Warren Murphy: King's Curse

"A very fine newspaper." Remo said.

"I got my job through The New York Times," Valerie said. "There were forty of us who answered the ad. But I had the highest qualifications. I knew it. I could tell when I first talked to Mr. Willingham." She paused. "Poor Mr. Willingham. Lying dead in that exhibit room and you, just leaving him there."

"Sweet old Mr. Willingham wanted to cut your heart out with a rock," Remo reminded her.

"Yes, but that wasn't the real Mr. Willingham. He was nice. Not like you."

"Swell," said Remo. "He tries to kill you and I save you and he's nice, not like me. Go to the Times. They'll understand you."

"Injustice," Chiun said. "You should understand it. You Americans invented it."

"Stick to your fairytales," Remo said. "This doesn't concern you."

The door to their suite pushed open and Bobbi came in. Her idea of cold weather garb was a full-length fur coat over a tennis costume.

"Hello, hello, hello, everybody, I'm here."

Chiun slammed a cork stopper into one of the bottles of ink.

"That's it," he said. "One cannot work in this environment."

"Were you followed?" Remo asked Bobbi.

She shook her head. "I watched carefully. Nobody."

She saw Valerie sitting on the chair in the corner and looked absolutely pleased to see her. "Hello, Valerie, how are you?"

"Happy to see you dressed," Valerie said glumly.

Chiun blew on the parchment, then rolled it up, and stashed it and the quills and the ink into the desk of the suite.

"Fine, Little Father, you can finish that later."

"Why?"

"We are going to Maine."

"Blaaah," said Chiun.

"Good," said Bobbi.

"I'm going to get fired," said Valerie.

"Why me, God?" said Remo.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

From Europe they had come. From South America and Asia they had come.

They had come from all over the world, the bravest of the Actatl. Their strengths had been wasted in misadventures before Jean Louis de-Juin had assumed leadership of the tribe, and this was what was left.

Twelve men, wearing the yellow feathered robes and the loin cloths, stood barefooted in ankle-high snow, oblivious to the cold, looking down a hill at a small cabin nestled in a stand of trees.

The cold Maine mountain wind whipped around them, and the gusts flattened the feathers of their robes against their bodies, but they neither shivered nor shook because the ancient traditions had held it that a child could not become a warrior until he had conquered a snake and a jungle cat and the hammer of the weather, and despite the passage of twenty generations all of them, even fat old Uncle Carl, knew they were Actatl warriors, and that warmed them and gave them strength.

They listened as one now as Jean Louis deJuin, dressed in heavy leather boots and a hooded fur parka, gave them their instructions.

"The woman is for sacrifice. The man I must speak to before we offer him up to Uctut."

"Will those two, the white man and the Oriental, come?" asked Uncle Carl.

DeJuin smiled. "If they do, they will be killed-from within their own encampment."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Mrs. Harold W. Smith was frumpy.

At thirty-two, she hadn't known it; at forty-two, she had known it and worried about it; and now, at fifty-two, she knew it and no longer cared about it.

She was, she often reminded herself, a grown woman and would act like one, and that included putting aside the childish fantasies about going through life doing exciting things with an exciting man.

So she didn't have that. She had something better. She had Dr. Harold W. Smith, and even though he might be dull, she no longer minded, because it was probably inevitable with all that dull work he did dull day after dull day at Folcroft Sanitarium, pushing dull piles of paper and worrying about dull educational studies funded by the dull federal government in Jacksonville, Arkansas, and Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and other dull places.

Harold-it wasn't Harry or Har, but Harold, Not only did she always call him Harold, but she had always thought of him as Harold. Harold might have been a far different man, she often thought, if he had simply been placed in different circumstances.

After all, in World War II he had done some kind of secret work, and while he would never say anything more about it than that he had been "in codes," she had once run across a personal letter from General Eisenhower, apologizing that circumstances made it impossible for the United States to award Harold W. Smith the Congressional Medal of Honor, adding that "no man who served on the side of the Allies deserved it more."

She had never mentioned to her husband that she had found this letter inside the front cover of a book on a shelf over his desk. To discuss it might have embarrassed him, but she often thought he must have been exceptional "in codes" to have merited such praise from Ike.

The day after discovering the letter she got to worrying that she might not have returned it quite exactly to its spot inside the cover of the book, and she went back to look at it again. But it was gone, and in the ashtray in his study she had found bits of burned paper-but that couldn't have been it. What kind of man would destroy a personal letter of praise from a man who went on to become President of the United States?

No one would do that.

She listened to the coffee percolating on the stove, filling the small kitchen of their rented Maine cabin with the oily sweet smell of coffee, on which she had come to depend to start the day, and she regretted nothing.

Harold might be, yes, admit it, dull, but he was also kind and a good man.

She turned off the electric burner and took the pot off the hot grill and placed it on the cool metal of the stove to stop the percolation and let the grounds settle.

It had been so nice of him to think about coming up here to Maine for a few weeks. She took two cups from a closet over the sink, rinsed them, and poured coffee into them.

She paused a moment.

Inside the bedroom she could hear Harold Smith's soft, methodical, regular breathing stop and surrender to a large sip of air, and then she heard the bed springs squeak. As he always did, Smith had awakened, had lain perfectly still for three seconds as if checking his surroundings, and then without any waste of time had clambered out of bed.

Seven days a week, it was the same. Smith never luxuriated in bed, not even for a moment, after he was fully awake: he climbed out as if late for an appointment.

Mrs. Smith carried the two cups back toward the small formica-topped kitchen table, glanced out the window, then stopped in her tracks.

She looked again, then set the two cups on the table, and walked to the window, pressing her face near the cold damp glass so she could see better.

That was odd, she thought. Definitely odd.

"Harold," she said.

"Yes, dear," he answered. "I'm up."

"Harold, come here, please."

"In a moment, dear."

"Now. Please."

She kept looking out the window and she felt Harold Smith move to her side.

"Good morning, dear," he said. "What is it?"

"Out there, Harold." She looked at the window.

Smith put his head close to hers and looked through the pane of glass.

Coming down the small slope of a hill toward the cabin were a dozen men, naked except for loincloths and feathered headdresses and robes.

They were dressed in the fashion of some sort of Indians, but they did not have the skin of Indians. Some were yellow, some white, some tan. They carried spears.

"What is it, Harold?" asked Mrs. Smith. "Who are they?"

She turned to her husband, but he was not there.

Smith had darted across the room. He reached up over the door and took down a 12 gauge shotgun that sat in a rack made of two sets of antlers. He locked the door's simple drop latch, then carried the gun to the small china closet in the room. From behind the dishes he took out a box of shotgun shells.