"You are in need of practice," Chiun said, glancing around the foyer with narrow almond eyes.
Remo eyed the Master of Sinanju quizzically. "Since when?"
"Since your elbow was bent."
Remo blinked. He hadn't heard that particular gripe-one of Chiun's favorites back in the old days-for many years.
"What's so terrible about a bent elbow, anyway?" he asked.
"Pray that you never find out," Chiun said darkly.
"Let's go find the big cheese," Remo said, shrugging.
"I warn you, Remo," Chiun said coldly. "This is wrong. Emperor Smith will be most displeased."
"Then why'd you follow me?"
Chiun's dry, papery lips thinned. He said nothing. His gaze darted into the building interior warily.
The room was shrouded in semidarkness. Remo trained his senses on the far end, and a black-walnut alcove. Only one person was there. The breathing was coming shallow and labored, laced with a loose-larynxed rattle. Whoever was in there had to be extremely old, sick, or both.
Remo creaked the door open carefully.
"What family you from?" someone in the back of the darkened alcove called.
Remo glanced at Chiun, who shrugged. "Sinanju!" he called out.
"The Jews ain't got no business in Scubisci territory," the voice answered. It was a pained, phlegmy rasp.
A light snapped on in the black-walnut alcove at the rear of the room. The light was the banker's variety, with a green shade and old-fashioned pull chain, and it illuminated walls plastered with sepia saints. A withered hand drew back from the ivory cone of light, to settle in the lap of the figure seated behind the bullet-scarred walnut table. The other hand was rooting around inside a grease-spotted paper bag. The thick smell of fried peppers wafted up from the greasy sack.
"What do you want from me?" Don Pietro Scubisci croaked.
"Answers," Remo said, advancing toward the alcove.
Don Pietro waved his free hand in a casual gesture. The other hand remained firmly inside the pepper bag. "A man my age, he has more questions than answers, I am afraid," he said. His eyes remained downcast, and he seemed to be absorbed in the spectacle of a cockroach that was crawling across his scarred tabletop.
"That's too bad," Remo said. "Because questions I got, answers you're going to give. Starting with Sal Mondello and Poulette Farms."
Chiun had drawn near to Remo, protectively.
"Remo, do not harm him," Chiun hissed.
"What?" Remo asked, surprised.
"Your friend, he is a wise man," Don Pietro Scubisci said. He reached his other hand inside the bag and pulled out a wedge of fried pepper. As if it had plans of its own, the first hand continued to search the bottom of the bag. Don Pietro placed the pepper delicately on his slug-white tongue and chewed it with deliberate calm. "You should be like him-maybe you'll live longer."
"My friend doesn't speak for me," Remo said. He rounded the table.
"A shame," Don Pietro said, shaking his head. "He sounds to me a very reasonable man." He still had not looked up at Remo.
"You and your dead-end kids have been behind the duck poisonings upstate at Poulette Farms, right?" Remo demanded.
"Remo!" Chiun called, sternly. "Have a care."
"Ducks?" a smile spread across the old man's features.
Don Pietro Scubisci looked up. Under the soft spread of light cast by the banker's lamp, his watery yellow eyes seemed to be swimming in a sea of mucus. But there was something else about those eyes.
Remo had seen that look before. He was wondering just where, when the hand slashed out of the greasy bag. It slit the paper in a perfect vertical line and went for Remo's throat like a switchblade snapping out.
The highly polished nail caught a glimmer of light from the banker's lamp. It was guillotine shaped. Remo saw that much. And it came back to him.
Remo William's body went on automatic. He dodged the don's hand in a quick sidestep, forcing it downward with a stabbing forefinger so that it struck the top of the table.
Brittle bones snapped under the force of the blow, but it made little difference to Don Pietro Scubisci. Remo's other hand shot out like a pile driver, crushing the old don's face to a pinkish pulp. All residual brain activity ceased, as if disconnected from its power source.
The old man collapsed to the floor, the side of his face mashing against his bag. It disgorged slimy peppers across the tabletop, like scurrying green mice.
Remo wheeled on Chiun, whose hands retreated into kimono sleeves.
"Now you know. . . ." Chiun intoned, his eyes bleak.
"Mondello too?" Remo guessed. "Am I right?"
Chiun averted his eyes.
"Dammit, Chiun, why didn't you tell me?"
"I was awaiting the appropriate time," Chiun responded.
"When would that have been?" Remo shouted. "When one of them had carved me up and used me to trim a tree?"
At that, the Master of Sinanju's stern face became angry. Wordlessly, he crossed to where the body of Don Pietro Scubisci lay on the floor and knelt beside it. With one of his own sharpened fingernails he opened a gash in the dead man's throat. Amid the feeble gurgle of blood, a tiny puff of orange rose from the orifice to be swallowed by the banker's lamp.
Remo watched the vanishing smoke in wonder. "What was that?" he asked.
"The only way known to release a spirit from its walking death. By liberating the bad air that makes them so." Chiun rose to his feet. "Learned at great cost," he added quietly.
Remo stared down in disbelief at the corpse on the floor. The Master of Sinanju turned to face his pupil.
"Is there anything you would like to say to me?" Chiun inquired.
"Yeah," Remo muttered, shaking his head. "I wish I'd bought fish."
"Idiot!" Chiun hissed, flouncing about and floating off. "Round-eyed idiot! Dense as all your kind!"