«If you loved me so much, why'd you run away?»
«Hey, I had things to do and I know you wouldn't let me. Besides, somebody was laying a lot of shit on me about his television shows.»
«From now on, you just stay with me. Don't get between Chiun and his television set and everything'll be all right.»
«Whatever you say, Remo.» She put an arm over his shoulder. «You missed all the fun.»
«What fun?»
«Somebody shot the throat out of Big Bang Benton.»
«That's fun?»
«Ever hear his radio show?» Vickie asked.
«No,» Remo said.
«Him without a throat is fun.»
«Anything happen to you?» said Remo, suddenly cautious and moving around in front of Vickie to shield her from the upstairs box seats which he noticed had a good view of backstage.
«No. I just been listening to my Maggot. Gotta ball that Maggot, you know.»
«I know,» Remo said. «I'm going to fix you up with him.»
«You are?»
«Sure. But you've gotta come up with me now so I can get my plans underway.»
«Well, man, I'd like to, but tomorrow's the Darlington Festival.»
«What's that?»
«Just the biggest rock bash in the history of the whole world.»
«You couldn't miss that, could you?»
«No way. No way.»
«Okay, we'll go there tomorrow.» Remo started to say more, but realized he could no longer even hear his own voice over the sudden roar of sound from the audience. Their voices had been a steady background rumble since he arrived, but now there was a new sustained, high-pitched unison scream. And then, prancing offstage came Maggot, wearing his white suit with the steaks and liver pinned to it, followed by the Three Lice wearing the same costumes, but with less gold braid.
Vickie took her arm from around Remo's shoulder and stepped forward toward Maggot.
«Hey, Maggot,» she called. He looked toward her. «Come here. You've got to meet a man.»
Maggot took one cautious step toward Vickie and Remo. «What happened to Big Bang?» he asked.
«Oh, don't worry about him,» she said. «Nothing serious. This is Remo. I want you to meet him.»
Maggot looked at Remo. He did not extend his hand. Neither did Remo. The three Lice moved up close behind Maggot.
«Pleasure, fellow,» Maggot said.
«Likewise,» Remo said. «By the way, that's a great outfit you're wearing. Who's your butcher?»
Maggot smiled fixedly, saying nothing. One Louse asked, «Vickie, is this guy a friend of yours?»
«My lover. My favorite lover,» she said.
«Him? He's like ancient, man. And look at his hair.»
«You make love with your hair?» Remo asked. «Well… maybe you do.»
Out front, the screaming was growing more intense. «Gotta go back,» Maggot said. «Quiet down the animals.»
«Throw them some raw meat,» Remo said.
Maggot looked at Remo shrewdly for a split second, then led the three Dead Meat Lice back on stage. The screaming doubled and redoubled. Maggot bowed. The three Lice bowed. The audience screamed louder.
Maggot waved his hands for silence. The wave produced chaos, and a surge of bodies toward the thin blue line of policemen who ringed the front of the stage.
Maggot waved again. Another surge. From his chest, he ripped a two-pound porterhouse steak and held it high over his head. In the hot lights, the blood and juice was shiny and slick against the meat. More screams. Like a Frisbee champion, he scaled it out into the audience. Frenzy. Chaos.
Then in an orgy of meat distribution, Maggot and the Lice tore the chops and steaks from their clothes and tossed them out over the audience's heads. As the meat splunked down toward the floor of the theater, little pockets of girls knotted and began fighting for the morsels. It looked like T-bone day at the Salvation Army kitchen. But there were more girls than there was meat.
Maggot and the Lice, after denuding their uniforms, started offstage. The meat had been swallowed up by two dozen lucky girls in the audience. The rest were infuriated. They charged the line of policemen. The policemen, held, bent, broke, and the girls poured like a human flood onto the stage and then out into the wings.
First, Remo had stood there with Vickie. Then the Lice and Maggot had joined them. Maggot was beginning to thank Remo for his brilliant concept about giving away the meat when Remo was caught in a maelstrom, a whirlpool of hot, sweaty, perfumed, almost-clothed bodies that swirled backstage like a wall of water.
Over the shrieks came the baritone voices of policemen, trying to clear out the audience. Remo felt himself pressed against the lighting-control panel. He turned toward it, felt hopelessly confused, grabbed as many switches as he could and began pulling them all down. The fifth one worked and backstage was plunged into darkness.
Screams became shrieks. Remo pinched his eyes shut for a second with his hands, forcing the pupils to widen, then he opened his eyes. He could see as well as if there were a light on, and he moved through the crowd of blinded tenagers and policemen as if they were not there. He moved toward the door to the alleyway. Vickie had gone. Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice were gone. He moved outdoors into the drizzling rain. Pulling away from the curb was a tan Rolls Royce, a gang of girls racing after it on foot down the street.
Vickie had gotten away again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Two phone calls concerning Vickie Stoner were made that night from Pittsburgh.
In a rundown hotel, Dr. Gunner Nilsson managed to convince the desk clerk to get him Switzerland, even though he had to put up a fifty dollar cash deposit before the clerk would complete the call. Nilsson took the call in the lobby, to make sure the clerk did not open the key to listen in.
He said simply, «This is Nilsson. Someone else was after the girl tonight.»
He listened, then said, «All right, they were not yours, but if any of yours show up, the same thing will happen to them.»
He listened again and said «The Darlington Festival? Then that is where this will all end. But I caution you. No more bunglers getting in my way. You might let that be known.»
Then, «Thank you.» Nilsson hung up and went to his room. He had to clean and polish his revolver. Tomorrow would be his moment. He must be ready.
«Who cares what the papers say?» Remo said into the phone.
Patiently, Smith tried to explain again. The body of Lhasa Nilsson had been found and identified. The press had dredged up his background and was now speculating that he had been in this country on a murder contract when he had met his own death. But now, the word was out in the underworld that the Nilsson family was in the country to take revenge against the killers of Lhasa.
«So I care what the papers say,» Smith said. «It means that you and Chiun must be extra careful. Vickie Stoner is now being hunted down by one of the world's great assassins and so, apparently, are you. Be careful. And it would probably improve Vickie Stoner's chances if you could keep her in your sight for more than a minute at a time.»
«Yeah, right, right, right,» Remo said disgustedly.
«Where are you going to pick up the girl?» Smith asked.
«She got away from us tonight in a riot. But we'll nail her at the Darlington music festival and get her away.»
«Be careful.»
«Is worrying written into your job description?» Remo asked, but Smith had already hung up and Remo slammed the phone onto the cradle.
«Dr. Smith worries?» Chiun asked.
«Yes. It seems the Nilsson house is after us because of what you did to Lhasa Nilsson.»
«Of course, they are,» Chiun said, shaking his head sadly. «But that is always the way with upstart houses. They take everything personally.»
«But we don't?» Remo said.
«You do, but I don't. It is the difference between the keeper of a tradition, and something the cat dragged in.»
Remo was now as
annoyed at Chiun as he had been at Smith.
«Well, you better go easy, Chiun. I understand these Nilssons are good. And they're no upstart house. They've been at it for six hundred years.»
«Still upstarts,» Chiun said. «The House of Sinanju existed when the Nilssons were still living in mud huts.»
«Well, Smith says be careful.»
«You should take his advice,» Chiun said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Being old hands at the rock festival routine, Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice, along with Vickie Stoner and their chauffeur, drove through the night to get to Darlington, a small village in the New York Catskills, where the concert would be held the next day.
Rooms had already been reserved at the town's one-and-only motel under the name of Calvin. Cadwallader, and there Maggot and company would dress tomorrow before being helicoptered to the concert scene to do their bit. They would also leave by chopper. This approach had come through experience, because they might literally be dismembered if they allowed their bodies to get into the clutches of their adoring-mostly young, mostly female, but all predatory-fans.
As the car rolled heavily away from Pittsburgh, Maggot sat in the back of the Rolls, Vickie next to him. From a compartment alongside the door, he took a pair of white gloves which he put on as carefully and ceremoniously as if he were a professional pallbearer. From the same compartment came the Wall Street Journal, an early edition which he had flown to him wherever he happened to be.
He opened the paper to the New York Stock
Exchange tables, after flipping on the airplanetype light in the right rear corner of the car. He began to run a glove-covered right index finger down the columns of type, which were printed bigger in the Wall Street Journal than in most other papers which carried stock prices.
Every so often, he would grunt. Vickie Stoner sat as close to him as his sense of hygiene would allow. Once she had gotten really close and he had simply pushed her back to her side of the seat as if she were a bag of groceries that had fallen on its side. The three Lice sat in a seat in front of them, chattering about music, girls, music, girls, and money.
Calvin Cadwallader grunted again. His finger rested on the name of a conglomerate. He opened the doorside compartment again and took out paper and a ledger pad and wrote down a figure.
«Sell,» said Vickie Stoner, who was able to see the name and number Maggot had written.
«Why sell?» Maggot asked. «It just went up a point.» For a moment, he forgot that he was talking to an idiotic, sex-strung groupie.
«That's right,» Vickie said, «and it's selling at thirty-six times earnings. And there's a Japanese company that's making a breakthrough on this outfit's main product and can produce it for half the cost. So sell, while you can still get out with a profit.»
She turned away from Cadwallader and looked through the window at the darkened, dismal Pennsylvania countryside.
«Why didn't my business manager tell me that?» Cadwallader asked.
«Probably he doesn't want you to sell until he unloads his first. Would you blame him? Sell.»
«How do you know so much about the market?» Cadwallader asked. «That is, if you do know anything about the market.»
«Right now, Maggot,» Vickie said, enjoying seeing him wince at the name, «I am worth seventy-two million dollars on the hoof. No one who is worth that much money is allowed to be ignorant or stupid. When my father dies, I should be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Somebody's got to mind the store.»
Cadwallader was impressed. He began to rattle off the names of stocks. «Tell me the truth,» he said. «Your honest opinion.»
He named a soft drink company.
«Sell. The Russian contract is falling through.»
A drug company.
«Buy, They've got an oral contraceptive for men.»
A petroleum company.
«Sell. There's been a change in the return-ofcapital ruling on their dividends. After September first, you'll go for your lungs in income taxes.»
They discussed high finance all the way to Darlington. They ignored the Dead Meat Lice and talked all the way into the motel parking lot.
They were finally interrupted when the giant sedan rolled to a stop in front of the string of rooms they had rented. Maggot got out, followed by Vickie.
«Take the car over to that guest house on the other side of town,» Maggot told the driver. «But don't forget. Be back here at exactly five o'clock tomorrow. Have everything packed and the motor running. That's when our helicopter will get back from the field.»
«Yes, sir,» the driver said. He took a string of bags out of the trunk, put them on the ground, and then drove quickly out of the lot, lest anyone see and recognize the car.
Maggot and the Lice already had their room keys. As they walked toward the string of rooms, Louse Number One fell in alongside Maggot. «We all set for tomorrow?» «Right,» Maggot said. «Need any rehearsal time tonight?» «No,» Maggot said. «I don't have time.» «You don't have time? What's so important?» «Gotta ball that Vickie,» Maggot said. He walked away from the stupefied Louse and followed Vickie into her room; he was already fishing inside his small personal-items kit for his jar of Vitamin E capsules.
Not being old hands at rock concerts, Remo and Chiun left the next morning for Darlington, before the sun rose, and found that everyone in the Western world had had the same idea. Twenty miles from Darlington, the traffic stopped.
Like an ant trying to find his way past a puddle, Remo turned from road to road, from highway to back street, from throughway to country road. All the same. All filled to overflowing. No one moved.
It was 10 A.M.
Chiun sat looking out the passenger's window which was open, allowing the air conditioning to rush out, unimpeded by the complication of cooling Remo at all. «The highway system in your nation is very interesting,» Chiun said. «It works perfectly well until someone decides to use it. It must have taken much planning to build roads that are too big for light traffic and too small for heavy traffic.»
Remo grunted. He wheeled the car around and put it back onto the main highway. Still twenty miles to go to Darlington. Only three hours before the concert started.
Remo sat stalled in traffic. A black and white police car whizzed alongside him on the shoulder of the road, its overhead light whirring, its siren whooping occasionally.
Up ahead, Remo could see the first signs of disintegration of the crowd's discipline. People were getting out of their cars. Some were climbing on car roofs to play cards. Others were beginning to huddle together, rolling marijuana joints. Car doors opened as if a fire drill had been called. Remo groaned. The traffic would never move now.
«Perhaps if we walk,» Chiun said. «It is a good day for strolling.»
«Perhaps if you just leave things in my hands, we will get there,» Remo said sharply.
«Perhaps,» Chiun said. «And then again …» he added. But Remo did not hear the rest of the sentence. He was watching in his rearview mirror the approach of another police car. This one was an unmarked Chevrolet, a red light flashing inside the car on the dashboard. It gave Remo an idea. He said a few words to Chiun.
Both got out of their car and moved over onto the road shoulder. Remo waved his arms over his head at the onrushing detective's car, which finally screeched to a halt near Remo's toes.
The driver rolled down Ms window.
«What the hell are you doing, Mac?» he shouted. «Get out of the way. This is police business.»
«Right,» Remo said, approaching the driver. «Right you are.» Chiun walked around to the passenger's side of the car.
Remo put his hands on the driver's door, noting with dismay that the passenger's side door was locked. «But listen, man,» Remo said, «like wow, this is important too.»
«Well, what is it?» the detective said anxiously, moving his right hand across to the left side of his rumpled gray suit.
«It's important, I tell you,» Remo said.
> The policeman looked at him, his attention totally distracted from Chiun.
«So?» the cop said.
«Man, I want to make a citizen's arrest. You see all these people around here. Man, they are all smoking pot. Now, unless I miss my guess, that is against the laws of New York State and Nelson Rockefeller. I mean, man, like all these people, they ought to be good for seven to fifteen under your new law. I want to swear out a warrant for their arrest.»
The policeman shook his head. «Can't do anything about it, fella. We've been told to lay off.»
«Is that any way to build respect for the law?» Remo asked.
«Those are the rules,» the detective said.
«In that case,» Remo said, «have you got a match? I mean, the lighter's like busted in my car and my grass is just sitting there, getting old and cold and sad and old. If I don't get a match, I'm just gonna waste away.»
«Waste, you son of a bitch,» the policeman said. He jammed the car angrily into drive and sped off, his rear wheels kicking gravel and pebbles back at Remo and Chiun.
Remo watched him leave, then turned to Chiun.
«You get it?»
Chiun brought his hand from behind his back.
It held the red blinking light from the car's dashboard.
«How'd you open the door?» Remo said. «It was locked.»
«Clean living,» explained Chiun.
«Let's go,» Remo said.
Back in the car, Remo wired the light to the two clips behind the cigarette lighter of his rented auto. The light began to rotate and flash.
Remo pulled off onto the shoulder, stepped on the gas and zoomed off toward Darlington. Acid rock freaks waved at him as he sped down the road. Some of them, already stoned, wandered out into the shoulder of the road and Remo was forced to swerve his way through them like an open field runner.
«Not so fast,» Chiun said.
«Concentrate on the centrality of your being,» Remo suggested.
«What does that mean?» Chiun asked.
«I don't know. It's what you always tell me.»
«And good advice, too,» Chiun said. «I shall concentrate on the centrality of my being.» He lifted his legs up onto the front seat of the auto and folded them into his meditation position. He stared straight ahead out the window. Ten seconds later his eyes were closed.
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