"Destroyer - 025 - Sweet Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

It wasn't really being shown by a real estate agent, Smith explained. Actually, the house wasn't even on the market yet. But it probably would be soon. And anyway, Smith just kind of wanted to get an idea of the type of house Remo wanted.

There were a lot of etceteras and Smith's car was rolling toward the guardhouse outside the main entrance to Edgewood University when Remo began to suspect he had been euchred.

The guard stepped out from the booth and waved the salmon-colored Volkswagen to a halt.

"We want to see Professor Wooley," Smith said.

"Sorry. I've got orders to admit no one but students until tomorrow."

Remo leaned out the window. "It's all right, officer," he said. "He's the head of a super-secret organization that safeguards our country's freedom from domestic insurrection."

"Remo. Please," Smith said.

"Hah?" the guard said.

"And I'm a secret assassin with more deaths on my hands that I can count. Deaths, that is, not hands," Remo said.

"Remo, stop," Smith said.

"Yeah, sure, buddy," the guard said, taking a step back toward the booth to be able to reach the phone.

"Wait, don't go," Remo said. "I'd like you to meet Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, and a man who could be a household word, if you could find a household interested in talking about kvetches."

"I think you all better just turn around and get out of here," the guard said. "I don't want any trouble."

He was about fifty years old with a beer belly so big it looked as if his wide leather belt would cut him in half if he exhaled suddenly. Remo suspected that the last "trouble" the man had dealt with had been an argument about overtime with the campus police union shop steward.

"You're not going to let us in? A master spy, a master assassin, and a master kvetch?" Remo said.

"G'wan, get outta here," the guard said.

"Too bad." When he woke up the next day, the guard wouldn't really remember much of the conversation; he'd just remember that the man in back didn't really seem to lean through the window, but the guard caught a flash of fingers and then felt a pinching sensation in his throat, and then he went to sleep.

Smith got out of the car, pulled the guard into the booth, and turned out the overhead light.

Remo settled into the back seat of the car, and then felt a pain in his right leg, as if it had been pierced with a dull stick.

"Owww," he said. "What'd you do that for, Chiun?"

"A kvetch is a scold," Chiun said. "A corn-plainer. A whiner. A sniveler. I am not those things."

"Right, Chiun, right," Remo said. "Take the pain away."

Chiun tapped on Remo's right knee and the pain vanished as quickly as it had come.

"If I were a kvetch," Chiun said, "I would not treat you so lightly. I would complain and carp about your name-calling. I would remind you of all the years I have wasted on you, years spent trying to make something worthwhile out of a pale piece of pig's ear. I would scold you for frittering away what I have taught you in parlor tricks for fat men who stand in guard boxes. These things I would do if I were a kvetch. I would tell you aboutЕ"

Smith had slid back into the car and turned from the front seat and looked at the two men.