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Remo shut the door.
Chiun sat lotus-position before the television set. Old actors were young again on this television screen, brought down to Baqia from the States in the luggage along with the tapes. Chiun did not like the modern soap operas. When sex and violence began to appear, he called it blasphemy and refused to watch the new shows. So he had taken to rewatching what he called "the only redeeming thing in your culture, your one great art form."
For a time, Chiun had tried to write his own soap opera, but he had spent so much time working on the title, the dedication, and the speech he would make when he received an Emmy that he never quite got around to writing the script. It was one of the things that Remo never mentioned to him.
"What is wrong with love and concern and marriage?" Chiun asked.
He answered himself. "Nothing," he said.
Now he mouthed the words of Dr. Channing Murdoch Callaher telling Rebecca Wentworth her mother was dying of a rare disease and that he felt he couldn't operate on the mother because he knew who Rebecca's real father was.
The organ music heightened the drama. Chiun's lips ceased to move as a commercial for a soap powder came on. It advertised that it had more zyclomite than any other cleaner. Remo knew the commercial was old, because modern commercials advertised that cleansers were zyclomite free.
"Who was at the door?" asked Chiun during the commercial.
"Nobody," said Remo. "Some British guy."
"Never speak ill of the British. Henry the Eighth always paid on time and purchased regularly. Good
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and noble Henry was a blessing to his people and a pride to his race. He showed that no matter how funny a person's eyes were, he could still show that he had a Korean heart."
"You know what you're going to do here?" asked Remo.
"Yes," said Chiun.
"What?"
"See what happens to Rebecca," Chiun said.
"Rebecca?" asked Remo, shocked. "Rebecca lives for seven more years, has fourteen major operations, three abortions, becomes an astronaut, a political investigator, a congressperson, gets a hysterectomy, and then gets raped, shot at, and inherits a department store before her contract with her studio runs out, whereupon she is run over by a faulty truck that was supposed to be recalled to Detroit."
Chiun's eyes moved slowly, as if searching for someone to share his shock at such a dastardly deed as destroying many many hours of what a poor, delicate kind gentle soul took his small pleasures in. There was no one else in the room but an ungrateful pupil.
"Thank you," said Chiun. His voice was laden with hurt.
There was a knock at the door again. The Briton in the blue blazer, light summer slacks, and the dandy Walther P-38 was at the door. This time the finger was closed on the trigger and the butt was set to take the slight kick. He was ready to kill.
"I'm afraid, old boy, you're just going to have to toodleoo off, what?"
"No," said Remo. "We just got here."
"I really don't want to kill you, you know. A bit of a mess."
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"Don't worry. You're not going to kill anybody."
"I am pointing the gun directly at your head, you know."
"I know," said Remo. He rested one hand against the doorjamb.
Chiun glanced over at the intruder at the door. Not only was his joy with the show spoiled by the revelation of the next six-hundred episodes, of which four-hundred were absolutely the best, but now Remo was going to put a body in the room while the main show was going on. He wasn't going to wait until the next commercial, Chiun knew. And why? Why would Remo kill that man at the door during the show, instead of waiting until a commercial?
Chiun knew the answer.
"Hater of beauty," he snapped at Remo.
The Rritish agent took a tentative step back. "I don't think you realize with whom you're dealing," he said.
"That's your problem, not ours," Remo said.
"You're a dead man, you know," said the agent. He had the forehead of this casual American directly in line with his gunsights. He would blast out the frontal lobe with such force there probably would be a king-sized hole in the back of the head, also.
"He's gonna shoot, Little Father. You hear him? He's gonna shoot now. It's not my fault."
"Beauty hater," said Chiun viciously. . "If you'll bother to look, you'll see his hand is gonna move that gun. Any moment now, he's gonna squeeze that trigger."
"Any moment now," said Chiun in a whiny, imitative voice, "he's going to squeeze the trigger. He's going to squeeze the trigger. So let's all interrupt
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anything that's going on because he's going to squeeze the trigger."
The agent had waited long enough. He did not understand why these two so casually faced death. Nor was he all that concerned. He had killed many men before and sometimes there was a dumb disbelief on the part of the victim. At other times fear. But never casual cattiness like between these two. Still there was a first time for anything.
He squeezed the trigger. The Walther P-38 jumped in his hand. But he did not feel the kick. And the white man's forehead was still there. AH of it. Un-punctured. What wasn't there was the Walther P-38 or his hand. At his wrist, there was the incredible wrenching like a giant tooth being taken out of his arm. He had felt force but no pain.
And he hadn't seen the man's hands move. He did catch a glimpse of a finger moving between his two eyes and he could have sworn he had seen it go in up to the fist knuckle of that hand and it was like a very big door had slammed on his head. He could have sworn that. But he wasn't swearing anymore. His last thought was a memory and by the time his body hit the floor he was not feeling anything.
His nerve endings were sending messages, but that part of the brain that was to receive them had been traumatized into a loose bloody pudding.
Remo wiped his finger off on the man's shirt and stacked him neatly in front of the room with the Bulgarians in it. A Kalishnikov assault rifle poked its way out of the door.
Someone asked a question in Russian, then French, and finally English.
"Who you?"
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"Me me," answered Remo, covering the forehead mess of the British agent with the straw skimmer.
"Who me?" came the voice from behind the partially opened door.
"You you," said Remo.
"No, you," said the voice.
"Me?" asked Remo.
"Yes. Why you?"
"Me me. You you," said Remo=
"What you do out there?"
"I'm putting a body away because the air conditioning doesn't work and they tend to stink after a while.
"Why at our door?"
"Why not at your door?"
Remo thought that was a good answer. Obviously whoever was behind the door did not because he fired off a burst from the Kalishnikov.
Back in the room, Chiun noted gunfire down the hall, which did not help the drama.
"Sorry," said Remo.
Chiun gave a nod, but not one that accepted Remo's excuse. It was a nod that acknowledged that Remo, one way or another, had found and always would find a way to trifle with an old man's pleasure. And sure enough, Remo did again with another Englishman and, this time, two shots into the room and a hand grenade down the hall.
This disturbance not entirely ruining Chiun's afternoon, Remo then announced that he saw a whole team coming around the building. They all wore blazers and straw skimmers. Their leader was a man with a pipe.
"Isn't it interesting that we are attacked always
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while Rebecca is making her most beautiful speeches ?" Chiun said.
"They attack when they attack, Little Father," Remo said.
"No doubt," said Chiun.
"They really are," said Remo.
The groups had come in what was known as a reserve triangle. Up the front of the street, up an alley on the side, and with two triangle tops, which was two men on each side, two men frontal and two behind them.