Warren Murphy: Oil Slick

"How'd you do that?" she said when she finally spoke.

"Clean living."

"Well, now that you're in, what do we do?"

"Go out, of course."

He led Jessie back toward the front gate.

"How'd the conference go?" he asked.

"Don't ask," she said.

"If I promise not to ask, do you promise not to talk about racism, lack of opportunity, the ghetto, genocide, and oppression?"

"Why, Mr. Goldberg, you don't sound like a liberal at all."

"To me it always seems as if liberals love people in large masses, and this is the price they pay to hate people individually. I guess I'm not a liberal."

"You don't hate people individually?" asked Jessie.

"Sure I do," said Remo. "But I won't pay the price of having to love everybody in a lump. I reserve the right to decide a bastard's a bastard, just because he's a bastard."

"All right," said Jessie. "That makes sense. No ghetto talk. You've got a deal."

By now, they were within ten feet of the two guards.

With his hand, Remo signaled Jessie to wait while he approached the guards.

"Hi, fellas. Remember me?" he said.

Both guards turned and looked at him, first in surprise then in annoyance.

"What are you doing here?" they said.

"I went to get two passes to leave this place."

"Yes," the bigger guard said suspiciously.

"I have them right here."

"Yes?" said the guard again.

Remo reached his hand into his trousers pocket and brought it out slowly, in a fist. He held it up between the two guards.

"Right here," he said.

They leaned forward to look.

"Well?" said one of them.

The two guards were leaning close to each other now, almost head to head, when Remo partially opened his hand, uncoiling the little finger and the index finger. He drove these fingers upward.

Each one hit into the forehead of one of the guards, right at that delicate point where veins merge to form a Y close under the skin.

The iron hard fingers like blunted spikes squashed into the veins, closing them for a moment, and bringing on total if short-lived unconsciousness. The two soldiers dropped to the ground, in what seemed, in the darkness, to be a heap of dirty olive drab clothes.

"Come on, Jessie," said Remo.

He helped the girl over the unconscious forms of the two guards. She looked down at them, seemingly unable to look away.

"Oh, don't worry," said Remo. "They'll be all right. Just out for awhile."

"Are you always so aggressive?" she asked.

"I told you, I reserve the right to decide a bastard's a bastard and deal with him in bastardly fashion. These two qualified."

"I have a notion we're going to have an interesting night."

As they walked away from the compound, Remo glanced back over his shoulder to make sure their redheaded companion was following. He was.

"Yes, an interesting night," Remo agreed.

He did not know it would be made even more interesting by the man following the redhead. He was a slight man, an Oriental, in a black business suit. He rarely smiled. His name was Nuihc and he had vowed to kill not only Remo, but Chiun.

This was the first occasion Jessie had had to sample Lobynian nightlife, which was nonexistent.

"You can't get a drink," Remo said. "Baraka doesn't allow alcohol."

"Well, jazz then. There must be a jazz joint."

"Sorry," said Remo. "Baraka's closed down nightclubs too."

"Can we dance?"

"Men and women aren't allowed to dance together."

"Baraka?" she asked.

He nodded. "Baraka."

"I should have poisoned his stuffed cabbage when I had a chance," she said.

"Excuses, excuses."

Remo and Jessie walked along Revolutionary Avenue and finally found one open place, that looked as if it might have once been called a nightclub. It was now labeled a private club "for Europeans only." Remo became a member of the club by slipping twenty dollars to the doorman. Inside, the place still carried memories of its nightclub days. There was a bar on the right. A large room in the back was full of tables leading up to a bandstand, where a belly dancer sweated to the music of three Lobynians playing unnameable string instruments and an unmentionable horn.

"Ain't exactly Birdland," said Jessie.

"Sufficient unto the day," began Remo. Jessie challenged him to finish the quote, but Remo declined since he could not remember the rest.

Remo insisted to the waitress who came to greet them that they be seated in one of the large booths that bordered the main room. The booths were more like small rooms, big enough to seat eight along padded benches around the U-shaped wall. They were screened off from the rest of the room by beaded ropes which could be pulled back if one wanted to watch the floor show. The ropes were infrequently pulled back, since the booths were favorite meeting places for European men and their young male Lobynian lovers.

Remo insisted on a booth. The waitress insisted that she did not understand English or his request. Remo insisted upon giving her ten dollars whereupon the waitress insisted that such a fine gentleman and his lady be seated in one of the fine booths that bordered the room.

As they moved toward the back, Remo glanced behind him and glimpsed the redheaded American moving toward the bar.

Jessie was upset that there was no alcohol, but finally she shared Remo's order of carrot juice.

"You order that like you're used to it," she said. "A teetotaller?"

"Only when I'm on duty."

"And what kind of duty is that?" asked Jessie, after the waitress had left and Remo had unfastened the clips on the sides of the beaded ropes allowing them to drop and sealing off their booth from the view of the room.

"The same kind of duty you're to," said Remo. "You know. Uncle Sam. The whole gig."

Remo was glad she chose not to be coy. "Then I guess we've got to protect each other, especially since we're being tailed," she said.

"You saw him?" She went up nineteen notches in Remo's eyes.

"Sure. He's been eating me up with his eyes ever since I started waiting for you at the gate."

"He's at the bar now."

"I know," said Jessie. She stopped talking when the waitress pushed aside the beads and placed glasses in front of them. When the waitress left and the beads stopped tinkling together, Jessie leaned across the corner of the table and said, "What are you here for?"

"Clogg," Remo said. "I'm wondering what he's up to."

"That's easy," she said. "He's got some kind of plan to smuggle Baraka's oil into the United States. Washington told me before I left."

"Why didn't they tell me?" complained Remo.

"Easy," said Jessie, sipping her drink slowly and watching Remo over the top of the glass with shrewd eyes. "Your real assignment's got nothing to do with Clogg so they didn't bother to tell you, just as you haven't bothered yet to tell me what your real assignment is."

"All right," he said finally, "you got me. I'm here to figure out how to get King Adras back on the throne." Remo did not like the situation he was in; the girl was smart, and he was not used to this kind of give and take lying.

"Anything else?" she said.

"Yes. One thing. When are we going to make love?"

"I thought you'd never ask," she said. Jessie moved next to Remo on the padded bench. Her arms went around his head and her lips came up to meet his.

Remo responded to her, silently cursing Chiun for the training that had taken all pleasure out of sex and replaced it with discipline and technique.

Jessie gave a slight moan and then Remo was moving his hand under her thin top, doing things to her upper side under her armpit that she had not felt before.

She moaned again. Remo felt her hands come away from his neck and she began to work up her white skirt.

Then in a confluence of bodies and contortions, Remo and Jessie made love on the bench. Her moans and exhortations were buried alive, under the sound of the heavyhooved belly dancer thumping around on the thin wooden floor to the music of the wooden whistle and string band.