Destroyer 030 - Mugger Blood

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DESTROYER #30: MUGGER BLOOD

For Maralyn who is beautiful, gracious, literate, charming, intelligent, strong and a

precious, precious friend.

Mugger Blood

Chapter One

At first she thought she was back in Nazi Germany. A ringing black starshine of pain was

at her left eye where the boy had stuck the ice pick. She could not see left anymore.

She remembered the Gestapo. But this could not be the Gestapo. The Gestapo had clean

fingernails and asked clear questions and let you know that if you told them what they

wanted, they would stop the pain.

The Gestapo wanted to know where Gerd was and she did not know where Gerd was. She kept

saying it. But these tormenters kept saying "tawk Murican." They meant talk American.

They smelled different, these boys. You could smell them. She had told this to Mrs.

Rosenbloom at the high school auditorium where the New York City Police Department had

sent over someone for a morning talk. It was safe sometimes in the morning.

The police, who thought they should get more money from a near-bankrupt city, were now

teaching the

elderly how to get mugged. You didn't resist, they told you. You gave up your purse.

There was a police lieutenant showing how to loosely fasten the straps so that the

mugger would not think you were trying to hold onto your purse.

"I can smell them too" Mrs. Rosenbloom had said that morning. But she cautioned Mrs.

Mueller not to mention anything. "They'll say that's racist and it is bad. You're not

allowed to be racist in this country."

Mrs. Mueller nodded. She did not want to be a racist because that was a bad thing. The

Nazis were that way and they were bad. She had seen what they had done and as a good

Christian she could not support them. Nor could her husband Gerd.

They had wanted to reach Gerd. But Gerd was dead. A long time ago, Gerd was dead. Mrs.

Mueller felt a kick in her chest. The Nazis were gone. These were blacks.

She wanted to beg the black boys not to kick her anymore. Not in the breasts. Was that

what was taught in the auditorium by the New York City police? She tried to remember.

Her hands were tied behind her with the electric cord. No. The police did not tell you

what to do when they tied you up and put out your eye with an ice pick.

The New York City police told you how to get mugged. They never gave old people lectures

on how to get killed. Maybe if they got more money, they would teach you how to be

murdered as well as mugged. Mrs. Mueller thought these things in a pain-crazed mind that

blended Nazi Germany and her slum apartment.

She wanted to tell the laughing black boys to kick her somewhere else. Not in the

breasts because that hurt too much. Would it be racist to ask blacks to kick you

somewhere else? She did not want to be a racist. She saw what racism had done.

But Jews never beat her up. You never had to fear for your life in a Jewish

neighborhood. This had been a Jewish neighborhood when she and Gerd had moved in. They

were German and thought there might be some trouble because of what the Nazis had done.

There was no trouble. There was no trouble with the Irish who had lived two blocks over.

Or the Poles. Or the Italians on the other side of the Grand Concourse.

But then a law was passed. And. the law said it was bad to keep people out of

neighborhoods. Black people. And everyone was to be taught to do the right thing. This

was America. Everyone had to do the right thing.

A woman had come to talk. She taught at a university. She had told everyone in the

community center about George Washington Carver, a black man, and all the other nice

black people and how good blacks were and how bad people who hated them were and it was

a bad thing to hate blacks. Gerd, who was alive then, had translated for Mrs. Mueller.

He was so smart. He knew so much and learned so quickly. He had been an engineer. If he

were alive, maybe he could make the boys understand not to kick her in the breasts but

somewhere else. No, they didn't want anything. They were just having fun with her old

body.

The woman who had told everyone how nice blacks were, was the woman from the university.

It was a progressive and good thing to welcome blacks to the neighborhood. The whites

and blacks were all going to be culturally enriched. When the blacks started moving in

and you could not walk the streets at night anymore, the people from the university who

said how nice it was to live with blacks did not come around. At first, they did not

come around at night. Then when more blacks moved in, they did not come around during

the day either. They went off somewhere else, Gerd said, to tell other people how nice

it was to live with blacks.

They never came to Walton Avenue anymore to tell people how culturally enriched they

were to have blacks around them because now it was almost all blacks.

The ones who had money could run. But Gerd did not have enough money anymore and they

did not want to bother their daughter who had come to them late in life. Born in America

she was. So pretty. She could speak English so well. Maybe she could ask these boys not

to kick her mother in the breasts where it hurt so much. Would that be racist? She

didn't want to be. a racist. That was a bad thing. But she didn't want to be kicked in

the breasts.

She wished the black policeman were here. He would make them stop. There were nice

blacks. But you were not allowed to say there were nice blacks, because that would mean

there were blacks who weren't nice. And that would be racist.

It used to be such a nice neighborhood where you could walk out in the street. Now you

trembled when you had to walk past a window that was not boarded up.

She felt the warm blood of her ripped breast come down her belly and she tasted the

blood come up her throat and she moaned and heard them laugh at her frail struggle to

live. She felt as if her back had nails in it. Time had passed. There was no one kicking

or stabbing her anymore and that meant they might be gone.

But what did they want? They must have gotten it but there was nothing left in the

apartment to steal. There wasn't even a television set any more. You couldn't keep a

television set because they would find out and steal it. No white person in the

neighborhood-there were three left-had televisions anymore.

Maybe they had stolen Gerd's silly machine that he had brought with him from Germany.

Maybe that was it. What else could they have come for? They said Heil

Hitler a lot, these young black boys. They must have thought she was Jewish. Blacks

liked to say that to Jews. Mrs. Rosenbloom said once they would come to Jewish funerals

to say that and laugh.

They did not know Hitler. Hitler thought blacks were monkeys. Didn't they read? He did

not think they were dangerous either, just funny monkeys.

When she was young it was her responsibility to learn how to read in school. Now that

she was old, the smart people from the university who did not come around anymore said

she was still responsible for other people reading. Somehow she was responsible because

they could not learn to read or write.

But she could understand that. She had trouble herself learning English and Gerd always

had to translate for her. Maybe these blacks spoke another language well and, like she

did, they just had trouble with English. Did they speak African?

She could not feel her arms anymore and the left side of her head was numbed from pain

in a faraway place and she knew she was dying, tied here to her bed. She could not see

from her right eye whether it was dark yet because you had to board up your windows if

you wanted to walk from room to room. Otherwise you had to crawl below the level of the

windowsill so they would not see you. Mrs. Rosenbloom could remember when old people

would sit in the sun in the park and young boys and girls would actually help you across

a street.

But Mrs. Rosenbloom had gone in the spring. She had said she wanted to smell a fresh

flower at noon again and she had remembered that before blacks had moved into the

neighborhood there were daffodils in St. James Park in the spring and she was going to

try to smell one in the bright sun. She knew they had to be up by now. So she had phoned

and said goodbye in case something should happen. Gerd had warned her not to

go but she had said she was tired of living without sunshine and even though she had the

misfortune to live in a now dangerous place, she wanted to walk in the sun again. It was

not her fault her skin was white and she was too poor to move away from blacks and she

was too old to run or to fight them off. Maybe if she just walked out on the street, as

if she had a right to, maybe she could get to the park and back.

And so Mrs. Rosenbloom had headed for the park that noon and the next day when Gerd had

phoned one of the other whites who could not leave the neighborhood, he found out that

Mrs. Rosenbloom had not contacted them either. Her phone did not answer.

Gerd reasoned that since there was nothing on the radio-he had a small silent earphone

put in because that way you could keep a radio because they wouldn't know you had one

and come to steal it-then Mrs. Rosenbloom was dead cleanly. The radio and the newspapers

only had stories when they poured gasoline over you and burned you alive as in Boston or

when whites committed suicide because the fear of blacks was too great as in Manhattan.

The normal everyday deaths were not on the radio, so perhaps Mrs, Rosenbloom had died

quickly and easily.

And later they saw someone who had known someone who had seen her body picked up, so she

was dead definitely. It was not a wise move to go to the park. She should have waited

for the New York City police to give a lecture on how to be mugged in the park, or gone

in the very early hours when the only blacks out were the ones who worked and they left

you alone. But she had wanted to smell the flowers under the noonday sun. There were

worse things to die for than to smell a daffodil in the full sun. Mrs. Rosenbloom must

have died cleanly. That was good in a neighborhood like this.

Was it a month ago that Mrs. Rosenbloom died? Two

months? No, it was last year. When did Gerd die? When did they leave Germany? This was

not Germany. No. This was America. And she was dying. It felt all right as if this was

the way it should be. She wanted to die to go into that night where her husband waited.

She knew she would see him again and was glad he had not lived to observe how horribly

she was dying because she could never explain to him that it was all right. That it

looked worse than it was and already, Gerd darling, she could feel the senses of the

body leave, there being no more need for pain when the body dies.

And she gave God her last thanks on earth and felt good leaving her body.

When the life went from the frail old whitened form and the heat went and the blood

stopped moving in the veins, the ninety-two pounds of human flesh that had been Mrs.

Gerd Mueller did what flesh always did unless frozen or dried. It decomposed. And it

smelled so frightfully that the New York City police finally came to collect it. Two

large men with unholstered guns provided protection for the coroner's office. They made

comments about the neighborhood and when the body was leaving on the stretcher, a gang

of black youths cornered one of the policemen who fired off a shot, catching underarm

flesh from one of the young men. The gang fled and the body went to the morgue

untroubled and the detectives filed their reports and went home to the suburbs where

they could raise their families sanely, in relative safety.

A boozy old reporter who had once worked for the many newspapers in New York City and

now worked for a television station leafed through the homicide reports. It was just

another old white person killed by blacks and he put it back in a pile of such reports.

It offended him that human life would be so insignificant now, as if the city were at

war. And it reminded him of another time, when deaths were also unimportant. It was

thirty years

before when blacks shooting other blacks just was not news.

He put down the reports and answered a call from the newsroom. A detective in the Bronx,

trapped by a gang of black youths, had fired and wounded one. The Black Ministry Council

of Greater New York was calling the shooting "barbarism." They were picketing the house

of the policeman's lawyer, demanding an end to legal defense of policemen accused of

shooting blacks.

The reporter was told by his assignment editor to link up with a camera and do an

interview in front of the lawyer's home.

The pickets were lounging in cars when the reporter got there. He had to wait for his

cameraman. When the camera arrived, it was as if everyone had suddenly been injected

with adrenalin. Out of cars and off car hoods they came. They joined the circle and the

cameraman got precisely the right angle to make it look as if an entire community was

marching in front of this lawyer's house.

They chanted and marched. The reporter put the microphone in front of a very black man

with a very white collar under his rutted face.

The reverend talked of maniacal policemen shooting down innocent black youths, the

victims of "the worst racism ever seen by man."

The black man identified himself as Reverend Josiah Wadson, chairman of the Black

Ministry Council, cochairman of the World Church Group, executive director of

Affirmative Housing Action I, soon to be followed by Affirmative Housing Action II. His

voice rolled like mountains in Tennessee. He invoked the righteous wrath of the

Almighty. He bemoaned white barbarism.

The reporter wished fervently that Reverend Wadson,

a massive man, would talk upward instead of downward at the reporter, and, if possible,

hold his breath.

Reverend Wadson reeked gin and his breath could have peeled epoxy off a battleship

turret. The reporter tried to hide how painful it was to stand near Reverend Wadson's

breath.

Wadson called for an end to police brutality against blacks. He talked of oppression.

The reporter tried to hold his own breath so he would not have to inhale so close to the

reverend.

He also had to hide the bulge under the reverend's black mohair jacket. The reverend

packed a pearl-handled revolver and the assignment editor would never allow this film to

appear showing that the reverend went around armed. The assignment editor didn't want to

appear racist; therefore all blacks had to appear good. And unarmed, of course.

When the film appeared and was grabbed up by the network, there was the sonorous weeping

voice of the reverend describing the awful plight of black youths and there were the

outraged citizenry behind him, marching in protest, and there was the reporter hunched

up, blocking the view of the reverend's gun, and the reporter was turning away every so

often and when his face came back close to the reverend's, there were tears in his eyes.

It looked as if the story the reverend told was so sad that the veteran reporter could

not refrain from sobbing on camera.

When it was showed overseas, this was just what the foreign news announcers said. So

terrible was the police oppression of black youths that a hardened white reporter broke

down in tears. This little news clip became famous within days.

Professors sat around discussing police brutality, which became oppression, which became

naturally enough "New York City police-planned genocide."

When someone brought up the incredibly high crime rate of blacks, the learned response

was what could one expect after such attempted police genocide? It was asked on tests in

universities. And those who did not know this answer failed.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gerd Mueller was buried with a closed casket. The funeral home had

attempted to resurrect the left side of the old face but the wax rebuilding where her

eye had been proved too difficult with old flesh. They couldn't turn in the folds in wax

to build up her old cheek. It looked too young for the immigrant from Germany.

So they shielded everyone's eyes from what the muggers had done, and when the casket was

brought from the church to Our Lady of Angels cemetery there was a large cortege. And

this surprised Mrs. Mueller's daughter because she did not know that her parents knew

that many people, especially men in their thirties and forties. And a few of them who

asked questions.

No, her parents had left nothing. Oh, there was a safe deposit box that held only a few

bonds. Trinkets. That's what one mourner said he was looking for. Trinkets. Old German

trinkets.

And the daughter thought this was shocking. But what was really shocking in today's

world? So a buyer wanted to do business at graveside? Maybe that was his thing? And she

longed for the days when some things had been shocking, because her heart hurt fiercely

and she thought of the old woman dying alone and how frightening it had been to visit

her parents after the neighborhood had changed.

"No bloody trinkets, damn you," she yelled.

And that day, wreckers began taking down the apartment building where the Muellers had

lived.

They moved in with an armed escort of federal marshals, each over six feet tall and

karate trained. They

sealed off the street. They built armor-plated barricades. They carried truncheons. The

old walk-up building was taken down with surgical precision brick by brick, and the

debris left the area, not by truckloads, but in large white trunks. With padlocks.

Chapter Two

His name was Remo and he was taking the elevator up- from beneath. He smelled the heavy

buildup of engine fumes embedded in the caked grease, and felt long cables tremble ever

so slightly when the elevator came to a floor and that fifteen-story ripple started with

a halt of the elevator and shimmied down to the basement and then back up past the

fifteenth floor to the penthouse, five stories overhead.

He had a good forearm hold on a bolt that he kept just above his lean frame. People who

held onto things for their lives usually tired quickly, precisely because they held on

for their lives. Fear gave speed and power to the muscles, not endurance.

If one wanted to hold onto something, one became a solid part of it, extended himself

out through the extruding bolt, so that the grip did not strangle but extended from what

it was joined to. As he had been taught, he let the hand do the attaching lightly and

for-

got about it. So that when the elevator started again, his body swayed easily from the

hand that was the pivot joint and up he went.

It was his right hand and he could hear people walking just above his right ear.

He had been there since early morning and when the elevator stopped at the penthouse

floor, he knew he would not be there much longer. At the penthouse floor, different

things happened. Remo heard locks snap, twenty stories down, twenty locks, each for an

elevator door. He had been told about this. He heard the grunt of muscled men who forced

themselves up through strain. They checked the top of the elevator. He had been told

about that also. The bodyguards always checked the roof of the elevator because it was

known men could hide there.

The roof was sealed with reinforced steel plating and so was the floor. This prevented

anyone from burrowing down or up into the elevator.

The elevator to the street was the only vulnerable point in the penthouse complex of the

South Korean consul in Los Angeles. The rest was a fortress. Remo had been told about

that.

And when he was asked how he would penetrate this complex, he answered that he was paid

for his services, not his wisdom. Which was true. But even truer was that Remo did not

really know how he was going to penetrate this complex at the time and he didn't feel

like thinking about it, and most of all, he hadn't felt like carrying on the

conversation. So he threw out some wiseacre comment, the kind he himself had endured for

more than a decade, and on the morning that upstairs wanted the job done, he sauntered

over to the building with the elegant penthouse fortress and made his first move without

even thinking.

One did not have to scheme too much anymore. At

first, the defenses he had run into-where people locked gates or lived high up or

surrounded themselves with bodyguards-had presented problems. And it was very exciting

at first to solve them.

This morning, for some reason, he had been thinking about daffodils. He had seen some

earlier in the spring and this morning he was thinking about these yellow flowers and

how now when he smelled them, it was entirely different from the way he had smelled them

before, before he had become this other person he now was. In the old days, there might

have been a sweet odor. But now when he smelled a flower, he could inhale its movements.

It was a symphony of pollen climaxing in his nostrils. It was a chorus and a shout of

life. To be Sinanju, to be a learner and a knower of the disciplines of the small North

Korean village on the West Korean Bay, was to know life more fully. A second now had

more life in it than an hour had had before.

Of course, sometimes Remo didn't want more life. He would have preferred less of it.

So, thinking of these yellow flowers, he entered the new white brick-and-aluminum

building with the full story-high windows and the elegant marble entranceway and the

waterfall going over the plastic flowers in the Iobby, took the elevator up to the tenth

floor. There, he fiddled around with the stop and emergency buttons until he got the

tenth floor about waist-high, then slid under the elevator, found a bolt on the

undercarriage, locked his right hand to it, until amid screaming from many floors,

someone got the elevator started again. And there he waited and swung until later when

the elevator went all the way up to the penthouse.

Not much thinking. He had been told so early by his teacher, by Chiun, current Master of

Sinanju, that people always show you the best way to attack them.

If they have a weakness, they surround it with ditches

or armor plating or bodyguards. So Remo, upon hearing of all the protection around the

elevator when he got the assignment, went right to the elevator, thinking of daffodils

because there wasn't really much else to think about.

And now, the person he wanted walked into the elevator, asking questions in Korean. Were

all the locks on so the trip down could not be interrupted? They were, Colonel. Was the

top hatch secure? Yes, Colonel. The roof entrance? Yes, Colonel. The floor? Yes,

Colonel. And, Colonel, you look so splendid in your gray suit.

Most American, no?

Yes, like a businessman.

It is all business.

Yes, Colonel.

And the twenty stories of cable moved.

And the elevator lowered.

And Remo rocked his body. The elevator descending in a long slow drop of twenty stories

rocked with the light human form on its undercarriage, like a bell with a swinging

clapper. It picked up the back-and-forth of the rhythm-perfect sinew machine on its

undercarriage, and at the twelfth floor, the elevator began banging its guide rails,

spitting sparks and shivering the inside panels.

The occupants pressed emergency stop. The coils snapped to a quivering stillness. Remo

took three slow swings, and on the third, hand-ladled his body up into the floor space

at the door opening above him, and then, getting his left hand up into the rubber of the

inner elevator door, gave the whole sliding mechanism a good bang and a healthy shove

with his left side.

The door opened like a champagne cork popping into an aluminum cradle. And Remo was

inside the elevator.

"Hello," he said in his most polite Korean but he knew, even with his heavy American

accent, the tones of

the greeting were sodden with the heaviness of the northern Korean town of Sinanju, the

only accent Remo had ever learned.

The short Korean with the lean hard face had a .38 Police Special out of the shoulder

holster under his blue jacket with good speed. It told Remo that the man in the gray was

definitely the colonel and the one he wanted. Koreans, when they had bodyguards, thought

it beneath their dignity to fight. And this was somewhat strange because the colonel was

supposed to be one of the most deadly men in the south of that country with, both hand

and knife, and, if he wished, the gun too.

"I don't suppose that would pose any problem to you?" Remo had been asked when given the

assignment and told of the colonel's skills.

"Nah," Remo had said.

"He has the renowned black belt in karate," Remo had been told.

"Yeah, hmmm," Remo had said, not all that interested.

"Would you like to see his moves in action then?"

"Nah," Remo had said.

"He is perhaps one of the most feared men in Asia. He is very close to South Korea's

president. We need him alive. He's a fanatic so that may not be easy." This warning had

come from Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for a special

organization which worked outside the laws of the land, in the hope that the rest of the

system could work inside. Remo was its silent enforcement arm and Chiun the teacher who

had given him more than American money could buy.

For while the assassins of Sinanju had rented out their services to emperors and kings

and pharaohs even before the Western world started keeping track of years by numbers,

they never sold how they did it.

So when the organization paid for Chiun to teach Remo to kill, they got their money's

worth. But when Chinn taught Remo to breathe and live and think and explore the inner

universe of his own body, creating a creature that used its brain cells and body organs

at least eight times more effectively than normal man, Chiun gave the secret

organization more than it had bargained for. A new man, totally different from the one

sent to him for training.

And Remo could not explain it. He could not tell Smith what the teachings of Sinanju had

given him. It would be like trying to explain soft to someone who could not feel or red

to a person born blind. You did not explain Sinanju and what the masters knew and taught

to someone who was going to ask you someday if you might have trouble with a karate

expert. Does the winter have trouble with the snow? Someone who thought of Remo's

watching movies of another fighter in action could not possibly understand Sinanju.

Ever.

But Smith had insisted upon showing the movies of the colonel in action. It was taken by

the CIA which had worked heavily with the colonel at one time. Now there was a strain

between Korea and America and the colonel was one of the larger parts of it. They could

not get to him because he had become familiar with American weapons. It was like a

teacher trying to trick an old pupil who had grown too wise. It was just the sort of

mission Smith thought the organization would be good for.

"That's nice," Remo had said and whistled an off-key tune in the hotel room in Denver

where he had gotten the assignment for the Korean colonel. Smith, undeterred by Remo's

indifference that had blossomed into yawning boredom, ran the movies of the colonel in

action. The colonel broke a few boards, kicked a few

younger men in the jaw, and danced around a bit. The movie was black and white.

"Whew," Smith had said. He arched an eyebrow, a very severe emotion on that normally

frosted face.

"Yeah, wha'?" asked Remo. What was Smith talking about?

"I couldn't see his hands," said Smith.

"Not that fast," said Remo. After awhile you had to listen and observe people to find

out where their limits were, because sometimes you just couldn't believe how dead they

were to life. Smith really believed the man was fast and dangerous, Remo realized.

"His hands were a blur," said Smith.

"Nah," said Remo. "Stop the frames where he's flailing around. They're sharp."

"You mean to tell me you can see individual frames in a movie?" asked Smith. "That's

impossible."

"As a matter of fact, unless I remind myself to relax, that's all I see. It's all a

bunch of stills."

"You couldn't see his hands in still frames," Smith challenged.

"All right, fine," said Remo pleasantly. If Smith wanted to believe that, fine. Was

there anything else that Smith wanted.

Smith dimmed the lights in the hotel room and put the small movie projector into

reverse. The lights flickered into a blur, as the camera whirred and then stopped. There

was the still frame. And there was the colonel's striking hand, frozen and clear. Smith

moved the camera still by still to another frame, then another. The hand was picture-

sharp throughout, not too fast for the film at all.

"But it looked so fast," said Smith. So regularly and consistently had he acknowledged

that Remo had changed that he was not aware of how much had truly happened, how much

Remo had really changed.

And Remo told him more that he thought had changed. "When I first started doing all this

for you, I used to respect what we were doing. No more," Remo had said, and he had left

that hotel room with instructions on what America wanted from the Korean colonel. He

could have had a few hours' briefing on how the CIA and the FBI had failed to reach the

man, what his defenses were, but all he wanted was a general description of the building

so he could find it. And, of course, Smitty had mentioned the protection on the

elevator.

So Remo watched the .38 Special come around toward him from the man in the blue suit and

watched the man in the gray suit back away to let his servant do the job and that was

good enough identification for him.

He caught the gun wrist with a forefinger, snapping it through the bone. He did this in

such perfect consonance with the bodyguard's own rhythm, it appeared as if the man had

taken the gun out of the holster only to throw it away. The hand didn't stop moving and

the gun flew into the open crack between floors and down into silence. As Remo cupped

his hand behind the head, he gave his fingers and palms an extra little twist. This was

not a stroke he had been taught. He wanted to wipe away the grease from the elevator's

undercarriage. He did that as he brought the guard's head down into his rising knee-one,

pushing through with a tidy snap at the end, right behind the man's head toward the open

wall; two, caught the returning body; and three, put it to rest quietly and forever on

its back.

"Hi, sweetheart," said Remo to the colonel in English. "I need your cooperation." The

colonel threw his briefcase at Remo's head. It hit a wall and snapped open, spilling

packages of green American money. Apparently the colonel was heading to Washington to

either rent or buy an American congressman.

The colonel assumed a dragon position with arching

hands like claws, and elbows forward. The colonel hissed. Remo wondered whether there

were sales on American congressmen like any other commodity. Did one get the votes of a

dozen congressmen cheaper than buying twelve separately? Was a vote ever reduced to a

bargain? What was the price of a Supreme Court justice? And what about cabinet members?

Could someone purchase something in a nice secretary of commerce?

The colonel kicked.

Or perhaps rent a director of the FBI? Could a buyer be interested in a vice president?

They were really very cheap. The last one sold out for cash in an envelope, bringing

disgrace to a White House already full of it. Imagine a vice president selling out for

only fifty thousand dollars in cash payoff. That brought shame to his office and his

country. For fifty thousand dollars, one should get no more than a vice president of

Greece. It was a disgrace to be able to buy an American vice president for so little.

Remo caught the kick.

But what could one expect from anyone who would write a book for money?

The colonel threw a kick with the other leg, which Remo caught, and returned the foot to

the floor. The colonel sent a stroke that could crush brick at Remo's skull. Remo caught

the hand and put it back at the colonel's side. Then came the other hand, and back it

went too.

Perhaps, thought Remo, American Express or Master Charge might simply credit an account,

or every freshman congressman would get one of the stickers of those credit agencies and

attach it to his office door and when someone wanted to bribe him, he wouldn't have to

carry cash out into the dangerous Washington streets, but just present his credit card

and the congressman could take out one of those machines he would get when he swore

to uphold the Constitution as he took office, and run through the briber's credit card

and at the end of every month get his bribe through his own bank. Just bribing a

congressman with cold cash was demeaning.

The colonel bared his teeth and lunged, trying to get a bite at Remo's throat.

Possibly, thought Remo, there might even be a stock market for Washington politicians,

with bids on farm votes and things like that. Senators up three points, congressmen down

an eighth, the president steady. And while his thoughts were sarcastic, Remo was greatly

sad. Because he did not want his government to be that, he did not want that stain of

corruption, he not only wanted to believe in his country and his government, he wanted

the facts to justify it also. It was not even good enough the majority were honest, he

wanted all of them that way. And he hated the money strewn around this elevator floor as

he throttled the Korean colonel. For that money was destined for American politicians

and it meant that there were hands out.

So this little thing with the colonel was a bit of a pleasure and he leveled the man and

put him on his back and very slowly he said-so that the man would be sure this was not

just a windy threat-"Colonel, I am about to puree your face in my hands. You can save

your face and your lungs which can be snapped out of your body and your gonads and

various other parts of your body that you will miss tremendously. You can do this by

cooperating. I am a busy man, Colonel."

And in Korean, the colonel gasped: "Who are you?"

"Would you believe a Freudian analyst?" asked Remo, pressing his right thumb under the

colonel's cheekbone and pressing down so that the left eye of the colonel strained at

its nerve endings.

"Ai.ee," screamed the colonel.

"And so, please dig deep into your subconscious and

come up with your payroll of American politicians. All right, sweetie?" said Remo.

"Aieeee," screamed the colonel, because it felt as if the eye were coming out of its

socket.

"Very good," said Remo and released pressure. The eye eased back into the socket,

suddenly filled with a roadmap of red veins as the burst capillaries flooded the

eyeball. The red lines in the left eye would disappear in two days. And by the time they

did, the colonel would be a defector in the custody of the FBI. He would be called a key

witness and newsmen would say he defected because he was afraid of returning to South

Korea which of course made no sense for he was one of the closest friends of the South

Korean president. And the colonel would name names and how much each one got.

And Remo hoped they would go to jail. It offended him that the grease-slicked head with

the little rat grin of a former vice president went pandering around the world when he

should have been behind bars doing time like the common thief he was.

So he told the colonel very clearly and very slowly in English and in Korean that all

the names would be named and that there was nothing that could protect the colonel.

"Because, Colonel, I have greater access to your nerves and to your pain than you do,"

said Remo, as the elevator closed its door and descended toward the basement.

"Who are you?" asked the colonel, whose English occasionally lost verbs but who

pronounced any figure above ten thousand dollars flawlessly. "You work for me. Fifty

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DESTROYER#30:MUGGERBLOODCopyright(c)1977byRichardSapirandWarrenMurphyForMaralynwhoisbeautiful,gracious,literate,charming,intelligent,strongandaprecious,preciousfriend.MuggerBloodChapterOneAtfirstshethoughtshewasbackinNaziGermany.Aringingblackstarshineofpainwasatherlefteyewheretheboyhadstucktheicepic...

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Destroyer 030 - Mugger Blood

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