"I know who we are. And soon they will know who we are, if they do not already. And once they know that, they can better kill us."
"Are you guys detectives?" asked Debbie. She had switched to black rags instead of yellow and green rags. Remo knew she had her own full-time seamstress to sew the rags together. They were not taken out of dime-store garbage pails but were actually manufactured for her.
"No," said Remo. "We're just trying to find out something."
"I thought you knew it all," she said. She winked at Remo and nodded to the bedroom.
"Bodies in there," said Remo.
"Was that what Chiun was doing? Oh, he's neat. He's beautiful. He's heavy. He's baddest."
"It is her way of attempting to explain perfection; Remo. We must be tolerant of her," said Chiun.
"How are we going to be killed?" asked Remo. He hadn't seen anything that would be a problem. The problem was figuring out how to gather evidence against the super shysters on the Coast, not getting through the day alive.
Chiun raised a finger.
"There has been the gun, and that has failed, correct ?"
Remo nodded.
"And there has been the knife, and that has failed, correct?"
Remo nodded. "And the grenade too, so what are you talking about? No problem."
"If you fail, and fail, and fail, what does that mean?" asked Chiun.
"It means you can't get bookings," said Debbie.
"I don't know," said Remo.
"It means that someday you will succeed. Remo, the handmaiden of success is failure. There are only so many times a determined person can fail before he succeeds. And look at whom we face. Someone who understood how Gupta worked. I believe we are being tested. See what fails here, and see what fails there, and see what fails elsewhere, and all the while the failures are telling that person who we are and what we can do."
"I dunno," said Remo.
"On the one hand, Remo, we face someone who knows what he is doing while we have no idea what we are doing."
"Talk in Korean," said Remo.
"I'm old enough to hear anything you say," said Debbie. "And smarter than you think, too. Yeah." But Chiun ignored her.
"We hunt these lawyers for proof for some judge. What sort of a country is it that an emperor cannot maintain order with a scaffold or sword? What is evidence but something someone else may believe? Is that what we hunt? We should hunt thundershowers for our purse and build walls from morning dew. We are made fools of. Do you not understand we do not belong here? If this were easy for us it would be right. But it is impossible."
"It's only impossible when you give up, little father. We will fail, and fail, and fail, and then succeed. What's good for our enemies is good for us."
"Unfortunately, Remo, when an assassin fails, he is usually dead for the trouble. Leave this crazy land and the crazy man Smith. Come with me to civilized people. Did you not feel the respect of India, the grandeur, the sanity, the beauty?"
"I saw a dirty river," said Remo.
"How American," said Chiun.
"I'm not giving up, little father. Every other country in the world has a tinpot dictator, where laws mean nothing. There's no difference between some despot and some glorious emperor," said Remo.
"That's what I am saying. This is the age of the despot, and here the glory of Sinanju wastes itself in foolishness beyond comprehension. We do not even serve a lunatic emperor like Smith any longer: we serve some poetry that you alone appear to believe in."
"Smith serves the same laws. And he's not insane. You just don't understand America."
"That's not the problem, Remo. You don't understand the world."
Debbie Pattie saw the two men fall into hostile silence. She did not understand a word they were saying, but she recognized a family fight when she saw one. She recognized two people thinking each other stubborn and unreasonable.
She also recognized a chance to make her point. "Look," she said. "I know you think I don't know what I'm doing with all these crazy rags and the weird colors and downright junk I dress in, but I do. Nobody ever paid a million dollars for Beethoven's Fifth. This is what makes money. And so this is what I do, understand? I mean, I couldn't be a heavyweight boxer, right? I couldn't really be an opera star, because I don't have a voice that would carry past the first row. So I did what I could do without any talent. And I did all right, too. I'm famous and I'm rich, and that ain't bad if all you can do is yell and dress bad."
Debbie paused. Her voice lowered, and they could hear the tears beginning.
"So what I'm saying, fellas, is would you please be a little bit understanding of someone who works different from you? Huh? How about it? A little human understanding, Remo?"
"No," said Remo. "I don't believe in it, and Chiun believes in it even less."
"Okay, you poor moneyless jerk, I'll show you I have smarts. I'm going to show you where every penny of that Save benefit went. I'm going to show you you're wrong. You're wrong about everything. Because whether you know it or not, I love you, you big ape," she said to Remo.
"I didn't know that," said Remo.
"Well, I do," said Debbie, her tears making a rainbow stream through her multicolored makeup. Remo shrugged. It didn't make any difference to him. Chiun, of course, was not surprised. The girl was the epitome of bad taste.
For Chiun, only one thing really mattered. He knew that if something did not change soon, he might lose Remo. And this mattered much, much more than he would ever let Remo know.
Chapter 9
During World War II, when defense planners identified the seven most likely targets for the maximum possible damage to the United States, the Grand Booree Dam on the Colorado River rated right behind the destruction of the capital itself.
The project was immense. Not since the pyramids had mankind produced anything so massive. At its base the dam was almost a half-mile wide. In a perfect awesome slope of reinforced concrete it rose to the top of the canyon, almost as high as it was wide.
Major U. S. highways were built just to transport material to the construction site. A rail line for the concrete alone was built along the upper ridge of the Booree Canyon. Enough concrete was used in the making of Grand Booree to build twelve cities.
And behind its massive wall, a lake formed of such size that if the government chose, it could lose a fleet of battleships there. Homes and cities rose around the lake. And it was this lake that gave defense planners such nightmares.
If an enemy chose to destroy the dam, the force of the unleashed waters cascading down the canyon would obliterate everything under a wall of water that would shame any tidal wave yet recorded.
It was a nightmare that had moved this dam in Colorado right up the list of most vulnerable targets. It stayed there until a military officer took one look at the project and asked quite simply, "How would they destroy it?"
He calculated that for Japan or Germany to put even a single hole in the Grand Booree they would need a round-the-clock fleet of heavy bombers pounding the dam for three weeks straight. Even if Germany or Japan could mount such an extensive air bombardment, penetrating formidable coastal defenses, they would certainly not bother to do it to flood a few cities in Colorado.
What about a saboteur's bomb? the officer was asked.
"In terms of known explosives, to put a hole into that mass of concrete would require the national production of dynamite for August and September, or roughly four full trainloads."
There was no way any saboteur could sneak in enough explosives to do damage to the Grand Booree. Nevertheless, the very thought of what could happen if the lake ever let loose on the valley downriver was enough to force the government to station antiaircraft batteries around its perimeter and limit access to it all through the war. The government felt it just had to do something, even if something was absolutely not needed.