She walked to her bed and put on a flimsy black peignoir. Then she heard a sound in her kitchen, at the other end of the trailer behind a thin plywood door.
It was short, dark, and pretty Ararat Carpathian. God, how she hated Armenians, she thought. Not that she knew that many. In fact, Carpathian was the only one she knew, but she hated him enough to make up for all the rest. If they could only find some way of boiling down those people, she thought, America could solve its oil problems by breeding Armenians.
She smiled at him and let her gown slip open slightly, making sure he got a good view of her front, then slowly pulled it closed.
"Why, Ari," she said. "How nice to see you."
"I've been waiting quite a while," Carpathian said. "But you were busy."
"Oh, you noticed," she said. "Yes. Quite busy."
"Your friend seemed to want to talk," Carpathian said.
"Men always do," she said. She busied herself at the stove, making a cup of hot chocolate. She did not offer him any. When she turned to come and join him at the kitchen table, she noticed for the first time that he had a lumberjack's double-bladed axe leaning up against the wall behind his seat.
"Well, what is on your mind, Ari?" she asked.
"Tonight's demonstration," he said.
"Ah, yes. The demonstration. We seem to live and die by our demonstrations, don't we, Ari?"
She noticed him smirking under the thin line of his mustache.
"You could say that, Cicely," he said.
She wondered why he was carrying that axe around.
"Our people are beginning to feel uneasy," Ari said. "After last night's fiasco and with the press watching, they're losing their enthusiasm for tonight."
"Go make a speech. That'll whip them up."
"No. They need more than that," he said.
Mrs. Winston-Alright shook her head from side to side.
"Well, go give them something more. You can't expect me to do everything, can you?"
"This is something only you can give them," Ari said. He shifted in his chair and she saw his hand move for the handle of the axe.
"Oh? What is that?" she said, sipping her chocolate. Maybe he wanted to rape her, maybe this poor insignificant little twerp had always longed for her body; maybe his manners and his deference and his courtliness hadn't worked and now he had decided to take her by force to satisfy his lust. She felt herself going wet again. She wouldn't fight. No woman was ever hurt by a good rape.
"Go ahead," she said. "I won't resist."
"You won't?" he said. "You know what's on my mind?
"Yes, you savage Armenian beast. You've come to rape me. Well, go ahead. Although what that's got to do with tonight's demonstration, I'll never know."
"Actually, nothing," he said coldly. "And that's not what's on my mind."
"It isn't?" Without realizing it, she had slipped down in her chair, and now Cicely Winston-Alright sat up straight again. She looked at him with a dowager empress's commanding eye.
"What then do our people need tonight?" she said, trying to get her mind back to business.
"I've talked to our backers at the Association," Ararat Carpathian said. "They agree with me. Totally."
"Agree with what?"
"That we need a martyr."
"A what?" she asked.
"We need a martyr. We need someone to be the victim of a gory, grisly murder — a particularly horrible, bloody thing that we can blame on the people of Tulsa Torrent. That'll bring out the marchers."
She sighed. "I suppose so, if that's what the Association thinks."
"I'm glad you feel that way."
Carpathian picked up the double-bladed axe and set it on the table.
"That's what I got this for, Cicely."
"I see," she said, and shuddered visibly.
"It should be most effective for our purposes," he said softly.
"I suppose so. But I hate to look at it." It was funny, she thought; she had never realized how much the little man's eyes looked like a cobra's. They were almost hypnotizing.
Ari stood up and took the axe in hand, almost as if he were about to chop a log.
"That thing gives me the creeps," she said.
"It won't for long."
"Have you picked your victim yet?" she asked. She looked in his eyes. His eyes held her. She had her answer without his saying a word. She wanted to scream but couldn't.
Finally he answered her. "Yes, Cicely. I have." It took him ten chops to get exactly the effect he wanted.
The moon was high in the sky when Remo came back across the snow to Alpha Camp. There was a large mound of snow where the A-frame building had been, and the air still carried the faint aroma of burnt wood, an aroma faintly redolent to Remo of his childhood days in Newark when he and some friends would start a fire in a vacant lot, then throw in raw potatoes to char them black. The burnt potato skins gave off that woody smell.
Remo was thinking of Cicely Winston-Alright as he walked past the mound that had been the A-frame, when suddenly he felt a pair of strong arms surround him, and a heavy weight bear him to the ground.
"Gotcha, you bet," he heard the French-accented voice roar in his ear.
"Goddammit, Pierre, it's me," he said. Remo had a mouthful of snow. He felt the big weight get off his back, then a strong hand pulled him to his feet.
"Peer sorry," the big man told Remo. "But you sneak across the snow like an Indian, and Peer think it somebody coming back to make trouble."
"All right," Remo said. "No harm done." He realized how much Sinanju had become a part of him. He had not been sneaking back to camp; he had just been strolling. But his stroll today was a soundless, ghostlike movement, beyond the ability of an ordinary man. He was glad that Pierre LaRue was alert.
The two men went inside the log cabin bunkhouse. Chiun and Joey Webb were sitting on a couch. Chiun was sipping daintily from a cup of tea. Joey's hands held a big tea mug, and from time to time she took a big gulp from it. The fireplace gave off the only light and heat in the room, and the young woman seemed to be vacillating between moving closer to it and pulling away from it. Pierre went to a corner and sat his big body down in an old rocking chair. A cat that had been hiding under the chair scurried out into a dark corner.
Looking at Joey, Remo thought about how much the girl had gone through in the last few weeks and how close to the edge of breaking she must be.
Joey looked up at Remo as he stepped into the jagged circle of light thrown off by the fire.
She smiled a hello to him, and he nodded back.
"Everything all right down with the copa-ibas?" he asked.
She said something in answer, but Remo didn't hear it.
He had turned to face the fireplace and let his mind go out to embrace the flames. For the next two minutes, he thought of nothing but his breathing and the rhythm of his blood as it coursed through his body.
When he came back from his rhythm fix, he saw Joey standing next to the fireplace. An old-fashioned standing hook was set into one side of it, and suspended from the hook was an equally old-fashioned teapot.
"Would you like some tea?" she asked him
Remo hesitated. Since he had been brought, kicking and screaming, into the House of Sinanju, his body had changed. He could no longer eat as he once did: Additives could kill him; most food made him want to throw up. His body was too closely tuned, too sensitive to sensation, to tolerate the garbage that most Americans compacted into their mouths. He was hesitant even to try other people's tea.
"It is not bad tea," said Chiun.
"For an American?" Remo asked.
"For an American, it is excellent tea," Chiun said. "For a Korean, it is not bad."
"Good. Then I'll have some," Remo said.
"Same way, right. No sugar, no milk, no lemon, no anything," she told him