"It's the revolution," said the boy with the Indian head band.
But he had said that the night before when the pop bottle fell and cracked open, and when they saw a squadron of jets overhead, he said it was the fascist pigs going to bomb Free Bedford Stuyvesant.
"Just keep the sign moving," said Vickie, and she rested her head on her knapsack, and hoped her father did not worry too much about her. At least, though, when she talked to him now, he was becoming reasonable.
A gray Lincoln Continental with a real straight at the wheel breezed by them and Vickie closed her eyes. Suddenly, there was a screeching of tires. A brief silence. The car backed up,
Vickie opened her eyes. He was an ugly straight, all right, with a big scar across his nose and he was looking down at something, then back at Vickie, and down at that thing which he then put into his pocket.
"Youse want a lift?" he yelled through a lowered car window. Funny-looking car, all marks on the right side of it, like someone had gone at it with fifty nails or something.
"Right on," said the boy with the Indian headband and they all piled into the luxurious car with Vickie last.
"You're Mafia, aren't you?" said the boy with the headband.
"Why you wanna say something like that?" said the driver, his eyes on Vickie in the rearview mirror. "That's not nice."
"I'm all for the Mafia. The Mafia represents the struggle against the establishment. It is the culmination of hundreds of years of struggle against oppressive government."
"I ain't Mafia. There's no such thing," said Willie the Bomb, his eyes still on Vickie, his brain now convinced he had found the right girl. "Where you kids gonna sleep?"
"We're not going to sleep. We're going to be. At the North Adams Experience." "Out in the air you're gonna sleep?"
"Under the stars, if the government hasn't fucked that up too."
"Youse kids, I like. You know the best place to sleep?"
"In a hayloft?"
"No," said Willie the Bomb Bombella. "Under a maple tree. A nice, straight maple tree. It absorbs the bad things from the air. It really does. You sleep under a maple tree and you're never gonna forget it. Really. I swear to God."
CHAPTER FIVE
"Is he somebody?" shrieked a blotch-faced girl whose bouncing boobs were causing a great commotion underneath her tie-dyed tee shirt.
"He's nobody," said Remo, fishing for his motel room key. Chiun sat on the other side of his fourteen large, lacquered trunks. His golden morning kimono wafted gently westward with a breeze that blew across the North Adams Experience, or what had been Farmer Tyrus's north forty until he had suddenly discovered it could be used for something even more valuable than not growing corn.
"He looks like somebody."
"He's a nobody."
"Can I have a piece of that way-out shirt he's wearing?"
"I wouldn't touch it if I were you," said Remo.
"He wouldn't mind if I took just a little piece of his dashiki. Oh, he's somebody. He's somebody.
I know it. Hey, everybody. Somebody. Somebody's here."
From cars they came and from the backs of trucks they came. From behind rocks they came and around trees they came. First a few and then, when the mass movement from Tyrus's field was noticed, more followed. Someone was here. Someone was here. The high point of every rock event. Somebody to see.
Remo went into the motel room. There were several possible outcomes to this sudden rush, one of them involved the probable need to dispose of bodies.
But why not? Why should anything go right, starting now? It had begun badly at the briefing session with Smith, which had bordered on the absurd. First, there had been the girl, Vickie Stoner. Her photograph taken at her debut, her baby pictures, a picture of her in a crowd, a picture of her with her eyes glazed.
It was Remo's job to protect her from unknown killers. That is, if she was still alive. She might be at the bottom of some lake now, or buried in a cave, or beneath a house, or decomposed in acid-the decomposing kind or the other kind.
But if she was alive, where would she be? Well, no one knew, least of all her father, but there was a pretty good theory that she would be at a rock festival somewhere, because she was a groupie type.
Which rock festival? Chances were she would not miss the North Adams Experience if she were alive. After all, Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice were playing there. How many people would be there? From four hundred to one hundred thousand.
Thanks a lot.
Remo had then posed this question to Smith: Since the open contract had obviously come from one of the people involved in the Russian grain deal, possibly even Vickie's father, why not let Remo do what he did best? Go down the list of suspects, find the one putting up the money, and reason with him.
No good, Smith explained. It would take too much time and it had too many flaws in it. Suppose Remo went after the wrong man. The right man could get Vickie Stoner. No. Protecting her was the answer.
So that was that and here he was.
There was a commotion outside the motel room and then the door opened and Chiun's trunks started coming in with acid freaks yanking at their handles, moaning and straining as if they were in chains. Remo heard yelling. He went to the window. A very fat young man whose belly was exploding over blue jeans and whose shirt had a peace symbol on it was swinging at a girl whose shirt said Love, not War. She was clawing at his testicles.
"I'm gonna carry his trunk. He said I could," yelled the girl.
"He said I could."
"He said I could."
"No, me. You fat pig shit."
And so it went in many couples until Remo observed that Chiun might become worried about the safety of his trunks. Chiun rose and stood above one trunk, his hands extended, the long nails reaching to the heavens. And he spoke to them, these children, as Remo saw them. And what he said was that their hearts should be in concurrence with the forces of the universe and they should be one with that which was one. They should be all with that which is all.
They should be as one hand and one back and one body. The trunks should rise like swans on gilded lakes. The green one first.
And thus it came to pass that morning that the trunks, one by one, went into the room of the Master of Sinanju. The green one first.
And when all the trunks were in the room, piled one on another, the green one separate by the window, the Master of Sinanju bade them all farewell. And when they did not wish to leave such an illustrious one, insisting he tell them the somebody he was, he no longer spoke. But a strange thing began to happen. The golden swirls of the kimono rustled, and one and another and another of these followers found themselves hurled out, until the last one, he too, was outside the door. With an ugly welt on his cheek.
"He is somebody," shrieked a girl. "Only somebody would act that way. I've got to have him. I've got to have him. I want him."
Chiun opened the green trunk. In it, Remo knew, was the special television set that not only showed one channel, but taped two other networks simultaneously, because as Chiun had often said, all the good shows were on at once, the good shows being the soap operas.
Another special feature of the set was that all the Sony marks had been ground, pried, or painted off, and replaced with Made in Korea. Chiun refused to use Japanese because of what he described as a recent treacherous incident committed by the Japanese against the House of Sinanju. By going through a chart of Japanese emperors Remo had deduced that the recent incident had occurred in 1282 A.D.
According to Chiun, the Japanese emperor, hearing of the wisdom and wonder of Sinanju, had sent an emissary to the then Master of Sinanju, requesting guidance in a difficult matter. Little did the Master realize what treachery, what perfidy he was dealing with, for after giving his assistance, he realized something had been stolen. Agents of the emperor had been watching him in his tasks and they had copied his methods, thus stealing the art of Ninji, or silent night attack, from Sinanju.