Warren Murphy: The Arms of Kali

"You knew I wanted to give you everything, didn't you?" the man said. "You understood my problem." He kissed Ban Sar Din's limp hand and pressed the wallet forward. "Yours," he said.

Ban Sar Din backed away, suspicious, and the man said, "No. Yours, please. I have been enlightened. I have been freed from the bonds of materialism. I am going to free myself from everything that binds, and I owe it all to you. What can I do for you, friend?"

"Do you have any change also?" asked Ban Sar Din as he made a great realization: picking Americans' pockets were not nearly as profitable as picking their minds.

It was a revelation and it proved to be a turning point. Ban Sar Din found that in America nothing was unsellable, no matter how stupid, if you put a towel on the head of a salesman and called it mystical.

The problem was which religion. Most of the good ones were taken already and were doing land-office business. One of them even had people paying good money in the belief that they would be able to learn to levitate.

Then, on a rainy afternoon in downtown New Orleans, Ban Sar Din remembered the old robbers of the highways.

Before the British came, an Indian could hardly travel from one province to another without an army to guard him.

But during the British oppression, as he had learned to call it, schools were started, courts of law were established, and roads to enable the peasants to engage in commerce were established.

But there was a problem on the roads. There were the servants of Kali, called the Thuggees. Their religion told them to rob travelers, but never to spill blood. It was so successful that both Hindus and Muslims, in a rare sharing of a doctrine, formed Thuggee bands, from which the word "thug" came into use through the English-speaking world. The British Colonial Office, in their rigid backwardness, thought it improper to have bands of killers prowling the roads, preying on travelers, so after years of constant policework, they finally hanged the last of the lot.

Ban Sar Din checked around. No one was using Kali. He went to an old junk shop and found a statue of the goddess. The price was surprisingly low, and after paying it, and safely holding the statue in his arms, he asked the store owner why he had sold it so cheaply.

"Because the damn thing's haunted, that's why," the store owner said. "Came in on a ship a hundred years ago, and anybody who owned it died badly. It's all yours, my friend."

Ban Sar Din was no one's fool, and certainly not fool enough to believe in one god from a country that had twenty thousand of them.

He rented an old storefront for use as an ashram and installed the statue at the front of it.

And then things started to happen. Students made the first good converts. They told him stories of how before their conversion, they had been timid and frightened. But as soon as they had placed their first rumal around a throat, power had come to them.

The converts themselves taught Ban Sar Din, whom they called the Holy One, new intricacies of the cult of Kali, the goddess of death. He never knew where they were getting their information or how they were learning Indian words. Then, one horrible night, he had a dream and the goddess with all her arms talked to him.

"Little pickpocket," she said in his dream, "I have let you live because you have brought me to my new home. Little pickpocket, I have hungered these many years for the death struggles of victims again. Little pickpocket, do not interfere with the rituals of death. I love them."

He ran out into the deserted ashram and looked at the cheap statue, which he had not even bothered to repaint. It had grown another arm, and there was no seam, no paint, nothing to show that the arm had not always been there, nothing but Ban Sar Din's memory. It frightened him so much that he decided he had been wrong about the number of arms and put it out of his mind.

By this time, the little Indian weighed 240 pounds and looked like a giant M the candy coating. He was also wearing one-thousand-dollar suits and driving a Porsche 911SC. He was wintering in Jamaica, summering in Maine, and hitting the French Riviera twice a year in between, all for handing out little yellow handkerchiefs and getting them back with money in them.

He knew, therefore, to leave well enough alone. So when forty dollars came back in a rumal, he gave the little jerks the Indian hocus-pocus they wanted and took the money. Although forty dollars in New Orleans would not even buy him a top-of-the-line meal.

He did not know, during that evening of despair, that his money troubles would soon be over and that he would become far more dangerous than any little band that had ever terrorized an Indian highway.

And as he went to sleep at his luxury penthouse that night, he did not know that back at the ashram, the chants were reaching a hysterical pitch.

Holly Rodan, who had just that day made her first offering, noticed it first. That was her privilege for pleasing Kali.

"It's growing, it's growing," she cried. A small brown nub was sprouting from the side of the statue, so slowly it looked as if it had always been there, so very slowly, but yet, when one blinked, one could see several smaller bumps, little things, like the beginnings of fingers on the beginning of a new arm.

Kali was speaking to them, they all realized. She was growing another arm.

And it too would have to be fed.

Chapter Five

Just Folks Airlines was making a few adjustments in flight-attendant profile-performance packages. Remo didn't understand what that meant, and a supervisor told him:

"When someone has to go to a lav, you don't give him a lecture on bladder control."

The supervisor was an attractive dark-haired woman with a pleasant smile and that sort of helpless determination people get when confronted by the reality that things are not going to work out well. She had already adjusted to just Folks no-frills consumer fare, and far from being embarrassed at the airline's policy of charging to use the bathrooms, she now regarded it as somewhat of a sacred duty.

"We get a quarter every time they use a lav," she told Remo. "Four dollars near the end of the trip. So please don't have your partner give instructions on how not to go to the bathroom."

"Why do you charge four dollars at the end of the trip?"

"Mr. Baynes figures that people have to go worse at the end of a flight, so you can get a premium price. There's a lav-increment scale. Twenty-five cents on boarding, fifty cents right after takeoff, and so forth."

"That's robbery," Remo said.

"No one is forcing them to take our lav-time."

"Where else are they going to go?"

"They could plan ahead and use the johns at the airport."

"What are we supposed to tell them when we ask for four dollars to use the bathroom?" Remo said.

"We always suggest saying that fuel consumption increased near the end of the flight and mumble something about flush-to-fuel comparative expenditures."

"I am not charging someone for a bodily function," said Remo.

"Then the loss comes out of your pay."

The first thing Remo did on the next flight was to give away the snacks and the sodas. He ripped the pay locks from the lavatory doors. He lent out the pillows without cost and urged the passengers to take them home as souvenirs. Then he carefully tried to see if anyone was setting someone up for a kill. He had learned that a college student who had been on his previous flight had been found murdered, strangled and robbed.

Yet, on that flight, there had been no one giving off any sense of death.

He asked Chiun about it later. "Do you give off a sense of death, Little Father?"

"For me, death is not evil. So I do not," Chiun said.

"Perhaps, then, there are others who don't think death is evil," Remo said. "Maybe they don't give off the sense of death either."