He nodded to Chiun and then Marino felt the pain in his right hand, wrist and arm move upward to his shoulder. It spread outward, like the ripples of a rock in a stream, and when the small, almost gentle vibrations reached his heart, it stopped.
The man dropped heavily at Chiun's feet. Chiun looked down at him.
"What are you posing for?" Remo asked.
"Just basking in the excellence of technique," Chiun said.
"Well, bask around this boat and see if there are any more of these goons aboard. I'm going to look for Grassione."
"If you find him…"
"Yes," Remo said.
"Tell him thank you for lending me his television set today," Chiun said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Arthur Grassione had the Dreamocizer on.
He was sitting in the downstairs lounge of the yacht, Il Avvocato, alone but for the bullet-shattered body of Don Salvatore Massello which lounged against the room's fireplace wall.
Grassione had used the telephone in the lounge to call Uncle Pietro in New York who had awarded his nephew warm congratulations on a job well done, and a promise that he, Pietro Scubisci, himself would call St. Louis now to inform people that Grassione had been working on the instructions of the national council and that any attack upon him would be regarded as an attack upon the national council itself.
"I got the machine too, Uncle," Grassione had said.
"What machine, nephew?"
"The television thing. They call it a Dreamocizer."
"Oh, that. Well, I do not watch much television anymore," Pietro Scubisci said. "Not since they take off the Montefuscos. That was a funny, that show. Like the old days with Mama and Pappa."
"Uncle, I think you should see this machine. I think we can make much money with it," Grassione said.
"How is that?" Scubisci asked quickly. "How is this different from the television set Cousin Eugenio got for me off the truck?"
And Grassione explained how Professor Wooley's Dreamocizer telecast a person's dreams, his wishes.
"You mean, I watch this television, I can see myself with lots of money, young again, with feet that don't hurt? Your aunt no longer has the boobies like two loaves of bread?"
"That's right, Uncle Pietro," Grassione said. "And it works for anybody. Whatever anybody wants, he can dream it on this machine."
"You be sure to bring this crazy machine home with you, Arthur," Scubisci said. "This I got to see. Me with hair, and feet that don't hurt." He laughed, a high tenor giggle.
"I will, Uncle, I will," said Grassione, but he hung up, not sure that his uncle had really grasped the significance of Professor Wooley's invention, the first major breakthrough in television since Grassione, as a boy, had first seen Felix the Cat at the 1939 World's Fair.
He remembered the demonstration that Wooley had given at the cafeteria. The little gook broad thinking about a Vietnam with no war.
Grassione had hooked up the Dreamocizer to the aerial connections of Don Massello's large-console, and then had attached the electrodes as he had seen it done, two to his forehead, two to his neck.
He sat back in the soft leather chair in the room and thought of what he wanted to dream about.
He knew.
He wanted to dream about that bastard who had been going around the country, tearing up some of the organization's best people.
But he had trouble. All he could think of was Edward Leung's warning to him: "All life ends in dreams and death."
He shook his head to clear it of those thoughts. He was Arthur Grassione. He was on the trail of the man who was attacking the organization. He was going to find him and kill him. Destroy him.
Slowly the fuzzy image on the television set cleared.
He had first heard of this character on a drug run in New Jersey a few years ago. Then the presence had been felt after the organization almost became involved in a union dispute. Before the syndicate could influence anyone, the dispute was no more. Neither were most of the disputers.
Then there was that election in Miami. The papers were crying about a governmental kill squad, but nothing seemed to stop whoever it was who was wiping out the organization's men.
And finally again, just a short time before, with a famous Mafia home movie. Few had seen it and most of them were dead. It showed one dark-haired young man wipe out two teams of assassins. With his hands and nothing else.
Grassione had not seen the movie. He had been told though that the man was thin, with dark hair but had thick wrists, and moved fast.
There were more places that Grassione had felt the unknown man's movements vibrating through the mob.
And so now for sport, for relaxation, for relief, he was going to kill the man with the thick wrists.
The Sony TV showed a bright landscape. There was a man running across a field. He was a thin, dark-haired man. He had thick wrists. Grassione had seen him before. He knew it. But where?
Right. He had seen him run across the campus at Edgewood University.
The man kept running. Running.
Grassione had seen him somewhere else, too. Where? On television. Once before. Running in the Boston Marathon.
The man was running faster and faster now, but the ground around him was covered with a growing shadow. And then the man took one last step and a giant foot came down and squashed him like a hard-backed bug. Juicy.
Grassione laughed and clapped his hands together.
The picture suddenly changed. It was a romantic, dimly lit apartment. The dark-haired young man was sitting at a small round table, raising a glass of wine to a dark-haired beauty across from him. She was small and delicate, with Oriental eyes. The door of the room burst open and Grassione appeared with a submachine gun and opened fire.
Grassione watched and sat smugly in his chair aboard Il Avvocato, smiling his pleasure with himself.
The picture began to jump again. But instead of a new shot, the colorful landscape returned. Grassione frowned. The giant foot was still there, but it was slowly rising.
Grassione sat up and looked closer as the foot rose.
The shadow under the foot receded until the dark-haired man, now looking gentler than Grassione had pictured him, had lifted the foot an arm's length above him.
Grassione thought about the foot pressing down, crashing down on this peacefully smiling man with the thick wrists. Except the foot didn't. It began to crack.