Warren Murphy: Feeding Frenzy

To call them criminals was in itself criminal. But it had rung just the right note for Hollywood. That city, run by people so dumb that they thought conspiracies explained everything, had found in Hardy Bricker an eloquent new spokesman. They bombarded him with picture offers. He took only the ones that paid him the most money.

Frag was followed by Dependent. Day, showing how America was an evil racist country that turned its back on the noble soldiers who had fought in Vietnam-the same noble soldiers who were murderers in Frag.

And then he did a movie called Horn, about some jazz musician who killed himself with a drug overdose brought on by his worrying about America turning into an evil racist country.

Then his movie Jocko told the story of a rising young politician who was killed by an evil racist secret power structure of the United States, in a conspiracy involving 22,167 people. It won Bricker his third Academy Award.

And tonight was to be the preview of Bricker's latest epic: Crap, which proved that all organized religion in the United States was the tool of an evil racist secret power structure trying to promote fascism in America. To be followed by remarks from Hardy Bricker himself, for those who needed even pictures explained to them.

Does anybody believe this bullshit? Remo wondered, then looked around at the bearded, hairy Harvard underclassmen who had packed the auditorium, and he nodded sadly to himself. These zanies would swallow anything.

Remo could tell that it was eight o'clock, and right on time the house lights dimmed and the elegant title Crap appeared on the screen, the individual letters apparently made by arranging dog turds on a white background.

Then the camera pulled away and the white background turned out to be a priest's cassock. The priest had it pulled up around his waist. He was sexually molesting a preteen girl. In the first five minutes of the film, the same priest sexually assaulted three more children. Then he shaved, put on expensive aftershave lotion, and went to lunch with an evangelist at an expensive New York City restaurant, where they talked about following the secret orders of their military-industrial masters. Before lunch was finished, both clergymen had ducked into the hatcheck room to ravage two waitresses.

When they finished and came out of the hatcheck room, they sprinkled Holy Water on the restaurant and blessed it as a Place for God's Work. Then they argued with management about the luncheon bill, refused to pay it, and went outside to their waiting block-long limousines, in each of which three street hookers had been gathered up to make sure the ride back to their churches wasn't too boring.

Remo rubbed his eyes in stupefaction at what he was seeing. The sound was scratchy. The film looked to be out of focus. The dialogue, what little there was beyond sexual grunting, seemed to have been written by an imbecilic fourth-grader.

And all around him, students were cheering, laughing, and applauding.

"Tell them, Hardy. You tell them, man," a black man next to Remo stood up to shout. He punched a clenched fist into the air.

"Sit down and shut up," Remo said.

"I . . . beg . . . your . . . fucking . . . pardon," the man said coldly. He was older than most of the others in the auditorium, so his dumbness couldn't be written off as the ignorance of youth. He wore a goatee, tortoise-shell glasses that might have been swiped from Hedda Hopper's cold corpse, and a black baseball cap with the Roman numeral ten on it.

Remo recognized the man then. He was a famous film director who after running ten million dollars over budget trying to film the life of a burglar-turned-pimp-turned-martyred-civil-rights-leader, cried racism after the film company refused to kick through the shortfall. When other black film personalities ponied up, he publicly demanded that black people all over the country skip work and school and breakfast to see his movie about black responsibility, or risk being branded as Uncle Toms themselves.

Harvard University immediately hired him to teach a humanities course called "Black Values."

Remo reached out and touched the back of the man's left knee. The leg collapsed and the man slumped back into his seat.

"Hey-!" he started.

"One more word out of you," Remo warned, "and I'll do the same thing to your head that I did to your leg. Shut up."

The man did. He whipped off his cap and started chewing on the bill.

Remo could put in only five more minutes of watching Crap before he stood and slipped quietly out of the row and walked around to the back of the theater. Although it was dark, he was able to adjust his eyes so that he saw as clearly as if it were high noon. There was a flight of steps at the side of the small stage and a door behind them.

Remo walked down quietly and let himself backstage through the door.

There were a half-dozen students running around, apparently busying themselves with errands of some sort, but Remo saw no sign of Hardy Bricker.

He walked down a long hall. While he made no effort to eavesdrop, any sound from inside the rooms would register on his sensitive ears. He stopped outside the last door. Inside he could hear sighing and heavy breathing.

The two guards could hear the breathing too. They were Harvard University campus police and they were paid not to remember things they heard or saw, and, occasionally, smelled.

"Hey, get away from that door!" the first guard shouted. "You know who's in there?"

"Another Bolshevik," Remo said.

"Hardy Bricker, that's who," the second guard said.

"Well, la-di-da," said Remo.

They were a Mutt and Jeff pair, one tall and reedy as a flagpole with the blue flag twisted around it, and the other short and squat like a squash ball stuffed into a shapeless blue sack.

They had been standing in their dark blue uniforms at the far end of the corridor, before the fire door and under the darkened EXIT sign, their hands clasped behind them, at parade rest.

Except now their hands were swinging at their sides and they were moving in on Remo with all the purpose of high school corridor monitors and, to Remo Williams, the first white Master of Sinanju, about the same threat level. Which was to say, none.

Remo lifted his hands to show that he had no weapon and wasn't a threat. He didn't look like a threat. He didn't look like much of anything-merely a man of slightly more than average height, very average weight, wearing a white T-shirt and tan chinos that fit tightly enough to suggest he carried no weapons, concealed or otherwise.

While the police were sizing him up with their eyes, satisfying themselves that this lean-bodied intruder was unarmed, Remo reached out with the deadliest weapons on his person-if not the universe-and got his fingers around the police throats. The thin-necked one was easy. The thick-necked one needed an extra two seconds of squeezing before his nervous system shorted too.

Still holding them by their necks, Remo carried the pair over to the fire door and dropped them there. Then he reached up to wave one hand over the EXIT sign. It winked on.

"Take a penny, give a penny," Remo told himself.

The sounds were still coming from behind the closed door. He took the knob, twisted it with deceptive slowness, and slipped in.

Hardy Bricker was standing in front of a mirror, making faces at himself. He had a puffy, spoiled face, the face of somebody with too much money and a private school background. So the way he snarled and frowned at the mirror was funny. It was as if he were trying to put on his tough face for the speech he was scheduled to give to the Harvard undergrads.

Remo stepped into the light so the mirror caught his reflection.

Hardy Bricker caught the reflection too. His face froze with his upper lip curled a la Elvis Presley and his lower lip pushed out in a hemorrhoidal pout.