room was another grotesque collection of early American furniture, well preserved.

  “Either you’re out of this house in one minute or I call the authorities. The authorities, young man. The authorities.”

  The kitchen had a gas-stove, one 1940s refrigerator, and more doodads. Something meaty was cooking for supper. Remo heard the galumphing stride of Mrs. Wilberforce behind him. He stepped left, the mass of humanity went with the step and he calmly walked out of the kitchen to the stairs. Mrs. Wilberforce’s room was another clutter; the bed was single. Her son’s room looked like a Wall Street law office with an oak post bed in it. There was a guest room as inviting as a dungeon and two bathrooms.

  Remo skirted Mrs. Wilberforce climbing up the steps by hopping over the railing mid-stairway. Nearby was the basement door. In the basement he found exactly where the next attack would take place. The oil burner.

  According to Smith, there had been an attempt on Wilberforce’s brakes earlier. Tonight it had been an elevator out of service. The pattern of simulated accidents would probably continue at least one more time. And a wooden house with an oil burner was just fine. Night would be ideal. Fire begins in the basement, cutting off the bottom floor escape. Wilberforces asleep upstairs. Nice, thought Remo. For people who worked with gadgets.

  There would not be another attempt this evening; the men were Western. He had known they were Western even before he had heard them in the hallway. He could smell them. One, he had seen later when looking down the shaft, had been black, but contrary to some Western opinion, the odors of black and white were identical. People smelled of what they ate and the attackers had been three heavy meat eaters. Their pores reeked of it. Beef, beef and beef. Sometimes Remo wanted a hamburger, remembering its delicious meaty taste and thinking of the onions and the tomato ketchup, and how good it would be to eat one again. But now when he got close to the smell, he was repulsed. He had smelled that odor in the dark hallway and taken the three men, using one as the bumper to guide the other two into the shaft whose very openness Remo had heard. He finished the one he used as a bumper with a simple brain stroke. If he had just thrown him still alive into the shaft, one of the other two might have cushioned his fall.

  Granted he should have saved one. But there would be another attempt on Wilberforce, and in the hallway of the federal building, Wilberforce would have been a nuisance, and might just have wound up falling into the open shaft himself. Remo would wait for the next attempt, follow it to its source, find out what was what, report to Smith and return to his rest period without Wilberforce being any the wiser, other than being relieved of a time-study man he didn’t want in the first place.

  “You down there. If you’re not out in five seconds, I will phone the police. Do you hear me?” It was Mrs. Wilberforce.

  Okay, it was the boiler. Tomorrow night or the next. Not tonight. Remo glided up the basement steps, underneath Mrs. Wilberforce’s outstretched arm. He gave the massive corseted rump a little pat as he passed her and heard a yell of horror, as if he had disemboweled someone.

  “Aaarrrrghhh,” yelled Mrs. Wilberforce. Nathan David hid behind the couch. Had Remo’s pat done that? He skirted the large flailing arms to get a better view of Mrs. Wilberforce’s rump. It seemed in fine condition. Not even a thread was disjointed. And he knew for sure it had been just a pat.

  Remo moved around a knee kick, and to make sure of what he had heard he gave the fanny another pat.

  “Aaarrgghhhh. Animal. Pig. Animal. Rape!” yelled Mrs. Wilberforce.

  “Merry Christmas,” said Remo and, moving inside a left hook, gave Mrs. Wilberforce a wet kiss on the cheek.

  “Good night, Nathan David,” said Remo. He left the Wilberforce house filled with good cheer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I DON’T LIKE FIRE,” said Anthony Stace, also known as Anselmo Stacio and, to many people who had never met him and knew neither of his names, as “Mr. Big.”

  In Scranton, Mr. Stace
was president of Stace Realty, a director of the First National Agricultural Bank and Trust Company, chairman of the United Charities, and the man to see if you were starting a fund drive for your church or club. Mr. Stace was rarely known to say “no.”

  In another level of Scranton, Anselmo Stacio kept tight and orderly control of the numbers, sports gambling, trucking, several labor unions and a goodly share of those sorts of loans where the repayment was seven dollars for five per week and the collateral was your body—its health and well-being.

  It was said by those very few who knew both his roles that Stacio did more good for the community than Stace. Stacio kept the white powder out of Scranton and its environs. Heroin, he had said, tended to create disorder and in disorder people often wanted drastic change. Since things were very profitable the way they were, both Anthony Stace and Anselmo Stacio wanted very little change. Especially since they had created a brilliant financial relationship.

  As director of the First Aggie, Stace had access to large amounts of capital. As Don Anselmo, Stacio had access to high-yield investments. For at seven-for-five per week, Stacio could put Stace’s money to work in loans that far outstripped the yields of Xerox and Polaroid. The First Aggie was a loan-shark funnel and at times banked half the state’s under-the-counter loans. First Aggie had more money “on the street” in the area than the Federal Reserve Board.

  It was a fine working relationship for the one man with two names, until a piddling assistant director of the Internal Revenue Service began collecting data. And what was worse, this piddling assistant director, Nathan David Wilberforce, was an unreasonable man.

  When Wilberforce’s account showed he had a savings balance of $125,000, up $123,547 from the week before, he brought it to the First Aggie’s attention, both in a registered letter and personally. The senior vice president was shocked that such a mistake could occur. The president was shocked that such a mistake could occur. It was such a shocking mistake that a member of the board of directors, Anthony Stace himself, personally visited the Wilberforce home to express his concern.

  He paid homage to the fine Wilberforce home and its beautiful decorations and Mrs. Wilberforce bemoaned the fact that so few gentlemen like Mr. Stace were around anymore. Mr. Stace asked Nathan David Wilberforce when he first realized there had been a mistake.

  “When I made a $23 deposit by mail and the book came back $125,000. Well, I told your teller, Mrs. V. Hansen, that there must be some mistake. She wasn’t rude but there, was a touch of surliness to her voice, an unmistakable tone of surliness.”

  “We’ll have to look into that,” said Stace, carefully resting his gray homburg on his lap. He was a dignified man with graying hair and lines of integrity in his face. His brown eyes showed warmth and trust. His dark gray suit was cut more for neatness than for style.

  He said he would see that Mrs. V. Hansen was made aware of his concern over possible rudeness to a treasured client. And then a wonderful idea came to Mr. Anthony Stace. He knew where the money might have come from. It might not have been a mistake at all.

  “Sometimes, Mr. Wilberforce, people are so grateful for favors that they make secret gifts to a person’s bank account. Have you done any favors for people lately?”

  Wilberforce thought hard. “I did promote a secretary two grades instead of one, but she was a tremendous worker. It was part of a new promotion enrichment program. But I don’t think she would give me $123,547 in gratitude. The increase amounted to $900 a year and at that rate it would take more than a century to make up, and if you consider, the interest, it would never be made up. As a matter of fact, it would fall behind at a compounding rate of about $4,000 a year.”

  “You work for the government then, Mr. Wilberforce,” said Anthony Stace, who knew damn well where Mr. Wilberforce worked.

  “Internal Revenue.”

  “Assistant director,” said Mrs. Wilberforce.

  “Perhaps in your job you have done someone a favor that he wishes to repay.”

  “Impossible,” said Wilberforce.

  “Perhaps it is a payment for future favors.”

  “Impossible again. That would be bribery.”

  “Of course,” said Stace. “I do believe that’s against the law.”

  “I probably shouldn’t even tell you this, but there are people at your bank who are under investigation right now,” Wilberforce said. “Maybe it came from one of them.”

  “Investigation? What sort of investigation?” asked Stace, his brows furrowing in deep concern.

  “Oh, I can’t reveal that. I just thought you should be put on notice how this extra-large deposit may have occurred.”

  “I’m glad you told me. Our reputation is our main asset.”

  “Now, don’t worry. It’s nothing that would incriminate your whole bank. Just sort of a few rotten apples in the barrel. But I can’t tell you anything more.”

  “Of course, I wouldn’t expect you to,” said Stace, who complimented Mrs. Wilberforce on her son’s integrity. It was, he said, the sort of integrity they were always looking for at the First National Agricultural Bank and Trust Company, particularly in vice presidents, and there would soon be an opening, but of course Mr. Wilberforce could not consider such a thing. Of course, Wilberforce said that he could not.

  Four hours later, Bonifacio Palumbo and Salvatore Messina were adjusting the brakes on a 1957 Volkswagen so they would not brake. They were interrupted by three armed men, waving guns and badges. Palumbo and Messina fled, reporting to the man who hired them that they had not been able to finish the job. He, in turn, reported to someone else, who reported to someone else, and that someone else finally told Stace.

  After a week’s deliberation, another order funneled through the protective layers of Stace’s empire. The operation took seven days to plan, three days to prepare, and 3.9 seconds to fail, counting elevator shaft time for Moe Klein, Johnny (The Pig) Pigellino and Willie (Sweet Willie) Williams. Stace naturally did not attend their funerals. He didn’t even know the men.

  So on a very cold day, Anthony Stace donned the hat of Anselmo Stacio and brought a problem to a close friend in New York City.

  “I don’t like fires,” said Stacio. “I never liked fires. They’re uncontrollable. They’re destructive of property.” He was in the living room of an old friend, who was also a man of repute, with great influence. He was an older man and he wore a thin gray sweater and a white shirt buttoned up to his neck. His wife brought him little cups of tea and for Stacio, a glass of anisette, which he sipped as he sought this man’s advice.

  The house appeared much like any other brown-stone on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. The only difference was that instead of Feldman or Moskowitz, the owner’s name was Scubisci. Pietro Scubisci, a good neighbor and a reasonable man.

  “You don’t like fires, I don’t like fires,” said Scubisci. “You don’t like blood; I don’t like blood. I do not even like harsh words and I am sure neither do you. But life is not an easy thing and a man does not always have a choice as to the comfort with which he will make his living. Given a choice, I would not even be Pietro Scubisci. I would be Nelson Rockefeller, and if I were Rockefeller I would not be in politics but would sit on a sunny island and watch the birds fly by.”

  “I would restructure the Chase Manhattan Bank,” said Stacio, smiling.

  “But we are not Rockefellers. So there are things we must do that we do not like. Even the Rockefellers must do things they do not like.”

  “I have heard that there might be another way,” said Stacio.

  “There are always other ways,” said Scubisci.

  “As you know, Don Pietro, and this is no reflection upon you, I have a quiet domain and the need for blood is less than in your area.”

  “You run a good business, Anselmo.”

  “Thank you,” said Stacio. “Therefore I am not fully aware of what may be the latest methods.”

  “Since the gun, what new methods are there? Really? Nothing new in
a hundred years.”

  “I have heard of a new way, Don Pietro. A way in which all appears very natural, like an unfortunate happenstance.”

  Don Pietro leaned forward. He whispered. “Are you talking about the hospital?”

  “Is that what it is?”

  Don Pietro slowly lowered his head and nodded. “Too much money. Too expensive. Fire. Take fire. What would it cost if a whole block burned down? You’re a businessman. What would it cost? Besides, the hospital people, they squeeze your gagliones. Hard.”

  “With all due respect, Don Pietro, I would like to investigate the possibilities of this hospital. It may be a very neat way of solving my problem.”

  Stacio listened to whom he must see, how he must approach that person and took one more bit of cautious advice before he left the Scubisci home. From Kennedy Airport, he made a long-distance call to the Robler Clinic, outside Baltimore.

  “This is Anthony Stace. I’m president of Stace Realty and a director of the First National Agricultural Bank and Trust Company of Scranton. I’d like to talk to your assistant administrator, Ms. Kathleen Hahl.”

  “She’s busy right now. Can she return your call, sir?”

  “I’m on a flight now to Baltimore,” said Stace. “I hope she can see me. I’d like to discuss a sizeable contribution. Sizeable.”

  “I’ll give Ms. Hahl the message, sir. Is Ms. Hahl expecting you?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll have to make an appointment.”

  “But this is a sizeable contribution.”

  “We appreciate that, sir, but Ms. Hahl is a busy person.”

  “When can I make an appointment?”

  “This is mid-December. Perhaps the end of January.”

  “You mean I have to get on line to make a contribution? I’m the head of the United Charities and I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’m just Ms. Hahl’s secretary.”

  “Well, if I were to fly in today, would it be possible for her to see me just for a few minutes?” said Stace angrily.