Warren Murphy: Syndication Rites

As the man worked, Don Vincenzo took a sip of wine. Sunlight sparkled off the glass.

It was time to start thinking about tomorrow.

Chapter 37

"There was some men come lookin' for you," Johnny Fungillo's mother told him as he stepped through the back kitchen door of her Jersey City house.

Johnny's hand froze on the doorknob. "What men?" he asked, eyes darting over his shoulder. Beyond, his mother's Mercury sat in the cold garage.

"What do I know what men?" Mrs. Fungillo asked with a frown of her great jowls. "Men." She didn't turn to her son. At the stove, she continued to use a big wooden spoon to stir the caldron of tomato sauce that bubbled on the back burner. Johnny immediately regretted coming back for some clean clothes. He left the door into the garage open. Glancing back over his shoulder, he hustled over to his mother.

"These men," he asked. "Were they young, old, what?"

"What are you doing leaving the door open?" Mrs. Fungillo asked, unmindful of the anxious look on her son's face. "It's the middle of January." She tasted a spoonful of sauce.

"Ma!" he snapped, grabbing her by the biceps. She recoiled. Her son had a murderous glint in his eye.

"Whatsa matter with you, Johnny?" she asked, drawing her orange-stained spoon to her ample bosom. "You in trouble again?" She saw for the first time the big circular bruise on his forehead. "Where'd you get that?"

He shook his head angrily. "The men," he demanded, squeezing harder.

"They come about an hour ago," Mrs. Fungillo said, wincing. She looked down with growing concern at her son's white-knuckled hands. His fingers bit into her big arms. "One was young and the other was real old. He was some kind of Chinaman. He was real nice. You know, polite."

"God," Johnny croaked, releasing her. Stunned eyes darted from his mother's sauce-splattered glasses to the cheap linoleum floor.

Mrs. Fungillo took a step back. Regaining her courage, she raised her stirring spoon like a weapon. "You and them slobs you hang around with could learn a thing or two about being polite from them Chinese," she warned him.

Johnny didn't hear. Before she'd even finished talking, he'd regained his senses.

He flew out the kitchen door, grabbing up his mother's car keys from the hook on the wall. He dove into her car, twisting the key violently in the ignition. The garage door split into a dozen neat panels as he plowed through it. The wood was flying into snowbanks on either side of the driveway as he slid out into the road.

He hadn't gotten as far as the stop sign three houses down when he heard something that froze his heart.

"Take your first left."

The familiar voice came from the back seat. He had heard it first in East Africa three months ago. Again on the plane in Boston earlier this week.

His frightened gaze strayed to the rearview mirror.

It was him. Along with the old man from the Boston Raffair office. Dead eyes stared through to Johnny's very soul. He was naked and alone on Judgment Day.

Johnny Books grabbed for the door handle. A long-nailed hand snagged him by the scruff of the neck, pulling him back into the driver's seat. "Please, " Johnny cried.

"We're beyond that," Remo said coldly. "Drive."

There was nothing else he could do. Johnny did as he was told. By the time they reached the empty parking lot behind the abandoned Newark tenement, he had told them where they could find Mikey "Skunks" Falcone and the third man who'd helped burn Castle Sinanju to the ground.

"We can cut a deal," Johnny begged as Remo dragged him out of the front seat.

"You don't have anything we want," Remo said as he hefted the thug into the air.

"Save one thing," Chiun intoned gravely.

As Johnny wept in fear, Remo flipped him upside down. He held the big man by one ankle, dangling him at arm's length above the ground.

The Master of Sinanju bent low. Johnny held his breath as the same deadly nails that had decapitated Louis Dir'rotti moved toward him.

Chiun's hand slipped past Johnny's frightened, upended face. He felt a tug at his hair. Not even very hard.

Johnny strained his eyes to see what the old man was doing. All he could see was the edge of the big purple bruise on his broad forehead.

Where Fungillo's hair brushed asphalt, Chiun twirled a single lock of greasy hair between two fingers. His fingertips rolled faster and faster until they became a barely visible blur.

A tiny curl of smoke rose into the air. Johnny caught a whiff as it rose past his nose. A look of upside-down horror appeared on his reddening face.

"No!" Johnny "Books" Fungillo screamed, just as his greasy hair burst into flame.

Johnny continued screaming as the fire climbed up his clothes. His jacket and trousers ignited rapidly. The sickly sweet smell of barbecued flesh filled the cold air.

For a few minutes, Remo tossed Johnny from one hand to the other. Eventually, when Johnny finally stopped screaming and the flames were too much for even Remo to bear, he tossed the burning corpse into a nearby Dumpster. The trash in the metal container flamed to life.

Remo and Chiun didn't give him another look. As the flames grew, charring to ash the body of the man who had taken their home away from them forever, they climbed into the front seat of Mrs. Fungillo's car. Leaving the fire to burn itself out, the two stone-faced men drove slowly out of the pothole-filled parking lot.

THE PRESIDENT of the United States sat in his bathrobe on the floor of the Lincoln Bedroom. Nearly everything was gone now, including the bed. The red phone was still there. He held it in his hand now as he tried to explain.

"I didn't mean for it to go bad like this, Smith," he said. "She just kind of makes things happen, you know?"

"No, I do not know, Mr. President," the disapproving voice of Harold W. Smith replied. "As for your wife's knowledge of our existence, that is as much my fault as it is your own. She inserted herself into enough crises in the past that I should have dealt with her long before this."

"Yeah," the President agreed hopefully. He bit his lip as he tried to go for the wiggle room. "It really is your fault more than it is mine."

"I did not say that, Mr. President," Smith said tartly, "and you cannot deny culpability in this matter."

The President rubbed anxiously at his face. A smear of orange rouge stained his pale palm. "You really made her forget about you fellas?" he asked.

"Yes," Smith replied. "Not that her knowledge of us was as extensive as yours. But she knew enough to make her a security risk. Obviously."

"Yeah, that was really awful how she made me tell her where your guys would he," the President said. "But you've met her-you can understand how I didn't have a choice."

"No, sir, I do not understand," Smith said icily. "You allowed your wife to manipulate you into placing my men at risk, all for some half-baked scheme that had no hope of succeeding. You had a choice. You could have refused."

"Maybe you haven't met her after all," the President exhaled tiredly. "She's taken me down this same road a million times. From universal health care to those Puerto Rican terrorists. What she wants, she gets."

Smith would not be led down that primrose path. "Before we end this conversation-which, Mr. President, will be our last-I need to ask a few questions. First, are the MIR revolutionaries associated in any way with Raffair?"

"No," the President replied. "I asked you to check Raffair out before my wife called me about you."

"So it was you personally who supplied the whereabouts of my men to your wife, and she in turn instructed the terrorists? There were no gobetweens?"

"Yeah," the chief executive said. "Each time her boys failed, she called me again, meaner than the last time. By the end, she was threatening to stay in New York, not even come down here for the inauguration tomorrow."