"Oh, that fish cellar," said Remo, who had never heard of any fish cellar and was dead sure there hadn't been one in the basement before today. "What's your name, by the way?"
"I am housekeeper. Name not important." And she bowed again.
"But you do have one?"
"Yes," said the old woman, bowing again and shuffling up the stairs to the upper floor.
"Chiun better have a good explanation for this," muttered Remo, ducking through the door leading into the basement.
The basement was an L-shaped space, just like the building above. Patches of light streamed through casement windows. They fell on rows of storage freezers like the ones big families use to keep sides of beef and giant racks of ribs. They were new. They hummed insistently. There were also giant bubbling aquariums, also in rows. All were empty of fish.
"Chiun, where are you?" Remo called out.
"Here," a thin voice squeaked.
Remo knew that squeak. It was not a happy squeak. Chiun was upset.
He found the Master of Sinanju at the far end of the cellar, in what had once been the coal bin. It had been changed. The wooden sides had been torn out and the area bricked off. There was a door. It was open.
Remo looked in.
The Master of Sinanju stood in the dim, cool space wearing his face like a mummy's death mask. His bright hazel eyes were looking up at Remo. They glinted, then narrowed.
Chiun wore a simple gray kimono of raw silk. No decorations. Its skirts brushed the tops of his black Korean sandals. His hands were tucked into the sleeves, which met over his tight belly.
His button nose flared slightly and he said, "You stink of sango."
"Sango?"
"Shark."
"Oh, right. One tried to eat me."
Chiun cocked his head like an inquisitive bird, his expression unreadable in the gloom. "And...?"
"I ate him first." Remo grinned. Chiun did not. His head came back, throwing off the shadows that clung to the wizened parchment features. He was as bald as an Easter egg, with two white puffs of cloudy hair over each ear. A beard like the unkempt tail of a white mouse hung from his chin.
"Smitty tell you what happened to me?" Remo asked.
"He did not. No doubt shame stilled his noble tongue."
"I got to the rendezvous zone in time. But someone had sunk the ship."
"You allowed this?"
"I couldn't exactly help it. It was sunk before I got there."
"You should have been early."
"But I wasn't."
"But you avenged this insult?"
"I tried to. A submarine torpedoed it. I went looking for it, but it found me first."
"You destroyed this pirate vessel in the name of the House?"
"Actually it kinda got away," Remo admitted.
"You allowed a mere submarine to elude you!" Chiun flared.
"I know what a sub is. I got aboard, but they chased me off. I did my best, Chiun. Then I found myself floating in the ocean without a pot or paddle. I almost drowned."
Chiun's face remained severe. "You are trained not to drown."
"I came that close. Sharks circled me."
"You are stronger than a shark. You are mightier than a shark. No shark could best you whom I have trained in the sun source that is Sinanju."
"Thanks for taking all the credit, but it was a close call."
"The training squandered upon you brought you home alive," said Chiun, stepping out and closing the door behind him with abrupt finality.
"Actually I don't think I would have made it, but I remembered Freya," Remo admitted.
Chiun lifted his chin in unconcealed interest.
"I remembered that I had a daughter and I wanted to see her again. So I found the will to survive."
Chiun said nothing.
"I'm sorry I blew the mission," Remo said quietly. He rotated his freakishly thick wrists absentmindedly.
Chiun remained quiet, his face stiff, his hazel eyes opaque.
"So, what did we lose?" asked Remo.
"Our honor. But it will be regained. You will see to that."
And Chiun breezed past Remo like a gray wraith.
Opening the door, Remo stuck his head into the bricked-off end of the cellar. It was bare, except for row upon row of cedar shelving.
Shrugging, Remo reclosed the door and started after the Master of Sinanju, and they mounted the stairs together.
"The old lady said you were in the fish cellar. But I don't see any fish."
"That is because there is no fish."
"Happy to hear it. Because I'm in a duck mood tonight."
"This is good because duck will be served tonight and every night for the foreseeable future."
"That's more duck than I was looking forward to."
They reached the top of the stairs.
"That is because there is no fish," said Chiun, without elaborating further.
They ate in the kitchen at a low taboret. The rice was white and sticky, steamed exactly the way Remo liked it, and served in bamboo bowls.
The duck lay supine in a light orange sauce.
Remo was surprised when the old woman who padded about the kitchen like a mute served Chiun a bowl of fish-head soup.
"I thought you said there was no fish," said Remo.
"There is no fish. For you."
"But there's fish for you."
"I did not fail in my mission," Chiun said aridly.
"Usually we eat the same thing."
"From this day until the honor of the House is avenged, you are reduced to duck rations. You will eat roast duck, pressed duck, steamed duck and cold, leftover duck. Mostly you will eat cold duck. And you will like it."
"I'll put up with it, but I won't like it," said Remo, poking at the duck's brown skin with a silver chopstick. "So, what's with the housekeeper?"
"I decided this today."
"She's South Korean, not North."
Chiun looked interested. "Very good, Remo. How can you tell this? By the eyes? The shape of the head?"
"By the fact that she hasn't eaten her way through the cupboard."
Chiun frowned. "Southerners make proper servants, but are of low character. I would not make a servant of a Northerner. Since she is Korean, but not of our blood, she is tolerable."
"You know, this might be a security problem."
"Her English is imperfect."
"I noticed," Remo said dryly.
"And I am weary of cooking for you and cleaning up after you."
"I pull my load."
"Not today. Today you lost an entire ship and its valuable cargo."
"That reminds me," said Remo, "what's Ingo Pungo mean?"
"You understand Korean."
"I don't know every word."
"You know ingo."
"Sounds familiar."
"You know kum."
"Sure. Kum is 'gold.'"
Chiun lifted one chopstick. "This is ingo."
"I remember now. It means 'silver.'"
With his silver chopstick, Chiun speared a fish head from his soup broth. "And this is pungo."
"A fish?"
"Not a fish. Fish is not fish. Fish have names. They have tastes and textures and even ancestries. River fish are different from ocean fish. Pacific fish are superior to Atlantic fish."
"Since when?"
"This soup is made from the heads of Pacific fishes."
Remo leaned over the taboret and scrutinized the fish head. It stared back.
"Don't recognize it," he admitted.
"It is carp."
"Ingo Pungo means Silver Carp?"
"Yes. It is a very worthy name for a vessel."
"Maybe. I never much liked carp."
"No, you are an eater of shark."
"It was a necessity," grumbled Remo.
"Not as much a necessity as bathing."
Remo looked at the Master of Sinanju.
"You smell of shark," Chiun reminded him.
"Bet
ter than the shark smelling of me," said Remo, who grinned even after the Master of Sinanju refused to return the grin.
It felt so good to be alive he even enjoyed the duck, greasy as it was.
Chapter 13
Although outwardly Dr. Harold W. Smith looked like a cross between an aging banker and an undertaker, there were days when he resembled an embalmed banker. This was one of those days.
Midwinter did nothing for Harold Smith's complexion. He was well past retirement age, and his hair had turned gray. Not white. A crisp white head of hair would have looked good on Harold Smith. It would have offset the unrelieved gray of his person.
Harold Smith was gray of hair, gray of eye, gray of demeanor and even gray of skin. The gray tinge to his skin was the result of a heart defect. Smith had been a blue baby. He was actually born blue. Like all newborn humans and kittens, Harold Smith had blue eyes at birth.
This soon changed. His eyes turned gray naturally. Silver idodine treatments for his condition had left his skin looking gray. It was as if, his mother had thought at the time, some dour cloud had come along to steal all the blueness from her dear little Harold.
No one knows exactly what forces dictate a man's destiny. Perhaps a man with a colorless name like Harold Smith was destined to enter some colorless field. His preference for Brooks Brothers gray and his chameleonlike ability to blend unobtrusively into social settings probably made the course of his life inevitable. No one named Harold Smith ever ran off with a busty starlet or broke the sound barrier or played music anyone wanted to hear.
It would have been the undeniable fate of Harold Smith of the Vermont Smiths to enter the family publishing business and toil steadily and doggedly and competently yet never brilliantly, but for Pearl Harbor. Harold Smith had enlisted. Smiths did not wait to be drafted. Smiths served their country in time of war.
Harold Smith's serious qualities were recognized early, and he spent the war in Europe with the OSS. This led to a postwar role with the new Central Intelligence Agency. Smith fit into the CIA perfectly. During the Cold War era, it was really a giant bureaucracy. There Smith learned computer science and gained a reputation and an inconvenient nickname, the Gray Ghost.
Smith would have retired from the CIA in the fullness of time were it not for a young President of his generation who saw the nation he loved spiraling into uncontrollable chaos. That President created a simple concept. CURE. An organization with no staff, no congressional mandate or sanction, but the ultimate power to right the keeling ship of state before the American experiment foundered on the shoals of dictatorship.
The President reached out to the supercompetent Harold Smith and offered him the responsibility for saving his nation from ruin. Smith responded to the challenge as he had responded to Pearl Harbor twenty years before. He undertook his civic duty. That was how he saw it, as a duty. He did not desire the post.
That was long ago. Many Presidents, many missions and many winters ago. Smith had grown grayer behind his desk at Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for CURE. He would never see retirement now. He would die at his desk. There was no retiring from CURE. And there was no end to the missions or the crises.
Now in the winter of his life, with the leaden skies making his gray personality seem beyond gray, he toiled at his desk and the computer terminal through which Harold Smith monitored the nation he was sworn to safeguard.
Smith had called up a simple data base, Flags of the World. Sometimes the deepest mysteries could be solved by simple resources.
Remo Williams had described to him a submarine with a white flag painted on its sail, framing a blue fleur-de-lis.
Smith had already looked up fleur-de-lis on his database. It was French for "flower of the lily." There was some historical confusion, he found. Because the flower represented by the fleur-de-lis was actually the iris, it was thought that the iris was originally called a lily. Thus the confusion.
It had been a symbol of French royalty since the reign of the Frankish King Cloris. The trouble was that the French royal flag was a gold fleur-de-lis against a blue background. A quick computer search of the flag data base showed no national flag depicting a fleur-de-lis of any color. The modern French flag was the simple tricolor. No fleur-de-lis.
Smith wasn't surprised. He possessed a photographic memory and recalled no such flag among modern nations.
Absently Smith plucked the rimless spectacles off his patrician nose and polished them with a disposable tissue. Decades of close computer work had made his eyes extremely sensitive to even the smallest dust particles on the lenses. He was forever polishing them.
Replacing them, Smith attempted a wider search. He called for any flag of any color depicting the fleur-de-lis.
The computer, its screen hidden under the black glass of his desktop, showed the colorless outline of a simple flag with a basic fleur-de-lis in the center.
Instantly it began absorbing color. Smith leaned closer.
He got the Boy Scout emblem. Remo had mentioned that. But the Boy Scout emblem was gold against dark blue. That was not the flag Remo had described. But of course it wouldn't be. The Boy Scouts don't operate submarines, much less attack shipping without cause.
Tapping an illuminated key, Smith instructed the system to continue its search.
After five minutes he came up with assorted heraldic flags, none of which matched the one described by Remo.
Frowning with all of his face, Smith leaned back in his cracked leather executive chair. Dead end. What could it mean?
Snapping forward, he ordered the system to call up any flag depicting any number of fleurs-de-lis. It was a long shot. But he had to know who was behind the sinking of the logo Pungo and if there was any reason to suspect a threat to CURE.
Almost at once, a blue flag divided into quarters by a white cross appeared. Each quarter framed a white fleur-de-lis exactly as described by Remo.
His mouth thinning, Smith studied it.
Of course, he thought. He had lived in Vermont, not very far from the Canadian border, and he should have recalled this particular flag. It was the provincial flag of Quebec, Canada.
Each quadrant matched the flag Remo had described, except the colors had been reversed.
Reaching for the blue contact phone on his desk, Smith dialed Remo's number.
A strange voice answered. "Who calls?"
Smith froze. "Who am I speaking to?"
"I ask first, sour mouth."
"I, er, am trying to reach Remo."
"Remo eating. Call back later. In meantime, go to hell."
And the phone went dead.
"What on earth?" Smith muttered.
Smith called back instantly, saying, "Please inform Remo that Dr. Smith is calling."
"I will. After dinner."
"It is important that I speak with him now."
"It is important that he eat. Go back to hell." And the line went dead again.
A rare flash of anger welled up in Harold Smith's gray, colorless soul. He quelled it. There was nothing to do but wait for the call back.
It came twenty minutes later.
"Smith. Remo. You called?"
"Who answered the telephone earlier?" Smith demanded in his lemoniest voice.
"Chiun's housekeeper."
"Chiun hired a housekeeper!" Smith said in surprise.
"Don't ask me why. She was guarding the door when I got back. And what happened to telling Chiun about what happened?"
"He did not answer the telephone."
"Okay, you're off the hook this time. But he's pretty steamed."
"Remo, the flag you described. Did it have a white cross in the center?"
"Nope. Just that flower symbol. Got anything?"
"My search failed to bring up an exact match, but the provincial flag of Quebec consists of a white cross framing four designs similar to what you described."
"Sounds right, though. They just got the color scheme reversed. But if they can't handle English, why should
we expect them to know their colors? Hey, Smitty. Does Quebec have submarines?"
"No. But the Canadian navy has. They are old World War II-vintage diesel-electric submarines."
"This was an old pigboat," Remo said. "And why would Canada sink the Ingo Pungo?"
"Of course they would not. Canada is our ally, and the ship was in U.S. waters, well within the two-hundred-mile limit."
"That's good because now that I've eaten, Chiun wants me to go chasing subs."
"Locating that submarine is your next mission," said Smith.
"I was afraid that was what you were going to say. Look, can it wait? I just spent a night in the water playing with the sharks and I'd just as soon not see open water for a while."
"A hostile submarine operating in U.S. waters is a security problem. Remo, those sailors you encountered. Did they speak at all?"
"No. The sub might as well have been crewed by Marcel Marceau and his Merry Mimes. Hey, he's French, isn't he?"
"I can think of no reason for a French submarine to be attacking U.S. shipping," Smith said dismissively.
"Maybe it's Quebec after all. They mad at us for any reason?"
"No. Quebec is currently at odds with English Canada over the secession question. But that issue has nothing to with the U.S."
"Then they had to be after the Silver Carp."
"The what?"
"That's the English name. I'm sick of saying 'Ingo Pungo.' It sounds like I go pogo."
"No one other than her crew knew of the Ingo Pungo's mission and cargo," said Smith.
"What exactly was it, by the way?" asked Remo.
"Fish."
"Fish!" Remo exploded.
Harold Smith cleared his throat. "Yes, during the last contract negotiation, the Master of Sinanju requested and I agreed to supply regular shipments of fresh Pacific fish."
"Fish?"
"As you may have read, there is a global fishing crisis. Coastal fisheries have been exhausted worldwide, forcing fleets to go fishing in deeper and deeper waters. The quality of catches is in sharp decline. Prices are skyrocketing. Master Chiun has been unhappy with the varieties available to him and requested that I remedy it."
"Let me get this straight-instead of more gold, he held you up for fish this time?"
"Actually the fish will end up being more expensive than gold on a per-pound basis, once all costs are factored in," Smith admitted.
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