"Yes. Ex-cop," said Pruel.
"I never told you what it was like, Pruel, to be a
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crippled dwarf and watch all the bosomy ladies go by. I didn't have even one leg, but I had a double dose of lust. And so what does a man do when he is repulsive to women ? How does he slake that great thirst? He becomes the best salesman you've ever seen."
"Yes, the best," said Pruel. He finished the wonderful glass of liquid and got up and snatched the bottle from Montrofort. It was his bottle. It was good. The world was good.
"You loved Ernest Walgreen," said Montrofort.
"Loved," said Pruel. He drank from the bottle. The bottle was good. Good was the bottle.
"You will kill his killers."
"Kill his killers," said Pruel. He was going to do that.
"You are an avenging angel."
"Angel. Avenging."
"You will put bullets into two men. One is white and one is Korean. You will be shown where they are. Here are pictures. They are with a blond woman with excruciatingly lovable breasts, with mounds of luscious glory preceding her like trumpets before the Lord."
"Kill," said Pruel, and the grapefruity taste filled his body. He had just gone through the very good feelings of nice boozy comfort and now he was clear about things. He knew who had killed Ernest Walgreen. Good old Ernie whom he loved. The two guys in the picture Mr. Montrofort had just shown him.
He had felt bad because he had not killed the two in revenge. If he were to kill them, all would be right again. He was above feeling good. Feeling good was for people who did not know
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the one good and great thing that would set everything right. The thing that had to be done. The one purpose for which a man lived. He knew what it was. His purpose was to kill. Those two men. Who were with a woman with big boobs.
Les Pruel hadn't felt right since Walgreen's death. The sticky itch of Umbassa was still with him, the feel of clothes left on your body too many days without air cleansing the pores.
It didn't matter. When he first tasted the drink, there was the warm goodness of a nice boozy mellow glow that filled him. But as he progressed, he rose above the need for feeling good. Feeling good was a crutch. Not to have to feel good was even better.
Was that Mr. Montrofort saying goodbye? It had to be. He was outside now and the sun was hot and the streets of Washington were hot and he felt he was going to vomit up all the grapefruit that had ever been grown. He felt lumps grow in his body. He saw the sun. It buzzed around his head and he smelted grapefruit orchards all around and his head hit something very hard. Crack.
Hands, soft hands pressed soft things to his head and he felt tremendous pain. But the pain did not matter.
He wished he had felt that way back in training. The laps they had to run while training for the Secret Service. He hadn't thought he was going to make it.
A very loud shot rang out near his ear. The sun disappearing. Someone was rubbing cold things on his head. He was thirsty. They gave him water. He wanted grapefruit. They didn't have grapefruit, but after he righted the wrongs
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against Ernie Walgreen, there would be that grapefruit drink.
"Shoot the kid," said a voice.
"Right," said Pruel. Where was his gun, he asked. You couldn't shoot without a gun.
"We will give you a gun that never misses," said the voice.
A woman screamed. Why did she scream?
"That man killed a child. He shot a child."
She pointed at him.
"Kill the woman," came the voice.
There. Now she wasn't screaming anymore. And this was right because everyone was right in front of the new J. Edgar Hoover building and there were the two men who killed Ernie Walgreen. The American with the high cheekbones and the dark eyes and the Oriental in the kimono.
He heard the voice again and now he knew the voice was not outside his head, but inside. He would listen to the voice and he would do what it said and make everything right and have peace and wonder for all time.
"Kill the Korean," said the voice.
The Korean fell with a fluff of the kimono.
"Kill the white," came the voice.
And the white man fell, spinning helplessly in his black tee shirt.
"Good," said the voice. "Now kill yourself."
And then Les Pruel saw that indeed he had a gun. It was a rifle and had a barrel and way down the barrel was his hand squeezing the trigger.
But what about the grapefruit?
And what about the big-boobied blonde screaming her head off?
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What about the nice crippled Mr. Montrofort and his sexual problems ?
And Ernie Walgreen? Good old Ernie Walgreen? What about him?
"Pull the trigger," came the voice.
"Oh, yes. Sorry," said Les Pruel.
The .30 caliber slug came up into his cheekbone like a truck going through a watermelon. The bone splattered, the ethmoidal sinus ruptured into the olfactory bulb, which meant Les Pruel could no longer smell anything, and the copper-pointed slug did a wing-ding puree of the cerebrum taking the top of his head off like an eggshell surrendering to compressed air. Pow.
The brain stopped working at the beginning of the thought over whether he was going to see the flash of the powder down there at the other end of the barrel. He found out just before his brain was about to realize it. The answer was yes.
There were no more questions.
And no more need for the olfactory bulb.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Remo felt the skull fragment underneath his fin-gerpads. Blood came heavy down the forehead and as he wiped it off, he felt the familiar warm wetness. He had been too slow. And now he had paid for it. Much too slow.
He let the 30-30 rifle drop to the pavement in disgust. He had reached the man just as he had pulled the trigger and was too late. The man had blown his own head off. He had been the pipe that Remo might have traveled through to get to the source. But now the man was dead and Remo had nothing.
"That was fast," gasped Miss Viola Poombs.
"Slow," said Chiun. "He let that man kill himself. You cannot afford that. We needed that man and we lost him."
"But he was shooting at everybody," said Viola.
"No," said Chiun. "He was shooting at me. And at Remo."
"But he hit that poor, poor woman. He killed that child."
"When one uses a machine for the first time, one tests it."
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"You mean he killed two people just to see if his gun worked ? Oh, my god," cried Viola.
"No," said Chiun. "He was the machine. When you write your poem of the assassins, be sure to mention that the Master of Sinanju, foremost among assassins, decried the amateur at work. And he showed how cruel it was to use one. Innocents are killed when fools have weapons. The gun should never have been invented. We have always said that."
"What do you mean, he was the machine?"
"It was in his eyes," Chiun said. "Written there for all to see."
"How could you even see his eyes?" said Viola, still grabbing desperately to regain some form of pre-shock thinking. "I mean, how could you see it? There were shots and people getting killed and it was awful. How could you see his eyes ?"
"When you, beautiful lady, walk into a room of other women, you can tell who wears what paint upon their face while to me it is a confusion of loveliness. But you know because you have seen before and have been trained to see. In such a manner are Remo and I trained to see. Death is not a confusing thing but a familiar thing. You might want to mention also when you write your story that not only is Sinanju effective but we have the most pleasant assassins that one can ever meet. If you don't count Remo." And Chiun folded his long fingernails and delicate hands back into his kimono on that pleasant spring afternoon in front of the new massive FBI building.