“Yeah. Well, forget that. Listen, have you got a cigarette?”

  “Sorry, I don’t smoke. I gave it up when the surgeon general’s report came out. I thought you represented all the danger to my health I could handle.”

  “It’s nice to be home,” Remo said. “Holler out in the hall and get me a cigarette, will you?”

  “Since when have you been smoking?”

  “On and off. Every so often,” Remo lied. He really wanted that cigarette and could not understand why. It had been years since he had smoked. Years of training had finally brought him to understand breathing was everything. All the tricks, all the magic, all the skill of Sinanju were built on breathing. Without it, nothing was possible. With it, nothing was impossible. The first thing one learned was not to breathe smoke.

  But he wanted the cigarette nevertheless.

  Smith nodded and went into the hall. While he was gone, Remo inspected the room. He realized, with a little shock, it was the same one in which he had awakened after being saved from the gimmicked electric chair.

  Sentiment? For old time’s sake? Not from Smitty. Remo was in that room because that room had been vacant. If the only vacancy had been in the boiler room, Remo would have been sleeping in the furnace between shovelfuls of coal.

  It was the usual hospital room. White. One bed, one chair, one bureau, one window. But the window was a sheet of one-way glass through which Remo could see, but which was a mirror from the outside.

  Smith came back with two cigarettes. “You owe them to the nurse in the hall. I told her you’d give them back to her. She said it was all right, but I told her you’d return them tomorrow. By the way, she thinks your name is Mr. Wilson and that Chiun is your valet.”

  “Don’t tell him that,” Remo said and yanked the cigarettes from Smith’s hand. One slipped and fell to the floor.

  Remo put the filtered cigarette to his mouth. Smith lit it from a book of matches that had exactly two matches. Remo wondered sometimes if the man was human. Two cigarettes, two matches. Smith could have taken an hour, walking the corridors looking for somebody with a free pack of matches with only two matches left in it.

  Remo took his first huge inhale as Smith retrieved the other cigarette from the floor and put it, along with the remaining match, in the bureau next to Remo’s bed.

  The first taste made Remo cough. Had it always tasted so bad? He knew it had. Back when he had been smoking, he often quit, sometimes for weeks at a time. That first puff when he weakened and went back was always a choking cough-producer, like the body’s last shout of warning before surrender. The second puff was better and halfway through the cigarette it was as if he had never stopped, not even for an hour. It was that way again.

  “Try to get me a pack, will you?” Remo said. “Put it on my room bill.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Smith said, then briefed Remo on what was happening in Boston.

  The killings were continuing. Police had shot one of the tiger people. “It was a housewife. Unfortunately, she died so we didn’t get a chance to study her and see if there’s an antidote.”

  “That’s a shame,” Remo said.

  “Now they’re screaming for massive Federal intervention, and with you and Chiun out of it, I guess there’s no alternative. What happened to you anyway?” asked Smith.

  “I was in a car with one of them. I think it was Sheila Baby, even though she looked different. She slashed my throat and tried to rip out my stomach. She did a pretty good job.”

  “What about her?”

  “I bopped her up some, but she got away,” Remo said.

  Smith felt a weight plummet from his gullet into his stomach. Remo was his best and had almost been killed. What hope did anyone else have? There was no limit to the number of tiger people Sheila Feinberg could make. Now each one of her pack was a new source of genetic material for others. The only way out would be to kill all the pack and make sure to eliminate Sheila Feinberg. Without her scientific knowledge, the geometric progression would stop.

  But who could do it? If not Remo, who? Martial law, if imposed, was hardly likely to turn up Sheila and her tiger people. They looked like ordinary humans. FBI agent Hallahan proved that. On the day he had tried to kill Remo and Chiun, he had been working at his desk, just as he had every other day.

  But if they weren’t stopped and soon, before long, it would not be just Boston in peril. They could get in a car or on a plane and go anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. You couldn’t put the whole planet earth under martial law.

  And even if you could, it probably wouldn’t work.

  The key was getting Sheila Feinberg first. That would stop the creation of new monsters. Then the existing ones could be hunted to ground, slowly but surely.

  “Are you going to go back after her?” Smith asked. “Will you be able to?”

  “Huh?” said Remo. He had not been listening. He was watching smoke rise from the glowing tip of the cigarette, savoring the taste.

  “Can you go back after Feinberg, I said?”

  “I don’t know,” Remo said. “I’m pretty weak. I seem to have lost my edge. And I don’t think Chiun would let me go. He’s pretty spooked about some kind of legend.”

  “Chiun is always disturbed about some legend or other,” Smith said.

  “Even if I found her again, I don’t know what I could do with her,” Remo said. “I couldn’t get her the last time.”

  “You could call for help,” Smith said.

  Remo looked at him, angrily for a moment, as if Smith had attacked his competence. Then the look faded. After all, why not call for help? If he ever met Sheila again, he would need it.

  “I don’t know, Smitty,” he said.

  “Why did they come after you anyway?” Smith asked. “I mean, they shouldn’t have thought you posed some kind of special threat to them. Even after you wounded Feinberg. Why not just leave you alone? If they’re really animals, revenge doesn’t make any sense. That’s human, not animal. Animals escape danger. They don’t go back just to get even.”

  “Maybe they just like me. Me and my winning ways,” Remo said.

  “Dubious, dubious. Highly dubious,” Smith said as Remo sucked one last lungful of smoke, saw the cigarette’s glow reach the plastic filter which melted from white threads into dried tan glue, and stubbed the butt out in the ashtray.

  “I’ll leave you now,” said Smith.

  “Don’t forget that pack of cigarettes,” Remo said, but Smith did not hear him.

  He was staring at a problem to which he already knew the answer but did not want to face.

  He was hunting the Sheila Feinberg pack and the pack was hunting Remo. To get them, he would have to use Remo as bait.

  It was clear and logical and left no alternatives. It was risk Remo, or risk the rest of the country, the rest of the world.

  Smith knew what he had to do. It was what he had always done. His duty.

  The trap was set with a classified advertisement in the Boston Times.

  “S.F. Patient is at Folcroft, Rye.”

  There was little subtlety about the trap and when one of her pack showed the ad to Sheila Feinberg, she knew it for what it was.

  “It’s a trap,” she said.

  “So we’ll ignore it,” said the other woman, a buxom brunette with narrow hips and long legs. “There is plenty of meat in Boston.”

  But the age-old instinct of survival before all else gave way in Sheila Feinberg to another instinct—the longing to reproduce one’s kind. She smiled sweetly at the woman, showing long white teeth that looked as if they had been polished by chewing through soft bone and said, “No. We won’t ignore it. We will go. I want that man.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  REMO LOOKED AT THE high ceiling of the Folcroft gymnasium, its climbing ropes lashed up like a telephone circuit’s cluster of wires, then scuffed the tip of his Italian loafer across the highly varnished floor.

  “This is where we first met,” Chiun said. He wore a yellow morning robe and looked about the gymnasium as if it were a favored son.

  “Yeah,” said Remo. “And I tried to kill you.”

  “That is correct,” said Chiun. “Right then I knew there was something about you I might be able to tolerate.”

  “But I wasn’t able to do it and you slapped me down good,” Remo said.

  “I remember. It was very satisfying.”

  “You would think so,” said Remo.

  “And then I taught you karate tricks and made them seem important.”

  “I never understood why you did that, Chiun,” Remo said. “What did karate have to do with Sinanju?”

  “Nothing. But I knew these lunatics would never give me enough time to teach you anything correctly. So I gave you karate, which I thought you might be able to remember. But if I had said, this is karate it is useless foolishness for attacking anything except a piece of soft pine shelving would you have listened? No. One must always feel that a gift has some value. I told you that karate was wonderful, marvelous, and would make you invincible. Then I proved it by attacking boards and doing tricks. Only that way could I manage to capture your attention for the five minutes a day necessary to teach you that game. How did they ever manage to toilet train you, Remo, when you forget everything so quickly?”

  “Can that, Little Father. And then I left you and went out to kill the recruiter.”

  Chiun nodded. “Yes. He was a good man, MacCleary. He had courage and intelligence.”

  “He picked me,” Remo said.

  “He had almost enough courage and intelligence to overcome his lapses in judgment,” Chiun said.

  “Since then it’s been you and me, Chiun. How many years?”

  “Twenty-seven,” Chiun said.

  “It hasn’t been twenty-seven. Ten. Twelve. Fourteen outside,” Remo said.

  “It seems like twenty-seven,” Chiun said. “I started out a young man. I gave you my youth, my best years. They have been frittered away in irritation, annoyance, a lack of true and proper respect, wasted on someone who eats meat and sneaks cigarettes like a child.”

  Remo, who did not know that Chiun had noticed his smoking, said quickly, “It was only a couple. I wanted to see how they tasted after all these years.”

  “How did they taste?”

  “Wonderful,” Remo said.

  “You give up the breathing so you can inhale particles of burning horse dung? This is truth, Remo, they make those things from horse and cow droppings.”

  “They make them from tobacco and, no, I don’t mean to give up my breathing. Can’t I do both?”

  “How can you breathe? Breathing involves air but your big white mouth is busy taking in smoke. They only tell you they make them out of tobacco. It is horse and cow droppings. This is the American way, the big profit that makes your whole country work.”

  “You sound like a Communist.”

  “Do they smoke cigarettes?” asked Chiun.

  “Yes. Made from horse and cow droppings. I’ve had them.”

  “Then I am no Communist. Just a poor, underpaid, misunderstood teacher who has failed to win the respect of his student.”

  “I respect you, Chiun.”

  “Quit smoking.”

  “I will.”

  “Good.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  In front of Chiun a pair of gymnastic rings hung from ceiling ropes. Without turning toward Remo, he swiped his hands at the hard plastic rings. They swung past him, their speed a blur, aimed at Remo’s head like a boxer’s one-two punch. Remo saw the one coming from the right side first. He slipped to the left to avoid it, and was hit in the forehead by the ring moving from the left. As he straightened up, the right ring, returning to its starting position hit him in the back of the head.

  Chiun looked at him with disgust.

  “Keep smoking. When they come for you, they will have you like a pork chop.”

  “You that sure they’ll come for me?” asked Remo, rubbing his head.

  “They will come. You are without hope. And don’t ask me to help because I can’t stand your breath.”

  He walked past Remo, out of the gymnasium. Remo, still rubbing his head, looked at the gently swinging rings and wondered if he had lost that much of his edge already.

  Smith posted extra guards in the corridor outside Remo’s room and distributed photos of Dr. Sheila Feinberg to be posted on the wall of Folcroft’s gatehouse. If the woman appeared, she was to be admitted without question but Smith was to be notified at once.

  Smith thought of assigning a personal bodyguard to Remo to stay with him all the time, but realized Chiun would regard it as an insult. Assigning a guard to Remo, with Chiun around, would be like adding a Boy Scout patrol to the Seventh Army for added firepower.

  There was nothing to do but wait. Smith did, in his office, reading the latest reports on two more deaths in Boston during the night. The governer had just declared martial law, which meant the city would be almost as well protected and patrolled as it had been before policemen were required to practice psychiatry, social work, and redemption. If Dostoyevsky were alive today, he thought, he would have entitled his masterpiece just Crime. Crime and Punishment would have no meaning to most of the general public. They had never heard of punishment.

  Smith waited.

  · · ·

  There had been nine years of hard decisions, made cleanly and promptly. Now, when it had all been done and had come to this, Jacki Bell couldn’t decide whether to wear the man-tailored brown suit, which had the virtue of being professional-looking, or the yellow scoop-neck dress, which had the virtue of being cool.

  She opted for cool and as she dressed thought how lucky she had been. Lucky enough to get out of a debilitating marriage, lucky enough to stay afloat financially during school years, lucky and smart enough to tough it out and become Jacki Bell, B.A., Jacki Bell, M.A., and finally Jacqueline Bell, Ph.D.

  Dr. Jacqueline Bell.

  Her luck still held, right up to reading the American Psychoanalytical Journal and finding the advertisement for a job at Folcroft Sanatarium. There had been many applicants but she’d been lucky enough to get the job from Doctor Smith.

  If anybody asked her who she thought should be her first patient in therapy at Folcroft, she would pick Harold W. Smith without hesitation.

  Throughout the interview he had spoken without looking at her. He had been reading some kind of reports that came in over a computer terminal on his desk. He had stared at a telephone as if expecting it to leap in the air and try to strangle him. He had drummed pencils, looked out his strangely brown-tinted windows, and finally, after asking her the same question three times, told her the job was hers.

  As she inspected herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door in the three-room apartment she’d been lucky to find, she shrugged. There were worse cases in the world than Doctor Smith, she supposed. At least he had enough sanity left to hire her.

  She had tried to find out what his doctorate was in because he did not have M.D. after his name on the door. But he had not volunteered any information, except to tell her she would be on her own. He would not look over her shoulder. He would not question her professional decisions, and in fact would be most happy if he never had to talk to her again.

  That would be okay with her too. He’d get no complaints from her. She counted herself lucky to get the job.

  It used to be that a bachelor’s degree would guarantee a job. Then college classrooms turned into places that ladled out “relevant education”—like courses in soap opera for students who could barely read and write—and the B.A. was devalued. It took a master’s degree to get a job. Then the same thing happened to the master’s degree.

  So it took a Ph.D. to get a job. But only for awhile. Soon it too was considered worthless. People who hired others went back to using Tennessee Windage and simple reading and writing tests to determine what potential employee might be able to find his way to work in the morning without a keeper. No degree guaranteed a job any more because no degree guaranteed that its holder had an education that went beyond one-two-three-many.

  The only good thing about it all, Jacki Bell reflected, was that the doctors of education who started it all were in the same bag. They found their doctorates were meaningless too and they had trouble getting work. Of course, being educated men, they decided they had nothing to do with it. It was all the fault of the evil, corrupt, capitalist society.

  She remembered something she had read once in a book of political essays: “He who creates the deluge often gets wet.”

  Dr. Jacqueline Bell approved of her image in the mirror and brushed imaginary lint off her left shoulder.

  The doorbell rang.

  She was not expecting anyone but it might be someone from the sanitarium. Because she had not grown up in New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles, she went right to the door and opened it without asking who was there.

  A woman stood there, a beautiful woman with long blonde hair, eyes that slanted in an almost feline fashion, and a body so breathtakingly and breakneckedly poured into her clothes she made Jacki feel instant-tacky. The woman smiled showing the most perfect white teeth Jacki had ever seen.

  “Doctor Bell?” the woman asked.

  Jacki nodded.

  “I’m glad to meet you. I’m Doctor Feinberg.”

  “Oh. Are you from Folcroft?”

  “Yes. They asked me to stop by and pick you up on my way in this morning.”

  “This is my lucky day,” Jacki said. “It’s so hot out there I don’t relish the walk.” She stood aside and waved Dr. Feinberg into the apartment. “We’re early by the way,” Jacki said. “Have you eaten yet? Why not have a bite with me?”

  Sheila Feinberg’s smile broadened as she entered the apartment.

  “Exactly what I had in mind,” she said.

  Chiun said “Why are those people in blue uniforms in the halls? Did you put them there?”

  “That is correct, Master of Sinanju,” Smith said formally.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17