Ghost in the Machine, page 17
Randal Rumpp, more for someone to talk to than for any practical reason, picked up his working cellular and said, “Hello, you still there?”
“Yes. And I still have cigarette lighter.”
“Keep it. I got a better deal.”
“What is that?”
“Come in with me.”
“Come in where?”
“Become a vital player in the greatest deal-making organization on the face of the planet, the Rumpp Organization.”
The voice grew interested. “You wish to hire me?”
“At a handsome salary. What say?”
“I say, how much salary?”
“Twice your previous one. I’ll have to check references, though.”
“I do not think KGB will give such things.”
“I know they won’t. There’s no KGB anymore.”
“Is true, then? Russia is no more?”
“Oh, Russia’s still there,” Rumpp said airily. “It’s just a heck of a lot smaller.”
“It shrink?”
“You might say that. Listen, this is chitchat. Are you willing to join the Rumpp team, or not?”
“Definitely.”
“Okay. I’m going to pick up the other phone now.”
“Before you do that, there are two things you must know.”
“Yeah?”
“One, I will be unconscious when I leave phone. I will float.”
“I saw that happen. You’ll come out of it.”
“Not if I do not turn off suit before battery runs out.”
“Suit?”
“I am wearing suit. Vibration suit. It enables me to vibrate through solid objects. If I float into solid object, then battery runs low and rematerialize inside, explosion may be nuclear.”
“What explosion?”
“The one that will result when atoms and molecules attempting to be occupying same space collide. Is bug in suit.”
“That’s a pretty big bug,” Randal Rumpp said dubiously.
“That,” the voice said, “is the second thing. I am ready to come out now.”
Randal Rumpp thought a moment. He hadn’t bargained on a nuclear downside. On the other hand, who would have thought a day ago he could have found a scam to make the Rumpp Tower safe from the banks? He decided to go for it.
“I’m picking up the other phone now,” he said.
The static roar was brief, loud, and seemed to pierce Randal Rumpp’s unwary brain like a noisy stiletto. The air about him turned white. Very white.
Randal Rumpp fell back in his chair and hit his head. The cellular phone fell from his fingers and struck the floor.
· · ·
When Randal Rumpp regained consciousness, he was looking at the ceiling. The ceiling looked ordinary. It was tile. The initials RR had been laid in the tile so large that only Randal Rumpp could see them.
He saw them perfectly now. He just couldn’t understand why he was looking up at the ceiling, when he had been sitting up straight at his desk just a moment ago.
He found out, when he tried to extricate himself from his fallen chair. His head hurt. The circulation in his legs had been cut off by the weight of his thighs on the chair edge.
“Damn.”
Unable to climb to his feet, he looked around.
Then he saw it. The white creature. The Russian. He was floating limply, just inches before the big picture window that looked out over Central Park and the nearby Rumpp Regis Hotel.
“Oh, shit,” said Randal Rumpp, realizing from the limp way the Russian’s arms hung down that he was dead to the world. Dead to the world and about to float into the window. The solid window.
Randal Rumpp’s legs refused to support him. So he crawled. He crawled hard. He got under the floating thing.
Its face was not expanding or contracting. It looked dead. And Rumpp, for the first time in his life, cared about a fellow human being.
“If that schmuck dies, I’m dead,” he said bitterly. “Gotta do something fast.”
He tried throwing objects at the floating apparition. All sailed harmlessly through him. He crawled to his computer and yanked out cables, trying to form a lasso. Desperation made him remember his Cub Scout knots. He flung the loop and actually scored a ringer on a left foot.
The loop dropped through the ankle like it was composed of fine mist.
“Gotta figure out a fresh scam,” he muttered.
Then, the creature floated into the window.
Randal Rumpp covered his head with his hands and hoped for a painless death. He got, instead, utter silence.
He looked up. Eventually.
The thing was still in the office. It was moving toward the glass again. This time Rump couldn’t tear his eyes away from it.
It touched and, like a balloon animal sculpture, bounced back.
Randal Rumpp was exuberant. “Back! It bounced back! This is fantastic! I’m not gonna go nuclear.”
Then, like a patient who had been subjected to electric shock therapy, the floating creature started to wave its arms helplessly. The fat bladder of a face contracted. Expanded. It was breathing again. Somehow.
Reaching for its belt buckle, the white creature gave the white rheostat affixed there a twist. Immediately, it lost its fuzzy glow and fell to the rug.
“Ouch!” it said.
Randal Rumpp forced himself to his feet. His feet felt like they were walking across tacks and not carpet nap.
“You–ouch!–okay, pal?” he asked.
“I am fine. Happy not to be vaporized in nuclear fire.”
“Same here,” said Randal Rumpp, giving the thing a hand. He pulled it to its feet. It grabbed its own shoulder as if in pain.
“You bounced off the wall. How come?”
The thing tested its footing. Rumpp noticed it stepped carefully, as if testing the solidity of the floor under its ridiculously thick boot soles. “Building was insubstantial. I was insubstantial. We were on same vibratory plane, and so felt solid to one another.” The manlike creature extended a rubbery white hand. “Here is lighter.”
“Keep it,” Rumpp said.
“Thank you. I can keep gold pen also?”
“You stole my graduation Waterman?”
“Da.”
“What are you, some kind of klepto?”
“Da. I am klepto. This is why I was sent to America by KGB. To steal. I steal much technology for KGB. And other things for myself, which I send to cousin in Soviet Georgia for black market. All lost now.”
“Okay,” Rumpp said impatiently. “Now that I know your work history, let’s get down to cases. I wanna buy the suit.”
“What about job?”
“I changed my mind. How much do you want for it?”
“I keep suit, all the same to you. Very valuable.”
“Don’t be coy. Everybody’s got their price. Name it.”
“I want job.”
“And I want that suit. Five million.”
“Dollars?”
“Yeah.”
“Hokay.”
“Take a check?” Rumpp asked.
“No.”
“Look, I’m Randal Rumpp, the greatest financial genius since Rockefeller. You know I’m good for it.”
“I know you are not,” the other snapped. “I have been trapped in your telephone system, and overhear every phone conversation. You are pauper.”
“The hell I am.”
At that moment, the lights came on.
Randall Rumpp looked up at the lights. “Oh, shit. Does that mean what I think it means?”
“If you mean, is building normal again, lights mean that, da.”
“Damn. Okay. Forget my buying the suit, I want you to fax yourself over to my hotel.”
“Why?”
“The IRS just seized it.”
“Ah. The IRS. I have heard of them. They are more vicious that KGB.”
“You’re pretty smart for a guy without a face.”
“Have face under helmet. Is for protection of eyes for when walking through walls.”
“Right, right. Listen, if we can pull off spectralizing the Rumpp Regis, the IRS can’t do anything.”
“What about Rumpp Tower II?”
“On the back burner, until we get this straightened out. How about it?”
“I do not know if this will work. It is dangerous. Also, I do not trust you. You tricked me once already.”
“Let me make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
“There is no such thing.”
“When word gets out that the Rumpp Tower is back on line–so to speak–the mob is going to try to bust down my door and tear me limb from limb.”
“Da?”
“If you’re here when that happens, you get the same medicine,” Rumpp pointed out.
The faceless Russian tilted his head, as if thinking. “You make excellent offer. I will telephone myself wherever you wish.”
“Great. There’s just one last thing.”
“What is that?”
“Any way I can hitch a ride with you? I wasn’t kidding about that mob.”
“Nyet.”
“That’s Russian for no, isn’t it?”
“Da.”
“Damn.”
“Sorry. Technology brand-new.”
“Okay,” Randal Rumpp said, offering the cellular unit, “I’ll be in a better bargaining position when the Regis thing is taken care of. Let’s give it our best shot.”
Randal Rumpp repeated a number and the thing dialed it.
Then the Russian turned on the suit.
Randal Rumpp had seen it before, but it still amazed him. The thing went white, seemed to congeal and collapse, only to be drawn into the diaphragm like a movie image being run in reverse.
The hand was the last to go. After the fingers had released their grip on the handset, the hand practically evaporated.
Rumpp caught the cellular before it could hit the rug.
“When this is over with,” he growled, “I’m gonna own that fucking suit. And I don’t care who I have to screw over to get it.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Major Yuli Batenin took little note of the strangeness that was taking place in the Rumpp Regis lobby. There were two persons, one in some Asian native costume and the other a Western man, engaged in making a racket–to the consternation of the desk staff. No doubt, he concluded, it was related to the odd holiday known as “Halloween.”
Batenin had just had his first American breakfast in three years, and cared little for watching street performers. He had ordered a Spanish omelet, blueberry pancakes, a side order of wheat toast, orange juice, and two cups of good Brazilian coffee.
It had cost him the equivalent of a year’s salary at the bread factory–or it would have, if he’d had any intention of settling his room tab–and probably taken three months off his life span in cholesterol consumption. But Major Batenin didn’t care. His first American meal in three years. His first decent meal in the same amount of time. It sat in his stomach like a warm mountain of pleasure.
It was good to be working–truly working–at his craft again.
He strode to the elevator and rode it, humming “Moscow Nights,” to his fourteenth-floor suite.
The elevator was old, but soundproofed. So he didn’t hear the insistently ringing telephone in one corner of the supposedly nonexistent thirteenth floor.
· · ·
IRS agent Gerard Vonneau could hear the phone all too clearly. It had been ringing for fifteen minutes now. If he got his hands on the damned thing, he was not only going to give the caller hell, but personally audit him until the end of time.
Gerard Vonneau was an agent for the New York regional office of the IRS. It was his job, along with a team of other agents, to inventory the staid old Rumpp Regis and prepare its contents for auction.
His responsibility was the thirteenth floor, which hotel records indicated had been set aside for no less than Randal Rumpp himself. Somewhere, he knew, there must be an office where that damned phone was jangling. It was the only explanation.
He was going to enjoy answering that telephone. He was going to take extreme pleasure in giving the caller hell. If he ever found it.
· · ·
There were rings under Cheeta Ching’s eyes as she tore apart the morning paper. On the front pages were blurry photos of the white floating thing her cameraman had filmed the night before. Each was credited to MBC News.
“I could just spit!” she hissed, as she ripped the papers to shreds with her busy talons.
The phone rang and she snapped it up, saying, “What is it?”
“Miss Ching. This is Gunilla.”
“Right. How are you?” said Cheeta, having no idea who Gunilla was.
“They say you’re willing to pay five hundred dollars for information on that witch lady.”
Cheeta brightened. “You know where she is?”
“Yes. I’m her maid.”
“Maid?”
“At the Rumpp Regis. Her room number is 182. But you’d better hurry. The IRS has taken over the place.”
“The check’s in the mail.”
“But you don’t know my–”
Cheeta Ching hung up and stormed from her Park Avenue penthouse.
Moments later, she burst out of a yellow cab in front of the Rumpp Regis Hotel, and stormed up the palatial steps toward the revolving doors.
She noticed a heavyset man in the revolving door. He was pounding on the brass-bound glass, as if he were somehow stuck.
· · ·
Delpha Rohmer was doing phoners when a demanding knock came at her door. She tried to ignore it. She was speaking to a talk show in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and judging from the hysterical tones of the callers, witch awareness was reaching new heights.
The knocking continued.
When the talk-show host called for a commercial break, Delpha excused herself and hurried to the door. She threw it open.
The sight of a plump maid with a red worried face was not exactly what she’d expected.
“Can’t this wait?” Delpha huffed.
“No, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. My name is Gunilla, and I want to warn you that Ching woman is on her way right now. And she knows your room number.”
If it had been possible for Delpha Rohmer to become more pale than her normal state, she would have done so. As it was, the only outward sign of her fright was a darkening of her mushroom eye shadow.
“Thanks,” said Delpha, grabbing her coat. She thrust a five-dollar bill in the maid’s plump hand and raced to the elevator, cursing the MBC news director, who had promised her absolute anonymity.
· · ·
Remo Williams was trying to keep the beat on the stupid drum and at the same time avoid the bear hugs of various IRS revenue collectors.
Avoiding their clumsy grabs was easy. He barely had to pay attention. They tried to circle him, but he ducked and retreated effortlessly. They might as well have been wearing lead diving shoes while attempting to bear-hug a flock of doves.
Keeping time with the Master of Sinanju’s jingling and caterwauling, however, was not easy. If there was a rhythm, Remo couldn’t find it. If there was a beat, he couldn’t keep it. So he just pounded on the stupid drum until the Master of Sinanju had finished his ceremonial spirit-chasing.
Then, suddenly, four strange and unexpected things happened at once.
First, Remo felt wrong. It was a kind of wrongness that was difficult to describe. His teeth hurt. His vision blurred for a microsecond, almost too quickly for an ordinary person to detect.
Chiun stopped in mid-warble.
“Remo!” he squeaked. “Something is wrong!”
“I know. I feel it, too.”
They looked around. All seemed normal. Except for the persistent IRS operatives.
Then Remo noticed Delpha Rohmer hurrying from the elevator banks.
Simultaneously, the Master of Sinanju spied Cheeta Ching clopping in off the street.
Delpha and Cheeta were both headed toward the same thing: the revolving door.
They reached it simultaneously. Cheeta noticed Delpha, and Delpha spotted her mortal enemy. In between, the trapped revenue collector pounded futilely for release.
He, at least, got his wish granted.
Cheeta took a run at the door. Delpha, in the act of entering the revolving door, hesitated. Cheeta bulled through. Literally through. She passed through the door as if it were a brass and glass mirage.
The sight of that was enough to start the IRS man’s adrenaline pumping. Like a slave lashed to a grinding wheel, he kept pushing the stubborn revolving door, forcing it to squeal and groan.
The door surrendered. The rubber weather stripping slapped and squeaked as Delpha, caught by surprise, was swallowed up and carried between two sheets of brass-bound glass.
The revolving door ejected the revenue collector onto the steps. He was so happy that he didn’t realize he was sinking into cold concrete until he had reached the sidewalk and found he had no traction.
Delpha Rohmer saw the man standing–apparently–on his ankles, then looked down at her own feet and clutched for a brass awning pole, moaning, “O Ishtar, save your daughter!”
She was on the last step. It seemed solid.
The IRS man looked up to her with a beseeching expression on his wide face. “Help me!”
When Delpha recoiled, he grabbed for one of her pale wrists. Delpha tried to kick him. She lost her balance and fell into the sidewalk.
Delpha Rohmer had wanted to be a witch since she was a little girl. Witches were her role models. As she crouched on the intangible sidewalk, staring at her hands slipping into the gray concrete, her mind flashed back to childhood.
“Help me!” she screamed in a high, skittery voice. “I’m melting! Oh, I’m melting!”
In a matter of seconds, she was a pair of legs sticking up from the pavement and collecting a horrified crowd.
· · ·
Oblivious to the fact that she had walked through solid glass, Cheeta Ching stumbled into the lobby yelling, “You’ll rue the day you met me, Hortense!”
Seeing no sign of her prey, Cheeta stopped, her eyes raking the lobby.
She started sinking into the floor almost at once.
Chiun shrieked, “Cheeta! She is sinking!”
“We lost Broomhilda, too,” Remo said. “What the heck’s going on?”
“Yes. And I still have cigarette lighter.”
“Keep it. I got a better deal.”
“What is that?”
“Come in with me.”
“Come in where?”
“Become a vital player in the greatest deal-making organization on the face of the planet, the Rumpp Organization.”
The voice grew interested. “You wish to hire me?”
“At a handsome salary. What say?”
“I say, how much salary?”
“Twice your previous one. I’ll have to check references, though.”
“I do not think KGB will give such things.”
“I know they won’t. There’s no KGB anymore.”
“Is true, then? Russia is no more?”
“Oh, Russia’s still there,” Rumpp said airily. “It’s just a heck of a lot smaller.”
“It shrink?”
“You might say that. Listen, this is chitchat. Are you willing to join the Rumpp team, or not?”
“Definitely.”
“Okay. I’m going to pick up the other phone now.”
“Before you do that, there are two things you must know.”
“Yeah?”
“One, I will be unconscious when I leave phone. I will float.”
“I saw that happen. You’ll come out of it.”
“Not if I do not turn off suit before battery runs out.”
“Suit?”
“I am wearing suit. Vibration suit. It enables me to vibrate through solid objects. If I float into solid object, then battery runs low and rematerialize inside, explosion may be nuclear.”
“What explosion?”
“The one that will result when atoms and molecules attempting to be occupying same space collide. Is bug in suit.”
“That’s a pretty big bug,” Randal Rumpp said dubiously.
“That,” the voice said, “is the second thing. I am ready to come out now.”
Randal Rumpp thought a moment. He hadn’t bargained on a nuclear downside. On the other hand, who would have thought a day ago he could have found a scam to make the Rumpp Tower safe from the banks? He decided to go for it.
“I’m picking up the other phone now,” he said.
The static roar was brief, loud, and seemed to pierce Randal Rumpp’s unwary brain like a noisy stiletto. The air about him turned white. Very white.
Randal Rumpp fell back in his chair and hit his head. The cellular phone fell from his fingers and struck the floor.
· · ·
When Randal Rumpp regained consciousness, he was looking at the ceiling. The ceiling looked ordinary. It was tile. The initials RR had been laid in the tile so large that only Randal Rumpp could see them.
He saw them perfectly now. He just couldn’t understand why he was looking up at the ceiling, when he had been sitting up straight at his desk just a moment ago.
He found out, when he tried to extricate himself from his fallen chair. His head hurt. The circulation in his legs had been cut off by the weight of his thighs on the chair edge.
“Damn.”
Unable to climb to his feet, he looked around.
Then he saw it. The white creature. The Russian. He was floating limply, just inches before the big picture window that looked out over Central Park and the nearby Rumpp Regis Hotel.
“Oh, shit,” said Randal Rumpp, realizing from the limp way the Russian’s arms hung down that he was dead to the world. Dead to the world and about to float into the window. The solid window.
Randal Rumpp’s legs refused to support him. So he crawled. He crawled hard. He got under the floating thing.
Its face was not expanding or contracting. It looked dead. And Rumpp, for the first time in his life, cared about a fellow human being.
“If that schmuck dies, I’m dead,” he said bitterly. “Gotta do something fast.”
He tried throwing objects at the floating apparition. All sailed harmlessly through him. He crawled to his computer and yanked out cables, trying to form a lasso. Desperation made him remember his Cub Scout knots. He flung the loop and actually scored a ringer on a left foot.
The loop dropped through the ankle like it was composed of fine mist.
“Gotta figure out a fresh scam,” he muttered.
Then, the creature floated into the window.
Randal Rumpp covered his head with his hands and hoped for a painless death. He got, instead, utter silence.
He looked up. Eventually.
The thing was still in the office. It was moving toward the glass again. This time Rump couldn’t tear his eyes away from it.
It touched and, like a balloon animal sculpture, bounced back.
Randal Rumpp was exuberant. “Back! It bounced back! This is fantastic! I’m not gonna go nuclear.”
Then, like a patient who had been subjected to electric shock therapy, the floating creature started to wave its arms helplessly. The fat bladder of a face contracted. Expanded. It was breathing again. Somehow.
Reaching for its belt buckle, the white creature gave the white rheostat affixed there a twist. Immediately, it lost its fuzzy glow and fell to the rug.
“Ouch!” it said.
Randal Rumpp forced himself to his feet. His feet felt like they were walking across tacks and not carpet nap.
“You–ouch!–okay, pal?” he asked.
“I am fine. Happy not to be vaporized in nuclear fire.”
“Same here,” said Randal Rumpp, giving the thing a hand. He pulled it to its feet. It grabbed its own shoulder as if in pain.
“You bounced off the wall. How come?”
The thing tested its footing. Rumpp noticed it stepped carefully, as if testing the solidity of the floor under its ridiculously thick boot soles. “Building was insubstantial. I was insubstantial. We were on same vibratory plane, and so felt solid to one another.” The manlike creature extended a rubbery white hand. “Here is lighter.”
“Keep it,” Rumpp said.
“Thank you. I can keep gold pen also?”
“You stole my graduation Waterman?”
“Da.”
“What are you, some kind of klepto?”
“Da. I am klepto. This is why I was sent to America by KGB. To steal. I steal much technology for KGB. And other things for myself, which I send to cousin in Soviet Georgia for black market. All lost now.”
“Okay,” Rumpp said impatiently. “Now that I know your work history, let’s get down to cases. I wanna buy the suit.”
“What about job?”
“I changed my mind. How much do you want for it?”
“I keep suit, all the same to you. Very valuable.”
“Don’t be coy. Everybody’s got their price. Name it.”
“I want job.”
“And I want that suit. Five million.”
“Dollars?”
“Yeah.”
“Hokay.”
“Take a check?” Rumpp asked.
“No.”
“Look, I’m Randal Rumpp, the greatest financial genius since Rockefeller. You know I’m good for it.”
“I know you are not,” the other snapped. “I have been trapped in your telephone system, and overhear every phone conversation. You are pauper.”
“The hell I am.”
At that moment, the lights came on.
Randall Rumpp looked up at the lights. “Oh, shit. Does that mean what I think it means?”
“If you mean, is building normal again, lights mean that, da.”
“Damn. Okay. Forget my buying the suit, I want you to fax yourself over to my hotel.”
“Why?”
“The IRS just seized it.”
“Ah. The IRS. I have heard of them. They are more vicious that KGB.”
“You’re pretty smart for a guy without a face.”
“Have face under helmet. Is for protection of eyes for when walking through walls.”
“Right, right. Listen, if we can pull off spectralizing the Rumpp Regis, the IRS can’t do anything.”
“What about Rumpp Tower II?”
“On the back burner, until we get this straightened out. How about it?”
“I do not know if this will work. It is dangerous. Also, I do not trust you. You tricked me once already.”
“Let me make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
“There is no such thing.”
“When word gets out that the Rumpp Tower is back on line–so to speak–the mob is going to try to bust down my door and tear me limb from limb.”
“Da?”
“If you’re here when that happens, you get the same medicine,” Rumpp pointed out.
The faceless Russian tilted his head, as if thinking. “You make excellent offer. I will telephone myself wherever you wish.”
“Great. There’s just one last thing.”
“What is that?”
“Any way I can hitch a ride with you? I wasn’t kidding about that mob.”
“Nyet.”
“That’s Russian for no, isn’t it?”
“Da.”
“Damn.”
“Sorry. Technology brand-new.”
“Okay,” Randal Rumpp said, offering the cellular unit, “I’ll be in a better bargaining position when the Regis thing is taken care of. Let’s give it our best shot.”
Randal Rumpp repeated a number and the thing dialed it.
Then the Russian turned on the suit.
Randal Rumpp had seen it before, but it still amazed him. The thing went white, seemed to congeal and collapse, only to be drawn into the diaphragm like a movie image being run in reverse.
The hand was the last to go. After the fingers had released their grip on the handset, the hand practically evaporated.
Rumpp caught the cellular before it could hit the rug.
“When this is over with,” he growled, “I’m gonna own that fucking suit. And I don’t care who I have to screw over to get it.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Major Yuli Batenin took little note of the strangeness that was taking place in the Rumpp Regis lobby. There were two persons, one in some Asian native costume and the other a Western man, engaged in making a racket–to the consternation of the desk staff. No doubt, he concluded, it was related to the odd holiday known as “Halloween.”
Batenin had just had his first American breakfast in three years, and cared little for watching street performers. He had ordered a Spanish omelet, blueberry pancakes, a side order of wheat toast, orange juice, and two cups of good Brazilian coffee.
It had cost him the equivalent of a year’s salary at the bread factory–or it would have, if he’d had any intention of settling his room tab–and probably taken three months off his life span in cholesterol consumption. But Major Batenin didn’t care. His first American meal in three years. His first decent meal in the same amount of time. It sat in his stomach like a warm mountain of pleasure.
It was good to be working–truly working–at his craft again.
He strode to the elevator and rode it, humming “Moscow Nights,” to his fourteenth-floor suite.
The elevator was old, but soundproofed. So he didn’t hear the insistently ringing telephone in one corner of the supposedly nonexistent thirteenth floor.
· · ·
IRS agent Gerard Vonneau could hear the phone all too clearly. It had been ringing for fifteen minutes now. If he got his hands on the damned thing, he was not only going to give the caller hell, but personally audit him until the end of time.
Gerard Vonneau was an agent for the New York regional office of the IRS. It was his job, along with a team of other agents, to inventory the staid old Rumpp Regis and prepare its contents for auction.
His responsibility was the thirteenth floor, which hotel records indicated had been set aside for no less than Randal Rumpp himself. Somewhere, he knew, there must be an office where that damned phone was jangling. It was the only explanation.
He was going to enjoy answering that telephone. He was going to take extreme pleasure in giving the caller hell. If he ever found it.
· · ·
There were rings under Cheeta Ching’s eyes as she tore apart the morning paper. On the front pages were blurry photos of the white floating thing her cameraman had filmed the night before. Each was credited to MBC News.
“I could just spit!” she hissed, as she ripped the papers to shreds with her busy talons.
The phone rang and she snapped it up, saying, “What is it?”
“Miss Ching. This is Gunilla.”
“Right. How are you?” said Cheeta, having no idea who Gunilla was.
“They say you’re willing to pay five hundred dollars for information on that witch lady.”
Cheeta brightened. “You know where she is?”
“Yes. I’m her maid.”
“Maid?”
“At the Rumpp Regis. Her room number is 182. But you’d better hurry. The IRS has taken over the place.”
“The check’s in the mail.”
“But you don’t know my–”
Cheeta Ching hung up and stormed from her Park Avenue penthouse.
Moments later, she burst out of a yellow cab in front of the Rumpp Regis Hotel, and stormed up the palatial steps toward the revolving doors.
She noticed a heavyset man in the revolving door. He was pounding on the brass-bound glass, as if he were somehow stuck.
· · ·
Delpha Rohmer was doing phoners when a demanding knock came at her door. She tried to ignore it. She was speaking to a talk show in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and judging from the hysterical tones of the callers, witch awareness was reaching new heights.
The knocking continued.
When the talk-show host called for a commercial break, Delpha excused herself and hurried to the door. She threw it open.
The sight of a plump maid with a red worried face was not exactly what she’d expected.
“Can’t this wait?” Delpha huffed.
“No, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. My name is Gunilla, and I want to warn you that Ching woman is on her way right now. And she knows your room number.”
If it had been possible for Delpha Rohmer to become more pale than her normal state, she would have done so. As it was, the only outward sign of her fright was a darkening of her mushroom eye shadow.
“Thanks,” said Delpha, grabbing her coat. She thrust a five-dollar bill in the maid’s plump hand and raced to the elevator, cursing the MBC news director, who had promised her absolute anonymity.
· · ·
Remo Williams was trying to keep the beat on the stupid drum and at the same time avoid the bear hugs of various IRS revenue collectors.
Avoiding their clumsy grabs was easy. He barely had to pay attention. They tried to circle him, but he ducked and retreated effortlessly. They might as well have been wearing lead diving shoes while attempting to bear-hug a flock of doves.
Keeping time with the Master of Sinanju’s jingling and caterwauling, however, was not easy. If there was a rhythm, Remo couldn’t find it. If there was a beat, he couldn’t keep it. So he just pounded on the stupid drum until the Master of Sinanju had finished his ceremonial spirit-chasing.
Then, suddenly, four strange and unexpected things happened at once.
First, Remo felt wrong. It was a kind of wrongness that was difficult to describe. His teeth hurt. His vision blurred for a microsecond, almost too quickly for an ordinary person to detect.
Chiun stopped in mid-warble.
“Remo!” he squeaked. “Something is wrong!”
“I know. I feel it, too.”
They looked around. All seemed normal. Except for the persistent IRS operatives.
Then Remo noticed Delpha Rohmer hurrying from the elevator banks.
Simultaneously, the Master of Sinanju spied Cheeta Ching clopping in off the street.
Delpha and Cheeta were both headed toward the same thing: the revolving door.
They reached it simultaneously. Cheeta noticed Delpha, and Delpha spotted her mortal enemy. In between, the trapped revenue collector pounded futilely for release.
He, at least, got his wish granted.
Cheeta took a run at the door. Delpha, in the act of entering the revolving door, hesitated. Cheeta bulled through. Literally through. She passed through the door as if it were a brass and glass mirage.
The sight of that was enough to start the IRS man’s adrenaline pumping. Like a slave lashed to a grinding wheel, he kept pushing the stubborn revolving door, forcing it to squeal and groan.
The door surrendered. The rubber weather stripping slapped and squeaked as Delpha, caught by surprise, was swallowed up and carried between two sheets of brass-bound glass.
The revolving door ejected the revenue collector onto the steps. He was so happy that he didn’t realize he was sinking into cold concrete until he had reached the sidewalk and found he had no traction.
Delpha Rohmer saw the man standing–apparently–on his ankles, then looked down at her own feet and clutched for a brass awning pole, moaning, “O Ishtar, save your daughter!”
She was on the last step. It seemed solid.
The IRS man looked up to her with a beseeching expression on his wide face. “Help me!”
When Delpha recoiled, he grabbed for one of her pale wrists. Delpha tried to kick him. She lost her balance and fell into the sidewalk.
Delpha Rohmer had wanted to be a witch since she was a little girl. Witches were her role models. As she crouched on the intangible sidewalk, staring at her hands slipping into the gray concrete, her mind flashed back to childhood.
“Help me!” she screamed in a high, skittery voice. “I’m melting! Oh, I’m melting!”
In a matter of seconds, she was a pair of legs sticking up from the pavement and collecting a horrified crowd.
· · ·
Oblivious to the fact that she had walked through solid glass, Cheeta Ching stumbled into the lobby yelling, “You’ll rue the day you met me, Hortense!”
Seeing no sign of her prey, Cheeta stopped, her eyes raking the lobby.
She started sinking into the floor almost at once.
Chiun shrieked, “Cheeta! She is sinking!”
“We lost Broomhilda, too,” Remo said. “What the heck’s going on?”
