"I don't see any rum fizzles," the passenger said.
"Take what's there," Remo said.
"Can I have a vodka and rum?"
"Sure. Take it and go," Remo said. "Can I have two?"
"Take them. Go."
"Two of them?"
"All of them," Remo said.
"Are you really a steward?" Holly asked Remo. She was not afraid. She had Her on her side.
"Sure," said Remo. "I've even seen you before. On this flight."
"Not on this flight," said Holly. "This flight only began a half-hour ago." It was a perfect answer. She liked putting people in their places. Mother had taught her how. It was the only thing her mother had ever been good for.
Remo suggested that now, since the coffeepot wasn't using the hotplate, she might like to sit there.
"You can't talk to me like that. There are regulations. You'll get fired."
"All right," said Remo.
"That's it?"
"Yup," he said.
"Nothing else?"
"Go back to your seat."
She did, and Remo watched her go. There was something wrong with this young lady. He wondered if Chiun had noticed it, but Chiun was busy with several people who were agreeing with him that workmanship throughout America was becoming shoddy. The true professional was a thing of the past. Chiun nodded sagely and pulled another petition from his kimono: "STOP AMATEUR ASSASSINS."
Remo let Holly Rodan get off the plane with the man she had been fawning over, but just as she was about to be picked up by some young friends, Remo moved in on the car and told the salesman to get lost.
The man threatened to call the police. Remo noticed his wedding ring and said, "Good. And call your wife too."
"Talk about a semischeduled airline. I've never seen such bad service," the salesman said.
"He has a right to come with us," said Holly. "We want to give him a lift."
"Give me a lift," said Remo.
"We don't want to give you a lift."
"We'll give him a lift," said the man in the front seat.
"We're not giving this son of a bitch a lift," Holly said. "I've got the other man who wants to go with us, and we're not giving this one a lift. He's a lousy stewardess and I wouldn't give him a lift to hell in a handbasket. "
The young man in the front seat did not try to reason with her, as her mother had, nor did he seek, as her father had, to understand the deeper meaning of her complaints. He did not attempt, as her teachers had, to establish a bridge of understanding.
What he did was far more effective than anything else that had ever been practiced on her. He slapped her in the mouth. Very hard.
"We would be happy to give you a lift, traveler," she told Remo.
"Much obliged," he said. "You people travel much?"
"Only when we have to," said the man next to the driver. The airport was Raleigh-Durham and they asked Remo if he wanted to go to Duke University or Chapel Hill.
"I just want to talk," Remo said.
"We like to talk too," said the passenger in the front seat. His hand rested over his shirt pocket and Remo knew that the pocket contained a weapon, although all that he could see was a yellow handkerchief.
They stopped the car near a small woods to have a picnic. They said they were hungry and had, in fact, been describing the odors and tastes, the crispness of fried chicken, the succulence of lobster in butter, the smooth richness of chocolate in the throat. When Remo thought about these things, his stomach became queasy, but he said nothing because, they obviously were trying to work up his appetite.
They parked the car and walked with Remo along a little path to a clearing, where they opened a picnic basket.
"Excuse me," said the man who had been sitting next to the driver. "Can I get this around your throat?"
"Sure," said Remo. So the handkerchief wasn't hiding a weapon. It was the weapon. The others grabbed his legs and hands. The handkerchief became a cord and circled his neck and then closed and tightened. Remo counteracted the contraction with neck pressure. He did not fight it with his muscles. He just lay there with people sprawled across his arms and legs.
The strangler pulled. Remo lay there.
"She loves it, She loves it," said Holly Rodan.
"The hell She does," said the driver. "Look, he's not even turning red."
Remo let the blood pressure rise in his head so his face reddened.
"There it goes," said the driver.
"Now She loves it," said Holly.
"Why isn't he struggling? Pull harder," the driver said.
The noose tightened. The phansigar's forehead broke out in perspiration. His knuckles whitened and his wrists strained. Holly Rodan dropped an arm to help pull on the other side of the rumal. She pulled and the phansigar pulled. The demon about to be offered up to Kali smiled and then the rumal snapped in half.
"Hi," said Remo. "Let's talk about strangling and robbery."
"You're not dead," said the phansigar.
"Some people might give you an argument about that," Remo said.
The driver made a break for the car. Remo caught one leg, then the other leg. He whipped the body into a tree, where it folded up neatly with a snap of the spinal column, then convulsed once and was still.
The phansigar opened his mouth, and then breakfast came up as he looked at the driver. The body was bent in two, backwards, with the nape of the neck touching the heels.
"Don't make bodies the way they used to," Remo said. "Now, the Neanderthal, that was a man. Solid. You hit a Neanderthal against a tree and the tree would break. Look at this guy. Never going to fix him. He's done. Just one little bang on a tree and he's done. What do you think, sweetheart?"
"Me?" said Holly Rodan. She was still holding half of the yellow rumal in her hand.
"You, him, I don't care," Remo said. "What's going on?"
"We're practicing our religion. We have a right," said the phansigar.
"Why are you killing people?"
"Why do Catholics say Mass? Why do Protestants sing or Jews chant?"
"It's not nice to strangle and rob," Remo said.
"That's what you say," the phansigar said.
"How would you like it if I killed you?"
"Go ahead," said the phansigar. "Long live death." Remo felt himself hesitate. He looked at the girl, and she was just as calm as the other young man. That was why he had sensed nothing about the girl on the just Folks flight.
"Go ahead," said the young man.
"Sure," said Remo. "If you insist," and dropped him like a loose marble onto the picnic basket.
"Long live pain," the young man gasped as he expired.
"What is all this about?" Remo asked the girl. Holly Rodan stared at the broken body. It had been so fast, so forceful, the body breaking like a brittle stick. She felt her limbs grow warm, and a tingling look over her belly. It was beautiful. This new one brought death in such speed and force. She had never seen it like this. She had a taste for death now. It could be beautiful, she realized, beautiful if it were strong enough. Not some limping off into eternity, but the gigantic crash into a tree. She looked at the phansigar, dispatched by Remo like a gum wrapper.
Then she looked at Remo, the handsome dark-eyed man with high cheekbones. His sharp gaze sent gushers of passion through her body. She wanted him. All of him. She wanted him in death, in life, his body, his hands. Death or passion, it was all the same thing. She now knew the secret of Kali. Death was life itself. They were the same.
Holly Rodan threw herself at Remo's feet and began kissing his bare ankles.
"Kill me too," she said. "Give me death. For Her." The feet moved away and she crawled after this beautiful force of death. She crawled down the path, her knees scraping on stones, bleeding. She had to reach him. She had to serve him with her life.
"Kill me," she said. She looked up into his eyes, imploring him. "Kill me. For Her. Death is beautiful." For the first time in his new life, Remo ran. He ran from
the clearing and from something he did not understand. He did not even know what he was running from.
Back at the airport, he met Chiun, who was stopping passersby and asking them to sign his petition. But when Chiun saw Remo, he knew something was wrong and put the petition away inside his kimono.
All the way back to New Orleans, Chiun made no criticism, expressed no annoyance at having had to train a white man, and on leaving the plane, even paid Remo a compliment. "You move and breathe well, Remo."
"I'll be all right, Little Father. I just have to think."
"Of course," said Chiun. "We will speak when you are ready."
But that night, at their new hotel, they still did not speak. Remo looked at the stars and could not sleep. Chiun watched Remo, and late, during the night, he put away the petitions in one of his large steamer trunks.
They would have to wait; something more important had happened, he knew.
Chapter Six
Ban Sar Din ate his way through the forty dollars before breakfast. And it wasn't even at his favorite restaurant; he couldn't afford that.
He left the restaurant and wandered the streets. Something was wrong with America. If you bought a plane ticket and sent three people out to do a job and then all you earned was less than the price of a full meal with dessert, something was seriously wrong. With the economy. With everything.
People were making fortunes on fund-raisers for revolutionary movements that were little more than bandit gangs. There was one yogi who was even selling a secret word for two hundred dollars a pop and he had the suckers lined up waiting.
Some cults had mansions. Others had corporations that came close to being listed in the Fortune 500. Some yogis bought their own towns, drove around in Rolls-Royces, and the suckers threw flowers at their feet.
And what did Ban Sar Din have?
He had an ashram full of crazies who thought nothing of killing someone for forty dollars just to see the victim wriggle a bit. And he was losing money. The Kali thing had started out all right, but now the crazies seemed more interested in the killing than in the robbing, and he was going bust.
In a land of opportunity, if you couldn't make money through murder and theft, how could you make money?
He felt like taking one of those bonus-fare coupons from just Folks Airlines and flying off somewhere. But his hands had gotten too fat for picking pockets and he had gotten used to being a spiritual leader to America's youth. What bothered him most of all that troubling evening was that he knew there was a fortune to be mined somehow, somewhere in that ashram. He had free personnel and a cult that seemed to have caught on.
How to make a buck out of it? A reliable buck.
He couldn't send out more of the killer teams. If each one showed a loss, increasing the volume just meant increasing the loss. Expenses? He couldn't cut any more than he had already. Handkerchiefs any cheaper and they wouldn't be able to hold a throat. He had tried white handkerchiefs once, but the faithful insisted on the yellow, and how could you argue with people you weren't paying anyway?
He couldn't even cut expenses by going to a totally unchartered airline. Who knew what kind of poverty-stricken passengers that kind of line might be carrying? His loonies would wind up killing and come home with a handful of food stamps.
He was in a circle growing smaller and there was no way out.
And then, in his despair, Ban Sar Din heard voices, a beautiful song rising with faith and gusto toward the heavens. He looked around and saw he had wandered into a poor black neighborhood. The voices came from a church. He entered and sat down in a rear pew.
The minister sang with the chorus. He preached of hell and he preached of salvation, but most of all he preached of the magic prayer cloth that would answer problems, and when treated with the magic blue juice, would cure the gout, rheumsey, cabob disorder, and lung cancer.
After the prayer meeting, Ban Sar Din went up to the minister.
"What ails you, brother?" asked the Reverend, Tee Vee Walker, a boom of a man with a rutted black face and large hands that glistened with gold and diamonds. His was the Church of the Instant Savior. "Business is bad," said Ban Sar Din.
"What business you in?" asked the Reverend Walker.
"Religion business," said Ban Sar Din.
"You in the life, then?" chuckled the Reverend Walker, and when Ban Dar Sin explained he was running an Indian religion, the Reverend Walker asked his weekly take.
"It used to be good, but costs have gotten out of hand."
"Don' know how to handle costs, excep' don' have none. What I always do is take the ugliest woman in the choir and give her some heavy lovin' and then make her in charge of all the costs. She figure out how to pay. Learned from my Daddy, he be a preacher too, one of your basic no-frills yell-in-their-face gospel preachers. You can go anywhere with that. Yell in their faces."
"I have a different sort of gospel," Ban Sar Din said.
"They all the same. It be what people buyin'."
"It's not the same. I'm afraid of my congregation."
"Pack one of these," said the Reverend Walker. It was a little silvery automatic. He explained that it was unseemly for a minister to carry a large pistol, but a pearl-handled automatic could fit in a jacket or trouser pocket. His father, he said, used to carry a switchblade.
"But mine are crazy," Ban Sar Din said. "I mean real crazies. You just can't yell in their faces. You don't understand."
"Listen, little fat fella. I'm not rescuing yo' congregation for nothing. I'll show you how to work the pulpit," the Reverend Walker said. "But I get the day's offerings. "
"You can yell in their faces?"
"I can whip yo' congregation into a pack of little puppies. And when I got them where you want 'em, remember ... give the ugliest woman some loving and let her solve yo' problems for you."
Ban Sar Din gauged the big man's size again. Perhaps. Perhaps he might get them in line. And once they were in line, Ban Sar Din might be able to get them into more profitable areas, might be able to convince them that coming back with forty dollars in a rumal was a sin, especially in these times when forty dollars didn't even get you a first-class meal with dessert.
"All right, nigger," Ban Sar Din said. "A deal."
"What's that word yo' say?" asked the Reverend Tee Vee Walker.
"It's wrong?"
"Only a nigger can use the word 'nigger.' "
"Everybody calls me 'nigger,' " Ban Sar Din said, in great confusion. "I thought that made us blood brothers or something."
"Not you. You brown enough, but you talk funny."
"The British imperialists forced us to learn this funny talk," said Ban Sar Din, catching in a single sentence the basic doctrine of the third-world theology; namely that no matter what happened, one had to blame it on some white men. That done, anything was acceptable.
The Reverend Walker did not find a pulpit in the ashram. There was a bare wood floor, well polished, a statue of their saint, which had too many arms and an ugly face, and not even the smell of something cooking somewhere. Just some very quiet, very white, very young people walking around.
"When do services begin?" the Reverend Walker asked Ban Sar Din.
"I don't know. They begin them themselves most of the time."
"This has got to stop right heayah. You run the church, or the church runs you. Let's lay some gospel down on their heads."
He noticed a blond girl, quite excited, her cheeks flushed with joy. For this occasion only, for his pudgy brown brother only, he would make an exception about the ugliest woman in the congregation. One had to take care of the good-looking ones too.
Reverend Walker flashed his broadest smile and stepped in front of the statue at which everyone was looking.
"Brothers and sisters," he boomed. He wished he had a pulpit to bang. He wished he had chairs to look at, faces to look back at him. But half these people had their heads down on the floor and the other half were only trying to look past him toward the statue.<
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"We got to move on to be right on," yelled the good Reverend Tee Vee Walker. "Man can't walk, man can't talk. If you pray, you pay."
People still didn't look at him. He thought that that should have worked. It hardly ever failed. One black preacher had even run for president by trying to reduce the nuclear-technological age to seven-year-old rhymes.
The reverend didn't know why these whites weren't responding.
If he couldn't get them with preaching, he would try singing.
His rich voice boomed out over the throng, calling for sweet understanding, bemoaning suffering, calling for trust. He liked the way he could bring it all up from his toes. But they still didn't respond. And it was good singing, too.
The Reverend Walker began to clap. No Walker had ever lost a congregation, not in four generations of preachers, and he wasn't going to be the first. He stamped his feet. He yelled some more at their heads, and no one even noticed him.
Then the pretty little blond girl smiled at him and nodded him into a side room.
The Reverend Tee Vee Walker did not miss that smile. So there were other ways to bring a congregation into line. He knew them all. He winked back and followed the girl into the room.
"Hi," she said.
"Hello there," said the Reverend.
"Can I just get this around your neck?" came a voice from behind him.
So these whites did groups. "Any neck you want," he said with a broad smile.
And there was number 108.
Ban Sar Din was waiting in his private devotion office when he heard a knock on the door. They were calling him to appear before Her.
Good, he thought. The reverend has finally gotten them into line.
But there was no Reverend Walker. Just a small group holding one of those silly yellow handkerchiefs. He didn't remember any groups going out now, but then again, they weren't telling him everything anymore either. He wondered what they had in the rumal this time. Loose change? He looked around the ashram, but saw no sign of the minister. Maybe he had done his job and left.
"She loved it," said one of the followers.
Ban Sar Din reached into his pocket. No cloth. He looked at the upturned faces of his followers. The crazies were going to kill him if he didn't have a fresh rumal. Maybe strangle him with their bare hands.
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