Warren Murphy: Mafia Fix

Remo looked down at the desk and saw the crocheting. "Hey, look," he said, "crocheting." He picked up the needle and the thread. "That's pretty good. Really, fella, that's pretty good. You keep practicing and pretty soon they'll be able to sell them. It's good for people like you to make a buck. Makes you feel worthwhile, doesn't it? Not like you're a burden on someone."

He leaned forward toward Gasso. "Come on," he whispered. "You can tell me. How do you get all that hair to grow? I won't tell anybody. It's not a wig, is it? I mean a body-sized wig is too much. Maybe some kind of astro-turf. Does it hurt your knees when you run? Do you have knees? It's hard to tell. I mean, I can see you don't have any wrists, but I can't see your knees. If you have knees."

He turned back to Willie the Plumber. "C'mon, you probably know. Does this thing have knees? It's important, so think carefully before you answer. If it doesn't have any knees, it might be a whole new species. We might make a buck. Imagine, finding a whole new species."

Of all the things Willie did not want, the thing he did not want most was to be drawn into this lunatic's conversation. Among the other things he did not want was to show anything that looked like a smile. He did not want to even look as if he had been listening.

So his mind worked fast and finally he said, "Just shut your face. Mr. Gasso asked you a question."

"Question? Oh yeah, how do I want to die?" Remo turned and looked at Gasso. "Well, guns kind of take the fun out of it and you might get disfigured if we used knives. And I wouldn't want that to happen, at least not until the museum gets its people over here to look at you."

Remo shrugged. "Anything you want's all right with me. How about clubs? Is your species using clubs yet?"

Willie the Plumber watched. Mr. Gasso was about to speak. Maybe he was about to send Willie the Plumber away. Gasso's mouth moved, but again he addressed his words to Remo Barry. "Last guy talked like that I pulled his arms out. He didn't make no more jokes after that."

"Guess not," Remo said...

"But I got something better for you."

"Oh? I wonder what it could be?" Remo snapped his fingers. "I know. You're going to give me a doily. All for myself. Hey, fella, that's really nice of you too. I know how long it takes you people to do a thing like this, trying to coordinate your fingers and all, and I want you to know I really appreciate it."

Gasso spoke again. "Willie the Plumber, you can go. You too, Lillisio." To Willie, he said, "Come back in the morning, so you can pick up what's left of him and get rid of it someplace."

He stopped momentarily, then asked, "You checked him for a gun?"

"Yes, Mr. Gasso," Willie the Plumber said. "He ain't carrying."

"Okay. Get out of here now. This comedian's gonna start talking and he's gonna tell me who sent him."

Willie the Plumber and Lillisio set a new world's record for trans-warehouse flight. When the door clicked closed behind them, Gasso reached into his pocket and pulled out a brass key. "This unlocks the door. If you can take it off me, you win. You can go." He put the key back in his pocket.

Remo said, "I'm not going to take it off you. You're going to give it to me."

"Why?" Gasso asked.

"So that I'll stop the pain."

Gasso lunged. His tree trunk arms encircled Remo around the chest, under Remo's arms.

"First, I'm going to take some of the snot out of you, buddy," Gasso grunted. "Then I'm going to peel your skin like an orange." He locked his hands behind Remo and squeezed. He gave it the hundred per cent squeeze, guaranteed to crack ribs and bring on unconsciousness.

Remo reached behind him with his hands and encircled the parts of Gasso's arms that would, on a normal person, be wrists. He concentrated on his hands and blanked his mind so that nothing existed for him but his hands and he remembered one of Chiun's innumerable chants, "I am created Shiva, the destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds," then he began to pull Gasso's arms apart.

Gasso's fingers felt slippery and then he felt the fingers began to slide. One hand gave up its hold on the other and his hands separated. It had never happened before. He roared and tried to close his arms again, but this punk-this Barry-had him and slowly, like a giant machine, he was pulling Gasso's arms apart. Then Gasso's arms were at his sides, then extended out by his shoulders and this Remo punk was smiling at him and still pressuring. Then Gasso felt his shoulder muscles begin to give. They were tearing and the arms were pulling out of the sockets. The pain was excruciating and Gasso screamed, a blood-curdling scream that resounded through the empty warehouse and then echoed off the ceiling and the walls, fed on its own intensity and carried even to outdoors, where Willie the Plumber Palumbo was just closing the door of his Eldorado behind him.

Willie the Plumber stopped for a moment when he heard the scream, then closed the door. Willie was careful to say the correct thing because he did not know if Lillisio might be the kind of guy to carry stories back. So he said, "I feel sorry for the poor bastard. But he shouldn't oughta made fun of Mr. Gasso."

And Willie drove away quickly. He did not want to hear more. He had been told to come back in the morning to dispose of what was left and his stomach was churning at the thought of what that would look like.

Poor Remo Barry.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

There are two hundred six bones in the human body. It was the kind of fact that Don Dominic Verillio remembered, and it was in large measure responsible for the reputation he had among his Mafia underlings for erudition and culture.

Don Dominic also felt he had a logical mind. Since there were two hundred six bones in the human body and since Gaetano Gasso was-despite his appearance-a human being, it therefore followed that Gaetano Gasso had two hundred six bones in his body also.

And every one of them was broken.

Don Dominic Varillio was not a religious man. It is true that he went to church every Sunday and on every holy day of obligation, but he went as a business investment. As a community leader, he must lead a community leader's life. He must be God-fearing and religious. In his true business as Capo Mafioso, the knowledge among his troops that he was a religious man could often compensate for some particular ghastly thing that Verillio, as the leader of leaders, must do or order done.

So he was not really a religious man. But he now crossed himself as he looked down upon the body of what was once Gaetano Gasso.

The body that only fifteen hours earlier had been a solid lump of muscle now looked like jello slowly melting inside an ill-fitting man-shaped sausage casing. It had been pulverized into a bag of mush.

The arms were flung out wildly and where arms normally transcribed only angles, Gasso's arms were bent into true curves, which was only possible because the bones that normally lent arms their rigidity, had been broken. And broken. And broken again.

And so had the legs and the ribs and the head. But that by itself was not enough to make Don Dominic Verillio bless himself and make the sign of the cross.

Growing out of the center of Gasso's forehead like a horrible antenna was a silver crochet hook, driven through the bone, into the brain, by some force that Don Dominic Verillio could not imagine. But that by itself was not enough to make Don Dominic Verillio bless himself.

What made Verillio utter a silent prayer, to whatever god might be out there who was still unattached and could fight on his side, was this:

Gaetano Gasso was naked. A white doily he had been crocheting had been dropped carefully over his private parts. Ordinarily, its white colour would have stood out starkly against the black hair that coated Gasso's body from head to toe. But it did not now because Gasso's hair was no longer black. The hair on his head, and on his shoulders and chest and stomach and legs and feet and arms was white. Snow white.