"Lasagne like your mother made?"
"My mother didn't make lasagne. She was half-Catawba and half-Irish."
"But her soul was all Catawba," said the girl named Cosgrove.
"Shut up, Cosgrove."
"Is that Lynn Cosgrove, who wrote My Soul Rises from Wounded Elk?" asked Remo.
"And as unwrapped as confetti," said the man.
"I am not Lynn Cosgrove. I am Burning Star."
"She's really buggy on this," said the man, putting down his pinochle hand. "I'm Jerry Lupin. This is Bart Thompson."
"They're Wild Pony and Running Bear," said Burning Star.
"Didn't I see her somewhere?" Remo asked Lupin.
"Yeah. The Academy Awards. Ruined the whole show. Debbie Reynolds was supposed to sing. And this one had to get her rocks off about RIP. It's nuts like her that ruin everything. C'mon, I'll take you to Petty."
"He's in war council. Do not let the white oppressor into our sacred councils of war," cried Burning Star.
"Cosgrove," said Lupin, making a fist. "You shut your mouth or you'll be wearing pontoons for a smile."
Remo saw her raise the large pistol shakily and point it at his head.
"I will see tomorrow free or I will bathe this sacred soil in white blood. White blood is the only blood that can cleanse this continent. Rivers of white blood, Oceans of white blood," chanted Burning Star.
Remo slapped the gun away, and Burning Star blinked in amazement, then covered her face and cried.
"She always gets like that after a food delivery from the Episcopalians," Lupin said. "They send it in on a truck with a minister, and he thinks he's got to preach a sermon. Like the Salvation Army, except the food is shit. The preacher thinks he's got a special message for us, cause he's an Indian."
"So?" said Remo.
"No," said Lupin, "Cherokee. Funny eyes and everything. We let him hang around sometimes and trot him out for photographers."
The war council was being held in what was left of the pretty white church. Pretty on the outside. Inside, the pews were in disarray, the bibles torn, human feces stinking in corners. Men and women slept in pews. Some leaned, half-awake, against shattered stained-glass windows, trying to drain sips of whiskey from bottles that had run dry. The American flag was shredded over a shattered piano.
And there were guns. Handguns in belts, rifles cradled in arms, stacked against walls, piled up in corners. If someone had built an arsenal in a never cleaned lavatory, this would be it, thought Remo.
A man in braids and deerskin sat where the pulpit had been. He waved at Remo. "Keep that bastard outside. I don't know him."
"He knows how to get food," yelled Lupin. "And whiskey."
"Bring him here."
"That's Dennis Petty," said Lupin as he and Remo approached.
Petty looked down from the pulpit, a sneer rising from his thin lips. "He looks like another reporter," he said.
"He ain't, Petty," said Lupin.
Petty had a pale, almost shiny face that looked like a pocked victim of too many chocolate bars, milk shakes, and peanuts. He had a gold cap on a front tooth, which made his sneer look like an attempt to shine the tooth or at least to air it.
"How are you going to get us food and why?"
"I will lead a war party, a raiding party," said Remo.
"We had two hunting parties, and all we got for it were two dead cows, which are now rotting."
"That's because you don't know how to hunt," said Remo.
"I don't know how to hunt? I don't know how to hunt? I am supreme chief of the Sioux, of the Iroquis, of the Mohawk and Cheyenne and Dakota. Of the Arapaho and Navajo and…"
"Hey, boss, I think he can really get some food in here."
"Bullshit. He can't even stay alive," said Petty and snapped his fingers. "It is written that the supreme chief should not look upon blood while in council." Petty turned his back on the intruder, who obviously had not read the New York Globe or Washington Post. Otherwise, he would have recognized Petty immediately.
"I tried," said Remo's companion apologetically.
"Don't worry about it," said Remo. He saw five men approach him from the sacristy. One wore feathers, the others braids, like Petty. The feathered man slipped a switchblade out of his floppy poncho. He clicked open the blade.
"He's mine," he said.
The man made a low-line lunge, looking for a fast kill between Remo's ribs. Unfortunately for him, one does not make fast kills with knives when one's knife has lost contact with one's shoulder. And it is even more difficult when one's throat suddenly feels a thumb go through it and into one's spinal column.
Whistling "Nearer My God to Thee" in honor of what was left of the liberated church, Remo brought thumb and forefinger together and flipped the knife wielder into a back pew.
He caught the man with the longest braids and tied them tightly around the neck so that the warpaint on the face would have a nice blue background. A simple step left and he took a forehead with a downcrack of the left hand. A step right and another crack on another forehead felled the fourth Indian revolutionary and left the fifth with a sudden vision. "You're my brother," he said to Remo. "Welcome to the tribe."
Hearing this, Petty turned around and saw one man gurgling red from his throat, another choking to death on his own braids, and two others with ugly dark welts in their foreheads, lying against church pews, their most recent cares being their last forever.
"Welcome to the tribe," said Petty.
"Thank you, brother."
Suddenly the pew shook and the church shivered at its beams.
"What's that?" asked Remo.
"Nothing," said Dennis Petty. "We're blowing up the monument. Let's go see if the first blast did it."
"I'll bet the first one didn't," said Remo, breathing.
CHAPTER FOUR
There were worse posts than Vladivostok. At least it had electricity, and when you were assistant personnel officer for Russia's largest Pacific port, you could get a half-share of a television and your own one-room apartment.
Granted it was not a dacha outside Moscow and granted there were no limousines, but there was meat three times a week, and in the spring, there would be fresh melons imported from Korea, just across the Sea of Japan.
It could have been worse. In Stalin's era Valashnikov would be dead—with luck—or in one of those camps that stretched like a sea across Russia. Those who went to the camps were the living dead.
But this was a new Russia, that is, as new as Russia could ever be, and after the years of failing to find the Cassandra, he was spared a court martial for treason and allowed to employ his mind in the service of the People's Port of Vladivostok, where he watched a lot of Russian television. As he said to a friend, "A man truly is ready for the last sleep when he can watch Russian television hour after hour."
Valashnikov's dark eyes no longer shone with the precise brilliance of his younger years, and the flesh hung flabby from his jowls. The hair was gone except for graying tufts around his ears, and his fat belly protruded in front of him like a taut balloon. He wore an old silk bathrobe and sipped tea through a sugar cube he held between his teeth.
"Isn't Russian television the best television in the world?" asked his young friend, a pretty little girl of ten, with plump cheeks and almond eyes, who let him touch her all over if he gave her honeyed dates and coins.
"No. No. It's rather dull."
"You have seen other television?"
"Oh, yes. America. French. British."
"You've been to America?"
"I'm not allowed to say, my dear. Come. Sit by your old friend."
"With my panties on?"
"No. You know how I like them."
"Mamma says you should give me more money for this. But I'd rather have candy."
"Well, money is scarce. But I'll give you a lemon drop."