Proudly he pushed them across the Formica table for Remo to read.
"You know, sugar's a drug," said Remo, glancing at the glistening layer of chemically colored goo enveloping the sugar-and-flour concoction. If Remo had one bite, his highly tuned nervous system would malfunction, and he would probably pass out.
"I like it," said Vassily.
"They say that about cocaine and heroin, too," said Remo, wincing as Vassily took a big bite.
"Is good," said Vassily. "Read, read. Look at the part about the 'cunning mastermind.' Is me."
Remo read about shotgunning in elevators, machinegunning in bedrooms, and shooting in the back of the steps of a church.
"Pretty brutal," said Remo.
"Thank you," said Vassiiy. "Those were my bones, as they call them. Have you made your bones?"
"You mean do a service?"
"Yes. Most assuredly. Do service."
"Yeah," said Remo.
"Would you like to join my new crime family?"
"No. I'm going overseas somewhere."
"Where?"
"I don't know."
"Crime families are not what they're cracked up to be," said Vassily. "They all ran. What is this with them? I made them caporegimes, too. And then they ran. What are crime families coming to nowadays'? That is what I ask. I hear so much about America deteriorating. Is this true of the crime families?"
"I dunno," said Remo. "I got my own problems. Once I find out what you do, then I'm done. More than twenty years and I'm through here. Well, okay, good enough. What should I tell my boss you do? I mean exactly. I mean, would a country invade another country just to get back a hypnotist? I thought he might have been lying."
"Was not lying. Russians are crazy. Crazy people. They invaded, you say?"
National Guard helicopters buzzed overhead. In the distance, small-arms fire could be heard. Many people had rushed out of the luncheonette and were being warned by policemen to stay back. Somehow the Russians had invaded America, but the word was, not too many of them. A bunch of Russians was trapped, someone yelled.
"And in one of the best neighborhoods, to boot," said another.
"They sent soldiers," said Vassily, covering his eyes with his hands. "What am I going to do? I can't fight a whole country. Not a whole country. You've got to be my friend. "
Vassily now decided that if this man would not be his friend voluntarily, he would do it the other way. It was always better to have a sincere real friend, but when one couldn't, one had to make do with what one had.
Just like with women. One would prefer that a woman would undrape herself with honest passion, but when one did not have honest passion available, the next best thing was dishonest passion. It certainly was better than no passion at all. He would give the man who introduced himself as Remo one last chance.
"Be my friend," he said.
"I got a friend," said Remo. "And he's a pain in the ass. "
"Then hello," said Vassily, taking his hands away from his eyes to make contact with Remo, who was going to be his best friend whether he liked it or not.
Unfortunately the man moved faster than anything Vassily had ever seen, and he did it so gracefully it hardly looked as though he were moving, except that he was out the door and into the street in an instant.
The reports out of Washington buzzed with relief. The President had nothing but praise for CURE. Smith, however, felt uncomfortable with praise. As Miss Ashford used to say in the Putney Day School back in Vermont:
"One should never do a job for praise, but because it should be done. And it should be done well. One should never be praised for doing what one should, because all jobs should be done well."
This parsimonious attitude was not peculiar to Miss Ashford. It was what the Smiths believed, and the Coakleys, and the Winthrops, and the Manchesters. Harold W. Smith had been raised in an atmosphere that was as rigidly uniform as in any of the courts of China. Everything had changed since then but the memories of the older folk, of which Harold W. Smith at age sixty-seven legitimately counted himself.
And so when the President told Smith he had come through in the hardest times, Smith answered:
"Is there anything else, sir?"
"We easily captured that special Russian group, and do you know how they got in every time without us finding them? They were planted ahead of time. All set to go. Bang. All they needed was their commander to tell them to go. And your man got him, and the rest of them are useless. And we know now how to take precautions against any other attempts at this. These are tough times and it feels damned good to win one for a change," said the President.
"Sir, what can we do for you?"
"Take a damned compliment for once," said the President.
"I do not not believe, sir, we were commissioned to win medals and such. If I ever mentioned a medal to either of our two active people, they would laugh at me."
"Well, dammit, thank you anyhow. You should know that the Russians have denied any involvement with their own soldiers, publicly declaring it a capitalist imperialist Zionist plot. Privately they threw up their hands and apologized. I think this thing is turning everything around. Their espionage system is exposed as it never has been before, their special group will never exist again, and we have them on the run. They've pulled back into their shell and word is they are running scared. Scared."
"Except we don't know why they risked so much yet."
"Did you find out?"
"Not yet, but I suspect when one of our active people calls in, I will."
"Let us know," said the President, and again he surrendered to bubbling enthusiasm. "These are great days to be an American, Harold W. Smith. I don't care how expensive that laundry list of treasure is to get. It's worth it."
"It might be a strain on the budget, sir."
"What budget? Nobody knows how this thing works. Besides, what's another few billion more if it's worth it? We lost a few billion just in accounting."
"Yessir," said Smith, hanging up.
Down at Vistana Views, Remo looked around the condominium to see if he had left anything. He was leaving America for good now. He had completed his last mission. Smith would be here soon for the last debriefing.
He felt sad, but he didn't know why he felt sad. He told himself it was fitting that he was leaving from Epcot Center, a Walt Disney production. His whole life might have been Mickey Mouse all along.
Was America any better for the work he had done? Was he any better? The only thing that made him better was his training. Chiun tried to cheer him by talking about the glories of the courts of kings, how one could play games with dictators and tyrants as employers, how Smith was inexplicable and treated his assassins poorly, ashamed of them, hiding their deeds, even hiding himself. But in the land of the true tyrant, an assassin was flaunted, an assassin was honored, an assassin was boasted about.
"Yeah, good," said Remo. And still he felt like yesterday's old potatoes, somehow being thrown out with the rest of his life.
"Do you feel bad, Remo. The Great Wang understood these things. It happens to all Masters, even the great ones. "
"Did it happen to you, little father?" asked Remo.
"No. It never happened to me."
"Why not?"
"Well, you have to feel that somehow you have done something wrong. All I had to do was look at my life. As the Great Wang said: 'Do not judge a life by how it ends, as do those of the West, but judge it by the whole.' If I did nothing but fail for the rest of my life, I would still be wonderful. "
"That's you, not me. I feel like the world has fallen out from underneath me and I don't know why."
"As the Great Wang said: 'Before perfection is that awareness of not being perfect, so that you feel your worst before you achieve your new level.' You are only getting better, Remo. And we should be grateful for that, because you certainly needed it."