Failing Marks, page 5
. . .
Though his eyes were no longer perfect, they didn’t need to be. Kempten Olmutz-Hohenzollerkirchen clearly saw his three companions point him out to the vile Nazi killer.
The old man had hoped to hunker down behind his cigarettes and beer until the intruder left the bar. He saw now that this was no longer possible.
Climbing uncertainly to his feet, he began hobbling quickly to the rear of the beer hall. He was vaguely aware of a door back there. At least there had been one about fifty years ago. He hoped it was still there.
As he walked, Kempten leaned against the side wall for support. He was an emaciated figure in out-of-date clothing. A few patrons glared angrily at him as he stepped steadily over feet and handbags in search of a door that might or might not be there.
He was surprised when he stumbled upon the ancient fire exit a moment later. His discolored eyes squinted suspiciously as he reached for the long metal bar.
Kempten rattled the handle. The door stubbornly refused to budge. He leaned his bony shoulder against the painted door and pushed with all his might. Still nothing.
He couldn’t allow his exertions to get the better of him. Every moment brought the assassin closer to him.
Kempten leaned back and shoved once more against the door. It sprang abruptly open. The old man found himself flying out into a garbage-filled alley. He landed in a heap atop a pile of fetid, rain-soaked plastic bags.
Hurrying, Kempten used the grimy alley wall to pull himself to his feet. As he moved, his dry tongue stabbed around the filterless end of his imported cigarette.
Coughing madly, he turned away from the garbage heap…and came face-to-face with the very man he was avoiding. The horrid spasm that racked his lungs froze in his throat.
Eyes flat, Remo allowed the rusted beer hall door to swing quietly shut behind him. The raucous shouts from within grew muffled, replaced with the sounds of distant traffic. Car horns honked angry complaints somewhere away from the alley.
Remo spoke but one word.
“Four.”
Still leaning against the alley wall, Kempten made an unpleasant face. Taking a deep drag on his cigarette, he blew a cloud of defiant smoke in Remo’s face.
He was smiling contemptuously, showing off his row of jack-o’-lantern teeth, when it occurred to him that Remo was no longer standing before him. The smoke cloud had missed its target. Kempten frowned.
He was still frowning when Remo reappeared beside him.
“Didn’t you catch the Surgeon General’s warning on these?” he whispered with quiet menace.
Remo reached out and yanked the cigarette from Kempten’s mouth. Somehow, half of Kempten’s lower lip came with it. As the old Nazi screamed in pain, Remo stomped both lip and butt beneath the toe of his Italian loafer.
“Four,” Remo said again.
“Go to hell,” Kempten snarled. He spit a bloody glob of phlegm at Remo. Remo sidestepped the expectorated ball.
“Age before beauty,” Remo said. Grabbing up a handful of the old Nazi’s greasy, yellowed hair, he twisted.
To Kempten, it felt as if his scalp had caught fire. He was acutely aware of each individual hair follicle as it burned a laser-precise hole through to his brain. Pain like nothing he had ever known made him scream in sheer agony.
“Pain on,” said Remo, giving the hair a final twist. “Pain off,” he added. He loosened the pressure.
The old man was surprised at himself. He had always thought he would be able to hold out under torture.
The words came in a flood.
“There is a village,” Kempten breathed wetly. “It is a haven for those who are reviled by the world.”
“Why aren’t you there?” Remo asked.
Kempten missed the sarcasm completely. He puffed his chest out proudly. “This is my home,” he said. “I will not be driven from it.”
“Spoken like a true fascist homesteader,” Remo said. “Where is this village?”
Kempten shrugged. “I do not know.”
“Not good enough,” Remo said, grabbing at another clump of filthy hair. He lifted the old man off the ground.
“South America!” Kempten shrieked. “Beyond that, I cannot say!”
Remo knew the old Nazi was telling the truth. His pain level was far too high for him to be able to sustain a lie. Remo released Kempten’s hair. Tangled bits dropped in filthy clumps to the grimy alley floor.
“I do not know where the village is,” the old man continued, panting heavily. “That is a privilege reserved only for those who choose to make it their home.”
“How do you contact them?” Remo demanded.
“A telephone number. I can give it to you,” he added helpfully. He began searching through his grubby pockets. After a moment, he produced a small scrap of paper. Like everything else about Kempten Olmutz-Hohenzollerkirchen, the paper was a sickly brownish yellow. He handed it to Remo.
Remo scanned the numbers. They meant nothing to him. He tucked the paper in the pocket of his chinos.
While searching for the paper, Kempten had removed a battered pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. Hands shaking, he tapped one from the rest, pasting it to the clotting blood on his lower lip. With a dirty silver lighter, he ignited the tip. The cigarette burned a bright orange.
Kempten waggled the cigarette at Remo. He shrugged his wasted shoulders feebly.
“It is customary, is it not?” he said, indicating the cigarette with a nod.
Remo nodded. “Knock yourself out,” he replied, folding his arms across his chest.
Kempten took a long, thoughtful drag. He exhaled mightily into the foul air of the alley. Beyond the closed metal door, the endless party within the beer hall continued its muffled hum. Kempten knew that he would never see his favorite corner booth again.
When his cigarette was nearly finished, the old Nazi took it from his mouth and stared at the glowing tip.
“The village is well guarded,” he said absently. “Even for someone of your abilities, it will be dangerous.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Remo grumbled, uncrossing his arms impatiently. “Will you hurry up with that thing?”
Kempten replaced the cigarette. He took one final, great pull. The tip of the cigarette burned brightly, and his lungs filled with the soft, comforting smoke. Kempten blew the last puff of smoke into the air.
“You will die there,” he said smugly. He dropped the spent butt to a filthy puddle at his feet.
Remo smiled grimly. “Maybe. But better there than here,” he said as he reached out with a thick-wristed hand for Kempten’s throat.
. . .
When he left the alley a few moments later, all that could be seen of the late Kempten Olmutz-Hohenzollerkirchen was a pair of stained black shoes sticking out of an oversized plastic garbage bag.
The old Nazi’s body with its collapsed ribs and lungs would not be found for two weeks. By then the anonymous IV village would lie in ruins and an ancient myth would threaten to bring the economy of Germany to the very edge of bankruptcy.
Remo Williams would take credit for the former, but he would swear until his dying day that the latter was not his fault.
Chapter Five
When Herman brought him the news of the disappearance of old Kempten, Adolf Kluge was in the process of packing up his office. There were cardboard boxes piled on the floor around his big desk. Kluge abandoned the box he had been filling and dropped woodenly into his chair, considering the import of the young man’s words.
“When?” the head of IV asked.
“Around three o’clock, Berlin time,” his aide replied. “It was him again.”
Kluge glanced up. “The Asian was not with him?” he asked.
“The older one was not seen,” Herman admitted. Kluge shook his head unhappily. “That does not mean that he was not there,” he sighed.
“So you have said.”
“How do we know all this?”
“Our operatives are in place. Per your instructions, they went immediately to his most likely targets. Kempten was on the list.”
Kluge’s mouth opened in shock. “If they were there, why did they not kill Kempten themselves?”
“They arrived at the beer hall after the younger Master of Sinanju. They could only watch as he led the old one outside.”
“And they did not think to follow, obviously,” Kluge said sarcastically. He threw up his hands in amazement.
“Those were not your instructions,” Herman explained.
“Of course not,” Kluge snapped. “If they had killed old Kempten, they might have ended this right then and there. But no. I did not fill out a form in triplicate instructing them to do so.” He wheeled around, staring at the ancient mantelpiece stretching along the outer wall. Like many of the other fine antiques in the massive stone temple, the mantel had been imported from Germany. “Freakish dunderheads,” Kluge muttered under his breath.
“What are your instructions, Herr Kluge?” Herman asked after an uncomfortably long moment had passed by in silence.
Kluge barely heard the words. He found himself staring at an object on the mantel.
Getting slowly to his feet, Kluge walked over to the fireplace. He took down the item that had drawn his attention, feeling its weight in his hands.
He stared at the heavy article as he spoke.
“He has gotten to Kempten. He is therefore much closer to us,” Kluge mused aloud. His eyes never strayed from the object in his hands. “It is only a matter of time before he reaches the village.” He turned to his aide. “Tell the fools in Germany to regroup. If he has gotten the information we entrusted to old Kempten, then we know where he will have to go next.”
The aide frowned. “You wish for them to return to South America?”
Kluge cast a withering eye on his aide. “No,” he said with exaggerated patience. “My hope is that we may stop them before they leave Germany. Send them to the airport. The men from Sinanju will surely go there first before skipping off to South America, wouldn’t you agree?”
Herman took Kluge’s sarcasm without reaction. “I will let them know,” he acknowledged.
“Please do,” Kluge said. “For, God help us, our lives are in the hands of those bungling aberrations.”
Nodding his understanding, the aide stepped briskly from the cluttered room.
Only after Herman had gone did Kluge realize that he was still holding the object he had taken down from the mantel. It was a two-inch-thick block of petrified wood with a face approximately one square foot around. Ancient characters had been chiseled in the solid surface of the wood.
Although time had worn some of its carved features smooth, most were still plainly visible. Kluge stared at the wood for a long time.
When he finally spoke, his words were barely audible.
“There is a kernel of truth in all legends,” he said.
Frowning, Adolf Kluge tossed the wood carving into the nearest packing crate.
Chapter Six
The Hotel Ein Dunkles was a tidy little building on Meinekestrasse just off the Kurfurstendamm, which until very recent German history had been the main street in isolated West Berlin.
Remo was whistling a cheery version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he pushed into the tidy lobby and strolled across the plush carpeting toward the lone elevator.
From behind his polished desk, the hotel’s grayhaired proprietor—apparently still nursing festering wounds from the Second World War—shot him a foul look from over his gleaming bifocals. It had the practical effect of making Remo whistle all the louder.
As the elevator doors were closing, Remo directed a final shrill burst toward the glowering desk clerk. He had calculated the pitch perfectly.
Remo’s final glimpse of the man before the elevator doors slid silently shut was that of the middle-aged German pulling off his pair of shattered glasses. If they hadn’t been broken, the desk clerk would have been able to see that his watch crystal was cracked, as well.
Happy, Remo rode the elevator up to the third floor. As the doors rolled quietly open, he paused to listen into his apartment, which was directly across from the lift.
He heard nothing.
Relieved, Remo crossed over to the door. He had just placed his hand on the polished brass knob when there came a sudden burst of wild electronic laughter from inside. This was followed by a merry cackle that was all too familiar.
Sighing, Remo pushed the door open.
The television was on—as he had expected it would be. The bulk of the laughter he had heard came from the small speaker on the side of the set. The balance came from the hotel room itself.
Seated before the TV was a man so old he made Kempten Olmutz-Hohenzollerkirchen look like a toddler. Unlike the dead Nazi, however, this old man had a vibrancy of spirit that belied his many years.
The wizened Asian’s tan skin was the texture of dried rice paper. His bald head was framed with puffs of gossamer hair—a single tuft above each shell-like ear. Bright hazel eyes displayed a glint of fiery youth that old Kempten hadn’t known since the days when brownshirts marched along the Rhine. Even now the aged Korean was laughing uproariously at the action on the TV screen.
“I’m back,” Remo called unhappily.
Chiun, Reigning Master of the five-thousand-year-old House of Sinanju—the premier house of assassins on the face of the planet for as many millennia—turned to Remo. Tears streamed down his parchment cheeks.
“You have missed the funniest program yet,” Chiun breathed. He sniffled as he turned back to the TV.
Remo frowned as he looked at the television. On it, a rather thin, gawky Englishman was stumbling around with a gigantic turkey over his head. Chiun shrieked in joy as the odd-looking man attempted to disguise the bird by throwing a blanket up over it.
“I’ve seen this one before,” Remo complained.
“I have seen many sunsets, yet each is always more beautiful than the last.”
“In that case, try looking out the window,” Remo suggested blandly. At that very moment, the sun was sinking low over the Berlin skyline.
“Shh!” Chiun insisted with an angry flap of one kimono-clad arm. He stared in childlike joy as the strange-looking man on the TV attempted to remove the turkey from his head. The Master of Sinanju clapped his hands with glee.
“I’m going to call Smith,” Remo sighed wearily.
Chiun made an effort not to listen.
Remo turned his back on the familiar scene and walked over to his bedroom. He shut the door as Chiun’s bald head bobbed in eager anticipation of the impending turkey removal.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Remo picked up the phone. He began depressing the 1 button repeatedly. It was rather simplistic, but it was the only phone code Remo ever seemed able to remember. Smith picked up on the first ring.
“I need you to trace a number for me, Smitty,” Remo said by way of introduction.
“Proceed,” came the tart reply.
Remo gave Smith the phone number from the scrap of paper he had gotten from the old Nazi at the beer hall.
“The country code is for Uruguay,” Smith noted.
“What can I say?” Remo said. “Nazis have a love affair with South America.”
He could hear Smith’s fingers as they drummed against the touch-sensitive keyboard buried beneath the edge of the CURE director’s desk.
“The number you have given me is to a hotel in Montevideo,” Smith said after a brief pause.
“Geography isn’t my strong suit, Smitty,” Remo cautioned.
“That is the Uruguayan capital,” Smith explained.
“And also where the rest of South America goes to rent movies on Saturday night. What happened when they were naming the place—‘Blockbuster’ already taken?”
“Actually the name stems from a story that is most likely apocryphal,” Smith explained. “‘Monte vide eu’ is what Magellan’s Spanish lookout allegedly shouted when he first spied the shore. It means ‘I see a mountain.’” Smith returned to the subject at hand. “May I ask what purpose this number serves?”
“That Kermit Ovitz guy bit the dust,” Remo explained. “But he gave that up first. It’s supposed to be a secret number to contact Four.”
“I do not believe so,” Smith said. “It appears to be no more than an ordinary number. It is something called the Hotel Cabeza de Ternera.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Remo shook his head. “I know he wasn’t lying.”
“One moment,” Smith said.
Remo could hear Smith drumming his fingers against his keyboard. A moment later, he was back on the phone.
“The proprietor is not Spanish,” Smith stated. He tried to keep an excited edge from his voice. “His name is Dieter Groth.” The typing resumed, more urgently now.
“Let me guess,” Remo said. “He’s a German immigrant.”
“Groth emigrated to South America thirty years ago. One moment, please, Remo.” He paused. “I’ve accessed the records of the Committee to Bring Nazi War Criminals to Justice. They do have a file on Groth, but are not actively pursuing him at the present time.”
“It’s their lucky day. They’re going to get a freebie,” Remo said. “Book me a flight to Uruguay.”
While Remo remained on the line, Smith quickly made the necessary arrangements.
“By the way, Smitty,” Remo said after the flight was sorted out, “the old guy said something about a village down there that’s supposed to be a refuge for Nazis.”
“I will borrow satellite time to search the Uruguayan countryside,” Smith said. “In the meantime, you and Chiun follow up the Groth lead.”
“Can do,” Remo said.
He hung up the phone. As he did so, there was renewed laughter from the living room of the suite. The Master of Sinanju shrieked in joy as a new program began. It starred the same British comic and was one the old Korean had seen at least a dozen times.
Remo wondered how he could pry Chiun away from the TV.
“I wonder if the gift shop sells extension cords that’d reach all the way to South America?” Remo asked with a sigh.
