Then suddenly the voices stopped and there was incredible silence in the vast museum, for everyone had been quiet trying to pick out the strange sounds.
A nun ran horrified to a gendarme. Two men, one an Oriental, had emerged from a wall in the Cour Caree section. The wall had shut after them. The Oriental had started the girls crying because he had called them vicious animals. He was arguing with the white man. Most of the talking was in English. The white man was saying he was sorry for asking for a simple favor.
When the guard returned with the assistant director of the museum, they could find no opening in a wall. The nun was put under sedation. Gendarmes escorted the girls back to their school.
And outside, walking to the hotel, Remo dismissed all Chiun was saying.
"I'm not interested in the last time Wang or Hung saw Paris." He stared at Chiun. "I just asked a simple little favor. I'm never going to ask again."
But Chiun wouldn't tell Remo what the tail had said.
Remo said he didn't care.
Chiun asked why, if Remo didn't care, did he have Chiun do the work of the translator? The problem, Chiun said, was that he was too easy-going. People tended to walk all over the good-hearted.
The next morning, Remo met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was midnight and only a man of peculiar habits would be working at his desk, so Dr. Harold W. Smith was at his when the special telephone rang.
When he picked it up, the first thing he heard was the receiver dropped on the other end of the call. There was a moment's fumbling, and then the President's voice came on in a rough-edged whisper, competing with a raucous background squawk.
"Good work."
"Sir?" said Smith.
"The European business. Went like a charm. I hear Treska's just about out of business."
"I can hardly hear you," Smith said.
"Well, somebody's here," the President hissed.
"Who?"
"Big Mama. The First Lady. She set her CB radio up in here."
"Mister President. In a dozen years this has never happened. If you wish to speak to me, I suggest you do it when no one else is around."
"How do I get rid of Big Mama?"
"Push her through the door and lock it behind her," Smith said, and hung up. After a few minutes, the phone rang again.
"Yes?" Smith said.
"You didn't have to get huffy," said the President in his normal voice, a voice that would be at home on a Detroit assembly line or pumping gas in Joliet, the kind of voice that belonged to a man people would elect and elect and elect to most offices because he was one of them. It was also the kind of voice that people voted against for the highest office in the land because it was too much like "one of them," and they wanted a President who was better than they were. And sounded it.
"I'm sorry you feel that way, Mr. President," Smith said, "but for more than a dozen years I have maintained this unit's security and secrecy. I haven't done it by playing 'breaker, breaker, there's a picture taker' on the radio with my wife in the room."
"Well, all right. Anyway, it looks like those two cleaned up everything in Europe. Reports I get say the Russians have withdrawn all their Treska units."
"Your reports are wrong."
"Wrong? I can hardly believe that. This is what we've heard from friendly nations. Allies."
"Wrong," said Smith. "The Treska hasn't been called home; it's been destroyed. There is no more Treska in the field."
"You mean… ?"
"I mean just that. There was an assignment to neutralize the Treska and render it harmless. They have been rendered the most harmless they can be," Smith said.
"Those two?"
"Those two," Smith said. "But it is not over. There is a Marshal Denia who has been called back to the Kremlin for discussions. He is in charge of Treska. He will be back at us with something new."
"What should we do?" the President asked.
"Leave it to us. The situation will be handled."
"Well… if you think so…" The President seemed reluctant.
"Good night," Smith said abruptly.
After replacing the phone inside his desk drawer, Smith sat reading copies of new reports produced by CURE'S overseas agents policemen, newspapermen, minor foreign officials, all of whom knew only that they provided information to some agency of the U.S. for a monthly check. All of them "knew" it was the CIA. And they were all wrong.
Their reports, raw information, some of it solid, some of it not better than rumor or outright lies from those who were taking money from Russia to ship America false information, came pouring into CURE's computers at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye,
New York, on the shores of Long Island Sound. There it was mixed and matched in a way no single human mind could emulate. A man missing from his usual office for a week, a body found floating in a river somewhere, an airline ticket bought and paid for in cash by a man with a Russian accent-the computers put all the tiny threads of fact and information together, and then, on a console that only Dr. Smith could operate, wove out for him what had happened, classifying its results Conclusive, Highly Probable, Probable, Possible, Unlikely and Impossible.
Then Smith, after using a computer to do work a man could not do, did what a computer could never do. He made instant judgments, weighing risks and rewards, conflicting priorities, money and manpower problems, to spell out CURE's next assignment. He did it day in and day out with few mistakes, aware of but never awed by the fact that the only thing that stood between a strong United States and a United States exposed naked and defenseless before its enemies in the world was Dr. Harold W. Smith. And Remo. And Chiun.
Smith was not awed because he lacked the imagination to be awed. It was his greatest liability as a human being, and in turn his greatest asset as the head of a secret agency that had suddenly been given the global job of defending America.
"That Smith is an idiot," Chiun said.
"What now, Little Father?" Remo asked patiently, watching Chiun who wore his golden morning robe but was visible only in black silhouette against the bright early morning sunlight pouring through their triple-width hotel windows. Chiun looked out over the street. He was absolutely motionless, his hands extended straight out in front of him, his long-nailed fingers pointing ahead, near but not touching the thin yellow gauze draperies that hung from ceiling to floor.
"We are done here," Chiun said. "So why are we still here? This is a city where every food is smothered in sauce, every juice is fermented, and the people speak a tongue that grates upon the eardrums like a file. And then, what they allowed to happen to the Louvre, the shame of it. I do not like France. I do not like Frenchmen. I do not like the French language."
"You prefer to hear Americans speak English?" Remo asked.
"Yes," Chiun said. "Just as I would prefer to hear any other kind of donkey bray."
"We'll be going home soon."
"No. We will be going back to the land of Smith and that maker of automobiles. For you and for me, our home is Sinanju."
"Don't start that again, Chiun," said Remo. "I've been there. Sinanju is cold, barren, heartless and treacherous. It makes Newark look like heaven."
"How like a native to speak disparagingly of the land he loves," Chiun said. "You are of Sinanju." While he spoke, his fingers had not moved a fraction of an inch. In silhouette, he looked like a plaster statue of Jesus as shepherd.
Remo had stared at the Oriental's fingertips, eyes sharper than a hawk's, trying to see even the faintest quiver of motion, the slightest tensing of a muscle pushed beyond its limit of endurance, a twitch, a tic, but he saw nothing, only ten long fingers extended, at arm's length, an inch away from yellow drapes that hung perfectly straight, perfectly still, from ceiling to floor.