Gris drives to an alley not far from Miss Pinch's house and is faced with this puzzle. The driver is still unconscious, not bleeding too heavily but breathing shallowly. Gris is out of bombs, so he can't oh-so-discretely "cover the trail again" with a huge explosion sure to attract the attention of every police officer, fire fighter, and FBI agent in New York State, not to mention the Nazi-Interpol agents from last chapter once they put the pieces together and realize the man who blew up Istanbul is now loose in the US.
Instead, Gris tries to wipe off any of his fingerprints, then tries the cab's "broken" radio and manages to get the dispatcher. "Officer O'Grunty" tells the woman that one of her drivers is "part of a gang that is about to steal the Holy Sepulcher from Christ. He's even pretending he's been shot, complete with fake blood. Would you please call the Bellevue Psychiatric Section for us and have them send the wagon?" And of course it works, because psychology owns this country, man. Also, the average IQ in the Hubbardverse is roughly half of our own. And nobody in any profession follows any sort of sensible procedure. And the narrative demands the flippant disposal of this unimportant character introduced for a ridiculous scene with modern "highwaymen," preferably in a way that reinforces our frothing hatred of psychology at the same time.
Anyway, Gris continues towards Pinch's apartment and admits that "It would be untrue to say that as I approached that fatal place my skin did not crawl or that I could not taste mustard." But the importance of destroying Heller gives him the purpose he lacked three hundred pages ago when he had the same mission of destroying Heller. He picks the locks without any difficulty and enters that apartment of bad memories, "stale marijuana smoke and perfume." Even though Miss Pinch and Candy will be at work for a few more hours, Gris stays away from the safe, because he knows there's a camera monitoring it, and evidently nothing in his Apparatus background has prepared him for evading a security camera. If only Gris had received some FBI training on how to rob banks and defeat those very security systems, like Heller did in book two, while Gris was watching through his eyes on HellerVision...
So Gris takes a shower. Hey, even Soltan Gris has a limit to how many parasites he's willing to support. He rinses all the fleas off and changes out of the dead man's clothes into... something he gets out of a woman's closet. Something that against all odds fits him. Something profoundly stupid.
It was a black silk kimono, very long and very big. It had an embroidered design upon the chest. I recognized it at once! It was a figure with two heads: At one end it was a horned dragon, at the other it was a fanged snake. The Ninja! They were a cult of outcast assassins, the most deadly secret executioners of Japan. How apt!
So now we can add ninja to the list of Things Mission Earth Has Ruined, which includes, off the top of my head, gangsters, mobsters, the FBI, Bugs Bunny, car races, the United Nations, New York City, music, sex, and the entirety of Turkey.
Now in his official ninja uniform, Gris gets two mysterious objects out of his suitcase and settles down on a pillow beside the apartment's front door to wait, occasionally grinning evilly to himself.
I wondered idly if there might not be something to the philosophy of one of Earth's truly great wise men, the Marquis de Sade, renowned propounder of sadism. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, they say. When in the apartment of Miss Pinch, the behavioral pattern she set was almost impossible to attain. But I fully intended to go one better than even Miss Pinch's wildest nightmares.
I chuckled now and then, sitting there in the dark behind the door, savoring my plan. A master of Earth psychology was about to improve even upon the Marquis de Sade.
You might be worrying what kind of sick tortures Gris plans to visit upon his victims. Allow me to assure you that nothing like that's going to happen; he's just going to rape them in two chapters.
Back to Chapter Five
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