King's Curse Read online

  “No kidding?” said the detective. A cold ash fell from his unlit cigar into the chest cavity as he peered into the body. “Sorry,” he said. The detective puzzled a moment.

  “Maybe you can help us with something else,” he said. From the left breast pocket in his shiny seersucker jacket he took a photocopy sheet rolled up like a scroll.

  It was about eight inches wide but twenty-four inches long and had twelve dark sections of writing when it was unrolled.

  “What’s this?” asked the detective, handing the sheet to Chiun. “We made it from an original found under the head of the body.”

  Chiun looked at the long sheet carefully. He examined the edges. He felt the surface of the paper, then nodded wisely.

  “This is a copy of a document produced by an American machine that makes such copies.”

  “Yeah, we know it’s a photocopy, but what does the note mean?”

  “It is in twelve different languages,” said Chiun. “And one of them I do not understand, nor have I seen. The Chinese I know, the French and Arabic I know, the Hebrew and Russian I know. Here it is again, in real language. In Korean. The Sanskrit and Aramaic I know. The Swahili and the Urdu and Spanish I know. But the first language I do not know.”

  “We think it’s a ritual murder and the note is part of the ritual. Death for kicks sort of thing,” said the detective. Remo glanced over Chiun’s shoulders at the note.

  “What do you think, Remo?” asked Chiun.

  “Is he an expert?” asked the detective.

  “He is learning,” said Chiun.

  “I don’t know,” said Remo, “but I’d guess all those languages say the same thing.” Chiun nodded.

  “But what is this symbol here?” Remo pointed to a rough rectangular drawing in the middle of the text of the unknown language.

  “In the other languages on this paper, it is called an Uctut,” said Chiun.

  “What is an Uctut?” asked Remo.

  “I do not know. What is a Joey 172?” Chiun asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?” said Remo.

  “Because that is in the note, too,” Chiun said.

  “So what does it all mean?” asked the detective. “We’ve had trouble making heads or tails out of it.”

  Chiun raised his delicate hands and signaled ignorance.

  Outside, in the muggy, grimy New York City streets, with traffic jammed to a horn-blaring standstill, Chiun explained.

  “It was a note of demand for reparations,” he said. “It was not clear because it was written in the lofty language of a religion. But whoever wrote it demands that a ‘Joey 172’ be punished for some sort of offense to an Uctut. And until this country punishes this Joey 172, then the servants of Uctut will continue to ease his pain with blood.”

  “I still don’t understand,” said Remo.

  “Your country gives up Joey 172, whatever that is, or more will die,” said Chiun.

  “Who gives a shit?” asked Bobbi.

  “I do,” said Remo.

  “This bright, beautiful, and charming young woman makes much sense,” said Chiun.

  “If you care, then do your thing,” Bobbi said to Remo. “Find Joey 172.”

  “She makes sense,” Chiun said, “when she is not talking stupid. Like now.”

  Remo smiled. “I think I know how to find Joey 172. Have you ever ridden on a New York City subway?”

  “No,” said Chiun, and he was not about to.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ANTWAN PEDASTER JACKSON FELT he had an obligation to bring wisdom to whites. For example, the old woman with the frayed brown shopping bag riding on the rear of the D train after seven P.M. Didn’t she know that whites weren’t supposed to ride the subways after that hour? She sure enough seemed to realize it now as he moseyed into the empty car with Sugar Baby Williams. They were both seniors at Martin Luther King High School, where Sugar Baby was going to graduate as valedictorian because he could read faster than anyone else, and without moving his lips either, except on the hard words. But even the teacher couldn’t read the hard words at Martin Luther King.

  “You know where you is?” asked Antwan.

  The old woman, her face lined with years of toil, looked up from her rosary, fingering a Hail Mary. A faded yellow and red babushka cradled her heartlike face. She moved the paper shopping bag tighter between her knees.

  “I am sorry I do not speak the English well,” she said.

  “This the Noo Yawk subway,” said Sugar Baby, the valedictorian.

  “This aftah the rush hour, honkey,” said Antwan.

  “You not s’posed to be being hyeah,” said Sugar Baby.

  “I am sorry I do not speak English well,” said the woman.

  “Wha you got in that there bag?” said Sugar Baby.

  “Old clothes which I mend,” said the woman.

  “You got bread?” asked Antwan. To her look of confusion, he explained: “Money?”

  “I am a poor woman. I have just coins for my supper.”

  To this, Antwan took great umbrage and brought a flat smacking black hand across the woman’s white face.

  “Ah don’t like liars. Ain’t nobody tell you lying a sin?” asked Antwan.

  “It shameful,” said Sugar Baby and smacked her in the other direction.

  “No. No. No. Do not hit,” cried the woman as she tried to cover her head.

  “Get yo’ hand down,” demanded Antwan, and he banged her a shot in the head. Then he tried his latest karate chop on her right shoulder, but a fist proved better. It knocked the babushka off and sent blood trickling from her right earlobe. Sugar Baby hoisted the old woman to her feet and rammed her head against the window behind the train seat while Antwan rummaged through her pockets. They got $1.17, so Sugar Baby hit her again for being so cheap.

  They got off at the next stop, commenting on how they had made the subways once again free of whites after nightfall. It did not occur to them that they had also helped make the subway system of New York City equally free of blacks and Puerto Ricans after that hour. They watched the empty train roll by, headed for Mosholu Parkway, the last station on the D train with the next stop the open yards.

  There was not much to do with $1.17, but they went upstairs to the street anyway. It was a white neighborhood, which meant the racist storeowners didn’t have everything locked up or hidden away out of reach, as in the black neighborhoods. Antwan and Sugar Baby, free of this racist store-owner mentality, enjoyed themselves like free men in these stores and markets where goods were displayed openly for people to handle, inspect, and then decide upon purchasing. At the end of this small sojourn off the Grand Concourse, they had three cans of aerosol spray paint, three bottles of Coke, four Twinkies, eight candy bars, a nudie magazine, and a bar of Cashmere Bouquet soap. And they still had their $1.17 left.

  “Wha you rip that soap off for?” demanded Sugar Baby.

  “Maybe we can sell it,” said Antwan.

  “That stupid,” said Sugar Baby. “Who gonna buy a bar of soap around our neighborhood?”

  “We could use it, maybe?” said Antwan thoughtfully. He had seen a television show once where a woman ran water over soap and then rubbed the resulting foam onto her face.

  “Wha fo?”

  “With water and stuff,” said Antwan.

  “You dumb. That Uncle Tom stuff. You Uncle Tom,” said Sugar Baby.

  “Ah ain’ no Tom,” said Antwan. “Don” you call me no Tom.”

  “Then wah yo’ doin’ with soap?”

  “Ah thought it was a candy bar, is all.”

  “Well, get rid of it.”

  Antwan threw it through the ground floor window of an apartment building and then they both ran, laughing. They had to run because, as everyone knew, racist cops would bust you for no reason at all.

  There was a reason for the spray paint. Sugar Baby was one of the better artists at Martin Luther King. He had painted the ceiling of the gymnasium by hanging suspended by ropes one night with Antwan
holding a flashlight from the floor below. And there it was for the big game against DeWitt Clinton. A masterpiece laid on a $30,000 acoustical ceiling. In red and green spray paint: SUGAR BABY.

  “Beautiful,” Antwan had said.

  “Oh, no,” the principal had said.

  “Ah’m king lord over all de planet,” Sugar Baby had said then, and now, running down a side street in the Bronx, he was going to do his masterwork. Instead of painting Sugar Baby on a ceiling or just one car of a subway train, he was going to invade the yards and put an entire train to his spray paint—if the cans lasted.

  The yard stretched beside an elevated track, and in the darkness he could tell he would have his pick. He needed the right train, one which was without others’ works, but it seemed impossible to find one free of Chico, RAM I, WW, and Joey 172.

  Sugar Baby finally made the hard decision. He would paint over. To make the cans last, he decided to omit the usual border and substitute one long thin line in script. He was good at handwriting, making the best B’s in the school, and a guidance counselor had told him his handwriting was good enough to make him the president of a college or at least of a corporation.

  He was on the first loop of the S, a bright fluorescent green crescent, when a face popped out from between two cars. It was a white face. It was a man. Sugar Baby and Antwan started to run. Then they saw the man was alone. And he wasn’t that big. Thin, in fact.

  “Hi,” said Remo.

  “Who you, mother?” said Antwan.

  “I’m looking for somebody,” said Remo, and he hopped down off the car onto the cinders of the yard.

  Neither Antwan nor Sugar Baby noticed that this man landed on the crunchy cinders with the silence of a balloon touching felt.

  “You looking for a bruisin’,” said Sugar Baby.

  “You grin, you in, mother,” said Antwan.

  “I really don’t have time to rap,” said Remo, “and I don’t think coaxing will work.”

  Antwan and Sugar Baby giggled. They spread apart so Antwan could come at the front and Sugar Baby at the back. The white man stood quietly. Sugar Baby tried his karate chop. The hand came down perfect on the white man’s head. He imagined himself splitting a brick. He imagined the head opening. He imagined how he would tell how he killed a honkey with one blow. His imaginings were interrupted by a decided pain in his right wrist. The skin was there but the fingers would not move, as if the hand were connected to the forearm by a bag of jelly. Sugar Baby dropped the spray paint. Antwan saw this and put his feet to action, heading out of the yards. He got four steps. On the fifth, his hip failed to cooperate. He went skin-splitting burning across the gravel, crying for his mother, professing innocence, vowing cooperation, and generally expressing fond feelings for the world and a desire to live in peace with all mankind.

  “Who is Joey 172?” Remo asked.

  “Ah don’ know, man. Hey, ah square wif you, baby. Ah love you, baby,” moaned Antwan.

  “Try again,” said Remo.

  And Antwan felt a sharp stabbing pain in his neck but he saw no knife in the white man’s hands. “Don’ know, man. Ah knows a Chico and a Ramad 85. They south city men.”

  “Joey 172, ever hear of him?”

  “No, man. He nothing.”

  “Then you know him?”

  “Ah say he nothing. Hey, Sugar Baby, tell mah man hyeah whuffo Joey 172.”

  “He nuffin’,” said Sugar Baby, holding his painful right arm as vertical as possible. If he held it straight down and breathed very gently he could make the wrist pain almost bearable, if the elbow were cradled just right. When Sugar Baby said nuffin’, he said it very softly.

  “Where’s he from?” Remo asked.

  “Nowhere, man. He’s nothing.”

  “Try,” said Remo.

  “Ah’m tryn, man. He ain’ big enough to be from somewheres.”

  “Where’s nowhere?” asked Remo.

  “Lotsa places nowhere, man. You dumb or something?” said Sugar Baby.

  “Name some,” said Remo and gave Sugar Baby’s dangling right arm a gentle touch.

  Sugar Baby screamed. He suddenly remembered someone saying once that Joey 172 was from the Stuyvesant High School.

  “All right, we’ll all go there,” said Remo.

  “Bronx High School of Science,” Sugar Baby corrected quickly. “He one of them Toms. Bronx High School of Science. Ah seen a Joey 172 there. They say that where he from.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Remo.

  And even in the next great pain, Sugar Baby allowed as how nobody could be sure, and Antwan too allowed as how it was probably Bronx High School of Science. Now, if the man wanted Chico, they could get him Chico for sure. Everybody knew Chico. For Chico they could give him the address.

  “Thank you,” said Remo. As an afterthought he took the can of green glow spray paint and, ripping off their shirts, made a neat artistic Remo on each of their chests.

  “I’m an artist myself,” said Remo and went whistling off to find the Bronx High School of Science building, which as it turned out was nearby. On all the walls, there was no Joey 172. It was a big city and finding one graffiti artist in a plague of them was like singling out a locust in a swarm. And then he had an idea. He bought a can of white spray paint from a hardware store open late and convinced a cab driver to take him to Harlem. This required a fist full of twenty-dollar bills and a gentle stroking of the cab driver’s neck. When Remo told the driver to let him off in front of an empty lot, the driver tried to nod but his neck hurt too much.

  Remo skipped into the lot from the silent street. If night crime had thinned the street population of the rest of New York City, it had made Harlem into a desperately quiet enclave of citizens bunkered precariously for the night. Almost nothing moved except occasional packs of youngsters or convoys of grownups.

  Stores were shuttered with metal shields, occasionally working streetlights illuminated empty littered sidewalks, a rat scurried soundlessly along a wall. And it was the wall Remo wanted.

  Even in the dim half-light, he could make out the strong lines of powerful colors blending into a mosaic of fine black faces, set like a monument of a new generation against the decaying brick of a preceding one. It was a Wall of Respect, and it hurt Remo a bit to deface it.

  With the white paint, he sprayed a neat and glaring Joey 172 across the wall and then faded back across the street to wait. The first person to spot the desecration of the wall that was, by custom and mutual consent, not to be touched was a youngster with a key around his neck. He stopped as if hit in the stomach with a pail of water. Remo lounged on a stoop. The gray dawn was succumbing to light. The youngster ran off. Remo smelled the ripe aroma of day-old greasy ribs, combined with week-old oranges and rotting chicken bones.

  The street lights went off. The youngster came back with three others. By the time the sun was high, Remo had what he wanted. A large crowd formed in front of the wall spilling out into the street. Young men in gang jackets, older ones in rainbows of reds and yellows and platform shoes, a few winos careening precariously in place, a fat woman with layers of clothes like tenting over haystacks.

  And down the street, his arms pinned by two burly men with raging Afros, was a young man, his eyeglasses askew, his eyes wide with terror, his sneakers kicking helplessly in the air.

  “That him,” yelled a woman. “That Joey 172.”

  “Burn the mother,” yelled a man.

  “Cut him,” shrieked a kid. “Cut him. Cut him good.”

  Remo eased himself from the stoop and cut into the mob, some of whom had been loudly discussing what to do about the white man across the street.

  He wedged himself toward the opening where the two burly men were slapping the youngster into place. Remo cleared a small area in front of him quickly. To the crowd it looked like hands floating and bodies falling. The front of the crowd, after making some useless swings with knives and knuckles, tried to retreat from Remo. The back pushed forward and the front p
ushed back. Swinging started in the center of the crowd. Remo yelled for quiet. He wasn’t heard.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, in a voice smothered to insignificance, like a pebble rolling uphill against an avalanche, “that you would consider this graffiti an expression of culture and ethnic pride?”

  Not getting a response, he dropped the young man’s handlers with two backhands flat to the side of the skull, just compressing the blood flow momentarily. Each dropped like a ripe plum. Remo grabbed the boy and cut his way through a wing of the crowd. Two blocks away, he avoided a police column that was waiting for the mob to fight out its energy before moving in.

  “Hey, man, thanks,” said the youngster.

  “You’re not going anywhere, kid,” said Remo, stopping the lad by cementing the tool’s wrist to his palm. They were in a deserted alley now with crumbled bricks rising toward the end like refuse from a bombing raid.

  “Are you the painter of the Joey 172’s?” Remo asked.

  “No, man, I swear it,” said the boy. He was about twelve years old, a foot shorter than Remo. His Captain Kangaroo tee shirt was torn off his left side revealing a skinny chest and bony shoulders.

  “All right,” said Remo. “I’ll take you back to the mob, then.”

  “I did it,” said the boy.

  “Now we’re talking.”

  “But I didn’t mess up no wall of respect, man.”

  “I know,” said Remo. “I did it for you.”

  “You mother,” said the boy. “What’d you do that for?”

  “So that I could enlist the aid and resources of the community in meeting you.”

  “You ain’t much with a spray can, man. You got a weak hand. A real weak hand.”

  “I never defaced anything before,” said Remo.

  “Why should I help you?” asked the boy logically.

  “Because on one hand I’m going to give you two hundred dollars cash if you do, and on the other, I’m going to puncture your ear drums if you don’t,” said Remo, just as logically.

  “You make a sweet offer. Where’s the money?”

  Remo took a wad of bills from his pocket and counted out exactly two hundred dollars.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” said the boy. “I just want to see if this money’s real. Can’t be too careful nowadays.”