Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

Remo heard it all and when Chiun was finished, he said:

‘I don’t like to kill people, Little Father. Not really, not always and not often.’

‘Drivel,’ said Chiun. ‘Who likes to kill? Does a surgeon like or dislike a liver? Does one of your mechanics like or dislike a motor? Of course not. And I would just as soon sit in peace with the world and give love to one and all who passed.’

‘That’s hard to believe, Chiun. I mean, what with what happens to anyone interrupting your shows and everything, know what I mean.’

‘I am not discussing my meagre pleasures,’ said Chiun angrily. Remo knew that when Chiun was imagining himself as a sweet, delicate blossom, to remind him that he was the world’s most deadly assassin was a breach of etiquette.

‘I too would like never to raise my hand again,’ Chiun said. ‘But this cannot be so, and so I do what every man should do. His job as well as he can. That is what I do.’

‘We’ll never agree, Little Father. Not on that.’

And the matter appeared decided, until a late night newscast where Remo saw why the condition red. He watched the reporter question the Presidential aide, and when the word Folcroft came up, Remo became hysterical.

‘I wish I could have seen Smitty’s face when he heard that,’ said Remo laughing. But he did not laugh long for he did see the face of Dr. Harold W. Smith. Television cameras had been denied admittance to the grounds of Folcroft Sanitarium but a telephoto lens had captured a look at Dr. Smith as he walked, hands behind his back, toward the waters of Long Island Sound. His face was his usual mask of calm, but Remo knew that underneath it was a great sadness. And seeing the head of CURE weak and helpless like that, Remo felt a rage he never knew he possessed. It was all right for him to hate, possibly even to verbally abuse Smith, but he didn’t like to see anyone else do it, particularly a country which would never know the debt it owed to Smith. He watched the TV set until Smith vanished behind the back of the sanatorium’s main building.

Then he called out: ‘Chiun, I want to talk to you about something. I’ve got a little surprise for you.’

‘I am already packed,’ said the Master of Sinanju. ‘What took you so long to change your mind?’

CHAPTER FIVE

Getting off the plane at the Dade County Airport was like walking into a hot towel.

‘Eccchhh,’ said Remo but Chiun said not a word. He had made it clear that so long as Remo got him to a television set by 11.30 a.m., he did not care where they stayed or how they travelled. He did not like to talk before his shows.

Remo carried all his clothes in a fat attaché case. For Chiun, they had to wait at a luggage wheel inside the airport. A chute vomited the luggage contents of each plane onto a revolving belt, around which passengers stood, waiting, looking for their suitcases and boxes and packages.

In the general jostle at the luggage wheel, Chiun made his way to the lip of the revolving belt, and although he looked like a frail feather in a herd of cattle, nevertheless he managed neither to be pushed aside nor ignored.

‘Who’s helping that poor old man?’ asked a hefty woman with a Bronx accent.

‘It’s all right,’ said Chiun. ‘I will manage.’

‘He doesn’t need your help, lady,’ said Remo. ‘Don’t fall for it.’

'That is my strong young son who makes aged father bear heavy burdens,’ Chiun confided to the woman.

‘He doesn’t look like you,’ said the woman.

‘Adopted,’ whispered Chiun.

A large red lacquered trunk with shiny brass trimmings came forth from the chute.

‘That is ours,’ said Chiun to the woman.

‘Hey, you. You gonna help your father with the luggage?’ the woman cried out angrily.

Remo shook his head. ‘No. But you will.’ He turned his back on the luggage wheel and strolled to a newsstand and it was here that he realized how much he had come to rely upon CURE in his assignments.

There would be no reports waiting for him on who was where or doing what or who was vulnerable because of something in his past. There would be no new name with new credit cards and a secure house. There would be no analysis of the problem by Smith, and as he purchased the two local newspapers, he realized how alone he really was.

The eyes and ears of CURE had been put to sleep. Remo read the headlines. It was now called ‘The League Affair’.

What Remo gathered from the newspapers was that somehow, notes on what the Greater Florida Betterment League had really been doing had gotten into the hands of a minor local politician, a functionary in the election bureau. He was making all the charges.

According to the local politician, the secret notes proved that a secret organization called Folcroft was conducting political espionage in Miami Beach. The espionage was financed by the federal government and its goal was to indict the mayor and current city administration.

‘Worse than Watergate,’ said the local politician who said he had access to the secret notes and would release them at the proper time. The politician’s name was Willard Farger. Remo put down the papers. All he knew was that the papers had printed that a lot of people said a lot of things.

There was no scale of verification, no scale of probability, none of the intensive checks and counter-checks that had gone into the knowing of something. What did he really know?

That a Willard Farger, who was a political cohort of the present administration, had said a lot of things and probably had access to the notes compromising CURE. Remo shrugged. It was a good enough beginning.

He picked up the paper again. A League employee had been murdered. The sheriff did not deny that it could be Folcroft agents. There was an editorial. ‘Government by Assassins?’

Remo would have to show that one to Chiun, who had once reasoned that the ideal form of government was that where the ablest assassin ruled. Remo smiled. The Master of Sinanju, in his governmental philosophy, was not unlike businessmen who believed government should be run by businessmen, or social workers who believed governments should be run as a social program, or generals who thought that military men made the best presidents, or even like the philosopher Plato who, while outlining the ideal form of government, said its leader should be, surprise, surprise, ‘a philosopher king’.

Willard Farger, thought Remo, if you have ever talked in your political career, you will talk to me. You’re a good beginning, Remo folded the papers under his arm. If CURE were still working, he could have had press identification if he wanted.

‘Hello, Mr. Farger, I want to interview you.’ Wham. Bam.

Press identification. Remo mulled the thought, and discarded immediately his first idea of a pre-dawn approach to Farger’s bedroom. Farger himself would be deluged with reporters. He looked at the paper again. On Page 7, there was a picture. The Farger family at home. And there was pudgy-faced Mrs. Farger, sucking in her cheeks and angling in at the camera to look slimmer, leaning forward, in front of her husband. In front of him, Remo thought. The way to Willard Farger, he realized, would be through Mrs. Farger.

Remo threw the papers into a waste basket and looked over to the luggage wheel. Sure enough, five vacationers were sweating and groaning under the large trunks which contained Chiun’s kimonos; his television taping machine; his sleeping mat; his autographed picture of Rad Rex, star of As the Planet Revolves; his special rice. In all there were 157 kimonos and six trunks. Remo had told Chiun to pack light.

The hefty woman, perspiring under one of the trunks, said to a young boy: ‘That’s him. That’s the old man’s adopted son. Won’t even help the old man after all the old man has done for him.’