Outside the mayor's office, the three councilmen found reasons to burrow themselves into corners so they could look into the envelopes and make sure they hadn't been handed coupons from the newspaper instead of cash.

At noon, Rocco Nobile began to look through the day's mail, a boring task which annoyed him because all the good mail was never sent by mail. It was hand-delivered to his apartment at the Bay City Arms.

He looked quickly through the stack of letters. Employee unions, state environmental agencies, federal bureaus, fan mail. One letter was unopened. There was a lump in the middle of the brown envelope and on the outside his name had been printed in ink along with a warning: personal, confidential.

The letter was handwritten on lined yellow paper. It was printed in block letters. It read:

MAYOR NOBILE. YOU ARE A BLOT UPON THE FACE OF AMERICA. THE ERASER RUBS OUT BLOTS. YOUR TIME IS COMING SOON.

It was signed: THE ERASER.

And Scotchtaped to the bottom of the letter was half of a broken pencil, the eraser end.

Nobile scratched his head under the blue-black hair and, as was customary, looked at his fingertips as he withdrew his hand. Then he read the letter again.

On his private telephone line, he dialed a number he had never called before but had committed to memory. He did not know who was on the other end of the line.

When the dry voice answered, he said simply, "I'm in trouble."

There was this little store off Canal Street in New York City that sold pure silk blouses from Hong Kong at half the price you could buy them anywhere else, so Ruby Gonzalez was going to go there and spend some time. But first she had to get out of Bay City, which was ugly.

She wanted to get to the store early so she had no time to waste.

She walked around the back of the Bay City Arms apartment building. It was a warm day and Ruby wore a white halter top and black slacks. Her coffee-with-milk skin seemed a perfect middle ground between the light and dark of her clothing.

There was a ramp behind the building leading to an underground garage, and whistling lightly and swinging her purse, Ruby walked down the ramp. It was cool and airless under the building. Forty cars were parked in numbered slots and she had no trouble picking out the black Cadillac with the New Jersey MG — meaning municipal government — license plates which belonged to Mayor Rocco Nobile.

She stood behind the Cadillac for a moment, looking around. There was no one else in the garage. She rooted into her purse and found a large Idaho baking potato. She bent over and jammed it into the end of the exhaust pipe.

It could just as easily have been a bomb.

As she was walking from the garage, a man came out the door at the far end of the building.

Ruby made a sharp turn and walked rapidly toward him.

"Hold the door," she called. She smiled at him.

He held the door open for her as she brushed by him.

"Thanks," she said.

"Have a nice day," he said.

She waited until the heavy metal door swung shut behind her, then got her bearings and went to the elevator.

Inside she pressed the top-floor button. When the door opened, she was in a carpeted hall, facing four doors. One of the central doors had potted plants on each side of it. That would be the main entrance to Rocco Nobile's apartment.

Ruby fished in her purse and found a thin strip of steel, the size of a credit card.

She listened at the door at the far left end of the hall. There was no sound from inside. She slipped the thin strip of metal under the wood molding of the door frame near the lock. She pressed hard, and felt the lock slip open. She pulled the door out a half-inch to satisfy herself there was no other lock. She pushed the door closed and removed the metal strip, quietly relocking the door.

She did the same thing at the door at the far right side of the hall.

Then she rode back down on the elevator.

In the lobby, she waved at the doorman who waved back. She smiled at him as he opened the door for her. Breezily, she walked across the street and got behind the wheel of her white Lincoln Continental.

So far, she thought, it was a joke.

She kept her eyes on the front door of the apartment building, occasionally checking behind her in the rearview mirror.

Fifteen minutes later, she saw the mayor's black limousine turning the corner. Ruby picked up a grocery bag off the back seat of the car. In her mind, it could very easily have contained a submachine gun.

She got out of her car and walked across the street just as the mayor's car, bucking and puffing, pulled up to the front door of the Bay City Arms.

As she drew close to the front entrance, the door opened and a man she assumed was the mayor stepped outside. Another man followed behind him. The mayor smiled at Ruby. The bodyguard scowled, then held the door to the rear seat open for Rocco Nobile.

The car sputtered. Ruby walked toward it. If she had carried a machine gun, she would simply have taken it out now and used it.

Instead, she said to the bodyguard still standing next to the car, "There's something stuck in your exhaust pipe."

He looked at her suspiciously.

She smiled and pointed to the rear of the car. "The exhaust pipe," she said. "Something's stuck in it."

The man growled. Ruby shrugged. She turned away from the building. Rocco Nobile saw her and smiled and gave her a small wave. She waved back.

The potato was removed from the exhaust and the mayor's car had driven away, before Ruby drove her own car out of Bay City toward the Holland Tunnel to New York.

She stopped to use a telephone in a booth alongside the roadway.

"Doctor Smith?" she said.

"Yes," answered Harold W. Smith.

"Ruby. That mayor got no security at all."

"As bad as that?" Smith asked.

"Yeah," Ruby said. "I coulda put a bomb under his car and no one would have noticed. I got into his building with no trouble at all. I slipped two of the locks into his apartment. And when he came out to go to work, I walked right up to him and I coulda blown him away. His bodyguards are hopeless."

Smith sighed on the other end of the phone.

"Thank you, Ruby."

"I think if you got some reason to want to keep that man alive, you better send in somebody. Send in the dodo. He can do it."

"All right, Ruby," Smith said. "When will you be back?"

Ruby pictured those half-price silk blouses in her mind. "Take a few hours," she lied. "I'm having me some car trouble."

The forty-foot-long wooden boat drifted aimlessly through the Atlantic Ocean. It had dieseled out at dawn from Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island, only forty miles away, but its direction was northeast, and when the boat's motors were turned off, it lay in 450 feet of water 120 miles due east of Manhattan.

Remo and Chiun sat atop a wooden locker on the back deck. Remo had peeled off his usual black T-shirt and was wearing only his black chinos and a pair of white leather running shoes with black diagonal stripes across the top. Chiun wore a white brocaded kimono which Remo estimated weighed at least fifteen pounds.

Over his bare chest, Remo had put a thick leather harness, cut like a short vest. Hooked below his belt was a padded metal gimbal, a cup-like device that looked as if it was designed to hold a flagpole.

"I do not understand this," Chiun said. He had said it half a dozen times on the three-hour trip out into the ocean and Remo ignored it as he had the earlier five times.

He watched the rear of the boat as Mickey, the mate, cut up herring and threw slices out into the oily chum slick the boat was trailing through the water. Two-inch-thick fishing poles angled out from the side of the boat, their heavy nylon lines pulled out at almost 90-degree angles from the perpendicular.