was everything he wanted. Everything. And more.
"Hey, that's right. A horse. That's what he said. Maybe you know him. Johnny Calypso, the Tattooed Man."
"Mmm. 1 doubt it," Foxx muttered. It was going to be a wonderful evening.
The Rolls pulled up in front of an awning in the expensive section of Fifth Avenue, and a doorman strode forward to help them out. "Oh, by the way, my name's Irma," the girl said. "Irma Schwartz."
"Lovely," Foxx said.
Irma was a dynamo. Foxx started with clothespins and graduated steadily through needles, ropes, whips, chains, and fire. "Does it hurt yet?" Foxx wheezed, exhausted.
"No, Doc," irma said, swigging from the bottle of champagne she'd brought with her from the car. "I told you. I'm a horse."
"You're a sensation."
"So are you, Foxie. Running changed my life. Really. Last week. Before that, I was into roller skating, only I broke my nose. I couldn't smell too good out of it, so I got it fixed. Before that, I was into rolfing. And est. Only I quit that 'cause ! didn't like people calling me an asshole. I mean, getting beat up by your boyfriend's one thing, but when a total stranger calls you an asshole, you know-"
"Didn't the broken nose hurt, either?" Foxx asked, yanking at her hair.
" 'Course not. I told you, I don't feel nothing. Then before that, the est I mean, I was into Valiums. But I started eating a lot. Doris, my roommate, told me how the guys at the Metropole was saying I was getting fat."
"Metropole," Foxx muttered as he dug his teeth into Irma's shoulder.
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"That's where I work. I'm a go-go dancer. They couldn't believe it when I wrote down on the application how old I was. Bet you can't guess, either."
"I don't care." He was on his way to paradise again.
"Go ahead. Guess."
Foxx sat up with a sigh. "All right. Twenty? Twenty-five?"
"Forty-three."
Foxx inhaled deeply. "Forty-three?" There were no lines on her face, no trace that Irma Schwartz had been on the planet longer than two decades. "You really are a horse," he mused. "The rarest kind of horse."
"I read a thing about it once in Ripley's Believe It or Not. There's some kind of drug in me. Not that I put it there on purpose or nothing, it's just there. Doctors call it propane."
"Procaine," Foxx corrected abstractly. His mind was racing. Irma Schwartz was too good to be true. What she possessed was worth more than all the nookie in the world. It would be selfish to keep her to himself. She belonged to the world.
"Yeah, that's it. Procaine."
"You're very lucky," he said. "People pay thousands of dollars for what you've got. A lot of forty-three-year-old women would like to look like they're twenty. It's an age retardant. Procaine's been used by the military for years. In small amounts, it wards off pain. It's related to Novocaine and to cocaine, only the human body produces it. In larger quantities, the drug can slow down the aging process. Theoretically, it can actually stop aging completely, allowing people to stay young for their entire lives. Of course,.that's only theory. It's much too rare to use in quantities like that."
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"Well, how do you like that?" irma said, "i got something floating around inside me that's worth money."
"Lots of money," Foxx said. "Any clinic in Europe would pay a fortune for the procaine in your system."
"Yeah?" Irma brightened. "Maybe I can sell some. I mean, I got lots, right?"
Foxx smiled. "I'm afraid that would be impossible. You'd have to be dead to donate it."
Irma giggled. "Oh. Well, I guess it's back to dancing at the Metropole."
Foxx dug his thumbnail into her ear in a gesture of endearment. Irma giggled. "Be right back," he said. He returned a moment later.
His hands were sheathed in rubber gloves. In his left hand was a brown, medicinal-looking bottle. In his right, a thick wad of cotton.
"What's that?" Irma asked.
"Something to make you crazy."
"Like drugs?"
"Like." He poured some of the contents of the bottle onto the cotton wool. The fumes stung his eyes and made his breathing catch.
"You're really good to me, you know that?" Irma tittered. "I mean, champagne, now this. ..."
"Breathe deeply," Foxx said.
She did. "I'm not getting off."
"You will."
"This the new thing at the discos?"
"The latest. They say it's like dying and going to heaven."
"What's it called?" Irma asked, her eyes rolling.
"Prussic acid."
"Groovy," Irma Schwartz said before she died.
Chapter Two
His name was Remo and he was climbing an electrified fence. He'd had trouble before with electricity, but after the old man had shown him how to conquer it, the matter of scaling a twelve-foot high screen of electrified mesh was no problem. The trick was to use the electricity.
Most people fought against the current, just as they fought against gravity when trying to climb. The old man had shown Remo long ago that gravity was a force too strong for any man to fight, and that was why most people fell off the sides of buildings when they tried to climb them. But Remo never fell off a building because he used gravity to push him forward, then redirected the momentum generated in his body by the gravity to push him upward.
It was the same with electricity. As he neared the top of the fence around the compound, he kept the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet exactly parallel to the surface of the fence, inches away from the steel frame. He kept in contact with the electric current, because that was what kept him suspended in air, but never varied his distance from the fence.
That contra! had taken him time to learn. At first,
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during his practice sessions, he'd come too near the fence, and the electricity had jolted him, causing his muscles to tense. Then he was fighting electricity, and it was all over. No one fights electricity and wins. That was what the old man said.
The old man's name was Chiun. He had been an old man when Remo first met him, and he had known him most of his adult life. When the electric current felt as if it were going to fry Remo alive, Chiun had told him to relax and accept it. If anyone else had told him to hang loose while a lethal charge of electricity coursed through his body, Remo would have had words with the person. But Chiun wasn't just anyone. He was Remo's trainer. He had come into Remo's life to create, from the expired form of a dead police officer, a fighting machine more perfect than anything the Western world had ever known. Remo had been that policeman, framed for a crime he didn't commit, sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't quite work.
Not quite. But bad enough. Years after the morning when he had come to in a room in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, the burns still fresh on his wrists, he remembered that electric chair. Long after he'd met the lemon-faced man who had personally selected Remo for the experiment and introduced him to the ancient Korean trainer named Chiun, he remembered. A lifetime later, after Chiun had developed Remo's body into something so different from that of the normal human male that even his nervous system had changed, the fear of electricity stiil lurked inside Remo.
So when Chiun told him to relax, he was afraid. But he listened.
Now he made his way up the fence, the fringe-ends of the electric current in contact with his skin. His
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breathing was controlled and deep, his balance automatically adjusting with each small move. The current was the force that kept him aloft. Using it, never breaking contact, he slid slowly up the fence, moving his arms in slow circles to generate the friction that propelled him upward. At the top of the fence he broke suddenly, pulling his legs backward and over his head and somersaulting over the top.
The compound he was in was an acre or more of snow-covered gravel and frozen mud set in the far reaches of Staten island. Rotting wooden crates, rusted cans, and soggy sheets of old newspapers littered the ground. At the rear of the compound stood a large, dirty cinderblock warehouse, six stories tall with a loading dock at the right end. A truck was parked at the loading dock. As Remo neared, he saw three burly men packing crates into the truck.