"You mean bomb," Remo said. "And I hear the police." He dropped the car into gear.
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"One moment." Chiun opened the door and rose slowly. "Sitting in an automobile is most unpleasant for the hip joints."
"This is no time to stretch your legs, Little Father. We don't want to have to murder the entire Weehawken police force."
"The police are still a quarter-mile away," Chiun said, and then whirred through the mess of Snodgrass's remains with a speed so fast even Remo could not follow all of his moves. "The police are now two hundred yards in the distance," Chiun said, returning to the car. "Let us leave, Remo."
Remo tore down the street and onto the highway, the sirens growing faint behind him.
"What'd you do back there, Chiun?" Remo asked as he turned onto a dirt road and slowed to ninety.
The old Oriental uncurled his delicate hand, revealing a pile of small pieces of green paper, their edges charred brown. "These are from the envelope which contained the boom." He turned the pieces over, one by one. "Some have writing on them. This one has a name. It says 'Denise Daniels.' Who is that?"
"I don't know," Remo said, "but it sure seemed important to Snotlocker or whatever his name was. We'll send it to Smith. And it's bomb." Chiun put the pieces inside the folds of his robe.
"This looks like the place," Remo said as he and Chiun entered the side door of Mickey's Pub, its windows decorated with dirt and neon shamrocks.
"The stink of it assaults the nostrils," Chiun said. "I shall slow my breathing so as to inhale as little of this unwholesome odor as possible."
Inside, a dozen fat, pink-faced men were enter-
39
taining themselves at the bar with jokes about the unusual footwear of a tall black man standing at the other end of the bar, drinking ginger ale.
Remo and Chiun wound their way across the floor, littered with peanut shells and broken pretzels, to a sticky table in the far corner.
"Is this indeed the restaurant at which this American person, Daniels, partakes of his meals?" Chiun asked, incredulous.
"That's what Smitty says. But he doesn't eat. He just drinks."
"How long must we wait in this iniquitous sink?"
"Till he shows up, I guess."
"Perhaps I will return to the car."
"Hold it, Chiun, that's him coming in now. The one in the white suit." Remo indicated Daniels, whose appearance was only slightly more presentable than it had been in the newspaper photograph taken after he had emerged from three months in the Hispanian jungle.
Daniels sat next to the Grand Vizier. The men at the bar stared. They were dressed in rough checkered shirts, with short jackets and dirty fedoras whose years of internal sweat had clearly overwhelmed their sweat bands and stained the hats a darker shade. They all drank beer, slowly enough so that the foam was left in rings down toward the bottom of the glass where the beer looked dead and yellow.
As the Grand Vizier stared stonily into his glass of ginger ale, the white men discussed the worthless-ness of some persons who only liked to drink, fornicate and fight. That was all some persons were good for.
This concept intrigued Barney and he asked if any of the gentlemen at the end of the bar had per-
40
sonally developed a polio vaccine, discovered penicillin, invented the radio, discovered atomic power, invented writing, discovered fire or made any great contributions to the thought of man.
The men at the other end of the bar disclosed that the late President John F. Kennedy was not black.
Barney informed them that not only was President Kennedy not black, he was not related to the men at the end of the bar any more than he was to Barney's tall black friend.
They said that perhaps the president was not related to them but that Barney obviously was related to his dark friend. This, they thought, was very funny. So did Barney, who said that for a minute the men had given him a fright because he thought he might have been related to them instead of to the Grand Vizier, who knew how to dress like a human being, which they did not. Then he inquired of them which ditches they had dug and if any of them had seen their wives sober in the last decade.
For some reason the discussion seemed to end there with someone throwing a punch in the cause of Irish womanhood, honest labor and killing the dirty nigger lover. It was a magnificent fight. Bottles, chairs, fists. Fast. Furious. Destruction. Courage.
Barney watched every minute of it, and the Vizier did himself proud. Single-handedly, he seemed to be able to fend off the entire population of the establishment. Chairs broke over his head, fists smashed into his nose, broken bottles drew blood. But the Vizier did not fall, and continued to drop men with single strokes of his oaken arms.
Barney would have liked to have seen the finish of the fight and to tell the Grand Vizier what a magnificent man he was, but this was impossible
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since he was already out the front doors of the saloon, and knew that it was only a matter of seconds before the thin young man and the old Oriental seated in the far corner would be able to fight their way through the melee to get to him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Remo blocked a body that came flying toward him. "Excuse me," he said to two men who were punching one another's faces. They did not move out of the way. "Excuse me," he said again.
"This'll excuse you," one of the men said, directing a left hook at Remo. Remo caught the man by the wrist and snapped it in half.
"Aghhhh!" the man screamed.
"Hey," the other man yelled, grabbing the back of Remo's tee shirt. "What do you think you're doing to my buddy?"
"This," Remo said, breaking the man's wrist in two between his thumb and index finger.
"I seen that," another man shouted, charging Remo with a pool cue. He swung it over his head and brought it down full force over where Remo was standing, but the stick missed its target and before he knew it the man was lifted in an arc toward the ceiling and then was crashing into the display of bottles at the back of the bar.
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Bernard C. Daniels, smiling benignly in the doorway, arched an eyebrow in approval at Remo's bar-fighting abilities.
Remo did not acknowledge it, although he felt a small flush of pride at the subtle display of admiration. Almost everyone who saw Remo in action was either awestruck or terrified, except for Chiun, who could find flaws in even the most perfectly timed maneuver. Rarely did Remo get a sincere "well done" from anybody, and even if this one had been from a man whose life he was going to snuff out in less than thirty seconds, it felt good.
A thankless job, Remo thought as he lodged the bridgework of a man wielding a gallon jar of pickled eggs into his gums. Shrieking the man threw the jar onto a nearby table where it splintered into a thousand glass shards. The mauve-colored eggs inside rolled onto the floor, causing a half dozen men to slip and fall and continue battling one another lying down.
Then came a high-pitched wail so piercing, so pitiful, that Remo had to take his eyes off Barney Daniels, who still stood in the doorway.
It was Chiun, leaning crookedly against the bar near where the Grand Vizier stood battle, a heap of unconscious men at his feet. "Remo," Chiun cried. The front of the old man's red kimono was stained dark. "Remo," he said again, his voice a gasp.
Remo broke the legs of a man who stood in his way. He sent bodies flying across the room with his feet. He hacked his way through the crowd, dropping men like bowling pins, the panic inside him boiling to his core.
"I am here, Little Father," he said softly, picking up the old man as if he were a small child. How light his bones are, Remo thought as he raced out-