Nilsson smiled. His right hand came away slowly from his pocket, holding the automatic revolver.
Barenga reentered the room. "Whole place empty," he said.
"Fine," Nilsson said, his eyes not moving from Chiun's. "Sit down and be quiet. Tell me, old man, how did you know me?"
"The House of Sinanju never forgets those it has fought. Each master is taught their motions, their characteristics. Your family, for instance. As it was with your forebears, it is with you. Before you move, you blink your eyes hard. Before you put your hand to your pocket, you clear your throat."
"Why learn that?" Nilsson asked. "What good can it do you?" He now aimed the pistol squarely at Chiun's chest, across the eight feet of livingroom carpet that separated them.
"You know that," Chiun said. "Why ask?"
"All right. It's to learn your enemy's weaknesses. But then why tell the enemy?"
Barenga sat against the wall, watching the conversation, his head swiveling, as if he were watching a tennis match.
"One tells the enemy to destroy him. As with you. Even now, you worry about your ability to pull that trigger without blinking your eyes. That worry will destroy you."
"You are very sure of yourself, old man," Nilsson said, a slight smile playing at his face. "Is that not the kind of pride you said could destroy a man?"
Chiun straightened to his full height. He still was a head shorter than Lhasa Nilsson. "For anyone else, perhaps," he said, "but I am the Master of Sinanju. Not a member of the Nilsson family." His contempt, crisp and unmistakable, triggered fury in Nilsson.
"That is your hardship, old man," he said. His finger tightened on the trigger. He tried to concentrate on Chiun who still stood, unmoving, in the center of the floor. But his eyes. What would his eyes do? Nilsson felt the first nudge of doubt creep into his brain. He tried to block it out, but could not. So he squeezed the trigger, but as he did, he realized he had blinked. Both eyes had shut tightly, an ancestral curse handed down through the ages. He did not have to see to tell his bullet missed. He could hear it chip off the plaster wall. He did not have to be told that he would never get another chance to fire. Suddenly, he felt the pain in his stomach and felt his body drifting away. All because of a blink. If only he could warn Gunner.
Before he died, Lhasa Nilsson gasped, "You are lucky, old man. But someone else will be coming. Someone better than I."
"I shall greet him with kindness and respect," Chiun said. Those were the last words Lhasa Nilsson ever heard.
Those were the last words that Abdul Kareem Barenga ever wanted to hear, "Feet, get moving," he yelled, and, wailing like a flute at midnight, he ran to the front door of the apartment, yanked it open and raced off down the hallway.
Remo had been worried. He had found no trace of Vickie Stoner. No one had seen her, no cabbie, bellhop, policeman, no one. Already he and Chiun had mucked it up, and right at the moment, he had no idea where to look. The girl had been so spaced out while Remo had been with her that he could not recall anything she might have said that offered a clue to where she might go.
Losing the girl made him angry; not knowing where to look for her made him more angry. Neither factor really had anything to do with Abdul Kareem Barenga, but it was Barenga's bad luck to be the unfortunate vessel that received Remo's displeasure.
When the elevator door opened on the eighteenth floor, Remo stepped out and was overrun by Barenga, who charged the elevator as if leading his Black Liberation Army of Free Africa to free samples at the welfare office.
"Calm down," Remo said. "What's the hurry?"
"Honkey, move on over," said Barenga, who had occupied his time waiting for the elevator to arrive by clawing at the closed elevator door. "I gotta get out of here." He tried to push Remo from the empty elevator.
Fully annoyed now, Remo grabbed the elevator door with one hand and refused to move. Barenga pushed, but he might as well have been pushing at the base of the Empire State Building.
"What's the hurry, I said?"
"Man, you get out of here. There's a crazy yellow man back there gonna kill us all, you not careful. Man, I gotta get me a cop."
"Why?" Remo said, suddenly cautious, wondering if Chiun's television shows had run late this day.
" 'Cause he just killed a man. Oooweee. He just hop across that room and he move that foot like magic and that man die. He just up and die.
Ill
Ooooweee. Too many people getting killed today. I gotta get me a cop."
His eyes rolled wildly in his head and Remo saw that Barenga would not settle for just a cop. A cop, a hundred cops, the state police, the sheriff's office, the U.S. Attorney, the FBI and the CIA. If they all came in now to protect Barenga, wearing full battle dress and marching in close order, he would still be in a state of panic. Remo needed no more complications this day. Nothing resolved complications faster than death.
"You do that," Remo said. "You go get a cop. Tell them Remo sent you." He stepped back out of the doorway and as Barenga reached forward to tap a button, Remo drove a hard right index finger into the black man's clavicle. By the time Barenga hit the floor, Remo was humming, busily working on the elevator control panel. He found the electrical cable cutoffs and shredded the wires with his fingers, so that nothing would work on the elevator, except the force of gravity. He backed out of the car, reached in through the open door, and tapped two wires together, then jumped back. The elevator unlocked itself and started down with an intensifying whoosh. Remo looked through the still-open door, down the shaft, as the elevator picked up speed on its way to the subbasement.
He could feel warm air circulating around the back of his neck in the wake of the runaway elevator. He continued to watch until he saw and felt the elevator crash at the bottom of the shaft. Its walls crumpled as if made of typing paper. Cables slithered down and fell on top of the car. Heavy clouds of greasy dust coughed up.
Remo stepped back, rubbing his hands briskly. He felt better now. Nothing like a little tussle with an intellectual problem to clear the troubled mind.
He felt so good that he was able to ignore Chiun's rantings about an upstart offspring of an upstart house insulting the Master of Sinanju. Remo just quietly shoved Lhasa Nilsson's body into a closet for safekeeping until he could figure out a way to shame Chiun into disposing of it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Big Bang Benton hit the button that activated his recorded theme music, waited for the engineer's gesture that signaled that his microphone was dead and he was off the air, then stood up and waved to the twenty-five girls who were observing his small studio from behind protective soundproofed glass.
He rubbed a hand over his head, careful not to mess up the expensive woven hair piece, stretched himself luxuriously, then motioned again. The girls responded with cheers and eager waving of their own.
Benton stepped forward toward the glass, an awkward, pear-shaped man, thumping heavily on the heels of his blue Cuban boots. As if on signal the girls, most of them in their early teens, ran forward. They pressed their faces against the glass like hungry urchins on Thanksgiving, and Benton could hear their squeals when he ran his fingers through his hair again. He lowered the almost black smoked glasses he wore until they perched on the end of his nose, and he leaned his face forward to the glass, careful not to press his body against it because it might crush the rolled satin flowers on his purple and white satin shirt.