"Ooh, let's go to the Thames River, Harold," Maude Smith announced excitedly. She pronounced every letter in the word. Mrs. Smith beamed as she looked at the glossy picture in the brochure she had picked up in the hotel lobby.
"That's pronounced 'Tems,' dear," Smith said absently from his seated position on the edge of the hotel bed. He placed his briefcase on his lap.
Still, she didn't hear him. She was too excited. "Oh, Hyde Park looks interesting. We could go there."
"Very well," said Smith. "Perhaps tomorrow afternoon."
He popped the special locks on his briefcase and lifted the cracked leather lid, revealing the small portable computer within. The sounds drew a response. "Harold." The voice of his wife was small. And sad.
Smith glanced up.
Maude Smith was looking down at the briefcase balanced atop Smith's bony knees. Her face was deeply hurt.
"This is our second honeymoon," she said softly. Already her eyes were welling up.
Smith hadn't seen his wife cry in many years. To witness such a display now came as a shock. She had always been a good wife. Undemanding. Dutiful. She had sacrificed her life for him and never had a complaint.
Something stirred deep in the rock-ribbed, unemotional core of Harold W. Smith. It was guilt. The same sensation that had compelled him to go on this trip in the first place. He found the emotion deeply unsettling.
Smith quietly shut the lid on the computer. He set the tamperproof locks on the briefcase and pushed it far under the bed. He stood up.
"Or we could go now," he offered, taking her hands gently in his.
Smith's rational mind knew that they had both changed. A great deal more than either of them had ever expected. But in that instant he was propelled back in time more than fifty years. The face he looked into was that of the shy young girl who had given him her youth.
A tight smile gripped his bloodless lips.
Maude Smith was so surprised by the sudden change in her husband that she wanted to burst out in tears of joy. But she knew Harold frowned on those sorts of emotional displays. When she cried, she generally cried alone. Ironically it was her aloneness that usually brought her to tears.
But she wasn't alone today.
She gripped her husband's gnarled fingers, sniffling slightly.
"I'll get the camera," Maude croaked feebly.
THEY FOUND several more rusted metal fragments from shattered bomb casings. Helene had even stopped denying that they were fragments of the ordnance stolen from the deminage bases. Her frown deepened at each discovery.
"So it was an accident," Remo mused. "But the stuff still got all the way down to Paris for some reason. Why?"
"There is only one reason to have booms," Chiun replied. He was watching the American investigators sift through the debris. They had found evidence of the deminage bombs, as well.
Remo nodded his agreement. "True. But we still don't know who has them. Any ideas, Helene?" he called over to the French agent.
She was talking into the cellular phone that she periodically removed from the pocket of her jacket. She pitched her voice low, little realizing that Remo could have heard her even if she were on the other side of the building and locked away in an isolation tank. Heard but not understood. Remo had never bothered to learn French.
It hadn't been easy, but he had convinced the Master of Sinanju to quietly translate some of what she was saying. It was during the first of these calls that Remo learned she was an agent for the DGSE.
"I do not support your conjecture," she called back. She hunched farther into her phone.
"She's not very helpful, is she?" Remo said to Chiun.
"She is French." The Master of Sinanju shrugged, as if this explained everything.
Remo put his hands on his hips. Frowning unhappily, he surveyed the embassy wreckage.
"We've gone as far as we can here. I don't see anyone running up to tell us they did it."
"Perchance Smith might have new information," Chiun suggested.
"Chiun, I can't call Smith," Remo explained. "He's on the first vacation he's ever taken since I've known him. Besides, his wife is with him."
"Call Smith, do not call Smith. It matters not to me," Chiun said with a shrug of his birdlike shoulders.
Remo thought for a few more minutes. His frown deepened with each passing second.
"I think I'll call Smith," he said eventually.
He hopped over a pile of shattered wall debris and stepped up to Helene. When she noticed him coming toward her, she pulled more tightly into herself, whispering a torrent of French into the small phone in her hand.
Wordlessly Remo reached around her. Before she could issue a complaint, he plucked the phone from her clenched hand.
"She'll call you back," he announced into the receiver.
"Give me my phone!"
"Sorry, kitten. Official State Department business."
As Helene protested, Remo pressed the button that severed the connection. She continued complaining violently as Remo-humming all the while-punched in his personal access code for Folcroft. Smith had told him before he left that he could phone at any time in case of emergency. The call would be rerouted to wherever in the world the CURE director was staying.
"Give me that this instant," Helene insisted hotly, grabbing at the phone.
"When I'm through," Remo promised. He had finished dialing and, batting away Helene's grabbing hands, was waiting for the call to go through.
Eventually Helene gave up trying to get the phone back. Seething, she crossed her arms.
"You are a barbarian," she snarled.
"This from the people who brought you the guillotine," Remo said smilingly. He resumed humming a song from the musical Gigi. It was Maurice Chevalier's "Thank Heaven for Little Girls."
HAROLD SMITH HAD SEEN as much of London as he had ever wanted to see during World War II. And most of what he saw back then had been at night.
Large parts of his youth had been spent ducking shrapnel. As the air-raid whistles squawked their nightly preamble to horror, the streets emptied. Blackout shades were hastily drawn and Londoners huddled together in shelters awaiting the end of the Blitz.
That end had come decades ago. The sirens were silent now.
The sandbags and antiaircraft guns were gone. As he strolled with his wife from Kensington Gardens and across the street into Hyde Park, Smith didn't see a single British soldier or military vehicle.
On their tour he noted that some of the buildings that had been damaged in the war had been repaired. Others had been torn down to make way for fresh architectural eyesores. It was as if World War II had never so much as brushed the shores of England.
To Maude Smith's eyes, this was London. She had never seen what Smith had seen, and so to her the images of the war had been restricted to the far-off unreality of newsreels and, in later years, the occasional advertisement for a PBS documentary. She never watched the programs themselves. They were too depressing.
Happily oblivious to the horrors that had nightly occurred on these very streets, Maude Smith clicked picture after picture on her old Browning camera. Smith thought it likely that she hadn't even loaded the film correctly. She had never been very good at it. Whatever the case, it didn't seem to matter to Mrs. Smith.
"Isn't it beautiful, Harold?" Maude Smith trilled. As she spoke, she clicked away at the pond in Hyde Park. It could have been any small duck-filled body of water in any city in the world.
"Yes, dear," Smith agreed.
"Aren't you having a wonderful time?" she asked. Her face was beaming. Briefly-through the rounder face, the slackness and other marks of age-a hint of the girl he had married peeked through once more.