"Why didn't you say so?" said Remo, feigning an air of enlightenment. "Through your hands but not by your hands. Now everything is crystal as cement. Through, not by. Why are we even arguing? Why didn't I see this before? And here I was thinking it was simple revenge."
"We have restored the sacrifices and will continue to do so until America acts properly," said Willingham.
"Would you like the Attorney General to hold down Joey 172 while the Secretary of State rips out his heart? Like you did to the congressman and Mrs. Delpheen?"
"They were in charge of monuments here at the museum. They refused my request to station guards in this room. And thus the desecration followed. It was their failure."
"Just who the hell do you expect to take this revenge for the writing on the stone?" Remo asked. "The FBI, the CIA? The Jersey City Police Department?"
"You have secret agencies. It could be done. We know it could be done. But your government has to realize what it has allowed to happen and then set about making amends. We would have allowed your government to do this quietly. Your government has done this before, many times and secretly. But your government has not acted to avenge the insult upon Uctut."
Remo noticed that Willingham held the stone knife in a strange grip. The back of the thumbnail drove the handle tight against the inside pads of the other fingers. From Orient to Western Europe, there was no grip like it. Not the Mecs in Paris or the stiletto in Naples. Even the many variations of tuck fist grip so prevalent in the American west, never used the thumb as the compressor. And yet this was a highly logical grip for a blade, allowing a good downward stroke.
Remo saw it coming from Willingham's flabby stomach, the slight twitch that meant he was getting his back into the thrust. And then he stopped at the top of the stroke as if generating power, which would be logical because a stone knife needed tremendous force to crack a chestbone.
"Now," said Willingham, his body tightened like a spring on the flicker of explosion. "Who sent you?"
"Snow White and the seven dwarfs. Or is it dwarves?"
"We will mutilate Valerie."
"You'd do that to your assistant?"
"I would do anything for my Uctut."
"Why do you call it Uctut? What does Uctut mean?" asked Remo.
"It is not the real name of the stone, but it is the name that men are privileged to speak," said Willingham. "We will mutilate Valerie."
"Only if you promise to start with her mouth," said Remo.
The stone knife hitched and started down with Willingham's shoulder under it. The thrust was perfect, except the body didn't cooperate. For the first time since the great stone had been served by the people of the Actatl, an Actatl knife struck the stone itself.
Remo's two feet yanked back, drawing the robed priests with them, and when his heels drove into their chests, they were going forward into the blows. Blood exploded out of their mouths with bits of lung. The two men holding his arms felt themselves yanked over his body, and Remo was on his feet, softly on the pedestal as the Actatl knife committed the sacrilege of striking Uctut, the stone which it served.
Using thumbs brought together from a wide inward arc, Remo caught the soft temples of the two men pinning Valerie. The thumbs went in up to the index fingers, touched hair, and then squished out. The men were dead in the midst of holding, and they looked up dumbly, their eyes focused on eternity, their minds shattered midthought.
The men who had held Remo's arms were still dazed, crawling on the floor, looking for their balance. Remo snapped one vertebra on one man, and he suddenly stopped crawling and flattened out on the floor. His legs stopped responding, and shortly thereafter his brain stopped, too.
Remo dropped the other man with a short shattering chop to the forehead. The blow itself did not kill. It was designed to use the thick part of the skull as fragments, driving them into the frontal lobes. It did the job without getting the hands sticky.
Remo wiped his thumbs off on the golden feathers of the robe. He noticed the knots tying the feathers into the cape were strange. He had never seen knots like that before. He knew something about knots, too.
Valerie spit feathers out of her mouth. She coughed. She brushed herself off. She spit again.
"Fucking lunatics," she muttered.
Remo went over to Willingham who leaned against the stone like a man having a heart attack. His cheek pressed against the uppermost bird, his robe drawn tightly over his chest.
"Hi," said Remo. "Now we can talk."
"With my own hand I have desecrated Uctut," moaned Willingham.
"Now let's start at the beginning," said Remo. "This stone is Uctut, right?"
"This stone is the life of my fathers and their fathers before them. This stone is my people. In many skins and many colors are my people because you would not let us keep our own skins and our own hair and our own eyes. But our souls have never changed, and they reside in the infinite strength of our beautiful god, who is eternal and one with his people, who serve him."
"You're talking about the rock?" asked Remo.
"I talk about that which is us."
"All right," said Remo. "We got the rock is holy. And you people are the Actatl and you worship it, right?"
"Worship? You make it sound like lighting some candle or not playing with women. You do not know worship until your very life is sacrifice."
"Right, right," said Remo. "Moving right along, we know you killed the congressman and Mrs. Delpheen. What I don't know is why I never heard of you guys before."
"Our protection was your lack of knowledge of us."
"You keep talking about other skins. What does that mean?"
"You would not let us keep our own skins. If I were brown with high cheekbones as once the Actatl were, would I be a director of this museum? Would DeSen or DePanola be ranking generals in the armies of France and Spain?"
"They're Actatl, too?" said Remo.
"Yes," said Willingham. He looked past Remo at the bodies on the floor, and his voice trailed off like an echo. "They came with me."
"I don't think they're ranking now," said Remo, glancing at the stone dead stillness of the bodies, limp as leftover string beans.
"Would we have been able to worship our precious and awesome stone in your society? People are not allowed to worship stones."
"I take it you've never been to the Vatican or the Wailing Wall or Mecca," said Remo.
"Those are symbols. They do not worship them. This stone god we worship and would never have been allowed to love and serve it as we do."
"Are there a lot of you Actatl?"
"Enough," said Willingham. "Always enough. But we made a mistake."
"Yeah?"
"We did not find out who you were."
"I'm your friendly neighborhood assassin," said Remo.
"They will find you and destroy you. They will tear your limbs. They will obliterate you. For we Actatl have survived the ages and we strong and we are many and we are disguised."
"You're also as floppy as dandalions." said Remo. He noticed the separations in Willingham's lower teeth oozed red, threatening to spill over his lower lip.
"We will survive. We have survived five hundred years," said Willingham, and he smiled, releasing the dam of blood over his lips, and let his yellow feathered robe slide from his shoulders. The handle of the stone knife, a round block of chipped stone, stuck from his belly and underneath his heart. Willingham, who was so expertly trained to rip out the hearts of others, had missed his own and was bleeding to death.
"I have bad news for you," said Remo. "I come from a house thousands of years old. While your Actatl had yet to use the stone, Sinanju was. Before Rome, Sinanju was. Before the Jews wandered in the desert, Sinanju was."