Braawwwwk'k.
Three rings. Remo put his ear to the door and listened.
The phone stopped. He listened. There was no more snoring.
Remo pulled the door tightly shut and walked away down the hall whistling. How did people live before there were telephones?
Sashur Kaufperson was gone. The jammed closet door had been opened from the outside by some kind of tool, probably a crowbar.
Remo began rummaging through the drawers In Sashur's bedroom. Nothing, unless one had a letch for panties with the days of the week on them and with men's names on them and with hearts on them and obscene drawings on them. Dozens of pairs of panties.
Sashur's closets were similarly unproductive. No pieces of paper left in jackets. No handbags crammed full of informational goodies. A zero.
"Why doesn't this woman write anything down?" Remo mumbled. He looked around the room. Suddenly he sensed that it was one o'clock and the telephone in his motel room was going to be ringing. Three times.
"Move your own couch next time," he growled.
The telephone.
Under Sashur's telephone was a personal phone book with names and numbers and one entry that made Remo suspicious: "Walter Wilkins. Music room. Wednesday night."
It was Wednesday night.
The police department switchboard confirmed that there was a Walter Wilkins School, gave Remo the address, but cautioned that it had been closed down for several years.
It was easy to open the school's front door and even easier to find the night watchman. Remo followed the snores down to the basement where the guard slept, in a brightly lighted room, atop an old cafeteria table which was a history in wood-carving of the sexual life of the school.
Remo shook the guard awake. The guard's eyes opened wide in panic. His pupils were wide black dots. The guard saw Remo and Remo could feel the man's tension ease.
"Oh. I thought it was the head custodian." The watchman's voice was thick as he shook his head trying to clear away his sleepiness. "Who are you anyway? How'd you get in here."
"I'm looking for Ms. Kaufperson."
The guard tilted his head as if listening to something, "She's here. That's them up in the music room. The kids' chorus and her." The guard looked at his watch. "Hey, shit, it's late. I'd better tell her."
"Don't bother, buddy. I'm going up there. I'll remind her about the time."
Remo walked away.
"Hey. You didn't tell me who you were? How'd you get in here?"
"Ms. Kaufperson let me in," said Remo, which was not only untrue but illogical, but the guard was too tired to notice and before Remo was down the hall, he heard the guard snoring behind him.
Remo went up the dark stairwell toward the top floor. Under the soles of his Italian leather loafers, he felt the hard slate of the steps. How many years had he spent walking up the same kind of steps, in the same kind of shabby school? The orphanage school had been like this, and his first memory of it was hatred.
Every time he came down the steps in that school, he would come down hard, jumping on the edge of each step, trying to crack the heavy slate, never succeeding. At night he would lie in his metal cot in a barracks-type room full of other boys and hate the school and the nuns who ran it and the steps that were as unyielding as life itself.
No matter what Chiun thought, he had changed. If he wanted to now, he could pound the steps into gray powder. And he just didn't want to. Steps didn't matter anymore.
The closer he got to the third floor, the louder the singing became. It was street singing of the fifties, a lead singer who sounded like a castrati yodeling the high-noted melody and a background chorus that sounded like a matched set of refrigerator vibrations repeating, over and over again, one word, usually a girl's name.
"Thelma, Thelma, Thelma, Thelma." Now for our next number we will do Brenda, Brenda, Brenda, Brenda. It was a good thing, Remo thought, that the music died before it ran out of girls' names.
He paused in the hall outside the door from which the sounds came. The windows in the door had been painted black and he couldn't see inside, but he had to admit, the kids were good. They sounded like a top-forty recording of Remo's youth.
He opened the door.
They were a top forty recording from Remo's youth.
The record was being played on a small stereo in the rear of the room which had a pile of records in position to drop and play next.
Sashur Kaufperson was at the front of the room standing at the blackboard. She wore a leather skirt and vest and a peach-pink blouse. In her hand was a pointer. The blackboard behind her was crowded with chalk writing. Remo's scanning eye picked up only scattered phrases. There were some state's names. The words "maximum sentence." Written in large capital letters were the words: Training. Performance. Silence. "Silence" was underlined.
Ten young boys sat at desks facing Sashur. Remo guessed the youngest at eight, the oldest at thirteen.
They turned toward him when he entered the room. Ten children. Children and their faces frightened Remo. They were hard cynical faces, with eyes that were blank of feeling. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke.
The boys looked from Remo back to Sashur.
"What are you doing here?" she said, her voice struggling to be heard over the roar of, "Thelma, Thelma, Thelma, Thelma."
"Just came to see how you were getting on. Can we talk?"
"What do we have to talk about? Your behavior tonight? Locking me in a closet?"
"Maybe your behavior. Fibbing to me about Warner Pell. Didn't you ever learn it's not nice to fib?"
"I know it. That's why I'm telling you the absolute truth when I tell you it'd be healthier if you left."
"Sorry," said Remo.
Sashur nodded slightly. Her class rose, as if on military command, and turned to face Remo. They were smiling, smiling at him, those hateful little bastards, and Remo wanted to rip them apart. He wanted to beat them, bust them, but mostly he wanted to spank them. He knew now how the nuns in the orphanage must have felt.
Again, almost in unison, their hands went into their pockets, jacket pockets, trouser pockets, shirt pockets, and they brought out pistols, small Saturday night specials.
They moved toward Remo, slowly raising their guns, like underage zombies. Remo remembered how he had frozen in the elevator when Alvin fired at him, and he did what instinct told him he should do.
He turned and ran.
The pack was after him then, silently like a pack of hunting wolves who neither bay nor howl nor yelp. Who just run.
Sashur Kaufperson stood at the blackboard as the last of the boys went out the door after Remo.
With a damp cloth, she erased the blackboard, then dried her hands on a paper towel, then walked to the back to turn off the blasting phonograph. She sighed as silence returned to the room.
A big sigh.
Remo was a man. It was a shame he had to die. She heard the pop of shots around the corridors. Poor Mr. Winslow, she thought, remembering the custodian asleep in the basement. He never knew what went on in his school. All he knew was that Sashur Kaufperson religiously brought in a can of beer on chorus nights and poured half the can for him and stayed with him while he drank it. It gave him pleasure that an educated Jewess was his Gofor. It never occurred to him to wonder why the beer put him so quickly and deeply to sleep. He never suspected that there might be sleeping pills in the beer.
Mr. Winslow would not hear the shots, she knew.
She put on her jacket, walked to the classroom door, then remembered something.
Back at the front of the room, she picked up the chalk and wrote on the blackboard: boys. be sure to clean up before you go.
Then she left, feeling good. It would not do for the boys to leave Remo's bullet-riddled body around where Mr. Winslow might find it in the morning and tell who was in the building.