The strangler pulled. Remo lay there.
"She loves it, She loves it," said Holly Rodan.
"The hell She does," said the driver. "Look, he's not even turning red."
Remo let the blood pressure rise in his head so his face reddened.
"There it goes," said the driver.
"Now She loves it," said Holly.
"Why isn't he struggling? Pull harder," the driver said.
The noose tightened. The phansigar's forehead broke out in perspiration. His knuckles whitened and his wrists strained. Holly Rodan dropped an arm to help pull on the other side of the rumal. She pulled and the phansigar pulled. The demon about to be offered up to Kali smiled and then the rumal snapped in half.
"Hi," said Remo. "Let's talk about strangling and robbery."
"You're not dead," said the phansigar.
"Some people might give you an argument about that," Remo said.
The driver made a break for the car. Remo caught one leg, then the other leg. He whipped the body into a tree, where it folded up neatly with a snap of the spinal column, then convulsed once and was still.
The phansigar opened his mouth, and then breakfast came up as he looked at the driver. The body was bent in two, backwards, with the nape of the neck touching the heels.
"Don't make bodies the way they used to," Remo said. "Now, the Neanderthal, that was a man. Solid. You hit a Neanderthal against a tree and the tree would break. Look at this guy. Never going to fix him. He's done. Just one little bang on a tree and he's done. What do you think, sweetheart?"
"Me?" said Holly Rodan. She was still holding half of the yellow rumal in her hand.
"You, him, I don't care," Remo said. "What's going on?"
"We're practicing our religion. We have a right," said the phansigar.
"Why are you killing people?"
"Why do Catholics say Mass? Why do Protestants sing or Jews chant?"
"It's not nice to strangle and rob," Remo said.
"That's what you say," the phansigar said.
"How would you like it if I killed you?"
"Go ahead," said the phansigar. "Long live death." Remo felt himself hesitate. He looked at the girl, and she was just as calm as the other young man. That was why he had sensed nothing about the girl on the just Folks flight.
"Go ahead," said the young man.
"Sure," said Remo. "If you insist," and dropped him like a loose marble onto the picnic basket.
"Long live pain," the young man gasped as he expired.
"What is all this about?" Remo asked the girl. Holly Rodan stared at the broken body. It had been so fast, so forceful, the body breaking like a brittle stick. She felt her limbs grow warm, and a tingling look over her belly. It was beautiful. This new one brought death in such speed and force. She had never seen it like this. She had a taste for death now. It could be beautiful, she realized, beautiful if it were strong enough. Not some limping off into eternity, but the gigantic crash into a tree. She looked at the phansigar, dispatched by Remo like a gum wrapper.
Then she looked at Remo, the handsome dark-eyed man with high cheekbones. His sharp gaze sent gushers of passion through her body. She wanted him. All of him. She wanted him in death, in life, his body, his hands. Death or passion, it was all the same thing. She now knew the secret of Kali. Death was life itself. They were the same.
Holly Rodan threw herself at Remo's feet and began kissing his bare ankles.
"Kill me too," she said. "Give me death. For Her." The feet moved away and she crawled after this beautiful force of death. She crawled down the path, her knees scraping on stones, bleeding. She had to reach him. She had to serve him with her life.
"Kill me," she said. She looked up into his eyes, imploring him. "Kill me. For Her. Death is beautiful." For the first time in his new life, Remo ran. He ran from the clearing and from something he did not understand. He did not even know what he was running from.
Back at the airport, he met Chiun, who was stopping passersby and asking them to sign his petition. But when Chiun saw Remo, he knew something was wrong and put the petition away inside his kimono.
All the way back to New Orleans, Chiun made no criticism, expressed no annoyance at having had to train a white man, and on leaving the plane, even paid Remo a compliment. "You move and breathe well, Remo."
"I'll be all right, Little Father. I just have to think."
"Of course," said Chiun. "We will speak when you are ready."
But that night, at their new hotel, they still did not speak. Remo looked at the stars and could not sleep. Chiun watched Remo, and late, during the night, he put away the petitions in one of his large steamer trunks.
They would have to wait; something more important had happened, he knew.
Chapter Six
Ban Sar Din ate his way through the forty dollars before breakfast. And it wasn't even at his favorite restaurant; he couldn't afford that.
He left the restaurant and wandered the streets. Something was wrong with America. If you bought a plane ticket and sent three people out to do a job and then all you earned was less than the price of a full meal with dessert, something was seriously wrong. With the economy. With everything.
People were making fortunes on fund-raisers for revolutionary movements that were little more than bandit gangs. There was one yogi who was even selling a secret word for two hundred dollars a pop and he had the suckers lined up waiting.
Some cults had mansions. Others had corporations that came close to being listed in the Fortune 500. Some yogis bought their own towns, drove around in Rolls-Royces, and the suckers threw flowers at their feet.
And what did Ban Sar Din have?
He had an ashram full of crazies who thought nothing of killing someone for forty dollars just to see the victim wriggle a bit. And he was losing money. The Kali thing had started out all right, but now the crazies seemed more interested in the killing than in the robbing, and he was going bust.
In a land of opportunity, if you couldn't make money through murder and theft, how could you make money?
He felt like taking one of those bonus-fare coupons from just Folks Airlines and flying off somewhere. But his hands had gotten too fat for picking pockets and he had gotten used to being a spiritual leader to America's youth. What bothered him most of all that troubling evening was that he knew there was a fortune to be mined somehow, somewhere in that ashram. He had free personnel and a cult that seemed to have caught on.
How to make a buck out of it? A reliable buck.
He couldn't send out more of the killer teams. If each one showed a loss, increasing the volume just meant increasing the loss. Expenses? He couldn't cut any more than he had already. Handkerchiefs any cheaper and they wouldn't be able to hold a throat. He had tried white handkerchiefs once, but the faithful insisted on the yellow, and how could you argue with people you weren't paying anyway?
He couldn't even cut expenses by going to a totally unchartered airline. Who knew what kind of poverty-stricken passengers that kind of line might be carrying? His loonies would wind up killing and come home with a handful of food stamps.
He was in a circle growing smaller and there was no way out.
And then, in his despair, Ban Sar Din heard voices, a beautiful song rising with faith and gusto toward the heavens. He looked around and saw he had wandered into a poor black neighborhood. The voices came from a church. He entered and sat down in a rear pew.
The minister sang with the chorus. He preached of hell and he preached of salvation, but most of all he preached of the magic prayer cloth that would answer problems, and when treated with the magic blue juice, would cure the gout, rheumsey, cabob disorder, and lung cancer.
After the prayer meeting, Ban Sar Din went up to the minister.
"What ails you, brother?" asked the Reverend, Tee Vee Walker, a boom of a man with a rutted black face and large hands that glistened with gold and diamonds. His was the Church of the Instant Savior. "Business is bad," said Ban Sar Din.