"So?"
"So he was recruited at the very highest levels of government for a secret mission. Wardell Pinkerton the Third vanished from the face of the earth."
"What has this got to do with me?" Remo asked. There were 266 pressed board tiles in the ceiling. Nineteen rows of fourteen each. Since Remo had never been able to multiply, he had counted each one of them.
"Well, precisely this," Smith said. "Wardell Pinkerton is Mayor Rocco Nobile."
Remo sat up in bed. "Say it again."
"Rocco Nobile, the mayor of Bay City, is Wardell Pinkerton the Third. He's a federal agent. He's working for us on this program, even though he doesn't know it is our operation. After he vanished from California, he had plastic surgery and then showed up again in Miami, where he used money to make mob connections. We were able to help him with that. We've been moving him around inside organized crime for five years. Then it was time to move. We sent him into Bay City to take over the town."
"But why? Why turn it over to thugs?"
"He has given an open invitation to organized crime to move its operations into Bay City. He's opening the piers so that contraband can move in and out easily. So drugs can flow freely. Mob interests are coming from all over the country. Cutting rooms and jewelry factories for stolen diamonds. Printing facilities for counterfeit stock certificates and securities. Major counting rooms for the nation's biggest illegal gambling operations."
"You still haven't told me why."
"Remo, he's turning it into a safe city, so we can get most of America's crime centralized there. And when we do, we're going to go in and shut it all down at once."
"I got it."
"Now you know why Rocco Nobile has to be kept alive. If anything happens to him now, the mob people will leave before we really get a chance to set them up. Remo, we want to get them all. We want to deal crime a blow that it might never recover from. That's why it's imperative you protect Rocco Nobile... er, Wardell Pinkerton."
"The Third," Remo said.
"Yes."
"All right," Remo said.
Smith said, "Of course, he doesn't know who you are or who you work for. He doesn't even know who he works for. He doesn't know CURE exists."
"Does he know we're coming?"
"He knows a government agent is coming to join his bodyguard staff, but you'll have to be discreet. You can't blow his cover. You've got to be a mob member protecting another mob member," Smith said.
"If I have to wear a pinky ring and a pinstripe suit, I quit," Remo said.
"Do the best you can." Smith stood up and picked up his briefcase from alongside the chair. He looked toward the closed bathroom door and lowered his voice to a whisper. "Perhaps it would be best if he did not accompany you. No attention should be called to this operation and he sometimes makes scenes."
"Leave it with me," Remo said.
Smith spoke aloud. "Give my best regards to Chiun."
"I will."
As the door closed behind Smith, the bathroom door opened. Chiun came out with two small bars of soap and a half-filled box of facial tissues. He carefully placed them into one of his trunks at the far end of the room.
Chiun slammed down the trunk lid with a crack that could have been heard even over the disco bands in the nearby town of Southampton. He picked up a small lamp and threw it through the back window of the motel room.
When he turned to Remo, his face was pale.
"Now what did he mean that I sometimes make scenes?" Chiun demanded.
The Rubout Squad had been given their first assignments by The Eraser.
Nicholas Lizzard had been told to rent two secret apartments in Bay City. He asked Sam Gregory to give him rent money in advance. Two months rent money. For two apartments.
"A thousand dollars," he said.
"That means that you're renting $250 apartments," Gregory said. "I don't think there are $250 apartments in Bay City."
"Ah, yes. Beauty must bow always before the invincible onrush of logic. Eight hundred dollars," said Lizzard who had made his mind up beforehand that he would agree to any reasonable compromise. He had figured that four hundred dollars should cover everything and anything over that was gravy. Or Vodka as the case might be.
"Here's six hundred," said Gregory, taking the money from a small leather money purse he carried in his back pocket.
"A mean and small-spirited man," mumbled Lizzard. He left the motel in Jersey City and rode into Bay City using one of the Rubout Squad's rented cars. He parked halfway down the block from Rocco Nobile's Improvement Association headquarters. He planned to get one apartment there and one apartment near the high-rise where Nobile lived.
But first a drink.
When he left the car, he took a small leather suitcase from the back seat. In the first bar he saw, he ordered, paid for and drank a Vodka. It was early in the morning and the bar was empty. He carried his suitcase into the bathroom and locked the door behind him with a hook and eye.
He opened the suitcase over the small iron-stained, scum-crusted sink. Time to go to work. But first a drink. He sipped a little Vodka from a metal flask inside the suitcase, then, almost reluctantly, capped it and put it away. Inside the suitcase was a cheap plastic makeup kit of cosmetics. Lizzard made up his eyes with false eyelashes, mascara and the dark-blue eye shadow favored by old women and prostitutes. He looked at himself. This was the part he liked best, redoing his eyes. He put on liquid makeup, to cover the blotchy broken blood vessels in his nose, then light pink lipstick and red rouge. Atop his thinning hair, he put a gray curly wig, and stepped back from the mirror. He nodded with satisfaction at his image which he thought made him look like somebody's grandmother. Quickly, he removed his sports shirt and trousers and shoes and socks and donned pantihose, nurse-type women's shoes, and a flowered dress with a sewn-in Polyurethane bosom.
He stood in front of the mirror again, checking himself as he stuffed his male clothing into the suitcase. He was satisfied. One of his best jobs yet. That certainly called for a drink as a reward. He took a long slug out of the Vodka flask, then replaced it under his clothing and snapped the suitcase shut. Done. No one would ever know that one of America's greatest male actors hid underneath that woman's clothing and behind that painted woman's face.
He unlocked the bathroom door and peeked out. The bartender was at the end of the bar, washing glasses, his back to Lizzard, who walked quickly out the front door without looking back. He locked his suitcase in the trunk of his car.
Almost directly across the street from the Bay City Improvement Association, he found a tenement building with a for rent sign. Before ringing the super's bell, he slouched over, changing himself from a six-foot-five man to a six-foot-four woman. He rejected the idea of using a limp. It wouldn't be necessary. His disguise was already perfect. To talk to the superintendent, he used his woman's voice, a high squeaky rattle, punctuated by chuckles.
"Got a lot of apartments," the superintendent said.
"The highest one," Lizzard said. "Me and my boys, we like to be up high."
The front windows of the apartment looked down at the Nobile headquarters.
"How much, sonny?" Lizzard said.
"A hundred a month, includes heat and hot water. What's your name, Mrs.?"
"Mrs. Walker," Lizzard said. "I'll take it." He looked at the superintendent and wondered if he should come on to the burly man. He would swear the superintendent was already infatuated with Mrs. Walker from the way he was staring at "her."
"Two months in advance," the super said.
"Good," said Lizzard. He paid with two hundred in bills that had come from Sam Gregory's roll.
"Me and my boys, we'll be moving in slow over the next couple of days. We gotta wait for our furniture to come."
"Oh? Where's it coming from?"
"Chicago," Lizzard said. "But you know how movers are." He batted his false eyelashes at the superintendent who seemed very anxious to give Mrs. Walker the keys and to leave. Probably realizing that his passion was boiling almost out of control, Lizzard thought. The super went back to his first-floor apartment, where his wife asked him who had looked at the apartment.