Union Bust Page 5

  Dr. Braithwait stared at the evenly breathing patient. What on earth was wrong with him? This defied medical knowledge,

  The only clue available came from the old Oriental on the first day. Hamburger. Hmmm. Hamburger.

  Dr. Braithwait absentmindedly touched the steel straps. Hamburger. He checked his watch. He had been warned not to disturb the Oriental until after 4:30 p.m. It was that now. Hamburger. That nervous system.

  Dr. Braithwait strode quickly out of the room with the surgical lights and went down the corridor. He knocked on a door. He waited. Inside the mellifluous organ of a daytime soap opera whined its heavy tune. Then someone was selling soap. The door opened.

  Draped in a saffron kimono, the aged Oriental indignantly inquired about Dr. Braithwait’s manners, upbringing, and by what right he, Dr. Braithwait, felt he could destroy moods of artistry?

  “That hamburger you claim did the damage. Where did the patient get it?”

  “From filth, ignorance and stupidity.”

  “No. The name of the place which sold him the hamburger.”

  “The name is dog and son of dog. The name is Halloran’s Happy Hamburgers.”

  “That’s it. Of course. Now I understand,” said Dr. Braithwait. “With his nervous system, naturally he would become semi-comatose.”

  “Because of the impurity of the essence.”

  “No. No. No. Monosodium glutamate. These hamburgers are nationally made for the entire Halloran chain. They’re made of gristle and the worst sections of beef. They sell cheaply and to make them edible they’re loaded with monosodium glutamate. Even some normal people have nervous system difficulties from it. That nervous system… well, it just went into a semisleep.”

  “You talk in riddles,” said the old man.

  “You were right. It was something in the hamburger.”

  “The impurity of the animal fat. The excessive indulgence. The lack of personal discipline.”

  “No. Monosodium glutamate.”

  The old man’s face wrinkled into puzzlement.

  “I tell you, the spiritual son of the Master of Sinanju has violated the purity of his essence, clearly and simply and understandably, and then you tell me ‘monosodium glutamate.’ Now what are you talking about?”

  “Monosodium glutamate is a chemical.”

  The old man nodded.

  “It is in food.”

  The old man nodded.

  “It was in the hamburger eaten by the patient.”

  The old man nodded.

  “Monosodium glutamate affects some nervous systems.”

  The old man understood that.

  “With the incredibly finely tuned nervous system of the patient, it wreaked havoc.”

  The old man smiled. “For a doctor, you are very stupid. I do not understand a word you say. Come. Let us go to my son. Is he better yet?”

  “Not much, maybe today. Maybe tomorrow or the next day, but he will definitely recover.”

  “I ask you a favor,” said the old man.

  Braithwait listened respectfully.

  “When I first explained to you what caused the harm, I accidentally said this white man was the true son of the Master of Sinanju, even though he was white.”

  Braithwait nodded. He remembered that idiotic rambling.

  “Do not let the patient know this. If he thinks he has any Korean in his soul, he will be impossible to live with. I call him white.”

  “He is Caucasian,” said the doctor. “I’d say Mediterranean-Northern European, a combination. High cheekbones may make him Slavic in there somewhere, but he is white.”

  “I say that. Not you. You cannot call him white. Now do you understand? Simple, no?”

  That evening when the patient was shrugging off the last effects of the monosodium glutamate, the old Oriental hummed happily. He kissed the forehead of the patient. He chuckled. He sang. He danced around the table. When the patient blinked his eyes and said. “Where am I?” the old man suddenly flew into a rage, his frail, bony arms flailing.

  “Dead. You should be dead. Ungrateful, horrible, undisciplined white man. You are a white man. You will always be a white man. You were born white and you will die a white man. White man with white man’s hamburgers.”

  “Jeez, Chiun, will you get off my back. What happened?” asked the patient. He looked at the straps and seemed amused. He looked at Dr. Braithwait.

  “Who’s the dingdong with the stethoscope?” he asked.

  This infuriated the aged Oriental.

  “Who this? Who that? What is this? What is that?” yelled the old man. “Questions you have now. You have many questions about this and that, but you do not question what you put into your blood stream.”

  Dr. Braithwait had had enough. He would be leaving soon, having told Dr. Smith that the patient was on the road to recovery. He would not have his office turned into a circus, even if it was hidden under piles of coal on a barge in a river.

  “You there,” he said sternly to the patient, “put your head back on the table.”

  “Where am I, Chiun?” the patient asked, ignoring Dr. Braithwait.

  “That is of great importance. That you ask. That you must know. You will die if you do not know that, Remo,” shrieked the Oriental called Chiun. There was triumph in his voice.

  “Your name is Remo, correct?” said Dr. Braithwait. “What’s your last name?”

  “What’s yours?” asked Remo.

  “I’m asking the questions. If you don’t answer them, you’ll stay strapped to the table.”

  With a little laugh, and a flip of the body as graceful as any ballerina’s, the patient burst the bonds and was on the floor.

  “Who is this guy, Chiun?”

  “Who is your stomach? Aha. That is the question.”

  The entranceway to the hidden hospital could be heard opening down the corridor. Purposeful strides. The door opening. Dr. Harold Smith, lemon face a mask of calm, entered.

  “I could hear you outside the barge,” said Dr. Smith. “Stop this racket.”

  He looked balefully at the patient.

  “Hmmm. Very good, Dr. Braithwait. I’d like to talk to you privately a moment, if you please.”

  “I have a few words to say to you, too, Dr. Smith.”

  “Yes. I’m sure you do. I will explain everything shortly. I’ll meet you at the end of the corridor. I’d like to speak to the patient first a moment, if you please.”

  Dr. Braithwait glowered at Smith.

  “I will be at the room at the end of the corridor, and I will give you exactly ten minutes to complete explaining to me what this is all about,” said Dr. Braithwait. “Ten minutes, Dr. Smith.”

  Braithwait had nothing to pack or he would have packed. From the room he had slept in, he removed a small plastic bag containing an instrument made of metal and black plastic. It looked like an electric drill, but it did not use current. He jammed a vial of strong nerve depressant into the instrument. It was an automatic needle used for inoculating many people when a normal syringe would prove too time-consuming. The dose Dr. Braithwait set was close to fatal. He was not concerned with curing the recipient this time. He cared about living. And if he had to kill to live, he had that right. He eased the automatic needle under his white coat. It would shoot enough depressant to immobilize the recipient. For the strange patient whose nervous system had already undergone a severe testing, it would prove fatal. So be it.

  Dr. Braithwait went to the small room at the end of the corridor and waited. Funny, they had supplied him this device on demand. He had merely called Smith, and within eight hours there was someone entering the barge with a package. Ah, such service. Perhaps there would even be the medical school he was promised. In which case the automatic needle would not have to be used. It was just a safety factor. In case.

  From his seat, Dr. Braithwait could see Smith pace down the corridor, heavy footed, with a faint trace of a stoop to his shoulders as though he bore a heavy weight, unseen by anyone but
the bearer. Dr. Smith entered the room and sat down. He avoided Dr. Braithwait’s eyes. Finally, Dr. Smith looked directly at him.

  “First, let me say, Dr. Braithwait. You were one of two choices. You met the other at Folcroft, another top internist. You have cancer of the stomach. He is in good health. You have maybe five years to live, depending on an operation. His probabilities of living are higher. So we chose you. That was the reason for the checkup at Folcroft. We’re going to kill you, and I had intended to kill whomever we chose. I am going to tell you why you must die. It is unfair, I know. But we are in desperate straits. We have been since our inception. If America was not hanging on the ropes, we wouldn’t have existed in the first place.”

  Dr. Braithwait eased his hand under his white medical jacket and clutched the handle of the needle. It was moist and clammy.

  “That’s quite a lot to digest, Dr. Smith. I mean hearing about your own death like that.”

  “I know. We could have killed you without your knowing it, with your walking out of the barge, with my apologies, with you holding plans to a new medical school, and then nothing. You would feel nothing. But I think your life has meant something, and I think your death should also.”

  Dr. Smith sighed, and began.

  “Quite a few years ago, it was decided by an American President—no longer living, by the way—that the country was headed for chaos, that crime was rising and would rise more rapidly. It was decided by this President that the United States Constitution did not work, that you could not have all those personal safeguards and maintain a semblance of civilization when so many, many people refused to obey the law. The American people is not that people. Right from the biggest corporations to the smallest hubcap thief, this nation is under assault and has been for a long time. That assault would have led, inexorably, to a police state.”

  “It could have led to more freedoms,” said Dr. Braithwait bitterly.

  “No. It is a fact of political science that chaos is invariably followed by dictatorship. The biggest freedoms exist during peaceful times. America as all of us knew it was dying. To combat this, the President could not himself violate the law, because that would prove the Constitution did not work. No. No existing enforcement agency could stem the tide under the Constitution. So the President did something else. He decided to give an edge to the survival of the nation. He decided that if the nation could not survive within the Constitution, he would create something outside the Constitution that made it work.”

  “That’s the same as violating the Constitution,” said Braithwait.

  “Correct,” said Dr. Smith. “But what if this organization did not exist?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What if the organization did not exist in the government budget? What if only three people knew of it, what it did? What if the many people who worked for it did not know for whom they worked or why? What if its budget was siphoned off from half a dozen federal agencies? What if it just did not exist at all?”

  “That’s impossible. You can’t have large numbers of people working for an organization and not knowing it,” said Braithwait.

  “That’s just where you’re wrong. I thought so, too, at the beginning, until I realized that the majority of the people working in America today only know whom they’re working for because they’re told.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Whom are you working for?”

  “Well, I have the hospital board, the director of the hospital, and I have a private practice.”

  “The latter is self-employment. At the hospital, are you sure you are working for the board, or do you know because you have been told and see those people around?”

  Dr. Braithwait ruminated on that statement. Dr. Smith continued.

  “Now. Our main job is seeing that prosecutors get information they ordinarily wouldn’t get. That crooked cops are exposed because someone just happens to talk, and there just happens to be public pressure. We even financed a novel about organized crime to expose it, to expose it to light. When a Mafia don set up a public organization to try to suppress the FBI, we generated friction within the ranks of organized crime. He was shot by his own kind. Only rarely do we ourselves kill. Then, because our secrecy is so necessary, only one man does the killing—one human being upon whom we rely. This lessens the chance of exposure. You see, for us to be exposed means a public admission by the government that the Constitution does not work. We cannot afford that. It would really mean that all our work is wasted.”

  “What happens when that man gets arrested and his fingerprints are checked out?”

  “Well, chances of anyone being able to contain him are slight, but he has no registered fingerprints.”

  “You lifted that from the FBI?”

  “No. We didn’t have to. You see, the man you helped save does not exist. He has been publicly electrocuted. His files were transferred automatically. Our Destroyer, as we call him, is the most vulnerable of all of us, since he operates outside the confines of Folcroft, exposing himself to danger. No, he is one of the three who knows, and we could not possibly afford for him to have an identity. What better tool than a dead man.”

  “His nervous system is unique.”

  “Probably just about like Chiun’s now. Chiun is his trainer.”

  “I see,” said Braithwait. “The Oriental knows, too.”

  “No. He does not know exactly who we are, and he does not care. He gets paid. And the money is delivered where he wants it. He does not care who we are. He is probably the truest professional alive today.”

  “And the third man?”

  “Each incumbent President.”

  “What happens when the President retires?”

  “He tells the incoming President, and then himself never speaks of it again. We ask them to forget, and—you’d be surprised—they do.”

  “What would prevent you from taking over the country?”

  “We have built-in stops. And besides, our only attacking force is one man, and while he is unusual, he is no match for an army. His best weapon is, as he tells me, secrecy. In open warfare he’d be doomed. Just look at the conflict with Japan during the Second World War. Certainly, man for man, the Japanese had more knowledge of the martial arts.”

  Dr. Braithwait gripped the handle of the injection device. He felt a cold cunning he had never known before, a staring at his grave and not worrying. Just acting.

  “You planned my murder right from the beginning when you phoned me, Dr. Smith, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that the way you protect a piece of paper? By violating it?”

  “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” said Dr. Smith.

  In one smooth motion Dr. Braithwait pulled the needle device from under his jacket. Dr. Smith did not move. Dr. Braithwait saw the patient coming down the corridor and he brought the automatic needle to Dr. Smith’s wrist. “Don’t move or you’re dead,” he said.

  Dr. Smith glanced briefly at the needle and then back at the patient as if the needle was of no import, as if Dr. Braithwait had placed a piece of peppermint against Dr. Smith’s hand. But, as ordered, the latter did not move his hand.

  “You’re arithmetic is off, too,” said Dr. Braithwait. “You said three men. What about the man who recruited your weapon?”

  “He was injured,” said Dr. Smith, “and exposed to a situation where he might talk. We had to kill him. All right, Remo. There’s an automatic needle probably containing some poison pressed against my right hand.”

  “Good,” said the patient smiling. “Now you know what it feels like.”

  “I’m going to kill him if you move any closer,” said Dr. Braithwait. His finger closed against the trigger of the needle.

  The patient smiled and shrugged.

  “That’s the business, sweetheart,” he said. And then Dr. Braithwait could have sworn he saw a hand flash out to the needle. He was not sure, however, and he d
id not have time to press the trigger, because there was the beginning of the hand flash and then darkness.

  Remo stood over the body watching its finger squeeze the trigger in obedience to the last command of the victim’s brain. The fluid shot out in short needlelike bursts, making a spray, then a whitish puddle on the floor.

  “Who was he?” said Remo.

  “The man who saved your life,” said Dr. Harold Smith.

  “You’re a real sonuvabitch, you know that, Smitty,” said Remo.

  “Do you think anyone else could run this organization?”

  “No one else would want to,” said Remo. “Guy saved my life, huh? Hmmm.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “We pay off nice, don’t we?”

  “We do what we have to. Now get out of that silly nightgown. You’re due in Chicago in a few hours. No labor leader ever wore a costume like that.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  REMO FOLLOWED THE DIRECTIONS. He would meet Abe Bludner, president of Local 529, New York City, at the Pump Room in Chicago for breakfast. Bludner would be a squat, bald man with a face like a pocked watermelon.

  Bludner, according to reports from Upstairs, had a stormy union record. He began driving at 15 with a forged license, became a shop steward at 23 when he singlehandedly fought off five company goons with a bailing hook, at 32 became the numbers bank for all barns (truck warehouses) in his local, and became president at 45 in an intralocal political battle that saw his predecessor lose by three votes in a case that wended its way through the courts for four years until the next election. Bludner won the second election handily and had been president of the local ever since. From time to time some of his drivers broke their arms when they accidentally fell into crowbars. Usually these crowbars were attached to Abe Bludner. From time to time trucking outfits would damage themselves when colliding with a crowbar. That is, the president or the treasurer or the vice president in charge of the terminal operations would find himself with very uncomfortable fractures. More often than not, the employer was the one who initiated the violence by hiring gangsters. Gangsters always met crowbars. After a while gangsters stopped coming.