"Well, we can't just stand here until they all fall asleep," she hissed again.
He raised a hand to silence her. "Leave it to me," he said. He lightly vaulted over the railing and dropped the fifteen feet to the room below. He landed on the cushions of the sofa, rolled backward over its back, landed on his feet between two of the would-be gunmen, and snapped the machine guns from their hands.
The man behind the chair heard the sound and turned toward him, slowly raising his Magnum to firing height. But before he could do anything with it, Remo had taken it from his hand. Remo stood there among the three men holding all three guns. Three guns were awkward, he realized. He tried holding one machine gun in each hand and the revolver under his chin but that wasn't comfortable.
"Who are you? What do you want?" the man behind the chair said.
"Just hold your horses," Remo said. It was hard to talk holding a gun under your chin.
He put both machine guns under one arm and held the pistol in his other hand, but the machine guns began to slip. They might fall out, go off and hurt somebody that way, he thought.
"Are you all right?" Pamela yelled from the balcony.
"Fine, fine, fine, fine," Remo said. "Will you all just wait a minute?"
Finally he gave up and tossed all three weapons into a corner of the room. "Listen," he told the three men. "I put them over there but that doesn't mean you should think you can run over and get one or something because then I'll have to kill you."
Pamela came down the steps into the living room. She covered the three men with her small pistol and Remo noticed that she held it low and close to her hip, the way people did who were expert in the law-enforcement use of firearms, not out in front of her where anyone could slap it away.
"Don't anybody move," she snarled.
"They weren't planning to move, Mrs. Peel," Remo said sarcastically. "Now aim that thing away from me." He turned back to the three men. "Okay, what're your names?"
"Who wants to know?" said the man who had been hiding behind the chair.
Remo upended the brass coffee table behind the couch and twisted one of its legs into a corkscrew shape.
"Next question?" he said.
"Bondini," the man said. "Bernie Bondini."
Remo glanced at the other two men, who were still on the floor, cringing in front of Pamela, whose gun pointed unwaveringly at them.
"Hubble."
"Franko."
"Any of those sound like the voice that's been calling?" Remo asked Pamela.
"I can't tell from just their names," Pamela said. "They've got to say more."
"Who are you?" Bondini asked.
"Will you stop saying that?" Remo said. "All right. Now I want you to take turns. One at a time, repeat this: Four score and something ago, our forefathers brought up--"
"You're getting it wrong," Bondini said.
"Just say it any way you want," Remo said. "I never told you I was any good at history."
"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon--"
"That's good," Remo said. "You remember that from school?"
"Yes," said Bondini.
"I could never remember it," Remo said. "I kept mixing up fathers and forefathers. I was supposed to recite it on Memorial Day but I kept getting it wrong."
"That's a shame," Bondini said.
"Yeah. They got Romeo Rocco to do it instead. Boy, did he stink. He sounded like that guy who does the fast commercials. He wet his pants in the middle and he still finished the speech before any liquid reached the floor."
He turned back to Pamela.
"Him?" he asked. She shook her head no.
"Okay, you," Remo said, pointing to the bearded man on the floor. "What's your name?"
"Hubble."
"Okay. Recite the Gettysburg Address."
"I don't know the zip code for Gettysburg," Hubble said.
"Very funny," Remo said. "Now will you try for a broken neck?"
"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers something something," Hubble said.
"Him?" Remo asked Pamela.
"No," she said.
"That leaves you," Remo said to Franko. "Recite."
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in--"
"That's enough," Remo said.
"--liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether--" Stash Franko rose to his feet. "-- this nation or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated--"
"I said enough," Remo said.
"--can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield--"
Remo clapped his hand over Franko's mouth. "If there's anything I hate, it's a show-off." He looked at Pamela and she again shook her head no.
"I'm letting you go," Remo told Franko. "If you promise to speak only when spoken to. You promise?"