"Hello, Remo," she said, lowering her big luminous eyes coyly.
Remo couldn't suppress a grin. "You're right on time. Wanna eat?"
"Certainly."
She took his arm and her perfume flavored the walk to the car.
At the Chinese restaurant, they talked over their meal. Remo was surprised at how he hung on Nalini's every word. He found her fascinating, in a mysterious way. He was halfway through dinner before he remembered he needed to pump her too.
"Clancy still hanging around?" he asked.
"Yes. He is very determined to save mankind from this terrible HELP. It has been his burden since the death of his brothers. Those poor men, Remo. Dying of overwork because they cared about helping people too much to rest themselves properly."
"You don't buy that crap?"
Nalini shrugged languidly. "I am a simple nurse from a foreign land. What do I know of such things? Some say there is a hole in the sky and others a disease in the air. I do not know. Others wiser than I will tell me what is truth."
"I heard that Jimbo and Robbo Clancy both died of syphilis."
Nalini's dark eyes flared. "That is not true!"
"How do you know it isn't?"
"I hear all the secrets of the Clancy family and I have never heard such a thing said. Why do you ask me these things, Remo?"
"I told you. I'm looking into HELP, and Clancy's been acting strange since he got here. I'm trying to figure out where he fits in."
Nalini looked at him closely. She leaned across the table and said, "You are not with the FDA. Who are you? You can tell me. I am good with secrets."
"Then here's one you'll appreciate. The thunderbug isn't giving people HELP. It isn't helping them either. It's worthless as food, despite what people are saying. Those PAPA crazies are starving with every bite."
"I do not believe that," Nalini said doubtfully. "You are making fun of me because I am different from you."
"There's a pathologist with the CDC who figured it out. He's going to blow the thunderbug part of the scam apart once he finds a reporter with a working brain."
Eyes darkening, Nalini said, "These things are beyond a poor foreign girl like me."
"Where are you from originally?" asked Remo, changing the subject quickly.
Nalini leaned back and toyed with her curried rice dish. "Ceylon," she said, her voice a pout. "It was called Ceylon when I was a girl. It is Sri Lanka now."
"So you're not Indian?"
"I am a Tamil, a Hindu. It is not so very different to Western eyes. I left my country to escape the strife."
Looking into her large black eyes, Remo felt he had known Nalini a long time, or in some past life. He kept forgetting his food. He kept forgetting everything except those alluring eyes and the perfume that made him feel pleasantly restless. His steamed rice had grown cold and the duck greasy. He had barely touched them.
Before he knew it, they were driving back to his bungalow and she was sitting close to him, her fruity perfume filling his head. He could feel the heat of her body. It was pleasant too. It also made him anxious to get to his destination.
Remo didn't have to invite her in. Nalini entered as if the invitation need not be spoken, and it was not long before they were kissing experimentally. Remo led Nalini to the bed and she smiled unabashedly as he tried to figure out how to remove her sari.
Laughing, she reached down and took it up by one trailing bit of silk. Then, coming up on one foot, she spun in place-unwrapping herself for him. To his surprise, she wore no undergarments.
Her body was a supple brown masterpiece with nipples as dark as her eyes. They seemed to stare at him.
She bent to turn off the light beside the bed. In the darkness, her smile was a thousand silent invitations to pleasure. They began exploring each other's bodies. Remo found her skin silky smooth.
Remo pushed everything he had ever learned about Sinanju sexual technique to the back of his mind and took her the way he would have in the carefree days before he had come to Sinanju.
Nalini was no coy maiden, for all her demureness. She knew sex, and she knew men.
What followed was rough and wild and Remo lost himself in her perfect, responsive body.
After Remo had rolled off her, Nalini surprised him by mounting him. Before, she had been warm and delicious. Now she became a tigress, moving up and down, making tiny, inarticulate sounds of pleasure that built into a crescendo so acute she closed her eyes and bit her lips as if suddenly ashamed to give voice to her passion.
The last thing Remo remembered was her dark breasts bouncing before his eyes, her nipples, so close to his face, like flat, alien eyes. They reminded him of something, but he was suddenly too busy responding to her rhythms to care what.
They came together, and then sleep came.
Sometime in the hours past midnight, Remo woke up with Nalini's scent still in his lungs and a relaxed feeling that he had not felt in many years. His bones felt loose and easy in his skin and his muscles were completely devoid of tension.
Then, a wrench turned something in his stomach.
He was instantly aware that he was alone. No warmth came from the empty spot on the bed beside him.
He was naked, the covers down around the foot of the bed.
And on his stomach something crawled.
Remo lifted his head carefully. Eyes adjusting to the darkness, he spied a long grotesque shape where his navel was.
Even in the gloom, he could see the flat alien eyespots. And he remembered what Nalini's nipples had reminded him of.
And before Remo could react, the longhead opened like a scissors, and from the inner edges of each separate bulb, long pincerlike mandibles unfolded like biological straight razors.
His Sinanju-trained nervous system kicked in and Remo's hand was moving before he willed it to move.
He slapped the hideous thing off his belly and across the room, where it struck the wall with a dry but final sound.
Remo rolled off the bed, hit the lights, and knelt to see exactly what he had killed.
It was dead, its legs already curling up.
The head was in two parts. Long fangs lay revealed.
It was one of the rust-colored ants that had been such a nuisance. Definitely. Only now it looked less like an ant than something else. Remo didn't know what.
Then he felt something on his back.
Remo whirled, and the sensation was abruptly gone. He heard the sound of something tiny slapping into a window curtain.
He looked at the rug under the curtain. Scrambling to find its legs was another of the ant things. Remo dropped a telephone book on it, and that was that.
More came. He brushed one off his shoulder, crushed it under a bare heel. It was like stepping on dry prickly twigs.
They were coming from the window. It had been closed. Now it was open a crack.
Remo slammed the sash down, crushing at least three. Their separating heads wilted, fangs not quite in open position.
He made a sweep of the room and found one more. He killed it with a shoe.
Then Remo day down on the bed and willed the wrench in his stomach to loosen whatever emotional bolt had been tightened.
When he got his emotions under control, he felt very cold. And angry.
In the darkness, Remo whispered a single soft word.
"Nalini."
Chapter 18
In the morning, after Remo had explained it all, the Master of Sinanju did not say, "I told you so." His eyes said it, but his mouth only whispered, "I did not know." His tone was strange.
"Know what?" wondered Remo.
"That they still lived."
"Who does?"
Chiun shook away the clouds in his hazel eyes. They cleared. "I have never told you of the Spider Divas," he said solemnly.
"Spider Divas?"
"They were great rivals of ours in the days of the Mogul emperors."