He opened the door and peered out. The passenger cabin was empty. He shut the door behind him, ripped the lid from one of the passenger seat's ashtrays and jammed it as a wedge into the base of the door. It wouldn't keep anyone out, but it would hold long enough to convince somebody that a tool kit was needed to fix the recalcitrant door. By that time, Spencer would be gone.
A few moments later, he fell in with a group of blond stewardesses who had just gotten off a Pan-American plane. He listened to them chatter in some dogbark accent about the best places in Madrid to snare rich men. They all walked past the airport's metal detector and Spencer waved to the
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young woman on duty there. She smiled back at
him and winked.
Boring, he thought. It was all so deadly boring. He hoped that the Yank and the Chink would at least be a moderate challenge, something to lift his flagging interest.
"Young woman, it is here," Chiun said.
Remo saw Chiun standing in front of a section of wall that looked to Remo no different from any other section. Terri, thirty feet away, hurried down to Chiun.
She shone the flashlight on the section of wall and said, "I don't see anyth . . . oh, there. Under the dirt."
"Yes," said Chiun.
With a handkerchief from her back pocket, Terri began to rub away at the gritty grime on the wall. Remo saw the first faint glimmering of gold begin to appear, reflecting dully in the beam of her flashlight.
Chiun backed away, toward Remo, to watch.
"How'd you know it was there?" Remo asked.
"The powder on the ground."
"Yeah? What about it?" Remo asked.
"You are really dense sometimes," said Chiun. "There was not as much of it there as elsewhere."
"What does that prove?"
"Is it not enough that I found the golden plaque? Must I be subjected always to this merciless cross-examination?" Chiun said.
"I just want to understand how you think," Remo said. "That's not merciless. Except to me."
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"It is intrusive," Chiun said. "Everything is there for you to see. Why do you not see it?"
"Because I don't know what I'm supposed to see," Remo said.
"And if a man with his eyes screwed tightly closed asks what color the sky is and someone tells him, does that mean he can see the next sky with his eyes still closed?" asked Chiun.
"I don't know what the hell that means," said Remo.
"That is your problem, Remo. That is always your problem and it is why you will never amount to anything. You do not know what anything means."
"I'm not that bad. You're just ticked off because that Jap didn't have a Space Invaders game for you to play."
"Yes, you are that bad. But because it will be the only way I will ever have any peace on this earth, I will explain it to you. There is less of that lime powder on the wall here than there is anywhere else. What does that mean?"
"Probably that something disturbed it," Remo said. "Somehow removed the powder."
"Correct. Now since that is the only place in this godforsaken tunnel that is different, is it not reasonable to expect that there is a reason for its being different? A reason such as that plaque being on the wall?"
"I guess that's logical," Remo allowed.
"But that's not all," Chiun said.
"It never is," Remo said.
"Why would that plaque being there ..." Chiun pointed to the wall where Terri Pomfret, oblivious
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to both of them, had finished scrubbing the encaked dirt from the golden plaque, "... Cause any change in the amount of powder there?" Chiun pointed to the floor at Terri's feet.
"Little Father?" Remo said.
"What?"
"Damned if I know," said Remo. "Or care."
"You are hopeless," Chiun said and walked away down the tunnel.
And because he didn't want Chiun to think he was hopeless, Remo tried to think, really think, about the significance of less powder on the floor. What could it mean? Had someone removed the powder? But why had they removed it in that spot? If they had, didn't it mean that someone knew the plaque was there?
He tried to think about it but his mind kept drifting away. Even in the semidarkness of the tunnel, he could see clearly because his eyes opened wide, like a cat's, to pull in every mote of available light. It was a matter of simple muscular control to one of Sinanju, a thing that even cheap cameras and binoculars were able to do, but that most people, whose eyes contained the most brilliantly devised lenses ever seen on earth, found impossible to imitate.
With his light-absorbing vision, he watched Terri Pomfret's rear end jiggle as she scrubbed away at the plaque and he soon forgot to think about the plaque and pleasantly thought about Terri's rear end.
He felt no guilt. It had often been his experience that when he tried to think about things, he could never think his way through them, but when he
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allowed himself to forget them, then the answer to the problem often jumped into his mind of its own accord. As if it were just waiting there, ready to solve itself, but it just wouldn't do it until he stopped bothering jt'.
Maybe that would happen now and he would impress Chiun. But it wouldn't happen if he kept staring at Terri Pomfret's rear end, clad tightly in faded blue denims whose softness seemed only to hint at the softness under them, whose velvet texture he could almost feel under his fingers, whose. . . .
He concentrated on the limestone powder on the floor. He saw Chiun coming back down the tunnel toward them. And he heard Terri say, "Oooohhhh." It was a long, sad, disappointed sound and when she turned to face Reino, her face was sitting Shiva.
"What's the matter?" he said.
"It isn't here," she said.
"What's new?" Remo said. "It hasn't been anywhere we've gone."
"This is new," Terri said. "It's not here and it's not anywhere."
Bullfights were really rather dull. Oh, perhaps they were all right for Spanish heathen who liked to see miniature men in tights and ballet shoes dancing around in front of a dumb beast, but somehow it left Spencer's blood unmoved.
"Ole, indeed," he muttered to himself. The crowd hushed as the matador drew the short curved sword from under the muleta. Slowly, holding the small cape at waist height and peering down the length of the sword which he held near his shoulder, the
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torero advanced on the poor confused bull, which stood in the middle of the arena, bleeding, sweating, tormented. If the beast had had a brain to wonder with, he would be wondering why he was being taunted by this young jackrabbit, Spencer thought, even as the bull, with the bravery born of stupidity, charged the red cape one more time and the matador plunged the curved blade down behind the bull's neck, and rolled off to the left to escape the bull's right horn. The blade curved down, severing the spinal cord and piercing a lung before cutting into the beast's giant heart.
The bull stopped leadenly in its tracks, and then, like a newsreel film of an exploded building collapsing, seemed to come apart in sections. First it dropped to its knees and then its rear legs collapsed and then it coughed, a hacking spray of blood that spotted the sand for fifteen feet in front of his body, and then it pitched onto its side and quietly, heroically, stupidly died.
The crowd leaped to its feet cheering for the torero who now strutted around the ring, looking up at the spectators, waving his hat to the ladies, curiously mincing in his walk, as the fans shouted their approval of his bravery in the face of death.
And Commander Hilton Marmaduke Spencer, O.G., K.L.M., D.S.C., thought it was all kind of disgusting and pointless, fit only for the brutish unwashed, and got up from his chair and started downstairs to kill people.
Tern looked away from Remo to Chiun. "It says there's no gold," she said. She turned back
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