"I'll try waving," Remo said.
The taxi pulled up, and Remo opened the door for Chiun. Chiun gathered up his kimono skirts and settled into the rear seat. Remo gave the driver an address and closed the door behind him.
"I'm surprised you don't speak Swiss, Little Father. Switzerland isn't exactly a backwater."
"To Sinanju it is. When was the last time you ever heard of Swiss political difficulties?"
"I know they stayed neutral during World War II."
"Yes. The Swiss love their money. They prefer to avoid arguments rather than have to spend any of it."
"Oh. I think I understand."
"No Master of Sinanju has ever worked for a Swiss ruler," Chiun said, folding his arms unhappily. "Ever. So please do not ask me about the meaning of their meaningless words."
"Okay, okay, don't get on my case. Besides, I just figured it out. Im Dienst means 'on duty.' "
"You had help."
"I did not."
"The driver. He stopped for us, did he not?"
"That wasn't help. That was a clue. I made a deduction."
"Bah!"
"Ask the driver if you don't believe me," Remo said, leaning forward to tap the driver on the shoulder. Chiun's next words stopped him.
"Do not bother. He will only tell you that he is neutral."
"You have an answer for everything, don't you?"
"Except the meaning of meaningless Swiss words," Chiun retorted.
The taxi deposited them in front of an imposing granite building that had "LONGINES CREDIT BANK" chiseled on the front.
"This must be the place," Remo said, paying the driver in American funds. He told the driver to keep the change from the fifty-dollar bill. It all went on Smith's tab anyway.
"I've never seen a bank like this before," Remo said, gazing up at the gingerbread ramparts. "Looks like a fortress. "
"I told you that the Swiss love their money."
"Well, if this bank is behind Friendship, International, they're going to be paying reparations to the American government for a thousand years."
Remo breezed through a revolving glass door.
The bank lobby was a cavern of marble and brass-fitted teller booths. The floors were Carrara marble and the vaulted ceiling was painted to outdo the Sistine Chapel.
"Where do we start?" Remo asked, his whisper bouncing off the polished walls.
A man in a cutaway coat and cravat walked up to them stiffly and looked down his nose at Remo's T-shirt and chinos.
"May I be of service?" he asked with studied politeness. "We're looking for the offices of Friendship, International," Remo told him.
"I have never heard of such a concern. Perhaps you have been misdirected."
"This is 47 Finmark Platz?"
"Indeed. And it has been the office of this bank for nearly three hundred years."
"Our information is unimpeachable, Swiss," Chiun spat in unconcealed contempt.
The manager raised a supercilious eyebrow at the Master of Sinanju's colorful kimono. "And I tell you that you are unquestionably mistaken."
"We'll look around, okay?" Remo said, brushing past him.
The manager snapped his fingers in the direction of a gray-uninformed guard. The guard followed Remo. He was very polite, his voice low and cultured.
"I'm afraid if you do not have business with the Longines Credit Bank that you will have to leave."
"Make me," Remo challenged.
"Yes," Chiun seconded. "Make him."
The guard reached for Remo's arm. He was sure he grabbed it. But the American kept walking, his back to him. Frowning, the guard looked to see what he had grabbed. It turned out to be his left arm. Odd. He hadn't moved the left arm. How had it gotten into his right hand? When he tried to let go, his clutching fingers did not respond. It dawned on him that something was wrong when he began feeling the pins-and-needles sensation of constricted blood flow in his left hand.
Hastily the guard retreated to the manager and tried to explain his plight. The manager lost his cultivated cool and began shouting in a skittish voice. The manager bundled the guard off to his office to call the police and incidentally get an ambulance for the frightened man.
"We'll find it faster if we split up," Remo said.
"But what are we looking for?" asked Chiun.
"Anyone who answers the phone with the words 'Friendship, International.' "
"And woe to him who does," said Chiun, slipping into a side office.
Remo walked past the tellers, sensing eyes upon him. The tellers regarded him as if he were a bug. But the eyes he sensed were not theirs. Remo looked around. The wall-mounted security cameras were following him as he passed before the teller cages. As he left the range of one, it reverted to its normal position, and the next one in line picked up the tracking.
Remo walked up to a teller.
"Who controls those cameras?" he asked.
The teller started to say, "I beg your pardon." He'd gotten to the E in "beg" when a thick wristed hand came up from under the narrow space under his glass partition and grabbed his tie. Suddenly his nose was mashed into the glass.
"I asked a polite question," Remo pointed out.
"Up stairs." It came out as two words because his teeth kept clicking against the glass.
"Much obliged," Remo said, and floated up the winding marble stairs leading to the upper floors.
He drifted through the cool rust-colored halls. It was like being in a church, not a bank. Remo decided that Chiun was wrong. The Swiss didn't love money. They worshiped it, and he was in one of their greatest temples.
There were men counting stacks of currency in both the left- and right-hand rooms. The currency was stacked in colorful piles and represented the cash of many nations. Diligent workers separated the stacks into neat piles and fed them into machines that counted the bills with quick riffling motions. No one spoke, but everyone's eyes held too-avid gleams.
"I'm looking for the security staff," Remo said.
The occupants of one room turned to look at him like librarians offended by a student cracking his gum in a reading room. They put their fingers to their lips in a gesture so in unison that they might have practiced years for this moment.
Their shush was one breath.
Remo moved along. He came to a locked room. There was a slit of a viewport in the rust-colored marble. He knocked. His knock sounded like wet clay against steel. It was hardly a plop. So Remo knocked harder. The marble cracked along its entire height.
A pair of frightened eyes came to the port.
"Is this where the security staff work?" Remos asked.
"Who are you?"
"I'll take that as a yes," Remo said. He hit the crack with the edge of his palm. The crack fissured and the door fell back in two heavy sections. The owner of the frightened eyes barely had time to jump back.
Remo walked over the shattered marble and examined the room.
A battery of video monitors occupied one wall. Each monitor had a uniformed guard attending it. There were no controls in front of them. The monitors were embedded in the same richly textured marble as the bank walls.
"Who controls the lobby cameras?" Remo asked of no one in particular.
"A computer," the guard told him.
"Who controls the computer?"
"No one."
"Damn," said Remo, thinking that he had just wasted ten minutes. He decided to trip up the guard with a trick question.
"I was told the office of Friendship, International was on this floor."
"By whom? This entire building belongs to Longines Credit Bank. There is no other occupant."
"Maybe they never told you."
"As head of security, it would be my business to know." The guard sounded sincere, so Remo told him to carry on.
"But the door. It is broken."
"After three hundred years, what do you expect?" Remo said, looking for the stairs.
In the lobby, Chiun told Remo that he had overheard no one answering the phones as Friendship, International. "Smith can't be wrong," Remo said firmly.