"The last time you said that," Smith reminded him, "we nearly lost Chiun."
"Point taken," Remo said, bringing his other foot outside and dropping out of the frame so fast that Smith had to blink the stubborn Cheshire-cat afterimage of Remo's grin from his retina.
He regarded the empty frame and the severed phone line by turns. After several long, difficult months, in which Chiun was presumed dead and later Remo had fallen into the hands of the enemy, things were back to normal.
Harold Smith didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Chapter 4
Antony Tollini had joined International Data Corporation in 1971 as a salesman. He had been promoted to head of sales in 1973 when the CEO of IDC, T. L. Broon, had died. When Broon's successor, Blake Corbish, had passed away after the shortest tenure as company president, Antony Tollini had found himself director of marketing.
It was like being on an elevator that moved up one step at a time, according to a halting mechanism. Through most of the seventies and eighties, Antony Tollini had been stuck in neutral, a vice-president in an ocean of gray-suited vicepresidents, all serene in the knowledge that they worked for the finest corporation in the world. A corporation so advanced that after World War II the Japanese had come to study it and appropriated its corporate model to create the economic powerhouse now called Japan Inc. A corporation so insular that U.S. business leaders were studying the second-generation Japanese model in order to compete in the global marketplace, unaware that the first-generation model was prototyped under the big blue logo IDC. A corporation so on the cutting edge of information services that no rival firm contemplated going head-to-head with it. They either went plug-compatible or they went their own way-usually out of business. Cloning IDC PC's and mainframes was the sole survival strategy in the field of information systems.
But in the early nineties, when the marketplace was going as soft as a candle stored in a July attic, mainframes were outdated. Any small company could compete in the new era of linked PC's and networking. IDC, bloated and arrogant, had found itself on the verge of becoming a dinosaur.
In these hard times, Antony Tollini almost wished he was working for one of the also-rans. He had been Peter Principled up to the level of director of marketing, a solid steppingstone to the stratospheric IDC boardroom, and suddenly there was no market.
That alone was enough to make a grown man cry. Antony Tollini refused to cry, however. He was a comer. He put his capped teeth together and his nose to the grindstone and set about the heroic task of identifying new markets, chipping away at the computer industry's diminishing market share.
He was polished. He was direct. He was everything an IDC employee should be. But the economy had been disintegrating faster than he had been innovating.
Then he had had a vision. One that would give IDC a brand-new client base none of the little guys could touch.
He would just have to work out a few minor bugs first.
As he drove in from his White Plains home, soothing New Age music on the sound system of his red Miata, Antony Tollini decided that the bugs warranted laying the entire matter before the board. The time had come. Definitely.
Yes, Antony Tollini thought as be guided his Miata into the parking slot in the south wing of the IDC parking lot, in the very shadow of Bold Blue--as IDC was affectionately called-he would make no excuses. He would stand up and be a man in the true IDC tradition. No more evasions. No more ducking the issue. If IDC was to get out from under this dark cloud, the board would have to be notified.
Why, this was IDC. Presidents listened when IDC men talked. Cabinet members, once their public-service careers were completed, often found seats on the IDC board-and then had to prove their business worth or be terminated like any common inventory-control person.
Who were these new clients to make unreasonable demands of International Data Corporation?
Squaring his Brooks Brothers shoulders, Antony Tollini strode past his personal secretary and asked, "Any messages?"
"Just . . . the Boston client."
Tollini felt his heart squeeze in his chest like a spongy fist. His resolve melted.
"What . . . did . . . they . . . say?" he asked, going ashen.
"They wanted to know where the new repairman was. They sounded impatient."
"Did they say what happened to the old one?" , "Generally. It had something to do with a cranberry bog."
Tony felt a stab of fear in his stomach. "Did they sound angry?"
They always sound angry. This time they sounded impatient too."
"I seeee . . ." Antony Tollini said slowly, his eyes acquiring a hazy glaze. "Any new resumes come in today?"
The secretary pulled open a drawer and extracted a sheaf of employee resumes only a little less thick than the Manhattan phone book. When IDC placed want ads, millionaires applied just for the thrill of being able to tell their friends they had been granted preliminary interviews.
Bent double with the weight of the latest batch of IDC aspirants, Antony Tollini bore himself into his office and collapsed behind his polished mahogany desk.
His eyes, if anything, glazed over even more. It would take forever to go through all these. Then there was the hard-no, agonizing-selection process. In the old days it had been easy to hire for IDC. One merely skimmed the cream and chose the pearls one found floating in it.
For the position of senior customer engineer newly created to deal with IDC's latest crisis, Tollini had at first looked for the pearls. When the best simply never returned, Tollini knew it was hopeless.
So he began to send the halt and the lame out into the field. It made the most sense. It bought the company time, and in a curious, almost fitting way, it was like survival of the fittest.
But it could not go on forever, he knew.
"Just one more," he murmured under his breath. "One more sacrificial lamb and we'll have worked out a solution."
He rejected the married applicants. He did not wish to widow anyone. Princeton graduates-his alma mater-were likewise spared as a gesture to sentiment. The hopelessly unqualified were also discarded from consideration. Hard times compelled people to apply for positions they could never hope to fulfill, and Tollini recognized these as hardship cases.
He was looking for a middle ground. Someone who could at least put forth a creditable effort. Maybe if enough technicians told the Boston client the same thing, they would realize it was hopeless and stop bothering him.
Thirty-some applicants into the thick pile, Antony Tollini ran across a name that stuck out.
The name was Remo Mercurio.
"Remo," he said aloud, tasting the name. "Remo. I like the sound of it. Remo. "
He skimmed the resume. It was lackluster. There were even a few misspelled words. But at the bottom of the page, in red felt pen, was scrawled a postscript:
I AM THE ANSWER TO YOUR PROBLEMS."
Normally such a crass deviation from the rigid formalities of business etiquette was cause for summary rejection. But if there was anything Antony Tollini had been praying to Saint Theresa for these last few weeks, it was someone to solve this, his greatest problem since joining IDC as a starry-eyed twenty-three-year-old.
"Remo," he said, tasting the vowels. He picked up the desk phone.
"Nancy. I want you to call an applicant named Remo Mercurio."
"Are you sure, Mr. Tollini? I mean, are you certain you want to do this?"
"Nancy, I'm positive."
Antony Tollini replaced the receiver, a welling of hope rising in his throat. Maybe this time it would work. Maybe this one would be the person. And maybe, just maybe, he could sleep soundly again.
He was sick to death of dreaming of decapitated horses, their dead equine eyes staring back at him accusingly.
Chapter 5
"I'm on," Remo said, replacing the telephone in the Mamaroneck hotel where he had taken a room.