The man turned around and looked at the man behind him. "Thief," he yelled. "Damned pickpocket thief."
"What?" said the second man, a burly man with a crew cut and a green plaid shirt.
"You heard me. Keep your dirty hands out of my pockets."
The woman was still shouting, working herself up. "You heard me, you pervert," she yelled at the delicate looking man behind her who tried to shrink away.
Muckley tried shouting over the noise. "We are sending you back to the Sodom and Gomorrah you came from, Pruiss," he intoned.
A scuffle started in the crowd. Remo helped it along by goosing two women and jabbing elbows into the ribs of two men, then disappearing from between them.
The first woman slapped the man behind her. The two men were on the ground battling over the wallet. A flurry of fistfights broke out. Wesley Pruiss was forgotten. So was Higbe Muckley. The cameramen came off the porch and toward the crowd to film the fights. Remo reached from behind one man, grabbed one of the TV cameras, and threw it to the ground.
"Press brutality," the cameraman shouted, "Reactionary," he yelled. The man he was yelling at threw a punch.
"Fascist," screamed the other reporters as they retreated back to the relative safety of the porch.
Remo moved away out of the crowd and back upstairs through a rear door of the building.
Chiun glared at him when he came into Pruiss's room.
"Remo, really," he said. "I ask you to keep it quiet. This is how you do it?" He gestured toward the window, through which could be heard the sounds of the police arriving and wading into the mob, breaking up the fights.
"Now I'll have to start all over again," he said.
Pruiss looked at Remo as if inviting pity.
Remo nodded to him. "Pruiss, you've never been safer than you are now."
"Why?" Pruiss asked.
"Chiun never lets an audience get killed."
Remo met Theodosia in the hall.
"Good work," she said.
"Not done yet," Remo said.
"What else?"
"I'm going to go talk to that Muckley. I want to find out if someone put him up to coming here."
Chapter eleven
Eight persons were arrested after the brawl in front of the country club but Rev Higbe Muckley was not one of them, and a half hour later, he found himself sitting on the edge of the Wanamaker River. He needed to be alone to think. He had a serious problem.
Where was Flamma?
When she had left the press conference with that reporter from the Star, they had told somebody they were on their way to Pruiss's house. But it hadn't fooled Muckley. He knew they were going to a motel right away. His belly tingled at the thought of Flamma in her red satin costume. He had tried calling the reporter's room, but there was no answer.
Where were they?
If that reporter was putting it to her, Muckley'd fix him. He'd fix them both.
He sat on the edge of the river, idly tossing pebbles out into its slow-moving waters. He let his mind drift to the demonstration at the country club. It had gotten untidy and ragged at the edges but it didn't matter. It would be on the news tonight, along with the charges he and Flamma had made at the press conference, and tomorrow when they marched again, their numbers would be larger, and inside of three days, half the people of Furlong County would be marching behind Higbe Muckley. And that would be that for Wesley Pruiss. There would be no alternative but for him to leave Furlong County.
Muckley did not doubt for a moment that the public would now support his crusade. Pruiss had almost weaseled his way into success by promising to cut taxes in the county. But he had forgotten that sex outplays money all the time. Odd that Pruiss of all people should have forgotten that, since sex was the cornerstone of his own empire.
Muckley began to think about the anti-sex sentiment in the country. There might be a way to tap into it. National crusades against smut. Collect money and use some of it to finance legal complaints by some association against smut peddlers, the rest of course to go for administrative costs, which meant Higbe Muckley. Not an association. A church. It would have to be a church for all the tax benefits.
Forgotten now was Flamma as Muckley began to zero his thoughts in on his first love cash.
A new name for a new church. The Divine Right church was okay for what it did but it didn't have the sock that anti-pornography would need.
The Clean Living church. The Church for Clean Living. He idly fingered a few more pebbles and tossed them into the river. Killyfish first bolted from the splash of each stone, then darted back in after it, searching for food.
A hundred thousand members at ten dollars a head each year. A million gross. He could get all the work done for less than a quarter of that. The rest to go to Higbe Muckley.
He wished that he had learned to read and write when he was a child. He was okay doing numbers, but if he had been able to write, he could have saved all those legal fees for the Church of Clean Living. He could write the anti-porn briefs himself.
He tossed more pebbles into the stream and wondered if there was a way to increase the net of the Church of Clean Living from seventy-five percent of the gross to something higher. Maybe he could hire cheaper lawyers.
The secretary in Muckley's office had seemed glad to tell him where he could find the preacher. She seemed angry at Muckley, almost hoping that Remo could bring some kind of irritation to his day. She took a deep breath and gave Remo her address too, so he could come around that night and tell her all about his meeting with Higbe Muckley.
Remo promised to and then he was out in the woods leading toward the Wanamaker River, moving silently, not because he tried to, but because it was the only way he knew how to move. Years of training, running along wet strips of soft tissue, spinning, leaping and jumping on the paper with the goal being not to tear it or even wrinkle it had made the soft, slow movement of the langorous cat the only way he moved now.
Someone else was moving toward Higbe Muckley, but Muckley heard nothing except the kerplunking of the small stones he tossed into the river. If Flamma had belly-danced up behind him now, finger-rings clicking and a balalaika plinking away, he might not have heard, because he was concentrating only on money.
So he did not hear the step behind him. He did not hear the whir as a knife made one lazy half-turn on its way to meet his back. He felt it only when the blade pierced his spinal column and then there was no longer anything to feel with so he fell face forward, his head between his feet, arms extended in front of him, like a man doing calisthenics and trying to touch his toes.
Remo had heard the whir of the knife. He had stopped. He heard the small sip of a groan from Muckley, and sensing what it was, he growled and ran ahead through the trees.
The assassin heard the growl behind him. He wanted to recover his knife. But his first choice was always to be careful and he sank back into the trees, moving quickly and quietly away from the place he had heard the sound of a man's angry snarl.
Remo saw Muckley at the edge of the river and saw the knife protruding from his back. He did not have to look to see if the man was dead. Remo knew from the location of the wound and the sprawl of the body that Higbe Muckley had taken his last tax deduction.
An anger welled up in him and he wheeled about to face the heavy forest. The blood of his adopted Korean ancestors surged in him and he called out:
"Wa, do you hear my voice?"
The assassin stopped short when he heard his name called, but he did not answer. He listened.
"There is no running from me, Wa," Remo called. "I am going to feed you your own knives."
The assassin wondered who was calling. And how did he know Wa?
"You speak bravely," he called back. Then, to give the other men no chance to fix the sound, he instantly began to move away, parallel to the river.