Brain Drain Read online

  “The pyramids.”

  “Look at them in decay. And look at the Egyptians. Look too at the fragment of a great temple, the Wailing Wall of the Jews. And look at the new Israelis. No, man renews himself, and his things do not. The thing understood. He knew that the House of Sinanju passed on from one master to another master and would be here strong and new and alive when his tinkerings had begun to rust. It is he who must destroy us now, not we who must destroy him.”

  “Why didn’t he take me in the hospital? When he was disguised as a nurse and could have had the jump on me?”

  “He probably thought you were conscious. Which proves that even gadgets can make mistakes. Also he may fear what one of us will do if the other is killed. He seems to want to dispatch us both at once. Hence the bomb in Smith’s room.”

  “That’s another problem. Smitty.”

  “There are other emperors in the world.”

  “I happen to have loyalty to this one.”

  “The House of Sinanju is famous for its loyalty. Loyalty is one thing, but stupidity another. We are unique. Emperors are many. We owe many loyalties and the first is to Sinanju, although this you have not yet understood, and you should, of all people, because someday you will be the Master of Sinanju.”

  “We’ve got to do something for Smitty,” Remo insisted.

  “If we had gone to Persia, Smith would be uninjured. For any emperor, the best thing one can do is serve him in his capacity and no more.”

  “I don’t buy that. Even though he’s not in his office playing with his computer, he’s still the boss. Mine and yours.”

  “Yours perhaps,” said Chiun. “Not mine. You may be an employee but I am an independent contractor.” He raised a hand. “But we will save Smith.”

  “How?”

  “You saw the nurse, the human nurse, who walked into his room without offsetting the bomb?”

  “Setting off. Yes, I saw her.”

  “The bomb is for us. For you and me. We will protect Smith by staying away from him and not offsetting the bomb.”

  “Setting off,” said Remo, but Chiun was not listening. He had turned back to the television set and Remo had to sit through the current day’s As the Planet Revolves and The Wrought and the Rampant before he could get an answer to another nagging problem.

  “What trap do you think Gordons will use against us?” Remo said.

  “The trap we tell him to,” said Chiun and would talk no more of the subject because to continue to pour water over a wet stone did not make it any wetter.

  In the afternoon, Remo phoned Smith from a pay phone in a nearby roadhouse.

  The jukebox was playing something that sounded like a teenager’s whine set to drums. Several motorcyclists in black jackets, with hair that looked as if it had been combed with tree roots from a mangrove swamp, drank beer and threatened people. The bartender attempted to preserve his manhood by scrupulously not noticing. If he were aware, he would have to do something about it. He didn’t want to try.

  Remo got Smith and found out he was feeling better, “considering.”

  “They’re taking the bandages off the left eye by the end of the week, and I’ve stabilized. They say I should be able to try to walk next week.”

  “Don’t,” said Remo.

  “I know that,” said Smith. “Do you have any good leads? You know I can’t get anything going from a hospital bed with open lines. I’m even afraid to install secure lines. Who knows what will set the thing off?”

  “Yeah,” said Remo.

  “Leads?” asked Smith again.

  “Yeah. We’re… uh, moving on a plan.”

  “Good,” said Smith. “If it weren’t for you, I’d probably have given up.”

  “Hang in there, Smitty,” said Remo, feeling very small.

  “Same to you, Remo.”

  Remo hung up and ordered a glass of spring water from the bartender. A motorcyclist with ape–hairy arms and an old German helmet painted with a swastika offered Remo something stronger.

  “I don’t drink,” Remo said. “Drink, smoke, eat meat or entertain ambivalent or hostile thoughts.”

  “What do you do, fag–o?” said the cyclist, laughing. He turned to his friends, who laughed with him. They had a live one. The back of the jacket said in pink and white paint: “Rat Skulls.”

  “I’m a hand surgeon,” said Remo.

  “Yeah? What’s a hand surgeon?”

  “I improve faces with my hand.”

  “Yeah? Improve mine, fag–o, heh, heh.”

  “Oh, thank you for the invitation,” said Remo, leaving the bar to stand close to the table with the rest of the Rat Skulls.

  “Now, gentlemen, I will show you how I can catch a nose in my hands,” said Remo.

  “That’s a shitty kid’s trick,” said one of the Rat Skulls. “You pass your hand over a kid’s face and stick your thumb between your fingers and say, hey, look kid, I got your nose.”

  “Let’s let him do it,” said the Rat Skull, lumbering over from the bar. “Go ahead. Do it, fag–o, and then I’ll show you my chain surgery.” He looked down at Remo and clanked a large towing chain.

  The others played with their beer and laughed.

  “C’mon, fellas,” said the bartender.

  “You say something?” asked the Rat Skull with the chain.

  “I’m saying, only, you know, this is a bar, and… ”

  “He started it,” said the Rat Skull with the chain, nodding to Remo.

  “Well, sure, okay,” said the bartender. “I know you guys have to protect yourselves.”

  “Yeah,” said the Rat Skulls in unison.

  “Are you ready?” Remo asked pleasantly.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Ready,” said the Rat Skulls.

  “No vomitty, vomitty,” said Remo. “It can be bloody.”

  “We don’t upchuck,” said a Rat Skull.

  “Good. Because there’s a penalty if you get sick. You lose your nose, too.”

  “Go ahead,” said the Rat Skull with the chain, and he chuckled.

  “Here comes the handsy wandsy,” said Remo, fluttering his fingers. The hand started slow, like the backswing of a golf club, but when it came down it looked as if it were yanked on the end of a whip.

  Two fingers separated and Remo’s hand closed on the face, and the two fingers joined together again, and there was a snap as if the whip had been cracked. The Rat Skull with the chain felt a sharp tug as if a baby tooth had been pulled. From the middle of his face. His breathing was suddenly funny also. Like he was drawing breath directly into his head. But it was moister than breath. He stood there dumbly with a big red splash in the middle of his face and two holes in the middle of the red splash and it stung.

  “Got your nosey wosey,” said Remo coyly and he showed the sitting Rat Skulls his right hand. Protruding from two fingers might have been a thumb. If thumbs had nostrils.

  Remo opened his hand and dropped the lump of flesh into a Rat Skull’s beer which turned a pinkish gold.

  “No uppy chuck,” said Remo.

  “Oh, jeez,” said the Rat Skull with a nose in his beer. And one might have thought they would take this harshly and not in the spirit of fun and games. But Remo prevailed upon them all. They certainly wanted no hostilities. Especially after Remo informed them he was also a genital surgeon.

  They all agreed it was only fun and games.

  “Drink your beer,” said Remo, and the Rat Skull with the pink beer passed out.

  On the short drive back to the motel in the rented car, Remo listened to a radio panel discussion on prison reform. One woman complained about the violence of the law.

  “Violence by the law only encourages more disorders,” she said. She did not mention that, as the police used their guns less and less, more and more people stayed prisoners in their homes from fear of those outside the law who did use violence. Remo thought of the Rat Skulls back at the roadhouse and how, if he could not have defended himself extraordinarily well, he m
ight have been just another victim.

  It did not surprise Remo to hear that the woman lived in a very expensive high rise apartment in Chicago. She was being magnanimous with the lives of those people who could not afford doormen.

  The law was becoming less efficient in fighting street crime, the punishments were becoming lighter, and therefore street crime rose. It was not complicated. Only the solutions were complicated. Like this woman on the radio who thought that all the government had to do was to transform the nature of the human animal. To do that, she called for abolishing prisons.

  “They don’t cure anybody anyway. The criminal comes out more hardened than before.” If anybody had any further ideas on the subject, she would be interested in hearing them. They could write her.

  At her summer place on the outskirts of Manitoba.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WANDA REIDEL HAD THE PACKAGE, so why was Summit Studios acting like assholes? She had an Academy Award director, an Academy Award writer, and the one actor who could make it all go, and did Summit want to pass up another Godfather? Another Sting? Was that the kind of business Summit was in, because if it was in that kind of business, she wasn’t forgetting that they had some very important shareholders who were already miffed about the last deal they blew, and crowns did not rest easily on the heads of studio chiefs.

  “Threatening? Who’s threatening?” said Wanda. Her secretary leaned lovingly over her puffy pale body with the red lips, rearranging the gray–blonde hair that Wanda’s hairdresser assured her was “Wanda.”

  “It’s you, precious loved one,” he had said. The hair looked like Hollywood–stucco. Wanda Reidel or Ms. Reidel or “the Octopussy,” as she was known in Hollywood, covered herself in original print muu–muus and a treasury of jewels, which gave the impression of a geodesic dome draped in Appalachian neon and spangled with shiny green–and–white rocks. These rocks looked very much like costume jewelry popular in the Bronx where Wanda was raised.

  When the Octopussy had her first million–dollar month, she had a Rome jeweler construct the jewelry to her specifications. Two of his artisans quit. But that was more than made up for by his new clients. If you wanted to be in with Wanda, you bought your jewels at her favorite store in Rome.

  One actress even ordered a $20,000 brooch, with this instruction: “Make it Wanda–style schlock.”

  In Hollywood, it was called “Wandaful Jewelry.” The artisans who had crafted universal elegance for the Windsors, Rothschilds and Krupps, using the genius of Cellini, now followed closely what was selling in Woolworth’s off the Grand Concourse on Fordham Road.

  “I’m not threatening,” said Wanda. “I don’t threaten. I make money magic. If your shareholders get on your ass because you don’t make money for them, it’s not my fault.”

  “Wanda, darling,” said Del Stacy, who also had a marine nickname in Hollywood—the Crustacean—you could get away with this at the beginning of your career a long time ago, but not now.”

  “What’s a long time ago?” Wanda asked.

  “Last Thursday. You’re slipping, precious.”

  “Hah,” said Wanda, with a bubbly little chuckle.

  “Kiss, kiss.” But when she put down the phone, the sunshine left her face for a dark, brooding storm.

  “Get the fuck out of here, cunt,” she said to her secretary.

  “Yes, precious,” said the secretary.

  When the secretary had backed out in the bowing posture that the Octopussy required, Wanda drummed her green fingernails with the inset cameos of the Taj Mahal, onto the mother of pearl desktop. A former studio vice president had once suggested that the desktop looked like Formica in a wetback kitchen. He was now selling tractor supplies in Burbank.

  She glanced out her pink–tinted windows at Sunset Boulevard. The little bastard at Summit was right. She was slipping. Not a great big slip, but what more did you need to become Lash Larue or Mack Sennett in a town where breakfast was yesterday?

  The Summit deal had to go through. It was really a very good deal. A perfect package. Everyone would make money. An Academy Award director, an Academy Award writer, and the one actor who could make it all go.

  Unfortunately the writer was under contract to another agent, and the director wasn’t talking to her. A peculiar sort of sickie who nurtured unreasonable grudges, he, childlike, had become fixated with an impossible promise and, childlike, wouldn’t let go of it or even slightly forget that he didn’t get the toy that was precisely promised. Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando. The name got stuck in his mouth like a broken record. Marlon Brando.

  He couldn’t understand Brando was booked. Couldn’t, in any mature manner, see that one actor was impossible and therefore, like a grownup, you used what was possible. Brando was booked, so you used Biff Ballon.

  “What’s the difference?” Wanda had asked. “Biff can play the grandfather. You dye his beautiful blond hair. You cover up his beautiful muscles with padding. Let me tell you, it would be easier to get Biff made up for the grandfather part than it would be to get Marlon physically in shape for Racket Lover. I’d like to see Marlon swing from a burning building with a Tommy gun in one hand and a knife in his teeth without messing his hair.”

  But juvenile obstinacy was juvenile obstinacy. So the director wouldn’t talk to her, and the writer didn’t talk to anybody unless his own agent said so.

  So when Wanda Reidel had told Summit Pictures that she had the writer and the director and the actor, she was not quite accurate. She had the actor. Biff Ballon.

  She needed something. She needed the big deal. That crustacean bastard was joking and not joking when he said she was through. She needed that deal, and she needed it by cocktail hour, or supper at the latest, or she would be washed up and tomorrow’s breakfast would see her retired.

  “Danish,” she screamed. “I want a Danish.”

  The secretary scurried in.

  “Strawberry Danish,” yelled Wanda Reidel.

  “But loved one, you know how angry you’ll be after you’ve eaten.”

  “Strawberry Danish. I won’t be angry. Give it to me.”

  “But you know after you’ve eaten it, you’ll hate the world.”

  “I already hate the world. I’ll love the world with a Danish.”

  “But loved one, your diet.”

  “I want the Strawberry Danish.” The voice of the Octopussy was heard in the office like the atmosphere of a cold, haunting, unused dark room that one not only did not enter but pretended did not exist. To this voice, secretaries did not argue.

  “Six Strawberry Danish,” corrected Wanda Reidel and six arrived soon after, carried by a white–coated counterboy with a nameplate.

  “Heublein,” said the secretary to the boy, reading his nameplate. “Just leave the Danish here.”

  “This is for the great Wanda Reidel, correct?” the boy asked.

  “Yes, yes, and she doesn’t want to be disturbed,” said the secretary.

  “I just wanted to see her. I have difficulty telling people from their pictures. People look different from their pictures.”

  “Just leave the Danish,’’ said the secretary, but the delivery boy was already through the next door in Wanda Reidel’s office.

  “Ms. Reidel,” said the delivery boy, “I can do wonders for you. You have access to more creativity than anyone else. I have read that in many places. You would be surprised at what I can do for you.”

  “That’s great,” said Wanda. “This is such Hollywood. Del Stacey of Summit who has the money I need won’t spring it, and I get the backing of a luncheonette employee.”

  “Leave, please,” said the secretary, bustling into the room. “Ms. Reidel hates the little people.”

  “I don’t hate. I don’t hate. Give me the Danish.”

  “Take only one,” said the secretary.

  But the delivery boy somehow moved the package so quickly that it was on Wanda’s desk, and away from the secretary’s grabbing hands li
ke a fast ball with a hop.

  Ms. Reidel went through the first one in two bites and was into the second before the secretary could get to the white bag spotted with grease and sugar. But Wanda slapped her hand away and was gulping and biting and fending off intrusions. When five Danish were in her stomach and the sixth was big chunks struggling toward her epiglottis, Wanda yelled at her secretary.

  “Why did you let me eat these? What the hell is the matter with you?”

  The secretary blinked through the hail of semi–chewed Danish that now came at her face along with Ms. Reidel’s anger.

  “Cunt. Get out of here,” yelled Wanda. She futilely threw the white paper bag at her secretary’s head. It landed just on the other side of the mother of pearl desk on the turquoise shag rug.

  The secretary backed out.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to solve your problem if you solve mine,” said the delivery boy.

  “A delivery boy solving my problems.”

  “I’m not just a delivery boy.”

  “I know. You’re going to be a big producer.”

  “No. All I want is to survive.”

  “That’s what we all want. Why should you survive? What makes you special? Who the hell are you?”

  The delivery boy gave a little bow similar to the one he had seen the secretary make when she left the room. Ms. Reidel did not see his hand come down like a pendulum on a pivot. But she did see a corner of her mother of pearl desk crack off evenly, as though sheared.

  “You break things, so what? How does that make you any different from furniture movers?”

  The delivery boy bowed again, and then, reaching down, picked up the sheared corner of the desk. She saw the orange glow, smelled something like plastic burning, and could have sworn later that those weren’t hands on his wrists.

  It probably took less than a minute, although at the time it seemed longer. But when the delivery boy backed away from the desktop, she saw a whole, clear, unshattered desk, as flawless as if it had never been cracked.

  “How did you do that?”

  “The main problem is determining what substance you are dealing with and its comparative fusion rations at variable temperatures, below the combustion level.”