"Those tiling’s hurt cars?"
"No. Goes right through metal. Picks up different kinds of plants. Carrots and things."
"What kind of things?" asked Willie the Plumber.
"Oh, I don't know. Carrots. Turnips. Poppies, I guess."
"Poppies? You mean them red things on veterans' day."
"Leave me alone," the man said.
"I'm just asking friendly questions. If you want to find out about carrots and turnips, why don't you go to the vegetable market?"
"Don't ask me, fella. It's the government."
Willie nodded and warned the man that the thing he was using better not hurt his Eldorado or the man would be "sucking on a lead pipe."
Then Willie the Plumber steered himself carefully back to his car, filing away the survey of carrots, turnips and poppies as a little fact of life he would not share with anyone until he saw a profit in it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was really getting good now.
There was no way out of it.
Vance Masterman simply had to tell Loretta that he could not marry her because she was his daughter. That would free her to turn in Professor Singbar Ramkwat as the thief of the lymph node cure and then Loretta could marry Bart Henderson and he would continue his research work. Not even Claire Wentworth, Loretta's mother, could be dissatisfied with that, particularly since it gave her a clear field to Dr. Bruce Barton.
But it all hinged on Vance Masterman telling Loretta. In just minutes it had to happen and Chiun was more than happy. Happiness, he demonstrated by rocking slightly back and forth while sitting in his full lotus position on the floor of their East Side apartment. When he was really overjoyed, sometimes he hummed. Today, Chiun was rocking and humming. Ecstasy.
He turned up the volume on the television set so as not to miss a word and then he waited for the solution to the problems of an entire community.
Braaaawk.
It was the door bell.
Whoever it was would simply have to wait. There were only about eight minutes left in the show anyway. Chiun could tell.
Braaaaaaaaaaaawk.
This time, the loud insistent squawk of the door bell threatened to overwhelm the music, violins and organs, sobbing from the television set.
Let him wait.
Of course, one should never let a person wait at a front door. That was rudeness and Orientals did not believe in rudeness. On the other hand, eighty-year-old Koreans who had attained peace with themselves, did not get up and walk away from the great moment of a show that they had watched for seven years to coax to this point. Politeness or self-contentment?
Courtesy was a duty and in his eight decades on the planet, Chiun had never shirked his duty. He was ready to shirk now, ready to sit Vance Masterman through right until the end and if someone waited in the hall until his feet grew roots through the carpet, that was too bad. People should not come visiting when good shows are on.
The impasse, fortunately, was resolved by up organ music, slow dissolve, momentary silence and then the appearance on screen of a lady plumber belly-laughing the stains out of sinks in New York City.
Chiun jumped to his feet and began running. Out of the living room, through the dining room, down the hallway, his long brocaded white robe swirling about his ankles.
Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawk.
Chiun reached up and unlocked the door. Then he unlocked the safety dead bolt. Then he went to remove the safety chain, all of which he had been assured were absolutely necessary to keep fastened at all times if one wished to remain alive in New York City for the better part of an afternoon.
But the safety chain was stuck and did not pull off its slide. So Chiun held the chain in his left hand and with a silent expulsion of air, brought his right fingertips down against the offending chain, searing one link as if it had been sliced by a bolt cutter.
Then Chiun turned the doorknob, pulled the door open fractionally, turned and was racing back down the hall, through the dining room, into the living room and back into his lotus position.
Organ music up, then fade in and enter Vance Masterman. "Dear, I have something to tell you. . . ."
In the hallway, Johnny the Duck, Vinnie O'Boyle and Pops Smith, saw the door swing open slightly. They looked at each other with suspicion and Johnny the Duck reached into the shoulder holster under his left armpit and removed a .45 calibre pistol. He touched the door tentatively with his left hand, then waited until the door swung all the way back, stopping with a soft thud against the wall. No one behind it.
The three men stepped inside, Johnny the Duck first as befitted his rank, then O'Boyle, followed by Pops Smith, a tall, shuffling, black man whose eternal grin was relieved only slightly by a scar that furrowed down his face from alongside his right eye to the point of his chin.
Pops had gotten it when he tried to hold out and continue running his small independent numbers operation in the face of a stated desire by the Mafia that it take over Pops' numbers. For a consideration, of course, since it simply was not good -business procedure to allow him to pay winners higher odds than the Mafia did, because, after all, there was such a thing as unfair competition and how could man survive in such a dog-eat-dog world. They made this point clear to Pops by slashing his face with a linoleum knife and warning him that the next time it would be his genitals.
Pops, who had been a big fish in a small pond, opted to become a fully-equipped, if small fish, in the Mafia's big gambling pond. While he still sometimes harboured suspicions that the Mafia was not truly concerned with entrepreneurship among minorities and was even at times bigoted, he did not express those opinions to anyone, especially not to Gaetano Gasso, who had sent him here today.
Pops looked anxiously now over the shoulders of Johnny the Duck and Vinnie O'Boyle. The long carpeted hall was empty. Funny they had heard or seen no one at the door.
The Duck nodded to Pops who fastened the two locks that still worked. Pops shook his head at the sight of the broken chain lock. A good way to get yourself killed in New York City, letting maintenance go that way.
Cautiously, the three men walked slowly down the hall, in sort of an ethnic pecking order in the Mafia: Johnny the Duck first, followed by the Irishman O'Boyle, followed by the black Pops Smith. Despite their best efforts, their feet made small scuffing noises on the carpet and the Duck removed the safety on his gun. Up ahead, they could hear voices. Funny, O'Boyle thought, that fifty bucks to the doorman told them that the dink was here alone.
Softly now into the dining room. The voices were louder now and O'Boyle took out his gun too, a .38 calibre police special with burned-off serial numbers.
The dining room opened into the living room through a large archway. They smiled at each other in relief. The voices came from the television set and in front of it, squatting on the floor, enraptured by the pale gray image in the bright sunlit room, sat the dink, his back to them.
"There's nothing you have to tell me that I want to hear," came a woman's voice from the television. The dink was rocking and humming.
Johnny the Duck chuckled and put his gun back into his shoulder holster. So did Vinnie O'Boyle. They noticed that Pops had not taken out his gun and that annoyed the other two, because he would be sure to tell Gasso how stupid both of them had looked with their guns aimed at the back of the aged, tiny Oriental who could hurt nothing more than his eyes if he sat too close to the set. And Gasso would needle them about it. Maybe for weeks, maybe for months, maybe forever.
And there was nothing you could do about Gasso's needling except take it. Maybe for weeks, maybe for months, maybe forever.
They stepped into the parquet-floored living room, their metal cleated heels making sharp clicks on the highly polished wood.
"Hey, you," Johnny the Duck called at the back of the brocaded, white robe. It kept rocking. Its occupant kept humming. Johnny the Duck walked around in front of Chiun and looked down into the placid Oriental face. A peaceful-looking old man.