Remo turned to Chiun. "So we just watch?"
"Emperor Smith instructed me to investigate and report on all I beheld."
Remo shrugged. "I guess that means watch. There are worse ways to spend Halloween Eve."
Cheeta got halfway to the door when one of her spiked heels struck a pebble. She stumbled, caught herself, and said, "Oh, damn. I gotta start over."
She went back to her mark, squared her shoulders again, and retraced the path. Her heels made sounds that made Remo expect to see sparks spit in her wake.
Then, walking backward, Cheeta's cameraman went before her, his lens capturing her every brisk, fearless step, the way her hair bounced determinedly. Cheeta narrowed her almond eyes at the camera until they glinted.
She came to an abrupt stop and said, "Okay, cut. Now move off to one side."
The cameraman obliged.
He repositioned himself so he could catch Cheeta's resolute profile as she reached for the door and flung it back.
That was not the image his lens captured. Cheeta reached for the brass door handle. Momentum carried her into the glass. It didn't break. It didn't resist. Cheeta tumbled through it and fell on her flat face in the lobby marble.
Her face quickly sank without a trace, taking Cheeta's shoulders with it.
"The building! It went crazy again!" Remo said.
"Cheeta! My Cheeta!" Chiun screeched.
"Use your atavistic womanly powers!" Delpha called. "Levitate! Levitate!"
The Master of Sinanju reached the scene a second ahead of Remo. He grasped Cheeta by her wildly kicking ankles and pulled back.
Cheeta came loose from the marble floor like a big yellow tooth with legs.
"My God!" she said, wide-eyed. "It happened again!"
"We noticed that, too," Remo said, looking up at the building's face. The lights were going dim again. "We're back to square one."
Cheeta, fuming and flaring her magnificent nostrils, climbed to her feet and complained, "It's not fair! This was my moment of triumph. What the hell's going on here?"
"It is a puzzlement," Chiun said slowly, grasping his wrists firmly. His sleeves swallowed his hands.
Delpha Rohmer drew near, like a professional mourner approaching a vertical coffin.
"There is only one rational explanation," she said.
Everyone looked at her, their faces reflecting their combined thought that a rational explanation would be very welcome at this particular juncture.
"My magic worked, but it has now worn off."
"You call that rational?" Remo said.
"We must summon a greater magic to defeat these forces."
"Yeah?"
"We must join hands and form a circle around this building."
Remo looked at Chiun and back at Delpha. "There are only four of us, and the base of this thing must be the size of a baseball diamond," he pointed out.
"We will enlist others in our cause."
"Like who? Houdini's dead."
Delpha gestured to the line of barbed wire several blocks down Fifth Avenue. On the other side the huge crowd of gawkers, many dressed in Halloween regalia, stood watching. No one seemed to have any interest in approaching, not even the National Guard.
Remo growled, "I think you'll have a tough time drumming up volunteers. They look more scared than the people inside the building."
"I will appeal to their mystical natures," proclaimed Delpha Rohmer, throwing off her trailing garment.
Remo quickly moved upwind. Chiun looked away.
Delpha began chanting, "Sisters of the Moon, join us now! A mighty spell is needed to repair the rupture in our physical plane. Those who believe in the awesome power of womanhood unleashed, join hands with me now!"
To Remo's eternal surprise, those people who believed in the eternal power of womanhood unleashed numbered at least a third of the people behind the police lines, including several police officers.
They stampeded for the nude figure of Delpha Rohmer. Throwing her head back, she lifted her arms in thanks to the hunter's moon.
Almost at once the air changed flavor, and half the stampede came to a dead halt and grabbed mouths and noses. A number retreated. Others pushed ahead through those who were reversing direction.
They surrounded Delpha, whose voice rose from the pack.
"Sisters, join hands with me now!"
Hands grasped hands as a human daisy chain was formed. It wound, sinuous and fluid, toward the Rumpp Tower.
As Remo and Chiun stepped out of their path and Cheeta Ching got her cameraman to record the display, the line of mystical convocation surrounded the Tower until its two ends, like a necklace joining at the clasp, completed the circle.
Delpha called, "Repeat after me: 'Diana, Goddess of the Moon, symbol of our sacred womb . . .' "
"Diana, Goddess of the Moon, symbol of our sacred womb . . ."
"Wait! Wait!" Cheeta cried. "Make room for me. I'm a woman too."
"That remains to be seen," Remo muttered.
The chant was resumed.
"Shine down your mighty light . . ."
"Shine down your mighty light . . ."
"So this shaft of misfortune is restored to sight!"
"So this shaft of misfortune is restored to sight!"
"Now," Delpha cried. "Move around it, closing the circle."
The circle moved. Not everybody moved in the same direction. Not everyone had a clear grasp of the concept of "left," but they soon got organized. Delpha led the chant. "Repeat the following words of power over and over: 'Max Pax Fax.' "
"Did they have faxes in olden times?" Remo asked the Master of Sinanju.
"Hush! I must study this white magic. There may be something yet to be learned of value."
"I've already picked up a magic pointer. Use triple-strength Right Guard."
The circle went around once. Nothing much seemed to happen. It went around twice. The chanters grew hoarse.
On the third go-round half the chanters were croaking like toads and frogs, and Delpha was no longer where she had been.
"I do not see her," Chiun muttered, stroking his wispy beard.
"I do not want to," Remo said.
Altogether, the circle went around twenty times before the last voice gave out and people began collapsing on the cold pavement. Enthusiasm waning, the circle simply broke apart into clots of people standing around, breathing hard.
Cheeta came out of the group, checked her cameraman, and approached Remo and Chiun.
"It didn't work," she panted.
"Gee. Wonder why?" Remo said airily.
"Maybe Delpha knows," Cheeta said vaguely, looking around. "Where'd she go?"
Remo shrugged. "Search us. She disappeared on the second doe-see-doe."
Cheeta's dark eyes went to the spot where Delpha Romher should have been standing. But she was no longer there. She was no longer anywhere on the broad, empty stretch of Fifth Avenue, where old newspaper fragments skittered along the gutters, impelled by gusty winds.
Cheeta's quick brain registered the absence of Delpha Rohmer. Her exquisitely made-up face quirked in surprise. Her bloodred lips puckered in astonishment.
But from her mouth there came only these words: "My tape! That bitch ran off with my tape!"
Remo asked, "Don't you mean 'witch'?"
Cheeta turned like a angry lioness. "I mean bitch with a capital B! Do you realize how much that tape is worth?"
"What's the sweat? You still have the second tape."
"Of over a hundred New Yorkers making fools of themselves. Me included." She shouted over to her cameraman. "You! Erase that tape. Right now, buster!"
The cameraman obediently popped the tape. Instead of trusting his machine's eraser head to fulfill Cheeta Ching's instructions, he smashed the tape under his pounding heel until loops of tape squirmed beneath his feet, like a nest of flattened brown worms.
For good measure, he kicked the tangled mess into an open sewer grate.