Balance Of Power td-44 Read online

  "Whitey. want to kill you, but we not gonna let him. You know why?" The hall was tomb-silent "Because we gonna kill him, dat's why. We gonna end this blue-eyed tyranny over our lives.

  "What we gonna do?" he asked. After a dramatic pause, he answered himself in a stage whisper. "We gonna kill, kill, kill." And then to the audience: "What we gonna do?"

  Men stood to scream, released at last from the torture of their hot wooden seats. Women clapped their hands joyously. They all screamed, "Kill, kill, kill!"

  "What ya gonna do?" the speaker asked again.

  "Kill, kill, kill!"

  "Say it again, children!"

  "Kill, kill, kill!"

  "Let Whitey hear you tell it."

  "Kill, kill, kill!"

  "Nice to see a community working together," Barney said to the two men at his sides. He reached for his hip flask, forgetting that his hands were cuffed together. As he was entangling himself in the folds of his burnoose, a figure veiled thickly in white tulle passed by, leaving a scent of lilacs in her wake. The Peaches of Mecca followed her, pressing Barney between them.

  She led them through another maze, up a concrete stairway, down a long hall, through an empty room, and up another staircase. The stairs ended at

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  yet another stairwell, this one a spiral of precision-made structural steel.

  "You may wait here, gentlemen," the woman said, her voice dripping with plantation charm. The two Peaches nodded impassively. One of them handed her the key to Barney's handcuffs.

  He followed her into an apartment of sparkling white, identical to her -house in every detail except for a world map on a wall behind a white desk. There she removed her voluminous veil and white cloak. As Barney watched, she pulled off her opera-length white gloves. She untied a white rope belt around her waist. The dress she wore draped over one of her creamy shoulders and cascaded in Grecian folds to the floor, clinging to her curves all the way down. Smiling into Barney's hungry eyes, she pulled at the clasp over her shoulder with her manicured nails and let the dress fall to Her feet.

  She was naked beneath. Slowly, she stretched her arms over her head so that her breasts lifted beguilingly. Then she brought her hands down over the length of her body, caressing herself, her hips undulating, as Barney looked on, his hands chained together. It was a strangely familiar motion. Had he seen it before?

  "I'm going to free your bonds now, Mr. Daniels," she purred.

  "Allah be praised," Barney said. He was sweating hard in his woolen monk's robe.

  She pressed one of her breasts into Barney's mouth as she unlocked the handcuffs. He did not take his lips from her as his hands searched out and found the treasure they were looking for. Then he moved his mouth away from her shiny wet nipple and wrapped it over the opening of the hip flask he

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  had raised and was now emptying into his gullet. "Great stuff," he said appreciatively.

  Gloria pulled him over to the bed and sated herself on him. As she came, screaming, Barney's hand fumbled over the surface of the nightstand for the bottle of tequila she had waiting for him. He took a swig, careful not to knock the bottle on Gloria's still thrashing head.

  "That was great," she said dreamily.

  "Best tequila I've ever had," Barney said.

  "You don't care for me at all, do you?" Her voice grew suddenly cold.

  Barney shrugged. "As much as I care for anything else," he said.

  It was the truth. He would sit on Gloria's white Disneyland bed and fake love with her and let her dictate the part he would play in her little drama, because he had no other part to play. Barney's part had been left in Puerta del Rey a lifetime or two ago, and what he had now was his tequila, and nothing more.

  He had gotten into this on a drunken whim and now he was a prisoner as sure as if he were in jail. It was a plush prison, to be sure, but a prison nonetheless, and Barney knew the sentence would be death, either from Gloria X and her trained seals or from the two men who had tried to help him.

  He didn't want help. He didn't care if his death came soon or late. It was already long overdue. He had already been dead for a long, long time.

  So why was he thinking about Puerta del Rey again? There was no answer to that most elementary question, the only question he ever asked: What happened? What happened? He forced his mind away from it. He made himself concentrate on

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  the satin cushions around him on the bed, and on the tequila, and the tequila and the tequila.

  And before the bottle was empty, the world was good and fine with Bernard C. Daniels.

  Then he smelled the lilac perfume. "Wake up," Gloria said, shaking him. "It's night."

  "Hell of a time to wake up."

  "It's time."

  "Time for what?"

  "For killing Calder Raisin." She smiled, her lips stretched tight across her teeth. Blurred through Barney's drunken vision, her face appeared to him like a grinning death's head skull through a misty fog. "I had you moved here when I heard you'd made contact with your CIA friends."

  "Don't have friends in the CIA," he said, his mouth still fuzzy.

  "Those two on the corner. My men saw you. But now they don't know where you are, so they won't be able to help you, poor baby. You're going to have to kill poor Calder all by yourself." She patted his cheek. "Get up now. You have an appointment with Mr. Raisin at the Battery."

  "What if I don't kill him?" Barney asked.

  "Then you don't get the thousand dollars, darling," she said sweetly. "And you lose your life very painfully in the process. You know what 'painfully' means, don't you? Do you remember the pain, Mr. Daniels, or has the scar on your stomach healed completely?"

  He leaped at her. "What do you know?" he demanded. "Tell me!" But her bodyguards were in the room, and pulled him away from the woman as she shrieked laughter as cold and shrill as the wail of a banshee.

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  There were no television cameras on the pier, as the two black reporters dressed in neat black suits had promised Calder Riaisin back at the hospital. Nor were there any microphones on the creaking boards of the deserted place where a group of demonstrators was supposed to be waiting for him.

  As soon as the limousine filled with overly friendly reporters deposited Raisin at the pier and sped away into the darkness, he knew the black reporters were fakes and he had been brought to this isolated spot to be killed.

  Calder Raisin shook his head. He had been warned.

  A man was waiting for him, sitting on the planks, his back resting against a barnacle-encrusted dock support.

  Only one man, thought Calder Raisin. But then it would only take one man to kill him. It was his own fault, Raisin reprimanded himself, for not listening to the young white man at the hospital rally. Well, there wasn't much he could do now. He would just try to get it over with as fast as he could.

  "What you want?" Raisin asked, turning up the collar of his bathrobe to protect himself from the wind. He shifted his weight from one hospital slipper to another to fend off the chilly wind. His hands were stuffed deep inside the pockets of the robe from which, at the bottom, a half-inch of hospital gown protruded.

  "I said, what you want," Raisin repeated. "Look, you gonna kill me or what?"

  Barney looked up, first at Raisin, and then off over the glistening black water.

  "See here. I didn't come all this way to stare at New York Harbor with you. Now, you gonna 'sassinate me, or I going to walk away?"

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  Barney looked out over the water. It reminded him of a giant inkwell. A place where all the words of his life could be obliterated in an instant. Words like honor. Decency. Love. Words he had lived by once, when he had had a reason for living. One jump, and he could be as dead and as meaningless as those words. The water would swallow him up, and the remains of Barney Daniels would disappear into it. The water. The cold, bleak, unforgiving, welcome water.

  "Snap to, boy," Raisin said," bending over to slap B
arney on the shoulder. "It's cold out here. You gonna freeze."

  Barney stared out over the water.

  Raisin's voice softened. "Hey, want to grab a cup of coffee somewheres?" the portly black man asked.

  But Barney only stared.

  Raisin picked up his red terrycloth slipper and bounced it on Barney's head. "Look alive, man," he shouted. "What is this stupidness? I get hauled out here in the middle of nowheres, getting the crap scared out of me 'cause I thinking you gonna kill me, and now you ain't about to do nothing. You on junk, boy?"

  Barney didn't answer.

  "You wasting my time. I got a sick-in demonstration going, so if you ain't going to rub me out, I better get back to it 'fore I die of the cold."

  Barney offered Raisin his flask. "Have a drink," he said. "It'll warm you."

  Raisin drank. "Man, what is that shit? Tastes like poison."

  "Tequila," Barney said, regaining possession of the silver container. "But it could have been poisoned."

  "Sure as hell tasted like it."

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  Ignoring the crass comment, Barney lifted the flask to his lips and let the liquid pour down his throat. "I could have poisoned you, you know," he said.

  Raisin shrugged.

  "Your wife wants me to kill you."

  "Lorraine? What she want to do that for? Who gonna pay the bills on that split-level money-eater in Whiteyville?"

  "Not Lorraine. Gloria. Your wife. The blonde."

  "My wife ain't no blonde," Raisin protested. "Leastways she wasn't four days ago. Lorraine look mighty silly a blonde. I gonna slap her silly if she done dyed her hair. Blonde. Hmmph."

  "Gloria," Barney said, louder.

  "I don't know no Gloria, stupid white ignoramus. You done come down here to kill the wrong man. Good thing you spaced out."

  "Her name is Gloria, I tell you," Barney shouted, "and she's paying me a thousand dollars to kill you."

  Raisin hopped up and down, his jaw thrust forward. "Well, then, you do that, smartass. You just try and kill me." He put up his fists. "Weirdo white junkie."

  "Oh, get lost," Barney said.

  "I ain't leaving till you 'pologize for calling my wife a white woman."

  "I won't apologize. Go."

  "I ain't going."

  "Then you'll have to die here on the pier, because the drink I gave you was poisoned." Barney stood up to leave.

  "Woah," Raisin said, restraining Barney with a shaky black arm. "You lying. Speaking falsehoods. You lying, ain't you?"

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  Barney ambled toward the end of the pier and sat down, his legs dangling off the edge. The water. The black, forgetful water.

  "Wait, man," Raisin said, running to him and grabbing his arm.

  "That's my drinking arm," Barney said. He yanked it free and took a long swallow from his flask.

  "You ain't put nothing in that drink you give me, did you? I mean, you drank it yourself. Ain't nothing in it, right? Did she pay you in advance, or is she waiting for you to finish me off?"

  Daniels pondered a moment, peered into the desperate eyes of a fellow human being, contemplated the obligation of all mankind to be responsible for all mankind, the true meaning of brotherhood, mercy and love and finally decided that if he were to relieve Raisin's doubts it might be whole seconds before he could get back to his flask of tequila.

  "Yes," Barney said with finality. "It was poisoned."

  "Oh, Lordie Lord!" Raisin's hands clutched around his throat.

  "And I'm going to sit right here and die with you," Barney said, thumping on the rotted wood of the pier. ''The perfect murder-suicide."

  Calder Raisin ran off into the night, up the length of the pier and deep into the shadows behind. But it was only a matter of seconds after Raisin scurried away until Barney heard a thud, and then the whooshing of air a man makes when his lungs are collapsing, and then a small moan. And another thud.

  Then they were on him, around him, behind him, hundreds of them, it seemed.

  Then Barney felt the sharp, searing pain, acid

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  pain, oh, beautiful, numbing, terrible, shaking pain.

  Frantic footsteps tore away into the blackness. Barney felt beneath his shoulder blades for the wounds. Just a little oozing dampness from all three cuts. He had not lost much blood, but oh God, the pain. Barney leaned against a dock support, fought to bring air into his lungs, then staggered up the ramp like a drunk.

  And then he thought he saw her again. Once again, as though she had never gone.

  "Denise," he whispered. Her face was in front of him again and she was smiling and the smell of her was on him, warm and giving and forever, before she began to fade again, into the black sea and the fetid air of the harbor.

  "Denise," he called into the cold wind. But she was gone. Again.

  He fell. And then there was blackness, the blackness for which he was grateful after an endless lifetime of waiting.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Gloria X entered her house in East Harlem, Malcolm was not at the door to greet her. He was inside, at the base of the stairwell, his neck broken so that Ms head joined his massive body at a perfect right angle. Surrounding him and leading up

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  the stairs were the corpses of six other Peaches of Mecca, their arms and legs splayed over the steps like broken dolls, their blue-edged knives glinting beside them.

  Silently, she pulled a small revolver out of her pursue and followed the trail of bodies up to her bedroom.

  The door was open. She listened. Nothing. Slowly she stepped inside, her revolver steady in her outstretched hand, positioned low for firing.

  There was no one in the room. She circled it once, careful to keep one eye on the doorway. No one. Not a sound.

  Then he came through the window as suddenly as a breeze, and the gun left her hand and soared out of reach as Remo clasped her wrists together behind her with one hand and held her throat with the other.

  "Where is he," he said quietly. "I haven't got much time."

  She closed her eyes with a shudder. Remo squeezed. "Barney Daniels," he said, pressing the veins in her. neck. "I know you've sent him out to kill Calder Raisin. Where are they?"

  "I don't know who you're talking about," she said levelly. "I never heard of him. And I don't know anything about Cald-"

  Remo's grip tightened until her eyes bulged. "You have three seconds," he said. Her tongue began to ease out of her mouth, encircled by white foam.

  "One," Remo said. "If you faint first, I'll kill you anyway. "Two."

  "At the pier," she croaked. Remo softened the pressure slightly. "The abandoned pier at Battery Park, near the Staten Island Ferry."

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  "Good girl." Remo took his hand away and threw her into a corner of the room as if he were tossing a wet washrag.

  She spun around on her knees. Crouched on all fours, she raised her head and laughed like a mad dog, her hate-filled eyes glistening. "You'll be too late," she spat, her voice still gravelly. "Raisin's dead by now. And so's your friend."

  "Then I'll be back," Remo said coldly.

  He found Raisin first, crumpled in a heap with his head bashed into bloody mush. On the pier, the silhouette of Daniels's body, doubled over, stood out starkly against the horizon.

  There was an odd smell about him as Remo rolled him over to look at the knife wounds in his back. A familiar smell, but faint in the musky night air of the waterfront.

  Remo held two fingers to Barney's temple. The weakest trace of a pulse remained.

  Then he spotted the knife. Still holding Barney, he picked it up. Toward the base of the blade a blue stain shone in the moonlight. Remo lifted it near his face.

  Curare. That was the blue on the knives of the well-dressed black men around Gloria's house. This was the scent they carried.

  The pulse was fading fast. Too late for a doctor. Too late for anything now. "Looks like your last binge, sweetheart," Remo said to the unconscious form in his arm
s. He picked up Barney's silver flask lying on its side a few feet away, and knew it didn't matter any more. "Have a drink, buddy."

  He raised the flask carefully to Barney's parched lips. He would wait with him until the end came. He would wait, because he knew that one day it would

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  be Remo lying alone on a pier or in a street or behind a building in some place where he would be a stranger, since their kind were always strangers. He would wait because when that day came, perhaps there would be someone-a casual passerby, maybe, or a drunken derelict who made his home nearby-who would hold him as he now held Barney Daniels, and who would offer him the warmth of human contact before he left his life as he had lived it. Alone.

  Barney's lips accepted the last of the alcohol. He stirred. One hand moved slowly toward Remo's and clasped it weakly.

  "Doc," Barney said, so softly that normal ears could not have heard it

  "Barney?" Remo asked, surprised at the restorative powers of the drink. "Wait here. I'll get a doctor."

  "Listen," Barney said, his face contorted with the effort. Remo leaned closer. Barney whispered a telephone number.

  Remo left him on the pier as he ran into Battery Park to reach a pay phone.

  "Jackson," a man's bass voice answered.

  Remo gave the man directions to the pier, then went back to Barney, whose breathing was so labored that, even in the chilly night, drops of sweat dotted his upper lip and forehead. "Hang on," Remo said. "Doc's coming."

  "Thanks . . . friend," Barney said, the muscles in his neck straining.

  As the gray Mercury skidded to a halt by the pier, Barney's head dropped backward and he slumped unconscious again in Remo's arms.

  A tall black man, elegantly dressed, approached them with a stride faster than most men's at a full

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  run. "I'm Doc Jackson," he said with authority. "Get him in the car."

  "I don't think he's going to make it," Remo said.

  "I don't care what you think," Doc answered, his lips tightened in grim determination as they sped away. Behind them, rolling to a stop at the pier, Remo could see the flashing red lights of police and emergency vehicles and the carry-all vans of New York's television stations.