“Exactly,” said Remo. “He’s trapped by his devotion to this ugly hunk of stone back here. I’ve got him.”
“I’d rather be him,” said Valerie, and she lowered her head into her hands and moaned about how she always met them. From the man in Paterson, New Jersey, who had to strap on a five foot medieval sword before he could get it up, to the Brooklyn dishwasher who had to lather her up with foaming Liquicare before he would do it. And now, the worst. Locked in a disguised safe with a guy who thinks the outside world is trapped because they have a rock inside with them.
“Why do I always meet them?” screamed Valerie, and she knew her screams would not be heard because the whole freaking room was lined with lead. They had even sealed off the beautiful north windows. Willingham had muttered something about protection from the north wind as though the ugly box of a rock was going to catch a headcold.
“Why me, Lord?” cried Valerie Gardner. “Why me?”
“Why not you?” asked Remo just as logically, and when he tried to comfort her with his hands, she shrugged away, saying she would rather do it with a walrus in aspic than with Remo.
Her anger turned to boredom and she started yawning. She asked Remo what time it was.
“Late,” he said. “We’ve been here about five hours and forty-three minutes. It’s eight-thirty-two and fourteen seconds.”
“I didn’t see you look at a watch,” Valerie said.
“I’m the best watch there is,” said Remo.
“Oh, great,” said Valerie, and she curled up in front of the stone and dozed off. An hour later, the square metal slab locking them in raised with a whirring sound. Valerie woke up. Remo smiled.
“Mr. Willingham, thank god,” said Valerie, and then she shook her head. Mr. Willingham was nude except for a loincloth and a draping of yellow feathers in a robe around his body. He carried a stone knife in front of him. Six men followed him. Two ran to Valerie, throwing her to the floor and pinning her arms. The other four rushed to Remo, two grabbing one foot each and the other two going for his wrists.
“Hi, fellas,” Remo said. He let himself be lifted. They brought him to the very top of the stone called Uctut. Willingham approached, the knife held high. He spoke in a language Remo couldn’t recognize. It sounded like stone clicking against stone, popping sounds with the tongue of a language kept in secret over the centuries.
“Your heart will not recompense your foul deed for it is not enough for the desecration you have performed,” said Willingham in English.
“I thought I improved the stone,” Remo said.
“No, Mr. Willingham, no,” cried Valerie. The two men stuffed part of their robes in her mouth.
“You may save yourself pain if you tell us the truth,” said Willingham.
“I like pain,” Remo said.
The man on his right wrist was gripping too tightly and would lose control of his strength shortly. The one on the left was too loose, and the men at Remo’s feet had no protection from his yanking his legs back and driving their ribcages into their intestines if he wished. He did not wish—yet.
“If you do not give me the information I seek, we will kill the girl,” said Willingham.
“That’s even better than giving me pain. I can live with that,” said Remo.
“We will kill her horribly,” said Willingham.
“What will be will be,” said Remo philosophically.
He glanced down over the stone edge to the floor, where Valerie tried desperately to shake loose. Her face turned purple in fear and rage and hysteria.
“Let her go,” said Remo, “and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“Why you did this awful thing and everything?” asked Willingham.
“And even where you can reach Joey 172,” said Remo.
“We know where we can reach Joey 172. We’ve known since the day after he did his horror. It is for the American people to make restitution, not us. Uctut wants proper restitution, not for his priests to soil their hands with unclean blood, but for the people of the offender to offer up to us the offender. To make the sacrifice through our hands but not by our hands.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” said Remo, feigning an air of enlightenment. “Through your hands but not by your hands. Now everything is crystal as cement. Through, not by. Why are we even arguing? Why didn’t I see this before? And here I was thinking it was simple revenge.”
“We have restored the sacrifices and will continue to do so until America acts properly,” said Willingham.
“Would you like the Attorney General to hold down Joey 172 while the Secretary of State rips out his heart? Like you did to the congressman and Mrs. Delpheen?”
“They were in charge of monuments here at the museum. They refused my request to station guards in this room. And thus the desecration followed. It was their failure.”
“Just who the hell do you expect to take this revenge for the writing on the stone?” Remo asked. “The FBI, the CIA? The Jersey City Police Department?”
“You have secret agencies. It could be done. We know it could be done. But your government has to realize what it has allowed to happen and then set about making amends. We would have allowed your government to do this quietly. Your government has done this before, many times and secretly. But your government has not acted to avenge the insult upon Uctut.”
Remo noticed that Willingham held the stone knife in a strange grip. The back of the thumbnail drove the handle tight against the inside pads of the other fingers. From Orient to Western Europe, there was no grip like it. Not the Mecs in Paris or the stiletto in Naples. Even the many variations of tuck fist grip so prevalent in the American west, never used the thumb as the compressor. And yet this was a highly logical grip for a blade, allowing a good downward stroke.
Remo saw it coming from Willingham’s flabby stomach, the slight twitch that meant he was getting his back into the thrust. And then he stopped at the top of the stroke as if generating power, which would be logical because a stone knife needed tremendous force to crack a chestbone.
“Now,” said Willingham, his body tightened like a spring on the flicker of explosion. “Who sent you?”
“Snow White and the seven dwarfs. Or is it dwarves?”
“We will mutilate Valerie.”
“You’d do that to your assistant?”
“I would do anything for my Uctut.”
“Why do you call it Uctut? What does Uctut mean?” asked Remo.
“It is not the real name of the stone, but it is the name that men are privileged to speak,” said Willingham. “We will mutilate Valerie.”
“Only if you promise to start with her mouth,” said Remo.
The stone knife hitched and started down with Willingham’s shoulder under it. The thrust was perfect, except the body didn’t cooperate. For the first time since the great stone had been served by the people of the Actatl, an Actatl knife struck the stone itself.
Remo’s two feet yanked back, drawing the robed priests with them, and when his heels drove into their chests, they were going forward into the blows. Blood exploded out of their mouths with bits of lung. The two men holding his arms felt themselves yanked over his body, and Remo was on his feet, softly on the pedestal as the Actatl knife committed the sacrilege of striking Uctut, the stone which it served.
Using thumbs brought together from a wide inward arc, Remo caught the soft temples of the two men pinning Valerie. The thumbs went in up to the index fingers, touched hair, and then squished out. The men were dead in the midst of holding, and they looked up dumbly, their eyes focused on eternity, their minds shattered midthought.
The men who had held Remo’s arms were still dazed, crawling on the floor, looking for their balance. Remo snapped one vertebra on one man, and he suddenly stopped crawling and flattened out on the floor. His legs stopped responding, and shortly thereafter his brain stopped, too.
Remo dropped the other man with a short shattering chop to the forehead. The bl
ow itself did not kill. It was designed to use the thick part of the skull as fragments, driving them into the frontal lobes. It did the job without getting the hands sticky.
Remo wiped his thumbs off on the golden feathers of the robe. He noticed the knots tying the feathers into the cape were strange. He had never seen knots like that before. He knew something about knots, too.
Valerie spit feathers out of her mouth. She coughed. She brushed herself off. She spit again.
“Fucking lunatics,” she muttered.
Remo went over to Willingham who leaned against the stone like a man having a heart attack. His cheek pressed against the uppermost bird, his robe drawn tightly over his chest.
“Hi,” said Remo. “Now we can talk.”
“With my own hand I have desecrated Uctut,” moaned Willingham.
“Now let’s start at the beginning,” said Remo. “This stone is Uctut, right?”
“This stone is the life of my fathers and their fathers before them. This stone is my people. In many skins and many colors are my people because you would not let us keep our own skins and our own hair and our own eyes. But our souls have never changed, and they reside in the infinite strength of our beautiful god, who is eternal and one with his people, who serve him.”
“You’re talking about the rock?” asked Remo.
“I talk about that which is us.”
“All right,” said Remo. “We got the rock is holy. And you people are the Actatl and you worship it, right?”
“Worship? You make it sound like lighting some candle or not playing with women. You do not know worship until your very life is sacrifice.”
“Right, right,” said Remo. “Moving right along, we know you killed the congressman and Mrs. Delpheen. What I don’t know is why I never heard of you guys before.”
“Our protection was your lack of knowledge of us.”
“You keep talking about other skins. What does that mean?”
“You would not let us keep our own skins. If I were brown with high cheekbones as once the Actatl were, would I be a director of this museum? Would DeSen or DePanola be ranking generals in the armies of France and Spain?”
“They’re Actatl, too?” said Remo.
“Yes,” said Willingham. He looked past Remo at the bodies on the floor, and his voice trailed off like an echo. “They came with me.”
“I don’t think they’re ranking now,” said Remo, glancing at the stone dead stillness of the bodies, limp as leftover string beans.
“Would we have been able to worship our precious and awesome stone in your society? People are not allowed to worship stones.”
“I take it you’ve never been to the Vatican or the Wailing Wall or Mecca,” said Remo.
“Those are symbols. They do not worship them. This stone god we worship and would never have been allowed to love and serve it as we do.”
“Are there a lot of you Actatl?”
“Enough,” said Willingham. “Always enough. But we made a mistake.”
“Yeah?”
“We did not find out who you were.”
“I’m your friendly neighborhood assassin,” said Remo.
“They will find you and destroy you. They will tear your limbs. They will obliterate you. For we Actatl have survived over the centuries and we are strong and we are many and we are disguised.”
“You’re also as floppy as dandelions.” said Remo. He noticed the separations in Willingham’s lower teeth oozed red, threatening to spill over his lower lip.
“We will survive. We have survived five hundred years,” said Willingham, and he smiled, releasing the dam of blood over his lips, and let his yellow feathered robe slide from his shoulders. The handle of the stone knife, a round block of chipped stone, stuck from his belly and underneath his heart. Willingham, who was so expertly trained to rip out the hearts of others, had missed his own and was bleeding to death.
“I have bad news for you,” said Remo. “I come from a house thousands of years old. While your Actatl had yet to use the stone, Sinanju was. Before Rome, Sinanju was. Before the Jews wandered in the desert, Sinanju was.”
“You have taken other skins, too, to survive?” Willingham hissed.
“No,” said Remo.
“Eeeedh,” cried Willingham. “We are doomed.”
“Hopefully,” said Remo. “Now where is your headquarters?”
And then Willingham smiled his death smile. “We are not doomed. Thank you for telling me so.”
Willingham went down in a mess of blood and feathers as though he were a goose caught at close range by double barrels of birdshot. Valerie spat the last feather out of her mouth.
“You were going to let them mutilate me, weren’t you?”
“Only your mouth,” said Remo.
“Men are turds,” yelled Valerie.
“Shhh,” said Remo. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You’re damned right. I’m calling the police.”
“I’m afraid you’re not,” said Remo and touched a spot on the left side of her throat. She tried to speak, but all that came out was a dry gurgle.
Remo led her from the room. Under a painting on the wall outside he found the switch that lowered the steel door. He heard it thump and click into place, then he closed the wooden outside doors. On the door he hung a sign he took from a nearby men’s room: CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.
Then Remo led Valerie from the darkened, closed-for-the-night museum and delivered her to the hotel where Chiun and he were staying at Fifty-ninth Street and Columbus Circle. Then he massaged her throat in such a way that her voice came back.
· · ·
Chiun sat in the middle of the living room of the suite. Bobbi Delpheen practiced her new forehand stroke, allowing the racket to float into an imaginary ball.
“You here for tennis lessons, too?” Bobbi asked Valerie.
“The world is mad,” shrieked Valerie.
“Shut up or your voice goes again,” said Remo.
“They’ve got a great system,” Bobbi reassured the worried Valerie. “You don’t hit the ball. The racket hits it.”
Quietly, Valerie began to cry. She would have preferred screaming, but she did not like being voiceless.
Remo spoke softly to Chiun. He told him of the stone. He told him of the new grip on the knife. He told him of Willingham’s sudden last joy when he had asked for the location of the Actatl headquarters.
Chiun thought a moment.
“That lunatic Smith has led us into ruin,” he said.
“You saying we should run?”
“The time to run has passed. The time to attack has begun. Except we cannot attack. He smiled when you asked about his headquarters because I am sure he does not have one. We are set against the worst of all enemies, the formless unknown.”
“But if they are unknown to us, we are unknown to them, Little Father,” said Remo.
“Perhaps,” said Chiun. “Once, many of what you call your centuries ago, there was a Master, and he did disappear for many years, and the stories were told that he had gone to a new world, but he was not believed because he was much given to exaggeration.”
“So?”
“I must search my memory,” said Chiun, “and see if something there may help us.” And he was quiet. Very quiet.
“Can I talk now?” said Valerie.
“No,” said Remo. Valerie started crying again.
Remo looked out over the night lights of Central Park. His plan had worked so well until Willingham. When you grabbed hold of an organization, you planned on working your way to the top. You didn’t expect someone to kill himself along the way and break the chain.
Remo walked away from the window. Chiun had often warned him against thinking too much, lest his greater senses be dulled to the subtleties of the moment.
And in this way Remo did not see the binoculars trained on the window of his hotel suite. He did not see the man raise a rifle, then lower it.
“I can’t mi
ss,” said the man to another person in the room across the street from Remo’s.
“Wait until you’re inside the room. We want his heart,” said the other man.
“Willingham probably couldn’t miss either. But this guy came out of the museum and Willingham didn’t,” the second man said.
“I still can’t miss.”
“Wait until you’re inside his room. We want his heart,” said the second man. “When we get the word.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE SPECTACULAR FAILURE AT the Museum of Natural History was outlined in detail to a senior vice-president of a computer company branch office, Paris, Rue St. Germain.
Monsieur Jean Louis Raispal deJuin, vice-president for corporate development of international data and research, nodded with all the feigned interest his finely etched patrician face could muster. Uncle Carl, from the German side of the family, had always been rather peculiar and one had to be patient with him. Jean Louis reacted instinctively with the politeness beaten into him by his governess and ordered by his mother, who had always said one could not choose one’s family, but one could certainly choose one’s manners.
So Jean Louis listened on about all sorts of mayhem and two formidable Americans, except one was an Oriental, and all the while his mind worked at an adjustment he would make in a research team that was stymied by a computer problem.
Occasionally he glanced out at Rue St. Germain with its bookshops and restaurants. He had always considered his university days his happiest, and since his work was entirely cerebral and could be done anywhere, the firm had allowed him to select the office site and furnishings, which were largely Napoleonic period combined with Chinese. The ornate gilded forms mixed so well. Robust, mother had called them.
Uncle Carl sat on a chair, ignoring the center extended portion of the seat, which allowed men to sit sideways so that their sword pommels could hang conveniently across their laps. Uncle Carl sweated like a stuffed red sausage this fine autumnal day, and Jean Louis wished he would suggest a walk, perhaps in the direction of Invalides, where Napoleon was buried, along with all those who had directed la belle France in one disastrous war after another. Uncle Carl liked those things. Even though he often railed about things European and often trailed off into some South American nonsense. This was surprising because Uncle Carl was an ardent Nazi, and it had taken awesome family pull to get him off unindicted by the War Crimes panels. Fortunately Cousin Geoffrey was a lieutenant general on Field Marshal Montgomery’s staff and Uncle Bill was in the American OSS.
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