"I don't know from whom or from what. He got a threatening letter today from someone who called himself 'The Eraser.' "

Remo sprawled down on the bed and looked over at Smith. Chiun turned on the television set and pulled the vanity chair around so he was sitting six inches from the screen. A sports program was showing the full contact karate championships. Chiun turned off the set in disgust. He had hoped there would be an ice skating show on. He had fallen in love with one of the skaters. When he found out she was married to a football player, he watched football hoping the player would be killed and cursed defensive linemen for their inability to make him into a vegetable.

" 'The Eraser?' " Remo said.

Smith nodded.

"Why should we care if Rocco Nobile gets himself knocked off by The Eraser or by anybody else for that matter? I told you he was turning that city over to the mob. What's it to us?" He put his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling.

Smith cleared his throat. Chiun went into the bathroom to count the bars of soap. If there were extras, they would go into one of his trunks.

"Remo," Smith said, "a number of years ago the CIA had an agent in Europe named Wardell Pinkerton the Third."

"He must have been a winner," Remo said.

"He was. He was one of the best field agents the CIA ever had. Then he developed heart trouble and had to be moved out of active line duty. He came back to the States."

"And today, I believe, that man is a certified public accountant?" Smith looked at Remo in confusion but Remo was rewarded by Chiun's roar of laughter from the bathroom. They had been in New York City one evening to buy roasted chestnuts and they had happened onto a playhouse off the main theater district. The picture in the box office window illustrating the play was so appalling that they went inside to see it. It was a one-actor monologue with lines so deadly dull that half the audience was asleep in the first ten minutes. And when the actor delivered the line about the public accountant, Chiun could contain himself no longer. He leaped onto the stage and chased the actor off it. He was about to leave when he looked out and saw the seventy-five faces looking up at him from the darkness. He delivered one of the shortest of the Ung poems, and an hour later, when everybody in the audience was asleep, he and Remo left.

"Certified public accountant?" Smith said.

"Never mind," Remo said. "You had to be there. What happened to Pinker Waddington?"

"Wardell Pinkerton the Third. He retired to California. Then his wife and daughter were killed in an accident. He got bored and tired and started drinking too much and one day, he decided the only way to pull himself back together was to go back to work."

"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.