"We're not dealing with what's bothering you, Burton."
"This is my last day, as you know."
"Yes, I know."
"I'm not cured."
"Well, cured is a very relative term."
"That helps me a lot."
"You'll be able to come back regularly. At least once a week."
"Once a week is not enough, Dr. Forrester."
"We must do the best we can with what we have."
Burton Barrett clenched his fists. "Oh, dammit, Lithia, I love you. I love you. And don't give me that crap about it being normal to love your therapist. I've been in therapy before and I never, never loved Dr. Filbenstein."
"Let's deal with your needs for love. Dr. Filbenstein is a man. You're heterosexual. I'm a woman."
"No tiddypoo? Really, Lithia, you're really a woman. I dream about you. Do you know I dream about having you?"
"Let's talk about your love needs. When was the first time you felt your needs were not being met?"
Burton Barrett stretched back onto the couch and closed his eyes. Back he went to the nurse, his mother, his father. His red wagon. He liked his red wagon.
It was a good wagon. You could get a good head-start with a foot push. You could whack it into the fat maid's balloon legs. The maid's legs were like pier pilings. Her name was Flo. She would scream and yell.
Burton Barrett was told never to ram the wagon into the maid again. So he did.
Then he was told if he did that again, his wagon would be taken away. So he did, and it was.
And Burton Barrett cried and wouldn't eat lunch and promised if he ever got his wagon back again, he would never ever ram the maid with it again. Never. He promised.
So he got his wagon back and rammed the maid again. She hit him and was fired. He felt bad about that. And he did not complain when the wagon was taken from him, for good that time.
"Why did you ram her with your wagon?" Lithia Forrester asked.
"I don't know. Why do people climb mountains? Because she was there. Anyway, what does my wagon have to do with it? I'm going back to my shitty job in a shitty office in a shitty city and dammit, Lithia, I love you. And that's my problem."
"You love me because I represent something to you."
"You represent, Lithia, the most beautiful woman I've ever seen."
"Was your mother beautiful?"
"No. She was my mother."
"That doesn't preclude her being beautiful."
"In my family it does. We all marry ugly women. Me too. If it weren't for my affair with that artist in New York, I'd go nuts."
"Do you think going to bed with me would help you, Burton?"
Burton Barrett sat up on the couch as though goosed with a cattle prod. He looked over at Dr. Lithia Forrester. She was smiling. Her lips were moist.
"Do you mean it?"
"Do you think I mean it?"
"I don't know. You said it."
"What I said was, do you think it would help?"
"Yes," said Burton Barrett, very honestly.
Dr. Lithia Forrester nodded.
"Then we're going to make love?"
"I didn't say that."
"Dammit, Lithia, why do you keep coming back with these stupid cutesy answers that don't say anything. If anyone else were that smartass with me, outside, I'd smash them in the face. I really would. Right in the face. Now, let's deal with my aggressions. Well, sweetie, fuck my aggressions. Deal with this."
And with that, Burton Barrett, regional director for the intelligence network of the most powerful nation on earth, unzipped his fly.
"I fully intend to deal with that," Lithia Forrester said. "I fully intend to. But first you're going to have to do a few things."
Burton Barrett blinked, grinned, then in surprise and shame, he zipped up his fly.
"You didn't have to do that, Burton, but we'll deal with that later. First, we're going to have a little drink and then I want you to hum a little tune with me."
"That sounds silly," he said.
"Those are my requirements. If you really want to sleep with me, you'll meet them."
"What's the tune?" asked Burton Barrett.
"It goes da da da da dum da dum dum da da da da dum dum," she said.
"Hey, I know that song," he said. "It's from the movie…"
"Exactly," she said. "Now hum it with me," she said, as she stood and walked slowly toward the couch where Burton Barrett had again stretched full length.
He was still humming the catchy little melody the next afternoon when he walked into the National Press Club headquarters in Washington, D.C., jumped onto a stage and told the assembled press of the world that he had a few things to say.
And then he announced that the United States government had seven ex-Nazis on its C.I.A. payroll in South America. He mentioned their names, their home addresses in South America and also the names under which they had been sought for years by the Israelis.
He promised the press photographs of the men.
He also listed the names of four agents working undercover in Cuba. And just to convince the reporters that he knew what he was talking about, he tossed his identification badge to a reporter from the Washington Post, sitting in the front row.
"Why are you disclosing this? Have you been ordered to?" asked the reporter.
"Why does anyone do anything? I just felt like it, that's all."
Then Burton Barrett said, "Look, check out what I told you. It's all true. But I've got to be going, because they'll be after me soon."
He jumped off the stage and walked leisurely through the audience, ignoring the reporters who tried to question him, carefully humming to himself a catchy little tune.
Burton Barrett was right. The C.I.A. was after him within minutes. They did not find him in his office in Langley, Va., or in his small apartment, nor back at Human Awareness Laboratories.
He turned up after dark in one of the small reading rooms in the Washington public library's main building. He had bought a pack of leather thong shoelaces, and had tied them together into a long string. Then, he wet them, sopping wet, in a washroom sink. He wrapped the stretchy wet leather several times around; his neck and tied it tightly with a knot. As the minutes passed, the leather dried and began to contract. As it contracted, it cut deeper and deeper into Burton Barrett's throat.
Witnesses reported later that he did not seem to mind. He just sat there, humming to himself, reading a large illustrated picture book of Mary Poppins, and then sometime after 4:30 p.m., he fell forward onto the table, dead.
Burton Barrett's self-strangulation had repercussions. It was front-page news in the papers of the world. The United States received strongly worded notes of protest from both Israel and the Latin American country which housed the seven ex-Nazis. Four U.S. agents in Cuba were killed.
In Zurich, a Swiss banker from the House of Rapfenberg received word that yes, France was definitely interested in bidding.
Burton Barrett's life story went into the computers at the CURE headquarters at Folcroft, and it was mixed and matched against Clovis Porter and General Dorfwill, and back out came a sentence:
"Check Human Awareness Laboratories for possible link."
The people who would destroy America had opened a door. Through it would walk the Destroyer.
CHAPTER TEN
Remo had just picked tip the telephone to call Smith when there was a knock on his hotel room door. He put the phone back down and was about to yell "Come in, it's open," when the door flung open and Chiun stood there. Behind him were two bellhops and Chiun's luggage. Three large steamer trunks.
Chiun could travel for a year with a manila envelope if he had to. If he didn't have to, he could fill two baggage cars. So when Remo had phoned Miami to tell Chiun to follow, he had limited the luggage to three trunks. No more.