“I am not interested in the activities of your cretinous offspring,” said Chiun.
“Yeah, a position,” the cabdriver said, not having heard one word of Chiun’s. “Did you ever hear of anything like that? He can’t take a job; he has to have a position?”
“I have a position for you,” said Chiun. “Prone. Mouth stuffed into dirt. Silent.”
Remo slid back into the cab.
“Well?” said Chiun.
“Well, what?”
“When does our vessel leave?”
“Not for a while, I’m afraid,” said Remo. He gave the cabdriver an address on Union Street.
Chiun folded his arms across his chest. Joleen watched him, then looked at Remo, who said, “It can’t be helped. It’s business, Little Father. That comes first.” He turned toward Chiun.
“It should not come before promises,” said Chiun.
“We’ve got this little thing to do first,” said Remo.
Joleen pingponged her head between them.
“But what is a promise made by a white man?” Chiun asked himself. “A nothing,” he answered himself. “A nothing made by a nothing, signifying nothing and worth nothing. Remo, you are a nothing. Smith is a nothing.”
“Right, Little Father,” Remo said. “And don’t forget racists.”
“And you are both racists. I have never heard of anything like this. A broken promise. The ingratitude. You would not do this to one whose skin was as fish-flesh pale as your own.”
“Right,” said Remo. “We’re racists through and through, Smitty and me.”
“That is correct.”
“And our word can’t be trusted.”
“That is also correct.”
Remo turned to Joleen. “Do you know he taught me everything I know?”
Joleen nodded. “Yes, he told me.”
“He would have.”
“He is right, you know,” said Joleen.
“About what?”
“You are a racist.”
“Who says?” asked Remo.
“Everyone knows. All Americans are racists.”
“Right, child,” said Chiun. “It is the defense adopted by the inferior person.”
CHAPTER TEN
In an alley off Union Street in San Francisco, hippie hucksters hawk homemades. Jewelry, painted shells and stones, leather belts fill up little stalls that line both sides of the alley.
Business is generally bad, but the salesmen do not seem to mind, content instead to sit in the sun, smoking marijuana, and talking among themselves about how nice it will be when the revolution comes and the new socialist government will pay them for sitting there.
In the rear, the alley opened into a gravel-coated yard, fenced in with high wooden stockade posts. Booths bordered the entire yard, and one of the booths flaunted the poster of the Maharaji Gupta Mahesh Dor.
Joleen dropped to her knees and kissed the steel cable that the poster was taped to.
“O Blissful Master,” she said. “Across the seas, I come following your goodness.”
“Don’t pull on the frigging wire,” said a bearded, tanned blond youth, shirtless, with rag-cuff jeans, a silver earring, and a grape juice concession.
From the booths along the fence, people turned, mostly young women, looking at Joleen.
“They smell bad,” Chiun told Remo.
Remo shrugged.
“Are these flower people?” asked Chiun.
Remo nodded.
“Why do they not smell like flowers?”
“Smelling good is part of the capitalist conspiracy,” said Remo.
Chiun sniffed. “It doesn’t matter. All whites smell funny anyway.”
The blond man with the beard was now yanking Joleen to her feet. She struggled to stay in her kneeling position, her hands tightly clenching the wire that anchored the pole holding up the small hinged roof of the grape juice shed.
“I said, get the frig out of there,” the youth said.
Remo moved toward Joleen, but a voice echoed through the yard.
“Cease!”
It came from the end of the yard. Faces turned toward the voice.
A man stood there. He had come from a door in the fence, between two booths. He wore a pink robe that came down to the top of silver-sandaled feet. Down his forehead was painted a silver stripe that matched Joleen’s.
“Let her be,” he intoned. “She is of the faith.”
“She’s got no goddam business hanging onto my roof wire,” the blond youth said. He tugged again at Joleen’s kneeling body.
The man in the robe clapped his hands together, twice, sharply.
The young women in the booths turned, as if on command, and began to advance slowly toward Joleen and the blond man. The youth kept tugging at Joleen, then looked up. He saw a dozen young women moving toward him, their faces expressionless, their feet, mostly sandal-clad, scuffing rhythmically in the gravel, like the sound of a railroad locomotive slowly pulling away from a station.
“Hey,” he said. “Okay. Just kidding, you know. I just didn’t want her to…”
They were on him then. Four women in front bore him to the ground with their weight. They sprawled their bodies upon him, pinning him, and then the others moved forward and began to strike at him, at his face and body, with hands and feet.
Joleen hung grimly to the steel wire, murmuring, “Blissful One, oh, most Blissful One.”
The man at the end of the yard looked toward Remo and Chiun and smiled at them, a smile that showed neither warmth nor embarrassment, then clapped his hands twice again.
At the sharp sound, the dozen women who had fallen upon the blond man stopped, rose to their feet, and shuffled back toward their booths.
“You will be gone in an hour,” the man intoned toward the youth who lay bruised and bloody on the gravel of the yard. “You are not worthy of lodging here.”
The man lowered his voice and directed his words toward Joleen. “Come, child of Patna, bliss awaits you.”
As if on command, Joleen rose and walked toward the end of the yard. Remo and Chiun followed.
“And have you business with us?” the man asked Remo.
“We brought her from India,” Remo said. “From Patna.” On a hunch, he flashed the gold shield he had picked up in Patna on the floor of Dor’s Palace.
“Actually,” Chiun said, “we were on our way to Sinanju, but we were stopped by a white man’s promise.”
“Oh, yes, Sinanju,” the man said, a note of confusion in his voice. “Come in.” He nodded knowingly to Remo.
He led them through the door in the fence and through a garden with large, smelly, tropical-appearing flowers, then into the back door of a building and into a large sunlit room that had been carved from four smaller rooms on the first floor of an old home that fronted on another street.
The room was immaculately clean. In it were nine young women, wearing long white gowns that flounced out around them as they sat on the floor, sewing.
They looked up at the four people entering the room.
“Children of bliss,” the man in the pink robe said, clapping his hands to bring them to attention. “These voyagers are from Patna.”
The young women, whose faces were white, whose hair was yellow and brown and black, rose to their feet and suddenly were clustered around Joleen.
“Have you seen him?”
Joleen nodded.
“And shared in his perfection?”
Joleen nodded.
“Make her at home among you,” the man said, and motioned Remo and Chiun to follow him toward a side room.
Behind them was the happy chatter of the young women.
“What of the Master?” one said.
“He is perfect,” said Joleen.
Chiun paused and nodded.
“And what of his perfection?” another asked.
“He is of perfect perfection.”
Chiun nodded again, more vigorously this time.
Jol
een warmed to her work. “He is the wisdom of all wisdom, the Master, the goodness of all that is good.”
Chiun agreed with that.
Remo leaned to him. “Chiun, they’re talking about the maharaji.”
“No,” said Chiun, disbelievingly.
“Yes,” said Remo.
“Americans are all fools.”
As Remo followed the priest and Chiun into the office, he turned. The nine girls had swelled in number to some fifteen. One whispered in Joleen’s ear, and Joleen blushed and nodded. The girl clapped. “You must tell us all.”
“I wanted to go to Holy Patna too,” another girl complained. “But my father took away my Diner’s Club Card.”
“Come,” one girl called to the newer arrivals into the house. “Meet Sister Joleen. She has been to Patna and seen the Master. She has…”
Remo closed the door behind him. The man in the pink robe was sliding behind the desk and graciously waving Chiun and Remo into two soft leather chairs facing it.
“Welcome to our house,” he said. “I am Gasphali Krishna, chief arch-priest of the California district.”
“Where is the Master?” Remo asked.
Krishna shrugged. “All is in readiness for him here. A suite of rooms has been arranged. Even the electronic games for his amusement.”
“Yeah, but where is he?” said Remo.
“We have not talked at all,” said Krishna. “Are you disciples?”
Chiun said, “He is a disciple. I am I.”
“And who is ‘I’?”
“I is a person cheated with promises broken by unfeeling racists.”
“Chiun, will you please?”
“It is true. It is true. Tell him the story, and ask him if it is not true.”
“What is true is that we are here to make sure all is well for the Master’s big thing,” Remo told Krishna. “For that, we came from Patna.”
Chiun laughed softly. “Master,” he said derisively.
“We were told to prepare for his coming,” said Krishna. “But he may be staying elsewhere.”
“In a zoo. With the other frogs,” Chiun mumbled.
“Chiun, would you go outside and talk to the girls? Tell them how wonderful the Master is,” said Remo.
And thus it was that the Master of Sinanju did go out of the office where Remo and a fake Indian were talking nonsense, and he did talk to the young women gathered about there, and he did tell them the absolute truth, as long as one did not get too specific about whom he was talking about.
“What think you of the Master?”
“He is the noblest, warmest, kindest person on earth,” said the Master of Sinanju.
“Is he perfection itself?”
“Some men approach perfection; he has reached it and gone beyond.”
“What is the lesson of his way?”
“Do well and love justice and practice mercy and all will be well with you,” said the Master of Sinanju.
“How may we approach perfection?”
“By listening to his words and acting on his dictates,” said the Master of Sinanju. “That is a jewel of truth I give you.”
“Come. Come hear the wise man. Come learn of the wisdom of the East that recognized the bliss and perfection of the Master.”
Thus did the Master of Sinanju comport himself, while nearby, in the small office behind the closed door, Remo and Krishna continued to talk.
After the door had closed behind Chiun, Krishna had removed the pink turban from his head with a hoisting movement of both hands and a mass of reddish blond frizzy curls had exploded around his head.
“Man, that’s a drag,” he said.
“It’s tough being in charge,” said Remo.
“Nah, I’m not in charge of anything. They just give me a title and 20 percent of anything I bring in. Man, I’m like a salesman for bliss. Hey, where’s that accent from?”
“Newark, New Jersey,” said Remo, annoyed at himself because he was no longer supposed to have an accent.
“Put ’er there, old buddy,” said Krishna. “Hoboken myself. Newark’s changed.”
“So has Hoboken,” said Remo as Krishna grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down.
“How’d you get into this business?” asked Krishna.
“Just kind of drifted in,” said Remo. “You?”
“Well, revolution, man, was out, like they was starting to shoot back. And I didn’t really have much stomach for that Third World bullshit. I mean, I guess you could do something with it if you wanted, but so many bad elements. And then this came along a couple of years ago, so I signed up. Dor wasn’t so big then, and they needed professional organizers. So old Irving Rosenblatt was Johnny-on-the-spot. But it’s like everything else. They start growing, and they’re putting their buttered buns in the best jobs. Hey, you like a drink?”
Remo shook his head.
“Grass or something? I got some great shit in from Hawaii.”
“No,” said Remo. “I’m tapering off.”
“Well, the only thing I hate worse than drinking alone is not drinking.”
He went to a small cabinet, pulled a bottle from behind a string of books, and poured himself a full glass of Scotch. Chivas Regal. He smiled at Remo. “When the peasants pay, ride first class.”
“Everything ready for ‘the big thing?’” asked Remo.
“Damned if I know. That’s why I’m graumed. They make me the boss out here, and I’m in for 20 percent, and I’m not complaining,’cause it’s been pretty good. But now, when we got the big Blissathon coming up, do they let me run it? No, they send in all these hotshots from every place else, and I don’t even get a look.” He angrily gulped at the Scotch. “I know what’s going to happen. They’re going to tell me that the revenue from the Blissathon, man, well that’s not part of the San Francisco receipts, and they’re gonna try to beat me out of my 20 percent.”
“That’s a damn shame,” Remo said. “You mean you haven’t even been in the planning?”
“Not even a smell. Tell me. What’s going to happen? I keep hearing these rumbles about something big.”
Remo shrugged and tried, without too much difficulty, to look unhappy. “Orders, pal. You know how it is.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Krishna, sipping heavily again. “Don’t worry though. The San Francisco mission will be there in all its glory to cheer on old Blissful.”
“You still think the swami’s going to show up here?” asked Remo.
“The swami,” Krishna laughed. “That’s a good one. I don’t know. But we’ve rolled in his ping-pong machine in case he does.”
“I want to congratulate you, by the way,” Remo said. “You run a pretty tight security ship. That was good with the girls out in the yard. With that blond guy.”
“Yeah. Well, the chicks are always your best freedom fighters. It must be a bitch being a woman.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Otherwise, why are they always running around after bullshit? Like looking for some secret thing or some special way that’s going to make everything perfect. What a way to have to live.”
Remo nodded. “I see the silver stripe. You’ve been to Patna, but you seem to have kept your wits about you.”
Krishna finished the glass and poured himself another. “Well, you know what they say, you can’t crap a crapper. Dor’s running the oldest hustle in the books. A little drugs, a lot of sex, and a lot more of make everybody feel good. Wanna blow up your mother? Go ahead. It is the way to bliss. Want to rob your boss or cheat the stockholders? You must if you are to attain bliss.”
“And you?”
“When I went to Patna, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. And it didn’t work. I’ve been on drugs, I’ve had enough sex, and he couldn’t impress me with that. And feeling good? Man, I always feel good. Anyway, I faked it and acted like everybody else, and here I am, a chief arch-priest. And I think they’re gonna try to beat me out of my 20 percent. They better not try. If they do, man, I’
m going into transcendental meditation.”
Remo stood up. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’ll give you a good report on the security here. You’ve got a good operation.”
“Thanks. You fellas have a place to stay?”
Remo shook his head.
“Well, stay here. We’ve got plenty of rooms upstairs. This place used to be a whorehouse.”
“I think we’ll do that,” Remo said. “That way we’ll be close to everything. Particularly if Blissful shows up. Tell me something. How do you get your skin that color?”
“Tanning lotion,” said Krishna, who had put down his glass and was now trying to stuff his hair back under his pink turban. “You know, that chemical crap. Use a lot of it, it’s perfect Indian color. Only thing is when I go to Malibu for the weekends, man, I look like I got yellow jaundice.”
The telephone rang. Krishna cleared his throat, and then, in a mock Indian accent, said, “Divine Bliss Mission, may Krishna bring you happiness?”
He listened, then whistled. “No shit,” he said. “Thanks for calling.”
He hung up the telephone and smiled at Remo. “Christ, I’m glad you’re here.”
“Why?” said Remo.
“We heard a rumble last week that there had been some kind of trouble at the San Diego mission. But everybody was clammed on it. But I just heard. The arch-priest down there, Freddy, done bought the farm. Somebody crushed his neck.”
“Who did it?” asked Remo casually.
“They’re not sure yet. Everybody in the place split so they wouldn’t have to deal with the fuzz.”
“You think it might be an attempt on the maharaji?”
Krishna shrugged. “Who knows? But I’ll tell you, I’m glad you’re here. I don’t need any crazy people going around killing up my folks.”
“Don’t worry,” Remo said. “We’ll protect you.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“What is he, Elton?”
“He’s an Indian.”
“G’wan, Elton, they ain’t no more Indians in this country.”
“Not that kind of Indian. He’s a from India kind of Indian.” Elton Snowy leaned across the cigarette-scarred wooden counter and whispered into the florid ear of the bartender: “Like a nigger, he is.”
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