The apartment looked like any other in the building. It was an important charade to preserve. When he had guests over-which he sometimes did to maintain a cover of normalcy-he didn't want anything to seem out of the ordinary.
The drapes were drawn on the daylight.
Dilkes had recently heard a reporter compare Florida to Rick's Cafe in Casablanca. The Sunshine State, with its porous border to the open sea, was a welcoming haven for illegal immigrants, drug runners and terrorists. Dilkes liked it for the fresh-squeezed orange juice.
When his father had retired here, Dilkes leased two apartments. One for the old man, one for himself. Despite the fact that Benson Dilkes had himself retired to a ranch in Zimbabwe, leasing a second apartment that remained largely unused was still preferable to staying with his father during visits to Florida. Even though Benson Dilkes generally only used the apartment a few weeks each year, he knew he wouldn't have lasted long under the same roof with his father.
Dilkes really only pretended to have a relationship with his father, mostly out of obligation to his dead mother. The truth was, Benson Dilkes wouldn't have cared if the nasty old bastard was buried under ten tons of collapsed building.
In his darkened apartment, the thought made him smile.
When he came to visit this time, people were as polite to Dilkes as they always were. He had been coming to the King Apartments yearly for the past few years. Most of the permanent residents knew him. They assumed that, like usual, he would stay for a short time and then head back home.
But one month became two, became three. People eventually realized that this time he was here to stay. The other tenants didn't know much about their new neighbor. They knew that he paid the rent on his father's apartment. The old man lived on the fourth floor. From the father they learned that the son had been some kind of businessman who had spent much of his time in Africa.
Dilkes allowed his father to perpetuate the lie. If the other tenants of the King Apartments ever learned the truth, Benson Dilkes would have to kill them all. He had gone the mass-murder route before. Hotel and apartment fires were easy enough to arrange. They worked better in Third World countries, where few questions were asked and everyone could be bribed, but the same techniques could have been applied to the King Apartments. Fortunately no one really asked questions of any consequence, and so Benson Dilkes wasn't forced to kill all of his neighbors.
As Dilkes passed through the living room of his darkened apartment, he fished something out of his jacket pocket.
The small plastic case rattled in his hand. He had gone to collect it from the storage room in the basement.
Most of the items downstairs had been shipped from his Zimbabwe ranch. They were seemingly innocuous items from his old African office that he had stored out in the loft of his garden shed. When he had closed his office five years before, he had assumed the stuff would collect dust forever.
Bright red thumbtacks clattered inside the case. Dilkes had hoped to never see that case again. But the world had dragged him from his life of well-earned leisure.
He noted the change in his skin tone as he brushed some grime off the cover of the plastic case.
Back home in Zimbabwe he grew rosebushes for pleasure. His work in the sun had given him a dark tan. In the months since he'd left Africa, the tan had begun to fade.
With melancholy thoughts of his beloved rose garden, Dilkes went up the hall to his bedroom.
The curtains were pulled tight here, too. When he flipped on the lights his lips thinned unhappily. There was a collection of corkboard world maps standing on easels near the far wall of the bedroom. The countries had been painted in bright, clashing colors.
The maps, which used to hang in a back room in his old offices, were hopelessly out-of-date. They were made for Dilkes back in 1977. World maps were drawn differently now. Since that time, countries had come and gone, borders had been redrawn. An entire empire had collapsed.
But countries were always changing. Maps could never be completely accurate from year to year. Dilkes knew that well from the many years he had worked in Africa. But although man changed maps to suit his whims, the geography itself didn't change. Nor, Benson Dilkes feared, did tradition.
Red thumbtacks were pressed into spots all around the corkboard maps. Many were in Europe, while others were in the United States and Asia. A few were in Africa and South America. Each tack represented a life.
The one in Washington, D.C., was Dilkes's old associate Sylvester Montrofort. There was one in Rome for Ivan Mikhailov, a brutish Russian from the old Soviet-era Treska hit squads who was supposed to be impossible to kill. Lhasa and Gunner Nilsson were represented by a pair of tacks, one in New York's Catskills Mountains, the other in New York City. Hilton Marmaduke Spenser's life was marked by a lonely red tack pressed into Madrid. And on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean, a thumbtack showed where the body of Merton Lord Wissex had washed up on a beach way back in 1982.
All had been killers. Famous in certain circles for cunning or skill or strength or family reputation. Benson Dilkes had known most of them, either in fact or by reputation. And every last one of them was dead. Dilkes popped the lid on the plastic case and picked out two red tacks. Setting the case on his nightstand, he walked over to the map of Europe. Very carefully, he pressed the tacks side by side into London.
He had just gotten the news from an old contact in Source. Thomas Smedley and Mrs. Knight had been good. Not up to the level of Benson Dilkes, of course, but they were more than just run-of-the-mill killers.
Two more red thumbtacks. Each representing a life. Soon to be joined by many others.
"And so it begins," Dilkes said to the darkened room.
He wondered if, when the time came, someone would record the end of his life thusly. He doubted it. Few people in his business were as efficient as Benson Dilkes.
Taking his pipe from an ashtray next to the thumbtack case, he lit the bowl and sat in a comfortable chair. To wait for the world to contract around his neck.
Chapter 11
Remo and Chiun took the tunnel train from England to France. Their destination was outside Paris.
This meeting was much like the one at Buckingham Palace. This time it was a secret chamber in a part of Versailles that was off-limits to tourists, and this time it was the elected president of France instead of a monarch.
Remo had met the French president a few years before and hadn't been terribly impressed. For politeness's sake he shook the man's offered hand then stood back and let the Master of Sinanju do the talking.
Chiun bowed and pledged eternal loyalty to the Capetian House and the Valois and Bourbon dynasties, which made the French president more than a little uncomfortable. Much of what the Master of Sinanju said was in French. Remo knew he was being played up for the president when he saw the grand gestures the old Korean gave, as well as the knowing nods he'd occasionally make back in Remo's direction.
In all, the meeting took less than ten minutes. "That seemed to go okay," Remo said after they left the magnificent palace, which had started as a modest hunting lodge for Louis XIII and eventually metastasized into a display of the sort of vulgar opulence that got French kings' heads separated from French kings' bodies.
They were on the grounds of Versailles, walking past the Basin of Neptune fountain group. Mist spraying from the fountains chilled the crowds of evening sightseers.
"I suppose," Chiun said. "Not that it matters. These modern Gauls cannot afford our services. In order to hire us, some of them might have to work more than two days a week, which is as offensive a thing to them as warm bathwater. On top of that they have ugly notions of self-governance."
"No argument here," Remo said. "Nothing uglier than socialism in a beret." As he spoke, he turned left and right, scrutinizing everyone they passed.
"What are you doing?" Chiun asked.
"Isn't this the part where some guy jumps out of the bushes and tries to brain me with a baguette?"
"Just because the first two were obvious does not mean they all will be," the Master of Sinanju said dryly. "If they have planned well, it will happen when you do not expect it. Now, come. We have something more important than your impending attempted murder to worry about."
They took the cab into Paris. Remo didn't sense anyone following them into the city.
At Chiun's insistence, while waiting for the next assassin to attack they stopped for supper at a little cafe on the Rue des Ecoles. They were seated outdoors near the street. The place was nearly empty. Their corner table was tucked behind some potted plants away from the other diners.
Chiun ordered duck. Remo got fish. Both men asked for a side order of brown rice.
The waiter who returned to serve them was not the same one who had seated them. The first had been a tall, thin man in his twenties. This waiter was shorter, stockier and older. He had thick, callused hands that didn't seem to have gotten that way from carrying serving trays. The waiter's black uniform didn't fit him very well.
The waiter set their plates before them and produced a bottle of wine.
"Your wine, monsieur," he said in thickly accented English.
"I didn't order wine," Remo replied.
"It is with the compliments of the management." As he spoke, the waiter poured out a glass.
"I said I don't want wine," Remo insisted, irritated, as the waiter poured. "The only thing dirtier than a Frenchman's ass is his feet."
"Heh-heh-heh," said the Master of Sinanju.