An Old Fashioned War td-68

by Warren Murphy

  "You had some deal with Remo. Probably for sex," said Chiun.

  "No. I stopped a war," said Remo, making sure the Mayan gold was not mixed with the lighter and shinier Thai gold.

  Chiun was proud that Remo would remember the difference between the two.

  "Well, we can deal with Arieson now."

  "I've heard about your deals, Chiun. What are you going to give him now?" asked Anna.

  "A pinch of something or other," said Chiun. He had spotted the casks of faience beads from the Third Dynasty of the upper kingdom of the Nile. "To the left, along with the alabaster cats, thank you," he said to the Sinanju workers.

  "You don't understand, Master of Sinanju, Arieson is not some mindless mystical thing that you could understand. Smith, an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, and I have put our heads together."

  "Twin cabbages," said Chiun, seeing the great damask cloth, named for the city of its origin, Damascus. "Ah, the beautiful Abbasids," said Chiun, being reminded of the treachery of that dynasty. And then of course there were the treasures from Baghdad, the pinnacle of civilization, which the warrior Genghis Khan destroyed, and then of course died for that abomination.

  "The old Baghdad," said Chiun, taking a bolt of silk centuries old but still perfect because of the denseness of its weave and the special perfection of its silkworms fed a secret diet by the wonderful caliphs in that wonderful city.

  And of course, the gifts from the Greek tyrants, coming now over the hill, down the path toward the House of Sinanju. Chiun's hands were aflutter with joy. The Masters of Sinanju always had special affection for the Greek tyrants. While the Greeks never paid excessively, they always understood exactly the work they wanted. They were not ones to see imaginary plots behind every marble wall. They knew who had to be removed and got the best to do it, saving themselves much wealth in the long run.

  "Mr. Arieson," said Anna, "in case you are interested, is an electronic force that feeds off its victims themselves. The victims are human beings who respond to negative military impulses. The reason you and Remo cannot be affected is you are so perfectly trained that all your basic responses are harnessed. Other men fight their fear; your fear powers you. You fight nothing because you are one with every element of yourselves. Do you understand?"

  "You slept with a woman who is going to explain Sinanju to you?" asked Chiun.

  Remo made a motion of the inexplicability of women, and stopped the Mali iron statues before they were brought too far forward.

  "Those go back a bit," said Remo.

  "Are you coming?" asked Anna.

  "No, he's not," said Chiun.

  "Let him answer," said Anna.

  "I've got to put stuff away here first."

  "Don't you want to see Mr. Arieson collapse in an electronic counterforce?"

  "Sure, but I've got to straighten up the rooms first," said Remo. Chiun smiled. Remo could be a good boy at times. And Remo was his.

  "He knows your little tricks cannot stop someone like Arieson," Chiun said.

  "But he's not a someone. That's what Smith and I figured out, from all the evidence."

  Chiun laughed. "You will never stop him. I will make you a bargain. If you in your ways stop Arieson, you may have Remo. If not, never set foot here again."

  "You won't interfere with us because I'm white?" asked Anna.

  "I promise," said Chiun.

  "Hey, you can't promise me to anyone," said Remo.

  "I can promise not to interfere," said Chiun.

  "Done," said Anna.

  "Done," said Chiun.

  "I'll phone for you, Remo."

  "Say good-bye to her, Remo."

  But Remo ignored them both. Anna did not see it as she walked up the mud path toward the now lower hill at the entrance, but Remo did and he knew where it went. He had seen pictures like it in the tunnels under Rome. He watched three men laboriously carry it on their shoulders, but he ran out to help them. Holding the marble base lightly in his fingers, he alone walked the path back to the house, and wiping his feet free of mud he carried it into the house and into the room where its square marble base fit exactly into the indentation in the dark mahogany.

  It was a marble bust. And the face had a beard and a fat neck, and obviously, four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Mr. Arieson had posed for it.

  It took three days for Remo and Chiun to replace the treasure. During that time, word reached Poo that Remo, in payment for returning the treasure of Sinanju, was released from his marriage vows.

  She came up to the house. She wept at the doorway. She wept louder when other villagers were about. She tore her hair. She screamed insults and curses. She said there would not be a soul in Sinanju who would not know how Remo had failed in his manhood in regard to her.

  This was not much of a threat because everyone knew that on the wedding night anyhow. Poo had always been a bigmouth.

  Poo stretched her great bulk over the steps of the doorway to the House of Sinanju, known in Sinanju as the House of the Masters, and declared to one and all she was an abandoned woman.

  "When does this stop, Little Father?" asked Remo.

  "On the fifth day," said Chiun.

  "Why the fifth day?" asked Remo.

  "By the fifth day she will be tired and ready," said Chiun, without explaining ready for what.

  On the fifth day, Chiun went down to where Poo lay exhausted and whispered in her ear. She allowed him to help her up and walk her back down to her home in the village.

  "Done," said Chiun on his return to the house.

  "What did you say to her?" asked Remo.

  "Forty-two thousand dollars cash," said Chiun. "What did you think I said to her? That everything would be all right? That the marriage was over? That she was better off without you?"

  "That's a lot of money," said Remo.

  "She earned it," said Chiun. "It was truly a noble performance she did on our steps."

  "How sure are you we won't hear from Anna Chutesov?" asked Remo.

  "Did the statue fit the room exactly, and was not the likeness perfect?"

  "Yes," said Remo.

  "Be confident, she will never come here again," said Chiun.

  "That's not what I wanted, Little Father."

  "You wanted to eat red meat at one time also," said Chiun.

  "But Anna's different. She's special."

  "You only feel she's special."

  "That's the only feel I care about, Chiun," said Remo.

  "Right," said Chiun. "You don't care what I think. You don't care what is good for the House of Sinanju, but what does the great Remo Williams feel? The feelings that count here are mine," said Chiun. And walking through the rooms of the house, he kept repeating the word "mine," although each time he said it the word became softer, and happier, as he viewed the returned treasure of Sinanju.

  Anna's call came on the seventh day, but there was no rejoicing. Remo was going to have to return to America and stop Harold W. Smith. He had gone insane.

  "He's screaming 'Forty-four-forty or fight,' and he's starting a war with Canada."

  "Smitty?" asked Remo, unbelieving.

  "Right from Folcroft."

  "How did you find out about Folcroft?"

  "I told you he's gone insane. He's not bothering with precautions anymore. He's gotten himself a banner and he's screaming that he wants recognition and that he deserves a medal for what he's done and he doesn't care who knows about him. The more, the better. You'd better get back here and save your organization, Remo."

  "Arieson?" asked Remo.

  "Who the hell else?" snapped Anna.

  "I'm coming over," said Remo, who even now saw the great bust of Mr. Arieson being carried on a litter down to the pier with Chiun directing everyone. Chiun himself followed with an alabaster jar. "What's that?" asked Remo.

  "A little pinch of something," said Chiun.

  Folcroft was a mess, but fortunately, since it was a sanitarium for the mentally deranged, fe
w bothered to even notice banners flying from its walls. Since it was close to Long Island Sound, many people thought of them as boat signals.

  Some of the doctors were questioning why the normally reserved and almost unreachable Mr. Smith was now saying hello to everyone and trying to enlist them in a fight against Canada. They would have committed him to an institution, except he was in one already and running it, and if the truth be known, what made someone a patient at a mental institution instead of an administrator was purely a matter of chance.

  According to Smith, Canada had thumbed its nose at America ever since the American Revolution, and the real honest and sacred boundary between the two countries was latitude forty-four-forty, but the cowardly and probably traitorous people running the country, all Canada-simps as he called them, had settled for this tragic injustice.

  All it needed was for a few brave and honest men who could not be bought off or intimidated by the Canada lobby.

  Remo gently cornered him with an arm and guided him back to his office, as Smith very intently asked Remo if he was one of those who was willing to forget that during the Vietnam war Canada played host to American draft dodgers.

  "They get away with everything and they control everything and when you point out these obvious facts, you're called a bigot. Do you understand?"

  "I do, Smitty," said Remo.

  "That's why only a purifying war can rid us of this cancer in our midst."

  "Right. We'll join your war, Smitty."

  Smith's gray hair was disheveled and his eyes were wide with the vision he alone saw. He found Anna in his office. Remo glanced at the drawers to the computer consoles out of instinct. She was not, after all, part of the organization.

  Chiun arrived bringing the bust of Mr. Arieson. It looked like a kimono as a stand for a ton-size marble bust. When he put it down on the floor the room trembled a bit.

  From under his gray kimono Chiun took the alabaster jar and opened it. He reached into the jar and took out a pinch of brownish powder and lit it. Its purplish fumes tickled the nostrils and made the far reaches of the room smell pleasant even as it burned a bright orange at its core. Incense. He had lit incense before the bust of Mr. Arieson.

  "O Aries, God of War, called Mars by the Romans, and other names by other tribes, please do allow mankind to have his own stupid wars instead of arranging them."

  With a whoosh like a storm, the incense clouds were sucked up into the stone nostrils, leaving only a great silence in the office of Harold W. Smith.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked Anna. "And you, Remo? And Chiun?"

  "We have made the proper sacrifice to the god of war the Indians released on the Ojupa reservation. He's returned to his observer status," said Remo.

  Smith straightened his tie and made sure all of the drawers were shut. Ms. Chutesov was, after all, a Russian high operative.

  "I don't believe it," said Smith.

  "That statue must have some historical significance which activated the electronic waves you talked about, when you tried that machine you had your scientists create to counterbalance any wave coming at it," said Anna.

  "Sinanju does have access to electronic forces," said Smith. "In its primitive way."

  "Historical forces," said Anna, who had been educated in communist schools.

  "The white mentality," said Chiun of both Anna and Smith, as he got Remo to carry the property of Sinanju out of Folcroft. After all, he had personally carried it in. But was he complaining?

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