"Here you go." Looking up, Basket Mary held out the pretty green-and-white basket.
"And here you go," Reggie said, smiling. Sunlight glistened off the long slender blade as he drove it into her vast chest. Blood sputtered around the metal and Basket Mary screamed, until Reggie clapped his hand over her mouth and bore her to the ground with the weight of his own body, as his knife-continued to rummage around in the big woman's chest.
She struggled for a few moments, her body thudding around as she tried to buck Reggie off her. The latticework walls of the gazebo shook, and then she was still.
Reggie never felt better in his life. Suddenly, he wanted breakfast. He rose and looked down at Basket Marys body. Then he remembered something he read once: that inside every fat person was a thin person trying to get out.
He knelt again alongside Basket Mary, raised the knife and started to test that theory.
When he was done, he picked up a telephone and dialed the police. "Could you send someone over?" he requested cheerfully. "There's a dead woman all over my gazebo."
The constable arrived an hour later. He stood just inside the wrought-iron gate and surveyed the carnage with professional calm. "No arrow in the heart, no morder," he pronounced. "Natural causes for sure. Never any morder here. Just surf, sun and good times. A real vacation paradise."
"Absolutely," Reggie agreed. He nodded toward what used to be Basket Mary. "If it's not too much trouble, I'm a little short of staff."
"No trouble," the constable said. "I get her up for you." He reached into the pocket of his baggy uniform and pulled out a folded plastic trash bag. "My scene-of-the-crime kit," he said. "Never go nowhere without it. Come in handy when these natural-causes deaths be messy like this one."
"Very commendable," Reggie said.
"You go and enjoy yourself. I clean up fine." Kneeling down on the blood-soaked carpet, he began to shove Basket Mary into the bag, with all the eagerness of a slum kid who had unintentionally been invited to the White House Easteregg hunt.
The aftermath of killing held no interest for Reggie. He picked up a croissant that had landed atop one of the bushes, and munching casually, he opened the gate and sauntered down to the beach. There was a cool pleasant breeze from the sea. Gulls wheeled and dived above the clear blue water. The surf lapped gently against the rocks like a lover talking.
Reggie sat down on a flat-topped rock at the water's edge. Now that he was feeling like his old self again, his thoughts returned to the problem of the two plums. He could think of them now without fear. It was a strange but wonderful contentment, a feeling of being at peace with himself.
With the sun warm against his face, he leaned over to doodle in the wet sand with his blood-encrusted finger. He drew a sailing ship with no emblem on its unfurled canvas. He doodled men in armor, their faces old and wise and full of mystery. He drew himself and his father and a crude outline of the island and finally the seventh stone itself. The surf came in, spitting at the rocks. When it went back out again, the wet sand was smooth, his drawings erased by the sea.
Not fully aware of what he was doing, Reggie leaned over again. The sand and water had washed the blood from his finger. He began to draw again, not shapes or images this time, but a single word, in ancient runelike characters. He recognized the language immediately. It was the language of Wo, the words that tied all the descendants of Prince Wo together. And he recognized the word too, a single word of command that had come unbidden to his casual finger from somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind. He had known all the time what he must do about the "two plums." Smiling, Reggie stood and studied the word in the sand. It was a summons, a call to the far-flung Wo clan.
The single word was "COME."
Reggie sent the one word to the farthest corners of the earth. In Nairobi, the Wosheesha tribe forsook the sacred ritual of the harvest hunt to pack up their spears and leather thongs. In Hokkaido, Japan, the Woshimoto clan prepared their ceremonial robes and made a final visit to the graves of their ancestors. In Manchester, England, the Woosters packed their gladstones and left a note for the milkman. The Wogrooths of Holland left their tulip beds in the care of a neighbor while the Worriers of France closed and shuttered their prosperous Left Bank café.
Two mornings later, the descendants of Prince Wo had converged on the island of Little Exuma. As the clock in the tower of Government House chimed the noon hour, Reginald Woburn III rose from his chair at the head of a long banquet table. The table was piled high with food, an international bazaar of delicacies representing the best of more than a dozen different cultures. There was even more diversity in the people seated in the high-backed chairs that bordered the table. Faces as ebony as a starless night; delicate oval faces the precise shade of yellowing ivory; bland milkwhite faces, cream and cocoa faces, cinnamonred faces; young faces and old faces, and all of them turned attentively to the man at the head of the table.
"You are all welcome here," Reginald Woburn greeted them. "You have come from near and far in answer to my summons and now we are all together, every last living descendant of the great Prince Wo. It is a time for rejoicing, a time for celebration, but that is not the only reason you have traveled these many miles."
He looked around the large room. The faces stared at him.
"We are gathered here for a purpose, a noble undertaking that will, once and for all, restore our noble house to its full and rightful position of honor. We have come here to band together against a single enemy. We are united so that we may banish him from the face of the earth forever."
"Who is this great enemy?" Maui Wosheesha demanded. His voice was as full of quiet strength as a lion passing silently through the high grass. His gold and ivory bracelets clattered musically as his broad hand closed around the shaft of his steeltipped spear.
"You wish to see him?" Reggie asked. "You desire to hear his name spoken aloud?"
"Show the man and say the name," Hirako Woshimoto insisted. There was the faintest rustle of silk as his fingers came to rest on the tasseled handle of his ceremonial samurai sword.
"The man is one called Remo. And if you wish to see him, you need merely to look beneath your plates."
The low-voiced murmur of a dozen different tongues accompanied the lifting of the plates. There was a photograph under each one, all alike. They showed Remo, wearing the ugly grayish suit he had worn to the presidential press conference. The camera had caught him in the instant that he had tossed a notebook, severing Du Wok's sword hand from the rest of his arm.
"His head is mine," Ree Wok shouted. "Mine," said Maui Wosheesha. "Mine," said Hirako Woshimoto.
Reginald Woburn silenced them with an upraised hand.
"Who will kill this man?" he shouted.
"I will." A hundred voices, a dozen tongues, all of them speaking as one. The windowpanes rattled as the chorused response filled the huge dining hall.
Reginald Woburn smiled, then slowly looked around the long table, meeting the eyes of each of them in turn.
"He who kills him will have a further honor," he said.
"What is this honor that will be mine?" asked Hirako Woshimoto.
"He who kills this man will be allowed to kill another."
"Who is?"
"The beast," Reginald Woburn said. "The Korean assassin who drove Prince Wo to these shores. For this young one is his disciple and the seventh stone tells us that both must die."
Chapter Eleven
"Pay attention now," said Chiun. "A wandering mind gathers only moss."
"That's a rolling stone," said Remo, "and I am paying attention. I always pay attention."
"You know less about attention than you know about wisdom. A rolling stone gathers no moss; a wandering mind gathers all moss. They are very different," Chiun said.