Power play, p.7
Power Play, page 7
“Rachmed has come to help,” Theodosia said.
“Yeah,” Pruiss said in disgust. “To help himself.”
“Wesley, give him a chance,” Theodosia said. “Can it hurt?”
Baya Bam paid no attention to her. He slowly lifted the covers on the bottom of Pruiss’s bed, exposing the publisher’s pale, thin legs to the sunlight.
He stood alongside the foot of the bed and turned his face to the sun. He raised his hands above his head and began to chant. There were occasional words in English but most of the words Remo could not understand.
“What’s he saying, Chiun?” asked Remo.
“He is saying nonsense,” Chiun said.
Baya Bam switched to English.
“Oh, almighty power of the golden orb, bring the strengthness and goodness of your peace force into these legs. Bring life where there is no life. Bring strength where there is only weakness.”
Pruiss turned his face away from Baya Bam. The look on his face would have been appropriate if he had seen the man eating spiders.
Baya Bam laid hands on Pruiss’s legs. He kneaded the muscles, then reached his hands above his head again toward the sun, as if refilling their supply of strength, and then reached down quickly, gripping Pruiss’s calf muscles and squeezing hard.
Pruiss winced.
“Ouch,” he said.
Theodosia squealed and threw her arms around his shoulders and kissed his face.
“Wesley, you felt it. You felt it,” she said excitedly.
“Huh?” said Pruiss.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “You felt his pressure on your legs. They’re not dead anymore.”
Pruiss looked stupid for a moment, then smiled and turned toward Rachmed Baya Bam. But the small Indian had turned his back to Pruiss and was again looking at the sun, now well above the string of trees bordering the first fairway of the golf course.
“Oh, holy globe,” Baya Bam said. “We thank you in the glory of your power and in showing us the way of the inner light. And we thank you for opening the eyes of this unbeliever to show him that all things wait for him who leads the good life and who glorifies your power and virtue. All hail, oh, golden one.”
He turned back and told Theodosia. “That is enough for now. We can do no more today.”
“I felt it,” Pruiss said. “I felt it. He squeezed my legs and I felt it.” He looked around to the bodyguards to share his good news with them, but, professionally, they had their backs turned to him. He saw Remo and Chiun and greeted them with a smile.
“I felt it,” he said.
“Yes, Wesley,” Theodosia said. “We know.”
She called to the three bodyguards. “All right, let’s get Mr. Pruiss inside before he catches a chill.” She pulled the bed’s covers down over his legs. The three guards came and began rolling the bed away.
She followed them but stopped to say to Remo, “I have to give Wesley the pain pills for his legs.”
Rachmed Baya Bam still stood facing the sun in the center of the putting green. Remo decided that if you put knickers and a turban on a gorilla, there would still be no trouble finding some people to call it a holy man.
“Do you want to talk to him, Chiun?” asked Remo.
“No,” said Chiun.
They went into the big building. They heard Rachmed Baya Bam following them, almost running to keep up.
They all walked past the three bodyguards, who stood in the hallway outside Pruiss’s room, and went inside. The publisher’s face broke into a smile when he saw the Indian. He nodded coolly toward Remo and Chiun. “I guess you two can stay too,” he said.
Baya Bam stood at the side of Pruiss’s bed.
“Guru,” Pruiss said. “I want to thank you. You’ve given me my first taste of hope.”
“Sirrr,” Baya Bam said. “It has nothing to do with me. I am merely the vessel through which the sun’s power is poured.”
“A fraud,” Chiun told Remo. “Next he’ll be saying that he’s the sun source.”
“The sun is the source and I am merely the conduit through which it flows,” the Indian said.
“See,” said Remo. “At least he’s more modest than you.”
“He should be,” Chiun said.
“Anything I can have, guru, you can have,” Pruiss said.
Baya Bam smiled, a smile Remo recognized as that of a man who had wired aces in a game of stud poker.
“The sun will make you whole,” Baya Bam said, “because the sun can do all things. So should you not share that goodness with all people?”
Pruiss looked dumb for a moment, then asked, “Solar energy?”
“Yesss,” said the Indian. “The sun can cure you and it will do that to make you ready for your mission in life. To bring the sun and its power to all the people of the world for their betterment.”
“That’s all you want?” Pruiss asked.
“Yes,” Baya Bam said. “That is all.” He paused. “That is a very handsome wristwatch you wear, sirrrr.”
Pruiss stripped it from his wrist and it vanished from his fingertips into the folds of Baya Bam’s pantaloons before the publisher could change his mind. Theodosia looked pained.
“You really think there’s hope?” said Pruiss.
“There is more than hope. A cure is a certainty,” the Indian said.
“Touch my legs again?”
The Indian shook his head. “Not today. Enough for today. Even the sun needs time to grow the tree.”
“That’s a good one, Chiun,” said Remo. “Why don’t you write it down so you can use it sometime?”
Chiun looked at Remo coldly. Pruiss was nodding at Baya Bam.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Theo, the solar project’s back on. And if I get cured…”
“When,” corrected Baya Bam.
“When I’m cured, I’m offering my life up to the sun. Maybe make movies about it. Work it into the pictures. Sunny Sexcapades. No. I’ll think about it. Maybe even give up the porn. Change the Gross-Outs into Sun-Spots. Serve health food. Guava jelly and some kind of crackers. No more frozen mayonaisse. Make ’em family places. Bring the lads and all.” His face looked dreamy as his voice slowly trailed off and Wesley Pruiss fell asleep on his pillow.
“Guru,” said Theodosia, “you are welcome to stay here for as long as you wish.”
“Thank you, little lady,” said Baya Bam.
“He is a fraud,” Chiun told Remo.
CHAPTER FIVE
SECURITY MEANT NOT BEING afraid when you were summoned to the boss’s office. This thought came to Will Bobbin as he walked, whistling, down the hall to the office of the director of community relations for the National Fossil Fuels Institute. He was no longer afraid: he was secure in his job.
And it had taken him a long time to achieve that goal.
When he had first come to work for the institute, he had anticipated making the oil and coal industries forward-looking, responsive to the public good. In his occasional appearances on television talk shows, he was always cool and articulate, nodding gently and concernedly when anti-oil bigots attacked the major producers, quietly awaiting his chance to systematically demolish them with impeccable logic. He fancied them as Tchaikovskian bursts of noise and himself as the gentle, precise melody of “Liebestraum.”
He had been sure his performance was being noticed upstairs. And whenever one of the presidents of an oil company had died, he had harbored the small hope—one he was unwilling to admit even to himself—that someone in the industry with foresight and imagination would recognize his merit and reach down into the ranks and snatch him up for president. And then he could show them how to run an oil company. How to make profits and still be sensitive to the public’s wishes. How to balance the bottom line for the company—profits—with the bottom line for humanity, which was “concern for the well-being of our country… nay, even for our species,” as he had once said on an interview show.
But no one had reached down to anoint him as a president, and as time went on, it slowly began to sink in that no one in the business took him seriously. His boss was fond of saying to him, while reading a report and talking on the telephone at the same time, “Yes, yes, Bobbin, that’s very interesting, send me a memo if you get a chance.”
One day, after he had been with the institute for more than ten years, he took a look around and realized that everyone who had joined the company at about the same time he had, had already been promoted upstairs while he was still in the same dead-ended job.
He thought about it for a long while and decided that the difference between them and him was that they were jingoistic fools who believed in the fossil fuels industry, right or wrong, and they would never attain his special higher form of intellectual grace. On the other hand, they were all making over fifty thousand dollars a year, and still climbing.
So Bobbin looked carefully at the industry that had obviously spurned his enlightened ideas, and he looked at the mortgage on his house and the college bills for his kids and the amount he still owed on his summer home, and he came to the decision that the fuel industry would have rewarded his genius if they had been allowed to. But they had been prevented from doing that by an avaricious American public that always wanted something for nothing and by a greedy, grasping government that wanted to steal all your profits in tax dollars so they could piss them away on the unworthy.
This Jesuitical judgment allowed Bobbin to hate the American consumer and the American government instead of the industry that had rejected him. And he hated with a passion. His voice became one of the most strident in the industry, attacking the looneys and the fuzzy-brains and the free-lunch grubbers.
Gone was the thoughtful, professorial Will Bobbin of the early days. Gone were the gentle explanations on talk shows of the oil company position. Instead, Bobbin turned into a gut fighter, always looking for an edge, shouting down opponents with performances that would have sickened him ten years earlier.
And the promotions had followed. And the raises.
Then he had developed his screening program for potential oil executives.
“What’s the point of all this?” the head of the lobby had asked him.
Bobbin had laid on him his very best, knowing, sardonic smile.
“Just to prevent the wrong land of guy from getting to run one of our companies someday,” he said.
“Oh? And what is the wrong kind of guy?”
“The kind of guy I used to be,” Bobbin said.
The head of the institute had smiled and given him the go-ahead for the program. They had used professional models in the films of the old people freezing, and then used life-sized mannikins underneath the ice for the later shots.
Bobbin supervised the filming himself and kept asking the cameraman and the director for “realism, dammit, more realism. I want to feel those old fucks shiver and twitch. I want to hear their flesh turning hard and their blood congealing. Make it realistic.”
For a few moments, Bobbin had thought of finding some old couple who were willing to enter a suicide pact and to lay a lot of money on their estate if they were willing to freeze to death on camera. But he rejected that idea because it might just to be too hard to find such a couple and he wanted to get the film shot and the program in operation as soon as possible. He could be delayed months, just to look for some old gas guzzlers who wanted to die.
The program had gone well and Will Bobbin had promotion on his mind when he walked into his boss’s office. But a look at his boss’s face had driven that idea from his mind, and for just a moment, he felt the same old twinge of fear he had felt in the early days when he was being called on the carpet.
“Bobbin, you see what this sucker’s doing?”
“Which sucker is that?”
“Wesley Pruiss.” His boss, a big man with big brutish hands with hair all up and down the backs of his fingers, waved a New York Times at Bobbin, who already had read the story. “He’s going ahead with that solar energy shit. You’d think a guy gets crippled, he’d have enough sense to do what he’s supposed to do. Go home and play with himself or something.”
“I saw the story,” Bobbin said. “Bad news.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?” Bobbin asked with a small sinking feeling.
“You said you could take care of it.”
Bobbin nodded.
“Then you better do it. There’s no room in this business, Bobbin, for weaklings who can’t see their duty and do it. You get my drift?”
Shaken, Bobbin rose to his feet and nodded. He was dismissed by a curt nod of the head. As he walked from the office, he vowed to himself that he had not come this far in the business just to have his life messed up by some porn publisher. If it turned into a question of the good life for Will Bobbin or life for Wesley Pruiss, well then Wesley Pruiss had just better duck.
· · ·
The assassin stood in the woods behind the Furlong County Golf Course. He was a small man, dressed casually in khaki slacks and a yellow sports shirt, and he would have looked like many other small men in Furlong County if it had not been for the fact that his skin, like his shirt, was yellow.
His attention was fixed on a squirrel, hopping along a felled tree. The squirrel moved a foot in a nervous hop, stopped, with his plumed tail waving about, then hopped again, all in a quick, herky-jerky movement.
Slowly, the assassin bent down and picked up a small stone in his left hand. He tossed it up into the air, about ten feet high, in the general direction of the squirrel. The stone bounced off the log behind the squirrel who took off as if propelled by a diarrhetic jet.
The animal raced the ten feet down the log, across two feet of open space, hopped onto the trunk of a fat black tree and flashed up toward safety.
The assassin’s right hand sped almost like an electric spark toward the back of the thick black leather belt he wore. In one smooth movement, he extracted a red handled knife, brought it up to his ear, and let fly.
The knife made one fast half-turn in the air and then slammed into the squirrel’s tail, ripping through the fur and flesh and burying itself an inch deep into the wood of the tree. The squirrel kept trying to climb but, pinned by the knife, was unable to move and emitted a pained, noisy shriek.
The shriek lasted only a split second, because even while the first knife was being thrown by the right hand, the assassin’s left hand was moving to the back of his belt, removing another knife, and with an identical throwing motion, winging the knife toward the spot on the tree where the squirrel futilely moved his legs.
That knife too made a lazy half-turn before the spike-sharp point buried itself into the squirrel’s small skull, cracking it with an audible split and pinning the animal to the tree. The shriek died in the animal’s throat. The assassin smiled and walked toward the tree to retrieve and clean his knives and return them to the belt of six he wore.
But the assassin’s smile was not a smile of pleasure. This had been his third squirrel of the day and he felt a lingering tinge of apprehension that his ancestors who had honed this knife-throwing art over the centuries would be disturbed if they could see that he kept his skills sharp by killing squirrels.
But soon, he thought, soon came Wesley Pruiss.
But even that did not give him much satisfaction, for a normal man was not much more to him than a squirrel. No more of a challenge. No more of a threat.
He wished instead for the days he had read about and heard about, in centuries past, when great killers were sent out to track down other great killers.
Today, he thought to his dismay, there were no great killers left to test him and to challenge his genius in a contest in which second-place meant death.
· · ·
Wesley Pruiss was sleeping when the pickets arrived. Rev. Higbe Muckley wore a long frock coat and a shirt with a frayed collar and a tie whose back strand was longer than the front.
Behind him were forty pickets, most of them carrying signs. One sign read: “Rock of Ages.”
“What the hell does that sign mean?” Remo asked Theodosia.
She came to the window and brushed her body against his, but she did not recoil at the touch. Instead, she stayed there and pressed against him harder.
“What sign?” she asked, looking down.
“The one the lunatic is carrying.”
“Be more specific.”
“‘Rock of Ages,’” Remo said. “What does that mean?”
Theodosia shrugged, a rubbing shrug that manipulated her body against Remo’s.
Pruiss woke up as the pickets, marching slowly around the building, began to sing.
“What’s going on out there?” he snarled from his bed.
“The dancing girls have arrived,” Remo said.
“Chase ’em, I’m trying to sleep.”
Their voices drifted up from below:
“…cleft for me…”
“Let me hide myself in Thee.”
“Who brought the pickets?” Pruiss asked sleepily.
“It looks like that Reverend Muckley,” Theodosia said. “The bible thumper from California.” She pressed closer to Remo.
“Well, at least it ain’t none of them lesbian libbers,” Pruiss said, before turning his face away on the pillow and closing his eyes. Remo felt Theodosia’s body stiffen slightly.
“Why’d this Reverend Muckley come here?” Remo said.
Theodosia said, with sureness. “Those goddam oil companies must have put him up to it. I think they’re behind everything that goes on around here.”
Pruiss, on the edge of sleep, mumbled something.
“What, Wesley?” Theodosia asked. But Pruiss was asleep.
“The CIA,” Remo said.
“What?”
“He said ‘the CIA.’”
The dark-haired woman shook her head. Her hair brushed against Remo’s cheek.
“Ever since Gross did an article on CIA assassins, Wesley’s been convinced the CIA is after him. If his car runs out of gas, it’s the CIA. If the tailor rips a button off his shirt, it’s the CIA. It’s like a fixation with him.”
