‘I see. Anything else?’
‘No. No. That’s about it.’
‘Would you like to work for us?’
‘Sure,’ said Bullingsworth, as sober as he had ever drawn a sober breath.
‘Would you like your money now?’
‘Now. Anytime.’
‘I see. Look at that boat behind you. Out there, in the Atlantic. Look.’
Bullingsworth saw the boat, placid and blinking in the vast darkness.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said the man with the heavy lilac cologne and the foreign accent, and then Bullingsworth felt a sharp sting in his right ear, and saw nothing else. But, in the vast nothing that is death is often infinite wisdom, and in his last thought he knew that his killer would face an awesome force that would grind him and his cohorts into waste material, a force that was at the very center of the universe. Of course, all of this meant very little to James Bullingsworth, former assistant vice-president of the Greater Miami Trust and Investment Company. He was dead.
In the course of normal, morning, beach-cleaning operations, Bullingsworth’s body was discovered with what appeared to be a wooden tool handle in his ear.
‘Oh, no,’ said the sweeper and decided immediately he would not act like some hysterical woman. He would walk calmly to the nearest telephone and call the police, giving them exact details and other useful information.
This resolve to discipline lasted three steps on the sandy beach, whereupon it was discarded for an alternate course of action.
‘Help. Arggghh. Dead. Help. Body. Help. Someone. Police. Help!’
The sweeper might have stayed rooted, screaming until he was hoarse, but an elderly vacationer spotted him and the body from her hotel window and phoned the police.
‘Better bring an ambulance too,’ she said. ‘There’s a hysterical man down there.’
The police brought more than an ambulance. They brought photographers and reporters and television crews. For something had happened during the night to make the death of this man a very important matter, important enough to call a press conference where James Bullingsworth’s doozy of an idea—his belief in a federal government plot to infiltrate local governments and jail key officials—got a public airing.
Waving the Bullingsworth notes before the heavy lights of TV camera crews, who were paid overtime for the pre-dawn work, a local politician of minor rank talked ominously of the ’most treacherous act of government interference in the history of our nation.’
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and he intended to interfere with local government very much. He intended to make it do its job.
He rested his toes in the brick crevices, and with his charcoal-blackened hands pressed flat against the rough brick, kept his balance outside the window. He could smell the heavy fumes of Boston. He could feel the vibrations of the traffic down below in the dampish night street through the building wall, and he wished he were in some place warm and sunny, like Miami Beach. But his assignment was Boston. First things first.
A passerby, fourteen stories below in front of the hotel, would never see this figure pressed into the wall, for he wore black shoes, black pants and black shirt, and his face and hands were blackened with a charcoal paste given him by the man who had taught him that the side of a building could be a ladder if the mind knew how to use it as one.
Voices came from the open window near his right kneecap. The window should not have been open, but then the two detectives and plainclothesmen hadn’t done their job very well from the beginning.
‘You’re sure I’m okay here, fellas?’ asked a man in a rough, rock voice.
That was Vincent Tomalino, Remo knew.
‘Sure. You got us with you all the time,’ said another man. Must be one of the cops, Remo thought,
‘Okay,’ said Tomalino, but his voice lacked conviction.
‘Wanna play some cards?’ asked one of the cops.
‘No,’ said Tomalino. ‘You sure that window should be open?’
‘Sure, sure. Fresh air.’
‘We can use the air conditioner.’
‘Lookit, you guinea stool pigeon, don’t tell us our jobs.’ It struck Remo as amusing that those officers with the heaviest service to the Mafia were always the freest to use terms like ‘guinea’, ‘wop’, and ‘dago’.
Upstairs probably had some psychological report on that. They had reports on everything it seemed, from parking-meter graft in Miami Beach to ex-Mafiosi who were going to be rubbed out because they planned to talk.
Tomalino was going to talk.
On this there were several opinions. The district attorney promised the papers Tomalino would probably spill, but the three policemen had promised the local capo mafioso that he wouldn’t. These opinions were really just opinions because it had been decided in an office in Folcroft Sanatorium in Rye, New York, that Vincent ‘The Blast’ Tomalino not only would talk, but he would tell everything he knew with a pure heart.
‘I want to check the window,’ said Tomalino.
‘Stay where you are,’ said one of the cops. ‘You two keep him on the bed. I’m going to check the roof.’
Remo looked up to the roof. Surprise, surprise—here it came. A rope swooped out in an arch and slapped back against the side of the hotel. It paused there a moment, a head peered over and the rope descended, right past Remo’s knee. He heard the hotel room door open and close, and assumed the officer was going up to the roof to get his payoff immediately after the job was done.
A large body grunted its way over the ledge and using hands and feet like clumsy logs lowered itself down the rope. Remo could smell the man’s meat-eating breath from five feet away. A carbine which could be handled with one hand was strapped to the man’s back. And there was something metallic around his waist. What was it? Remo peered more closely. The man had attached a pulley to his waist so he wouldn’t fall.
Remo couldn’t get the idea of meat out of his mind. He hadn’t had a steak for two years. Oh, for a juicy-fat crisp steak, or rich thick hamburger, or a slice of quivering roast beef oozing its juices from a delicious red center. Even a hot dog would be great. Or a slice of bacon, a magnificent slice of bacon.
The meat-eater’s right foot touched the top of the window and still he did not see Remo. He reached for the carbine on his back and since he seemed to be having trouble, Remo helped him.
‘It’s stuck,’ said Remo, reaching up, but not for the carbine.
He got the pulley with his right hand, snapping it off, and since there was no need for loud unpleasantness, he took out the meat-eater’s throat with a thumb on the way down.
Like a water-filled balloon from a conventioneer’s window, the meat-eater plummeted—arms and legs flailing noiselessly—to the pavement below. Concrete and killer were joined with a muffled splat.
Remo climbed up the rope, which he did not need but thought appropriate for his greeting on the roof.
‘I didn’t hear nothing,’ came the voice from the other side of the ledge. It was the voice of the policeman who had left the room.
‘Hi, there,’ said Remo pleasantly, rising over the ledge. ‘I’d like to borrow your head for a few minutes.’
Blackened hands moved faster than sight. There was a short, wrenching sound on the roof. Then Remo departed through the roof door and scampered down the steps with something in his right hand behind his back, dripping.
When he got to Tomalino’s room, he knocked.
A patrolman answered the door.
‘What do you want?’ asked the patrolman.
‘I want to impress upon you and your charge in the room about talking from a pure heart. I think you will agree with me, after a few moments of explanation, that truth is the most valuable thing we have.’