Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

‘So? For two brochures, you argue with volunteer labour? Does one win war by losing all battles?’

‘Dammit, Chiun, I can’t let that woman browbeat me any more. I’ve been working here forever. One hundred is one hundred. Why should I count them when I can finger-weigh them?’

‘Because if you do not count them, all our ladies will walk out the door. Then what will you do? Go back to foolish child’s plan of partial violence against the enemy? A plan that will most likely destroy you? And your Mr. Polaney? Does he just go back, quietly, to losing?’

‘Chiun, I liked it better when we were losing.’

‘Losers always like it better when losing. The act of winning takes not only discipline but morality.’

‘The morality of saying one hundred is really one hundred and two?’ Remo asked.

‘The morality of saying it is two hundred and fourteen if that is necessary.’

‘Chiun, you are despicable.’

‘You are sloppy and that is worse. While this pack does contain one hundred, that one contains only ninety-nine.’

He pointed to another stack of brochures, seven feet away on the long table.

‘Wrong, Chiun. One hundred.’

‘Ninety-nine.’

‘You’ll see,’ Remo said. He leaned over, snatched up the suspect pile, and began to count them loudly onto the table. ‘One. Two. Three.’

As he counted, Chiun walked away, back toward Mrs. Hirshberg’s desk.

‘He understands now,’ Chiun said gently. ‘You see, he is not really bad. Just lazy.’

Over the room came Remo’s voice.

‘Seventeen.

‘Eighteen.

‘Nineteen.’

‘Like so many young people today,’ Ethel Hirshberg said, consoling Chiun. ‘I never thought to ask. Can he count to one hundred?’

‘He needs only to reach ninety-nine with that pile,’ Chiun said.

‘Twenty-five.

‘Twenty-six,

‘Twenty-seven.’

Dorothy Walker seemed to exude cool breezes as she came through the door, crisp and fresh in a white suit, and paused at Mrs. Hirshberg’s desk.

‘Is Remo in?’ she said.

Ethel Hirshberg raised a finger to her lips. ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘He is busy right now.’

‘Forty-seven.

‘Forty-eight.

‘Forty-nine.’

‘Will he be done soon?’ Dorothy Walker said, looking at Remo, whose head was down over the table in intense concentration.

‘He’s only got fifty more to count,’ Mrs. Hirshberg said. ‘For him, another fifteen minutes?’

‘I’ll wait.’

‘Please do.’

‘Sixty-four.

‘Sixty-five.

‘Sixty-six.’

As Dorothy Walker waited, her eyes roamed the headquarters, quietly impressed by the efficiency and organization with which more than two dozen volunteers were carrying out logistical work.

‘Ninety-seven.

‘Ninety-eight.

‘Ninety-nine.

‘NINETY-NINE?’

Remo looked up and saw Dorothy Walker. He smiled toward her and approached.

‘Yes?’ Chum said.

‘Yes, what?’

‘You have nothing to say?’

‘What’s to say?’

‘There were how many?’ Chiun asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Remo said.

‘You don’t know?’

‘I don’t know. I got tired and stopped counting at ninety-nine.’

Of the next words, Remo recognized a few. He would ignore Chiun. Remo, at least, would not stoop to petty bickering.

Dorothy Walker smiled at him. ‘I thought I’d see how the winner lives,’ she said.

‘You think so?’ Remo said.

‘You can’t miss.’

‘Just so long as Albert Einstein here doesn’t count the votes,’ Mrs. Hirshberg interrupted.

‘Come on,’ Remo said to Dorothy Walker. ‘These lower-echelon types don’t understand us creative people.’

‘Is Teri around?’

‘She said everything was in the can for tomorrow’s commercials and advertisements. She was going out of town to stay with a friend, and she said she’d see us tomorrow night at the TV studio,’ Remo said.

Dorothy Walker nodded. ‘I’ll talk to her tomorrow,’ she said.

She let Remo lead her out. He enjoyed it. She looked good and smelled even nicer—a fresh, crisp floral scent.

The scent was even stronger in his nostrils later, in Dorothy Walker’s apartment, when she took from his hand the glass she had put there, pressed her body against his and planted her mouth on his.

She stayed locked there a long time, exuding her clean aroma into Remo’s nostrils. He watched a tiny pulse in her temple increase its speed.

She stopped, and led Remo by the hand out onto the balcony of the penthouse. Up there, above the lights of the strip, the night was black. She still held Remo’s hand as, with her other hand, she stretched out far to the left and then swept around past the sea in front of them, then further on, until her hand swung in front of Remo and came up onto his shoulder. She leaned her head against his upper arm.

‘Remo, this could all be ours,’ she said.

‘Ours?’

‘I’ve decided that my firm is going to open a political division, and I want you to head it.’

Remo, who knew that he had obvious political skills and was pleased that they were recognized, paused a moment, then said, ‘Sorry. That’s not my line.’

‘Just what is your line?’

‘I like to move from place to place, doing good wherever I go,' he said, feeling for a moment that it was true, and sensing the satisfaction the same lie always gave Chiun.

‘Let’s not fool each other, Remo,' she said. ‘I know you feel the same attraction for me that I do for you. Now how can we be together? To satisfy that attraction? How and where and when?’

To which Remo replied, ‘How about here and now? Like this.’

He had her there, on the smooth tile of the balcony, their own body smells mingling and strengthening the cool flowered smell of Dorothy Walker. To Remo, it was a parting gift. She would go on to become a political manager; Remo, he knew, would go back to doing what he did—being the second-best assassin in the world. It would have been heartless of him, not to give her some way to remember him in those empty years she faced ahead.

So he gave of himself, until she shuddered and lay, smiling still, beneath him.

And later, she said, ‘This is a dirty business, this politics, Remo. Let’s forget Polaney. Let’s go now.’

Remo watched the stars blink in the blackness overhead and said, ‘Too late now. There’s no turning back.’

‘Just an election?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Not just an election. First, I elect Polaney. And then I do what I really came to do.’

‘It’s that important?’ she said. ‘This thing that you do?’

‘I don’t know whether it’s important or not,’ he said. ‘But it’s what I do, and so I do it. I guess it’s important.’

And then he had her again.

When the door clicked shut behind him, Dorothy Walker rose and went to the telephone. Her number came through quickly.

‘Papa,’ she said. ‘This Remo is your government man, and I don’t think there’s any way to make him back off. He believes in what he’s doing.’

Then: ‘Yes, Papa, I suppose there is always that way. It’s just truly a shame. He is a man like you, papa.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

‘For my next number, I would like to play Nola. I would also like to play the Flight of the Bumblebee. Since I can’t play either of them, I’ll try to play My Old Kentucky Home.’

Mac Polaney was wearing frayed bottom shorts, sneakers with no socks, a red shirt, and a baseball cap with a script B on it that looked like an old Brooklyn Dodger issue.

He sat on a wooden stool, braced his long woodcutting saw against one foot, and began to stroke it with a violin bow. The wailing the ramin sound it made was a reasonable facsimile of My Old Kentucky Home.