Pulling over to a roadside pay phone, Remo picked up the receiver and thumbed the 1 button. He held it down. That triggered an automatic dialer sequence that rang a blind phone in an artist's studio in Wapiti, Wyoming, and was rerouted to Piscataway, New Jersey, before finally ringing on a shabby desk in a shabby office overlooking Long Island Sound.
"Smitty. Remo. The Weasel is a dead duck."
"Remo," said the lemony voice of Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, in Rye, New York-the cover for CURE. "You have called just in time. There has been an event on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue."
"Nuclear?"
"No."
"Then what do you mean by 'event'?"
Smith cleared his throat. He sounded uncomfortable. That could mean anything.
"Smitty?" Remo prompted.
"Sorry. Chiun has already left for the site."
"Chiun? Then it must be serious, if you're rash enough to let him run loose unsupervised."
"It is unprecedented, I agree."
"Is it something you can explain in twenty-five words or less?" Remo wanted to know.
The line was very quiet. "No," Smith said at last.
Remo switched ears. "I'm not up for charades, Smitty. I've been strangling weasels, remember?"
Smith cleared his throat again. Whatever was bothering him, obviously it was big. Remo decided to press his advantage.
"You know, Smitty," Remo began casually, "I've been thinking. Ever since you threw Chiun and me out of our own house, we've been footloose vagabonds. I'm sick of it. I want a permanent campsite."
"See Randal Rumpp," Smith blurted.
"The real-estate developer? You got an in with him?"
"No. The-er-event is at the Rumpp Tower."
"There's that word again. 'Event.' Can I have a tiny clue?"
"People are-um-trapped inside the building."
"Okay."
"And people who go in-ah-never come out again."
"Terrorists?"
"I wish it were only that," Smith sighed. Then the words came rushing out. "Remo, this is so far beyond anything we've ever faced before, that I am at a complete loss to account for it. Please go to the Rumpp Tower and evaluate the situation."
Harold Smith sounded so ragged-voiced that Remo forgot all about pressing his advantage.
"Is Chiun in any danger down there?" he asked.
"We may all be in danger if this event spreads."
"I'm on my way."
Before Remo could hang up, the normally unflappable Smith said a strange thing.
"Remo, don't let it get you, too."
Chapter 3
The Rumpp Tower occupied half a city block at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, abutting the quiet elegance of Spiffany's.
By day, it gleamed like a futuristic cigarette lighter cut from golden crystal. By night, its sixty-eight stories became a mosaic of checkered light.
Day or night, its brass and Maldetto Vomito marble lobby atrium, containing six floors of the finest shops and boutiques, attracted thousands of shoppers. Offices occupied its middle floors, and above the eighteenth the sumptuous duplex and triplex luxury apartments began.
On this late Halloween afternoon, no one was shopping in the atrium shops. The tourists who had been caught in the building when the phones went dead were huddled at the ground-floor windows looking out with fear-haunted eyes, waiting for rescue.
No one dared leave. They had seen the terrible thing that had happened to any who made that mistake.
It was the same at the Fifty-sixth Street residential entrance. The doorman had opened the door to let a blue-haired matron out. He stepped onto the street, one hand on the brass door handle. It was very lucky for him that he kept his hand on the handle. The second he felt no solidity under his polished shoes, he pulled himself back in.
"What is it? What's wrong?" demanded the perplexed matron.
"My God! It felt like the sidewalk wasn't there."
"Are you drunk? One side, please."
The matron had a poodle on a leash. She let the poodle go ahead of her.
The poodle gave a frisky leap, yelped as if its tail had been run over, and the leash was pulled out of the surprised matron's hand.
"Joline!"
The matron started to step from the lobby, but the doorman pulled her back.
She whirled and slapped him.
"What are you doing?"
"Saving your life," said the doorman, pointing at the poodle's curly butt as it slipped into the pavement, like sausage through a meat-grinder.
"Joline! Come back!" The tail disappeared from sight, and she grabbed the doorman by his charcoal-gray jacket. "Save my Joline! Save my Joline!"
Any thought of rescue evaporated when one of the basement garage elevators rose to sidewalk level and a white stretch Lincoln rolled out.
Momentum carried it into the street. It was still moving forward as the wheels slipped into the asphalt. The grille tipped downward.
When the hood ornament dipped to ground level, the driver jumped free. His leap carried him clear of the car-and straight down into the unsupporting street.
People do strange things when confronted with danger. The chauffeur was up to his chest in gray street, and only a few feet away the stretch Lincoln was slipping from sight. Like a man grasping at a sinking straw he tried to flounder toward it, as if he were swimming in an unreal sea.
The chauffeur's head was lost to sight bare seconds after the Lincoln had vanished.
Not even an air bubble was left to show that they had sunk from sight on that mundane spot in midtown Manhattan.
"I think we'd better stay put," the doorman gulped.
The blue-haired matron said nothing. She had fainted.
Even now, three hours into the crisis, people were still stepping off the elevators, unaware that the Rumpp Tower had undergone an invisible but very dramatic transformation.
Whenever an unwary resident stepped off an elevator, a knot of the trapped would rush to intercept him.
"Please, don't leave the building!" they would implore.
The exchange was almost always the same. Beginning with the inevitable question.
"Why not?"
"Because it's not safe."
After the first dozen people had stepped out onto the sidewalk, and then into the sidewalk, the would-be Samaritans gave up telling the truth. The truth was too unbelievable. So they pleaded and cajoled, and sometimes held the person back by force.
Sometimes a simple demonstration was enough. Like the time two people demonstrated the unstable nature of the world beyond the Rumpp Tower when they rolled an R-shaped brass lobby ashtray to the Fifth Avenue entrance and shoved it out a revolving door.
The ashtray wobbled, tilted, and slowly began to sink. It tipped sand, and the sand seemed to melt into the cheerless gray pavement.
It was a convincing demonstration-and saved several lives-but soon they ran out of ashtrays.
Once, a brave fireman approached the Fifth Avenue entrance. By this time the block had been cordoned off with Public Works sawhorses and emergency vehicles. The fireman wore the black-and-yellow slicker and regulation fire hat of the Fire Department, which made him look like a sloppy yellow-jacket with an attitude. He carried a pole normally used to pick apart burning debris. He carried this like a blind man's cane, tapping the ground before him as if attempting to find a solid path through the apparently unstable concrete.
A cheer went up when, apparently by chance, he found a solid patch of pavement.
The door was thrown open for him. Hands reached out to shake his, to thank him, to touch the brave public servant who had defied an unbearable fate to rescue his fellow human beings.
No sooner had the fireman set foot on the splotchy pink marble apron extending from the lobby than he slipped from grateful hands and began sinking into its gleaming surface.
The fireman managed a stunned comment. "What the fuck!"