The Arms of Kali td-59

by Warren Murphy

  "We await, Holy One," said the kid from Indianapolis who had taken to calling himself the phansigar. There were several of them now.

  "Right. Waiting," said Ban Sar Din. "Waiting is perhaps the fullest way of service to our holy Kali."

  "Did you forget the rumal?" asked the kid from Indianapolis.

  "Forgetting is a form of worship. Why does one remember? That is the question we must all ask ourselves," said the pudgy little man. He felt sweat forming in his underpants, and his mouth was dry. He tried to smile. If he smiled, they might not think he was getting ready to run for it.

  He made a sign of blessing he had seen somewhere. Oh, no. It was the sign of the cross, and he carefully did the motions again, backward, as if erasing his previous moves.

  "Thus Kali erases false doctrine," he said unctuously. If he ran for it, could he get away? he wondered. "You have forgotten the rumal, the holy blessed rumal with which we serve Her," said the yellow-haired girl from Denver. She was the one who frightened him most. He had gathered indirectly that she loved the death throes even more than the male followers did.

  "Let us all praise Kali now," said Ban Sar Din. He backed toward the door. If he could get a jump on these crazy white kids, he might make it into the alley and then out of New Orleans. He could always lose weight and pick pockets again. And even if he failed, there was always jail. At least, he would still be alive. It was an incredibly appealing thought.

  Ban Sar Din's little legs began running toward the thought before he could stop them. They were moving, and moving fast.

  They were not fast enough.

  Hands had his ankles, his arms, and he knew his throat was next. He felt his legs still going through the motions of running, but he was not going where he wanted to go. He was being carried to the base of that statue, which apparently was a new one, because it had more arms now than when he bought it. This was religion out of control, he thought, and somebody ought to do something about it.

  "Kali. Kali." The chants began, first as two screams, then as drumrolls, and the feet began hitting the floor and the whole ashram building shook with the chant of Kali. Kali the divine. Kali the death giver. Kali the invincible, goddess of death.

  The floor shook underneath his back from the stomping, and his fingers grew numb because his wrists were being held so tightly. He could smell the floor wax and feel the fingertips of young worshipers dig into his ankles.

  The chant continued: "Kali. Kali."

  It occurred to Ban Sar Din at that moment that if he heard the chants and smelled the floor wax and felt the pounding of feet, he was still alive. And if there was one thing he knew about the cult of Kali, it was that they never did the chanting before a death. It was always after a death had occurred. Of course, he did not know all that much about the cult. He had only bought the statue and given the white kids some Indian names.

  Ban Sar Din felt something funny on the soles of his feet. At first it tickled.

  "Please don't torture me," he cried out. "Have mercy."

  "It's kissing," said the phansigar from Indianapolis. Bar Sar Din opened his eyes. He saw lots of yellow hair near his feet.

  "Head north," he said.

  "It is so. It is ever so," said the yellow-haired girl. "He does not have the rumal."

  "If you say so," said Ban Sar Din.

  "We were told you wouldn't," she said.

  "Who told you? Get him out of here, whoever he is," said Ban Sar Din. "What does he know?"

  They were all looking down at him. He pulled his feet away from the yellow-haired girl and rose. He pulled his upper tunic tighter around his body.

  "Do you have the rumal for us?" asked one youth.

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Tell us you don't. Please," said the blond girl. Tears of joy filled her eyes.

  "All right. Since you asked, I don't. Now, step back. Holy men don't like to be crowded."

  "Kali the grand. Kali the eternal. Kali victorious," chanted three young men. Their feet began stomping on the wooden floor of the ashram.

  "Right," said Ban Sar Din. "I am going to get another rumal. I knew that this time I shouldn't bring one."

  "She told us. And we knew," said Holly Rodan.

  "Only the Holy One should predict and know," said Ban Sar Din as he looked around at the cult members. No one seemed to object, so he repeated it with more force. "Only one should predict."

  "She did. She did," repeated Holly Rodan. "She said that two must be brought before Her. He who has not the rumal will be the Holy One, the leader. And that one is you."

  "And the one who has the rumal?" Ban Sar Din asked.

  "He will be Her lover. And we will send him to Her in death," Holly Rodan said. "And that one is not you," she said. The blond-haired girl smiled at Ban Dar Sin. "Do you not wonder who that one is?"

  "The Holy One never wonders," Ban Sar Din said, wondering what she was talking about.

  "Did you not notice that we are now fewer?" Holly Rodan asked him.

  The pudgy Indian looked around. There were two faces missing. What had happened to them? Probably they took off for some other wacko cult.

  "Here today, gone tomorrow," he said. "Lots of people leave for fly-by-night cults, and we are well rid of them. We just have to make sure that they don't leave with the offerings in the rumals. Kali needs our offerings. It's part of our faith, faith of our fathers, now and certainly through November," he said, thinking of the disconnect notice of the electricity.

  "No. They did not leave. They were faithful. They tasted death. It was beautiful. Never have we seen death so strong, death so quick, death so powerful," said Holly Rodan.

  "Wait a minute. You mean we lost people to death?" asked Ban Sar Din.

  "Long live death. Long live Kali," said the girl. "We have met the great one, the one She wants. We have met Her lover. And we will bring him to Her and he will be carrying the rumal."

  Ban Sar Din took the yellow handkerchief that was shoved into his hands and left to go back into his office. Over the edge, he thought. They had gone over the edge. It was one thing to kill for some statue with too many arms, but to talk about bringing Her some lover to die for Her, well, that was just too much. He broke out in a sweat when he realized that he had been only a yellow handkerchief away from being the one.

  The pudgy pickpocket was thinking of packing and leaving when he opened the rumal and noticed the very thick roll of green bills. There was twenty-three hundred dollars in cash. There were four rings. Were they combining robberies now? Then he noticed that all the rings were for large fingers. There was a gold Rolex watch with a diamond-studded sweep second hand. There was a lapis-lazuli cocaine case with goldinlaid initials, TVW, and a pearl-handled automatic pistol.

  The reverend. They had killed the Reverend Tee Vee Walker.

  Ban Sar Din would have run if he hadn't counted the bills again. Over two thousand dollars. And inside the roll of bills was an airline ticket.

  He thought at first that it was one of the just Folks cheapo tickets, but this was a first-class round-trip ticket to Stockholm, Sweden. Inside was a note with perfumed stationery. It read: "From your grateful congregation to the Reverend Tee Vee Walker."

  On the inside of the ticket was another handwriting, much rougher and less refined. Ban Sar Din guessed that it was Reverend Walker's own writing. He had apparently jotted down something he didn't want to miss in Stockholm: "Madame Olga's House of One Thousand Pleasures."

  Ban Sar Din looked at the ticket for a long time. He could use it to flee, but something told him not to. Some inner voice said the ticket was a gift and an opportunity, not to be wasted.

  He wrapped the ticket in one of the old rumals with the Kali picture on it, the ones you couldn't buy for a decent price anymore, and went out into the ashram and placed it in one of the statue's many hands. The followers would know what to do.

  Three days later, the rumal came back with $4,383.47. Plus jewelry. Real jewelry. And Ban Sar Din learned a new lesso
n about economic success. You had to spend money to make money.

  No more consumer flights. No more semischeduled airlines. From now on, first-class flights.

  He called just Folks Airlines and canceled his special year-round consumer fare with the free-use-of-the-bathroom option and the offseason three a.m. Anchorage to Tallahassee fare and told them where to send the refund.

  Number 109.

  Comedienne Beatrice Bixby found someone who really thought she was funny. She found him next to her in first class headed to Stockholm, Sweden. He was not interested in her body or her fame or her money. He really gave Beatrice what she had always sought on the stage, approval. Everything she said was either brilliant or hysterically funny.

  "I'm not that funny," she said, not meaning a word of it. She was as funny as she had always dreamed of being. When the young man invited her to stop off at a little restaurant and then later suggested they go someplace quiet, and then asked a simple favor about a handkerchief, she said:

  "Of course. And if it's going around my neck, you can put diamonds in the handkerchief too." She waited for the laugh.

  But he wasn't laughing anymore. And soon, neither was she.

  Chapter Seven

  Dr. Harold W. Smith got the one answer he had always feared from Remo. It was two letters, one word, and the word was "No."

  He had gotten a secure telephone hookup to call Remo from the CURE headquarters, which were hidden behind the large brick walls that surrounded Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. It had been many years ago that Remo had been brought to the sanitarium from the morgue of the prison and nursed back to life and to health and then to something more. He had been chosen by Smith because all the tests had shown that Remo's basic character would not let him fail to serve his country.

  And now Harold Smith was getting that first "no" to a call for help.

  "It's gone international," Smith said.

  "Fine. Then America's safe."

  "We can't let something like this go on," Smith said.

  "Well, we are, aren't we?"

  "What's wrong with you, Remo?"

  "Maybe there are a lot of things that are wrong."

  "Would you like to tell me about them?" Smith asked in what he tried to project as his warm voice. It sounded like ice cubes cracking in warm water.

  "No," Remo said.

  "Why not?"

  "You wouldn't understand."

  "I think I could," Smith said.

  "I think you couldn't."

  "That's it?"

  "It," agreed Remo.

  "Remo, we need you," Smith said.

  "No," said Remo.

  For the first time since Remo had gone out for the organization, Smith was forced to go to Chiun for an explanation. It was not something he relished, because he seldom understood the old Oriental. The only things he was ever sure of was that he was being forced to send more money to the old man's village in North Korea. Remo had explained to him once that the village of Sinanju was poor and that for centuries its people had lived on the earnings of the Master of Sinanju, the world's foremost assassin.

  There had been many bad times, and in those times, Remo explained, the villagers had been forced to "send their babies home to the sea." This meant to throw them in the bay to drown rather than letting them starve to death. Remo felt it explained Chiun's insistence on large payment, frequent payment, and payment in gold, and seemed to think that it was a beautiful story.

  Smith thought that it was basically stupid and that all the villagers had to do to prevent starvation was to find a job somewhere and work for a living. Remo told him that he should never mention this idea to Chiun, and Smith never did. The infrequent meetings of the two men generally degenerated into Chiun's fawning all over Smith as America's emperor and then proceeding to do exactly what Chiun wanted.

  Not this time, Smith thought. He had to find out what was wrong with Remo. The meeting with Chiun was imperative, but where to meet someone in a kimono without attracting attention, someone who, for some insane reason, had blatantly taken out an advertisement in a Boston newspaper with his picture in it?

  He thought about it a long while, then decided to fly out to Denver. He rented a car at the airport, picked Chiun up at his hotel, and drove off into the Rocky Mountains outside Denver. It was the best he could think of. And Smith was tired. And he was wondering if it all made a difference anymore. Maybe Remo was right.

  Looking at the first snows on the peaks, Smith wondered if all he was trying to do, all the struggles and organization, were not just like those mountains. The problems were here today, and like the mountains, they would be here tomorrow. Nothing had been lost, but what had been won? He had been at this for twenty years and he was getting old and tired. Who would replace him? And would it make a difference? Could anything make a difference anymore?

  He saw Chiun's long fingernails reach over and appear as though they moved a button on Smith's chest.

  "Breathe as if a melon is stuck in your throat," Chiun said. "As if you must force the air into your stomach. Hard."

  Smith, without understanding why, complied and pulled air deep into his body, and suddenly things felt light. The world was light. Problems were solvable. This sudden change unsettled Smith. He was a man who ran everything by his intellect, and he did not want to believe that his perspective on the world could alter because of the way he took oxygen into his system. And yet it hadn't changed. He knew everything he knew before, all the problems and worries. It was just that he felt stronger, more able to deal with them, less tired of the world.

  "Chiun, you have trained Remo magnificently."

  "A reflection of your glory, O Emperor."

  "We are, as you know, engaged in an operation yet to be completed," Smith said.

  "How wise," Chiun said, and nodded, and his beard fluttered in the breezeless car. He was not sure what Smith had said. He assumed that he had just stated that they were all working on something, but Chiun never knew with Smith. He never quite understood him, so he nodded a lot.

  "Remo seems to be having troubles," Smith said. "Do you know what they are?"

  "I know that he, like I, lives to serve your wish and enhance the glory of the name Smith, greatest of Emperors."

  "Yes, yes. Of course. But have you noticed something bothering him?"

  "I have. I must admit, I have. But it is nothing that your glory should concern itself with."

  "It does concern me," Smith said.

  "How noble. Your grace knows no bounds."

  "What is bothering him?"

  "As you know," Chiun began, "the yearly tribute is delivered to Sinanju, as was agreed in our contract of service. Your submarine delivers onshore a seventeen-weight of silver, a five-weight of gold, and fragrances of great value."

  "Yes, that's the contract," said Smith suspiciously. "Since the last time you renegotiated it. What's that got to do with Remo?"

  "Remo's adoration for you, Emperor, is so strong that he cannot bring himself to share with you his true worries. He said to me: 'Gracious Master, teacher of Sinanju, devoted servant of our great Emperor, Harold W. Smith, how can I rest my head knowing that a five weight of gold is all that comes from my country to Sinanju? How can we be so disgraced as a race and a people to give a paltry five-weight of gold and a mere seventeen-weight of silver?'

  " 'Still your tongue,' I said. 'Has not Emperor Smith through these many years delivered the correct amount? Have we not agreed to this amount? Is it not according to the contract?'

  " 'Indeed, noble teacher, true servant of the Emperor Smith,' Remo said, 'it is according to the contract and I should still my tongue.'

  "And this he did," said Chiun. "But the hurt remains. I tell you this only because of my great trust in you."

  "Somehow, I can't see Remo worrying about Sinanju's yearly tribute," Smith said.

  "It is not that. It is the honor of his nation. And yours. "

  "I don't think Remo's mind works like that," Smith
said. "Not even after all your training."

  "You asked, Emperor, and I but told. I await your command."

  Smith could easily add more gold to the payment. The cost of having a submarine enter North Korean waters to deliver the tribute to the house of assassins far exceeded the tribute itself. But the problem with giving Chiun more money for a special emergency, as this was, was that it became the new base price for everything else in the future.

  "Another weight of gold," said Smith reluctantly.

  "Would that it were enough for Remo's heavy heart," Chiun said. "But in my foolishness, I told him that even a small king in a small poor country paid a ten-weight of gold to Sinanju."

  "Seven," said Smith.

  "It is not seemly that a servant argue with his emperor," Chiun said.

  "Does that mean that seven is acceptable? That we have a deal at seven?" Smith asked.

  "It means I dare not negotiate with you."

  "You're standing at ten?" Smith asked.

  "I am yours to command. As always," Chiun said.

  "Eight."

  "If only I could convince Remo."

  "I know he isn't going to serve any other country," Smith said. "He isn't that much Sinanju yet."

  "I only follow your will," Chiun said Calmly. His hands were folded and he looked out at the mountains.

  "Nine. And that's it."

  "For this special emergency, your will overrules the very tides," Chiun said.

  "Something is wrong with Remo," Smith said again, "and we need him. This danger has just gotten worse, and he's not willing to do anything about it."

  "It will be done," Chiun said. "What will?"

  "What is needed to be done," Chiun said, and such was the authority of his voice and the grace of his body and movements that Smith, at that moment, believed him. Why not? This was Sinanju, and it had not survived for thousands of years because these people did not know their business.

  "Did Remo tell you what this case is all about?" Smith asked.

  "In his halting way," Chiun answered. "He is only eloquent when speaking about injustices done to my village."