Guards escorted the three down the escalator of the ship toward the main auditorium and the crowd swelled in behind them, leaving Remo on deck. He looked out at the Skouratis launch, a dull gray speck out across in the night, across the Atlantic. The boat had stopped circling and was now motoring toward Thebos' yacht. And then, as Remo watched, he saw two small trails of air bubbles, white against the black sea like talcum specks, move slowly away from the launch and head toward the Thebos yacht.
Remo leaned against the elevator entrance until the crowd on deck had thinned out. Something gnawed at the back of his mind. He had sealed off the entrance to the below-ships passageways but there must he other entrances. He reached his hand up and touched the elevator frame over his head. Something. There was something in his mind, something he should know, remember, but he could not find it. All he had was an instinct that it was important that he keep his eyes on Skouratis and Thebos tonight.
The two men and Helena were in the royal box on the auditorium's mezzanine when Remo got there. Three armed guards stood watch at the door.
The Iranian box was too far away to be a good surveillance spot so Remo slipped in through the door leading to the box next to the Thebos' seats.
The auditorium box seats had been laid out around the oval perimeter of the large auditorium in order of importance. The royal box was in the middle of one of the long sides of the arena, hanging from a mezzanine deck with balcony seats above it, and ground-level seats below. Near the royal box were the boxes assigned to other countries by the United Nations General Assembly. These included India, Libya, Cambodia, a handful of African states.
Across the auditorium from the royal box were the boxes assigned to nations considered to be of secondary importance: Russia, China, France, East Germany.
And in the worst boxes, at the far ends of the auditorium, were the lowest-ranked nations: America, Israel, Great Britain, Japan, West Germany.
Remo looked around and decided that the UN had worked out a new equation. A country's importance was in direct relationship to its inability to feed itself.
Remo was in the box of the Indian delegation. The Indian ambassador occupied it with two young Western women. They sat in deep plush seats at the front of the railing, both blondes, each wearing low gowns that bared a pneumatic wealth of cleavage, while the ambassador poured champagne for them into crystal goblets.
He turned as he heard the door close and Remo came down the steps and sat in a straight-backed chair from which he could see across the three-foot-high wall separating India's box from the Skouratis-Thebos box seats.
"I beg your pardon," the ambassador said.
"It's all right," Remo said. "You won't be in my way."
The Indian smiled at the two women, a smile that apologized for the intrusion and promised quick resolution of this petty minor problem.
"I don't think you understand. This is a private party."
"Now, look, Mahatma," Remo said, quietly, "I'm here and I'm staying here. Now drink your champagne that somebody else paid for and play with your women that somebody else paid for and watch the party that somebody else is paying for. But leave me alone. Interrupt me again and that's something you will wind up paying for."
Remo's dark eyes narrowed as he looked at the ambassador, wearing a Nehru jacket and short knee-length trousers and silk stockings and slippers. The ambassador met his stare, then turned to the two women. Both of them had looked at Remo and were still looking at him.
"Oh, let him stay," said one.
"Yes. He won't be any bother," the second blonde said.
"If you insist," the ambassador said. "The women say you may stay."
"How lucky for you," said Remo. He leaned over the railing atop the low wall and tugged on Helena's sleeve. She was sitting on the right side of the box, Skouratis sandwiched between her and her father in purple-velvet chairs. She turned and her face soured when she saw Remo.
"You do not know where you are not wanted, do you?" she said.
"Yes, I do," said Remo. "I'm not wanted here. Gunga Din just told me but, against his better judgment, invited me to be his guest for the evening. As long as we're going to be neighbors, I thought we might as well be friends, you and I."
"Go away, American." Helena turned in the chair, her back firmly toward Remo, and put her left fingertips on Skouratis' neck. The swarthy Greek looked up at her and smiled. He leaned close and whispered to her and she laughed. Thebos meanwhile was leaning over the railing, signaling to people on the auditorium floor below.
The crowd hushed as an amplified drum roll reverberated through the auditorium. People settled back into their seats. Remo stood up to look down into the pit of the arena, where he saw five men, dressed in gladiatorial costumes, move out onto the floor. Some carried swords; others spears and nets. Thebos was restaging the Roman games.
Four of the gladiators were white. The fifth was a black man, a huge black man whose muscles had been oiled and who glistened under the high-intensity overhead lights. As the men moved around the arena, a tremendous roar of awe and approval greeted the black warrior.
Remo glanced at Thebos who was sitting back in his velvet chair, his face displaying a satisfied smile. Around the balcony, ambassadors and their guests in VIP box seats moved forward in their armchairs to lean over the rails and watch the combat below. The crowd in the lower seats roared its approval. The five gladiators moved around the arena in a line until they were below Thebos' box, and then they pointed their weapons toward him in a salute. Remo saw Thebos nod to the gladiators. Skouratis, his arm around Helena's shoulders, moved his chair forward. Helena glanced back to see if Remo was watching. When she saw he was, she moved even closer to Skouratis at the rail.
Thebos had an expression below the smile on his face as he looked out onto the crowd. Remo analyzed it for a moment, then knew it for what it was. It was pity. For the gladiators? The look deepened when the crowd roared again. No, pity for the delegates. The descendant of the glory that was Greece smiled as he acknowledged the delegates' warm reception of his reminder of the brutal and stupid grandeur that was Rome. How appropriate, his face said, that one pack of illiterate ignorant brutes should cheer the memory of another.
Remo agreed. He moved up to the railing, pushing aside the Indian ambassador who huddled there with his two blondes, his hands busy in their laps, watching the action below.
The five gladiators paraded once more around the arena. Then they squared off to battle. Two small white men faced each other. The black giant, holding a spear and net, faced two men, both armed with sword and shield.
The crowd expressed its approval of the black man; they cheered as he paraded before them; roared as he flexed the muscles in his huge back. Silence descended on the crowd, like the dropping of a curtain, as the two white men approached the black man. One feinted with a sword. The black man slipped trying to jump out of the way. He fell backward, hitting his head on the floor with a loud thunk and dropping his spear. One of the two white men danced in lightly and touched the point of his sword to the black man's belly, then looked up for a referee's judgment. The referee nodded, a clean kill.
The crowd booed. The two white men who had faced the black ignored them, and faced off against each other. The black man got up rubbing the back of his head, then turned a slow circle, facing the crowd, his arms raised overhead in a gesture of victory. He was loudly cheered. Remo glanced at Thebos. The Greek was leaning far back in his chair, laughing uproariously, and Remo decided that he was not a nice man. Nice was not shoveling it in the faces of diplomats too stupid to know what it was.
Skouratis was not laughing. He was still talking to Helena, his right hand looped over her shoulder, his left hand on her knee. He whispered easily into her ear.
Remo watched for long minutes. She did not once turn to see if he was looking.
After the gladiators had left the arena, the lights dimmed, and when the giant cake came out, the whole arena stood on tiptoes to see the larg
est cake ever baked.
The cake was white, like the hull of the Ship of States, on which they were all headed toward Africa. A John Deere tractor hauled it on a flatbed, six times the length of a mobile home. In the program, guests were informed that enough egg whites had been used to keep three American farms working a half year, along with fifteen tons of flour and eighteen hundred pounds of sugar. The cake itself had to be applied over aluminum rigging that held it, otherwise the center of the cake would have been as hard as rock from the pressure of the tons of cake above it.
There were real lights on the superstructure of the pastry ship and each deck had sugar and marzipan coating, the entire production of that sweet from Belgium and Luxembourg.
The cake itself, rumor had it, cost two hundred and twelve thousand dollars to bake. So immense was the model ship that the cake pieces, used like building blocks, could not be baked but had to be air blown into molds. The engineer who designed it got paid twenty-one thousand dollars in commissions, the usual ten-percent architect's fee. It was the size of a double garden apartment in Queens.
An orchestra greeted it with a Greek tune. Only one thing differed in appearance between the giant ship grinding its massive way toward Africa and the sugary model on the arena floor. And this was black letters, each the size of a forty-year-old oak. Besides the lights and the aluminum superstructure, they were the only uneatable things on the cake ship. And when the ship was towed to the center of the floor, imbedded lights in the black-plastic letters flashed on, as if offering a message from the gods in dark space. And the word was: SKOURATIS.
It flashed like lightning in the arena. And from all the loudspeakers came the voice of Aristotle Thebos.
"Skouratis," he said. "Forever let the greatness of this ship bear his name. Demosthenes Skouratis. This party honors Skouratis. This cake honors Skouratis, as does this great ship. Let this ship be forever Skouratis and Skouratis be the ship. From this day forth, the class of this ship shall be known as Skouratis. This vessel, this gift to the world of Demosthenes Skouratis, shall henceforth be known as Ship of States of the Skouratis Class."
Applause rose like the thundering of gravel rolling down into a galvanized-iron valley.
And when Remo again looked at Aristotle Thebos, he was leaned far back in his chair, laughing so hard that tears streamed from his eyes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"We want Skouratis! We want Skouratis!"
The chant started small, then built up and welled through the vast auditorium until it rattled off the high ceiling and seemed to echo the crashing of the waves outside the safe walls of Ship of States.
The chant started small because it had been started by just two men. They sat in low seats opposite the royal box and all night long Remo had watched them watch Aristotle Thebos. And when the cake came in and Thebos had delivered his speech, Remo saw him signal toward the two men with a motion of his right index finger. As Remo watched, one man left the other and walked quickly to a spot about forty feet away from his seat. And then they started:
"We want Skouratis."
Around them, voices picked up the chant until it was no longer a chanted request, but a roaring demand.
Skouratis looked to Thebos. There was a look of embarrassment on his ruddy, wrinkled face. Thebos nodded and Skouratis stood.
Behind his back, Thebos again gestured to his two men down in the lower seats.
Above the cheers for Skouratis, who stood at the front of the box, waving his arm in greeting to the crowd, came two voices again:
"Down here. Cut the cake! Down here. Cut the cake!"
And it too became a roar. "Down here. Cut the cake!"
With an apology to Helena Thebos, Demosthenes Skouratis waved a reluctant agreement, then turned to walk up the steps leading from the royal box. He paused and gestured to Thebos to accompany him.
Thebos shook his head. "Go," he said. "It is for you, Demo. Go."
As the door opened in the back of the royal box to allow Skouratis to leave, a man with a face like cement leaned inside. Thebos saw him and the man nodded.
Amidst the roar of voices, Thebes whispered to Helena and Remo listened. The secret was focusing the ears the way people focused their eyes. If you could narrow down the angle from which your ears took in sounds, then even a whisper could not be lost in a hubbub of background noise because the background noise was thinned out.
"I knew the shoeshine boy could not resist a birthday cake," Remo heard Thebos say. He saw the Greek look to his daughter for approval, but she was silent.
"You go back to the yacht now," Thebos said. "Then send the launch back for me."
"Father, I want to stay," said Helena.
"I am afraid I do not care what you want to do. You must get back to the yacht. Now. Time is very important."
Helena Thebos looked as if she was going to say something more but changed her mind. Without another word, she stood up, leaned over the railing of the box for a last look at Skouratis who was advancing toward the huge cake, a giant silver knife in his hand, then she walked up the carpeted steps toward the door in the rear of the royal box.
She wasn't going to leave. Remo saw a set in her shoulders, a glint in her eyes, a forward thrust of her chin. She had no intention of being a dutiful daughter and returning to the Thebos yacht.
He got to his feet and followed her out into the passageway. Thebos' guards clustered around her.
"That's not necessary," she spat out. "I can find the way to the deck without you. Stay here."
She pushed through them angrily and stalked off down the corridor. Remo fell into the cluster of guards outside the door to the Thebos box, waiting there, moving in and out through them so no one would notice him or get a fix on who he was, until Helena turned at the end of the passageway.
When Remo saw her again, she was walking down the stairs instead of going up to the deck and to the elevator to the waiting launch.
Helena went down two flights and, with an assurance born of moneyed breeding, pushed her way through clusters of people until she was standing on the level floor of the auditorium, under the overhang of the royal box, hidden from her father's view.
Her eyes were fixed on Skouratis. He looked up from the cake cutting, saw her and smiled, a thick-lipped possessive smile. He waved to her, swinging over his head the giant knife spotted with dots of whipped cream.
Remo came alongside Helena. "I thought he was just a shoeshine boy," he said.
She looked up startled. "It does not concern you."
"Papa's going to be unhappy that you didn't do what he told you."
"I have often made Papa unhappy. I think that after tonight I will make him very unhappy again. Very unhappy."
She kept her eyes on Skouratis and smiled in his direction when their eyes again met.
There was no understanding women, Remo thought. She had hated Skouratis, really hated him. And he was ugly, ugly as a frog. And here she was, mooning and goo-goo eyed, looking at him as if he were the incarnation of Hercules and Achilles together.
"What about last night?" Remo said to her.
"What about it? It meant nothing and you mean nothing. Now will you please leave me alone?"
"Yes. Stop bothering the nice lady," said Chiun from someplace that seemed to be inside Remo's ear. "Things to do on this vessel, always things to do, and I must do them all because you are busy mashing people."
"All right, Chiun. What is it?" Remo said.
"You had better come with me. Your Emperor Smith has been hurt."
"Smitty?"
"Is there any other Emperor Smith that you know?" Chiun asked.
They went through the crowds as if they were not there, Chiun leading the way, Remo moving along with him as if tugged by Chiun's slipstream.
"Where is he?"
"In our room."
"Where did you find him?"
"Hidden in the bowels of the ship."
"The secret passages?"
"If you call t
hem that," Chinn said.
"What were you doing there?"
"I did not choose to watch these animals eat cake tonight. And there are no television dramas, no beautiful stories aboard this ship. And so I thought to find the source of the secret television in our room. Perhaps, I thought, that is where there may be television worth watching. And I found it, a room, hidden in the middle of the ship."
"I know. I've been there. What about Smitty? What happened then?"
"What happened then was terrible," said Chiun.
"Yeah?"
"Terrible."
"Dammit, you already said terrible. What was terrible?"
"What was terrible was that the television was broken. There was this big computer and it had a big television screen on it that tapes are played through. But some lunatic had broken it. Ripped out wires. Broken the screen itself. And the same in another room of television sets. Terrible."
"I know about that. I did it. What about Smith?"
"You did it?"
"Chiun, later we'll talk about television. What about Smith?"
"I found him on the floor in one of those secret rooms. He had been beaten."
"Badly?" asked Remo.
"I would say very badly. It looked as if he had been struck in the head but the striker obviously did not follow through because Smith's head was still intact. There were also marks on his chest and stomach but again the attacker did badly. The skin was not perforated so the force of the blows was inadequate to the task. Yes, I would say he had been beaten very badly."
"Goddammit, Chiun, I'm not interested in a critique of others' styles. I'm interested in Smith. Is he all right?"
"He will live. He is unconscious. I let him remain so because the body needs rest at times like these. I should think you would pay attention when I point out the errors of other people's attacks, since you are so likely to make those same mistakes yourself."
They were outside their room now in the Iranian wing of the ship and Remo slipped past Chiun and into the room where Smith lay, unconscious, on a mat on the floor. Blood trickled down the left side of his face from a head wound. His clothes had been ripped open, either by an attacker or by Chiun, who had been feeling for his iniuries.
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