Lost Yesterday td-65 Page 5

  “I understand. I, too, would be reluctant to admit that I failed before such a gracious emperor,” said Chiun. He of course said this in English. Remo knew this was only for Smith's benefit. In Korean, Remo told Chiun he was full of the droppings of a diarrhetic duck.

  Chiun, hearing this insult from Remo, took the injury to his heart, where he could nurture it and make it grow. One day he would use it profitably against the man who had become his child.

  Smith only waited. More and more now, these two would drift into Korean that he didn't understand.

  “I want another crack at that guy,” said Remo.

  “They've moved him,” said Smith.

  “I don't care where he is. I want him,” said Remo.

  * * *

  Gennaro Drumola was eating a triple order of spare ribs in the penthouse suite of the San Francisco Forty-Niner Hotel when the thin man with the thick wrists dropped in on him again, this time through the window.

  Drums did not know how he could have gotten through the guards, much less to the window. The guy had to climb walls.

  Drums cleaned his dripping hands on his great mound of belly covered by a white T-shirt. Thick black hair sprouted from the shirt's every opening. Even his knuckles had hair. This time Drumola would be ready for him. He would not be caught napping. Drumola picked up a chair, cracked it in two with his bare hands, and was ready to put a sharp splinter into the skinny guy's face when he felt himself being dragged by an awesome force right through the window. Drums would have screamed but his lips were pressed together just like back at the camp when he felt a mountain had collapsed on him.

  His lips were closed and he was being swung thirty stories above San Francisco by something that felt like a vise. Upside down, looking down at the street as he moved like a pendulum, he wished it were even tighter.

  “Okay, sweetheart. What happened?”

  Drums felt the man release his lips. He was supposed to talk. He talked.

  “Nothin' happened. I did what you said. I said I remembered.”

  “But then you forgot.”

  “For Chrissakes. I wish I could remember. I don't remember.”

  “Well, try,” said the man, and dropped him a story. It felt like it was going to be twenty-nine more of them, but something caught him again.

  “Are we getting any better?”

  “I don't know nothin'.”

  Drumola felt warm liquid run up his ears. He knew what it was. It was running from his pants, down his stomach and chest, and dripping out his shirt around his ears. His bladder had released in fear.

  Remo swung Drumola back up to his penthouse suite. The man wasn't lying. He was tempted to let him drop all the way, but that would have let the world think the mob had killed him. Remo stuffed Drumola's face back into the spare ribs and left him there.

  Remo had failed. It was the first time he had failed to persuade a witness. There was an instant before death, he had been taught by Chiun, when fear takes over the body. In that instant, the will to live became so strong that it grew into an overpowering fear of death. And at that moment, nothing else mattered— not greed, or love, or hate. All that mattered was the will to live.

  Drumola had been in that state of fear. He could not lie. And yet Remo had failed to turn him back to his testimony.

  “I am not losing it,” he told Smith.

  “I'm asking because we have what seems to be a sudden rash of forgetful witnesses.”

  “Then let's get 'em. I need the practice.”

  “I never heard you say that before.”

  “Well, I said it. But it doesn't mean I'm losing anything,” said Remo into the telephone. He wondered if he should visit Smith and perhaps shred the steel gates of Folcroft over Smith's head. He hadn't been to the sanitarium headquarters of the organization for a long while now.

  “All right,” said Smith. The voice was weak.

  “If you don't want me to do it, just say so. And I won't.”

  “Of course we need you, Remo. But I was wondering about Chiun.”

  “You don't even know Chiun,” said Remo. He was at a telephone at the Portland, Oregon, airport. A woman at the phone next to him asked him to be quiet. He told her he wasn't yelling. She said he was. He said if she wanted to hear yelling, he could yell. She said he was yelling right now.

  “No,” said Remo, collecting power in his lungs, and then setting a high pitch to his voice. “This,” he sang so that the very lights quivered in the ceiling, “is yelling.”

  The three floor-to-ceiling windows at gates seven, eight, and nine collapsed like a commercial for sound tape.

  “Well,” said the woman. “That certainly is yelling to me.” And she hung up and walked away.

  Smith was still on the phone saying shocks had somehow altered the scrambler system and he was getting warning signals that this might be an open line very soon. No protection for secrecy.

  “I'm all right,” said Remo. “I know I had my target in panic. That's what does it. Making the life force take over.”

  “Does that life force have anything to do with the cosmic relationship?”

  “No. That's timing. That's me. Life force is them. No. The answer to your question is no.”

  “All right, Remo. All right.”

  “The life force is not me,” he said.

  “All right,” said Smith.

  “All right,” said Remo.

  “The name is Gladys Smith. She is twenty-nine years old, a secretary to one of the largest grain-trading companies in the world. She is testifying against her entire firm, which has been making secret deals with the Russians undercutting our entire agricultural policy. The government is keeping her in a Chicago apartment. She is not that heavily defended, but she is defended.”

  “So she's defended. Defenses aren't a problem for me,” said Remo.

  “I didn't say they were. Remo, you are more important to us than these cases. We've got to know we have you. America needs you. You're upset now.”

  “I'm always upset,” said Remo. “Just give me her address.”

  When he left the little phone area, he saw workmen were cleaning up the barrier glass at the gates and people were staring at him. Someone was mumbling that Remo was the one whose voice had shattered the windows. But an airport maintenance director said that was impossible. A car could drive into that glass and it would not shatter.

  Remo grabbed the next flight to Chicago and dozed in first class. Before they landed he did his breathing and felt the good leveling force of all power move through him, calming him. He realized then he had done what he should never do, let his mind take over, the mind where doubts lived and thrived on selected pieces of negative information culled from the universe of information. He knew he had done his job right. The witness had somehow truly forgotten. He decided not to use fear this time.

  * * *

  Gladys Smith had finished her fourteenth romance novel of the week and was wondering if she would ever get to have a man's arms around her again, when the finest romantic experience of her life walked through the door she thought had been locked.

  He was thin, with thick wrists and a sharp handsome face with dark eyes that told her he knew her. Not from an earlier meeting, but in some other, deeper way.

  He moved silently with a grace she had never seen in a man.

  “Gladys?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Gladys Smith?”

  “Yes.”

  “I'm here for you.”

  “I know,” she heard herself saying. He did not grab her like one of the boyfriends that haunted her past. He did not even caress her. His touch was gentler than that, as though his fingerpads were an extension of her own flesh.

  She never knew her arms could feel so good. She sat down on the bed. She never knew she could feel so good about her body. It was becoming alive in ways she had never known. It was welcoming him, it was wanting him, and finally it was demanding him.

  Her mind wa
s like a passenger on a trip her body was taking. And just when she hovered at the edge of a climax that would satisfy every longing she had had as a woman, he asked for something so minor and trivial all she could do was sob, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” And that sob became a scream of satisfaction and joy.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, darling, anything. Of course I'll remember. What should I remember?”

  “Your testimony,” he said.

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Of course. What do you want me to remember?”

  “Whatever your testimony was,” he said. She put his hand back on her neck. She never wanted his hands away from her again.

  “Sure. But I don't remember it. I don't remember anything that happened at the company. It's like almost everything after my twenty-first birthday never happened.”

  “Of course it happened.”

  “I know it happened. But I don't remember it, darling. I don't. When I look at the pages of testimony I gave, it's as though some stranger had said it. I don't even remember giving the testimony. I don't remember anything past four weeks ago.”

  “What happened four weeks ago?”

  “Put your hand back where it was. Okay. There. Right where you had it before. People were looking at me. And they were asking me things, strange things about grain transfers. And I didn't know what they were talking about. They told me I had worked for a grain-trading company. They got very angry. I don't know why they got angry. They asked me who bought me off. I would never lie for money. I'm not that sort of person.”

  “You really didn't lie,” said the man with the dark eyes that knew her.

  “Of course not, darling. I never lie.”

  “I was afraid of that. Good-bye.”

  “Wait. Where are you going? Take your clothes back off. Get back here. Wait. Wait!”

  Gladys ran after him to the door.

  “I'll lie. If you want me to lie, I'll lie. I'll memorize everything in the transcript. I'll remember it. I'll say it word for word. Just don't leave me. You can't leave me.”

  “Sorry. I've got work.”

  “When will I ever find someone else like you?”

  “Not in this century,” said Remo.

  * * *

  This time he did not phone in his failure. He insisted on a meeting with Smith.

  “That won't be necessary, Remo. I know you didn't fail. As a test, one of our government agencies damned worried about this thing ran lie-detector tests on two witnesses who claimed to have forgotten their own stories. Both of them passed. They weren't lying. They really did forget their own testimony.”

  “Wonderful,” said Remo.

  “Wonderful? This is a disaster,” said Smith. “Someone out there knows how to dismantle our entire justice system. This country is going to fall apart pretty soon.”

  “Pretty soon? When was the last time you made a phone call, Smitty? You want to watch falling apart in action, call a repairman.”

  “I mean there will be no way we can enforce any law if someone knows how to make witnesses forget. No law. Think about it. If you can make people forget, there will never be another witness. Never.”

  Remo thought about it. He thought about forgetting things, forgetting his early life in the orphanage. If he could only forget selectively, he thought, it might be the best thing that ever happened.

  “Remo, are you there?”

  “I'm thinking about it, Smitty,” he said.

  Chapter 4

  Beatrice Pimser Dolomo was happy. Rubin Dolomo, the guiding genius of Poweressence, the spiritual force, was feeling almost good enough to get out of bed. Cutting his minimum daily requirement of Valium down to a single triple dose helped, but it was always easier getting out of bed when Beatrice was happy. Everything was easier when Beatrice was happy.

  But the Dolomos' lawyer was not happy.

  “I don't know what you two are giggling about, but the feds have got us nailed.”

  “If you would only renounce your failure mechanism you would reap success and power. The only thing between you and your new dynamic life is yourself,” said Rubin.

  “You want a Poweressence convert or you want to try to stay out of jail?” asked Barry Glidden, one of the foremost criminal lawyers in California. The Dolomos had hired him because he was known as a no-nonsense, no-holds-barred defender of clients, provided those clients had a no-holds-barred attitude toward payment.

  Barry rested his arms on the table of the beautifully lit Dolomo day room, overlooking the magnificent Dolomo estate. He already had plans to buy it from them when they went to jail and turn it into a condominium development. There was enough prime land here to build an airport if he wanted.

  “Let me tell you two happy people what they got on you, in case you think this hocus-pocus you make so much money on can work miracles. One, they got the alligators you put in that columnist's pool. That's Exhibit A. They got a wonderful witness, one of your former devotees, who says that Exhibit A was what you, Beatrice, told her to put into the pool. Because you aren't going to pass that off as stocking of wildlife, and because no one is going to believe an alligator walked from Florida homing in on a columnists' negative forces, that leaves any reasonable jury only one option: attempted murder.”

  “That was Rubin's idea,” said Beatrice, displaying her charms in a halter and slacks. She knew Glidden wanted the property. One of Rubin's Poweressence converts was a movie star who had already been approached to invest in the consortium Glidden was organizing to make the purchase. She did not tell him she knew this, however.

  She had told him simply that if he lost this case his children would be boiled in oil, alive.

  He had offered to resign the case. She had told him she was only joking. Mostly. She had laughed coquettishly when she had said that. Barry Glidden had not thought it a thing of mirth.

  “In Dance of the Alarkin Planet, a creature very much like a crocodile kills people with negative vibrations,” said Rubin. “Animals sense these things. Their instincts are a lot purer than the twisted products of the human brain.”

  “He's not interested in your short stories, Rubin. He's interested in money. Right?” said Beatrice.

  “I'm interested in the law. You put an alligator in a person's swimming pool to kill him. I've told you a hundred times, Beatrice, that you can't threaten, maim, buy, destroy, and knife your way out of everything. There comes a time when the world catches up to you. You are going to do time on this alligator thing. That's it. We can cop a plea and with a little bit of finagling here and there, get it down to six months. That is a light sentence for attempted murder.”

  “No plea,” said Beatrice.

  “I cannot get anyone on a jury to believe that cockamamie negative-force nonsense. You're going to do serious time if you don't plead. Jurors do not read Dance of the Alarkin Planet. And if they did, they wouldn't believe it.”

  “They have been programmed by failure not to believe,” said Rubin.

  “Rubin, you have not paid taxes for twenty years. No jury is going to accept that you owe your first allegiance to the universe. Not when they pay their taxes for sewer systems, national defense, police forces, and various other things that make a civilization.”

  “We're in religion,” said Rubin. “They cannot tax religion. We have a right to be free of governmental oppression.”

  “This is not exactly a church here,” said Glidden, pointing to the rolling California landscape of the Dolomo estate.

  “Have you ever seen the Vatican?” said Beatrice.

  “You are comparing yourself to the Roman Catholic Church?”

  “So they have been here a bit longer,” said Beatrice. “But they, too, were persecuted in their time.”

  “And we offer two more sacraments— the holy character analysis and blessed success on earth. Granted, they have been here longer,” said Rubin. “But in a time warp a couple of thousand years is nothing.”

  “I don't know which one of you is crazier. The lady who think
s any threat to anyone will do, or you and your cockamamie fairy tales.”

  “Our money is not crazy,” said Beatrice. “The checks are good.”

  “Listen. I am just a human being. I have weaknesses. Juries are made up of human beings. They have weaknesses too. But don't underestimate the strength of their beliefs. They may not believe in negative vibrations. Most of them will not believe that the planet Alarkin exists. But they do believe that the President of the United States exists. Now, do you want to tell me about that, Beatrice?”

  Beatrice Dolomo adjusted her halter. She cleared her throat.

  “No,” she said.

  “Some Americans might find it disturbing to hear that you have threatened the President of the United States. Did you do that, Beatrice?”

  “I take whatever actions I have to. If I let the world bully me, I would be bullied by everything. Rubin and I would be nowhere if I listened to people who said I should know when to quit. I never quit. If I listened to them I would be the wife of a nobody science-fiction writer, at a time when science fiction is not selling.”

  “So you threatened the President of the United States,” said Glidden.

  “We used to eat tuna fish for Sunday dinner. Rubin wore vinyl belts and polyester suits. We were intimately familiar with every tenant-protection law on the books. We learned how to delay evictions by months.”

  “So you threatened the President of the United States. You did,” said Glidden.

  “Diamonds? Hah. I had a glass ring. It cost two dollars and thirty-five cents. When Rubin proposed to me he promised he would buy me a ring as soon as he sold his next book. He said every penny he made from Dromoids of Muir would go toward getting me that ring. And do you want to know something?” said Beatrice, her temples throbbing, her face flushing with the heat of her anger. “Do you want to know something?”

  “Beatrice, please let go of my face. I can't talk,” said Glidden. His client had risen from her seat in fury. Her red-lacquered fingernails were now digging into his cheeks.

  “You want to know something?” she yelled again.

  “Yes, please. I certainly do,” cried Barry, who wanted his cheeks back with as little puncturing as possible.