Warren Murphy: Funny Money

Al, out in the hallway, could not hear Forsythe, so he did not answer.

"Al, dammit, I'm talking to you," said Forsythe.

"Mister Al is not here," said Chiun.

Jumping forward as if jolted by electricity, Forsythe hopped ahead, spun, and saw Chiun. He backed away toward the window, so he would be out of the lunging reach of the two men and could still cover both of them at the same time.

"Oh, it's you," he said.

Chiun nodded. "I am always me."

"I hope I won't have to kill you, old timer," said Forsythe, "but I will if you move a muscle. Without even a second thought, I'll blow you to smithereens."

"Careful, Chiun," said Remo. "He's a cold-blooded killer."

Forsythe turned back toward Remo. "I was about to tell you why you're going to die."

"Let's get on with it," Remo said. "I want to get some sleep."

"You're going to take that big sleep," Forsythe said.

"Good," said Remo.

"But first I have to tell you why you must die. I owe it to you." Remo looked at Chiun in hopeless supplication. Chiun sat down on the edge of the lamp table. He would not stand forever, even if this fool insisted on talking forever.

Forsythe went ahead to tell Remo that Remo's life was the price Mr. Gordons demanded to stop undermining America's economy. "I'm here to pay that price," he said. He explained that his normal position on ransom was not to pay it, but that these were extraordinary circumstances. "I have to face my responsibilities. I hope you'll face your responsibilities as a government man too and go quietly and willingly. It's bigger than both of us. I'm sure you'll agree." He paused for an answer. The only sound in the room was the faint hiss of breath from the sleeping Remo's nostrils.

Forsythe looked at Chiun. "How can you kill a man who isn't conscious?" he asked.

"It is easy," said Chiun. His right hand, resting on the edge of the table, had grasped one of the dinner plates he had put their earlier. Holding the edge between thumb, index, and middle fingers, he brought his arm forward fluidly, smoothly. The plate seemed glued to the end of his fingertips as his arm moved in Forsythe's direction. At the last moment, when it seemed the plate must surely drop to the floor, his wrist snapped with an audible crack and the plate flew toward Forsythe with a speed that made it invisible.

It rotated so fast it whirred, but the whirring lasted only a split second before it was succeeded by a buzzing thunk as the dull leading edge of the plate hit into, spun against and sawed, and then slipped through Forsythe's neck. The plate, pinkened with a slick of blood, clunked off Forsythe's left shoulder and dropped to the floor.

Forsythe's eyes were still wide open, his mouth still twisted in the expression of the last word he was about to say, then his body, no longer held upright by life, crumpled toward the floor, dropping out from under Forsythe's no-longer-attached head, which dropped down a split second later, hitting the back of the corpse and rolling toward the wall.

Remo slept on.

Chiun went to the door and opened it. Al was pacing nervously back and forth in front of the door.

"Your employer says to go home," said Chiun. "He is going to stay."

"Is everything all right?"

"Go home," said Chiun and closed the door.

Back in the room, he went to Forsythe's head and grasped it by its dark brown hair and looked at the features. Fatty but close enough. Using the edge of his hand, first as an ax then as a scalpel, Chiun began to attack the head, battering it and molding it, so that it would no longer be recognizably Forsythe, so that it would no longer be definitely not Remo.

It took thirty seconds. When Chiun was done, Forsythe's nose had been broken so that it looked as if it might have once been Remo's nose. Extra flesh had been compressed off Forsythe's cheeks and jowls to resemble Remo's high, protruding cheekbones. The bones of the eye sockets were broken so Forsythe's eyes, in death, sagged deeper into the sockets resembling Remo's brooding, deep eyes.

The ears. The ears were not right, Chiun thought as he looked down at the bloody lump on the floor. He glanced toward the bed where Remo slept. Remo had almost no lobes at all. Forsythe had long full ear-lobes which Chiun decided was characteristic of Americans and rightfully so, since if they were all going to act like jackasses, they might as well share with them not just intellect but ears. With his hardened fingertips and nails, he began to shave the excess flesh away from Forsythe's earlobes. He leaned back to inspect. Still not right.

With two slashes of his right hand, he took off the excess flesh, rendering Forsythe lobeless. It might not be perfect, but it was the best he could do. It would have to do. He hoped it would do.

Chiun removed a plastic tablecloth from the lamp table and wrapped the head inside it tightly, then stuffed the whole lump into a pillowcase he ripped from one of the pillows on his bed. He put the pile onto the sofa and looked around the room. Forsythe's headless body still lay in the middle of the floor. That would not do. The whole point of the deception would be lost if Forsythe's headless body were found and the press reported it, as they reported all such trivia to this nation of trivia collectors.

Chiun went to the window leading to the fire escape. He hit the heels of both hands simultaneously against both sides of the window, then with his right index finger pushed upward. The window slid smoothly and easily upward and Chiun leaned out to see the garbage pail down below the fire escape.

Easily, he hoisted Forsythe's body through the window and onto the fire escape. He removed the man's wallet from his pocket, then held the body over the edge of the fire escape and dropped it. It slid down into the garbage pail smoothly, not touching the side before the feet hit bottom, like spitting into a sink.

Chiun looked down satisfied. If there were one of those insidious newspaper articles, it would talk about the headless body found outside Mr. Remo's room. That was fine for what Chiun had in mind. He went to the bathroom and flushed Forsythe's wallet down the toilet. The gun on the floor was another problem. Using his hand as a knife, Chiun slashed open one of the couch cushions and stuffed the gun deep inside it.

Then he picked up the pillowcase bundle, took one last look at Remo sleeping, and left the room, locking the door behind him, lest burglars sneak in and disturb Remo's rest.

"Heh, heh, heh, old timer. Delivering your Christmas packages early this year?"

The airport guard chuckled as he addressed Chiun, who was wearing a red robe and carrying his pillowcase over his shoulder like Santa's sack.

"Do not labor yourself with attempts to be funny. Where is the Eastern Airlines resignation desk?"

"Resignation desk?"

"Where they write many copies of tickets because you need only one to get on a plane."

"Oh, the reservations desk. Heh, heh," the sallow-faced guard said. "Down there, old-timer." He waved toward the other end of the terminal's main passenger building.

Chiun wordlessly walked away from him.

He saw the litter basket in front of the Eastern Airlines desk.

And then his senses told him Mr. Gordons was near but he did not know why. He sensed people because people had a living pulse, a rhythm of their own. Machines vibrated. Mr. Gordons vibrated; Chiun had recognized only lately that they were not human vibrations. He felt those vibrations now. They grew stronger as he approached the trash basket.

Glancing around him cautiously to see that no one was watching, and satisfied that no one was, Chiun dropped the little white sack into the top of the basket.

The vibrations that were Mr. Gordons were so strong, they almost made Chiun's flesh quiver.