King's Curse td-24

by Warren Murphy

Remo nodded.

  The boy whistled again.

  "I've got to know what you defaced."

  "Improved," said the boy.

  "All right, improved."

  "Let's see. Bathrooms at school."

  Remo shook his head.

  "Two cars on an A train."

  "I don't think so," said Remo.

  "A bridge."

  "Where?"

  "Near Tremont Avenue. That's real uptown," said the boy.

  "Any church or religious monument nearby?"

  The boy shook his head.

  "Did you do it on a painting or something?"

  "I don't mess over someone else's work," said the boy. "Just things. Not works. Rocks and stuff."

  "Any rocks?"

  "Sure. I practice on rocks."

  "Where?" asked Remo.

  "Central Park once. Prospect Park a lot. Rocks are nothing, man."

  "Any place else?"

  "A museum. I did one on the big museum off Central Park. With the guy on the horse out front."

  "What did the rock look like?" asked Remo.

  "Big. Square like. With some circles and birds on it and stuff. A real old rock. The birds were shitty like some real little kid carved them."

  "Thanks," said Remo.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Off Central Park Remo found the Museum of Natural History, a massive stone building with wide steps and a bronze statue of Teddy Roosevelt on a horse, facing fearlessly the onslaught of the wilds, namely Fifth Avenue on the other side of the park. The bronze Roosevelt presided over two bronze Indians standing at his side, equally fearless in their unchanging stare across the park.

  Remo made a contribution at the entrance and asked for the exhibit of stones. The clerk, drowsy from the mind-smothering passing out of buttons, which labeled the donor as one of those keenly aware of the importance of nature and of the Museum of Natural History, said the museum had a lot of stones. Which one did he want?

  "A big one," said Remo. "One that has some graffiti on it."

  "We don't feature graffiti, sir," said the clerk.

  "Well, do you have any stones? Large ones?" asked Remo. He felt heat rising in his body, not because the afternoon was muggy but because if the organization was still operating, they could probably have had this whole thing worked out in an afternoon and just given him the name of whoever or whatever he was supposed to connect with, and that would be that. Now he was looking for rocks in a museum. If he were right, he would have this whole little mess wrapped up in a day. Give him the sacred rock and the killers would have to come to him.

  "We don't just collect rocks, sir," said the clerk.

  "This is a special rock. It's got engraving on it."

  "Oh. You mean the South American artifacts. That's the ground floor. Turn right."

  Remo wandered past a stuffed bear, an imitation jungle, two dried musk oxen, and a stuffed yak eating a plastic peony into a dark room with large stones. All were intricately carved. Massive heads with flattened noses and almond eyes. Curving serpents weaving among stilted birds. Rock remnants of peoples who had disappeared in the western onslaught. But as Chiun had said, "The sword does not destroy a people; only a better life does. Swords kill. They do not change."

  But on South American cultures Chiun had never shed any light, and Remo was sure it was because those cultures had been cut off from the rest of the world until the coming of the Euro-peans in 1500. Which meant to Chiun, since an ancestor had probably never done business there, that the area was still undiscovered.

  "You mean you didn't have book on any of them," Remo had said.

  "I mean the area is undiscovered," said Chiun. "A wilderness with strange people, like your country, until I came. Although your birthplace is easier because of so many descendants of Europeans and Africans. But now that I have discovered it, future generations of Sinanju will know of your inscrutable nation."

  "And what about South America?" Remo had asked.

  "So far undiscovered," Chiun had said. "If you should find out anything, let me know."

  Now Remo was in the museum, finding out, and finding out very little at that. The carvings seemed very Egyptian, yet Egyptians used softer stone. These stones were hard.

  Two guards stood before a large unmarked door at the north end of the display room.

  "I'm looking for a special stone," Remo said. "It's been marked over recently."

  "You can't go in," said one guard.

  "So it's in there?"

  "I ain't saying that. Anyone who goes in needs special permission from the Antiquities Department."

  "And where's the Antiquities Department?"

  "That's closed today. Just the assistant is on."

  "Where's the department?"

  "Don't bother, mister. They won't let you in. They never let anybody in who just walks up anymore. Just special people. Don't bother."

  "I want to bother," Remo said.

  The assistant was in a small box of an office with a desk that made moving around difficult. She looked up from a document, focusing above blue-framed eyeglasses. Her reddish hair formed a bouquet around her delicate face.

  "He's not in and I'm busy," she said.

  "I want to see that stone in the locked room."

  "That's what I said. He's not in and I'm busy."

  "I don't know who you're talking about," Remo said, "but I just want to see that stone."

  "Everybody who sees it goes through the director, James Willingham. And he's not in as I said."

  "I'm not going through James Willingham, I'm going through you."

  "He'll be back tomorrow."

  "I want to see it today."

  "It's really nothing much. It hasn't even been classified into a culture yet."

  Remo leaned across the desk and, holding her eyes with his, smiled ever so slightly. She blushed.

  "C'mon," he whispered in a voice that stroked her.

  "All right," she said, "but only because you're sexy. Academically this makes no sense."

  Her name was Valerie Garner. She had an M.A. from Ohio State and was working toward her Ph.D at Columbia. She had everything in her life but a real man. She explained this on the way down to the South American exhibit area. There were no real men left in New York City, she said.

  "All I want," she said plaintively, "is someone who is strong but gentle, sensitive to my needs, who will be there when I want and not be there when I don't want. Do you see? Is that asking too much?" asked Valerie.

  "Yes," said Remo, beginning to suspect that Valerie Garner, assuming she ever met a man, would not be able to see him because the sound waves rising incessantly from her mouth would obscure her vision.

  Valerie motioned the guards away from the door and unlocked it with a key from around her neck.

  "The director goes bananas about this stone and there's no reason for it. It's nothing. Nothing."

  The nothing she described was about Remo's height. It rested on a polished pink marble pedestal with soft crystal lights bathing it in a deep artificial glow like a far-off morning. A small flowing fountain, carved from what appeared to be a solid five-foot piece of jade, bubbled gently, its clear water coming from carved lips above a perfectly round basin.

  The stone itself looked like a random block of igneous rock with incredibly inept scratching of circles and lines, and only by the greatest tolerance could Remo make out a circle, birds, snakes, and what might have been a human head with feathers above it. But the rock had what Remo wanted.

  A graceful, glowing green signature of "Joey 172" ran diagonally across the circle from the chunky snake to the stiff bird.

  "The graffiti is the only piece of art in it," said Valerie.

  "I think so, too," said Remo, who had seen enough. The stone looked like the symbol in the note the police had recovered from under Mrs. Delpheen's body, the symbol that was called an Uctut in the other eleven languages of the note.

  "You should have seen Willingham when he saw the graff
iti on it," Valerie was babbling. "He couldn't talk for an hour. Then he went into his office and stayed on the phone for a half-day. A full half-day. Long distance calls, overseas and everything. More than a thousand dollars in phone calls that one afternoon."

  "How do you know?" asked Remo.

  "I handle the budget. I thought we were going to get killed by the trustees but they approved it. Even approved two guards for the doors. And look at the stone. It's nothing."

  "Why do you say that?" Remo asked.

  "For one thing, I don't think it's more than a thousand years old, which would therefore not justify such shoddy craftsmanship. For a second, look at the Aztec and Inca work outside. Now those are gorgeous. This looks like a scribble compared to them. But you want to know something crazy?"

  "Of course," said Remo, sidestepping Valerie's hand, which somehow alighted on his fly as she said the word "crazy."

  "This stone has had more groups of visitors from all over the world than any other special exhibit. There's no reason for it."

  "I think there is," Remo said. "Why didn't you people clean off the graffiti?"

  "I tried to suggest that but Willingham wouldn't hear of it."

  "Can you reach him today?"

  "He never comes in on his day off. He's got an estate up in Westchester. You can't pry him out with crowbars."

  "Tell him someone is defacing the statue."

  "I can't do that. I'd be fired."

  With two fingers, half curled and pressed together like a single instrument, Remo snapped his nails downward across the raised circle, carved by stone implements in a time that preceded even the memory of the Actatl tribe. Crumpled chunks of pinkish rock sprayed from the path of his fingers. A small white scar the size of an electric cord cut a curve in the circle.

  "Now you've done it," said Valerie, pressing her hand to her forehead. "Now you've done it. This place is going to be a madhouse."

  "You're going to phone Willingham, right?" said Remo pleasantly.

  "Right. Get out of here. You don't know what you've done."

  "I think I do," Remo said.

  "Look," Valerie said, pointing to the scar. "That's bad enough. But if you're still here, there may be murder."

  Remo shrugged. "Phone," he said.

  "Get out of here."

  "No," said Remo.

  "You're too cute to die."

  "I'm not leaving."

  Since he was thin and Valerie was one of the toughest defensive guards in field hockey at Wellesley, she put her shoulder into his back and pushed. The back didn't move. She knew he couldn't weigh more than 150 pounds, so she tried again, this time getting a running start and throwing her body at the back.

  When she was bracing for the thump of impact, it seemed as if the back suddenly dropped beneath her and she was hurtling horizontally toward a wall, and just as suddenly there were hands about her waist, soft hands that seemed to caress her as they guided her softly to her feet again.

  "Make love, not war," said Valerie.

  "Phone Willingham."

  "Do that thing with the hands again."

  "Later," Remo said.

  "Just a touch."

  "Later, I'll give you everything you want."

  "There's no man who has that much."

  Remo winked. Valerie glanced down at his fly.

  "You're not one of those machismo types who's great with his fists and duds out in bed, are you?"

  "Get Willingham and then find out."

  "There won't be anything left of you. I mean it," said Valerie and with a shrug she went to the wall with a green metal cabinet. The cabinet housed a phone.

  "It's not bad enough this rock's had to have running water in the room, but it's got its own private line, too. You ought to see the phone bills that come off of this line. It's incredible. Visitors come and make these free calls at museum expense and Willingham doesn't do anything about it."

  Valerie's conversation with Willingham quickly dissolved into her pleas for Mr. Willingham to stop screaming. Waiting for him to arrive, Valerie took eighteen drinks of water, fourteen cigarettes, often lighting three at a time, went to the lavatory twice, and muttered "Oh God, what have we done?" every seven minutes.

  Willingham was there in an hour.

  He spotted the stone immediately. He was a large lumbering man with large freckles sun-tickled from their winter hibernation. He wore a tan suit and a blue ascot.

  "Oh," he said, and "no" he said. His dark brown eyes rolled back into his forehead, and he weaved momentarily in place. He shook his head and gasped.

  "No," he said firmly, and as his body regained its normal circulation, his lips tightened. His eyes narrowed and he moved methodically to the stone, ignoring Valerie and Remo.

  He lowered himself to both knees and pressed his head to the marble base three times. Then with great force of will he turned to Valerie and asked: "When did you discover this?"

  "When I did it," Remo said cheerily.

  "You did this? Why did you do this?" Willingham asked.

  "I didn't think it was a true yearning of man's cosmic consciousness," said Remo.

  "How could you do it?" asked Willingham. "How? How?"

  So Remo pressed two fingers tight together in a light curve and with the same loose wristed snap made another line through the circle on the great stone. It crossed the first line at right angles, leaving an X.

  "That's how," Remo said. "It's really not too hard. The secret, as in all better use of your body, is in breathing and rhythm. Breathing and rhythm. It looks fast, but it's really a function of the slowness of your hand being slower than the rock. You might say the rock moves out of the way of your fingers."

  And with snapping fingers and rock dust flying from the great stone, Remo carved neatly through the spray of Joey 172 and the stiff bird and the curving raised snake: REMO.

  "I can do it left-handed, too," he said.

  "Ohhh," moaned Valerie, covering her eyes.

  Willingham only nodded silently. He backed out of the display room and shut the door behind him. Remo heard a whirring. A large steel sheet descended from the ceiling, coming to a neat clicking stop at the floor. The room was sealed.

  "Damn," said Valerie, running to the phone in the wall. She dialed. "I'm getting the police," she said to Remo over her shoulder. "This place is built like a walk-in safe. We'll never get out. Can't reason with Willingham after your insanity. He'll leave us here to rot. Why did you do it?"

  "I wanted to express myself," said Remo.

  "The line's dead," said Valerie. "We're trapped."

  "Everyone is trapped," said Remo, remembering a talk long ago in which Chiun had explained confinement. "The only difference between people is in the size of their trap."

  "I don't need philosophy. I need to get out of here."

  "You will," said Remo. "But your fear isn't working for you."

  "Another religious nut, like Willingham and his rock. Why do I always meet them?" asked Valerie. She sat down on the pedestal of the great stone. Remo sat down next to her.

  "Look. All your life you've been trapped. Everyone is."

  She shook her head. "Not buying," she said.

  "If you're poor, you can't afford to travel, so you're trapped in your home town. If you're rich, you're trapped on earth unless you're an astronaut. And even they are trapped by the air they have to bring with them. They can't leave their suits or their ship. But even more than that, every human being is trapped by his life. We're surrounded on one end by our birth and the other by our death. We can't get out of our lives. These walls are just a small period in our trapped lives anyhow, see?"

  "I need a way out of here, and you're giving me a pep talk."

  "I could get you out of anything but your ignorance," Remo said, and it surprised him how much like Chiun he was sounding.

  "Get me out of here."

  "I will after I'm finished with it," said Remo.

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "I
'm the one who's got Willingham and his friends trapped."

  "Oh, Jesus," said Valerie. "Now not only are we trapped, Willingham is too."

  "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.