"No doubt," said Ludmilla who had not been listening to the answer but was very carefully outlining the blemish with her finger. She did not want to aggravate it more by touching it. She found it quite helpful to ignore the crudities of Major Krushenko. In the center of her entire world, this blemish on her body lounged in grievous and grating insolence. And that Krushenko lout claimed she hadn't even seen it at first. Krushenko was a barbarian.
She applied body cream made from Vitamin E, sardine innards, and bleached beet paste, and said a small prayer that this grief be removed from her life. Then she covered herself in a gauze bathrobe and packed her face with warm mud brought from the Caucusus.
It was in this manner, with her eyes closed, that she met with a marshal of the Soviet Socialist Republics, one of the highest ranked KGB officials in the short history of the Communist state. Field Marshal Gregory Denia who had done something quite awesome in Western Europe, something which she had heard about during the gossip of the KGB community, and something which didn't interest her very much. It had to do with the Americans. But didn't everything? When it wasn't the Chinese or someone?
She did not open her eyes when she heard the clomping footsteps of the marshal in the hallway. Major Krushenko greeted the marshal and added congratulations for recent successes.
She heard him enter the sun room where she rested and plop his body heavily in a chair. She smelled the reek of cigars.
"Hello, Ludmilla," said Marshal Denia.
"Good afternoon, Gregory," said Ludmilla.
"I have come on business, my dear."
"And how is uncle Georgi?"
"Georgi is fine," Denia said.
"And Cousin Vladimir?"
"Vladimir is fine."
"And how are you?"
"I am fine, Ludmilla. We have an emergency and now you can repay to the state all that the state has given you. You can do for Mother Russia what armies cannot do, I believe. I am here to call on you to carry the banners of the heroes of Stalingrad and of your people, who will never again have to see their homes and their families brutalized."
"And how are you?" asked Ludmilla.
She heard a fist pound into the sofa on which she had heard Gregory lower himself. He expressed anger. He expressed hostility. He included a veiled threat and made accusations of a lack of gratitude to the state.
"Gregory, Gregory, of course I wish to help. I work for the same committee as you. Why do you show so much anger? You should be more like your executive officer, what's his name?"
"Vassilivich. General Vassily Vassilivich, dead in the line of duty, who has given his life so you may live here in safety where the capitalists cannot wring your neck."
"Yes, Vassilivich. That was his name. How is he?"
She felt the sudden shock of hands upon her very person. Rough palms rubbing off the soothing mud, thick brutal fingers at her neck. Denia was yelling at her.
"You will listen or I will shove your pretty face in a vat of acid. Damn your relatives. You will listen. My units lie strewn across the face of Europe and I am going to annihilate their killers. And you are going to help me or I will crush you."
Ludrnilla shrieked, then cried, then begged for forgiveness, and vowed she would pay attention. Through her tears she asked to be allowed to get fully dressed. She was not prepared for this, she sobbed. She whimpered as Major Krushenko helped her, with a motherly arm, to one of her powder rooms.
Ludmilla thought she detected a small smile of triumph on Major Krushenko's plain face. Inside the powder room, the whimper disappeared. Ludmilla was crisp in her orders. She wanted a plain print dress without bra, a pair of light linen panties, and American cold cream.
She prepared herself in a record thirty five minutes. She reintroduced tears to her eyes before she returned to the sun room.
Marshal Denia stood by one of the large windows, at a pre-boil, looking at his watch. But when he turned and saw the sweet freshness of Ludmilla's beauty and the rim of tears beneath her eyes, and when he heard her soft voice beg forgiveness, the anger vanished like air from a balloon. He nodded curtly.
She held his hands as he talked. He explained about the country's killer teams, and America's, how, after years of stalking, the heroes of the Soviet Socialist Republics had finally seen an opportunity to rid the continent of these murderers, and had struck back brilliantly and quickly.
Alas, it proved to be a trap by the cunning American mind. With the taste of victory in their mouths, the extended units of the peoples' teams, called Treska, had suffered a vicious onslaught by the capitalists, who were using a deadly team of but two men.
But Mother Russia had not bled for centuries to lower the standards of the people before gangsters. Russia was preparing its counterattack, which would be more victorious because of the greater obstacles to overcome.
The difficulties were, first the locating of so small a unit-two men at the most-second, finding out how they did what they did, what secret powers or tools they had. Once that was known, they could be annihilated, and the rightful dominance over intelligence in Europe would go to the superpower indigenous to Europe.
"Europe for the Europeans," said Ludmilla.
"Yes. Absolutely," said Denia, happy that Ludmilla was now listening. He wanted to kiss her beautiful cheeks, but he restrained himself by remembering all his men who were gone.
"And you want me to find out how they do what they do so we can defend ourselves. I can succeed where muscle cannot."
"Correct," said Marshal Denia, delighted:
"I am honored, gracious marshal." And she leaned over and kissed his rough, pudgy cheek, knowing that the neckline of her dress exposed her perfect breasts. She felt his arm reach around and ducked playfully under it.
"We have work now," she said with her "delightful" smile, a middle-range sort of thing used for refusing sexual overtures or a second slice of cake.
Laughingly she ushered him to the door. There would be problems of course. She did not want to have to fend men off until she reached her target man. That tired her so. When the door was shut behind Marshal Denia, Major Krushenko asked Ludmilla what had transpired. She knew they would be packing.
"Assholes got themselves killed and we have to bail them out," said Ludmilla.
"Oh," said Major Krushenko, with absolutely no surprise.
"Denia is in trouble and we're his long shot," said Ludmilla, who had known and understood KGB policy since childhood. Denia had always had a reputation for overextending himself, and, without that bookish Vassilivich to restrain him, he had undoubtedly gotten some of his people wiped out. Or captured. Or something. She hated the family business. It was so boring.
She repacked her face and re-oiled her body, and so spent the rest of the afternoon pleasantly, remaining gorgeous. The blemish was beginning to recede. She was going to be Delilah to America's Samson, whoever the lucky man was.
In America the President got the first good foreign news since the surrender of the Japanese in World War II. The Russian extermination squads known as Treska seemed to have abandoned aggressive activities in Western Europe. The news came from the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Secretary of State looked on. The President read the message and waited for the doctor to leave the Oval Office before commenting.
The Secretary of State said he hoped the cut on the President's forefinger would heal soon.
"Yes," said the President. "Those band-aids have very sharp edges and if you grab them wrong, they can cut like knives."
"Not as sharp as paper, though," said the CIA Director.
"You know," said the President, "the home is the most dangerous place of all. Seventy per cent of all accidents occur in the home."
The Secretary of State, in his urbane manner, decided cautiously and wisely not to ask the President why he had needed a bandaid. He saw a small bottle of burn ointment and an ice cube melting in an ashtray, and he did not want to hear that the President of the United States had burned himself on
ice.
"Well, good news," said the President after the doctor left.
"We don't know why the Treska seems inoperative at this point in time, but they seem to have run into something that bloodied them pretty well," said the CIA Director.
"British, French, who?" asked the Secretary of State.
The CIA Director shrugged. "Who knows? They're not going to tell us anything until those Senate investigations quiet down. Who would want to trust us now?"
"Gentlemen," said the President, "it is neither the British nor the French, and I am not at liberty to say who or what it is, but as I told you at a recent meeting, this matter would be taken care of. And it has."
The Secretary of State wanted to know how. The President said there was no need for the Secretary to know. Nor was there a need for the Director of the CIA to know.
"Whatever did it, we're lucky it's on our side," said the CIA Director.
"And it will stay on our side as long as no one talks about it. Thank you for coming, gentlemen. Good day."
He eased the tight pressure of the bandaid on his finger, then looked up at the back of the Secretary of State.
"Uh, by the way, would you send the doctor back in, please? Thank you," said the President, hiding the new cut on his other hand.
In a three-star Paris hotel rated for its quality and service, Chiun decided to speak on the death of their guest of a few days, Vassily something with the funny name, the nice Russian boy.
He knew why Remo had killed the sweet, respectful young man.
"He was a KGB general, Little Father. He was the last of the Treska killers. That's what Smitty sent us over here to do."
Chiun slowly and precisely shook his head. His frail beard hardly moved with his head.
"No, that may be why Smith will believe you killed, but I know the true happiness you had."
"Happiness?" said Remo. He checked out the bathroom. The tub was much deeper than any in America, and there was a sitting bowl that looked almost like a toilet, except it had two water faucet handles and a metal tube sticking up. It was for women. The hotel's name was Letutia. The ceilings were high, and the closets were not in the wall but separate dark wood pieces with legs. "Happiness?"
"Happiness," said Chiun.
"It was work," said Remo. "We went to the one known location of the Treska, grabbed a piece of it, and unraveled. Hey, you know how women use this thing?" Remo asked. He played with the faucet handles at the back of the almost toilet. He reasoned that it took some skill. The water went squirting up. A lot of skill.
"You enjoyed your work because the nice young Vassily showed proper respect. His teachers must have been very proud of him. He must have given them much joy, for in Russia they could say, this is my student and he has given me much joy. Not like in some other countries where those who give the greatest knowledge are abused and ignored and generally discarded."
"What is wrong?" asked Remo.
"When I recited Ung Poetry to you, you merely left the room."
"I never heard of Ung Poetry."
"Of course. Like diamonds thrown into mud before the worm. The worm slithers over great beauty as but a sharp obstacle. You never heard because you never listened. You do not know languages or kings. You do not know the names of the Masters of Sinanju in their proper order, or who begat whom. You were eating animal fat meats on soft decayed bread when I found you, and you do not know who is where or what is why, but rumble along in your dark cloud of ignorance."
"I listen. I've been training more than ten years now. I do what you tell me. I think like you tell me. Sometimes I'm beginning to think I am you. Everything you say I respect. This is so. I have never gone against you."
"Then let us do honor to the Masters of Sinanju. We will start with the first Master who came from the caves of the mist."
"Almost everything," said Remo, who remembered some of the early sessions where he had tried to get down who was whose father and who was whose mother, and they had all sounded overbearingly repetitious and unimportant. At that time, Chiun had said that Remo could not learn, because his training was starting too late in life.
"Vassilivich would have learned," said Chiun. "He was a good boy. In my history of my mastership, I shall call myself 'teacher of the ungrateful.' "
Remo turned on the television set. It jutted out of the wall on a platform just above his head. There was a picture of Charles De Gaulle talking. It was a film of his life. He did not understand French. Chiun did.
If Chiun's baggage had not been misplaced in shipping, Chiun would have had his own television programs which he could run on tape. Lately, however, he had been looking mostly at reruns. America, he said, had desecrated its own pure art form, turning it into filth and violence and the reality of everyday life. After that, Remo could not convince Chiun that every American family did not harbor in its midst a dope addict, a child beater, a leukemia victim, a crooked mayor, and a daughter who'd had an abortion.
Chiun looked at De Gaulle's image and told Remo to turn off the television. "There was never any work from that man," he said. "Now the Bourbon kings, ah, they knew how to employ an assassin. France was always a good place until the animals took over." Chiun shook his head sadly. He sat in the middle of the floor on the soft brown carpeting before the two large beds. By "animals taking over," Chiun meant the French Revolution of 1789. Every French president after that remained to Chiun a wide-eyed radical.
"I give up," said Remo. "When did I fail to properly listen to your Ung poetry? I never heard it."
"I was reciting it to that nice Vassilivich boy."
"Oh, that stuff," Remo said. "I don't understand Ung."
"Neither does the carpet or the wood of the closets," said Chiun. With a great sigh, he said he must now explain Paris to Remo, only praying that Remo would remember some of what he had been told.
Downstairs in the lobby of the Letutia, Chiun had a small argument with the concierge about something. Chiun silenced him with a word.
Remo asked what the argument was about.
"If you understood French, you would know," Chiun said.
"Well, I don't understand French."
"Then you do not know," said Chiun as if that pleasantly explained it all.
"But I want to know," said Remo.
"Then learn French," said Chiun. "Real French, not the garbage spoken today."
The street was the Boulevard Raspail. Two elderly woman sold sweets and crépes in a small white stall on a corner. A man in a dark limousine did a quick double take on Remo and Chiun. The car pulled over to the curb across the intersection. Remo saw the man lift a small camera to the back window. Remo did not recognize the man but the man obviously was looking for someone who looked like them.
By the time they had walked across one of the graceful wide bridges that spanned the dark Seine, Remo knew the confusion had ended. There were two tails, both young men, following, and three more staked out on the far side of the bridge. It was not hard to tell a tail, because he locked into your rhythms instead of his own.
A tail could be reading a newspaper, looking at a river, or gazing at the outside of the mangificent Louvre that Remo and Chiun now were approaching. No matter what he was doing, he was really locked with you. Eyes did not focus properly, or something. Remo could not quite explain it. He had tried once to tell Smith about it, but he had fallen back on "you just know."
"But how do you know?" Smith had asked.
"When a person really reads a newspaper, he does things differently."
"But what?"
"I don't know. It's different. Like right now, I know I only have part of your mind. Most people can't hold a single thought for more than a second. Minds are jumpy. But a tail has to keep his mind still. I don't know. Just take my word for it. You can tell."
So it was spring in Paris, and Remo caught a couple of smiles from a couple of beautiful women, and he returned them, but in such a way as to acknowledge their loveliness but decline their invi
tation.
Chiun called this a typical American sex fiend way of looking at things. He too noticed the tails. But as they approached the Louvre, and as Chiun looked into a window, he emitted a low wail. "Ung poetry, Little Father?"
"No," said Chiun. "What have they done to the Louvre? What have they done? The animals!" Chiun covered his eyes. He made a fast check with marks on the bends of the River Seine, repeating all the descriptions given in the history of Sinanju, and yes, it was the place, and the animals that had followed the Bourbons had crassly turned the place into a museum.
People even had to pay to enter now. What disgust.
Remo saw the gilt ceilings, the rococo marble, the paint on paint, and he thought, "If this weren't the world famous museum, it would be in bad taste." It was just too much. Chiun shuffled through the crowds, checking one spacious room after another. Here a prince had slept. Here the king had entertained briefly. Here was where the king's advisors had held councils of war and peace. Here a great festival had been held. Here was where the king's mistress had slept. Here the Count de Ville had planned to assassinate the king. And what had they done? That had not only remodeled the beautiful palace-one of the true art forms of the world, like American dramas used to be-but they had strewn the whole place with ugly pictures and statues. Garbage. The animals had turned the palace into a garbage heap.
Chiun slapped a gendarme who was so surprised by the little Oriental that he merely blinked.
"Animals," shrieked Chiun. "Degenerate animals." They had not only destroyed a palace, they had made a chapter of the history of Sinanju obsolete. Chiun had always wanted to see Paris, especially for this palace so well described by his ancestors, but now the mobs had ruined it.
"What mobs?" asked Remo.
"Everyone after Louis the Fourteenth." And even he, according to Chiun, had not been all that gracious. He confided to Remo that he was glad Charles the Fifth was not alive to see it now.
A prim nun in a gray suit and a short black bonnet led a line of well-scrubbed little girls with blue blazers and school emblems, carrying small locked briefcases. They pattered down the hall like cute, prim ducks in a row.
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