"Uh-huh."
Smith accessed the Berlin phone directory. He scrolled rapidly down to the Os. Still nothing. "This man is in Berlin, presumably," Smith commented.
"I don't think so," Remo said. His voice grew more faint as he addressed someone nearby. "Where'd you say he was?" he asked.
The low gurgle had continued until now. It stopped. "Juterbog," the strange voice rasped. The gurgle resumed.
"Jitterbug," Remo said to Smith.
Frowning, Smith accessed the proper phone book. He found the name immediately.
"Kempten Olmutz-Hohenzollerkirchen," he said.
"Wow. He must have to print that on both sides of his business card," Remo mused.
"Confirm this before you proceed," Smith pressed.
"Okeydoke," Remo said. The gurgling grew very loud now. It was the sound of someone being strangled. "Say that name again, Smitty?" Remo called from somewhere beyond the gurgle.
Smith repeated the name. There was a choked "yes" on the other end of the line.
"He's our man," Remo said, coming back on the phone.
"I will see what I can uncover about him," Smith said. "You and Chiun proceed to Juterbog."
Remo sighed. As he did so, the strangling grew louder. Frantic. "We'll go there, but I bet I end up doing most of the work."
"Why? Is something wrong with Master Chiun?"
"I don't know," Remo griped. "He hasn't been much of a help lately." The gurgling sound reached a fevered pitch and then stopped suddenly. There was a heavy thump, audible even over the satelliteto-fiber-optic-cable telephone feed. "Are you still keeping a kill record?" Remo asked.
Smith winced at the term. "Yes," he admitted. "Add Gus Holloway," Remo said, then hung up the phone.
Smith found that his headache had gotten worse during his phone conversation with Remo. He removed an aspirin bottle from one of his desk drawers and took out two pills. He swallowed them without water.
Smith's throat-dry as dust-had a difficult time accepting the two aspirins. He finally felt them drop from a point beneath his protruding Adam's apple. They plopped into his acid-churned stomach.
Medicated, Smith returned to his computer. Calling up his list of neo-Nazis, he located the name of Gus Holloway. Beside his name, Smith wearily recorded the day's date.
Chapter 4
The old man had been a fixture in the musty corner of the ratty Juterbog beer hall for as far back as anyone there could remember. He sat in the same chair, in the same back booth wearing the same reeking clothes every single night of the week. His yellowed eyes rarely strayed from the door.
A smoldering cigarette hung in perpetuity from between his brown-smeared chapped lips. The blackened stumps of teeth that remained attached to his mucky gums were held in place seemingly by damp ash alone.
He smoked in deep drags, blowing great hazy clouds at the smoke-yellowed ceiling. There his relentless exhalations would join the massive fog created by the assembled drinkers in the Schweinebraten Bier Hall.
Kempten 0lmutz-Hohenzollerkirchen stared at the door as the young men around him reported the latest news.
There were three of them, all dressed in skintight black leather with a multitude of zippers. Their heads were shaved smooth, and their noses and ears were adorned with a variety of safety pins, chains and earrings.
"That fat American was found dead this morning," an earnest skinhead named Hirn whispered. The pin and chain in his flat nose wiggled enthusiastically as he spoke.
"How?" asked another.
"Strangled with his own armband."
Hirn tapped his biceps. Beneath his long-sleeved black shirt was a Nazi band similar to the one that had been found wrapped around the bloated neck of Gustav Reichschtadt. Hirn and his companions were forced to hide their armbands when they ventured out in public.
Aged Kempten pulled his cigarette from his mouth. Bits of skin on his lip tore away, stuck to the unfiltered end. Kempten didn't seem to notice the bleeding.
"Where was this latest attack?" he inquired, voice thick with phlegm.
"Berlin."
Kempten nodded. "Did anyone see his killer?" The ball of brown goo that he coughed up and spit to the floor of the beer hall was as large as a small mouse.
Hirn nodded and glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the room. "It was him," Hirn said in a hushed voice. Shivering, he took a pull from the large beer stein which sat on the table before him. No one seated in that cramped booth needed to ask who "him" was. They all knew the stories of the unstoppable killer who was carving a bloody path through the neo-Nazi underground.
Kempten made a mental note. He had been reporting each of these incidents as he heard them. He would have to make another phone call tonight.
"Have there been any others since then?" Kempten asked.
"Today?" Hirn said. "No, none today. The American was the only one. I heard the killer was seen chasing him at nine o'clock this morning."
"That dumpling would not be very hard to catch," one of the other young men joked.
The group around the table joined in an uncomfortable chuckle. All except Kempten.
The old man made a sudden supreme effort to clear decades of mucous buildup from his smoke-ravaged throat. An awful, ragged wet rumble poured up from deep within his withered chest. Whatever this maneuver managed to dislodge was swallowed back down an instant later in a slippery-sounding gulp. Kempten nodded across the crowded room to the door.
"My eyes are not so good," he said to the disgusted group of young men. "Who is that who just came in?"
Hirn looked back across the hall to the distant entrance. Through the haze of smoke he saw a thin young man framed in the doorway. The new arrival was scanning the room with a pair of eyes buried so deep within their sockets they lent him the appearance of an angry skull.
Hirn turned back quickly, his heart beating madly. He glanced at his two younger companions. They had seen the stranger, as well. All three skinheads were looking anxiously at one another.
"It's him," Hirn whispered anxiously.
Old Kempten was still straining to see the door. "Who is it?" Kempten repeated. "Is it Rolph?" He squinted at the figure that was even now scanning the many faces around the crowded room. Try as he might, Kempten couldn't see who the strange outsider was.
AS SOON AS HE STEPPED through the door of the Schweinebraten Bier Hall, Remo's body automatically doubled the number of times he ordinarily blinked per minute. The air in the cramped bar was thick and grimy and his eyes were forced to work harder than usual just to cleanse themselves of the accumulation of smoke and attendant airborne particulates.
He had assumed that he would be bothered most by the stench of fermented grains, but he had forgotten the European love affair with carcinogens. If they weren't mining them, building shanties on them or being irradiated by them, they were damned well determined to smoke them.
Fortunately Chiun had declined to join him on this expedition to Juterbog, preferring the solace of their Berlin hotel. The Master of Sinanju would have been impossible to deal with in a place like this. As it was, Remo's body was having a hard enough time filtering out the airborne toxins.