Warren Murphy - Murder Ward

Then the hall lights came on. Wilberforce gasped and felt his head become light. His new employee was standing beside him holding his arm so he would not faint. Wilberforce had seen it.

The elevator door had been open. And there was no elevator. He was standing before an open shaft. There were eight floors of nothing before him.

"My god. Someone could have fallen in. What carelessness. What carelessness," gasped Wilberforce.

"Someone did," said his new employee and held him while he leaned over the edge for a look.

Down below in the darkness, Wilberforce made out a broken body impaled on the springs and perhaps two others. He could see only arms and legs way down there, and then he saw something floating down toward the bodies. It was his late afternoon snack.

Remo helped Wilberforce to the stairs, and they walked down the eight flights. At each landing, Wilberforce gathered a bit more of his horrified senses. By the ground floor, he was complaining about the lack of proper maintenance in federal buildings. His mind had done what Remo had heard Chiun say untrained minds did. When confronted by an unacceptable fact, it would rearrange it to make it acceptable or it would ignore it.

Standing in the Scranton street with Pennsylvania snow falling, turning from white to gray in the last twenty feet of its descent, Remo saw that Wilberforce had adjusted the attempted assassination into a janitorial problem.

"I'll have to send a memo to the building superintendent in the morning," said Wilberforce, buttoning his gray and orange winter overcoat, the kind of coat Remo knew was destined second-hand for Skid Row, but which he had never seen worn new before.

Remo wore gray slacks, a light blue shirt, and a gray-blue blazer that flapped in the wind.

"Where's your coat?" asked Wilberforce.

"I don't have one," said Remo.

"You can afford one, can't you?"

"Yeah. I don't need one."

"That's impossible. It's cold out."

"How do you know it's cold?"

"The temperature tells me," said Wilberforce.

"Well, talk back to it. Tell it it's wrong."

"You can't do that to temperature. It's part of nature."

"What do you think you are? You're part of nature."

"I am Nathan David Wilberforce and I keep buttoned up," said Wilberforce. "I see that your mother hasn't properly trained you."

"I never knew my mother. I was raised in an orphanage," said Remo.

"I'm sorry," said Wilberforce. "I can't imagine what life would be like without a mother."

"Pretty good," said Remo.

"That's a horrible thing to say," said Wilberforce. "I don't know what I'd do without my mother."

"You might do pretty well, Wilberforce."

"You're a horrid human being," said Wilberforce.

"If you work at it, you might become one, too," said Remo. "A human being, that is."

"Is your work over for the day or are you going to report on my homelife tonight?"

"Tonight isn't so important, but I might as well take a look-see."

"You don't take notes."

"In my head," said Remo. "I take notes in my head."

That night would not be dangerous for Wilberforce, Remo knew. It would be probably one of the safer nights for him. In the Western world, as Chiun had taught him, there were only single attacks, never multiple level on a linear time basis. Chiun had explained it in the earliest training using lacquered wooden balls the size of grapes and a large wooden ball about the size and color of a grapefruit.

"In the West, an assassination is one ball," said Chiun, holding up a single, small black ball in his bony hands. The ball seemed to rise to the tips of his fingernails as if on a string.

"The philosophy behind this must come from the mind of a businessman for it is not really designed for effectiveness. It is designed to use as little energy as possible. Watch."

Chiun pointed to the large yellow ball on the table. "That is the target. When it is on the floor, the task is done. For that is what assassination is: a task."

"Call it what it really is," Remo had said. "Killing. Murder. Say it if you're going to say it. Don't give me this funny talk about a task."

Chiun had nodded patiently. It was only years later, after Remo achieved proficiency and wisdom that had made him into another being, that Chiun would criticize and call him a pale piece of a pig's ear. In the early training, Chiun appeared to be patient.

"Pay attention," Chiun said. "This is the Western technique."

Chiun flipped the small black ball at the larger yellow ball. It struck slightly off-center and the larger ball moved slightly toward the edge of the table. Chiun's hands came to rest on the lap of his golden kimono and exaggeratedly he watched the large ball. Then, with just as much exaggeration, he appeared to ponder, and then flipped another black ball. It missed. He stared at the large yellow ball, appeared to think long and hard, then threw another small black ball. This one hit the larger ball dead center, and slapped it over the edge of the table onto the floor. The smaller ball, spinning wildly with English, rolled almost crazily around the table, but then wound up stopping just before Chiun's hand.

"Western technique," Chiun said. "Now the technique of Sinanju. Get me the yellow ball."

Remo picked up the large ball, bending with pain to reach it—for he was in the early phase of his physical training—and put it back on the table.

Chiun bowed, smiled, reached into his pocket and brought forth a handful of small black balls. He took a few in each hand, and then snaked his two hands in different directions in front of the table, and then, bing, bing, bing, bing, balls shot out from his fingertips as it from two rocket launchers, and one after another, hit the large yellow ball dead center, without pause, and spun it immediately off the edge of the table.

Chiun put his now empty hands on his lap again.

"Now do you understand? The Western way of assassination provides moments of readjustment, secure periods, awareness of danger time—all things that you do not wish for the intended target."

"How did you do that with the balls? Shoot them out of your hands that way? Like little bullets, and your fingers didn't even seem to move."

"Do you wish to be a juggler or an assassin?"

"And that ball that came back to you? Did you have reverse spin on that or what?" Remo had asked.

"It is not the ball that I wish you to understand but the method. Some day you may learn."

"Do you think if I grew my fingernails longer I could do that with those balls?" asked Remo.

Chiun sighed.

Remo babbled on. "If I'm going to make a hit on someone, and I'm not sure that I'm ever going to, I'm going to use the biggest gun I can get. Now show me how you do that thing with the balls. Is it with your wrist?" Remo had said. It was later, as he began to understand Chiun's training and as his body came to be a different kind of instrument, that he found one day he could do with the balls just what Chiun had done. It came not from trickery, but from knowledge and feel of the essence of the balls. And Remo never forgot Chiun's lesson on the Western and Eastern assassination techniques.

Now as Remo and Wilberforce approached Wilberforce's 1957 Volkswagen, Remo had little concern for the evening. Wilberforce might even have two days, but at this moment, he was as safe as he was ever going to be. Western assassination attempts came one at a time.

Wilberforce opened the hood over the rear engine.

"If you remember those three men who came in earlier today, they were bodyguards and they always checked the rear of my car. I really don't know what to look for. Perhaps you do."

"Yes, I do," said Remo, getting into the front of the car.

Wilberforce left the engine open and unlocked the driver's door and poked his head into the front seat.