Warren Murphy: The Arms of Kali

"Whatever it is," Chiun said, "I thought you would like to know who is arriving."

"Who?" Smith squinted to see in the direction that Chiun was pointing. Past the blockade of police cars, two figures ran toward them. One of them was Remo. Remo strolled up, surveyed the accident, and said, "I go away for just a few minutes, and look at the mess you two make."

"Maybe if you had been around tending to business-" Smith began.

"Take a hike. I was busy being blown out of the sky," Remo said. "Anyway, I hope this teaches you a lesson."

"What kind of lesson?" Smith asked.

"Sign Chiun's petition. If you have amateur assassins, you're going to have mess after mess, just like this."

"I have one here," Chiun said, reaching a longnailed hand into his kimono.

"No, no, no," Smith said. "Please, Master of Sinanju. Put it away. You and I will discuss that another day."

"Maybe these people standing around would like to sign," Chiun said hopefully. "They must be disgusted by all this noise and waste."

He looked around, but then stopped as Smith suddenly wobbled a little on his feet and began to sink toward the sidewalk. Remo caught him and held him in his arms.

"What happened, Chiun?" he asked.

"The Emperor was assaulted tonight by these creatures. He will be all right."

"I'm okay now," Smith said, pulling himself away from Remo, obviously embarrassed at his momentary display of human weakness. "Let's just collect A. H. Baynes and put him away, and I'll feel fine."

"I figured Baynes," Remo said. "I think he planted a ticket on me while I was sleeping and then rigged a bomb on the plane to try to kill me."

Ivory caught up with them, slightly breathless and wobbling on her high-heeled shoes. She looked around at the accident victims, then placed her hand on Remo's and said, "Is there anything we can do?"

Smith eyed her coldly, then called Remo away from the woman. "Who is she?" he demanded.

"Somebody I met."

"How can you bring a stranger in on the middle of a case like this?" Smith hissed. His anger was visible.

"She doesn't how anything."

"She better not," Smith said. "As it is, she's seen the three of us and-"

"Remo," Ivory called. She was standing behind some shrubs and her face was ashen. He walked over and she pointed down to the body of Holly Rodan. Smith and Chiun came over also.

"She's dead," Remo said, feeling for a pulse.

"There is dirt beneath the fingernails of her right forefinger," Chiun said. "She was trying to write a message in the earth." He looked up at Ivory. "Right where you are standing, madam."

Ivory gasped and moved backward. Just above Holly's finger was the smeared footprint of a highheeled shoe.

"I'm ... so sorry," Ivory whispered.

"It's all right," Remo said gently. He put his arm around her. His eyes were on Smith and in those eyes was a challenge.

Chiun dropped to the ground beside Holly and looked carefully at the earth. "She had written a C," he said. "But that is all I can discern."

"I don't know if it means anything," Ivory said, "but I called you over because of that." She pointed to Holly's left hand. In it was clutched a fragment that looked like stone.

Chiun removed it and held it up. The fragment was in the shape of a small hand.

"The statue?" Remo said.

"Not the statue," Ivory sighed. "It can't be. I've got to see if there are other pieces around." She darted away from Remo into the crowd.

"It is apparently the hand of a statue," Chiun said.

Smith looked at the fragment carefully. "What's this all about?"

"The statue, Emperor," said Chiun. "The one of which we spoke. Of Kali."

"Well, thank God we'll have no more talk of magical statues," Smith said. "Now all we've got left to do is get Baynes."

He handed the statue fragment to Remo, who said casually, "There's one other problem."

"What's that?"

Remo held the piece of statuary up to his nose. "It's the wrong statue," he said.

"What?" asked Smith.

"I don't feel anything. Baynes switched statues. This isn't Kali."

There was a long silence. Finally Chiun said softly, "There is another problem, Remo."

"Huh? What?"

"The woman."

"Ivory?" Remo looked around, but Ivory was nowhere in sight. He combed through the crowd, even slipping past the police to look into the wreckage of the van, but the woman was gone.

He stood in the middle of the street and yelled, "Ivory."

But there was no answer.

The three men returned to the ashram. Remo hoped that Ivory had gone there looking for the statue. But there was no sign of the statue, of Ivory, of A. H. Baynes. All had vanished.

Chapter Twenty-five

"Ivory," A. H. Baynes whispered to the beautiful woman who lay next to him in bed.

Outside, the sun was rising in the Rockies beyond the glass wall of the chalet. The tips of tall pines glistened with dew in the valley below the cliff where Baynes's mountain house stood, surrounded by earlymorning fog.

It was a perfect sunrise, and with Ivory's creamy body rubbing against his, Baynes was glad she had awakened him to see it.

"How did you know I'd be here?" he asked, stroking the inside of her white thighs.

"The girl. The stupid one with the blond hair."

"Holly? She told you?"

"Of course not. She was dead. She wrote C-0-L in the dirt. I assumed it meant you had a place in Colorado."

"Dead? What are you talking about?"

"You can stop the pretense, darling. I'm the one who wears disguises, remember? Anyway, I erased the message with my foot. No one knows we're here."

"All right," Baynes said. "She was getting to be a pain in the ass anyway. All of them with that chanting crap. I got a lot out of them anyway. Two new airlines to add to just Folks. If the feds aren't after me."

Ivory rose languidly and walked over to a creamcolored suitcase. She opened it. "And if they are," she said, "this will set you up all over again somewhere else." She tilted the suitcase to show neat rows of used hundred-dollar bills.

"I have something for you too," he said.

"I was hoping you'd say that."

Baynes hauled a large box from behind the sofa in the living room. He tore open the box and set the statue of Kali on a low table in front of the glass wall overlooking the cliff. Against the background of peaked mountains and clouds, the statue looked for a moment like a real goddess to him, serene and inscrutable, floating in the sky.

"She's magnificent," Ivory said in hushed tones.

"A hell of a lot of trouble for a hunk of stone," he said. "I can tell you I'm glad to get it off my hands." Ivory went back inside the bedroom to dress. She emerged wearing a pair of slacks and a heavy sweater. "Planning on going out?" he asked.

"No, just a little chilly," she said.

"Well, sit down and have a drink." He poured bourbon for both of them. "You are a marvelous-looking woman," he said, handing her a glass. "I'll never get over my surprise when I met you at that abandoned building. I thought you were a man, for Christ's sake."

"I was wearing cloaks."

"With nothing underneath. I've never been seduced like that before," he said.

"You never owned the statue of Kali before," she said.

His pride felt perforated and he said, "Damn that hunk of rock. Who's willing to pay so much money for it, anyway?"

"No one. Kali is for me. My people."'

Baynes guffawed. "Your people? Where are your people from? Scarsdale?"

She looked at him levelly. "I am from a mountainous region in central Ceylon. My ancestors created the statue. It belongs to their descendants."

"This piece of junk?"

"I would advise you not to refer to Kali as junk," she said.

"Hell, you believe it too. I used to have those ninnies at the ashram running around in circles, making believe that the airline tickets grew magically out of Her fingers every night. And all I did was stick them there."