"Listen to her, she makes sense," said Chiun, imagining how the pure black kimono would look with a single silver lotus blossom. He wondered if it would clash with the costumes of the rock stars. And then he gave up, realizing that everything clashed with what rock stars wore.
In Korean, Remo told Chiun he was not going to humor her like Chiun preferred to do.
And in Korean Chiun answered: "He who reasons with fools dresses in warm aspic."
"I stand for things, little father."
"The wrong things, Remo. Be nice to the girl. Then we can get on with this idiotic degradation of assassins' calling, this occupation termed detective work. "
Remo glanced back at Rizzuto's door. He could hear laughter in the room. He could also hear Rizzuto curse. The big concert was only a few hours away. He had to find out what Rizzuto's plans were for the concert before then. Why, he was not sure. But he was fairly certain that if he knew what Rizzuto was going to pull, he could be there to make sure some evidence for a court case could be unearthed.
Remo found the door to Rizzuto's room locked. With a careful pressure of the handle against the lock, he cracked the lock. Unfortunately he cracked it too hard. It shattered with the force of a grenade. The door flew open and three men ducked behind couches grabbing for shoulder holsters. The only one who didn't have a pistol was Rizzuto. He was playing cards for big stakes with three strangers who carried guns.
The piles of bills were naturally not in front of him, and his checkbook was open with a leaking fountain pen beside it. Remo thought it looked like it was bleeding.
Remo shut what was left of the door behind him. "Hi, it was open, so I thought I'd just pop in."
"Who're you?"
"Friend of Rizzuto's."
"We're leavin'," said one of the men. "He can't bring in some backup."
"Get out of here, Remo. I gotta recover. They can't leave."
"Don't worry, they're not leaving," said Remo.
"We're leavin'," said the one who did not put his gun away.
"Well then, if you must, but don't take any money with you."
"We're leavin' with our dough, sweetheart," said the man with the gun.
"Because you have a gun?"
"Because we won it and yeah, because we got guns. "
"Genaro, do you always play with strangers who have guns?"
"I didn't know they had guns until you crashed in," said Rizzuto.
Remo caught the thug's attention with a smile, which was enough distraction for him to slap the gun free. He also got the other guns as they reappeared from their holsters and put them in the middle of the table. Then he said they could all leave with their guns and money but he wanted to play a few hands of poker.
The three men looked at each other, stunned. They hadn't seen the hand that had disarmed them. They had moved for their guns, held out their guns, and then found them missing.
One of them couldn't believe it. He lunged for his gun in the middle of the table. Something sharp like barbed wire brushed the back of his palm, causing incredible pain. And yet there was no bleeding. There was just the stranger who had burst through the door, who had taken the guns so quickly they didn't see his hand move. And he was smiling. The gambler cradled the throbbing hand that the stranger had barely touched.
"I think we're going to play some cards," said Remo.
"I didn't know you gambled," said Rizzuto. If he had known that, he wouldn't have ignored the man all this time since Gupta, the man with too many questions Genaro Rizzuto did not want to answer.
"All the time," said Remo.
"What do you like to play? Stud? Five-card draw? What?"
"Poker," said Remo.
"They're all poker," said Rizzuto.
"The one with full houses and flushes," said Remo.
"They all have that. How much poker have you played?"
"Enough," said Remo. Actually he hadn't played cards for years. When he was a policeman, before he went through the phony execution to make him the man who didn't exist, before his training and new life with Chiun, he had played, for pennies and nickels, poker that had so many different wild cards and payoffs that the big hands wouldn't end in winners and losers but in heated arguments over the rules.
These men played a hard tight game for big money. They would never play a game with so many cards wild that there could be three straight flushes in one hand, the highest grouping of cards. And the only gambling game Chiun had taught him wasn't really a gambling game, but a Korean mental exercise originated by the Masters of Sinanju called Ka, or game of stones, from which the far cruder Japanese game of Go emerged.
"Sure I can play poker. Let's play the kind where you get five cards and nothing is wild."
"Five-card draw," said Rizzuto. The gamblers returned to the tables, exchanging quick glances. What the glances said was that they were soon going to win back their guns and anything else that was on the table from this lunatic who broke doors and moved so quickly no one saw him.
Before they began Remo had one question. "Among the four suits, the highest suit is spades, right?"
They all nodded.
"You sure you know poker?" asked Rizzuto.
"Sure," said Remo. "Just one more question. Spades is black, right? But so is clubs. Clubs is the one with the bumps, not smooth rounded like spades. Spades are more heart-shaped. Right?"
"Right," said everyone.
"No limit with a C-note ante," said one of the gamblers.
"That's a hundred dollars," said Remo.
"Right," said everyone.
One of the reasons Remo lost his liking of money was that upstairs supplied all his needs, and there was no reason for him to accumulate anything. He moved around so much it was silly to buy a home. He never cared about cars, so the walking-around cash upstairs gave him tended to stay in his pocket for a long time.
He had twenty hundred-dollar bills almost as fresh as the day they were issued to him years ago. He put one into the middle of the table. Everyone else tossed in money, except Rizzuto, who put down an IOU, asking Remo if it were all right.
"These guys are my friends. They take my IOU's," said Rizzuto. As soon as one of the men began to deal, Remo could tell why they were so generous.
Someone else might simply have seen cards being shuffled, but Remo clearly saw each individual card, and he saw the aces move up the deck like a ladder with exactly three rungs-the other cards-between each ace.
Remo smiled and folded on the first hand. Rizzuto bet heavily. He had kings. He lost.
When it came time for Remo's turn to deal, the hard part was reminding himself what were second-, third-, and fourth-highest hands.
He spread the cards out faceup in one sweep of his hand to see where each was, and then quickly collected the deck. With one hand moving several cards so rapidly it looked like shuffling, he moved the other hand, careful not to use so much speed that he burned the cards from friction; feeling the weight of each, the balance of each, the very power of the stability of the roam, he got the cards in order, careful to give each man the right hand.
There was the formality of the cut, whereby one of the players, to avoid cheating and assure honesty, took half the deck from the top and put it on the bottom. As Remo picked up the deck to deal, he simply reversed the weighting of the cards, so that the deck went back to the way he arranged it. All three of the gamblers watched him closely. None of them saw him work the deck.
Strangely, none of them bet heavily. Only Rizzuto, who had the winning hand.
Rizzuto cursed his luck that the first time he got spades straight flush, no one else had anything to bet into him. And then Remo gave them all a little demonstration. He made them turn up their cards, something players never had to do, but encouraged to be honest by the promise of getting their wrists snapped if they didn't go along, they all complied.