Willy was still rubbing his ear. "Can I go now?"
"I'm done with you," Remo said.
"I am not," Chiun said. Willy clapped his hands over his ears in self-defense.
"Unhand your ears, you idiot," Chiun said. "When you came into this office last night, were the lights on or off?"
Remo shook his head. Chain's lights again.
"The switch was on," said Willy. "But all the lights was off. Nine of them. Count them. Nine of those bulbs. They was all burned out. And they was new bulbs, 'cause I only changed them like a month ago. I change all the bulbs at once 'cause I read a story once that it's more efficient to do it that way than to let them burn out and change them one at a time."
"So the bulbs were extinguished and you replaced them?" Chiun repeated.
'That's right, sir. Yes, sir. That's right."
"You may go," Chiun said, dismissing Willy with a wave of his long-nailed hands.
"That's handling those old folks, Chiun," said Remo after Willy left. "You call that respect?"
"Respect, unlike water, runs from low place to high place. This means that you should respect everyone you meet. I, on the other hand, am to be treated with respect by everyone. You may not like it, Remo, but it is the way of things."
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"Make your next lecture on modesty," Remo growled. "You do it so well. Why are you so interested in the light bulbs?"
"Because our invisible man," Chiun said, "can only be effective in the darkness. These last killings and the one of that man with the wife who varnished her hair were done in darkness. Darkness created by the killer. He may have a way, Remo, to turn out lights."
Remo nodded. The old Korean made sense.
"Then I guess we better turn out his lights and fast," Remo said.
The secretary in the outer office had overestimated the difficulty of compiling the names, addresses, and inventions of all the clients the firm had seen in the last six months. There were only twenty of them and she finished the job in twenty-eight minutes.
Remo sat at the conference table looking at the sheet of yellow paper on which she had printed in large block letters the client list.
He did not know what, if anything, he was looking for. But without leads, he would settle for anything. A clue. A hint. A hunch. Anything.
And it was there. The third name on the list.
"Chiun. Look at this." The Korean came over and stood behind Remo's shoulder.
"Invisible paint," Remo read. "Elmo Wimpler. And look at the address. Right next door to the guy with the varnished wife."
"The little man who did not like his neighbors," Chiun said.
"You're right," Remo said. Somehow he had failed to associate the name and address with the
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man they had met earlier. "The little nerd with the rented van."
"The little ones are often the most dangerous," Chiun said.
Remo looked at Chiun, who stood less than five feet tall, but suppressed the smile he felt that remark deserved.
"I think we ought to go back to Wimpler's house and see what we see," Remo said. "Or cannot see," Chiun said.
CHAPTER TEN
Elmo Wimpler had left his furniture behind when he left his ramshackle Brooklyn home. Looking around, Remo could understand why. His couch
was a massive, flower-covered lump in which a normal person, if he made the mistake of sitting down, might vanish without a trace. The living room armchairs were ratty and ripped.
His kitchen set was a small, round table with one wobbly leg and a hard-backed chair with a worn-through cushion. His bedroom set was ornate, old wood that looked as if it had been carved during the First Crusade.
Remo went through the house carefully, room by room, looking for something, anything, that would tell him who Elmo Wimpler was, and, more important, where he was.
But every personal trace seemed to have disappeared. There were no boxes of letters in the basement, no high-school yearbooks, no correspondence with relatives. Nothing that would indicate that the house had been lived in any time since the Industrial Revolution.
But when he got back to the living room, Chiun had found something Remo had missed.
The old man was sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading through a magazine. Next to him on the threadbare rug was a small pile of other maga-
76 I 77
zines. They had apparently been stashed under the couch.
Remo looked through the stack of magazines. Four of them were girlie magazines for the sadomasochistic trade. But the other three were copies of a magazine called Contract.
Remo looked at the one Chiun was looking through. The cover showed a diplomat, in striped trousers and formal coat, standing on a street corner. A man behind him was looping a strangler's wire over the diplomat's head. The cover blazed the legend of what was inside. "New Techniques for Successful Assassination." And "The Most Wanted Man in the World."
"I have never heard of this magazine," said Chiun.
"Me neither. Is it what I think it is?"
"It is for your American excuses-for-assassins. It tells them who somebody wants to have killed and what the fees are."
"Did the 'New Techniques for Successful Assassination' teach you anything?" Remo asked.
"Only that you and I never need fear being out of work," Chiun said. "Here." He handed the magazine forward. "You will find this interesting."
The magazine was opened to the article: "The Most Wanted Man in the World." Accompanying the article was a photograph of the Emir of Bislami in full military regalia.
The article said there was a twenty-million-dollar price on the deposed Emir's head, and the article's title had been circled in red ink.
Remo looked through the rest of the magazine. The classified section in the front was circled in red
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pen. He turned to the classified section and glanced at the help wanted columns:
WANTED: FEMALE WITH ABILITY TO
KILL WITH PLEASURE. RESUME AND
REFERENCES NECESSARY.
The ad gave a box number.
There were ads advertising different killing specialties: throwing knives, ripping knives, crossbows, undetectable poisons, guns with special night sights.
Another item circled in red caught Remo's eyes:
EVER KILL AN EMIR? CHECK OUT THE
PRICE. (Another box number.)
Another read:
ICE AN EMIR. (A box number.)
A third read:
SEND A MONARCH TO THE MORTUARY.
"Chiun," Remo started.
"I have seen them," Chiun said. He was reading another issue of Contract magazine. He seemed engrossed. Remo put the copy of the magazine into his back pocket and stood up to check the garage.
He went out the back door of the house and walked to the small detached garage. He saw the widow, Phyllis, in the next yard. When she saw him, her hand went naturally to her teased, blond hair.
"You couldn't stay away, could you?" she said with a smile.
"Just checking a few more things," he told her.
"Come in for coffee or something when you're through. Maybe I can help you with a few things."
"Sorry. I'm on duty right now," Remo said.
"When you get off duty," she said.
"Maybe. We'll see."
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She chose to take his answer as agreement, smiled, and turned back to her gardening.
Remo entered the dark garage, made black even in the daytime by the heavy plastic sheets that covered the windows.
He found an overhead light and flipped it on.
Against the far wall, he saw a large workbench. The shelves that lined the walls were filled with gadgets and devices, apparently the lifework of a committed inventor. Each item was labeled, with the date of its creation.
There were mousetraps that looked like lobster traps. There was a disco light radio. Another item was labelled "Electric Shoe Softener." It was a big metal foot, and from its hinging, Remo guessed that when it was plugged in, the foot bent and stretched, wearing out the stiffness of any new shoe placed on the device.