They walked along in silence and Remo listened to Paris. With the end of the morning rush hour traffic, the city hummed, a dull throbbing sound almost below the level of perception, but numbing the brain and senses. New York was noisy; it was a city where someone was always shouting. Paris was a city in which everyone was whispering at once, and no one was listening.
Except Remo. And out of the hum and the buzz he picked out what he wanted: the heavy clump and click of the two Russians following him, and Ludmilla.
"They're still following us," Remo said.
"Oh, those swine. They never leave one alone," Ludmilla said. "I wish they were dead."
"The wish is father to the dead," Remo said. He grabbed Ludmilla's elbow and steered her gently into an alley.
"What does that mean?" she said.
"Damned if I know," said Remo.
They were in a narrow dead end, only a half block long. It was bordered on both sides and at the end by three story high buildings that people called slums in the United States but called quaint when they arrived in Paris on a vacation to get away from the American slums.
Remo stood Ludmilla against the powdery brick wall of a building and walked across the cobblestone street to wait. There were no cars on the little alley.
The two men turned the corner, looking into the alley, then stopped. Remo winked at Ludmilla. She was looking at the two men and Remo saw her nod slightly to them. They came forward toward Remo, their hands jammed into their jacket pockets, their metal tipped heels clicking like castanets on the stones of the street.
Ludmilla fished in her gold brocade bag for a gold cigarette case. She flipped it open and extracted one cigarette, a long golden holder, and a thin golden lighter, and began assembling her smoke. A Russian scientist had reported that cigarette smoke caused the skin to age prematurely. From that day on, Ludmilla had used the long holder to keep the cigarette flame away from her face.
She watched as the men approached and stood in front of Remo, who leaned casually against the stone wall of a building.
"You are a killer," said one of them, a short stocky man with a face as memorable as a well worn patio block.
"Actually, I'm a dancer," Remo said. "If it was raining, I'd give you 'Singing in the Rain' " He looked skyward and shrugged. "Not even a "drizzle."
"You have killed many of our men," said the other man, a human built generally along the lines of a refrigerator.
"Right," said Remo, "so two more won't make any difference."
The two men pulled their hands from their pockets. Guns were in their hands.
Remo pulled their guns from their hands and then their hands from their arms and then put the two of them into the stone wall where their heads hit with matching clunks and became two more ringing endorsements of the poster there proclaiming Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
Ludmilla was about to flick the cigarette lighter when she heard the two men's heads hit and looked up to see them become part of the beauty that was Paris.
She ran across the street to Remo who was putting the men's guns into a sewer.
"Oh, I was so worried."
"Yeah," said Remo taking her arm and leading her back toward the main street. "I want to talk to you about that."
"About what?"
"Look, these dingoes come into the alley and you give them the high sign to go get me. Now if you're going to keep trying to kill me, it's going to be difficult to have any kind of meaningful relationship."
"It is true," Ludmilla said. She hung her head, doing abject sorrow.
"So what are we going to do?" Remo asked. "Seeing as how we're in love."
Ludmilla looked up brightly. "Suppose I only try to kill you on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays?"
Remo shook his head. "Naah, it'll never work. Too complicated. I have trouble remembering days and things."
Ludmilla nodded, understanding fully the immensity of that problem.
"You understand," she said, "that the only reason these people came after you was so that I could see you in action."
"I figured something like that."
"So I could learn your secret," she said.
"Right."
"You are awesome."
"Well, when I'm at my peak, I'm pretty good," Remo allowed. "Look." He stopped on the street and faced the young Russian woman, taking her elbows in his hands. "Just what is your mission? Is it to kill me or find out how I work?"
"Find out how you work. Then others can kill you."
"Okay, then it's solved. You do anything to try to find out how I work. But don't try to kill me. Fair?"
"I have to think about it," she said. "It may be just a dirty capitalist trick to try to stay alive."
"Trust me," Remo said, looking hard into her violet eyes with a look that had never failed before.
"I trust you, Remo," the woman said. "I will not try to kill you."
"Okay, then that's settled."
"But others might," Ludmilla said. It was not a prediction, it was an insistence. She would not enter into this pact with Remo unless other Russians had the right to try to kill him. After all, what did Remo take her for? A coat-turn?
"I don't care who else tries to kill me. I just don't want you trying it."
"Agreed," Ludmilla said. She extended her hand and shook Remo's formally, as if they were two diplomats who had spent months working out a meaningless, unworkable agreement of no interest to anyone but themselves.
"Okay. What do we do now?"
"We go to my hotel," Ludmilla said.
"And?"
"And we make beautiful, exquisite love. Seeing as how we are in love." Ludmilla smiled, the smile of awakening youth. It was one she did very well.
Remo nodded, as if making love were the most logical conclusion to an armistice that anyone could have devised. Together, arm in arm, they walked off. Remo looking forward, for the first time in years, to making love, and Ludmilla thinking of how she was going to find out the secret of his power so someone could kill this American maniac.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was twenty-four hours since he'd left, but when Remo returned to his hotel room, Chiun was standing in the same position before the same set of yellow draperies, staring out at the same bright sun.
"It is all right," Chiun said without turning.
"What is all right?"
"It is all right that you are gone all night and you never let me know anything and I stay awake wondering all night if you are well or dead in an alley someplace. They have a Pig Alley in this city where people die all the time and how did I know you weren't there? Especially since they named it after you?"
"I wasn't there."
Chiun turned and waved a long nailed index finger in triumph. "Aha, but did I know that? Did you care enough to tell me?"
"No," said Remo honestly.
"Ingrate," said Chiun.
"True," said Remo. Nothing was going to spoil this day, the first day of the rest of his life, not even a bitching, carping, kvetching Chiun.
Remo smiled.
Chiun smiled.
"Ah, you are joking with me. You wanted to let me know you were well, but you couldn't? That's it, isn't it?"
"No," said Remo. "I haven't thought about you since yesterday morning. I didn't care whether you were worried or not. By the way, if you couldn't sleep, what's your sleeping mat doing out?"
"I tried to sleep, but I couldn't, I worried so much. I almost went out looking for you. You can see. The mat is barely wrinkled."
Remo said, "You could dance on it for eight hours and not wrinkle it." He said it mildly.
"But I didn't. I didn't even sleep on it."
"Chiun, I'm in love."
"Well, good,' said Chiun. "I forgive you then. It is a major step to take and I can understand why you were wandering the streets all night, thinking of the glories that are Sinanju and deciding to devote your life to our village, in a spirit of love. It is…"