"I have a bad back," said Rubin. "And don't forget about the corner. Do not touch the upper-left-hand corner. The guards will probably want to read it. Let them, but you hold the letter. Only the witness touches the left-hand corner. Got it?"
"Upper left. Only the witness touches it."
"Right."
"I feel better already. Your power forces just reflected through my toes."
"Yeah. I am like that," said Rubin, who badly needed a Dexamyl, two aspirins, a Valium, and six cups of coffee to give him enough strength to get to bed for an afternoon nap.
"And don't forget. Be pleasant and open and they won't stop the letter."
"I'll use my positive essence."
She picked up the letter by the lower-right-hand corner and walked out of the Dolomo mansion refreshed. How true was Poweressence. How profound were the lessons she'd learned. When she smiled she felt better. When she smiled at others, they treated her better. All this from only a first-level course discount-priced at $325.
Ordinarily the U.S. attorney would have the witness secreted in a safe location where only prescreened mail could reach him. But since that didn't seem to protect all the witnesses lately and since this witness wanted to go home even more badly than most, the U.S. attorney relented. He allowed the witness to live in his own home. There was a special advantage in that. That hysterical pair, the Dolomos, seemed very likely to attempt some trick. And some government agency was going to lay a trap for them.
The reasoning was that anyone who would put an alligator in a columnist's swimming pool would try anything. And this might lead to finding out how witnesses were being turned. It was so secret the U.S. attorney was not sure which department was involved in the ambush, but when a thin man with dark eyes and thick wrists arrived outside the witness's home, the attorney knew not to question him. He just called off the normal guards.
The home was in a middle-class neighborhood of Palo Alto; needless to say, it was a neighborhood in which no middle-class worker could afford to live anymore.
Remo sat on the steps to avoid questions from the witness inside. The man wanted to know what his badge number was and where the guards were. He wanted to know how one lone unarmed person could protect him. Remo locked him in a closet for twenty minutes until he stopped yelling. Then he let the man out.
The man did not question him anymore but Remo had been put in a foul temper. He knew that anger could kill him, for it was the one emotion that blocked strength, turning it into unfocused energy. He had just decided to breathe himself out of it when a sweet young thing came up the walk to the house carrying a pink envelope.
"Hi. I've got a letter for the occupant of the house."
"No," said Remo.
The girl smiled, very broad, very bright. Continuously: "I understand he is part of the government witness program and I understand that his mail has to be screened because it might contain a threat to him."
"No letters."
"Why not?"
"Because that means I'll have to open the door and hand him the letter. He'll expect me to speak to him and I don't like him. I don't like you either, to be honest."
"You have a lot of negativity, you know. May I ask you if it is doing you any good? Because it isn't, you know. I can help you be as happy and free as me. Would you like that?"
"No," said Remo.
"May I read you the letter, then, and then slip it under the door?"
"Nope."
"It's a beautiful love letter," said the Powie. She knew what she was up against: guard types were chosen just because of their unflagging slavery to negative forces. And what could be more negative than force that wanted to limit the freedom of Poweressence?
"'My dearest Ralph, my love forever,' signed 'Angela,' " said the Powie.
"Not good enough. Rewrite it."
"But it's his love letter."
"I don't like it. I don't like Angela. And I don't think I like you," said Remo.
"How can you be so negative?"
"Easy. I like it."
The Powie stepped back and yelled at the house. "Ralph. Ralph. I have a letter for you. It's from Angela, but your guard won't let me give it to you."
Remo opened the door. "Want the letter, Ralph?"
"You going to throw me back in the closet?"
"No," said Remo.
"Then I don't want the letter. Angela was a dumb Powie I used to sleep with."
"Powies are not dumb," said the young girl.
"They're all dumb," said Ralph. "And I was the dumbest of them all. I stole the alligator for them."
"Ralph, don't you even want to read your letter?"
"That's just what I don't want," yelled back Ralph. Remo shut the door. The next day Ralph testified that under the instructions of Beatrice Dolomo, he did upon a certain night at a certain time purchase one alligator, Exhibit A, now sloshing around in a large glass pool brought into the courtroom for the viewing of the jury. The jury, watching the alligator's teeth chomp around for a day and a half, convicted the Dolomos of attempted murder.
At Folcroft Sanitarium, Harold W. Smith heard the verdict and despaired. This had seemed like the perfect witness to be attacked by a loss of memory. And he was not attacked. They had nailed two petty crooks for national fraud, and the American justice system still hung vulnerable to a strange new force. On the same day the head of the California rackets was acquitted when his chief accuser, a former strong-arm man, could not remember enough to validate notebooks full of testimony.
That same day, Angelo Muscamente thanked the justice system of the United States, his lawyer, his mother, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and the proud new force that had brought success to his life. He joined the famous actress Kathy Bowen and other celebrities in saying, for the benefit of the press, that the saddest day for American freedom was the day the Dolomos were convicted of a crime.
"It will shame America, the way Jesus' death shamed the Roman empire, the way Joan of Arc's death shamed the French, the way Moses' death shamed someone or other," Angelo announced on the courthouse steps. "I am free but these good people now are in jail."
"They're out on a million dollars bail," a television reporter told Muscamente.
"Yeah? A million dollars bail?"
"They put it up in cash."
"Well, they got the dough," said Muscamente, who went back to his well-guarded home to confront his astral negativity and rid himself of a little more of it. And why shouldn't he? he thought. He had paid a half-million to reach Level Twenty, and at that spiritual apex no court case could ever harm him. It was guaranteed, money back if not delighted. As he explained to his bodyguards, "Don't knock what fuckin' works."
Chapter 5
The trap had failed. Smith told Remo he did not blame him. Chiun apologized for the failure anyhow.
"Let us stop him from embarrassing you further, O great Emperor Smith," said Chiun into his end of a threeway telephone hookup in the Miami condo.