Remo backed off, with only inches separating him from Kenny.
"Is this any way to greet an old friend?" Remo asked.
"Old friend, huh?" Kenny glowered.
"Sure. We met in Newark. Oh, maybe ten years ago. Don't you remember?"
Kenny was wavering. "No."
"Yeah. I arrested you for gambling. You had me transferred off my beat."
Kenny's eyes squinted behind the glasses, trying to remember. He did. "You're a cop," he hissed. "A goddam cop. No wonder."
"Take a good look, you pail of garbage. It's the last face you'll ever see," Remo said.
Kenny lunged with the knife and Remo slid alongside the thrust. The blade hit the metal door and the force of the stroke skidded the blade along the door, until it slipped into the crack between the door and the frame. Remo slapped the door open, and the movement snapped off the knife blade, and then the edge of Remo's hand hit Kenny in the face.
He jolted backward, onto the toilet seat, dropping the knife-handle. Then Remo was on him, an arm under Kenny's arm, the heel of his hand against the back of Kenny's neck, pressing it forward, cutting off the air. He forced Kenny over the shallow sink and shoved his head down into it. He ran the water until the sink was full, and he kept Kenny's face down under the water. In the confines of the tiny room there was little opportunity to move about or gain leverage. Remo was on him like a vice. First there was bubbling and then thrashing, then just silent limpness.
Already, his trip was a success, Remo thought. PJ Kenny. Good. And that could be his passport to Nemeroff. Passport.
He reached into Kenny's jacket pocket and took his billfold and passport. Still holding Kenny in the sink, he flipped open the passport. It was made out in the name of Johnson and carried the picture of the new Kenny—horn-rimmed, country-doctor glasses and all. Remo took his passport from his hip pocket and slid it into Kenny's jacket. The dead man was now Roger Willis.
So much for that.
He dried Kenny's face and hair with a towel, then arranged him on the toilet seat. Kenny's body slumped against the wall. His glasses hung from only one earpiece.
The glasses. Remo took them. He'd need them, if they checked passports. The horn-rims would fool anyone, particularly passport checkers to whom all faces looked alike anyway.
He started to leave, and remembered Kenny's face. Even with the passport for Roger Willis, someone might recognize him as Kenny. Probably that blonde stewardess.
With his fingernails he made sure no one would ever recognize Kenny again.
He then washed his hands and slipped Kenny's eyeglasses in his shirt pocket.
Stepping out of the lavatory, he smashed the side of his hand twice against the hinges of the door, crushing the metal, making sure it would not open to a casual push.
He would be long gone, before they found PJ Kenny's body.
Before anyone was ever able to identify the corpse as PJ Kenny's, Remo would be done with Baron Nemeroff and Vice President Asiphar. It should all work very well.
Remo walked back down the aisle, and with no stewardess in sight, took the attaché case from under Kenny's seat.
He got back into his own seat just as the "fasten safety belts" light came on.
The blonde walked up the aisle, checking seat belts. She smiled at Remo and he smiled back.
He wondered what her expression would be after they'd landed, and they found the body sitting on the john. Or later, when they determined that he had died of drowning.
Probably, she'd smile.
Remo would.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Baron Isaac Nemeroff had sent telegrams of summons all over the world, and all over the world men prepared to come.
From the top families of the American Mafia to the leading producer and purveyor of pornography in the world-a Japanese who owned and operated brothels and film processing plants in more than fifteen countries-they prepared to come. Men who controlled thousands of acres of land, now turned over to the growing of poppies, made ready to come. From the bowels of crime would come the professional gamblers who owned those casinos around the world which once had been expected to drive criminals out of gambling. From Switzerland would come a seventy-two-year-old man whose name was probably unknown to everyone but Nemeroff, who knew him as the greatest counterfeiter in the world, a man who had printed literally billions of dollars of queer and floated it into the world money-markets from his Swiss headquarters.
There would be smugglers, gun-runners, swindlers, the head of a ring of jewel thieves.
When Nemeroff called, they would all come.
And most of them were not sure of why.
Few had ever met him, which was as Nemeroff wanted it, since he was not a public man.
His name did not make gossip columns unless he wished it to. He did not allow himself to be thought of as phony Russian nobility, another fraud who declared himself baron three days after learning which fork to use.
His credentials as nobility were impeccable. He chose to live his life to meet the arbitrary standards he had set for that nobility.
Nemeroff was forty-six years old, the only son of a beautiful young Frenchwoman, and a Russian father whose ancestry was connected with the Romanoffs and whose capacity for anger was connected with the Cossacks.
Young Isaac had been born in Paris, and soon after his birth, his mother died under circumstances that could only be described as suspicious.
Those who knew the old Count Nemeroff knew that there was nothing suspicious about it. His wife was a trollop, of noble birth, but a trollop nonetheless, and upon finding himself cuckolded, Nemeroff had simply poisoned her.
There was almost no Nemeroff fortune left, the Russian revolution having taken care of that. But his mother left young Isaac and his father a comfortable amount of money, which his father found decidedly uncomfortable.
The old man and the boy then began to live the life of wanderers, travelling continuously from year to year, from one pleasure capital of the world to the next. And everywhere there were beautiful women for Count Nemeroff, to provide him with the funds to at least imitate his former life style.
Young Isaac grew to hate them, with their brittle faces and alabaster skins, and their staged, identical, musical laughs. He hated them as rivals for his father's affection. He hated them most when he saw them slip envelopes into his father's pockets and he hated the look on his father's face when he opened the envelope and counted the cash it contained, when in their carriage on the way back to their hotel.
Isaac was eight years old when he became a thief. He had already been well-grounded in the important currencies of the world: diamonds were best, gold next, other precious metals, stones and American dollars following somewhat after that.
He specialized in diamonds.
While he was supposed to be at poolside at some rich woman's villa and his father was inside tending to her needs; when he could hear the laughter and the sighs floating softly through a window; he would leave the pool and wander the house. A pin here. A ring, there. A brooch. He avoided necklaces because he thought their absence would be too quickly noted. He gave no thought as to what he would do with his booty. He carried the pieces in a shaving kit which he kept in his suitcase, and which his father never opened, thinking its possession merely a young boy's affectation.
When he was a few years older, he rented a safe-deposit box in a Swiss bank and began keeping his jewellery there. Upon each of their subsequent trips to Switzerland, he would take out one of the pieces, break the jewels from their mountings and sell them to a diamond dealer.
Isaac, though only twelve, was already over six feet tall, and seemed to grow so rapidly that his clothes were always ill-fitting. He was conscious of his wrists extending from his sleeves and his ankles visible below his cuffs when he went to see the first diamond merchant on the list of names he had copied from a telephone book.
The merchant, a kindly-appearing old man with a walrus moustache, had looked at Isaac, at his long, sad face, at his ill-fitting clothes and had laughed aloud and put Isaac out of his office. Years later, Isaac bought the firm, hired accountants for the sole purpose of finding errors in the books, and through criminal and civil actions in the courts hounded the former owner into suicide.
But he had to go no farther than the second name on his list to find a merchant who would buy his stones. He was paid $10,000 American dollars, one-tenth of what the flawless diamonds were worth. He was happy to get it. The cash went into a numbered bank account.