Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

‘Good,’ Remo said. ‘The opposition’s going to know they’ve been in a fight anyway.’

Poor Teri. Her first campaign, and she was raising exuberance to an art form. But no matter what she did, there was no way to win. Remo conceded that now. There were no workers. And even if there had been workers, there was no work for them to do. Farger had kept everything in his head. Without him, Remo could not find the printing, the brochures, the bumper strips, the buttons, all the necessary paraphernalia of a political campaign.

He confided this to Chiun back at their hotel room.

‘I do not understand,’ Chiun said. ‘You mean that people vote for one person, rather than another, because they prefer his button?’

‘Well… sort of,’ Remo said.

‘But you told me earlier that people would vote the way that police lieutenant told them to,’ Chiun said.

‘Well.. . some people will.’

‘How can you tell the people who follow the police lieutenant from the people who follow the buttons?’ Chiun asked;

‘You can’t,’ Remo said.

Chiun spattered the room with Korean, of which Remo could recognize a phrase or two, most dealing with the stupidity of democracy and how it was, therefore, the only form of government which white men deserved.

Finally, Chiun stopped. In English, he said: ‘What do you do now?’

‘We can’t win. But I can make things uncomfortable for them.’

‘But you told me that you could not kill your opponents.’

‘That’s right. I can’t. But I can rough them up a little, them and their campaign.’

Chiun shook his head sadly. ‘An assassin who is not permitted to kill is like a man with an unloaded revolver who takes solace in the fact that at least the gun has a trigger. The risks are very great.’

‘But what else can I do? No workers, no equipment, no nothing,’ Remo said. ‘Let’s face it, Chiun. The political campaign is over for us. We’ve lost.’

‘I see,’ Chiun said and watched as Remo changed into dark slacks and shirt and shoes.

‘And now?’ Chiun asked.

‘I’m going to drop a little rainfall in the lives of our opposition.’

‘Do not be caught,’ Chiun said. ‘Because if you are, I will tell investigators everything I know. I understand it is the way of your country.’

‘Feel free,’ Remo said. ‘I won’t be caught.’

Remo got to the hotel headquarters of Mayor Tim Cartwright’s campaign shortly after midnight. He left shortly before dawn, seen only by one person, and that only fleetingly, as that person decided it would be good to sleep until noon.

Behind him, Remo left a record of accomplishment, on which he would have been glad to campaign for a second term as campaign burglar.

He ripped out the telephone connections and rewired the junction boxes, until they were tangled mazes of coloured cables. The telephone instruments themselves were carefully taken apart, their innards mangled, and then reinserted. Remo took apart the electric typewriters and re-jiggered the connections so that when struck, different keys produced the wrong letters. For good measure, he also bent the typewriter rollers.

He tore thousands of bumper strips in half. Thousands of copies of a campaign newsletter were dumped down the incinerator shaft, followed by three crates of lapel buttons. He painted moustache and beard on printed pictures of Mayor Cartwright, and as his last act, dropped a match down the incinerator shaft and waited for the flame to start with a muffled puff.

Remo decided to walk back to his hotel and he stopped in the early morning warmth and swam in the ocean. He swam strongly, powerfully slipping through the water in the way of Sinanju, his mind churning in marked contrast to the smooth moving of his body, and when his anger had waned and he turned in the water, the shoreline was out of sight. He had swum miles out to sea.

Slowly he returned to land, padding ashore in his briefs, then sitting in the sand and slipping on his clothes, under the startled eye of a beach boy who was setting up the chaise lounges for the day’s invasion of freckled, pale-skinned New Yorkers.

He got back to his apartment by mid-morning. Chiun should be up, he thought, and stuck his head into the old man’s room. The cocoa mat on which Chiun sometimes slept was rolled up and neatly stored in a corner. The room was empty.

On the kitchen table, Remo found a note.

‘A matter of urgency has taken me to Mr. Polaney’s headquarters.’

Now what? Remo decided he had better go and see.

Outside Polaney headquarters, the noise in the hall was deafening. What the hell was going on inside, Remo thought. Perhaps one of Farger’s bunnies had lost her nail polish.

He pushed open the door to step inside, then stopped in amazement.

The place was overrun with people. Women. Middle-aged and elderly women. All moving, all working.

At Farger’s desk sat Mrs. Ethel Hirshberg. She was shouting into a telephone.

‘I don’t know nothing from labour problems. You want to get paid, you deliver in an hour. Otherwise, you and your lovely family can eat the paper you used.

‘That’s right. One hour or no cash. Don’t tell me about arrangements. This operation is under new management. That’s right. One hour. And be sure you have somebody carry them upstairs. Us ladies have bad backs.’

She hung up the phone and pointed to Remo. ‘Your father’s inside. Now don’t just stand there. Go inside and see if there’s anything you can do to help, even though you’re not much good for anything.

‘Rose,’ she screamed. ‘You have that list of North Ward volunteers yet? Well, step on it. Get this show on the road.’ She turned to Remo again. ‘Hard,’ she said derisively. ‘After 40 years in the fur business, I’ll teach you hard. Hard like you don’t know hard. Why are you standing there? Report in to your father and see what it is you can do to help him. Poor old man. You should be ashamed of yourself, leaving this job to him until the last minute. And him so upset and all, for fear you might get hurt. And nice Mr. Polaney, that he shouldn’t be stuck with someone like you.’

Her phone rang and she picked it up before the first brrrrng had ended. ‘Sunshine is Nicer headquarters,’ she said, listened a moment, then barked, ‘I don’t care what you promised, you’re going to have those sound trucks here in one hour. One hour. That’s right. Oh, no? Now listen. Do you know Judge Mandelbaum? Yes, well, he would be very interested to know that you are not willing to rent your trucks to anybody who calls. Did you know that’s a violation of the federal fair election laws?’ She shrugged at Remo. ‘Yes, that’s right, and Judge Mandelbaum knows it, who is the husband of my cousin, Pearl. And anytime you shouldn’t think that blood is thicker…’ She put her hand over the phone and shook her head at Remo again. ‘Inside,’ she hissed. ‘Help your father.’ Then she was back on the phone.

Remo shook his head in astonishment. There were fifty women working in the office, and more arriving each minute, brushing by Remo with a brusque ‘Unblock the door,’ tossing floppy flowered hats on tables, and without being directed, sitting down at desks and tables to begin working on what apparently were voter registration lists.

Mrs. Hirshberg hung up. ‘I got rid of your three playboy bunnies,’ she told Remo. ‘For campaign work, they are like zero. Maybe after the election, we find a nice place for them in a massage parlor somewhere.’

Remo finally left the doorway and walked to the back office where Teri Walker usually worked. Inside, Chiun was seated behind her desk. He smiled when he looked up and saw Remo.

‘My son,’ he said in greeting.

‘My father,’ said Remo, bowing deferentially. ‘My resourceful, astonishing, devious, worry-about-me sneak of a father.’