The Head Men td-31 Read online

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  yourself aflame as to continue on your foolish course. For if I told you the location of this safest place, you would not have a safe place but a place at the mercy of my torturers. Do you trust them with your life? After you have trusted my life to them?

  "Lo, even now I cannot tell you because you are not alone. Guards upon guards are around you. You are not worthy of this safe place. I will take it to my grave with me."

  And the Master of Sinanju was ordered taken from the great palace of the shogun to a small house by the sea where he was given nourishment and his wounds nursed. When he was well, he received a visitor alone just before sunrise. It was the shogun.

  "Now, Master, you may tell me. I am worthy of it."

  And The Fly demanded a great price for the location of this safest place for if he gave it away it would not be valued. For when man sets a price on something, he really sets his own value of it.

  And the price was paid although the Master of Sinanju knew he could never claim it for the price was in land which led the shogun to believe The Fly intended to stay and live. But The Fly knew that once the shogun thought he had found the safest place, the Master would be killed so the shogun need fear no one's betrayal.

  So the Master told the shogun to come to the outskirts of the sacred city of Osaka, three days hence, and from there they could walk in one night. The master named a spot for the meeting and said the shogun must come alone.

  But of course the shogun did not. At a short distance were three faithful lords all with weap-

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  ons. But none who would succeed the shogun if he died. Thus he could trust them more.

  It was enough that the shogun was within arm's length. And the Master brought him to a little hill, and he said:

  "Here it is. The place I spoke of." And the shogun replied: "I see nothing." "You are not supposed to," said the Master of Sinanju. "For if you saw something, so would others. That is why this is so safe. Take my sword. Dig."

  "I am shogun. I do not dig." "You cannot find it without digging. It is most spacious. But the entrance is sealed, can't you see. And I am still too weak from the cuts and burns of your torturers."

  So the shogun dug with the Master's sword and he dug most of the night until there was a hole as high as his head. And when it was this high, the Master, who was not all that injured because there is a way to allow your body to be tortured so that things appear more painful and more harmful than they really are, lifted a great rock above his head. And he whispered:

  "Shogun, you are now in the only safe place that has ever been in the world. The grave." And with that, the Master brought the rock crushing down on the shogun's head.

  And he called to the three following lords who were now matched out in the open against a Master of Sinanju and he slew them, all did The Fly slay, one, two and three. And he took their heads and put them on poles and fled the land.

  And when the lord who had bought the death of the shogun became himself shogun, he sent much tribute to Sinanju. Rice did he send and

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  fish in great plentitude, and jewels and gold and swords. For during his reign, he used The Fly much and was considered the finest ruler Japan ever had.

  This was how Remo had heard the story, and when he had looked up the new shogun's name, he had seen that the man had been one of Japan's bloodiest leaders, which made sense for anyone employing Sinanju so regularly.

  The moral of the story was that if you can't get to someone where he's at, get him to where you can get at him.

  Remo looked down into the shattered remains of the foundation.

  "Explosives in the foundation itself, Chiun," he said. He jumped into the hole. He crumbled pieces of foundation in his hand.

  "So whoever got this guy out here into this place probably acted like The Fly way back when. But why bother to get that guy here at all ?"

  "Who knows how whites think?" asked Chiun.

  "I don't know, Little Father," Remo said. He was worried. And he became more worried when he found out, by checking back in Minneapolis, who had put Ernest Walgreen, businessman, into that Sun Valley house. It was a security agency.

  "It doesn't make sense, Chiun. Now we know whoever put Walgreen here killed him. But why a security agency he hired to protect him?"

  "You are jumping to conclusions," Chiun said. "Perhaps the security agency was tricked into bringing this Walgreen to Sun Valley. Would the story of The Fly have been any different if he did not go with the shogun himself to have him dig the hole, but had tricked someone else into doing

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  it? The lesson would be the same, the result the same. The shogun dead."

  "I guess you're right," Remo said, strolling the neat lawns of the Minneapolis suburb where Walgreen had lived. "But I'm scared for the President. How are they going to get him into a hole? And who are they? Was there anything else Smitty told you?"

  "Who remembers what liars say?" Chiun asked.

  "Smitty isn't a liar. That's the one thing he's not."

  "Not only is he a liar but a foolish one. He promised that I was in charge and before the emperor, your President, he withdrew that promise and shamed me."

  "What did he say? Come on. What's the connection? What's the connection between the death of this Walgreen here and an attempt on the President's life?"

  "It is quite obvious," said Chiun with a lofty smile. "What they both have in common is simple."

  "What's that?"

  "They are both white."

  "Thanks for the big help, Chiun."

  Remo tried to think as he gazed along the driveway that curled behind Walgreen's house, effectively opening it up to an attack from any side. The furniture inside the house was covered. There was a f or-sale sign on the lawn, which was four days past being neatly cut. It was a home where Walgreen had lived the kind of life Remo could never live.

  Remo could touch this house with his hands and yet he could never have it. He envied Wai-

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  green what Walgreen had had when he was alive. Killers could never get Remo that way but Remo could never have this house, the family that had lived here, the life they had shared.

  Across the street, a woman with very yellow hair looked at Remo and Chiun too often to be disinterested. Remo watched her leave her car..

  She walked with a smooth voluptuous grace, accustomed to assaulting male eyes with her very appeal. A light blue silk dress clung over full breasts. Her lips were pulpy and glistened. She smiled as if she could stampede a football team with a wave of her hand.

  "That's the Walgreen house," she said. "I couldn't help noticing you examining it rather closely. I am an investigator for the House Committee on Assassination Conspiracies and Attempts. Here's my identification. Would you mind telling me what you're doing here?"

  Her hand produced a small leather foldover wallet. Inside the wallet was her photograph, looking quite somber and hardly sexy at all, and the Congressional seal on the identification. Pressed underneath the identification was a folded piece of paper which Remo removed.

  "You're not supposed to see that," she snapped. "That's important Congressional correspondence. It's a privileged communication. It's a Congressional communication."

  Remo unfolded the paper that had been wedged underneath the identification. It was on the stationery of Rep. Orval Creel, chairman of the House Committee on Assassination Conspiracies and Attempts, in parentheses (CACA). The note read:

  My place or yours?

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  It was signed: Poopsie.

  "What are you investigating?" asked Remo.

  "I'll ask the questions," she said, snatching back the folded piece of paper. Her name, according to her identification was Viola Poombs. "Now what are you doing here?" she asked, reading from a card that told her to ask that.

  "Planning to murder the Supreme Court, Congress, and all the members of the Executive Branch making more than $35,000 a year," Remo said.

 
"Do you have a pencil?" asked-Miss Poombs.

  "Why?" asked Remo.

  "So I can write down your answers. How do you spell planning."

  "What did you do before you became a Congressional investigator?" asked Remo.

  "I was a model in a finger-painting parlor," said Miss Poombs. Her billowing pinkish cleavage rose proudly and smelled moist in the spring heat. "But then Representative Creel made me an investigator. The problem for me is I don't know the difference yet between a murder and an assassination."

  "In this degenerate country, child, you wouldn't," Chiun said. "But you will know. I have decided to teach you. Of all your kind, you will understand the difference best of all. Your committee will have wisdom and you, among your kind, shall be venerated as wise."

  "My kind? What kind is my kind?" asked Miss Poombs.

  "The billowy breasted white person," said Chiun, as if he were describing a bird he had seen on a winter meadow walk.

  "That's cute," said Viola.

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  "Come on, Chiun, I'm working," Remo said. "You're not going to teach anybody anything."

  "You're not cute," said Viola. "You're nasty." She glared at Remo and added, "I always wanted to be loved for my mind."

  Remo looked at her chest. "Both of them?"

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  CHAPTER FIVE

  Viola Poombs was all excited. She was going to find out who killed everybody. And the nice little Oriental man, why he was telling her so many things, nobody ever knew so many things about assassination, why Poopsie and his committee would just love to know everything. Everything! He might even run for senator and governor and then there would be better jobs than just being an investigator, she might even get to be vice governor or whatever one gets to be when they are close to their governor.

  But first she had to do some things.

  "With your clothes on ?" asked the nasty white man called Remo.

  "I wasn't going to take them off. I never take off my clothes in public. I'm not an exhibitionist. I am an employee of the federal government of the United States of America and I would take off my clothes only upon a direct order from a duly elected representative of the American people."

  And that showed him. All right, maybe he knew more about killings and things but she had her rights too. And she was cooperating enough.

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  She had called the Secret Service and made an appointment with the assistant director, and he said he would see her. And they all went to Washington, and they were all going to see this man and they would ask questions. Important questions. Viola Poombs knew they were important because she was told she wouldn't understand them. That could mean only one of two things: either they didn't want to tell her or she really wouldn't understand them. Most things she didn't understand. What she did know was that you asked for things when men were all excited and that was the best time. Afterwards, when they were comfortable and released, that was the worst time.

  It was not much that Viola understood but that simplicity had earned her, at twenty-four, the beginning of a $78,000 pension fund, 3,000 shares of Dodge-Phillips, $8,325.42 in a passbook account, and at least two years at $28,300 a year from the American taxpayers. She rightly understood that her good years were between now and thirty. Between now and then she would have to learn to do something with her mind. Unless she got married. But marriage was not that easy nowadays, especially considering that she looked for someone with more financial solvency than she had.

  The thing she had to do before any of them stepped into the office of the assistant director of the Secret Service was to call the chairman of the committee she worked for.

  "Hello, Poopsie," she said when Congressman Creel's secretary finally got her through. The secretary had been trying to learn to work the phone buttons for months now, but every time

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  she had it almost down pat, she would have to take time off to prepare for another contest. Next year, she hoped to be Miss Walpole, Indiana.

  "I'm in Washington," said Viola.

  "You're not supposed to be in Washington. We're supposed to meet this weekend in Minneapolis. Remember the tip? That the killing of that Walgreen is somehow connected with presidential assassinations? That's why I sent you out there."

  "I'm investigating. And I'm going to make you famous. You're going to know everything there is about assassinations."

  "The only thing I have to know is how to get more money for my committee."

  "There's money in assassinations?" asked Viola.

  "Fortunes. Don't you look at the bookstands and the movies and the TV shows?"

  "How much money?" asked Viola Poombs.

  "Never mind," snapped Congressman Creel. "Get back to Minneapolis and watch that house. Or don't watch it. But get back there for when we arrive."

  "How much money?" asked Viola, who in subjects like these refused to be intimidated.

  "I don't know. Some guy just got $300,000 from a publisher for Cry Mercy. It's about how America's rotten greed caused all these assassinations, dear."

  "You said three hundred thousand dollars?" repeated Viola slowly.

  "Yeah. Now get back to Minneapolis, dear."

  "Paperback or hardcover?" asked Viola. "Who kept the foreign rights? What about the movie

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  share? Did anyone mention television spinoffs? Book clubs? Was there book club money?"

  "I don't know. Why is it you become so damned technical when it comes to the almighty dollar? You're a greedy person, Viola. Viola? Viola? Are you there?"

  Viola Poombs heard her name coming from the telephone earpiece as she hung up.

  She left the booth in the Treasury building and went right up to the cute little old Oriental and gave him a big kiss on his adorable cheeks.

  "Do not touch," said Chiun. "If you want to touch, touch him." He pointed to Remo. "He likes it."

  "Are you ready, Miss Poombs?" asked Remo with a bored sigh.

  "Ready," said Viola.

  "The first thing you must remember," said Chiun as they all walked to the elevator, "is that assassinations have gotten a bad name in this country because of amateurism. Amateurism, free wanton murder without payment, is a curse to any land. I am telling you this so you will get it all right for your committee and everyone will know the truth, because I think I am going to be blamed if something goes wrong. And it will, because I am not in charge."

  "Chiun," said Remo, "knock it off."

  The assistant director of the Secret Service directed the President's safety. He never met anyone in his office because his office had charts of men in charge of assignments, White House protection, traveling protection and, worst of all, crowd control and protection.

  The assistant director was forty-two years old and looked sixty. He had white hair, deep lines

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  around his mouth and eyes, and deep dark watermelon wedges under his eyes, that always seemed to be staring out at some horror.

  He sipped Alka Seltzer as he talked, washing down specially pressed bars of Maalox. The Maalox soothed his stomach. It took the great amount of acid his body poured into his intestines and neutralized it. His entire oral function was to combat these massive amounts of stomach acid his body produced during tension. While others sometimes got up in the middle of the night to urinate, he would wake up reaching for his Maalox. He dreamed in code.

  When he first took over the job of protecting the President of the United States, he reported to the doctor that he was having a nervous breakdown. The doctor told him he was doing better emotionally and physically than his predecessors had. For his job there were new standards for nervous breakdowns.

  "New standards?" he asked. "What are they?"

  "When you start peeling off pieces of your cheeks with a letter opener, then we begin to consider nervous breakdown. And we're not talking just outer layer either. A good gash, right down to bone. Last fellow ground down his teeth till they hit stubs."

  So when the luscio
us blonde and the Oriental and the incredibly-relaxed American in black tee shirt and gray pants and a loose manner of lounging in a chair asked the key question, the morning's Maalox came up all over the conference table.

  "I take it," said Remo, "that there is a connection between the death of the Minneapolis

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  businessman by explosion in Sun Valley and the safety of the President of the United States."

  The Secret Service man nodded, wiping his lips with a handkerchief before the stomach bile ate through them to his gums. He quaffed a long gulp of Alka Seltzer and swallowed a Maalox bar whole. His lower intestines felt as if they were being crisp fried in Wesson oil. Much better, he thought.

  "Direct connection. And we're worried. The way Walgreen was killed leads us to believe that we're facing a new level of assassin, probably the best there is."

  "No. We are on your side,'' Chiun said.

  "What?" asked the assistant director.

  "Nothing," said Remo. "Ignore him."

  "Are you sure you're from the House CACA committee ?"

  Viola Poombs showed her card again. The Secret Service man nodded in rhythm with his twitch.

  "AH right. Direct connection. Absolutely direct. If it weren't for the President of the United States, Ernest Walgreen and his wife would be alive today. How's that for direct?"

  "Explain," said Remo.

  "Explain," said Viola, because it sounded like the official thing to say.

  "Don't bother," said Chiun. "It is obvious."

  "How do you know?" demanded the Secret Service man.

  "Because it is only done every other century," said Chiun disdainfully. And in Korean, he explained to Remo that it was a variation of The Hole. When one wanted tribute from an emperor not to kill him, one chose someone very well pro-

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  tected and killed him. This was not done by the House of Sinanju, because basically it involved collecting moneys for not doing work, and that cost the body its skills. To get paid to do nothing produced weakness and weakness produced death. Remo nodded. He understood more and more Korean nowadays, but only the northern dialect of Sinanju.

  "What did he say? What did he say?" asked the assistant director.