Next Of Kin td-46

by Warren Murphy

  The Dutchman held out the scrap of paper on which Pierre had written the address of the villa. "This is where they're staying, you say?"

  Pierre tried to speak, but his throat felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. He nodded mutely, his eyes wide and bulging. Lordie, what a mistake. Something was wrong in this place. It was cold here, and too still. It reminded him of old Mr. Potts's mausoleum in the cemetery, where Pierre and his cousin had broken in when they were boys. Cold and stale and motionless, like the Dutchman himself. He was like a ghost, that one, dressed in white and moving and talking, but dead all the same.

  Pierre avoided the ice-blue eyes as the Dutchman eased himself languidly toward another door. He walked like a cat, Pierre noticed. Not a sound, not a ripple in the white satin smoking jacket he wore. He gestured with his hands. An olive-skinned servant came in silently carrying a silver tray with a bottle and a glass.

  "Sherry, Mr. LeFevre?" the Dutchman asked. "I'm afraid I can't join you, but I'm told it's very good."

  "N-n-n-n—" Speech had long since left Pierre.

  "No? Very well. I thought it might warm you. After all, it's quite cold outside."

  Pierre managed a lopsided grin. Cold? It was eighty-five in the shade.

  "Don't you feel it?"

  Who was this honky kidding? Good thing the Dutchman wasn't drinking. That boy had to be nuttier than Fabienne's old man was the day he flew off Easter Cliff. Then again, there was a definite chill in the air.

  "You're shivering. Would you like a sweater?"

  Pierre shook his head emphatically. This nigger cutting out of here like a jet engine, man. He skittered toward the doorway. How he would find his way out of the castle was another story, but... Jesus, it was freezing!

  "Before you go, I'd like to pay you for your trouble," the Dutchman said. He reached into the pocket of his smoking jacket and pulled out two hundred-dollar bills. Tentatively, Pierre accepted them. He screamed once, and they dropped fluttering to the floor. They were like slabs of ice. The Dutchman cocked his head, amused, as Pierre bolted down the corridors of the castle.

  He rubbed the gooseflesh on his arms as he barreled down one dark hallway after another. His breath came in ghostly clouds. He'd seen movies of people breathing in the cold, their breath misty and white, but this was the Caribbean. Nobody was cold here. That was the deal, wasn't it, God? No money, but no icicles either. Oh, Lordie, he should never have stolen the Jeep. He should never have come to the castle. Him what looks on the golden boy of Devil's Mountain... Mother, he was going to lose his mind, just like old Soubise. Once he got out of this hellhole, he was going to lock himself up in his room for five days with a gallon of Potts Rum, just to make sure he wouldn't, in his madness, go sailing off to outer space.

  Far off, he heard the distant creaking of a door. That had to be the front entrance. He remembered the front door to the castle, two huge, medieval slabs bolted together with iron, overlooking a bridge across the castle's moat.

  When he reached it, the door stood open. Pierre gasped at the sight outside. An ice storm was blowing with the strength of a hurricane, the shriveled palm trees bent over at 90-degree angles. Their leaves crackled and slapped together, pointing like the fingers of banshees down Devil's Mountain.

  "Oh, Lord, no," Pierre whispered. His eyes moistened. He felt the tears harden to ice on his skin. He stepped onto the bridge, squatting low against the terrible wind that seemed to come from the castle looming behind him. A gust of hail pulled up the thin fabric of his shirt and lashed at his back like bullets.

  Somewhere down there was the Jeep, but the ice storm was too thick to see beyond his nose. Somewhere was...

  Someone was coming.

  He could make out a dim outline against the soupy hail. Whoever it was had spotted him.

  "Pierre," the voice called. It sounded oddly cheerful.

  "Here! I'm here!" He tried to run forward, but his legs had grown stiff and numb, and he tumbled onto his stomach. Oh, so tired. He tried to push himself up from the ground. His fingers popped at the knuckles. The skin on his hands cracked. The blood froze into brown crystals. "Over here," he rasped. The man was running. He would find him.

  Pierre closed his eyes to the wind. He would never open them again.

  "Pierre?" Remo said, feeling for a pulse in the black man's neck. There was none. He turned over the body. It was soaked with perspiration. Pierre must have been running for some time in the sweltering afternoon heat. Maybe his heart had given out.

  He picked up one of Pierre's hands. The skin had been bleeding, and the knuckles were snapped. Was he tortured? Then he saw the fingernails. That was funny. The skin beneath them was blue.

  Blue? He looked over Pierre's corpse again, noticing the dry, cracked skin, the sores around the eyes, the blue flesh beneath the fingernails. It was insane.

  It was ninety degrees out here. The palms drooped sullenly from the heat. The wispy grass was dry and patched with brown.

  And Pierre LeFevre had frozen to death.

  ?Twelve

  Inside the castle, the Dutchman bowed low to his visitor. Chiun returned the bow.

  "I am honored with your presence," the young man said. "All my life have I waited to meet you."

  "It saddens me to meet you," the old Oriental said. "Your work is most promising. This meeting brings me no joy."

  "Why?"

  "You know why. I have come to kill you," Chiun said.

  "And I was born to kill you, Master of Sinanju."

  The two men nodded again to each other, and the Dutchman led Chiun to an airy, well-furnished room bounded on three sides by immense French windows that led to wide balconies where orchids of every color grew. "This is the only comfortable room in the castle," the Dutchman said. "I thought perhaps we could talk for a moment before beginning. I have wanted to ask you many questions over the years." The pale eyes were searching and humble.

  "You may ask, but I cannot in a few moments teach you the true way. Not after you have spent a lifetime embracing falsehood," Chiun said simply.

  "The Master Nuihc was not false!" The Dutchman rose angrily, his cheeks aflame. "He saved me from disaster."

  "So he could lead you into a dark tunnel from which there is no escape, and even more certain disaster."

  "That's enough!" In a high corner of the room, a painted lamp exploded into sparkles of glass. Chiun watched it break and splinter, untouched. He looked at the Dutchman.

  "You were wise to come alone," the young man said.

  "This concerns me and you. Not my son."

  The Dutchman's face was dark with fury. "Your son! In the same way that Remo is your son, so was Nuihc a father to me. You destroyed that father."

  "He was an evil force that sought only personal gain. Nuihc cared nothing..."

  There was an agitated knock on the door. Sanchez burst in, gesturing wildly.

  "What?" the Dutchman growled. "He is here?"

  The mute pointed toward an eastern-facing window. Chiun stepped over to it. On the path below, Remo was climbing up Devil's Mountain.

  "No," Chiun called. "Go back, Remo!"

  Remo looked up, making no acknowledgment that he had seen Chiun, then continued his march up the hill.

  The Dutchman's jaw worked nervously. "He has come to help you," he said, amazed.

  "Go away. I don't want you. I told you I was finished with you, white thing."

  Remo didn't answer.

  "Do not open the gates to him. Send him away," Chiun pleaded. "He has no part in this. Leave him alone."

  "He is a true son," the Dutchman said, his voice heavy with sadness. "Clearly you have tried to turn him from you to keep him from danger. But he would die for you. And so he will."

  The drawbridge lowered over the fetid, murky green water of the moat. As the enormous oak doors opened, Remo glimpsed a double file of beautiful women standing at attention inside.

  "Hello, ladies," he said pleasantly. The girls devoured him with their eyes.


  At the end of the line, the mute came forward and led him up a long, curving staircase to the room where Chiun waited with the Dutchman. Remo and the Dutchman stood looking at each other.

  "I'm Remo."

  "I am Jeremiah Purcell." Neither offered a handshake.

  "Why have you come?" Chiun asked in anguish.

  Remo looked at the old man for a moment before speaking. "I thought you might need me," he said.

  The Dutchman flushed again. "We were just having a chat. Would you care for some tea? I know you don't drink."

  Remo started to shake his head, but Chiun said, "I would like some tea."

  "Very well." He gestured to Sanchez, who stood by the door, and the mute disappeared. In a few moments he reappeared with a lacquer tray bearing three Korean porcelain cups and a teapot made of red clay. Remo sat down.

  "That is from Sinanju," Chiun said, eyeing the teapot.

  "It was a gift from my father," the Dutchman answered. He added quietly, "That is, I found it here."

  "Was that Nuihc?"

  "You seem surprised. Did you think you were the only person in the world to inherit the teachings of Sinanju?"

  "Yeah," Remo said. "That's what I was told. I was told a lot of things. But that wasn't what surprised me. You called him Father. Nuihc didn't strike me as the fatherly kind, that's all."

  The Dutchman poured the tea and passed the tiny unhandled cups to Remo and Chiun. "He was not, perhaps, the image of a father one would hold. He was a... stern man."

  Remo and Chiun exchanged glances.

  "But he saved me from a life of imprisonment and scrutiny. You see, I am no ordinary assassin."

  "No," Remo said, "Nuihc was a baboon, so you're the son of a baboon."

  Purcell sipped his tea. At the moment when he lowered his eyes, Chiun hurled his teacup, still full of steaming liquid, toward him. The Dutchman reached up lazily and caught it just in front of his face, careful not to spill a drop.

  "As I was saying, I am no ordinary assassin. And not a baboon. You will not defeat me by surprise, Chiun." He handed the cup back to him gently with both hands.

  Chiun said calmly, "Apologies for the rudeness."

  "Quite all right. I would have done the same myself if I were not certain you would catch the cup."

  "This is so sweet," Remo said, "that you're both making me sick."

  "How old are you, my son?" Chiun asked the Dutchman. Remo flinched at the words.

  "I am twenty-four years old. I was not to do battle with you until my twenty-fifth year, but circumstances..." He shrugged.

  "You are not ready," Chiun said.

  The Dutchman set his teacup down. "I am ready. The Master's will has brought you to me, and I will avenge him."

  "Hi ho, Silver," Remo said. "You forget, pal. There are two of us."

  The Dutchman smiled. "But you don't count," he said. "I may come to this confrontation a year before my time, but Chiun is many ages past his. He is a has-been. You, on the other hand, are a never-was."

  Remo stood up.

  "Stop, stop," Chiun said. "We have no time for insults, and no energy to spare. There is no need for any of us to die sweaty. I wish to know about you, Jeremiah."

  Remo walked to the windows and gazed out at the balconies and the terraced lawns below as the Dutchman told Chiun about the farm, his parents, the incident with the pig, the day on the train. Remo agreed enviously that it had been an extraordinary life. Maybe springing full-grown into the training of Sinanju, as Remo had done after years of dissipation, couldn't stand up to the kind of training the Dutchman had had— year after year of strict study since childhood. And Chiun, for all his nagging perfectionism, had allowed Remo to make mistakes. His bent elbow, for one. Nuihc would have allowed no mistakes.

  No wonder Chiun thought the Dutchman was such a prize. He was perfect, the prick. Remo began to feel the loose stirrings of self-doubt.

  "He sent me to school in Switzerland," the Dutchman was saying. "I was good in languages. At times I thought I might graduate like any other student and work as a translator. I think I might have liked that." For a moment, the icy eyes thawed, remembering a time long gone when hope was still something that belonged to everyone, even the Dutchman.

  "And?" Chiun asked.

  The eyes retreated behind their glacial façade again. "It was not my destiny," he said. "The school found out about my unusual abilities."

  "The exploding lamp?" Chiun asked.

  He nodded.

  "What about Pierre?" Remo asked from the windows. "He froze to death. In this weather."

  "Sometimes it's hard for me to control this...this thing." Purcell looked apologetically at the old man. "I won't use it with you, though. We'll fight fairly."

  "Let Pierre tell you how fair he is," Remo said.

  The Dutchman pretended not to hear. "When the school found out, they put me in a special room with no exits, and they brought in a team of doctors and scientists to poke and probe at me. They never let me rest, always sticking me with needles and trying drugs on me."

  "Poor little stinkums," Remo said. "They just wouldn't let you kill people in peace, like all the other homicidal maniacs."

  The Dutchman colored deeply, but continued. "After six months, I managed to escape during one of my supervised outings. I ran for the communications office and signaled Nuihc in Lisbon. Two days later he arrived and demolished the place. There's no trace of the school now. Then he brought me here, to train. And wait for you. He hated and feared you, you know. I never saw him again."

  Chiun put down his teacup with a silvery tinkle. "I never knew Nuihc had adopted an heir. And why? He held no ties to anyone, as far as I knew."

  The Dutchman stooped slightly. "I don't think I was his heir. You see, he never expected to die. But he wanted a partner with my mental abilities. That was why he trained me. In the end, he wasn't able to use me."

  "I suppose you know what Nuihc would have done to you once your usefulness got in his way," Remo said.

  "You swine!" The Dutchman moved his arm in a sweeping arc. Remo felt a hundred knives come crashing in on his bad leg where the python had crushed it. He buckled, gasping, to the floor.

  "You gave your word," Chiun spat, rushing over to Remo.

  "To you. To you alone. Not to untrained vermin like him."

  "Our talk is finished," the old man said. He cradled Remo's head in his hands.

  "I'm all right," Remo said between clenched teeth. "Don't fight him without me."

  Chiun whispered softly into Remo's ear. "I must. That was why I left you at the shipyard. He is too much for you. I have trained your body, but his weapon is his mind. He promises not to use his power, but he cannot keep that promise, because Nuihc, in all his teaching, did not teach him right from wrong. We must not allow him to kill us both at once, Remo. If he kills me, then you must fight him. Not before."

  "I can't let that happen," Remo groaned.

  "I hope I have taught you right from wrong," Chiun said. "Obey me, for the good of us both." He stood.

  The Dutchman nodded to Sanchez. The mute helped Remo off the floor and led him, limping, down a long corridor. Remo looked back. Chiun was watching him silently. When Remo was out of sight, Chiun spoke.

  "You call Nuihc your father. Did he ever refer to you as his son?"

  The Dutchman looked at him sharply. "What gives you the right to ask such a question?"

  "As I thought. And so, when I say that Remo is my son and that I love him, does that make you wish to harm him?"

  "He is nothing. Nothing compared with me."

  "And still no one will call you 'son.' " The hazel eyes shone with pity. "You could have been fine, Jeremiah Purcell. But now you will be dead. Fatherless and dead."

  The Dutchman stood stock still, his breathing heavy. Working to keep his face expressionless, he pointed to the four corners of the room. As if commanded, a thick fog inexplicably rolled in from the corners. It covered the floor and curled its way up the walls
. "Poison gas," he hissed.

  "Nuihc taught you well in his skills of lying and treachery. You cannot keep your word, can you? So important is it that I see your power and your worth." He shook his head sadly.

  "I keep my word to kill you," the Dutchman answered. "Come outside and fight, or die here like a coward. Our moment has come, old man." He threw open the French windows and leaped to the balcony, then to the lawn below.

  It is illusion, Chiun told himself as the room careened around, the air choking him. The old man crawled out the window to the balcony and balanced on the rail. Below, the terraced gardens tilted crazily, the effects of the Dutchman's conjured poison still thick in Chiun's body. Good, the Oriental said to himself. He has shown me his capabilities. I understand the enemy. Now I can fight him.

  Rest, Remo, my son. Your time with him may soon come.

  On the railing of the balcony, Chiun drained his lungs of the poison gas and filled them with clean air. He slowed his heartbeat.

  The Dutchman waited below, his pale eyes glowing with anticipation and fear. He was going to do combat with the ancient Master of Sinanju. The end was coming, one way or the other. Blessed end to a life no one should have to live.

  "I am your destiny, Chiun," the Dutchman said quietly. "Come do battle with the spirit of the dread Master Nuihc."

  Chiun stepped off the railing.

  ?Thirteen

  Alberto Vittorelli lay unconscious on a cot in the ship's infirmary, covered by an oxygen tent brought by two Dutch island doctors. Dr. Caswell instructed the nurses to watch the makeshift monitors closely as the ship's crew prepared the island's ambulance speedboat for departure.

  It was five P.M. Caswell was numb with fatigue. Not since his days as a medic in the Pacific during World War Two had he been called on to treat a patient for shock, third-degree burns, an amputated limb, and massive infection all at the same time. As the two Dutch G.P.'s slapped him wearily on the back in congratulations, he felt a surge of gratitude for the training of those wartime years.

  He had been planning to retire in a few months. The cushy cruise ship job was Caswell's last stab at a youth long departed. It hadn't turned the trick for him: age and defeat, he discovered, crept up on him in the middle of the Caribbean as easily as they did anywhere else. But just when he had begun to give in to time, when the ambition and fervor of a young surgeon seemed a thousand years past, Alberto Vittorelli came, burned and mutilated, into his hands. And with those hands Caswell had healed again. Vittorelli was alive.