"Hey, there he is!" the man shouted. "The Steroid Stallion himself. Bronzini!"
The catcalls followed. "Boo!" they hooted. "Bronzini! Go back to Japan."
"Hear me out," Bronzini shouted. His words were drowned out. The picketers-they belonged to IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees -interpreted Bronzini's angry face to suit themselves. "Did you hear what he called us?" one cried indignantly. That did it. They started for him en masse.
Bronzini stopped. He folded his arms. He was going to hold his ground. What was the worst they could do? The worst they could do, it turned out, was to surround him in a shouting, haranguing circle.
"Down with Bronzini! The Bronze Bambino has feet of clay!"
"Listen to me," Bronzini shouted. "I just want to talk to you about this. I think we can reason this through." He was wrong. They were not listening. Camera crews were moving up to get a picture of the worldrenowned Bartholomew Bronzini held hostage by two dozen protesters armed only with placards.
When the cameras started taping, one of the protesters called out, "Hey, watch this!"
He whacked Bronzini with his placard. The broomstick broke against Bronzini's muscular shoulder. He barely felt it, but that didn't matter. Bartholomew Bronzini had grown up in a rough Italian neighborhood where turning the other cheek was the kiss of death.
He decked his assailant with a roundhouse right. The protesters turned into a mob. They descended on Bronzini like a fury. Bronzini returned blow for blow. He started laying protesters out on the blacktop of the parking lot. A wild grin cracked his Sicilian face. This was something he understood. A bare-knuckled fight.
But as he mashed a man's nose flat, he wondered if he wasn't on the wrong side of this brawl.
The question was answered for him when the horde of Japanese men piled out of the lobby. Some of them, on orders from an excited Jiro Isuzu, pulled pistols from under their coats. Bodyguards.
"Stop them," Isuzu shrieked. "Protect Bronzini. Now!" The bodyguards waded in. The protesters turned on them too. Bronzini tried pushing his way clear of the mob, but there were too many of them. He took one of the protesters by the throat.
Then a shot rang out. The man in Bronzini's metallic grasp gasped once and went limp. He fell. His head made a cracking sound when it hit the ground.
"What the fuck!" Bronzini yelled. "Who fired that shot? Who?"
It was obvious in another moment. Bronzini felt something yank on his belt. He struggled. It was one of the Japanese bodyguards.
"Let go of me," Bronzini snarled. "He's hurt bad."
"No. You come."
"I said let me-"
Bronzini never got the next word out. The sky and ground swapped perspectives. He was suddenly on his back. The shock blew the air out of his lungs. Stunned, he wondered if he had caught a stray bullet. And as other gunshots sounded in the background, he was lifted by several husky Japanese and dumped into the waiting Nishitsu van.
He was whisked from the Shilo Inn at high speed. "What happened?" Bronzini asked the hovering Jiro Isuzu in a dazed voice.
"Judo. Necessary."
"The fuck."
Chapter 4
It was dawn when Remo Williams was dropped off in front of his Rye, New York, home by taxi.
Remo handed the driver a crisp hundred dollar bill. "Merry Christmas," Remo said. "Keep the change."
"Hey, Merry Christmas to you too, buddy. You must be expecting a whale of a holiday yourself."
"Nah. I'm on an unlimited expense account."
"Thanks just the same," the cabby said, pulling off. It was not snowing in Rye, New York. The storm that had blanketed New England had passed through New York State the previous day. The town had already cleared the sidewalk with a small tractor snow blower. Its caterpillar tracks had left their unmistakable imprints. But Remo's walkway was buried.
Remo placed one foot on the crust of snow that covered the walk. His breathing changed. His arms seemed to lift slightly from his sides as if they were filled with air instead of bone and blood and muscle.
Remo walked across the thin frozen crust of the snow without breaking through. He felt light as a feather. He was a feather. He thought like a feather, moved like a feather, and the thin hard crust reacted to him as if each foot was a feather duster.
Remo went in his front door with the expression of a man who had slogged through a sloppy wet snowbank in his stocking feet, not one who had executed a feat that other men would have scorned as impossible.
Even the novelty of having a home to come back to for the first time since he joined the organization did not lift his spirits. The living room consisted of bare walls, a hardwood floor, and a big-screen TV. Two straw mats sat on the floor before the screen.
Somehow, it was not very homey.
Remo walked to his bedroom. It, too, was only four walls and a bare floor. A futonlike mat stretched out in one corner. His wardrobe, consisting of six pairs of chinos and an assortment of black and white T-shirts, lay neatly folded at the bottom of a closet. On ,a shelf above a cluster of empty wire hangers were racked a dozen pairs of handmade Italian leather loafers.
From the other bedroom came a series of long, drawnout sounds, like a goose honking.
"Braaawwwwkkkk!"
"Hnnnnkkkkkkk!" Snoring.
Remo decided he wasn't sleepy. Turning on his heel, he made for the door.
Remo later pulled up in front of an all-night drugstore, asked the woman behind the counter if she accepted credit cards, and when he got a yes in return, he went straight to the Christmas-decoration shelf There were more bulbs, candy canes, and tinsel than he could carry at one time, so he took hold of the shelf at each end and applied pressure. The crack was instantaneous. Remo carried the entire shelf to the cash register.
"Oh, my God," the girl said.
"Put all this stuff on my card," Remo said, slipping the plastic onto the glass counter.
"You broke the shelf."
"Yeah. Sorry about that. Just add it to the bill." Outside, Remo set the shelf on the hood of his Buick. He opened the trunk, and balancing the shelf carefully, upended it over the open trunk. The packages rattled down the shelf like coal down a cellar chute.
Remo tossed the shelf into a cluster of trash barrels and closed the trunk.
His next stop was at a used-ear lot with a banner that said "Christmas Trees Cheap." The lot hadn't opened for the day, so Remo took his time examining the stock. The first one he liked looked too tall for his living room. The second left dry pine needles in his hands when he grasped one of the branches experimentally.
Remo went through every tree on the lot and decided that if the cars for sale were in the same shape as the trees, the driving public was in mortal peril. "Nobody respects Christmas anymore," Remo growled as, one by one, he picked up the trees by their bases and, like a farmer shucking corn, stripped them of their branches with one-handed sweeps.
Remo left a note that said, "I got carried away with the spirit of the season. Sorry. Send me a bill." He didn't sign it or leave an address.
Disgusted, Remo next drove to the golf course that spawled behind his house. There he picked his way among the evergreens. He found a young one he liked and, kneeling beside it, felt all around the base to get a sense of its root system. When he found a weak point, he used the side of his hand to sever the root.
By the time he was done, the evergreen came out of the frozen ground as easily as a daisy. Remo carried it to his back door over his shoulder like Paul Bunyan. He got it through the door so expertly he lost only three needles.
Remo set the tree in one corner of the room. It balanced perfectly, even without a stand. Remo had flattened out the roots to form a natural base.