Warren Murphy: King's Curse

It was Chiun.

"How'd you get here so fast?" asked Remo in Korean. Chiun's long fingernails stopped in the midst of an eloquent gesture. Smith sat behind the large, well-polished desk, his dry face precisely shaved. He wore a dark suit with vest and a fresh tie and a spotless white shirt.

Three a.m. The man was facing an obvious disaster and he looked as if he had only paused for a coffee break in a Wall Street office. He must have been the only baby ever to toilet train himself in the first week of life. Remo never remembered seeing Smith without a crease in his pants.

"It is of no importance how I got here. I must extricate you from this idiot emperor and his disaster," Chiun answered in Korean.

"What about your trunks?"

"I have more invested in you. Ten arduous years without so much as a mite of repayment for the great gifts of knowledge I have bestowed upon you. I will not let you just run off with my investment."

"If I may interrupt," said Smith, "I think we have important business. I don't understand Korean."

"Neither does Remo, really," said Chiun in English. "But it is our thing to know things to serve you better."

"Thank you," said Smith. "Remo, I have what may be shocking news to you. We're not only just in trouble but I've had to-"

"Shut down most of the systems," Remo interrupted.

"Let him finish," scolded Chiun.

"Shut down most of the systems," said Smith.

"You see," said Chiun to Remo. "Now you know."

"We're virtually inoperative," Smith continued. "We could have survived those ignorant investigations of the CIA and FBI where we have linked systems that they don't know about. But after that gruesome insanity with the congressman, they started looking all over and they stumbled onto a few of our systems. I phoned you direct, hoping you wouldn't rely on one of our special phone numbers."

"I did."

"Lucky you didn't get picked up."

"I did," said Remo.

"Kill anyone?"

"Of course," said Chiun.

"No," said Remo.

"Good," said Smith.

"Of course not," said Chiun. "Peaceful as a monk. Awaiting only your word to slay your enemies."

"I'm, afraid that just eliminating someone won't do here," Smith said. "It won't relieve the pressure on us. You've got to find out who or what did that killing of the congressman and then make it clear to the world. Have it or them confess or be convicted. That should take the pressure off this investigation."

"Are there any leads?"

"None," said Smith. "The congressman's heart was ripped out. And they didn't even find it."

"By hand?" asked Remo.

"Not exactly, as far as we could tell. It appeared like some very crude knife."

"No trace of the heart?"

"None."

"Sounds like some lover's quarrel," Remo said.

"Man didn't have a love life. He was married," Smith said, thinking of his own thirty-year marriage. "A normal happy marriage that just grinds on and on."

"Like the incessant dropping of water," said Chiun.

"Yes. Something like that," Smith said.

"I had one of those once," Chiun said, "but one day she slipped on a rock near the windy bay and drowned. So you see, patience makes all things turn out well."

"In any case," Smith said, "this congressman was clean. He didn't have any but political enemies. He was safely guarded, they thought. The man assigned to him by the Justice Department when this investigation started was outside his office door all night. He got suspicious at about five a.m., and when he checked, he found the congressman slumped over his desk. His shirt had been unbuttoned and the heart was out. Arteries and valves severed. Incredible amount of blood."

"Amateurs," said Chiun disdainfully. "The first sign is sloppiness."

"So you have to be careful," Smith said. "The FBI and the CIA are just as anxious as we are to get the right man. The only problem is that they think it may be us, some secret organization that they don't know anything about. If they suspect you're with our organization, they might just scoop you up."

"I'll be careful," Remo said.

"I'm going to start closing this place down for a while," Smith said. "The computers have been washed clean already, and most of the staff has been cut loose. In a few days there won't be a trace. Everything else is up to you."

"Okay," said Remo.

"More than okay," said Chiun. "We shall find this menace and destroy it."

"Not destroy," said Smith, clearing his throat. "Identify and have him publicly convicted. This is not an assassination."

"But of course," said Chiun. "Your wisdom is beyond that of a simple assassin. You are truly an emperor, most formidable."

Outside in the cooler night with the salt wind coming in off the Long Island Sound, Chiun said in Korean to Remo:

"I have always said that Smith is a lunatic, and tonight he has proved it."

And this reminded him of a czar who, when he went insane, asked the court assassin to clean the stables. "That one wanted a stable cleaner, and this one wants I do not know what."

"He wants someone convicted," Remo said.

"Oh. A representative of justice, a speaker in the courts of law. A lawyer. I would rather clean stables."

"Not exactly," said Remo. "We've got to find out who and then get the evidence to some prosecutor."

"Oh, like soldiers, policemen, and detectives do?" asked Chiun.

"Sort of."

"I see," said Chiun. "We are looking for some one or something, but we are not exactly sure what or who, and we are not exactly sure what we are supposed to do to this someone or something, but we do know that if we don't succeed in what we do not know, Emperor Smith will suffer."

"I know what I'm doing," Remo said. "Don't worry."

"Worry?" said the latest Master of Sinanju. "One would have to stop laughing to worry. You whites are so funny."

CHAPTER FOUR

Mrs. Ramona Harvey Delpheen was examining a chart of bicentennial celebrations when a long yellow feather fell over a blue outlined box called "Columbus Circle Monument Parade." She looked up.

Mrs. Delpheen was a portly woman whose flesh had been pampered by expensive oils and skilled fingers so that when she smiled it looked as if delicate creases had jumped from hiding. She smiled intensely because she was surprised by these men and also they looked rather funny.

"What are you fellows doing in all those feathers?" she said, laughing. She thought she recognized one, a rather untalented lad who somehow had gotten control of a publishing company.

Met him at a party or somewhere. The other men were strangers, and she was not quite sure why the butler had let them through the main door of her Fifth Avenue residence without announcing them first. There was so much trouble nowadays on the New York City streets outside that one should never allow strangers access to the house proper. She was sure that she had made this very clear to the butler.

"We already have a group of Indians for the Columbus Circle affair," said Mrs. Delpheen. "Besides, it's an Italian-American day," she added.

The men said nothing. The long robes of yellow feathers hung down to their knees and were open in front, revealing bare chests and white loin cloths.

"I said we already have a very fine band of Mohawk dancers. Those aren't even American Indian trappings you're wearing. More South American, if you will. Aztec."

"Not Aztec," said the farthest man, who held what appeared to be a phallic symbol made of a light colored chipped stone. The other four men stood at the sides like a formation of twos.

"Well, we can't use Mayas either," she said.

"Not Maya."

"You don't look like Indians anyway," said Mrs. Delpheen, forcing the smile now. She fingered a pearl at the end of a strand that hung looping over her ample breasts enclosed in basic black. The pearls became sweat-slippery in her hands.