REMO PAUSED OUTSIDE THE DOOR of the room on the sixth floor, reserved for patients at the Human Awareness Laboratory.
The other patients’ doors were plain gray with shiny metal handles. These doors were black. Highly polished black doors. A passerby might think the room did not belong to a patient. Perhaps the passerby might be correct.
Remo paused in front of the door when he heard the periodic thwack, thwack, thwack. The sound was familiar but he could not place it.
Other patients’ doors had no locks. But these black double doors had a central bolt, the worst kind of lock for a double door. Any grown man, with a little forward pressure, could ease the bolt out of its slot, Remo did it with a snap of his forefinger.
The doors sprung open. Standing in a very large, plush room was a mountain of nude chocolate, its back to Remo. The head on the mountain spun around with the wheezing of an asthmatic who had exercised too much.
“Get out of here,” said Dr. Lawrence Garrand, the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal. “I’m busy.”
Garrand stood, his bare brown feet sunk into a plush white polar bear rug, his two dark rolling arms containing an avalanche of flesh, at the end of which were two almost-pointed hands holding darts.
Garrand did not move his body around because it would take several steps to accomplish. Instead, he kept his head twisted over his sloping shoulders where the cascade of flesh seemed to begin. Large white stretch marks cut his billowing buttocks into a road map. The legs looked like dried lava flows defying the law of gravity, as if the polar bear rug had vomited up the dark mass.
Yet the face underneath the flesh, the face that turned over the shoulder to glare at Remo, was a delicate, fine face.
Remo could catch a glint on the flesh of the forehead from a diffused overhead light. Garrand was perspiring. Yet the room was cool and smelled of delicate mint incense. Garrand’s perspiration came apparently from the exertion of his dart throwing.
“Get out of here,” Garrand wheezed.
Remo stepped into the room, never feeling so light in his life. Two steps into the room, he saw what Garrand’s target was, what his body had been hiding, like a mountain obscuring a view of a valley.
There was Lithia Forrester, about a third larger than life size, in full golden color, naked, seated on a purple cushion, one leg folded up in front of her and the other extended full, exposing her to view. Holes punctured the blue eyes and the erogenous zones were perforated with the memory of thousands of darts. Three red feathered darts protruded from her navel.
All the while, from the portrait, Lithia smiled seductively, the even, white smile of cool confidence and joy.
Remo looked back to Garrand.
Around his neck, the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal had hung his asthma spray bulb on a leather strap. A fold of flesh had hidden the leather strap from the back.
Garrand’s eyes followed Remo as Remo moved into the room, and just the movement of his head set his body quivering. His breasts were larded with white streaks like an over-boiled hot dog just before splitting. Fat fought fat for space fore and aft on his arms. His nipples were bigger than Lithia’s.
He squeezed his asthma bulb into his mouth, squirting his bronchial tubes with adrenalin.
“I thought I told you to get out of here,” he said.
“I heard you,” Remo said.
Garrand shrugged, a very slight shrug that made his flesh ripple. He dropped the spray back onto his rolling stomach, and turned his head again toward Lithia’s picture.
Garrand raised a dart to precise eye level with his right hand. The left hand still held two more. With a flick of his fingers, Garrand let loose a dart as he announced:
“Left breast.”
The dart thwacked in just over the aureole around Lithia Forrester’s nipple.
“Right nipple,” Garrand said and powerfully, almost invisibly with no curve in its trajectory, another dart flashed across the eight-foot distance and buried itself, quivering in the turgid right nipple of Lithia Forrester.
“Mons veneris,” Garrand said, and the third dart flashed on too, punching its way into the triangular patch of golden hair on the portrait
Garrand reached down to a wooden dart box and took out three more darts. “You haven’t told me why you busted in here.”
“The game’s over, Garrand.”
“So the bitch talked.”
“No, she didn’t, if that’s any consolation to you. She died without saying a word.”
“Good for her. I knew the honkey bitch was good for something. Right eye,” he said and buried a dart into the sparkling blue eye of Lithia Forrester.
“Mouth,” he called, and another dart hit its mark with a thwack.
“Why, Garrand?” Remo asked. “Just because of a traffic arrest in Jersey City?”
“Vagina,” Garrand called and buried another dart in the exposed private parts of Lithia Forrester. “Not just because of a traffic arrest, Donaldson. Just because your country is rotten. It deserves what it gets. And I deserve whatever I can get for it. Call it back-dues to my people.” He was wheezing now from the exertion of talking so long.
“Your people?” Remo said. “What about your people whose lives would be ruined if your scheme worked?”
“That’s the tough luck associated with being a house nigger,” Garrand said. “Listen. As long as you’re there, give me more darts will you. On that table. In the box.”
Remo had reached a waist-high white table with a marble top, an exquisite piece of furniture that went with the exquisite room, mostly furnished in white. On the table top was a black box, the size of a loaf of bread, with layer after layer of darts in it, like bombs in a storage hanger. Remo grabbed three by their heavy metal points. The feathers were trimmed and true. The points sharp. The wooden bodies were weighted, about a fifth of an ounce heavier than competition darts.
He handed the darts to Garrand who accepted them. Then Remo stepped back, eight feet away from Garrand.
“Left thumb,” Garrand said, and flew a dart into Lithia Forrester’s left thumb.
“Whose idea was it?” Remo asked. “Yours or hers?”
“Mine, of course. She didn’t have brains enough to think of it.” He turned now, shuffling and labored, to face Remo. “But I saw the possibilities as soon as I came here for therapy and saw all the government personnel here. I thought right away of the kind of power she could have over them. She could get them to do anything.”
“How’d you get her to do it?” Remo asked.
“You might not believe it, Donaldson, but she loved me.”
“So you used drugs and post-hypnotic suggestion?”
“To simplify it for you, yes. Plus Lithia’s peddling her ass. That helped. Men were just fascinated by her body. A little of her twiff and they’d do anything,” Garrand said imperiously. He was lecturing now. “I never could understand it myself. She just wasn’t that good.”
“I thought you couldn’t get someone to act against their will under hypnosis,” Remo said.
“A typical piece of comic-book stupidity,” Garrand said. “First you convince them that what they’re doing is the right thing to do. That colonel, for instance. He thought you were a Russian spy. And General Dorfwill. He wasn’t bombing St. Louis; he was bombing Peking in retaliation for a sneak attack. And Admiral Crust? Why shouldn’t he destroy the Statue of Liberty, particularly since he knew it was the hideout for a band of anarchists about to blow up our country? That’s how it’s done, Mr. Donaldson.”
“And the song?”
“That was my idea, too,” Garrand said, smiling, his teeth pearled in the ground coffee brownness of his face. “You’ve got to be careful when you use trigger words to set a person off. You can’t pick a word that someone’s liable to hear in conversation. It could set them off before you were ready. When you think about it, not many people are likely to use super-kale-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious in conversation.”
“A lovely plan,” Remo said. “I respect you for it. Now I need to know where the bidding will be held.”
Garrand smiled and ignored the question. “One thing puzzles me, Donaldson. I had everything worked out. All except you. This government isn’t that good that one of our sources shouldn’t have a line on you. It’s like all of a sudden there was an organization that did not exist. But it existed. And so did you. Now, if you wish to live, if you wish these darts not to enter your eyes or your temples or wherever I wish, you can tell me where you came from.”
Remo laughed. “You lose,” he said. He saw his laughter grate Dr. Garrand like a rasp and then the two pointy hands flicked and the darts were at him in that flat trajectory, across the eight feet of room, but Remo’s head did not move. His eyes, toward which the darts flew, did not blink. Remo’s hands flashed up in front of his face and his hands caught the darts by the points, between thumb and index finger; hands receiving the thrust of the killer weights, wrists like spring locks accepting the force and holding short, just short of the eyes.
Garrand’s mouth opened. His eyes widened. He looked toward the box of darts on the table and querulously reached forward a hand. But suddenly his hand was pinned to the table as Remo pierced it with one of the darts. “Right thumb,” Remo said. He still held the other dart in his right hand.
For the first time in years, Garrand became physical. He ripped his hand loose from the dart, tearing the flesh, and lumbered toward Remo. And for the first time in years, he felt his legs going high above him, above his head, and he was up at the diffused lighting, then at the walls, and then his head was buried in the polar bear rug, and there was that arrogant white face between his bare feet, and Lawrence Garrand was upside down, his head pressed painfully into the rug. He had scarcely seen the man move. And it was becoming hard to breathe.
“Okay, sweetheart,” said the leering face between his feet. “Where’s the auction?”
Garrand breathed in and tried to breathe out. It was getting more difficult. The blood was pouring into his head and his chocolate skin was taking on a blood-gorged purple color. He fought to exhale. His chest pressed down into his chin. A strand of polar-bear hair caught in his eye and burned.
“Where’s the auction?” that white face insisted, then began to press down on Garrand’s legs, forcing them into his waist, and Garrand finally blurted out, “Villebrook Equity Associates. New York. Tomorrow.” He was exhausted from the effort.
“Okay, sweetheart,” Remo said. “Time to go bye-bye.”
“You can’t kill me,” Garrand insisted. “I’m the foremost authority on atomic waste disposal. I deserve to live.”
“Sure. So did Clovis Porter. General Dorfwill. A lot of others.”
“Call the police then,” Garrand gasped. “You can’t kill me. If I were white, you wouldn’t kill me.”
“I’d kill you in any color, sweetheart.” Remo looked down along Garrand’s wet brown body and his eyes met those of the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal. Remo extended the remaining dart out over Garrand’s face with his right hand. “External jugular,” he called, then dropped the dart. It buried itself into the flesh alongside Garrand’s throat and a thin purple spurt of blood fountained out of his neck as the blood pressure was momentarily relieved by the pierced vein. Remo dropped Garrand heavily to the floor. Before Remo turned off his breath forever, Garrand managed to gasp something muffled by the fat folds of his cheeks and chin. Later, Remo would think that what he said was “I knew it wouldn’t work. You people… ”