"Pal," Kenny snorted. "I don't know you and I don't like you. Already, I could find a reason to do some things to you that ain't pleasant. Now get lost."
"I'd love to. Except I'm your contact man. I'm supposed to get you to Nemeroff. In one piece. That means without being beaten up by some airline stewardess or arrested by airport police for having a phony passport."
"What's your name?" Kenny asked.
"Roger Willis."
"I never heard of you," Kenny said.
"I've heard of you, Mr. Kenny. So has the baron. That's why he sent me. To keep you out of trouble."
"You got any identification?" Kenny asked.
"In my briefcase."
"Get it," Kenny said.
Remo looked around him, then up at the overhead oxygen mask. It would be pleasant to give Kenny a demonstration of how it worked and cut off the air supply. Too risky. Too much chance of people wandering by.
"You've really slipped," Remo said. "Sure, I'll open my briefcase out here, so that every nosy bastard on the plane can come by and snoop into our business. The lavatory. Five minutes. The one on the left, leave the lock open."
He got up without waiting for an answer, stepped over Kenny's legs and returned to his own seat.
Remo glanced at his watch. The plane should be nearing its destination in a few minutes. He wanted to shave the time just right.
Five minutes later, Kenny got up and walked toward the center of the plane. Remo nodded to him as he passed. He waited a minute, then stood up and followed.
Kenny was washing his face at the sink when Remo entered the little cubicle and his eyes met Remo's in the mirror. There was a glint of metal at Kenny's wrist and Remo remembered he carried a knife in his sleeve.
Kenny patted his face delicately with a towel from a pile over the sink, put back on his eyeglasses, and turned to Remo.
"Now where's your identification?" he said.
"Right here," Remo said. His left hand flicked out and the fingernails raked the skin over Kenny's left eye, tearing up the tissue-paper thin scar tissue, and sending blood streaming down Kenny's face. "That identifies me as a guy who doesn't like to see women beaten up."
"Bastard," Kenny growled. He flicked his arm toward the floor, hard; the handle of the knife was in his hand, and then it was pointed at Remo's midsection. "When I'm done with you, they'll identify you by my initials on the inside of your stomach."
"You're forgetting Nemeroff. I'm his man," Remo said.
"Screw Nemeroff. He hired me to be around if he needs me. He didn't hire me to be pushed around by some punk."
Remo backed off, with only inches separating him from Kenny.
"Is this any way to greet an old friend?" Remo asked.
"Old friend, huh?" Kenny glowered.
"Sure. We met in Newark. Oh, maybe ten years ago. Don't you remember?"
Kenny was wavering. "No."
"Yeah. I arrested you for gambling. You had me transferred off my beat."
Kenny's eyes squinted behind the glasses, trying to remember. He did. "You're a cop," he hissed. "A goddam cop. No wonder."
"Take a good look, you pail of garbage. It's the last face you'll ever see," Remo said.
Kenny lunged with the knife and Remo slid alongside the thrust. The blade hit the metal door and the force of the stroke skidded the blade along the door, until it slipped into the crack between the door and the frame. Remo slapped the door open, and the movement snapped off the knife blade, and then the edge of Remo's hand hit Kenny in the face.
He jolted backward, onto the toilet seat, dropping the knife-handle. Then Remo was on him, an arm under Kenny's arm, the heel of his hand against the back of Kenny's neck, pressing it forward, cutting off the air. He forced Kenny over the shallow sink and shoved his head down into it. He ran the water until the sink was full, and he kept Kenny's face down under the water. In the confines of the tiny room there was little opportunity to move about or gain leverage. Remo was on him like a vice. First there was bubbling and then thrashing, then just silent limpness.
Already, his trip was a success, Remo thought. PJ Kenny. Good. And that could be his passport to Nemeroff. Passport.
He reached into Kenny's jacket pocket and took his billfold and passport. Still holding Kenny in the sink, he flipped open the passport. It was made out in the name of Johnson and carried the picture of the new Kenny—horn-rimmed, country-doctor glasses and all. Remo took his passport from his hip pocket and slid it into Kenny's jacket. The dead man was now Roger Willis.
So much for that.
He dried Kenny's face and hair with a towel, then arranged him on the toilet seat. Kenny's body slumped against the wall. His glasses hung from only one earpiece.
The glasses. Remo took them. He'd need them, if they checked passports. The horn-rims would fool anyone, particularly passport checkers to whom all faces looked alike anyway.
He started to leave, and remembered Kenny's face. Even with the passport for Roger Willis, someone might recognize him as Kenny. Probably that blonde stewardess.
With his fingernails he made sure no one would ever recognize Kenny again.
He then washed his hands and slipped Kenny's eyeglasses in his shirt pocket.
Stepping out of the lavatory, he smashed the side of his hand twice against the hinges of the door, crushing the metal, making sure it would not open to a casual push.
He would be long gone, before they found PJ Kenny's body.
Before anyone was ever able to identify the corpse as PJ Kenny's, Remo would be done with Baron Nemeroff and Vice President Asiphar. It should all work very well.
Remo walked back down the aisle, and with no stewardess in sight, took the attaché case from under Kenny's seat.
He got back into his own seat just as the "fasten safety belts" light came on.
The blonde walked up the aisle, checking seat belts. She smiled at Remo and he smiled back.
He wondered what her expression would be after they'd landed, and they found the body sitting on the john. Or later, when they determined that he had died of drowning.
Probably, she'd smile.
Remo would.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Baron Isaac Nemeroff had sent telegrams of summons all over the world, and all over the world men prepared to come.
From the top families of the American Mafia to the leading producer and purveyor of pornography in the world-a Japanese who owned and operated brothels and film processing plants in more than fifteen countries-they prepared to come. Men who controlled thousands of acres of land, now turned over to the growing of poppies, made ready to come. From the bowels of crime would come the professional gamblers who owned those casinos around the world which once had been expected to drive criminals out of gambling. From Switzerland would come a seventy-two-year-old man whose name was probably unknown to everyone but Nemeroff, who knew him as the greatest counterfeiter in the world, a man who had printed literally billions of dollars of queer and floated it into the world money-markets from his Swiss headquarters.
There would be smugglers, gun-runners, swindlers, the head of a ring of jewel thieves.
When Nemeroff called, they would all come.
And most of them were not sure of why.
Few had ever met him, which was as Nemeroff wanted it, since he was not a public man.
His name did not make gossip columns unless he wished it to. He did not allow himself to be thought of as phony Russian nobility, another fraud who declared himself baron three days after learning which fork to use.
His credentials as nobility were impeccable. He chose to live his life to meet the arbitrary standards he had set for that nobility.
Nemeroff was forty-six years old, the only son of a beautiful young Frenchwoman, and a Russian father whose ancestry was connected with the Romanoffs and whose capacity for anger was connected with the Cossacks.