"His name is O'Brien," Nemeroff said. "He is a guard at the New York federal prison. He has done invaluable service to us there."
"Good," Remo said. "I can't wait to meet him."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Remo followed Nemeroff up the steep flights of damp stone stairs to the first floor.
As they stood momentarily in the large entrance hall, Nemeroff walked away from him.
"Mr. Fabio. How are you? So happy you could come."
An olive-skinned man had just walked through the glass doors from the first floor patio. He looked up at Nemeroff with the Mafia's traditional look-halfway between cowardice and toleration-which passed for respect, and stiffly stuck out his hand.
"Who's that?," he asked Nemeroff, gesturing with his head over the baron's shoulder toward Remo.
The baron laughed. It was that evil whinny of a laugh that greeted things he thought were funny.
"Oh, yes," he said, still braying. "I want the two of you to meet."
He took his visitor by the elbow and led him toward Remo. Outside, Remo could see Fabio's bodyguard lounging on a chair on the patio, trying to appear unconcerned, but watching the activities through the glass, ready to move if it became necessary. He was exiled to the patio because it was considered bad form to bring one's bodyguard into another man's home.
Then Remo had his hand stuck into the hand of Fabio.
He looked hard at the face and knew he should have known it, but it was just another wop with the brains of an organ-grinder. Who he was just wasn't worth the effort.
He heard Nemeroff say: "This is Mr. Fabio. He is an important man in the United States."
Remo looked harder at him. The man had a fleshy face, and a small thin scar ran from the corner of his left eye to the bottom of his left ear. The skin was whiter than his normal skin, he had splashed powder on his face to try to equalize the colour but he was still scarred and hideous.
And then Remo heard Nemeroff say:
"And this is my associate, Mr. PJ Kenny."
Fabio's hand tensed in his and then removed itself, not recoiling suddenly as if from fear, but moving back deliberately as if for a reconsideration, and then he heard Fabio speak:
"Dat ain't PJ Kenny."
Nemeroff whinnied again, so Remo adopted his mood and smiled as Nemeroff said:
"Good. That is proof of how successful the plastic surgery was."
Remo watched as Fabio's little pig eyes burned into his. Then Fabio said:
"PJ. Is it really you?"
Remo nodded. Fabio stared a little longer. Then his pig features relaxed into a smile. He took a step forward, raised his right hand, palm up, to signify surprise, and then brought his hand around Remo's shoulders in a half bear hug.
"PJ," he said. "I've been wondering what happened to you. Everybody was."
"I was under the knife for the new face," Remo said, hoping that was the right thing to say. "And then the baron arranged for me to come here and join him."
"And join him," Fabio mimicked. "Maybe that doctor operated on your brain, too. You talk better than you used to."
"Thanks," said the man who thought he was PJ Kenny. "Part of my new image."
"I'll tell you, your new image is a lot better than your old image," Fabio said. "You was about the ugliest looking thing I ever saw."
"Wasn't I, though? I looked downright Italian," Remo said. When Fabio paused, unsure how to answer, Remo added, "and now I look Neapolitan," giving the word the extra Italian accent on the last syllable, guessing that Fabio was Neapolitan because of the way he had raised his hand in greeting.
Fabio laughed out loud. "Yeah," he said, "that's a real improvement. And you're in with the baron?"
"Right-hand man," Remo said.
Nemeroff moved quickly into the conversation.
"Mr. Kenny has agreed to join with all of us in insuring that whatever agreement we reach will be fairly kept. I think he has that reputation for fairness," Nemeroff said.
"You bet he has," Fabio said. "Hey, PJ—remember when you got my brother, Matty?"
"Sure do," Remo smiled. "It was some job."
"Some job?" Fabio laughed. "They was picking up pieces of him for weeks."
"Yeah," Remo laughed. "I used my special cheese cutting knife for that job." Then he added, "Ho, ho, ho."
"Hee, hee, hee," laughed Fabio, remembering the one hundred twenty-seven pieces of the remains of his brother, Matthew, whose crime had been that he held up to ridicule the son of another gangland leader.
"Ha, ha, ha," whined Baron Nemeroff. Then he turned the smile and laugh off as if by a switch, and said,
"Come, Mr. Fabio. We will go to the meeting room upstairs. Some of our mutual friends have already arrived."
He stepped toward the picture on the wall and pressed the button hidden in the moulding of the frame. The door slid quietly open.
He stepped aside to allow Fabio to enter first, and turned to Remo: "The man-O'Brien-is in the study. Perhaps he can tell you more about this Williams. What he looks like or what to look for."
Remo nodded and waited until Nemeroff had entered the elevator and pressed the button for the fifth floor. The painting moved softly back over the door opening.
Remo turned and walked across the parquet floor, his tennis shoes noiseless on the highly polished wood. The door was a giant wooden panel, deeply carved with elaborate filigrees, but it pushed open as though it had been hinged on ball bearings.
The room was dark. Remo found himself looking at the stark silhouette of a man, who stared out the first floor window toward the end of the house. Over his shoulder, through the window, Remo could see a red helicopter coming into view. He realized the man was following the helicopter's flight with his eyes. Though neither knew, it was the craft that had taken Vice President Asiphar the few miles to the Scambian Presidential palace where he expected, within forty-eight hours, to occupy the presidential bed.
Remo moved up behind the man, close enough to touch him, and he said, "O'Brien?"
The man wheeled and as he turned, released the heavy drapes he had been holding, and the room again leaked into semi-darkness. But Remo could see the man's face was startled, and the man said: "Boy, you gave me a fright, sneaking up on me like that."
"Tennis shoes," Remo said, as if that explained it. "The baron tells me you know this Remo Williams?"
"No," O'Brien said, "I don't know him. But I saw him once." He brushed past Remo and walked back to a small chair alongside a desk, and plopped down heavily into it.
Remo turned, the sun glistening between the drapes now at his back and shining into O'Brien's face.
"What's he look like?" Remo asked.
"Well, when I saw him, he was dressed like a priest," O'Brien said.
"That's not going to help me much."
"Wait. I'm trying. He had brown eyes, but not like regular brown eyes. They were deep, like they had no black. All deep-coloured. You know what I mean?"
"Yeah."
"And he had a hard face. Like he was dressed like a priest, but he sure didn't look like any priest. His nose was straight and he was the kind of guy that looked right in your eye."
O'Brien squinted to try to get a better look at the man standing in front of the window, but all he could see was the outline of his head and body.
"All right," Remo said, "cut the art class lectures. How big was he?"
"He was a big guy, but not that big. Maybe six feet. Not heavy either. But big thick wrists, like he worked on a chain gang or something."
Remo moved closer to O'Brien's chair. O'Brien was casually inspecting his toes. Remo leaned onto the desk top.
"Yeah, go on," he said.
O'Brien looked up, squinting. "As I said, he had thick wrists. Like yours," he added, glancing down at Remo's hands on the desk. "And there was something else."
"What's that?"
"It was his mouth. It like didn't have any lips. It was thin and hard looking and you just knew he was a bad-ass. That was some bad mouth," O'Brien said. He looked up and squinted again into Remo's shadowed face, reflecting slowly, "It was like yours."