At the start, she had had a moment's doubt. When her husband told her he had hired a new assistant at the sanitarium and then that the assistant was a young woman, well, she worried a little about that, because after all Harold W. Smith was a man and he might be reaching that age when men all seem to go temporarily or permanently crazy.
But the worry had been short-lived. She knew her husband well. And soon, she began to wonder why Harold-even in her mind, it was always Harold, never Harry or Hal-why he had not hired an assistant years before.
Because suddenly, Harold was getting a chance to go out in the afternoons and play golf and he was coming home for dinner for the first time in all his years of running that terrible dull sanitarium, and for the first time in many years, Mrs. Smith had other things to do with her life than meet with other members of the Ladies Aid Society and roll cancer dressings.
She had taken her cookbooks out of the shoe box in the hall closet and had begun again to en-
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joy working in the kitchen. Her mother had once told her that a well-cooked meal was a performance, but no performance had meaning unless it had an audience. Now, for the first time in years, she had her audience back.
Mrs. Smith was busy now pounding thin strips of veal into paper-thin slices for veal parmigiana. She glanced at the wristwatch Harold her given her as a present thirty years before. He would be home any minute. And she would put a glass of white wine in his hand and sit him in the living room with his slippers and fifteen minutes later she would have on the table a meal fit for a king. Or an emperor.
It had all happened very quickly. Harold W. Smith had been thinking about Remo and Chiun's failure in London. He had been fed the computer printouts of the Associated Press and United Press International wire copy filed on the mass murder at the home of the Russian ambassador in London. And he had been driving mechanically, his mind on Project Omega, rushing remorselessly to its conclusion which might just be the death of the Russian premier and the start of World War III.
Smith stopped at a red light, before turning off the main street in Rye, New York, up into the hill section of town where he lived with his wife in a modest tract house whose value had increased in the ten years he had owned it, from $27,900 to $62,500, and on which he often congratulated himself, it being the only good personal business deal he had ever made in his life.
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He wasn't looking and then there was a man in the car, leaning over from the backseat, with a gun stuck in Smith's ribs. He spoke with an accent.
"Drive straight ahead."
Two blocks later, the man directed him to pull to the curb and park. They both got out of the car and into a red Chevrolet Nova where a man with a cowboy hat was sitting behind the wheel.
Smith automatically recorded the car's license number in his memory as they got into the backseat. The man in the cowboy hat looked into the rearview mirror and his eyes met Smith's.
"Doctor Smith?"
Smith nodded.
He recognized Colonel Vassily Karbenko, head of Russia's spy network in the United States, but he decided there would be nothing to be gained, and perhaps much to be lost, by saying anything now.
"Good," said Karbenko. "We have much to talk about." He put the car into drive and pulled smoothly out into the late supper traffic. The man sitting next to Smith kept the gun pushed into Smith's ribs.
She called at twenty after eight.
"Miss Gonzalez," Mrs. Smith said. "The doctor isn't home yet."
Ruby pursed her lips. Smith had left the office an hour ago and told Ruby he was going straight home. Straight home for Harold Smith meant straight home, Ruby knew. It didn't mean stopping for gas, for a newspaper, for a pack of ciga-
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rettes, for a drink at the neighborhood saloon. It meant straight home. A nine-minute drive. Eight minutes and forty-five seconds if he was lucky and missed the light on the corner of Desmond and Bagley Streets.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Smith. The doctor was called into the city at the last minute," Ruby lied. "He asked me to tell you he's be late. I'm sorry."
"Oh," said Mrs. Smith. The disappointment in her voice struck at Ruby's heart. "Men just have no idea what veal cutlets cost."
"They sure don't, Mrs. Smith. As soon as I hear from him, I'll let you know."
"Thank you, Miss Gonzalez." Mrs. Smith hung up. She was annoyed. The least this Gonzalez girl could have done would be to call before she had gotten the cutlets ready for the oven.
Ruby did not put down the telephone. She called the guardhouse in front of the sanitarium and got the license plate number of the red Chevrolet she had seen loitering across the street.
She punched up the computer console on Smith's desk and fed the license plate number into it. The computer was hooked up through interlocking networks with computer systems all over the country. This time Ruby picked the New York State motor vehicle records connection and waited for a return on the owner of the car.
It took two minutes. The computer sent a message onto the small television-type screen on Smith's desk.
"No record of vehicle registration."
"Sheeit," Ruby mumbled. "Goddamn New York can't do nothin' right." Since she had moved to
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Rye to work for Smith, her life had been a continuous series of run-ins with the New York State bureaucracy, typified by her problems in trying to register her white Lincoln Continental in New York. Not only were the state's auto registration fees the highest in the nation but the registration form-which was accomplished in most other states on a single postcard-sized piece of paper-ran to seven separate documents and required a law firm to fill out. Ruby finally surrendered and kept her Virginia plates and if she ever got stopped and got any lip from a state trooper for having an out-of-state registration, she was going to run the sucker down.
She got out the Westchester County telephone book and began rifling through the yellow pages.
She began calling all those service stations listed for Rye, New York.
Ruby had found that people were never suspicious of the stupid, so she turned her accent into deep dripping Alabama.
"Hello. Mah name be Madie Jackson. Ah's tryin' to fahnd me a car ah hits today in a parkin' lot. A red Nova. Ah wanna call the owner and fix up his car for he."
On the twelfth call, she got lucky.
"Yeah, Madie," said a black voice from Cochran's Service. "That be Gruboff's car."
"Who?"
"Igor Gruboff, some funny name like that. He live up on Benjamin Place. He here complainin' all the time. Hey, Madie, what you doin' after you call him?"
"Depends on what ah's offered," Ruby said.
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"Ah closes down at 11. Then it's party time."
"Look for me," Ruby said.
"What you be drivin', Madie?"
"A blue deuce and a quarter," Ruby said.
"All raht," said the gas station man. "Hey, Madie, you gonna go see this Gruboff ?"
"Ah thought ah just call him."
"Don' let him jive you none. He a tight-ass suckah and he be tryin' to con you outa yo' money."
"Thanks, brother. Ah be careful and ah see you at 'leven."
"Ah'll be waiting. You'll know me. Ah be the handsome one."
"Ah can tell," Ruby said and hung up the telephone.
She found Igor Gruboff's address on Benjamin Place in the telephone directory. On a hunch, she punched it into CURE'S computers.
The printout came back that Igor Gruboff, fifty-one, was a communications specialist, working with micro-processing. He and his wife had defected from Russia eighteen years earlier, been granted asylum, and seven years ago had become American citizens. Mrs. Gruboff had died two years earlier. Gruboff was employed at Molly Electronics, which had four government contracts for silicon memory chips used in spacecraft.