Remo let the man drop to the sidewalk. Chiun continued walking away without looking up.
"There is another one up there, too," he said over his shoulder to Remo.
Remo glanced upward in time to see a second man, a knife in his hand, leap off the roof toward Remo. Remo ducked, grabbed the man who lay in a clump on the walk, and tossed him up.
The quick and the dead collided in midair. And then both were dead as the knife in the live man's hand twisted around from the force of the collision and buried itself in the man's throat. They were both dead when the two bodies hit again.
Remo glanced up. Chiun was leaning against their rented car, still reading.
Remo looked through the dead men's clothing. There was no identification. Their faces told him nothing. They could have been any of a half-dozen nationalities. There were no wallets, no clothing tags, no driver's licenses. Nothing.
Remo left the bodies where they lay. When he ap-
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proached the car, Chiun said, "What took you so long?"
"You could have warned me they were up there," Remo groused.
"I was busy reading. Why is it that people in this country always think that if you're reading, you are not doing anything important?" He pointed over Remo's shoulder. "And my magazines. You dropped them. Go pick them up. First, you keep me waiting, and then you drop my magazines, too. Really, Remo."
Back at their hotel room, high overlooking Central Park, Remo called Smith again and told him of the attack at Wimpler's house.
"No identification at all?" Smith asked.
"None," Remo said.
"Could you tell if they were foreign?"
"You mean, maybe from the Emir Bislami? I don't know. They could have been from Italy for all I know."
"Dark skinned?" Smith asked.
"Yes, but that means Spanish, Italian, Bislamic, or a dozen other things including sun tanned. Besides, why would anyone from Bislami send a hit team after Chiun and me?"
"Maybe you didn't make any friends when you visited the Emir?" Smith said. "Be careful tonight."
"Sure, Daddy. Tell Mommy we love her. Bye."
Chiun was still reading Contract in the living room of the hotel apartment.
"Did you see any ads that might fit us?" Remo asked him.
"No. Not one. Not once did I see any advertisement calling for someone to attempt fruitlessly, to
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dispatch the Master of Sinanju and his ungrateful pupil who drops magazines. Not a word," Chiun said. "Wait until I start writing for this magazine. Then you'll see its quality improve," he said.
Remo looked out the window at the park.
Could the assassins have been hired by Wimpler? That made no sense. He sounded as if he liked to do his own killing.
The night was moonless. The park would be perfect for an invisible assassin.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Elmo Wimpler entered Central Park near the East 72nd Street entrance a few minutes after 11
P.M.
Dressed in a white shirt and slacks and carrying a paper bag, Wimpler had as much chance of survival walking through the park as a piece of sirloin thrown into a cage of starving Dobermans.
But only seventy-five feet in the park, Wimpler darted from the pathway and into a cluster of bushes. He congratulated himself on being unseen.
But Wimpler was wrong.
He had been seen by Bats Agron. Bats was lounging against a pipefence, fingering the switchblade knife in his pocket and when he saw Wimpler enter the park, he wrapped around himself the dark cape which had given him his nickname and slid back in the shadows to watch. The little man in the white shirt had victim written all over him, and Agron had smiled as the man walked ever closer to him.
Then the little man had run into a clump of bushes. Probably some kind of fagola, Agron thought. Well, he might have been waiting to meet his boyfriend, but he was in for a surprise. He was going to meet Bats Agron.
The slim, smooth-faced, Latin youth took his knife from his pocket and held it in his right hand, his finger on the switch that flipped it open. He
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walked through the splash of sparse bushes into a small clearing, then looked around. It was a dark night, but that white-shirted man should have stood out like a lighthouse. Agron looked all around him, but saw no one.
"Shit," he cursed softly to himself.
"Looking for someone?" came a soft voice. It seemed to come from behind Agron's right shoulder. He turned, but saw nothing, just another silhouette of just another bush. He turned in the other direction, straining his eyes to see into the darkness.
He never had a chance to press the switch on his knife. He felt something metallic pressing against both sides of his head, then he heard a voice say, "So long, sucker," and then there was a flash of pain.
And then nothing.
Elmo Wimpler was pleased. He wiped off the skull-crusher and replaced it into the waistband he had designed to carry his equipment. Since leaving his house, he had been giving a lot of thought to the problem of his invisibility. He was invisible in total darkness, but in anything less than that, he was visible as a silhouette, without features, almost a
shadow, but still the silhouette of a man. He had He realized now how fooMl he had been on
realized that his protection would be much greater if
he had fashioned a folding screen, shaped roughly into the outline of a bush. He had painted it with his invisible, black paint also. In a dark park setting, he could just open the screen and anyone glancing in that direction would see nothing but the dark sil-
90
houette of just another bush, instead of the outline of a man.
He had wondered if it would work. The body of Bats Agron, lying at his feet, his skull in pieces, had just given him his successful road test. It worked.
Whistling lightly under his breath, Wimpler folded the screen under an arm and began strolling off toward the Sheep Meadow to meet the people who wanted him to kill the Emir of Bislami.
He knew little about the Emir, except what he had seen on the television newscasts. But politics didn't matter to him. What had mattered was that the people he had called were willing to pay a million dollars each for the Emir's death.
Wimpler still hadn't made up his mind. Should he kill the Emir and admit it to the world, challenging them to catch him? Or should he do it silently, as a professional, an anonymous hit man?
Why not? He could do both. He could take the credit for the Emir's death. People would be lining up to hire him. Contract magazine was filled with ads from people looking for killers. He could pick and choose.
But first, his two-million-dollar job.
Brooklyn dock to have asked for so little to kill that
. ij u u- -lu a * c t federal witness. But that was then. The person who
he could change his silhouette, and out of a few , ƒ* 7T Vv**i t • a *u +
« a¿ a a i *u ¦ i j asked for that little amount was a wimp, and that pieces of cardboard, hinged along their long edges,
wimp was dead. Alive now, in his place, was Elmo Wimpler, Elmo the Invisible Killer, Elmo the Scourge of the World.
He laughed aloud with happiness. From sheer joy, he took the light oscillating device from his pocket and aimed it at one of the streetlamps that
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'tlA«
lined the roadway through the park. He pressed the I there was no longer any weakness about Elmo Wim-
switch. The light sputtered and died.
He remembered "The Shadow" radio show. That's what he was, a modern-day Shadow, striking fear into the heart of men.
The first meeting was scheduled to be held in the southwest corner of the Sheep Meadow. Wimpler was there a few minutes before midnight and when he saw that the area was empty, he found himself a dark spot near some bushes, opened up his screen and propped it onto the ground. Then he sat behind it, his head out, able to see around the entire clearing. He had his compressor on the grass next to him.