"Woo ha. Ya. Ya. Ya," O'Donnell said.
"Why?" repeated the voice.
O'Donnell's hands flew to his leg. They sank into the green goo that had seeped through his gray knit slacks.
Where was the greatly lauded security of this damned condominium park? Where were the cameras? The double-lock doors? The little guardhouse in the parking lot?
O'Donnell saw the thick wrist again move, this time toward his right leg.
"No, no," he shouted. "I'm not sure, but I think the meatpacker."
"Why?" The thick wrist moved away from his leg again.
"Because I told the packer and he was upset and he wanted to know if Vinnie had told anybody else." As he spoke, O'Donnell stared through pain-blurred eyes as a football announcer interviewed boys of nine, 10, 11, and 12 who were involved in a passing-and-kicking contest. O'Donnell thought the kids looked like whirlybirds in their outsized shoulder pads.
"And what'd you tell him?"
"I told him I didn't know. I didn't think so."
"All right. Who's the packer?"
'Texas Solly. Texas Solly Weinstein in Houston. I called him and told him. That's the truth. I swear." If O'Donnell ever got hold of his real-estate agent, he'd ram all of the Timberwood condominium's security devices down his throat.
"What's Solly's number?"
"It's at my office. At Meatamation."
The thick wrist moved again toward his leg.
"No, no. Honest. I don't carry his number. I just punch out a coded number on my line and it connects."
"What's the coded number?"
"I punch out four-oh-seven-seven," said O'Donnell, staring at the big white numbers on the red jerseys of the kids until the red washed over the white and the famed Triquinox color turned to an inky black. The set stayed on but he turned off and passed out.
Remo wiped the small flecks of bile from his hand onto O'Donnell's shirt, then looked up as Chiun entered the room.
"You must not go any farther," said Chiun. "Stay here."
"Since when do you like football?"
"Do not go," Chiun repeated.
"Sorry, Chiun. A job's a job."
"Then we will both go." Remo looked up. "We will both go and I will tell you of the skeleton in the tree and what it signifies and then we will tell Emperor Smith that we do not like this assignment and will not do it."
"He'll really be happy to hear that," said Remo. "Somebody's trying to poison all America and we're going on vacation."
"Americans have been filling themselves with poison for years," Chiun said. "It is in their food, it is in their air. They smoke poison. They ride in poison. They replace milk with poisonous chemicals. If they did not want to die, they would not do it. So why should we stand in their way?"
Remo would have argued if he could have seen any flaw in Chiun's reasoning, but he couldn't. So he said, "We go."
And Chiun said: "This is a bad thing you do, more bad than you know."
The Meatamation office building and distribution center sat on the lovely Westport countryside like a castaway egg crate. It was one of the new gray architectural wonders that clashed with nature and revelled in wasted space.
Remo stopped in the main driveway when he saw a pack of screaming people marching back and forth in front of the building's main entrance, a great hulking swaying mass, waving signs and shouting.
"I will stay here," Chiun said. "These noise-mongers offend me."
Remo found a gray-haired man in levis and gold windbreaker watching the people march.
"You work here?" Remo said.
The man nodded.
"Where's O'Donnell's office?"
"Who?"
"Peter Matthew O'Donnell."
"Why do you want to see him?" the man asked.
"I'm his sister. Mother is ill," Remo said.
"I guess it's important."
"Yeah."
"It'll be tough getting in there today," said the gray-haired man, nodding his head toward the marchers.
"Just tell me where O'Donnell's office is. I'll worry about getting in."
"I don't know O'Donnell. Never heard of the man. How should I know where his office is? You could ask the guard inside."
"Go pound sand," Remo said. He started moving toward the door.
"Be careful," said the man. "Don't make them think you work here."
Remo stopped. "Why not?"
"I don't know. They're yelling something about not wanting scabs."
"They slow me down, they're going to have plenty of them."
When he got close to the line, a bland-faced middle-aged woman in knee warmers, long fur coat, knitted scarf and mittens turned toward him and started screaming, "Pig, swine, fascist butcher."
Remo smiled pleasantly and kept moving.
A man in a knitted woolen cap and pea coat stopped and pushed his sign close to Remo's face. Remo plucked out the two nails holding the placard to the post and walked on. The sign flopped to the ground as Remo sidestepped a young mother screaming at her nine-year-old son to bite him on the leg.
Finally Remo got to the door. An overweight black guard on the other side of the glass, who had no gun, no nightstick, and probably no dimes to use the lobby pay telephone, desperately motioned for him to go away.
The back of Remo's neck was accosted by hot breath. He turned to face a half-dozen aggravated people pressing in on him waving their signs menacingly.
Remo was considering the possibility of laminating them to their signs when a voice rang out: "Back off! Back off!"
The group stopped a few inches from Remo, then turned, grumbling, and walked back to their picket lines, making way for a young, auburn-haired girl in tight-thighed bell-bottom jeans and a multicolored knit sweater. She stalked over to Remo, stopped, put one hand on her hip, and stamped her foot.
"Well?" she demanded.
"Not bad," Remo admitted. "On a scale of one to 10, I'd give you an eight and a half."
The green eyes of the auburn-haired girl flashed.
"What do you think you're doing?" she said.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"We are helping the helpless. We are defending the poor. We are protecting the downtrodden. We are fighting for ignored rights."
"You're doing all that? Here? At a glorified butcher shop?" asked Remo in wonder.
Another chorus of chanting filtered through their conversation.
"We are marching for the Third World," the young woman said. "The Third World is poverty. The Third World is hunger. The Third World is two billion people going to bed at night with empty bellies."
Remo shrugged. "The Third World is two billion lazy retards and 2,000 big-mouthed liberals. Save 'em if you want. But why at a meat factory?"
"Look at you," the redhead said. "You've never known hunger." She looked at him more closely. "Well, maybe you have. Maybe a little bit. But probably a self-imposed hunger to conform to a corrupted society's standard of beauty."
Remo noticed that the girl seemed to take pains that she herself matched that corrupt standard of beauty. Every curve, every line of her body was just the right size and shape and in just the right place.
"Do you hear what those people are saying?" she asked.
"No," said Remo. "I can't make it out."
The redhead stamped her foot again. "They are crying out against this capitalist society's attempt to crucify us all on a cross of meat. They are shouting, we'll eat no more meat. We'll take no swine-flu shots."
The girl broke off her conversation to scream out the message with the rest of the group a few times. Then she turned back to Remo.
"This is a joke, right?" Remo asked. "You're all really members of The Movement of the Month Club, right?"
"Our aim," the girl said haughtily, "is to convince this corrupt government that America has a moral obligation to feed the rest of the world."
"I doubt that the rest of the world will stop breeding long enough to eat," Remo said. "What does that have to do with swine-flu shots?"