Smith stayed with them— their family name was Jevsevar— for five days. During the day, Dimi, the man who had saved his life, and Smith, disguised in Dimi's rags and passed off to family acquaintances as a visiting cousin, went foraging for food among the few shops still operating in the city.
Dimi expressed his admiration for Smith's abilities as a thief. Smith himself was not particularly proud of stealing, for whatever reason, and in later years would never mention the episode to anyone, not even his wife.
At night, the Jevsevars amused themselves with stories while Smith pored over maps, seeking an escape route out of Poland for himself and the Jevsevars.
On the sixth day the Nazis came.
Their unmistakable footsteps pounded up the rickety stariway. The beating at the door began. Dimi shoved Smith out the fire escape and up onto the roof.
"Run," he said. "Over the rooftops, toward the river. Most of the buildings are abandoned there."
"Get your family. Well all go."
Dimi shook his head. "My boys are too young, and Helena is not strong. My place is with them. Hurry."
Smith watched the wiry man with the strong hands walk back to the fire escape. "Thank you," he said. He never knew afterward if Dimi had heard him or not.
The Jevsevars were taken to Auschwitz. From his post as an OSS strategist in London over two years later, Smith was able to book passage on an army convoy headed for Poland amid the Allied victory celebrations. After weeks of false leads, he finally tracked down Dimi Jevsevar in a seamy rooming house outside the town of Piekielko.
He was still wiry, but his calm strength had been replaced by a haunted emptiness. His hands trembled, and he had difficulty remembering. He knew Smith, but had forgotten the circumstances, mistaking him for a distant relative. His hair had turned white.
Dimi's family was gone. The twin boys were the first to die, courtesy of Mengele's and Lustbaden's experiments with chromosomal alteration. His wife, Helena, neither healthy nor particularly beautiful, outlived her usefulness shortly afterward. She was claimed by the gas chambers. The girl with the sea-green eyes, Dimi's daughter, was used as Zoran's private prostitute until she took her own life with a jagged piece of a discarded liquor bottle across her wrists.
There was nothing left. A trace in Buenos Aires... too late. SPIDER had reached Lustbaden before Smith. A whisper near the leper colony at Molokai seven years later... He was gone, fled with a group of patients from the colony and his SPIDER corps.
And then, for twenty years, nothing. The Prince of Hell had vanished.
Smith awoke with a start, surprised to hear the roar of jet engines. His fingers had plastered themselves to the photograph on his lap, and when he removed them, they left prints over Lustbaden's half-moon smile.
I have known you for too long, Smith thought, looking at the picture and seeing only the face of pure evil.
The search would end soon. One of them was going to die.
He opened his briefcase, arranged its contents, and set the photograph carefully inside.
?Chapter Eleven
And so it came to pass that the elderly Chiun, regarded by his employer as a bizarre, if competent, adjunct to the enforcer arm of CURE, and Harold W. Smith, notable among his employees as the most boring man in the world, set out together for the Valley of the Damned.
Smith had commandeered a Navy speedboat, and was at the helm. As usual, the two men had little to say to each other, since both despised small talk. Smith steered the vessel toward the island, following Chiun's terse directions. Chiun reveled silently in the exhilarating wind that shot into their faces in the open boat.
Locking his briefcase in a watertight compartment, Smith moored the craft at a deserted, rocky spot some distance from the concealed path. Careful not to disturb the birds gathered there, they made their way through the jungle brush to the airstrip.
"We think it is here that Zoran brought your missing airplane," Chiun said.
"I see," Smith answered noncommitally.
Chiun yawned and moved on. Nothing interested Smith. Nothing. Chiun vowed he would write an Ung poem about Smith one day, if he could keep from falling asleep while composing it.
The residents of the valley were holding some sort of ceremony. As far distant as the shore, Smith and Chiun could hear the tribal chant of the whole village.
Timu, garbed in ceremonial robes and a high feather headdress, looked at the two men in surprise when they approached.
"Master," he said, bowing low to Chiun. "You live. We were certain the birds had killed you— with these others." He gestured toward a stack of long objects the size of human beings, swathed in black cloth.
"These are your dead?" Smith asked.
The chief eyed him suspiciously.
"He is the Emperor of my son's tribe," Chiun whispered to the chief. "He brings no harm."
Solemnly Timu bowed to Smith. He raised a carved wooden staff. The villagers, chanting in front of their huts, moved slowly toward the pile and picked up the black-draped bundles.
"These represent our dead," Timu explained. "They are only sticks wrapped in cloth. We are not permitted to keep the bodies of our murdered people." His mouth curved down bitterly. "Zoran needs the corpses for his own purposes.
The villagers formed a double-circle, chanting as they carried the effigies high over their heads.
"How were they murdered?" Smith asked.
"The birds," Timu said wearily. "Again," He turned to Chiun. "We thought you were among our losses today. Portions of your boat were found, smashed to pieces."
Timu shouted something in an ancient Hawaiian dialect, and an old man stepped out of the double-circle of mourners. He was carrying a black-shrouded effigy set apart from the others by a gold stripe. "This was your effigy, O Master of Sinanju. I am pleased to remove it from our funeral." He unwrapped the black cloth slowly and scattered the sticks on the ground. "You were brave and kind to return to us."
"We wish to help you," Chiun said. "Only you must no longer be afraid to tell us the truth."
Timu looked at the villagers, helplessly grieving over their families and neighbors. In the distance, beneath the high-domed rocks, the bodies of those dead were awaiting Zoran's mutilation. The Master of Sinanju's own son was somewhere in that cave, possibly already under Zoran's knife with the others.
"I will tell you all I know," Timu said.
The funeral ended, the chief led them to his hut. At the doorway, he said, "We can speak here— outside— if you wish."
"I am not frightened of your ailment," Smith said.
They went inside. Timu gave Chiun the place of honor, facing the narrow doorway, with Smith to his right. He began slowly, as if he had rehearsed the telling of his story many times over the years.
"He was always called Zoran, nothing more. He is a doctor, although he does not wish to be addressed that way."
Smith felt his heart quicken. "A German?" he asked. It was the same man. It had to be.
"A foreigner," the chief said. "He came to Molokai, where my people lived, many years ago. He did not practice at the main hospital, but in his own clinic, where he accepted only the worst cases— those the hospital could no longer treat. He made miraculous cures. Dying men who could hardly breathe walked with ease under his care. Women whose bodies had been damaged beyond repair by sickness were able to bear children. We looked on him as a god."
Smith nodded. There was no doubt that Zoran Lustbaden had a brilliant medical mind. Josef Mengele himself had said as much in one of his rare references to his associate.
"While my sister Ana went to college, she worked in Zoran's clinic. She continued after she began medical school. He was her hero in those days," the chief said ruefully. "It was her dream to become like him, to take over his clinic after he died. Then— the thing— happened. The terrible event." Timu squeezed his eyes shut as he struggled with his emotions.