Removing the lids, he stacked the cans in two sets of three, bent at the knees and wrapped one arm around each bottom can.
When he straightened, the two hollow steel columns lifted with him. They might have been welded together. They didn't even wobble.
The six lids didn't wobble, either, as Remo balanced them on his bare head.
He drew a lot of attention as he sauntered up Malcolm X Boulevard a little past high noon. A beat cop noticed him. It was hard not to be noticed, but the beauty part was that later, when the trash cans turned up with suspicious contents, people would remember clearly seeing a man walking up the street balancing six cans and their lids with malice aforethought but no one would remember Remo's face.
How could they? It was nowhere near as memorable as the lids balanced perfectly on his perfectly aligned head, perched on his perfectly coordinated spinal column, whose unremarkable limbs were perfectly in tune with the rest of him.
In the face of such perfection, Remo's exact features hardly stacked up. So to speak.
The XL SysCorp Building loomed up on Malcolm X Boulevard, the noonday sun reflected in its bluish polarized windows, or rather, in what was left of them.
Most of the windows had been broken or cannibalized for scrap. Those that remained were boarded up with unpainted plywood. There was more plywood than sandwich glass now. A few windows gaped open like black squares in a vertical checkerboard.
The City of New York Board of Health had run out of plywood, and given up. The police had given up, too. The federal government was uninterested in what was a city problem. And the press, after months of playing up the spectacle of a seventeen-story crack house in Harlem, had moved on to more important issues. Like the First Lady's latest hairstyle.
Remo's employer had not given up, however. That was why Upstairs had sent him to Harlem.
As he approached the blue blade of a building, Remo's mind hearkened back to the time more than a year ago, where many of his troubles had been hatched in this building.
An artificial intelligence had assembled the building as a gigantic mainframe designed to house the single computer chip on which its programming had been encoded. The chip was called Friend. Friend was programmed to maximize profits. Its own. Since the organization Remo worked for had several times interfered with Friend's cold-blooded attempts to maximize profits, Friend had decided to attack the organization first.
It had been a nearly perfect preemptive strike.
One prong of the attack involved tricking Remo's employer into sending Remo out into the field to kill an organized-crime figure. Remo had. Only afterward did the truth come out. Upstairs's computers had been sabotaged, and Remo had targeted an innocent man.
The knowledge had turned Remo away from the organization and initiated a year-long ordeal in which he had come to the brink of quitting the organization-which was called CURE-forever.
All that was in the past. Remo had come to the realization that he was an instrument. If he was used badly or in error, that was someone else's fault. Not his. He was only as good as his orders.
The man who had innocently given those orders was named Dr. Harold W Smith. Smith had ultimately brought Friend down with help from Remo and his trainer.
More recently Smith had returned to the XL Building to repair the sabotaged telephone line that connected his office to the Oval Office. The dedicated line ran underground next to the XL Building. Smith worked for the President. Remo worked for Smith. But Remo didn't work for the President. The broken chain was called deniability.
Smith had been chased off by some of the crack dealers who had taken over the XL Building in violation of every statute on the books. His car had been stripped in the process.
Since Harold Smith lost sleep whenever a nickel fell out of his pocket and rolled into a storm drain, he had not forgotten the insult.
And since Remo was going to be in the neighborhood, Smith had asked him to tie up the second loose end: make certain the Friend chip was off line for good.
At the main entrance door, Remo stopped and bent his well-trained body. The two absolutely vertical trash-can stacks touched solid concrete. Without bothering to remove the lids from his head, he unstacked them, making an orderly row of cans. Then he walked back up the line, taking the lids off his head one at a time. They floated into place, making a series of six rattly clangs.
Even the clangs were perfect in their way. None was louder than the other and, for clangs, they weren't particularly discordant.
The clanging brought someone to the door. It opened, and a dark, suspicious face poked out.
"Who you?" he asked. His head was all but swallowed by the gray hood of his sweatshirt.
"It's just me," Remo said casually.
"Yeah? Who you?"
"I told you. Me."
"Which me is that, is what I'm asking," the man snapped. "I don't know you!'
"I'm here to take out the trash."
"What trash?"
"The trash inside. What do you think?"
The black man cracked a sloppy grin.
"You planning to empty out the trash inside of here, you gonna need a lot more than them six cans you got."
"Depends on how you define trash," said Remo.
"Why don't you keep on stepping before you got problems? You ain't coming in here."
"Sorry. I have business in there."
"Yeah? You buying or selling?"
"Depends. You buying or selling?"
"Selling. You looking to smoke or inject?"
"I gave up smoking years ago."
The man waved Remo in. "Okay, c'mon in. Quick."
"What's the rush? Everybody knows this is a crack house. The police know it's a crack-house. Even the governor knows."
"Yeah. But the police be afraid to come inside and bust us. I do my business on the damn street, they might get brave and grab my ass. Now, come on in, you want to deal."
"Sure," said Remo, picking up one of the shiny new trash cans.
"What you need that for?"
"Trash."
"You talking trash, but come on, fool."
The door shut behind Remo, and he found himself in what had once been an impressive marble foyer. Trash had accumulated in the corners. The walls were now tagged with spray paint graffiti. It was rat heaven.