The guards looked at him warily, and he ignored them, for he was deep in thought.
It was unfortunate. If Smith died, it would be the end of Chiun's work in America, richest of Sinanju clients. The man called Norvell Ransome was hardly worthy of Sinanju service, but in time he could be educated in kingly ways. He was, in some respects-both good and bad-very much like Nero the Good. Too bad. There were so few Neros in the modern world....
Chapter 22
"Please don't leave me, I beg of you," Naomi Vanderkloot wailed.
"Do you mind?" Remo Williams said impatiently. "I need that foot to walk with. Let go."
"Not until you promise to stay. I want you."
"I can tell. I can't remember the last time I had a woman get down on her knees like this. Don't you feel embarrassed-you, a professor?"
"No. It's my mating strategy. In primate courting behavior, the female withholds her favors until she finds a male primate with whom she's willing to mix gene pools. You're him. For me, I mean. Take my genes. They're yours."
"I don't want your genes," Remo said, bending down and prying her fingers off his ankle. They jumped to his calf. Remo rolled his eyes ceilingward. "I've heard of women who fall for cons, but I never thought it would happen to me."
"That's not it at all," Naomi protested, hurt.
"Look. If I stay, will you behave? No more notebooks or pencils?"
"I swear."
"Okay. "
Naomi Vanderkloot jumped to her feet. Her face was a quarter-inch from Remo's. Her eyes were wide with appeal.
"Now?" she asked breathily. "I'm feeling very labial all of a sudden." That goofy smile came on again. Only this time it was more like a leer.
"Labial?" Remo said.
" 'Horny,' to you."
" 'Horny' I understand," Remo said. He was surprised at himself as they walked back to the bedroom. He was not looking forward to this at all....
An hour later, it was growing dark. Remo was lying back on the pillow, smoking thoughtfully. He was handling it better now.
"You probably think I'm some kind of space cadet, don't you?" Naomi asked quietly.
"Maybe. If I knew what a space cadet was."
"I'm not some ivory-tower type, you know. I don't just teach. My work at the Institute for Human Potential Awareness is important. We even do contract work for industry."
"Industry trying to design a better man these days?" Remo asked in a dry voice.
"No, human homogeneousness is not static. Population group studies show definite phenotypical trends. For example, people's rumps are getting wider."
"I hadn't heard that," Remo said, thinking: What a space cadet.
"It's no joke. We did work for the airline industry, measuring fannies so they would know how much to widen the next generation of airline seats."
"Can't have people getting stuck, now, can we?"
"Before that," Naomi went on brittley, "I did fieldwork. You probably never heard of the Moomba tribe."
"Not me. I can't even do the mambo."
"They were a culturally isolated group of hunter-gatherers discovered in the Philippines. I was the first woman-the first person, really-to be admitted into the Moomba secret rituals."
"Oh, yeah?" Remo said, interest flickering in his voice. "What was it like?"
"I was hoping you wouldn't ask," she said, picking through his chest hair. "Do you know in lower primates what I'm doing now would be the postcopulation checking for lice?"
"No, and I wish I was still in ignorance of that arresting fact."
"There are a lot of carryovers from primate behavior."
"Tell me about the rituals."
"Well, I've never told anyone this," Naomi said, looking up at him. "I refused to write a monograph about it. The head of the anthropology department at my last teaching position thought I had become initiated into some kind of primitive magic society, but it wasn't anything like that. I was a young, idealistic anthropologist then. I guess I couldn't get along in the modern world that well. I thought doing fieldwork with primitive cultures, which I had more empathy for, would work for me."
"Didn't, huh?"
"It took six months to gain the confidence of the Moomba tribe. Then one night we went into the rain forest to this circle of banyan trees. We all got naked together."
"Group sex?"
"I wish. Starting with the chief, we all took turns squatting in the center of the circle and . . . defecating into shallow wooden bowls."
"Sounds like that would be worth six months of preparation, yeah," Remo said dryly.
"That wasn't the worst of it. When everyone was done-and that included me-the chief took a so-called magic stick and measured each stool. Mine was the largest."
"Congratulations. Did you win a prize?"
"You might say so. They presented me with the magic stick and explained that I was now the consecrated measurer of stools."
"You lucky anthropologist, you. What happened after that?"
"That was it. That time. At the next meeting of the society, we did the same thing, only I did the measuring. Then we all sat around discussing the relative merits of one another's turds. Oh, God, this sounds so ridiculous now."
"Now?" Remo asked.
"I had gotten myself inducted into a primitive shit-appreciation society. That's all they did. Measure and discuss stools. When they got bored with that, they discussed color and texture and firmness of stools. Not to mention legendary stools of their ancestors. It was depressing. For years anthropologists had been speculating on the probable meaning of the ritual. It would have made my reputation, but I was too ashamed to publish my findings."
"I can see where you might be," Remo said, blank-faced.
"I was crushed. I had idealized these people as closer to nature than civilized people, imbued with elemental wisdom, and all that. And for recreation, they played with their feces like toddlers. That was it. I gave up fieldwork and ended up at U Mass with the other unemployable academics.
"Well, your story explains one thing," Remo remarked.
"What's that?"
"Why you keep trying to measure me," Remo said. "Must be a carryover from your primate ancestor experiences."
Naomi Vanderkloot had no answer to that, and Remo smiled for the first time that day.
His smile lived as long as it took him to inhale, for he happened to glance through the fern-choked window and saw a silent figure pass on the street like a figment from a dream.
Seeing the color seep from Remo's face, Naomi gasped. "What is it? What do you see?"
"A ghost," Remo said, reaching for his clothes. "As yellow and wrinkled as a raisin, and coming up your walk."
The door chimes rang and Naomi frantically scrambled for her clothes. She and Remo were dressed by the time the chimes sounded a third time. Before there could be a fourth, the rip-squeal of tortured hinges told them that they needn't bother to answer the door. It was open.
The Master of Sinanju had decided that he would not kill the woman known as Naomi Vanderkloot immediately. First he would question her about the source of her knowledge of Remo. The Nero-like Ransome had not considered that an important matter, but the Master of Sinanju knew that Smith would have made it a priority. And so would Chiun, who considered himself to be still working for Smith.
When the woman did not bother to answer the front bell, even though the sound of her respiration came clearly through the thick oval-windowed door, Chiun decided not to bother with the door. He sent it inward with a short-armed punch and stepped over it, careful not to injure his sandals on the broken glass. A thin-faced woman with a long nose peered around a doorway molding. Her mouth flew open and she cried, "It's him! The Mongoloid!"