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ten points and I get ten points. Gross points. Marlon Brando don't get points that easy and he wanted to play Superman's father in a suitcase."
Crazy, Smith thought. Hollywood had gotten to this one's brain, whoever he was. There was nothing left. What was he going to ask for now?
"Well, what is it you want?" Smith said.
"I've been giving it a lot of thought. I want three hundred fifty thousand and thirteen points."
Smith hesitated a moment. If he offered it, what would this madman want next? He thought for a split second, then reverted to his tight-fisted New England roots.
He slammed his fist on the desk.
"Not a chance," he shouted. "That's it. No three hundred fifty and no thirteen points. And no two hundred fifty or ten points either. The offer's now two hundred and eight points. Take it or leave it. You've got five seconds. One. Two"
"Hold on; wait."
"No wait," Smith snarled. "I'm not going to be jerked around forever. Three. Four. Five "
"Okay, okay," whined Barry Schweid. "You got a deal. Two hundred and eight points. I'll throw in a free rewrite. Don't tell the union."
"I don't know," Smith said. "It's a lot of money."
"One-ninety. I'll take one-ninety."
"Okay," Smith said after a pause, "now who the hell are you? You're not playing games with me anymore."
"All right. I'm Barry Schweid."
"Address and phone number. My lawyers will need it," Smith said.
Schweid rattled off the numbers and said, "I
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don't know much about you, you know. Just who are you?"
"The person who's going to pay you one-ninety and eight points. I want that script in my hands the day after tomorrow." Smith gave him the number of a postal box in Manhattan. "Without fail. You got it?"
"Now you sound like a producer," said Schweid. "It'll be there."
"And I don't want a lot of copies floating around either," Smith said, and then hung up.
As he hung up the telephone, Smith smiled. Maybe he should start treating Remo that way. It might be more effective than trying to reason with him. It was a thought he decided to hold for a while.
And three thousand miles away, Barry Schweid replaced his telephone receiver. By trying to negotiate on his own, he had cost himself sixty thousand dollars and two points.
It wasn't fair. Producers were always taking advantage of writers. He decided he needed help, and the longer he thought, the more sure he was that he had exactly the right people to deal with one thieving producer.
Two thieving producers.
Bindle and Marmelstein.
Fourteen
The crowd sounded far away, but when they shouted "Ole," even the walls seemed to vibrate.
Remo groused, "This is getting absurd. Can't you take us anyplace without cows?" but Terri answered only with an annoyed "Shhhhh."
She was walking through a darkened tunnel, playing a flashlight on the walls. The only other illumination carne from a single small lightbulb fixed to the stone ceiling of the tunnel thirty yards behind them and from a thin sliver of sunlight that snaked in under some kind of large wooden door twenty yards in front of them.
"Ole! Ole!" The crowd roared again.
"It's here somewhere," Terri said in exasperation, waving the flashlight angrily along the sweating stone walls. The air was musty, filled with sour dampness and the sweet decaying animal smell that reminded Remo of hamburgers. From back in the days when he was able to eat hamburgers.
Remo noticed that Chiun, standing alongside the woman, was rubbing the toe of his sandal in the white powder deposits on the stone floor, which
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years of dampness had washed from the tunnel's limestone walls. Chiun's toe scored the powder along the base of the walls, as if he were idly marking time, but Remo could tell, by the concentrated hunch of Chiun's shoulders, that he was not idling.
As Terry Pomfret continue to play her light on the walls, feeling the stone with her free hand, looking for something, anything, Chiun turned away to the other side of the tunnel and began to examine the powder on the floor there.
Toe pushed through the powder. Step. Toe again through the powder.
Remo was bored. He slumped down into a sitting position on the floor. The wall was cold and unyielding against his back and he felt its dampness through his thin black t-shirt. He watched Terri wandering around, shining her light, and Chiun wandering around, dragging his toe, and realized he was tired. Tired of the assignments, tired of the travel, tired of the same damn dullness of it all. He tried to think back to the days, so many years ago, before he had become one with Sinanju.
He had never thought of being an assassin then. He had been just a cop, his head filled with cop's ideas and cop's goals and cop's ambitions, most of which involved staying alive, not letting the bastards put a bullet in your belly, and getting out at age 55 after twenty years minimum service and spending the rest of his life fishing. He never even thought of assassins and didn't know that they existed.
But suppose he had thought about being an
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assassin, what would he have thought? That it was an exciting glamorous life? The spies who came in from the cold? James Bond with exploding suitcases and poison pellets and a license to kill? One-man battles against the Mafia? Women sniffing around?
And what was the truth?
It was all of those things and none of them. It was Smith, always with a new assignment for him, always worrying about the end of the world, the end of civilization as we know it, the end of CURE. And Remo would grumble and take the assignment and almost all the assignments were wait, wait, wait. A few minutes of exercise and then more waiting. Only the exercise, the chance to use his skills, kept him happy and busy. The waiting just made him bored.
He watched Chiun push his toe through the dust.
Was Chiun bored too? Had thousands of years of Masters of Sinanju spent their lives in boredom and desperation, wishing something, anything, would happen?
No. It was the difference between Chiun and himself; the difference between the real Master of Sinanju and the young American who would someday be the next reigning Master of Sinanju.