Remo explained that Sister Evangélica was nobody's sister, but the name of an apartment complex where the main pastime among the tenants was murder. The casualty toll for the complex was in the hundreds, and the corridors of Sister Evan-gelica's served as an active war zone for every punk in the city who had access to an illegal handgun.
For years the metropolitan police had been unable to curb the violence, and the number of killings had risen sharply in recent months.
Dr. Harold W. Smith, Remo's employer, had learned that the reason for the increase in violence was that regular shipments of handguns and ammunition were coming into the complex. Whereas before merely a handful of hopped-up muggers had sported in Sister Evangelica's, now virtually every man, woman, and child was packing a pistol and shooting at anything that moved. It was full-scale war.
Smith headed a secret organization called CURE, which was developed years before by an-
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other President, now dead, to control crime by functioning outside the Constitution.
Swift and secret, CURE's one weapon was a thin man with thick wrists, an orphan with no past, a former Newark, New Jersey, police officer framed for a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. He was a man trained for more than a decade by the most accomplished master assassin in the world, a practitioner of the martial arts disciplines of Sinanju, a Korean village that had produced master assassins for thousands of years. Deadlier than any weapon, this man, an American, was known to the President only as "that special person."
"That special person," dispatched to Sister Evangelica's to eliminate the gun runner who was supplying arms to the complex, was juggling his seven captured bullets high overhead as he waited for more gunfire.
Remo looked for more bullets from the broken windows of the battle-scarred tenement apartment. There were none. He reasoned that the gangs with the guns had declared a cease-fire for their morning heroin break.
"Hey, what's going on?" he called into the silent courtyard. "I need forty-three more bullets." There was no answer. "Sheesh," he said. "There's never a gunman when you need one."
He walked past the rusted elevators, which hadn't worked since 1973, and down six flights of blown-out cement steps strewn with bullet-riddled rats. "Jose 181"—a message admonishing visitors to 181st Street to visit a hospitable per-
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son named Jose—was a popular theme on the graf-fit-streaked walls of the stairwell. "For a good time, call Delphine" was another.
Remo found the advertisement touching. Amid all the squalor and death of Sister Evangelica's, stouthearted Delphine was apparently still having a good time and willing to spread cheer to one and all.
At this point, Remo thought, with only seven bullets in his pocket and no gun runner to be found, he wouldn't mind having Delphine show him a good time. She'd probably be better company than Chiun, with his stupid exercises.
By the time Remo reached the bottom of the stairwell, the courtyard was filling up with people. Old men on crutches, toddlers with their arms in slings, bandaged mothers huddling small children near them, walked serenely over the pitted, bullet-scored concrete, talking and waving in neighborly fashion to one another.
It was certainly a far cry from the trench warfare of ten minutes before. Even the gangs—some Irish and freckled; some black; some Hispanic, speaking Spanish softly—seemed subdued and pleasant, tipping their caps for women without so much as a wiggle toward the women's pocket-books.
Remo couldn't figure it out. He spotted an old white man hobbling with a cane toward a bench. When the old man sat down, Remo walked up to him.
"Hold it right there, sonny," the wrinkled crone said as he hoisted a Browning .9 millimeter from his vest with palsied hands.
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"Where'd you get that gun?" Remo asked.
"Found it. One step closer and I'll shoot."
"Shoot," Remo said as he reached out and crumbled the pistol into black gravel. It sifted between his fingers to the ground.
"Okay. You asked for it," the old man said, tightening his trigger finger on empty air. "Hey, what'd you do?"
"I took your gun away," Remo said. "It's on the ground if you want it."
The man looked at the pile of crushed metal. Tears came to his eyes. "Oh, Lord," he said.
"Did you really find that gun?"
"Yep," the old man said softly. "Old George next door had it. He got killed. I found it next to his
body."
In the distance, schoolgirls were chanting as two preteens with only minor lacerations skipped Double Dutch with a clothesline.
"What's your name?" Remo asked awkwardly.
The man was weeping openly. "Archie," he
said.
"I'm not going to hurt you."
"Big deal," Archie said. "What about them?" He pointed at a Puerto Rican gang loafing near a defunct fountain bearing Delphine's message of hope. "Or them?" He nodded toward the cluster of white boys. "Or Mrs. Miller? She's a killer, that one. Got twelve notches on her belt already."
"Who's Mrs. Miller?"
The old man stopped weeping long enough to point out a fat lady in a polka-dotted dress, who was carrying a bag of groceries. "Oh, Lord," Archie said.
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"Maybe it's over," Remo suggested, staring at the eerily quiet scene around him.
The old man laughed. "How long you been here, son?"
"I sort of just moved in."
"Well, move right back out if you can. Quick, before the mayor goes shopping."
"The mayor?"
"The mayor. She's a dipshit. She been here three weeks now. Living with us. Can you believe that? Wednesday's her shopping day. That's why we're getting us this little rest. Uh-oh. Too late, boy. Here she comes now. Coffee break's over."
The doors to one of the complex's entrances creaked open, and two dozen uniformed policemen marched out four abreast. There was a gap in the formation, followed by another six rows of officers.
"Where'd they come from?"
"That's her bodyguard," Archie said. "They come in a couple of minutes ago. That's why the shooting stopped. They come to get her."
"Who?"
"The mayor, boy. There."
In the center of the sea of policemen walked a small, reed-slim blonde woman with flinty green eyes and a smile for all the residents of Sister Evangelica's.
"You see how much better things are since I've moved in, you impoverished darlings?" she called pleasantly to the tenants. "Police protection, better conditions. That's what a mayor's for."
"She don't see the killing that goes on," Archie
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confided. "It all stops when she comes around, but the minute she leaves, it's back to the shit."
Behind the mayor, the final four patrolmen bolted the entrance to her building. Behind them, four white gang members pulled out brass knuckles. A few Puerto Ricans expertly zipped out switchblades. Just about everyone else in view pulled out a gun.
"Remember me on election day, darlings," the mayor sang cheerily as she strutted out of sight, the police fast behind her.
"Ain't none of us going to live to election day," Archie said ruefully. "Well, since we ain't got no guns, we best look for cover, you and me."
Remo noticed that the courtyard had nearly cleared out in a matter of seconds. Only the gang members remained, and one of them was headed straight for Remo and the old man. He was tall and burly and the color of paper bags. On his head he wore a maroon beret. In his waistband he carried a .38 Police Special. As he approached, he pulled out the .38 and pointed it at Remo.