She looked down at the papers in front of her. One paper had five neat rows of five letters each. Twenty-five letters. Miss Feldman marked it 100 percent with four gold stars.
"The valedictorian?" Remo asked.
"Yes. She always has trouble with the W's."
"If you tried to teach, could they learn?" Remo asked.
"Not by the time they reach me," Miss Feldman said. "This is a senior class. If they're illiterate when they get here, they stay illiterate. They could be taught in the early grades though. If everybody would just realize that giving a failing mark to a black kid doesn't mean that you're a racist who wants to go back to slaveholding. But they have to do it in the early grades."
As Remo watched, a small tear formed in the inside corner of Miss Feldman's left eye.
"And they don't," he said.
"They don't. And so I sit here putting gold stars on papers that twenty years ago would have been grounds for expulsion, black student or white student. What we've come to."
"I'm a friend of Tyrone's. How's he doing?"
"As compared to?"
"The rest of the class," Remo said.
"With luck, he'll go to prison before he's eighteen. That way he'll never starve to death."
"If you had it in your power to decide, would you keep him alive? Would you keep any of them alive?"
"I'd kill them all over the age of six. And I'd start fresh with the young ones and make them work. Make them learn. Make them think."
"Almost like a teacher," Remo said.
She looked up at him sadly. "Almost," she agreed.
Remo turned away and clapped Tyrone on the shoulder. He woke with a start that nearly tipped over the desks.
"Come on, clown," Remo said. "Time to go home."
"Quittin' bell ring already?" Tyrone asked.
CHAPTER NINE
The fact that Tyrone Watson had made one of his infrequent appearances in class was quickly noted by one Jamie Rickets, alias Ali Muhammid, alias Ibn Faroudi, alias Aga Akbar, AKA Jimmy the Blade.
Jamie talked briefly to Tyrone, then left Malcolm-King-Lumumba School and jumped the wires on the first car he found with an unlocked door and drove the twelve blocks back to Walton Avenue.
In a pool hall, he found the vice counselor of the Saxon Lords and related that Tyrone had mentioned he spent the night at the Hotel Plaza in Manhattan. The vice counselor of the Saxon Lords went to the corner tavern and told the deputy subregent of the Saxon Lords who repeated the message to the deputy minister of war. Actually, the Saxon Lords had no minister of war who would have a deputy. But the title "deputy minister of war," it was decided, was longer and more impressive sounding than minister of war.
The deputy minister of war repeated it to the sub-counselor of the Saxon Lords, whom he found sleeping in a burned-out laundromat.
Twenty five minutes later, the subcounselor finally found the Saxon Lords' Leader for Life, sleeping on a bare mattress in the first-floor-left apartment of an abandoned building.
The Leader for Life, who had held the job for less than twelve hours since the sudden schoolyard demise of the last Leader for Life, knew what to do. He got up from his mattress, brushed off anything that might be crawling on him, and walked out onto Walton Avenue where he extorted ten cents from the first person he saw, an elderly black man on his way home from the night watchman's job he had held for thirty-seven years.
He used the dime to phone a number in Harlem.
"De Lawd be with you," the phone was answered.
"Yeah, yeah," said the Leader for Life. "Ah jes finds out where dey staying."
"Oh?" said the Reverend Josiah Wadson. "Where's that?"
"De Hotel Plaza down in de city."
"Very good," said Wadson. "You knows what to do?"
"Ah knows."
''Good. Take only yo' best mens."
"All my mens be my best mens. 'Ceppin Big-Big Pickens and he still in Nooick."
"Don't mess things up," Wadson said.
"Ah doan."
The Leader for Life of the Saxon Lords hung up the pay telephone in the little candy store. Then because he was Leader for Life and leaders had to display their power, he yanked the receiver cord from the body of the telephone.
He chuckled as he left the store on his way to round up a few of his very, very best men.
CHAPTER TEN
"Where we goin'?" asked Tyrone.
"Back to the hotel."
"Sheeit. Whyn't yo' jes' leave me go?"
"I'm making up my mind whether to kill you or not."
"Dass not right. Ah never did nuffin' you."
"Tyrone, your presence on this earth is doing something to me. You offend me. Now shut up, I'm trying to think."
"Sheeit, dat silly."
"What is?"
"Try'n-to think. Nobody try to think. Yo' jes' does it. It be natural."
"Close your face before I close it for you," Remo said.
Tyrone did and slumped in the far corner of the cab's left rear seat.
And as the cab driver tooled down toward Manhattan, four young black men walked along the hallway of the sixteenth floor of the Hotel Plaza toward the suite where a blood brother bellboy had told them a white man was staying with an old Oriental.
Tyrone stayed quiet for a full minute, then could stay quiet no more. "Ah doan lahk staying in dat place," he said.
"Why not?"
"Dat bed, it be hard."
"What bed?"
"Dat big bed wiffout de mattress. It be hard and hurt my back and everyfing."
"The bed?" Remo asked.
"Yeah. Sheeit."
"The big hard white bed?"
"Yeah."
"The big hard white bed that curves up at both ends?" Remo asked.
"Yeah. Dat bed."
"That's a bathtub, plungermouth. Close your face."
And while Remo and Tyrone discussed the latest in bathroom furniture, the Leader for Life of the Saxon Lords put his hand on the doorknob of Suite 1621 in the Plaza, turned it slightly, and when he found the door unlocked and open, presented a pearly smile of triumph to his three associates who grinned back and brandished their brass knuckles and lead-filled saps.
The cab came across the bumpy, rutted Willis Avenue bridge into northern Manhattan, and as the cab jounced up and down on the pitted road surface, Remo wondered if anything worked anymore in America.
The road he was riding on felt as if it hadn't been paved since it was built. The bridge looked as if it had never been painted. There was a school system that didn't teach and a police force that didn't enforce the law.
He looked out at the buildings, the geometric row after row of city slum buildings, factories, walkups.
Everything was going to rack and ruin. It sounded like a law firm that America had on a giant retainer. Rack and Ruin.
Nothing worked anymore in America.
Meanwhile, the Leader for Life opened the door of Suite 1621 wide. Sitting on the floor in front of them, scribbling furiously on parchment with a quill pen, was an aged Oriental. Tiny tufts of hair dotted his head. A trace of wispy beard blossomed below his chin. Seen from behind, his neck was thin and scrawny, ready for wringing. His wrists, jutting out of his yellow robe, were delicately thin, like the wrists of a skinny old lady. He must have used a stick the other night in the schoolyard when he hit one of the Lords, the new Leader for Life thought. But they were all little kids anyway. Now he was going to see the real Saxon Lords.
"Come in and close the door," Chiun said without turning. "You are welcome to his place." His voice was soft and friendly.
The Leader for Life motioned his three followers to move into the room, then closed the door and rolled his eyes toward the old man with a smile. This was gonna be easy. Dat chinky mufu was gonna be a piece of cake. A twinkie even.
Inside the cab as it turned south along the Franklin D. Roosevelt East Side drive, Tyrone's mouth began to work as he tried to formulate a sentence. But Remo was close to something. There was a thought gnawing at him and he didn't want it interrupted by Tyrone so he clapped a hand out across Tyrone's mouth and held it there.