Fool's Gold (11 page)

It was this proof of body control that let him speak to the multitudes. He had not only been trained as a priest of Gint but had been to the London School of Economics, where he learned to hate America.

He also hated Britain, France, West Germany and all the Western industrialized countries. This was easy to come by in London where he had been exposed to what he and most of the other Third World students really hated about the West. They weren't part of it.

Seeing Remo and Terri, he spoke in English to the multitudes.

"Here they are. The imperialists. Why don't you have skyscrapers like they have? Because they have exploited them from you. Why don't you have as many shirts as they have? Because they have many shirts while you do not even have one. Is that fair? They consume so much of the resources of the world that you have nothing. They ride around in big cars while you walk on bare feet. Is that fair? There they are. The imperialists come to step on you."

Thus spoke the fakir dedicated to the goddess Gint. Now the beggars who stood around did not understand English but the fakir knew the talk was not for them, for they had no coins for his begging bowl. It was for the Americans themselves, because if you called Americans or Britons imperialist exploiters, they would put bills in your bowl. Especially American women who were stupid enough to believe that if Americans had fewer shirts, somehow Indians would have more.

The Britons were not as good for this, sometimes thinking things through. But American women were absolutely splendid, believing that somehow American use of bauxite and petroleum deprived people in loincloths of something they would otherwise use.

The fakir saw the American man approach. He could see that his speech had gotten to the woman but the American's man's face was hard to read.

"Exploiter of the masses, have you come to step on us? Have you come to steal our bauxite? Are you robbing us of our manganese and ferrous oxide?"

The fakir lifted his head very gently for a sudden move on his bed or nails would let the sharpened spikes pierce his backbone.

"Pig. Brutalizer. Robber," he said to Remo and Terri. Terri put fifteen dollars American into the bowl. Remo stepped up and onto the fakir, pressing him down into his nails, making sure the upper back went down with the first step so there would be no more noise out of the mouth.

The fakir lay there embedded on his spikes. Remo took back Terri's fifteen dollars and gave it to the crowd.

Terri looked at the fakir, the crowd, the fakir, Remo, and the fakir again, Already flies were settling on him.

"Why... what did you do that for?" she gasped.

"Listen, if he says I came to step on him, who am I to prove him wrong?"

"You're the ugly American. Absolutely," she said.

"Why not?" said Remo and the day was good.

Terri turned to Chiun. "Did you see him? He just killed a man. For no reason at all. A poor simply holy man speaking the truth as he knew it."

Chiun said nothing but Remo snapped, "I don't know what the matter is with you, but you seem to take some malignant anti-American crap and invest it with virtue. You don't know what he was talking about. Maybe he was ragging the crowd to mob us. Would you rather have seen me kill the crowd?"

"All this death all the time. Why, why, why?" asked Terri.

"Because, because, because," said Remo.

"That's not an answer."

"It is for me," Remo said.

"You beast," said Terri.

And in Korean, Chiun said to Remo about the fakir now impaled on his bed of nails, "I always wanted to do that. I always wanted to do that."

Terri did not understand what he said, but she said, "That's right, Chiun. You tell him that professional assassins don't kill wantonly."

"It seemed right," Remo said to Chiun in Korean.

"Don't listen to him," Terri said to Chiun. "He could corrupt you."

"If you see another one," Chiun said in Korean, "He's mine. I don't know why we never thought of that before."

"You've got to be special," said Remo with pride.

"I am," said Chiun. "That's why I don't know why I never thought of that before."

Suddenly Terri sobbed. "I hate you," she sputtered at Remo. "I hope the mob does mob us. How's that?"

"No. They only go after you if you look weak. They'll never attack anyone who steps a fakir into his nails," Remo said.

Terri looked. It was true. All the beggars were looking at the punctured corpse as a curiosity. No one was bothering them. One of them peeled off the corpse's loincloth to use as his own.

According to legend, the goddess Gint mated with the forces of the universe to create the god of dark places.

Gint herself was said to have murdered a part of the day which people would never see again. It was not morning or evening, but was supposed to occur shortly after noon and according to legend, was a cool and dark moment, a brief respite from the hot Indian sun.

This did Gint take into her bosom and away from mankind. Naturally, it made her one of the India's most beloved goddesses. She was widely regarded as the benefactress of schemes, and the cult of Gint was one of the richest in India.

Yet this day as Remo and Chiun accompanied Terri into the temple looking for more Hamidian writing, no one was tending the flowers or the candles or the sweetmeats set at the feet of the goddess' statue.

Gint had seven breasts and according to Indian mythology eight sons, who promptly destroyed the weakest by cutting off his lips so he could not eat.

Seeing how much more milk there was, the strongest son decided to take all the breasts for himself and when his brothers were suckling, bit off the backs of their heads. Angered, Gint ordered her remaining son never to drink her milk again but to drink the dark brackish waters in small ponds and to live forever as a mud slug.

So to that very day, devout Hindus were careful of stepping on mud lest they profane the only remaining son of Gint.

"How spiritual. How beautiful," said Terri, reading the legend under the statue and smelling the incense candles.

"The statue's got a face like a mushroom and seven tits," Remo said. "She's the ugliest thing I've ever seen."

"How beastly you are. In the presence of such spirituality, showing how gross you are."

Their footsteps sounded like coins dropping on the taut skin of a drumhead. The ceilings were painted with snakes devouring babies and slugs drinking from the breast of swamps. This was done in rubies, emeralds and sapphires.

Remo noticed little bundles taped to the ceiling where the support pillars were. Every pillar had them.

They felt wrong. He looked toward Chiun and the old Korean nodded.

"Let's find the writing and get the hell out of here," Remo said.

"It should be right near this temple," said Terri. "But I don't want to profane their religion."

"The only way you can profane it is by having an honest thought," Remo said. He looked up at the bundles and he saw Chiun nod to him. They did not belong in the temple of the goddess Gint.

Tonaka Hamamota, number one adviser to the great House of Wissex, had watched the trio enter the temple.

He had sat quite comfortably at a distance, letting his computer watch the people. It did not tell him much about their facial features, but instead how they moved and emitted heat. The heat emissions came out on a screen, showing the coolness of the temple stones and the heat of the three bodies entering.

Lord Wissex had assured him the three would enter and so they had, and that was all Tonaka Mamamota needed, since he could trail a target by the scent of the wax in their ears.

Tonaka had been told that there might be danger and that he should report every step as he did it. He thought the idea of danger was ridiculous but one did as one's employer wished.

Tonaka Hamamota wore a blue imitation cotton Sears suit with imitation silk striped tie and an imitation polyester white shirt.

He watched as his computer screen ticked off the facts:

Movement of trio. Males glide with the very motion of body. Woman clomps as is normal. Males seem always to have weight centered.

Pulse. Woman normal. Males subnormal, closer to python than ape.

Position: Males always keep female between them in protective cordon.

Language: Female doing most of talking; apparently hostile.

First attack: Males' movement instantaneous with explosion. Female, delayed normal reaction time. Scream.

Terri started yelling as the tile around their feet exploded in little luminescent fragments pitting the walls with impact.

She tried to run but felt a strong reassuring hand on her arm.

It was Remo.

"There's nowhere to run," he said.

"Let me go."

"You can't run. Those are bombs going off. The whole temple's a bomb. Look." And he pointed and she followed his finger and then saw the packages strapped to the pillars where they joined the graceful dome of the roof.

She felt Remo pull her toward the ground. His finger touched an inlaid tile.

"This is a bomb too," he said. "There are nothing but bombs here. We're in the middle of a bomb."

"Oh, no," moaned Terri. She began to shake.

"It's all right, kid," Remo said. "They're not going to kill you."

"How do you know?"

"You'd have been dead by now," Remo said.

"The bombs were obvious from the beginning," Chiun said.

"Then why did we walk in here?"

"I didn't know who they were for," Chiun said. "It was obvious they were not part of the temple. Look at the strapping. Look at the packages. See how clean the lines are."

"Good taste," said Remo.

"Probably Japanese," Chiun said.

"Definitely not Indian," Remo said.

"It's in good taste," Chiun agreed.

"Definitely not Indian," Remo said.

"They're going to kill us and you're talking about design," Terri screamed.

"If we're going to die, it's not going to hurt us to talk about design."

"Do something," shouted Terri and Remo obligingly did a little tap dance and sang two bars from "Once Upon a Blue River, Darling."

Not to be outdone, Chiun recited a stanza of Ung poetry.

"That's not what I want you to do," Terri yelled.

"Name it," said Remo.

"Get us out of here," Terri said.

"We could get out but you can't," said Remo. "Look at 'the windows and doors. Do you see those beautiful square lattices that look like borders?"

Terri nodded.

"Bombs," said Remo. "We could get out fast enough but not you."

"You've got to protect me."

"And we are."

"Then do something," she said.

"We are," Remo said.

"You're doing nothing. You're just standing there."

"We're waiting," Remo said.

"For what?"

"For what is going to come, my dear," said Chiun and suddenly there were voices in the temple. It was one voice but because of the echoes it sounded like many. It said:

"I can kill you any time. Watch."

Suddenly Terri's ears ached from two concussions.

"That is an example," the voice said. "You are in a bomb I have constructed. Resistance is useless."

"See. I told you we were in a bomb," Remo said. "Whole place is a bomb."

"Oh, no," sobbed Terri.

"Send the woman out to me or you will all die," said the voice.

"What should I do?" whined Terri.

"You could die honorably with us," said Remo, "or you could run for your life."

"I don't want to leave you," said Terri. "But I don't want to die either."

"Then go."

"I'll stay," she said.

"No, go. Don't worry about us."

"Will you be all right?" she asked.

"Sure. Go," said Remo.

"I hate to leave you, Chiun," she said.

"Ahhh, to see beauty as one's last sight is but a pleasant way to pay the debt of death that is owed from one's birth."

"You're so beautiful," said Terri. "And you, Remo, if only you weren't so hostile."

"So long, kid," Remo said. "See you around."

Terri stumbled from the temple, holding her head, shielding her weeping eyes from the bright sun. She walked past the pools, following the sound of a voice that told her to keep moving.

The voice kept repeating that when Terri came just over the little hillock facing the temple, the two inside the temple would be released unharmed.

Terri stumbled from the temple gardens and sobbed her way beyond a little hill, where a fat Oriental with a square face, wearing a blue suit, sat in front of a little computer built into an attaché case.

"Dr. Pomfret?" he said.

"Yes."

"I have receivers in the temple that capture and magnify my voice. They are smaller than a pencil dot."

Hamamota picked up a tiny microphone, no larger than a thumbnail, and into it he spoke.

"Now you die, Melican dogs."

The temple of the goddess Gint went up in a mountain of pink plaster and spraying jewels. The earth shook. Terri felt her ears grow numb. The pink plaster of the temple was still coming down over the outskirts of Bombay when Terri finally got herself to look over the little hillock. Where Remo and Chiun had been was now only a large, smoldering hole. They were dead.

Then she thought she heard them arguing from the Beyond. The voices came through the buzzing in her ears.

"He called me an American," said Chiun.

"No. He called you a Melican," said Remo.

"That's how they pronounce American," Chiun said.

"So?"

"Would you like to be called a boy when you are a man?" said Chiun's voice from the Beyond.

"There's no comparison," said Remo's voice in Heaven.

"It is bad enough being called a Chinaman. But to be called an American. That means I have those funny eyes, that sickly skin, that awful odor about the body. It means that I am of European stock, and therefore, somehow related to the French. That is beyond degradation."

"I'm white," Terri heard Remo's voice say.

"And don't think that has been easy on me," said Chiun.

"And I am very proud to be an American," Remo said.