"I'm not allowed to. You're supposed to be sedated."
"Don't give me that shit. There's a sawbuck in it for you."
"I'm not going to violate my sacred nurse's pledge for a ten-dollar bill."
"A hundred."
"Long distance or local?"
Polastro got his number and had to offer another yard for the nurse to leave the room. First she had to cradle the telephone between his right ear and shoulder.
"Look," said Polastro, "don't answer. I'm going to talk. At the end, ask questions if you want. This is an open line. Both my wrists are broken. I've lost two of my best men. There are two men after you. They must use some kind of weird killing machines. I gave them your name. I had to. They would have killed me. But you can stop them. One's a gook."
"We understand and hope to work with you toward a progressive solution."
"That's good, right?"
"There's no good or bad. Just situations towards which we must harness community energy. Goodbye."
Polastro called back the nurse. This time he wanted a local call. This time, she could stay. The call was brief.
He wanted four men right away. No, he didn't care if they had records. To hell with the public front. His ass was at stake.
"That's a thousand," said the nurse. "I didn't know you were in the Mafia."
"Where do you get words like that?" said Polastro.
"Oh, I know. Everyone knows. You've got millions."
"Don't be ridiculous."
"I want a thousand dollars or I talk to anyone who will listen."
"We don't work that way."
And when the four men entered the hospital room twenty minutes later, the nurse knew what Mr. Polastro was talking about. She saw the faces, the cold black eyes, the sort of faces that said "we break open heads for a living" and she really did not want that much money. Not at all. She was glad to help.
"Give her a hundred bucks," said Polastro, and a single one-hundred-dollar bill came off a roll of bills as fat as a sink drain.
As Polastro explained his problem to the men who helped him out of the hospital room, a man to each arm, he now faced hit men whose method he did not know. Therefore, they had to be ready for anything. Anything. Electronics, bullets, hands, knives, anything.
"They gotta do it with something," said one of the men, honored to be promoted to personal bodyguard. "They don't walk through walls or nothing, right?"
Everyone but Polastro said, "Right." Polastro said, "I hope not."
The top two floors of one of his office buildings were vacant, so just in case his home in Grosse Point had been staked out, he put himself up in those two floors. The elevators were rigged to be unable to open their doors at these floors. A round-the-clock guard was put on the stairways and the roof. The windows were curtained off so no one at a distance could get in a sniper shot. The food was stored and prepared right in the top floor. One of the henchmen had to taste half of whatever was made, then Polastro would keep that bowl near him for an hour to make sure no one else touched it. At the end of the hour, he asked the taster how he felt. If the answer was fine, Polastro ate. If there was any question, any slight dizziness, Polastro would pass up the bowl. No one could leave the floors.
All telephones were cut off so none of the men could make an outgoing phone call. The only phone working was Polastro's which he kept in his lap.
This procedure lasted exactly twenty-four hours and thirty-one minutes. At 12:45 p.m. the following day, the guards were called down from the roof, the shades were opened on the windows and everyone left-with the body of Salvatore Polastro, beloved father of Maureen and Anna, husband of Gonsuelo, president of Dynamics Industries, Inc., Polastro Real Estate, Inc., Comp-Sciences, Inc., and exalted grand leader of the Detroit Council of Buffaloes.
"He will be sorely missed," said the chairman of the Holy Name sports complex building fund.
"Suddenly, of complications at his home in Grosse Pointe," the obituary read. The complication was above his waist. The bodyguards had difficulty scraping his torso off the walls and windowshades. The casts on his wrists, however, remained intact, prompting a hospital spokesman to comment that the "complications" could have had nothing to do with the very simple medical procedure at the hospital.
Polastro's death had been ordained by Dr. Harold W. Smith, in the faint hope that it might discourage others from availing themselves of the new contract-killing service that Remo had told Smith about. The idea was that there was no point in killing a witness to stay out of jail when that guaranteed you that you would wind up a greasy smudge on your living-room wall. Smith did not think it would work, but neither had anything else. It was worth a try.
Meanwhile, Remo and Chiun had arrived in Chicago with only three of Chiun's normal complement of fourteen large steamer trunks. They were not supposed to stay long, but Chiun had noted that Remo's plans did not seem to be working all that well.
"You mean I'm failing?"
"No. Sometimes events are stronger than people. To change thought patterns and action patterns because of difficulties is folly. That is failure."
"I don't follow, Little Father," said Remo who had expected an unbroken string of I-told-you-sos after the loss of Kaufmann, for had not Chiun warned there was no chance of saving the man. "Didn't you criticize me on the Army post for doing the same thing over and over again? Remember? The rice and the leaky fence and the dead dog?"
"You never listen. I did not criticize you for that. I was explaining a fact to you, that that man was dead. But I did not say you should change. If a farmer plants rice for tens of years and then one year he has a bad harvest, should he stop planting rice?"
"He should find out why the crop failed," Remo said.
"That would be nice, but not necessary," said Chiun. "He should keep planting rice in the way that has worked so many times before."
"Wrong," said Remo. "It's necessary to find out what went bad."
"If you say so," said Chiun with unexpected mildness.
"And another thing," said Remo. "Why aren't you carping as much as you usually do?"
"Carp?" said Chiun. "Is that not the word for complaining? Is that not the word for ridiculing? Is that not the word for incessant demeaning chatter?"
"It is," said Remo, watching the beefy cab driver load Chiun's trunks into the back of the cab and the cab trunk and on the cab roof. The Chicago air smelled so heavily of soot you could ladle it into bowls. One of the disadvantages of using more of your senses was that when you were alive in air like this, you would just as soon have them dormant. To breathe Chicago air was a meal.
"You say I carp?" Chiun said.
"Well, yes. Sometimes."
"I carp?"
"Yes."
"I carp!"
"Yes."
"I take a pale piece of a pig's ear, raise it above what it came from, give it powers and senses beyond any its family history has ever known, and I carp.
"I glorify it beyond its boundaries and it goes around giving away secrets to a charlatan who babbles about mind waves and breathing. I give it wisdom and it spurns it. I nurture and love it and it produces putrescence and complaints that I carp. I carp!"
"Did you say 'love,' Little Father?"
"Only as a form of lying white speech. After all, I am a carper. I carp."
Chiun asked the cab driver, who was now facing heavy traffic on the way into downtown Chicago, whether he heard any carping.
"Of the two, who would you say is the carper?" Chiun demanded. "Be honest now."
"The white guy," said the cab driver.
"How did you do that?" Remo asked, not having seen any currency pass between Chiun and the driver or Chiun leaning into one of the man's pressure points.
"I trust in the honesty of our good driver. All in the West is not foul or ungrateful or complaining… I carp, Tieh, heh," cackled Chiun. "I carp."