"I asked a question," Remo said, clamping down with both hands. He lifted the man straight off the rug, even though the man was a half-foot taller than Remo. Just to drive home the point.
"You're . . . making a . . . mistake," the man wheezed.
"Give me a name."
"Talk . . . to the boss. He'll . . . straighten it all . . . out."
"Who's the boss?"
"Talk . . . to . . . Fuggin," the man gasped.
"Who's Fuggin?" asked Remo, giving him a little air.
"What are you, stupid? Fuggin is Fuggin."
Since an answer that made no sense was just as useless as no answer at all, Remo suddenly released the man from his two-handed throat grip.
Gravity took hold of the man. He started to fall. Before he got an eighteenth of an inch closer to the rug, Remo's hands came back, open and fast.
The sound was like a single sharp clap.
When the man's feet hit the rug, the top of his head struck the ceiling. Since the distance between the two was eight feet, and the man just under six-foot-four, there was about one and a half feet of distance unaccounted for.
When the man's head struck the rug, it bounced twice and stopped suddenly. It would have kept rolling but was stopped by a two-foot length of stretched matter that resembled chewed bubble gum after it had been drawn between two hands.
Of course, it was not bubble gum. It was the man's limp, shock-compressed neck.
Remo turned away and helped the one called Frank to his feet.
The man allowed himself to be set on his feet in front of the bed. He allowed this despite outweighing Remo by almost eighty pounds because he had seen the fate that had befallen his coworkers after he had extracted his head from the pillowcase.
"What'd you do to Guido?" the man asked, pointing to the pink taffylike mass that connected the dead man's trunk and head.
"The same thing I'm going to do to your balls if you don't answer my question," Remo warned.
"Look, I don't know who you are or what you want, but you really, really want to talk to Fuggin. Get me?"
"Who's Fuggin?"
"The boss. My boss. The boss of the guys you just croaked. Fuggin don't like for his guys to be croaked."
"Tough. "
"This is a big mistake," the thug said in an agitated voice. "I want you to know that."
"What's your connection to IDC?" Remo demanded.
"None."
"I believe you. Now, what happened to the IDC technicians who came to fix that computer?"
"Can I take the Fifth on that?"
"Are your testicles made of brass?"
"No."
"Shall I repeat the question, or do you want proof of that immutable quirk of biology?"
"They got whacked," the man said dispiritedly.
"Why?"
"They screwed up."
"What's so important about the computer?"
"Ask Fuggin. I don't know nothin'. Honest."
"Is that the best answer you can give me?"
"It's the only one I got."
"It's not good enough," returned Remo, feinting toward the man's neck. The man grabbed his own throat with both hands in order to protect it from Remo's terrible fingers.
So Remo took hold of the man's head with both hands and inserted his thumbs in his eye sockets. He pushed. The sound was like two grapes being squished. The man fell back on the bed with his eyes pushed all the way to the back of his skull and two spongy tunnels through the brain.
Whistling, Remo recovered the rope and, looping it through the ceiling fixture and around the throats of the three dead thugs, created a scene that eventually went down in the annals of Boston homicide as a first.
As the homicide detective asked when he first viewed the macabre scene, "How could three guys hang themselves from the same rope like garlic cloves?"
Remo left the motel room surreptitiously.
The chauffeur was still behind the wheel, his nose buried in a racing form. He tried to look casual, but his face was like a stone chopped out of a granite outcropping.
Remo figured he knew less than the three dead thugs, so he left the man alone as he slipped away in search of a pay phone.
He wondered what Harold Smith was going to say when he informed him that International Data Corporation, the largest company in American, had somehow become embroiled with the Mafia.
Most of all, he wondered who the hell this Fuggin was.
Chapter 7
From an early age, Carmine (Fuggin) Imbruglia had only one burning ambition in life. To become an arch-criminal.
"Someday," he would boast, "I'm gonna be a kingpin. You'll see."