"That must be nice for you," Remo commented mildly.
"I'm going to rip your head off your shoulders and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine."
"Love to tussle with you, Lud, I really would, but I think you should play with somebody your own age."
When Remo looked around, the Master was nowhere in sight.
"I'd rather play with you," Baculum said.
Then the plundered mattress hit Remo square in the face. Before he could move to escape, the senator threw his body against the other side of the mattress, sandwiching Remo against the wall. From head to heels, he was not only held fast, but slowly being smothered.
"Now I've got you," Lud said as he dug in his toes, using his shoulder to wedge his victim tighter to the wall. With his free hand, the senator started ripping open the underside of the mattress, over the unmoving lump that was Remo. Through the hole he'd made in the ticking, he plucked away big clumps of kapok stuffing.
Soon to be big clumps of Remo.
"Pucker up, Buttercup...." the senator cooed.
Chapter 18
Having taken to heart Remo's caution about the loss of a valuable source of information, and how dimly Emperor Smith would view a repeat of the football incident, Chiun was determined to capture their quarry alive. He recalled the ancient Korean proverb, "You can catch more bloodworm with fish paste than you can with bitter gall."
In search of fish paste, the Reigning Master of Sinanju padded into the mansion's kitchen, which resembled that of a modestly sized upscale restaurant. Everything was made of stainless steel. Sinks. Countertops. Range tops. The refrigerator doors set in a row along the wall.
Chiun opened all the refrigerator doors and stepped back to survey their contents. "If I were Animal Man," he asked himself aloud, "what would soothe my savage breast?"
He stroked his scraggly beard as he considered the problem.
There was meat aplenty on hand, cooked and raw. Cold standing rib roast, virtually intact. A partially dissected turkey. The nether quarters of a suckling pig. Mounds of aged steaks and chops.
He lifted the cover from a ceramic tureen. Duck!
He took a tender leg from its congealed bed of sauce and nibbled daintily. Most excellent, he judged. Even cold, and perhaps four days old, it was far superior to Remo's meager cuisine. Try as he might, the man simply could not make a decent sauce. How many Saturday afternoons had Chiun made his pupil observe the magicians of the cooking channel? How many pages of notes had Remo taken down? All for nothing, it seemed. Remo's sauce was either thin as water or thick as glutinous rice. It either swam away from the dish it was supposed to adorn, or choked it, like so much concrete.
As Chiun gnawed the moist, dark meat from the bone, sucking it absolutely clean, he decided that flesh, even the fattiest kind of flesh, would not do the trick for Animal Man.
He turned his attention to the refrigerator that held a selection of high-calorie desserts. A wide array of flaky pastries, mousses and elaborate whipped cream cakes stood on the shelves before him. Yet something told him that even a five-layer Black Forest cake was not enough.
The job required something even more artery clogging.
Something so purely, so totally fat laden that the beast-senator could not possibly turn it down. Chiun found what he was looking for in the kitchen pantry, which was jammed with various sacked, canned and jarred comestibles. The ten-gallon glass jar he sought stood on the pantry floor, its off-white contents the quintessence of fat. Bending his knees, he picked up the heavy jar and carried it back toward the master bedroom.
The Master could hear the sounds of violent struggle as he lumbered down the hall with his burden, and as he approached the open door to the bedroom, once again he saw bits of mattress fluff drifting out like snow. He stopped at the doorway, unscrewed the big metal lid and discarded it.
When Chiun entered the bedroom, his pupil was nowhere to be seen. The old man with a young man's body was holding the mattress against the wall with one hand and ripping at it with the other. Under the mattress was a man-sized lump.
A Remo-sized lump.
Then the senator thrust his hand into the hole he had made, and as if he were pulling a rabbit out of its hole, jerked Remo's head through the opening by the hair.
Chiun's pupil's face was very red all over, like it had been abraded with steel wool. The whites of the eyes were red, too.
"Do something!" Remo shouted.
"Of course," Chiun answered breezily. He reached into the big jar, grabbed a handful of the slippery white stuff and flung it at the back of the senator's bald head, where it landed with a wet splat over his neck and shoulders.
The effect was instantaneous.
Ludlow Baculum let go of Remo's hair and jerked his head around, his nostrils flaring wide. Still leaning against the mattress with his shoulder, the senator scooped some of the stuff off the side of his neck and pushed it into his mouth. A moan of pleasure escaped his withered lips. His rheumy eyes rolled up in their sockets.
From his raggedy porthole in the mattress, Remo croaked, "What the hell is it?"
"Fish paste to a bloodworm," Chiun answered.
"Well, for Pete's sake, give him some more!" The Master made another mayonnaise snowball and hit Bacuium square in the chops with it.
"Nuhhhgghhh," the senator gurgled as he used the edges of both his hands to scrape the full-fat dressing into his open mouth.
"Here," Chiun said, lowering his point of aim. He tossed a string of softball-sized gobs of mayo onto the bedroom carpet, leading Animal Man away from the mattress, and the still trapped Remo.
The distinguished Southern senator hurled himself facedown on the rug and, like a dog in pursuit of its own vomit, frantically licked and sucked up the slick white goo from the tightly woven carpet fibers. When he was through with one wet gob, he scrambled on all fours to the next, totally preoccupied with the task.
Remo pushed the mattress aside and stepped away from the wall. "That bastard almost had me," he said, pausing to pick a stray bit of mattress fluff off the tip of his tongue.
"You did an excellent job of keeping him here while I found the solution to the problem," Chiun said.
"Yeah, right. I sure didn't let him escape...."
"Now that we have the live specimen Emperor Smith desired," Chiun said, "all that is left is to render him senseless so we can bind him securely for transport."
"That honor is mine," Remo said.
Senator Baculum growled menacingly as Remo approached him, but he did not stop sucking the daylights out of the carpet. He remained on his hands and knees, facedown, combing the short strands of carpet through his three surviving teeth.
Chiun watched his pupil carefully. The angle of approach.
The coiling to strike. The choice of fist.
The location and power of the blow.
He was pleased to see that Remo avoided the head completely. A ninety-plus-year-old brain could be a fragile thing, full of leaky vessels and bulging aneurysms, and it was the brain they needed for its information. Remo's strike was open-handed, and there was absolutely no follow-through. The target Remo selected was a small place on the back above the right kidney, a place where many important nerves came together.
Whap!
Senator Baculum let out a startled gasp and slumped face first into a puddle of his own slobber.
Chapter 19
In his white sterile suit, Carlos Sternovsky rushed down the hall of the Family Fing Pharmaceuticals medical wing. At his side was Fosdick Fing. The lanky American took a single loping stride for every four of his Taiwanese counterpart. From the corridor ahead came a series of behemoth roars and a terrible crash of glassware and steel.
It sounded vaguely familiar to Sternovsky. Like feeding time at the lion house.