“I think I remember you. I think I do.”
“Remo. Remo Williams.”
“Right. Yeah. I think. Right. Remo.” And then Ed Polishuk jumped back in his seat.
“Remo, you're dead,” he said. “And what happened to your face? You got a different kind of a nose and mouth. You're dead, Remo. No, you're not dead. You're not Remo.”
“Remember the newsstand you tried to shake down for cigarettes and I threatened to report you, Ed?”
“The dumb-dumbest straighto. Remo. Remo Williams,” yelled Polishuk. And everyone in the bar and grill turned to look. Ed Polishuk hushed his voice.
“What the hell has happened to you, Remo?”
“I don't know. Crazy things. I see this old Oriental in front of me. I speak Korean fluently. I can do things with my body like you wouldn't believe. And you, Ed, you're twenty years older.”
“And you're not. That's the strange part.”
“I know.”
“Remo,” whispered Polishuk, “you died about twenty years ago.”
Remo let go of Polishuk's wrists. He pinched his own arm. He felt it. He knew even more certainly in his breath that he was alive.
“I'm not dead, Ed.”
“I can see that. I see that. Something's going on here.”
“What?”
“I don't know, Remo. I don't know. I remember they electrocuted you. You shot some punk. I thought: Serves him right for being such a straighto. It doesn't pay to be straight, Remo. You never learned that lesson.”
“I don't know what I learned. Have you ever heard of Sinanju?”
“No. But let's get out of here. Hey, you lost weight. And you look younger. You look friggin' younger. How did you do it?”
“I don't know.”
“You were electrocuted, you know. Do you remember the trial? It was,” said Ed, lowering his voice, “the niggers. They run everything now. Newark's gone to hell. Everything's for sale. Niggers.”
“But you were always for sale, Ed. What do you mean, Negroes? You were always for sale. What's that fat envelope in your pocket? So it's not cigarettes now. It's cash.”
“I'm trying to be friendly. I forgot you can't be friendly with a dum dum. So lay off. Niggers steal. I, on the other hand, protect my future retirement. It don't do no good to be honest. What for? For niggers?”
“You weren't even honest when Newark was mostly white.”
“So, look at you, Remo. Look at you. You got shanghaied and railroaded. I knew you didn't shoot that guy in the alley. But they had witnesses up the kazoo. And then the pressure from above. That's what everyone said. The pressure from above. They had to show a white cop could be electrocuted for shooting a black. That's what they had to show.”
“How do you know I didn't do it?”
“Because you never used your gun against regulations. You were impossible as a buddy. I can't believe how young you look. You're dead. I know you're dead.”
Outside on the street, Remo picked up a can from the gutter.
“If I'm dead, how can I do this?” asked Remo, crushing the can.
“Hey, cans are light nowadays. Anyone can crush cans, Remo.”
Remo opened his hand and showed Ed Polishuk a small shining ball.
“You fused the damned thing.”
“I know. I can do that. I found it out on the plane when I tried to fit an ashtray back into its holder. That's nothing. You know the kind of money I could make throwing baseballs for a living?”
In an alley, Remo picked up a rock and threw it at a square marked off for stickball. The rock crunched into the softer red brick like an explosion, making a hole through the wall into a warehouse. They knew it was a warehouse because they saw men looking around inside, startled. The hole was big enough.
“Sheeet,” said Captain Ed Polishuk. “Where did you learn that? Where have you been?”
“I think Sinanju,” said Remo.
“Where's that?”
“I don't know, but I come from there too. Now, how can that be?”
Ed Polishuk told his desk sergeant that he would be busy for the rest of the afternoon. He did not make his normal pickups, partly out of shock but partly because he suspected that indeed this was crazy Straighto Remo Williams, and he would turn in the entire bag route, from whorehouses to bookie joints.
So this day Ed Polishuk was not going to let him out of his sight. In his office, he sent requests to the public- relations division for all newspaper clippings on the police force during the years following Remo's execution.
“I don't remember those,” said Remo.
“Of course you don't. You were dead.”
Remo read the comments about himself. The one that touched him most was from Sister Mary Elizabeth, who remembered Remo as “a good boy.”
He saw that he maintained that he was innocent until the end. But he didn't remember the trial. Was there something that should make his memory stop on one night? Because the last thing he remembered was looking up at the stars. And Polishuk was with him. Patrolman Ed Polishuk was with him.
“I remember thinking I was a star as I looked up. Something really crazy about eternity and who I was,” said Remo.
“You were always crazy, but not like this,” said Polishuk. “You had no feel for poetry, music, taking a little bit of the action which a patrolman deserves on his salary. Nothing.”
“Now, why should my memory end there? Do you see that?”
“What?”
“That Oriental guy. He's speaking Korean.”
“Remo, you're really crazy.”
“Maybe,” said Remo.
“You returned to that one night,” said the Oriental in the language Remo now knew, “because that was the one night you understood, if ever so briefly, who you were, and that was who you were going to be.”
And then the name Shiva came to Remo. He kept hearing how Shiva was the destroyer of worlds, and that one had to die to live as something else. Captain Ed Polishuk thought it sounded like some born-again-Christian group. He also did some detective work for Remo, who wouldn't leave his office.
Sinanju was a town in North Korea on the West Korea Bay. Historically it had a lot to do with the courts of Europe and the Mediterranean and Asia for some reason. They provided advisers of some sort to kings. Remo couldn't remember who or what he would advise. He didn't know how to advise anyone. Yet Sinanju somehow seemed just as strong in him as the orphanage.
Shiva, as it turned out, was some Asian god. So that left him nowhere. But there was something Captain Ed Polishuk could do to help them all get to the bottom of this. He could prove once and for all to the satisfaction of anyone, especially the FBI and the news media which he was ready to call in, that Remo Williams indeed was the same Remo Williams who had been electrocuted in Trenton State Prison. If he could do that, then both the glare of publicity and the good work of the FBI would find out what kind of phony execution went on in Trenton State Prison.
“How are you going to do that?”
“We're cops, right?”
“I thought so,” said Remo.
“Then it's simple. Give me your fingerprints. Do you remember how? Roll the pads over the ink. You can do it with stamp-pad ink,” said Polishuk, pushing a white piece of paper and a pad across his desk. Then he phoned headquarters to get fingerprints.
“I want the fingerprints of Patrolman Remo Williams.”
“We ain't got no Williams, Remo, Captain,” said the fingerprints clerk.
“He'd dead,” said Captain Polishuk.
“What do you want with a dead man's prints?”
