Every time he came down the steps in that school, he would come down hard, jumping on the edge of each step, trying to crack the heavy slate, never succeeding. At night he would lie in his metal cot in a barracks-type room full of other boys and hate the school and the nuns who ran it and the steps that were as unyielding as life itself.
No matter what Chiun thought, he had changed. If he wanted to now, he could pound the steps into gray powder. And he just didn't want to. Steps didn't matter anymore.
The closer he got to the third floor, the louder the singing became. It was street singing of the fifties, a lead singer who sounded like a castrati yodeling the high-noted melody and a background chorus that sounded like a matched set of refrigerator vibrations repeating, over and over again, one word, usually a girl's name.
"Thelma, Thelma, Thelma, Thelma." Now for our next number we will do Brenda, Brenda, Brenda, Brenda. It was a good thing, Remo thought, that the music died before it ran out of girls' names.
He paused in the hall outside the door from which the sounds came. The windows in the door had been painted black and he couldn't see inside, but he had to admit, the kids were good. They sounded like a top-forty recording of Remo's youth.
He opened the door.
They were a top forty recording from Remo's youth.
The record was being played on a small stereo in the rear of the room which had a pile of records in position to drop and play next.
Sashur Kaufperson was at the front of the room standing at the blackboard. She wore a leather skirt and vest and a peach-pink blouse. In her hand was a pointer. The blackboard behind her was crowded with chalk writing. Remo's scanning eye picked up only scattered phrases. There were some state's names. The words "maximum sentence." Written in large capital letters were the words: Training. Performance. Silence. "Silence" was underlined.
Ten young boys sat at desks facing Sashur. Remo guessed the youngest at eight, the oldest at thirteen.
They turned toward him when he entered the room. Ten children. Children and their faces frightened Remo. They were hard cynical faces, with eyes that were blank of feeling. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke.
The boys looked from Remo back to Sashur.
"What are you doing here?" she said, her voice struggling to be heard over the roar of, "Thelma, Thelma, Thelma, Thelma."
"Just came to see how you were getting on. Can we talk?"
"What do we have to talk about? Your behavior tonight? Locking me in a closet?"
"Maybe your behavior. Fibbing to me about Warner Pell. Didn't you ever learn it's not nice to fib?"
"I know it. That's why I'm telling you the absolute truth when I tell you it'd be healthier if you left."
"Sorry," said Remo.
Sashur nodded slightly. Her class rose, as if on military command, and turned to face Remo. They were smiling, smiling at him, those hateful little bastards, and Remo wanted to rip them apart. He wanted to beat them, bust them, but mostly he wanted to spank them. He knew now how the nuns in the orphanage must have felt.
Again, almost in unison, their hands went into their pockets, jacket pockets, trouser pockets, shirt pockets, and they brought out pistols, small Saturday night specials.
They moved toward Remo, slowly raising their guns, like underage zombies. Remo remembered how he had frozen in the elevator when Alvin fired at him, and he did what instinct told him he should do.
He turned and ran.
The pack was after him then, silently like a pack of hunting wolves who neither bay nor howl nor yelp. Who just run.
Sashur Kaufperson stood at the blackboard as the last of the boys went out the door after Remo.
With a damp cloth, she erased the blackboard, then dried her hands on a paper towel, then walked to the back to turn off the blasting phonograph. She sighed as silence returned to the room.
A big sigh.
Remo was a man. It was a shame he had to die. She heard the pop of shots around the corridors. Poor Mr. Winslow, she thought, remembering the custodian asleep in the basement. He never knew what went on in his school. All he knew was that Sashur Kaufperson religiously brought in a can of beer on chorus nights and poured half the can for him and stayed with him while he drank it. It gave him pleasure that an educated Jewess was his Gofor. It never occurred to him to wonder why the beer put him so quickly and deeply to sleep. He never suspected that there might be sleeping pills in the beer.
Mr. Winslow would not hear the shots, she knew.
She put on her jacket, walked to the classroom door, then remembered something.
Back at the front of the room, she picked up the chalk and wrote on the blackboard: boys. be sure to clean up before you go.
Then she left, feeling good. It would not do for the boys to leave Remo's bullet-riddled body around where Mr. Winslow might find it in the morning and tell who was in the building.
She sighed again as she walked from the classroom.
Remo had taken a wrong turn and instead of being in a stairwell going down, he was in a stairwell that went only up. Feeling the stones under his feet, he ran to the top of the stairs.
Behind him, he heard the corridor door open again. "He's gone up," he heard a young voice whisper.
The angled stairway ended at a door. It had once had a pushbar to open it, but. that was back when there had been students in the school. The pushbar was now removed and the door was locked. Remo grabbed the handle of the door and turned slowly and removed it from the metal door as easily as removing the top from a once-opened catsup bottle.
The roof smelled of a fresh tar coating, and he could feel the small pebbles imbedded in the sticky surface. A three-foot-high wall surrounded the roof. There were no stars, no moon, and the roof was as dark as the inside of an inkwell, its level surface broken only by a question-mark-shaped large pipe from an old unused ventilator system.
If Remo hid behind the pipe, it would be the first place the children would look.
Remo hid behind it. He heard the voices as the boys ran onto the roof.
"Hey," one hissed. "He's got to be hiding behind that pipe. Everybody be careful. Don't let him get your guns away from you."
Remo peered out from behind the pipe. As he did, he saw a splash of light come onto the roof from the open door. One of the boys apparently had found the light switch in the stairwell. Then the light faded as one of the boys pushed the metal door shut with a heavy clang.
Behind the pipe, Remo now heard the feet moving toward him, shuffling over the pitted roof. He heard the footsteps split into two groups and move around to come behind the ventilator from both sides.
Timing his footsteps to coincide with the soft shuffling of the boys' feet, Remo backed off from the ventilator shaft toward the far wall of the roof. He felt the railing around the roof behind him, then moved silently to his right, a dark shadow in a night of dark shadows, to the right angle corner of the railing, then back toward the center of the roof and the door that led downstairs to safety.
He was near the shedlike structure of the door when he heard the voices back in the darkness.
"Hey. Where is he? Charley, be careful, he ain't here."
The door was unguarded. Remo opened it and slipped inside, closed it softly behind him. He turned to go downstairs. Halfway down the steps was a boy, perhaps nine years old.
"Charley, I presume," said Remo.
"You're dead," Charley answered. His pistol was pointing at Remo's stomach.
It was a small-caliber weapon. Remo could take one bullet in the belly and get away with it, but the full cylinder of the gun would mincemeat him, and the knowledge of it, the galling rotten knowledge that he was about to be done in by a nine-year-old boy, made Remo angry rather than sad. He did a smooth reverse foot spin and the boy looked to the left where Remo's body had moved. But Remo was already back on the right, moving down the steps, not seeming to rush, but taking all the steps in one motion. Then he was beside the boy and the gun was ripped from the boy's hand, and Remo lifted him under one arm.
The boy screamed. Remo stuck the gun into his belt and slapped the back of the boy's head, hard, and the scream turned into a wail.