Child's Play td-23 Read online

  "The people who are going to end your career."

  "This is rubbish. Besides, I can't be held responsible for failure by Fort Dix personnel."

  "Your career, General."

  "If you're CIA, you're in more trouble nowadays than I am. You're vulnerable."

  "Your career," said Smith and with a dramatic dry little chuckle, Smith hung up.

  Maybe, like father, like son. CURE needed something. It had played its two top cards and not only had the finest assassins in history failed to protect the witnesses but they had no idea how the killing was done. Sinanju, whose every master had carefully studied the methods of whatever country he was in, did not know how these witnesses were being killed. More than two thousand years of learning stymied.

  Like father, like son. Hopefully. Perhaps Haupt could get a lead where Smith and his organization had failed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Salvatore Polastro, president of Dynamics Industries, Inc., Polastro Real Estate, Inc., Comp-Sciences, Inc., and exalted grand leader of the Detroit Grand Council of Buffaloes-a civic and fraternal organization--had finished dedicating the new Holy Name sports complex and was washing his hands when someone blended his left wrist into a stunning colies fracture.

  He knew it was a colies fracture because while skiing three years earlier, he had suffered a similar injury, that time jamming his left hand into an oncoming skier and glare ice. Five breaks in his wrist. This time, turning on the water faucet in the boys' room of the Holy Name sports complex.

  He had only turned the faucet left and then the hand would not turn anymore and there was this incredible pain. He lowered himself to his knees the better to cradle his left arm with. He did not even feel the soapy floor water on his knees. On his knees, he smelled the sink soap quite clearly because his face rested against the cool washbasin.

  "Yaaaah," he groaned.

  "Hello there," came a voice from behind him. "My name is Remo, and you're going to talk to me."

  "Yaaaahh," said Salvatore Polastro again.

  "I'd appreciate something more than groans. You've caused me a problem. You're going to uncause it. How did you kill Kaufmann? Who did it for you? Did you arrange it?"

  "My wrist. I can't talk."

  "I left you your throat so you could talk. Now if you're not going to use it for me, I'll take it with me."

  Polastro had not seen what had shattered his wrist. He hobbled around on the soapy floor so he could see his questioner. He saw two knee caps, two empty hands, a light sports shirt and a rather bored face. Since there was no blood in his broken wrist, the man must have used some instrument that didn't break skin to draw blood. But the man's hands were empty.

  How did he get in here, anyway? Where were Tony and Vito? He'd settle the matter with those dumbhead bodyguards shortly. They live off you, fat and sloppy, and the first lunatic that makes an attempt at you succeeds.

  "Time's up," said the man.

  "In Chicago at the board of education, there's a man. He provides the service."

  "The killings are contracted out?"

  "Special ones. It's expensive. I ain't admitting that I contracted anything out. And none of this will hold up in a court. This is no confession."

  "I'm not in the court business. How does this man do it?"

  "I don't know. That's why he's expensive."

  "His name?"

  "I don't know his name."

  "How expensive?"

  "A hundred thousand in advance. A hundred thousand when the job's done."

  "And you tell me you give a hundred thousand down to someone whose name you don't know?"

  "Yes," said Salvatore Polastro and he saw a hand move very slowly down to his good, cradling, wrist. Slowly, yet it was out and back, and now his right wrist had that searing shock, that instant of pain that let him know it was more than a sprain that would go right away. He slumped back on his heels which were now beneath him. His two hands, loosely connected to arms by two broken wrists, lay useless in his lap.

  "You phone a special number in Chicago, and then they call back and tell you where to send the money and they get all the information on the hit," Polastro said.

  "I just need someone."

  "The first call goes to a Warner Pell. He's the assistant director of special advancement progress."

  "What does that mean?"

  "He tries to keep the niggers and the retards away from ruining the students."

  "With force?"

  "I don't know. I don't know what he does. He's just assistant director of special advancement progress. You never know what they do. None of my business. Hey, let me get to a doctor."

  "You're a racist," said Remo.

  "Who isn't?"

  "Lots of people."

  And then Polastro saw an old Oriental shuffle into the boys' room of the new Holy Name sports complex. An old man he was, with long fingernails and wisps of white hair circling his frail golden skull like delicate ribbons.

  "I heard that," he said. "Any system that keeps whites and blacks away from the real students is a good one."

  What was that old man doing here? Where were Tony and Vito? They were letting people through like they were going through turnstiles.

  "I know you wouldn't lie to us. Warner Pell, you say."

  And Salvatore Polastro, a leading Detroit citizen, was about to say yes when everything became dark. When he woke up, both his hands were aching and they were heavy with white plaster casts. He saw a white ceiling light above him and that he was covered with a light gray blanket and white sheets. He was in a bed. He saw a black plastic knob hanging down from a black wire. It was a call button. He was in a hospital.

  "Shit," said Salvatore Polastro.

  "Sir, are you awake?" asked a nurse who was reading a magazine.

  "No. I always talk in a coma," said Polastro. "Where are my chauffeur and secretary? Tony," he called out. "Vito. Vito. Tony."

  "Sir, you'd better rest."

  "I want Tony and Vito."

  "Sir, they're indisposed."

  "What does that mean?"

  "They can't come here right now."

  "You tell them I say so. They'll come."

  "I'm afraid not, sir."

  "Did they run away?"

  "Not exactly, sir. They were found in the trunk of a car near the Holy Name sports complex. Just after the sisters found you unconscious on the floor with your wrists broken."

  "Found? How were they found? They were big men."

  "In the front trunk of a Volkswagen suffering traumatic hemorrhaging and severe bodily fractures."

  "Which means what?"

  "Squashed to jelly, sir."

  "I figured. Okay. Make a phone call."

  "I'm not allowed to. You're supposed to be sedated."

  "Don't give me that shit. There's a sawbuck in it for you."

  "I'm not going to violate my sacred nurse's pledge for a ten-dollar bill."

  "A hundred."

  "Long distance or local?"

  Polastro got his number and had to offer another yard for the nurse to leave the room. First she had to cradle the telephone between his right ear and shoulder.

  "Look," said Polastro, "don't answer. I'm going to talk. At the end, ask questions if you want. This is an open line. Both my wrists are broken. I've lost two of my best men. There are two men after you. They must use some kind of weird killing machines. I gave them your name. I had to. They would have killed me. But you can stop them. One's a gook."

  "We understand and hope to work with you toward a progressive solution."

  "That's good, right?"

  "There's no good or bad. Just situations towards which we must harness community energy. Goodbye."

  Polastro called back the nurse. This time he wanted a local call. This time, she could stay. The call was brief.

  He wanted four men right away. No, he didn't care if they had records. To hell with the public front. His ass was at stake.

  "That's a thousand," sai
d the nurse. "I didn't know you were in the Mafia."

  "Where do you get words like that?" said Polastro.

  "Oh, I know. Everyone knows. You've got millions."

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  "I want a thousand dollars or I talk to anyone who will listen."

  "We don't work that way."

  And when the four men entered the hospital room twenty minutes later, the nurse knew what Mr. Polastro was talking about. She saw the faces, the cold black eyes, the sort of faces that said "we break open heads for a living" and she really did not want that much money. Not at all. She was glad to help.

  "Give her a hundred bucks," said Polastro, and a single one-hundred-dollar bill came off a roll of bills as fat as a sink drain.

  As Polastro explained his problem to the men who helped him out of the hospital room, a man to each arm, he now faced hit men whose method he did not know. Therefore, they had to be ready for anything. Anything. Electronics, bullets, hands, knives, anything.

  "They gotta do it with something," said one of the men, honored to be promoted to personal bodyguard. "They don't walk through walls or nothing, right?"

  Everyone but Polastro said, "Right." Polastro said, "I hope not."

  The top two floors of one of his office buildings were vacant, so just in case his home in Grosse Point had been staked out, he put himself up in those two floors. The elevators were rigged to be unable to open their doors at these floors. A round-the-clock guard was put on the stairways and the roof. The windows were curtained off so no one at a distance could get in a sniper shot. The food was stored and prepared right in the top floor. One of the henchmen had to taste half of whatever was made, then Polastro would keep that bowl near him for an hour to make sure no one else touched it. At the end of the hour, he asked the taster how he felt. If the answer was fine, Polastro ate. If there was any question, any slight dizziness, Polastro would pass up the bowl. No one could leave the floors.

  All telephones were cut off so none of the men could make an outgoing phone call. The only phone working was Polastro's which he kept in his lap.

  This procedure lasted exactly twenty-four hours and thirty-one minutes. At 12:45 p.m. the following day, the guards were called down from the roof, the shades were opened on the windows and everyone left-with the body of Salvatore Polastro, beloved father of Maureen and Anna, husband of Gonsuelo, president of Dynamics Industries, Inc., Polastro Real Estate, Inc., Comp-Sciences, Inc., and exalted grand leader of the Detroit Council of Buffaloes.

  "He will be sorely missed," said the chairman of the Holy Name sports complex building fund.

  "Suddenly, of complications at his home in Grosse Pointe," the obituary read. The complication was above his waist. The bodyguards had difficulty scraping his torso off the walls and windowshades. The casts on his wrists, however, remained intact, prompting a hospital spokesman to comment that the "complications" could have had nothing to do with the very simple medical procedure at the hospital.

  Polastro's death had been ordained by Dr. Harold W. Smith, in the faint hope that it might discourage others from availing themselves of the new contract-killing service that Remo had told Smith about. The idea was that there was no point in killing a witness to stay out of jail when that guaranteed you that you would wind up a greasy smudge on your living-room wall. Smith did not think it would work, but neither had anything else. It was worth a try.

  Meanwhile, Remo and Chiun had arrived in Chicago with only three of Chiun's normal complement of fourteen large steamer trunks. They were not supposed to stay long, but Chiun had noted that Remo's plans did not seem to be working all that well.

  "You mean I'm failing?"

  "No. Sometimes events are stronger than people. To change thought patterns and action patterns because of difficulties is folly. That is failure."

  "I don't follow, Little Father," said Remo who had expected an unbroken string of I-told-you-sos after the loss of Kaufmann, for had not Chiun warned there was no chance of saving the man. "Didn't you criticize me on the Army post for doing the same thing over and over again? Remember? The rice and the leaky fence and the dead dog?"

  "You never listen. I did not criticize you for that. I was explaining a fact to you, that that man was dead. But I did not say you should change. If a farmer plants rice for tens of years and then one year he has a bad harvest, should he stop planting rice?"

  "He should find out why the crop failed," Remo said.

  "That would be nice, but not necessary," said Chiun. "He should keep planting rice in the way that has worked so many times before."

  "Wrong," said Remo. "It's necessary to find out what went bad."

  "If you say so," said Chiun with unexpected mildness.

  "And another thing," said Remo. "Why aren't you carping as much as you usually do?"

  "Carp?" said Chiun. "Is that not the word for complaining? Is that not the word for ridiculing? Is that not the word for incessant demeaning chatter?"

  "It is," said Remo, watching the beefy cab driver load Chiun's trunks into the back of the cab and the cab trunk and on the cab roof. The Chicago air smelled so heavily of soot you could ladle it into bowls. One of the disadvantages of using more of your senses was that when you were alive in air like this, you would just as soon have them dormant. To breathe Chicago air was a meal.

  "You say I carp?" Chiun said.

  "Well, yes. Sometimes."

  "I carp?"

  "Yes."

  "I carp!"

  "Yes."

  "I take a pale piece of a pig's ear, raise it above what it came from, give it powers and senses beyond any its family history has ever known, and I carp.

  "I glorify it beyond its boundaries and it goes around giving away secrets to a charlatan who babbles about mind waves and breathing. I give it wisdom and it spurns it. I nurture and love it and it produces putrescence and complaints that I carp. I carp!"

  "Did you say 'love,' Little Father?"

  "Only as a form of lying white speech. After all, I am a carper. I carp."

  Chiun asked the cab driver, who was now facing heavy traffic on the way into downtown Chicago, whether he heard any carping.

  "Of the two, who would you say is the carper?" Chiun demanded. "Be honest now."

  "The white guy," said the cab driver.

  "How did you do that?" Remo asked, not having seen any currency pass between Chiun and the driver or Chiun leaning into one of the man's pressure points.

  "I trust in the honesty of our good driver. All in the West is not foul or ungrateful or complaining… I carp, Tieh, heh," cackled Chiun. "I carp."

  There were a multitude of reasons why Chiun could not possibly carp. Remo heard every one of them in detail on the way to the board of education, the last one being it was not Chiun who had lost Kaufmann, not Chiun who had said fifty-seven different gambling odds, not Chiun who had wasted his time at that Army post. Why not Chiun? Because Chiun was not a carper.

  "Look, Little Father, I'm a bit worried. Smitty said we should stay away from Chicago until he could find out more about that guy. Maybe I'm not doing the right thing."

  And on this rare occasion, the Master of Sinanju yelled: "Who have I taught, you or your Smith? Who knows what is right, some seedling emperor, of which are there many each generation, or the skilled product of Sinanju? You are wonderful, fool, and you do not comprehend this yet."

  "Wonderful, Little Father?"

  "Do not listen to me. I carp," said Chiun. "But know you this. While you were at that Army outpost, doing what a mere emperor told you to do, you failed. Now you will succeed because you do what you know to do, what I have taught you to do. Sitting, even a stone is not safe. Rolling, it carries all before it. Go."

  At this point, the cab driver who had been expecting a big tip under the reasonable assumption that a lie was worth more than the truth in the tipping market, did note that perhaps the Oriental did carp a bit. However, he did not dwell on this. He had more important and immediate things, li
ke getting his ears out of the triangular vent window of the front seat. His nose was very close to the outside mirror and his ears pinched as he tried to pull his head back through. What he could not figure out was how his head got there. He had made the comment about carping and then was wondering how to get his ears past the metal trim, back into the cab. If he could squeeze his ears through, he could get the rest of his head back in and that would be wonderful. It was what he wanted now more than anything else in the world. He heard the Oriental tell the white guy to trust himself and then the Oriental stopped the deafening clatter for a moment and the cab driver said:

  "I was sort of wondering if you could help me, sort of, get back in the cab."

  "You would ask a carper for help?"

  "You don't carp," said the driver. He felt a fast warmth around his ears and then his head was back inside and what was most amazing was that the window panel wasn't bent. Sir, no sir, the sir wasn't a carper at all, sir, and yes sir, it was really amazing how people would not listen to good advice these days, sir.

  Chiun thought so too. Even transportation servants, when properly reasoned with, could come to correct solutions.

  Inside the Chicago board of education, something was wrong. People moved quickly, some barking sharp commands. Knots of worried faces exchanged questions with each other.

  "What happened?" came a voice. Several answered.

  "Warner Pell. At his desk."

  "What?"

  "Dead."

  "No."

  "Yes."

  "Oh, my God. No."

  And while this was going on, another:

  "What happened?"

  "Warner Pell."

  "What?"

  "Dead."

  "No."

  "Yes."

  "Oh, my God. No."

  Remo intruded upon a knot of people.

  "You say Warner Pell is dead?" Remo asked.

  "Yes," said a fleshy-faced woman with large rhinestone eyeglasses hanging by a cord over widening breasts that seemed to strain her twenty-pound test weight nylon bra, like large formless vestigial lumps that might, ten or twenty years before, have been used to feed babies.

  "How?" asked Remo.

  "Shot to death. Murdered."

  "Where?"

  "Down the hall. Murder in the board of education. This is becoming as bad as a classroom. My God, what next?"