"See you tomorrow," she called after him.
"How about the interview with the mayor?"
"His schedule is filled. Sorry."
"I'll see him. Don't worry."
"Will you come back tomorrow?"
"No," Remo said.
"Okay," she said. "You come back tomorrow and you can see him for five minutes. Get here at 10 a.m. and you can see him at noon. We'll find some way to while away the hours. Now shut the door. I've got work to do."
Another seed planted. Remo smiled to himself as he thought of the double meaning. On to the editor.
Editor James Horgan sat with his feet on his desk, his polka dot bowtie open over his checked shirt, cleaning his fingernails with a makeup rule, a thin strip of steel used to separate type in the composing room.
"Sure I know about the massive heroin import. I imported it. I want to start my kids early on the habit and since the stuff is so hard to get nowadays, I thought I'd buy a lifetime supply. Anything else you want to know?"
"I'm serious, Mr. Horgan."
"You don't sound it." The voice was a gravelly whine, a pervasive discontent in search of something to be discontented about. Horgan got the pinky with a right-angle tip of the makeup rule.
"Hudson has become the heroin capital of the country. I believe you're the mastermind," Remo said.
Horgan looked up. His eyes twinkled.
"You're on a fishing expedition, son. What do you really want?"
"I want the facts."
"All right. There's a market for heroin. As long as there's a market, you're going to have people selling it. As long as it is illegal it will be expensive and the people who sell it will be criminals. Now if you could buy the stuff with a prescription from your doctor, goodbye heroin traffic."
"But wouldn't that create addicts?"
"You talk as if we don't have them now. What that would do would be to make it unprofitable for the pushers and they'd stop trying to get other people hooked," Horgan said.
"Wouldn't that turn America into a nation of drug-users?"
"As opposed to?"
"Is that why you imported so much heroin?"
"I've gone fishing myself, son. You're not bad at it. Then again, you're not very good at it. Ever been in the newspaper business?"
"No," said Remo. "There are some things I wouldn't stoop to, even for money."
Horgan guffawed. "What makes you think we get paid?"
Remo rose to leave. "Thank you for the interview," he said. "I'll keep you in mind."
"Uh, look, son. Good luck on whatever you're looking for and on the way out, try to wake up my city desk. See if any of my editors are alive and send one of them in. You can tell they're alive if the dust hasn't settled on their faces. And if you should bump into anyone who can write, tell him he's hired. You wouldn't want a job, would you?"
"No thanks. I've got one."
Remo walked out into the dull, green city room, lathered by ink dust. Around a collection of desks pushed together sat a group of men, moving their hands zombie-like over pieces of paper.
Physically, they were alive.
Outside, in front of the Hudson Tribune in Hudson Square, Remo picked up his tails. He took a taxi to New York City instead of a bus or the subway, so that his tails would have an easier time staying with him.
He brought them to a modern apartment building in the fashionable upper East Side of New York City.
He knew that his tails would be all over the doorman with five, ten, maybe twenty dollar bills. Of course, in such an exclusive neighbourhood, no doorman would give away information for five dollars. They might even want as much as fifty. Remo hoped the doorman held out for top dollar.
On the tenth floor, he got out of the elevator and walked down the carpeted foyer to his apartment.
When he entered, he saw Chiun sitting before the television set, the flickering making his yellow face pale in the darkness of the apartment.
CURE had bought Chiun a taping device, which he brought with him when he accompanied Remo. This way, he could tape the daytime soap operas instead of missing two while he watched one.
"It is wrong," he had complained, "that all the good shows should come at one time so that they be missed. Why do they not have one after another so people can have true enjoyment?"
With his taping device hooked up to another television in the apartment, Chiun could watch his soap operas from noon until 7 p.m. He would make little clucking sounds as Mrs. Claire Wentworth disclosed that her daughter had been living with Dr. Bruce Barton, even though Dr. Barton could not leave his wife, Jennifer, because she was dying of leukaemia, and even though Loretta, the daughter, was really in love with Vance Masterman who, she did not realize, was her father but who she thought was in league with Professor Singbar Ramkwat of the Pakistani Embassy who had stolen the plans for the lymph-node cure which Bart Henderson had devoted his life to developing before he met Loretta, with whom he was in love.
As Remo remembered it, this was pretty much where Mrs. Wentworth and Vance Masterman were a year and a half ago. He mentioned it to Chiun, as he went to the phone on the living room table.
"Quiet," said Chiun.
Remo dialled a number, let it ring three times, then put the receiver down on the cradle and reached into a drawer for a plastic box punctured for speaker holes. The white plastic box had four dials on the left side, each with numbers one through nine.
What was that combination again? He knew it as well as his birthday, mainly because it was his birthday, minus two digits from the year. He dialled the number, setting the box on function. When the phone rang, he lifted the receiver and snapped the box onto it, transforming the meaningless squawks into a human voice.
Unfortunately, the voice was always Harold W. Smith's, and Remo liked the squawks better. Outside telephone booths had become almost open circuits because of the little known but extensive tapping of them by security agencies. And those that weren't tapped didn't work, a fact which drove the Mafia to write threatening letters to the telephone supervisors. So now, Remo used a scrambler.
'Yeah," Remo said.
"Still no shipments have moved out, and the buyers around the country are getting edgy. We've heard this around. How are you doing?"
"Okay for the first day. I've created some interest."
"Good."
"Are you running those heroin detectors through Hudson?" Remo asked.
"Yeah, but we've gotten nothing. The stuff may be underground and if so we wouldn't pick it up. What's wrong? You sound down."
"I saw an old friend today."
"Oh, that thing. Yes, we got a report on it. Well, we expected you might run into something like that."
"I'm glad we did, you sonofabitch," said Remo and hung up the phone. Then he dialled the number again, but took off the scrambler and listened to the receiver squawk incoherently.
At 7:35, Chiun turned off the last of his daytime serials and put Remo through his workout. He noted that Remo had had sex twice by certain alterations in his movements, and he advised against orgasms while at peak.
They went through the floater stroke again, with warnings again from Chiun about target balance and the dangers of missing the target.
At 10:15 p.m., Chiun made himself dinner and Remo showered, put his hand through a wall in frustration and went to bed. Skorich had been a nice guy.
CHAPTER NINE
Rad Pulmetter had his master's degree in agricultural biology, specifically the transmutation of wheat strains. With that sort of education, you either got on top of a tractor, joined Ralston Purina or went to work for one of the government agencies. Unless, of course, you wanted to teach agriculture which Rad Pulmetter did not want to do.
Which he used to explain to himself while asking himself what he was doing in the Hackensack meadows on a small platform similar to a duck blind, pointing an aluminium housed tube at passing vehicles and making notes. He made notes on blinks. He made notes largely on vegetable trucks. Why the Department of Agriculture needed a routing plan on tubers was beyond him. The stupidity of the government.