Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

‘Just so you shouldn’t be forgetting,’ Chiun said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

By noon, three hundred women were on the streets of the city. They went door to door with literature. They assaulted the shopping centers. They broke into song at random moments:

‘Sunshine is nicer.

‘Vote for Polaney.’

People who refused literature or who made nasty comments about Mac Polaney were subjected to cajolery. The easy abuse with which they dealt with each other had been left in campaign headquarters. On the street, under Mrs. Hirshberg’s guidance, it was all sugar. ‘So, it wouldn’t hurt you to vote for Mr. Polaney. So what’s wrong with having a nice guy as mayor for a change. Look, I know how you feel, being Mayor Cartwright’s sister and all, but why not be giving an honest man a chance. You can trust Mr. Polaney.’

This was underway in full force at 12 noon. At 12:01 p.m., the Cartwright headquarters were aware of what was happening. At 12:35 p.m., countermeasures were underway.

It would be very simple, Marshal Dworshansky explained to Cartwright. These are volunteers who therefore have no real stake in Tuesday’s election. Make an object lesson of one or two of them and the others will quickly find very good reasons to return to their Mah Jongg games.

This was subsequently explained to Theophilus Pedaster and Gumbo Jackson, who were assigned by a friend of theirs to deliver this object lesson.

‘Women, you say?’ said Theophilus Pedaster, giggling. ‘Young women or old women?’

‘Old women.’

Pedaster looked disappointed. Gumbo Jackson, however, did not. He was the smarter of the two and had already taken the four hundred dollars offered for the job and placed it in his pocket. ‘Young women, old women,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter. Just a leeetle lesson.’ And he grinned because it had all been carefully explained to him.

Unfortunately, someone had forgotten to explain it nearly that carefully to a little old Oriental in orange robes, who was accompanying the first group of ladies that Pedaster and Jackson confronted.

‘Give us all them leaflets,’ Pedaster had said.

‘You get one each,’ said the big-busted woman in the blue dress, who was leading the group.

‘Ah wants them all,’ Pedaster repeated.

‘You get one.’

Pedaster pulled a knife from his pocket. ‘You don’t understand. Ah needs them all.’ He looked at Gumbo Jackson who also pulled a knife.

‘Protect Chiun,’ the bosomy woman yelled, and then swung her purse up over her head, down onto Pedaster’s skull. Three women joined her, swinging their heavy pocketbooks. It was bad, man, and finally Pedaster decided he better cut somebody.

But that didn’t work either. In the mix of bodies and arms and pocketbooks, he saw an orange-robed arm flash, and his knife was gone. Worse yet, his arm was disabled. He turned toward Gumbo, just in time to see an orange flash bury deep into Gumbo’s stomach. Gumbo splatted onto the sidewalk like a fresh egg.

Pedaster looked at his lifelong closest friend there, unconscious on the ground, the women hovering over him, and he did what he had been trained to do since childhood. He fled.

Behind him, he heard the women babbling: ‘Is Chiun all right? Are you okay? These shvartzes didn’t hurt you?’

It was only when he got three blocks away that Pedaster realized Gumbo had the four hundred. Oh well, let him keep it. If he lived, he deserved it. Pedaster would have no need for it, since he was going to visit his family in Alabama. Right away.

By nightfall, every hand in the city had held a piece of Polaney Literature. The next day, every house was visited by a team of women who explained why all decent, self-respecting persons would vote only for Polaney. There were so many Polaney volunteers on the street that Cartwright workers began to feel oppressed, skulking across streets, ducking into bars, chucking their remaining literature down sewers rather than risk the wrath of the sharp-tongued women who somehow had gotten onto Polaney’s bandwagon.

And over the entire city rang the noise of the sound trucks:

‘Sunshine is Nicer.

‘Vote for Polaney.’

In the taverns and the living rooms, whose air conditioning sealed out the sound truck noises from the street, the message came pouring out of televisions and radios, saturating Miami Beach.

Vote for Polaney.

The message even found its way onto a cabin radio in a large white and silvered yacht, bobbing gently a half mile off the shore of the city.

Marshal Dworshansky angrily flipped the radio off, and turned to his daughter, immaculate and cool in a white linen pants suit.

‘I had not expected this,’ Dworshansky said, beginning to pace, his heavily muscled arms bulging under a tight blue tee shirt.

‘What?’

‘That Polaney would be able to put together such a campaign. I had not expected,’ he said reproachfully, ’that your work for him would be quite so productive.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Dorothy Walker. ‘I personally approved the commercials and the advertising because they were the worst I had ever seen. The best way for them to waste their money.’

‘Waste money? Hah,’ said the old man who, at that moment, looked old and mean. ‘That money might buy the election. We must find something else.’

Dorothy Walker stood up and smoothed the front of her pants-suit jacket. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘it is a thing I think I must do for you. We will find if this Remo has a weak spot.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘I want a hundred in a package,’ Mrs. Ethel Hirshberg told Remo. ‘Not ninety-nine. Not one hundred one. I want one hundred. So count them.’

‘You count them,’ Remo said. ‘There’s one hundred in these packages.’

‘How can there be one hundred when you don’t count them? Just reach in and grab, pull out anything and tell me it’s one hundred? I shouldn’t be like you in business, thank heavens.’

‘It’s one hundred,’ said Remo stubbornly. Ethel Hirshberg had had him at the job for over an hour now, breaking down vast boxes of brochures into stacks of 100 for wrapping and distribution to volunteers. Remo did it like a card trick, running his fingers down the side of a stack until he knew there were 100 brochures there. ‘It’s one hundred,’ he repeated.

‘But you count,’ Ethel Hirshberg said.

Chiun came out of Teri Walker’s office. He was wearing his heavy black brocaded robe and his serenity was like a force of nature.

‘Chiun,’ Remo yelled.

Chiun turned, looked at Remo without expression, and then smiled as his face came to rest on Mrs. Hirshberg.

‘Come here, will you,’ said Remo.

Mrs. Hirshberg shook her head. ‘Your father. Your father, yet, and you talk like that. Come here. No respect at all for your elders. Or your betters.’

Chiun approached them.

Remo and Ethel both tried to state their own case first.

‘I want piles of one hundred…’

‘These are piles of one hundred…’

‘So it shouldn’t hurt to count them. Just to make sure we don’t waste them…’

‘I don’t have to count them if I know there’s a hundred here.’

Chiun raised a hand on Remo’s dying words: ‘How many are in this pile, Chiun?’

Chiun looked at the pile of leaflets in front of Remo, lifted it into his hand, and said magisterially, ‘This pile contains 102 brochures.’

‘See,’ Ethel said. ‘Count them from now on.’ She walked away, and Remo said, ‘Chiun, why did you say that? You know there’s only one hundred in that pile.’

‘You are so sure? The infallible one cannot make a mistake?’

‘No, I can make a mistake, but I didn’t. There’s one hundred here.’