"No more food until we get some answers from you," Remo informed him. "We want to know who supplied you with the hormone drug."
"What difference does that make?" Baculum replied. "WHE isn't illegal to sell or possess. On the other hand, kidnapping is very much illegal. And the kidnapping of a U.S. senator happens to be a capital crime."
"So we've heard," Remo said without interest. "I'll bet you're glad you voted for that bill."
"Who the hell are you two?" the senator demanded. "Who do you work for?"
"That isn't the issue here," Remo answered. "We need information. The drug you've been using is dangerous."
"That's preposterous. Look at me. I'm a new man. Better now than I ever was. How has it hurt me?"
"Ask your late wife."
The senator glared at Remo.
"There will be serious national-security problems if the use of WHE continues to spread," Remo said.
"So you're trying to make me think you're working for our government?" Baculum scoffed. "I wasn't born yesterday, you know. Since when does the DEA hire hit men?"
Remo decided not to get into that area of discussion with the senator. CURE's involvement had to remain secret at all costs.
"If this potion is not illegal," Chiun said from the comfort of the fully reclined La-Z-Boy, "then why are you so concerned about protecting the people who are giving it to you?"
"Because it is a rare and very expensive commodity that I want to keep on taking for a long, long time," the senator told him. "If I make trouble for my supplier, if I make him angry, he might cut me off."
"Face it, Lud," Remo said. "You're already cut off."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Remo picked a Ziploc bag from the TV tray and showed it to the senator. Inside was a used adhesive patch. "This was your last fix. I took it off your ninety-year-old behind myself about an hour ago, while you were still in la-la land."
For an instant, the light went out of the rheumy eyes.
"No mas, baby," Remo said. "We're just going to sit here and watch you revert to your former self. Got the walker and the oxygen tanks waiting for you in the back bedroom."
"Growing old," Chiun said solemnly, "is a bitter herb that should not have to be tasted twice."
When Ludlow Baculum looked down at his beautiful, still buffed bod, his lower lip started quivering, and in no time, hot tears were streaming over his cheeks. "You can't be that cruel," he insisted. "You just can't. It's inhuman. Please give the patch back to me. Please. I'll pay you anything you want. I'll give you anything you want. I can get you an ambassadorship. A cabinet post. A date with the First Lady."
"Let's cut the old crapola, Lud," Remo said. "You can't buy us because we aren't for sale. And no matter what you think, this isn't a kidnapping for ransom. Who sold you the patches?"
"No. I won't say."
Remo tried another angle of attack. "Why don't we get real for just a minute?" he said. "You are not being audio- or videotaped. You are not being observed through one-way mirrors. It's just you and us, Senator. And we all know that the drug not only gives you a bigger, better body, but it makes you do things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. It made you kill your bride on her wedding night. It's made others kill, as well. Somewhere inside that screwed-up old head of yours, you have to know what's happened. Exactly what's happened. You have to know how bad it is." Ludlow Baculum did not respond.
"He knows," Chiun said. "He knows and he doesn't care. He is Animal Man."
"Not for long now," Remo said, checking the clock on the living-room wall. "The effects of that muscle juice should have already started wearing off. It's happening so slowly you probably won't even notice at first. But after a while, things should start shrinking up and falling off."
Remo turned to Chiun and said, "Maybe we should let him think about that for a bit? I gotta make a call, anyway."
A look of desperation passed over the senator's face. Desperation and horror.
Remo picked up the speakerphone from the lamp table and waved for Chiun to follow him into the bungalow's tiny kitchen.
Chapter 22
At the sound of the bell-like electronic tone, Dr. Harold Smith looked up from his computer monitor to the color TV bolted to the wall, hospital-room style. A swirl of graphics on the television screen was accompanied by the raucous, annoyingly repetitive theme music of "Peephole USA." The theme only had one joyous bar, which was played over and over again at every conceivable opportunity. As Smith tuned in, the show was already in progress; it was just returning from a commercial break.
The male host turned to the female hostess and, with his cheeks fully dimpled, said, "Molly, you're not going to believe your eyes when you see this next story. I know you're into personal fitness and you watch your diet like a hawk..."
Molly beamed at him. Under the set's desk, her long, slender legs slithered lovingly over each other. After a slight hesitation, the dimpled man continued-the pause was calculated to increase the dramatic effect. "But wait till you get a look at the rich and famous people who've recently jumped on the workout bandwagon."
"I can't wait, Jed."
"Then you're ready for 'Look Who's Buffed!'" The two-shot of heads at a phony desk dissolved into the story title, which, in turn, dissolved into Jed walking along Muscle Beach in Venice, California. Jed had no shirt on, and was tanned and well-built, with just a hint of softness above the points of his hips. Dr. Smith noted that Jed was also completely hairless, like a preteenage boy.
"Like most of the people you see around me here on the beach," Jed said, "I work out regularly with a personal trainer. It's the fit-and-healthy life-style here in southern California, where the folks like to show as much skin as the law allows."
The camera cut to a pair of in-line-skating honeys in thong bikinis as they zipped past Jed on the boardwalk. The zoom framed the girls' backsides and held the shot for a good five seconds. Then the entire gratuitous skin sequence was rerun in extreme slo-mo.
"Well," Jed went on, "that trend has finally hit some of the biggest, and I mean that in every sense, movers and shakers in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Her Royal Highness, Princess Pye..."
The video cut to file footage of the former wife of the heir apparent to the Mossy Throne. She was twenty-three, blond, tall, with a stunningly beautiful face. She was also grossly overweight. The video showed her wearing what appeared to be a pup tent of a pink suit. Its fabric was tortured by her many personal bulges, all of which were on public display. Dr. Smith had heard it rumored that the princess's panty hose lasted only a few hours before the friction between her great shuddering thighs shredded them. On the video, she lifted the veil on her matching pink pillbox hat in order to bring a forkful of food to her lips with a dainty, white-gloved hand.
"This is the princess at a reception in York, England, two months ago," Jed told his viewers. "As you will soon see, the state function quickly escalated into a fruited-scone-and-Devon-cream-eating contest."
Dr. Smith shrank from the sight in disgust.
Jed was seriously overstating the case for a contest. If there was any competition going on, it was strictly between the princess and herself. Like a bulldozer, she plowed across the table of refreshments intended for the crowd of better than two hundred upper-crust well-wishers. The princess slathered on the rich cream even as she raised the half scone to her mouth. And took it down in a single ravenous bite. Smith found her economy of movement mesmerizing. And the pile of baked treats melted away, like the proverbial green cake left out in the rain.
In his cutesy voice-over, Jed scolded the princess for her excess of appetite. "Now, I've heard of a woman eating for two before," he said, "but Her Royal Highness is doing the work of ten. Those of you still wondering how she lost her girlish figure so soon after the wedding the world watched, need wonder no more."
As Smith recalled, the royal separation and divorce, endlessly publicized in the tabloid media, had been granted to the prince because of his wife's eating disorder. Which, according to all accounts, was both a public disgrace and a private nightmare. Apparently the princess didn't stop feeding even during the act of physical love. She always kept a trolley of tea cakes on her side of the marital bed.
"And she isn't the only big-time celebrity with a big-time poundage problem," Jed told his audience. "Consider, if you will, the international rock star, Skizzle..."
The video cut to a hugely fat young man, naked from the waist up, heavily tattooed, barefoot and clad in cutoff Levi's. The superstar Skizzle held a microphone in one hand and a quart bottle of his favorite alcoholic beverage, Black Death Porter, in the other as he cavorted in a spotlight on a stage before tens of thousands of screaming fans. Empty bottles of the super-high-calorie brew littered the stage. Skizzle's grotesque blubber jiggled and shook as he danced to the savage beat of his backup band. He danced and drank, sang and drank. Drank and drank.
Suddenly Skizzle froze. Clutching at his throat, the rock star pitched facedown on the stage. The six-piece band, which was accustomed to such occurrences, continued to play the vamp with overamplified enthusiasm. They played as an emergency medical team rushed out from the wings of the stage. The paramedic crew quickly voided the hefty headliner of the beer bolus that was blocking his airway.
After a good puke, Skizzle rose from the dead to the tumult of the crowd. Guzzling more Black Death, he picked up the song and dance right where he had left off.
"And last but certainly not least," Jed said, "how about the world's richest man? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dewayne Korb, the computer-software billionaire."
The video shifted to a shot of Korbtown, the three-hundred-acre high-rise complex where the thirty-something tycoon's army of fresh-from-college, handpicked nerds worked, lived, played and earned seven-figure retirement packages by age twenty-six. The shot cut again, this time to Dewayne Korb himself as he walked from the reception center's entrance to his stretch limo, waving and smiling meekly for the assembled paparazzi. His clothes were less a fashion statement than a desperate and fruitless attempt to conceal what lay beneath them. Korb wore loosefitting, pleated tan cords, a button-down blue shirt under a vast, heather-colored, Shetland V-neck sweater.