He found a pay phone down the street and dialed the Chicago Dial-a-Prayer number that connected automatically with Smith's phone at Folcroft Sanitarium. "Yes?" came Smith's acid voice.
"What in hell are you doing now?"
"Meet me in one hour on Mott Street in Chinatown," Smith said.
"I want to know why you have henchmen listening in on my phone calls at the E-Z Rest Motel."
"Not yours, Remo. Everyone's. That person is one of thousands who've been contacted."
"What's going on?"
"I'll fill you in later. One hour. The dragon." Smith hung up.
There was only one dragon in Chinatown, and that was the one winding its way down Mott Street in the Chinese New Year's parade.
"Excuse me," Remo said, pressing his way through the crush of cheering spectators.
27
"It is everywhere," Chiun said ominously behind him.
Remo looked around. "What's everywhere?"
"Pork," the old man said. "The smell of stir-fried pork is emanating from every barbaric Chinese mouth here."
"Take it easy."
"Only a white man would ask a Korean to tolerate a mob of pork-eating Chinese."
"Then why did you come along? You didn't have to come to Chinatown," Remo said irritably.
Chiun sniffed. "I came because it is my duty to come," he said archly. "As the Master of Sinanju, it is imperative that I attend to Emperor Smith's wishes personally."
"Little Father, I work for Smitty. You're my trainer. You don't have to come."
"I do," Chiun insisted. "When the Emperor wishes to bestow a gift upon a valued assassin, the receiver of that gift should be present. It is only polite."
"Gift? What gift?"
"The portrait of Cheeta Ching. Emperor Smith has promised it to me."
"You already have a portrait of that flat-nosed barracuda. You've made a shrine out of it."
"That portrait is of Cheeta Ching in Western dress I requested one of the beautiful and gracious lady attired in the traditional robes of her native Korea."
"She doesn't even know where Korea is. For her, the underside of one rock's as good as another."
"White lout. Pork eater."
"I thought the Chinese were the pork eaters of the day."
"Chinese, white, what difference does it make? A waste is a waste."
28
As they neared the multicolored paper-mache dragon, it began to wobble and stagger randomly down the street, knocking over a fried-noodle stand. Remo slid under the cloth sides of the beast in time to see Smith buckle in exhaustion to the ground. He picked Smith up with one arm while supporting the sweltering shell of the dragon with the other.
"You okay, Smitty?"
"You're fourteen minutes late," Smith said, consulting his Timex. "How long did you think! could hold this thing up by myself?"
"Sorry, Smitty." He set him on his feet. "Why are we meeting here, anyway?"
"Silence, brainless one," Chiun said. "The Emperor has chosen to meet us in this teeming, stinking location because he is a man of great sensitivity and humility." He bowed to Smith. "He wishes to bestow his gift of beauty in the midst of squalor to demonstrate that loveliness can transcend all ugliness. Oh, very wise, Emperor. Most fitting."
"I'm not an emperor, Chiun," Smith began to explain for the hundredth time. Chiun persisted in believing that Smith had hired Remo and Chiun for the same reasons emperors throughout history had hired Chiun's ancestors. "Oh, never mind," Smith said.
"I am honored to accept your gift, O mighty one," Chiun said, smiling.
"Gift?" Smith looked to Remo. "What gift?"
"A picture of the Korean version of Godzilla in drag," Remo said.
"The photograph," Chiun prompted. "The portrait of the beauteous Cheeta Ching."
"I thought I got one of those for you."
"In ceremonial robes. The traditional Maiden's Por-
29
trait." His wrinkled face was falling in disappointment. "You have not forgotten?"
"Er, I'm afraid I have," Smith said impatiently. "I'll see what I can do. I've brought you here because what I have to tell you is of the utmost secrecy-and must remain so."
"Like the requests of your valued assassins," Chiun muttered.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Never mind," Remo said. "Go on."
Smith spoke urgently. "You know, perhaps, that the Secretary of the Air Force was murdered yesterday morning."
"I think I heard part of that. Burned by a flamethrower or something."
"Right. What the press doesn't know is that last night the Secretary of the Navy, Thornton Ives, was murdered, too. Bayonetted. He was ambushed outside the home of Senator John Spangler in Virginia. It looks like the work of more than one assassin."
"A white assassin," Chiun grumbled. "Only a white man would attempt to kill with a net. For a real assassin, one comes to the Master of Sinanju. But does one bother to honor the small request of the aging Master? Never. Perhaps we should use nets, too. We could bludgeon the enemy with the holes."
"A bayonet isn't a net, Little Father," Remo explained. "It's a sort of spear on the end of a rifle."
"Oh, I see. The white assassin uses a rifle to stab with. Very efficient."
"Get off the snot, Chiun," Remo said in Korean. "Just because you didn't get your picture."
"Just because the one small light in my twilit years has been extinguished. . . ."
30
"Please, please," Smith said. "We have limited time."
"Forgive me, O Emperor," Chiun said with humility. "I will not speak again. Who cares to hear the pleas of an old man, anyway?"
"Now really-" Smith began, but Chiun clamped his jaws together and turned his back. Smith sighed and went on. "The man who found the body, a gardener at the Spangler house, doesn't know anything. The FBI and the CIA have been grilling him ever since he reported the incident."
"To the police?"
"No. The police are being kept out of this. They've lost every lead on the murder of the Secretary of the Air Force, and the president is afraid they'll bungle this one, too. We can't afford that. It's beginning to look like a pattern."
"Who's next?"
"The Secretary of the Army, probably. The Secret Service already has a twenty-four-hour guard on him, as well as on key persons around the president. But it can't go on indefinitely. Whoever is carrying out these killings has to be stopped."
"Is that why you've got your spy network going full tilt?"
"Of course. Since we have nothing, any scrap of information may help to bring some pieces of the puzzle to light."
"Okay," Remo said. "If these guys were killed by flame-throwers and bayonets, it could be the work of the military. Want me to start there?"
"I don't think so. All the branches of the military are carrying out their own investigations, and I'm already tapped into their computer information banks. I think you ought to start at the scene of the crime. Go to Sen-
31
ator Spangler's house and see who else was at the party last night. The guests there were the last to see Admiral Ives alive."
"That's routine police work," Remo protested.
"We have every reason to believe this isn't a routine murder," Smith said. "And we have to start somewhere. All the police know is that a body was found on the front lawn of the Spangier residence. The senator's daughter, Cecilia, alerted the FBI immediately, and the body was removed from the morgue before it was identified."
"Then why doesn't the FBI handle this?"
Smith checked his watch. "Remo, if we had two years, the FBI could handle it. But we don't. The heads of two military branches of the United States government have been eliminated, and I don't know if we've seen the end of this spree. The president is alarmed. We have to work fast, before things get worse."
"Ail right, all right," Remo said, not relishing the idea of slogging around, asking questions of every guest at a drunken Washington party. "But I don't see where it's going to get us."