"Not so tough now, are you?" Remo taunted.
He looked for another hand. He found one, writhing as if in its death throes. Reaching down, Remo brought it up to his wild-eyed face.
The fingers made a futile stab for his face. Remo laughed again as he calmly began pulling the fingers off, one by one.
"She loves me . " he sang. "She loves me not."
When he plucked off the thumb, he said, "She loves me," and flushed the maimed palm down the toilet.
There were no other intact hands, Remo was disappointed to see. He looked around for the head. Not finding it, he frowned.
"Here, kitty," he called, for want of a better term. "Here, kitty, kitty."
When that produced no response, Remo got down on hands and knees and spied under the furniture.
"Not under the dresser," he muttered. Shifting, he saw the head wasn't beneath the writing table either. Nor was it hiding under the chairs.
"That leaves . . ." Remo began, reaching down for the hem of the bedspread.
" . . Under the bed. Boo!"
The head beneath the bed reacted to the sudden light and the sight of Remo's face with horror. The clay mouth formed an O that was echoed by its mates. The opaque white eyes went round too.
"Well, if it isn't Mrs. Bill," Remo said, reaching in for the head. It bit him. He laughed. The teeth were soft clay. It could do nothing. Kali was the goddess of evil, but he was the Reigning Master of Sinanju. He was invincible.
Getting to his feet, Remo carried the protean head to the window. Brushing aside the drapes, he employed one fingernail to score a circle in the glass. The sound was like a diamond-tipped glass cutter at work.
"Don't you just hate that screechy sound?" Remo asked the head, lifting it so its many eyes could see the whitish circle in the pane and the city lights it framed.
"Guess what happens next?" Remo asked the head of Kali. The six eyes closed. And Remo smacked the face into the glass.
It stuck there, the center face mashed flat. The side faces, however, continued their fearstruck contortions.
"Next time, come back as something a little stronger. Like balsa wood," Remo suggested, giving the back of the head a gentle tap.
The glass gave a crack! The circle fell outward. It carried the clay head down eight stories to the pavement below.
Upon impact, the glass circle shattered. Remo looked down.
A matronly woman stopped dead in her tracks before the flat white blob on the sidewalk that was surrounded by a litter of glass shards.
"Sorry," Remo called down. "Temperamental artist at work." Then he laughed again, low and raucously. He hadn't felt so good in years. And he had been so scared. Imagine. Over a stupid clay statue. So what if it was imbued by the spirit of the demon Kali? According to Chiun, Remo was the avatar of Shiva the Destroyer. Remo had never believed that. What the hell would Shiva be doing come back to earth as a Newark cop?
But if he was Shiva, obviously Shiva was mightier than Kali.
Remo left the hotel room laughing. He was free now. Really free. He could do whatever he wanted. No more CURE. No more Smith. Hell, he didn't even have to listen to Chiun's carping anymore.
"Free. Free. Freeee," he sang with drunken joy.
Chapter 12
Remo Williams whistled as he rode the elevator to the lobby.
The cage stopped at the second floor, and a well-dressed man stepped aboard, a copy of The Wall Street Journal tucked under his summer jacket.
"Nice night, huh?" Remo said.
"Indeed," the man said dryly.
"On a night like this, you really understand what life is all about."
"And what is that?" The man sounded bored.
"Winning. Taking care of your enemies. Squeezing their soft doughy guts through your fingers. It doesn't get any better than that."
Eyeing Remo nervously, the man edged over to the safety of the elevator control panel. He pretended to finger a spot on the brass panel that was greasy with skin oils. His hand stayed close to the alarm button.
Remo resumed his whistling. He wasn't going to let some stiff who didn't understand what a glorious night this was ruin his good mood.
The cage deposited Remo in the lobby, where he found a pay phone and dropped a quarter in the slot.
"Mission," Remo said after Harold Smith picked up, "accomplished. Surprise. Surprise. Bet you thought I had deserted you."
"I knew you would not," Smith said without pretense.
"Sure, sure," Remo said. "You probably want my report, huh?"
"The target has been neutralized?" Smith asked cautiously.
"Sleeping the sleep of the dead," Remo said, humming. "And I got the statue."
"You did?" Smith said in an odd voice.
"It too has been neutralized, to use your quaint expression. In fact, to coin one of my own, I would say it's been mashed to a crisp."
"I am glad your mind is free of worry," Smith said, dismissing the matter of magical statues with his brittle tone, "but what about the target?"
"I told you-dead as a doornail. Where did that expression come from, anyway? I mean, what the heck is a doornail?"
"It is the metal attached to a knocker," Smith said. "One strikes it with the knocker."
"Is that so? Imagine that. Smith, I'm going to miss your dictionarylike personality. Your encyclopedic wit. Your-"
"Attention to details. Who was your target? What was her goal?"
"I think she had a grudge against Irugis."
"Iraitis. Irug is another country entirely."
"Irait. Irug. Irun. It's all the same. Except Irun. That's what I'm going to do now. Run. I don't know that I can take more than a week in Sinanju, but at least I gotta break the bad news to the villagers. If I'm lucky, they'll throw me out and I won't have to put up with them anymore either."
"Remo, who was this woman?"
"Called herself Kimberly. Had a mean way with a yellow silk scarf, too."
"And her last name?" Smith asked patiently.
"We never got that personal, Smitty. It's hard to get a complete biography when the target's trying to throttle you."
"She must have had personal identification."
Remo considered. "She did have a purse."
"Please, Remo, we have a dead Iraiti ambassador to explain. I must know who this woman is."
"Was. Dead as a doorknob now. But I'll admit she looks good. Natural, as the embalmers like to say."
"Remo, are you drunk?"
"Smitty," Remo clucked, "you know better than that. Alcohol would upset my delicate constitution. I'd end up on the slab next to poor Kimberly. Of course, a hamburger would do that. So would a hot dog. Even a good one."
"You sound unlike yourself."
"I'm happy, Smith," Remo confessed. "Really happy. I was scared for a while there. Scared because I was going up against something I didn't think I could handle alone. But I did. Kali was putty in my hands. So to speak. Damn. Should have used that line on her. Too late now."
"You are really happy?"
"Really," Remo said, scratching his initials in the pay phone's stainless-steel acoustical shield.
"Even with Chiun dead?"
Silence clogged the wire. Remo put a finishing flourish on the W for "Williams." His open, carefree expression froze, then darkened. Lines appeared. They etched themselves around his mouth, his eyes, his forehead.
"Smith," he said in a small voice, "you know exactly how to rain on my life, don't you, you cold-blooded son of a bitch?"
"That is better," Smith said. "Now I am speaking to the Remo I know."
"Fix this moment in your memory, because it may be the last," Remo warned. "I'm officially off the payroll."
"One last thing, Remo. The woman's identity."
"All right. If it's so important that you'd wreck my good mood, I'll root around in her purse."
"Good. I will remain here." Smith disconnected.
"Bastard," Remo muttered, hanging up the phone.