"Yeah."
"See if you can find out who they are. It's just a feeling I have, but maybe this 'big thing' had something to do with his American followers."
"Could be."
"Do you need any help?" asked Smith.
"Well, a brass band might be good to let everybody know that Chiun and I are here. A couple of flamethrower units and a division of artillery, and I think we should be able to handle his eminent fatness. Of course, we don't need any help. Nothing your computers can give us anyway. What time is it?"
"Twelve-five and ten seconds."
"Dammit, I'm off. See you, Smitty. Stay within your budget."
Inside the cab, as Remo walked back toward it, Joleen asked Chiun: "Are you his friend?"
"I am no one's friend but my own."
"Well, you seem so close."
"He is my pupil. He is backward, but we do the best we can, considering. He is more a son than a friend."
"I don't understand."
"If you no longer like a friend, you end friendship. With sons it is different. If you no longer like them, they are still your sons."
"That's right, buddy," said the cabdriver. "I got one like that. Big lug. All-state football in high school and the team. So I work to put him through school. So he gets a scholarship to USC for it. But he was too lazy to make out of school, and do you think he'll look for work? Not on your life. He says he's waiting for a position. He can't take just any job."
"I am not interested in the activities of your cretinous offspring," said Chiun.
"Yeah, a position," the cabdriver said, not having heard one word of Chiun's. "Did you ever hear of anything like that? He can't take a job; he has to have a position?"
"I have a position for you," said Chiun. "Prone. Mouth stuffed into dirt. Silent."
Remo slid back into the cab.
"Well?" said Chiun.
"Well, what?"
"When does our vessel leave?"
"Not for a while, I'm afraid," said Remo. He gave the cabdriver an address on Union Street.
Chiun folded his arms across his chest. Joleen watched him, then looked at Remo, who said, "It can't be helped. It's business, Little Father. That comes first."
She turned toward Chiun. "It should not come before promises," said Chiun.
"We've got this little thing to do first," said Remo.
Joleen pingponged her head between them.
"But what is a promise made by a white man?" Chiun asked himself. "A nothing," he answered himself. "A nothing made by a nothing, signifying nothing and worth nothing. Remo, you are a nothing. Smith is a nothing."
"Right, Little Father," Remo said. "And don't forget racists."
"And you are both racists. I have never heard of anything like this. A broken promise. The ingratitude. You would not do this to one whose skin was as fish-flesh pale as your own."
"Right," said Remo. "We're racists through and through, Smitty and me."
"That is correct."
"And our word can't be trusted."
"That is also correct."
Remo turned to Joleen. "Do you know he taught me everything I know?"
Joleen nodded. "Yes, he told me."
"He would have."
"He is right, you know," said Joleen.
"About what?"
"You are a racist."
"Who says?" asked Remo.
"Everyone knows. All Americans are racists."
"Right, child," said Chiun. "It is the defense adopted by the inferior person."
CHAPTER TEN
In an alley off Union Street in San Francisco, hippie hucksters hawk homemades. Jewelry, painted shells and stones, leather belts fill up little stalls that line both sides of the alley.
Business is generally bad, but the salesmen do not seem to mind, content instead to sit in the sun, smoking marijuana, and talking among themselves about how nice it will be when the revolution comes and the new socialist government will pay them for sitting there.
In the rear, the alley opened into a gravel-coated yard, fenced in with high wooden stockade posts. Booths bordered the entire yard, and one of the booths flaunted the poster of the Maharji Gupta Mahesh Dor.
Joleen dropped to her knees and kissed the steel cable that the poster was taped to.
"O Blissful Master," she said. "Across the seas, I come following your goodness."
"Don't pull on the frigging wire," said a bearded, tanned blond youth, shirtless, with rag-cuff jeans, a silver earring, and a grape juice concession.
From the booths along the fence, people turned, mostly young women, looking at Joleen.
"They smell bad," Chiun told Remo.
Remo shrugged.
"Are these flower people?" asked Chiun.
Remo nodded.
"Why do they not smell like flowers?"
"Smelling good is part of the capitalist conspiracy," said Remo.
Chiun sniffed. "It doesn't matter. All whites smell funny anyway."
The blond man with the beard was now yanking Joleen to her feet. She struggled to stay in her kneeling position, her hands tightly clenching the wire that anchored the pole holding up the small hinged roof of the grape juice shed.
"I said, get the frig out of there," the youth said.
Remo moved toward Joleen, but a voice echoed through the yard.
"Cease!"
It came from the end of the yard. Faces turned toward the voice.
A man stood there. He had come from a door in the fence, between two booths. He wore a pink robe that came down to the top of silver-sandaled feet. Down his forehead was painted a silver stripe that matched Joleen's.
"Let her be," he intoned. "She is of the faith."
"She's got no goddam business hanging onto my roof wire," the blond youth said. He tugged again at Joleen's kneeling body.
The man in the robe clapped his hands together, twice, sharply.
The young women in the booths turned, as if on command, and began to advance slowly toward Joleen and the blond man. The youth kept tugging at Joleen, then looked up. He saw a dozen young women moving toward him, their faces expressionless, their feet, mostly sandal-clad, scuffing rhythmically in the gravel, like the sound of a railroad locomotive slowly pulling away from a station.
"Hey," he said. "Okay. Just kidding, you know. I just didn't want her to…"
They were on him then. Four women in front bore him to the ground with their weight. They sprawled their bodies upon him, pinning him, and then the others moved forward and began to strike at him, at his face and body, with hands and feet.
Joleen hung grimly to the steel wire, murmuring, "Blissful One, oh, most Blissful One."
The man at the end of the yard looked toward Remo and Chiun and smiled at them, a smile that showed neither warmth nor embarrassment, then clapped his hands twice again.
At the sharp sound, the dozen women who had fallen upon the blond man stopped, rose to their feet, and shuffled back toward their booths.
"You will be gone in an hour," the man intoned toward the youth who lay bruised and bloody on the gravel of the yard. "You are not worthy of lodging here."
The man lowered his voice and directed his words toward Joleen. "Come, child of Patna, bliss awaits you."
As if on command, Joleen rose and walked toward the end of the yard. Remo and Chiun followed.
"And have you business with us?" the man asked Remo.
"We brought her from India," Remo said. "From Patna." On a hunch, he flashed the gold shield he had picked up in Patna on the floor of Dor's Palace.
"Actually," Chiun said, "we were on our way to Sinanju, but we were stopped by a white man's promise."
"Oh, yes, Sinanju," the man said, a note of confusion in his voice. "Come in." He nodded knowingly to Remo.
He led them through the door in the fence and through a garden with large, smelly, tropical-appearing flowers, then into the back door of a building and into a large sunlit room that had been carved from four smaller rooms on the first floor of an old home that fronted on another street.