"Uh— vacationing. With Mrs. Smith. On Saba, uh, nearby island." Smith had never been a good liar. He nodded tersely and strode toward the door.
"Hey, wait a minute. You two look like senior projects at undertakers' school. What's going on?"
Smith shook his head, cleared his throat again, and said, "Good day," without looking at either of the men in the room. Chiun sat motionless, his head bowed. "Oh, I nearly forgot," Smith said. He took a parchment-colored envelope from his breast pocket and slid it on the floor beside Chiun. "It was on your doorstep, but I saw the wind blow it into the bushes. Thought I'd better hand it to you myself before it got lost." He touched his fingers to his hat and was gone.
"What in the hell has happened to Smitty?" Remo said, laughing. "First he puts us here in deluxe accommodations, then he comes here on vacation. That old skinflint hasn't taken a vacation in fifteen years, and the last time was to visit his wife's uncle in Idaho..."
Chiun wasn't listening. His breath was catching as his hand moved slowly toward the envelope beside him.
"What is it?" Remo asked. "You feeling all right, Little Father?"
Chiun snatched up the envelope and held it with both hands up to the light. On it in both English and Korean, was written the name "CHIUN" with thick black brush strokes. In a frenzy the old man tore open the envelope and yanked out a single translucent piece of old, dried rice paper.
Then Chiun did something so strange, so unlike himself, so terrifying, that Remo couldn't believe his eyes. The old man leaped up from the floor, bounded toward Remo, encircled him in his frail, bony arms, and held him.
"Wha-what?" Remo stammered. "Little Father, are you okay?" Chiun said nothing, but held fast. "I mean the dives were pretty good, if I do say so myself, but... C'mon, I'm not used to this. Hey, it's the envelope, isn't it, Chiun? What'd you get? A fan letter from Sinanju. That's it, isn't it, a fan letter?"
Still caught in the old man's embrace, he turned to see the piece of paper in Chiun's hand. On it were three carefully drawn Korean characters.
"What's it say, Chiun?" Remo asked.
Chiun broke away. "It says 'I live again.' "
Remo half smiled, trying to share Chiun's joy. "I live again? That's it, huh?"
"That is the message. 'I live again.' "
"Hey... great. Good news. Really glad to hear it. Who lives again?"
"Never mind," Chiun said. He tucked the paper into a fold of his kimono sleeve.
"Well, whoever it was, I'm glad he gave you such a lift. Say, I've been thinking maybe we could take a little sightseeing tour of the island before dark—"
"You will perform ten more Flying Walls," Chiun snapped.
"What? I just did fourteen!"
"Fourteen of the most slovenly examples of the Flying Wall I have ever had the misfortune to witness. Your descent was at least a handspan too steep."
"It was not. You weren't even watching..."
"Ten," Chiun decreed.
Glaring over his shoulder, Remo shuffled toward the door. "See if I ever ask you again..."
"Ten."
After the door closed, the old man smiled.
?Three
There were six women in the room, two blondes, three brunettes, and an Asian. They were all naked, their smooth flanks glistening in the dim colored light of the room as they lounged unceremoniously along the heavy padding of the floor.
There were no courtesan's squeals to greet the Dutchman as he entered; he was only annoyed by such preliminaries. He took the one nearest to him, a blonde, and directed her languid hand to his body. Her jaw was slack. As she brought him mechanically to readiness, he saw the pinpoint pupils of her eyes beneath the heavy, sodden lids.
Roughly he pulled her left arm up toward the light to confirm the inevitable appearance of the track marks on the bruised skin. An addict. She would be sent away tomorrow. He did not tolerate drug usage among the women he hired. It emptied their minds. They could be of no use to him beyond providing receptacles for his passion.
He pushed her aside. The girl slumped to the floor where she had stood. The Dutchman grabbed the hair of the next girl and forced her head back, pulling up the skin of her eyelids to check for the same symptoms. When he was convinced she was in normal health, he eased her to the floor. Silently she submitted to him while the others in the room sat back, their expressions bored, as each waited her turn.
He went through four of them, each shattering climax fueling his terrible energy more than the last until his pale skin shone with sweat and his nerves were as sensitive as live electric wires.
The Asiatic took his thrusts with stoic docility, her almond eyes veiled and impersonal.
"You are a tigress," he said to her in French, her language. He wanted no one in the Castle who spoke English, to better guard his privacy. The Dutchman himself spoke eight languages, plus the arcane sign language he used with his mute servant, so there was no privacy from the Dutchman.
The girl's quiet eyes suddenly burned with bright fire. "You are an animal of the jungle," the Dutchman whispered. "Your claws are sharp. Your teeth shine with the promise of death." With an effort, he restrained the girl from raking his back with her long, blood-red fingernails. She bared her teeth in a cat's grimace. Something deep in her throat growled with feline pleasure.
He fought her, there on the padded white floor, as her knee-length black hair whipped around them both in frenetic passion. Her curled hand struck at his face. He slammed it to the floor above her head and rode her until she screamed in defeat and satiation.
He was ablaze. He was ready now. Naked and slick with sweat, he left the girl panting on the floor with the others and walked into a small courtyard lined on one end with straw dummies. In the open end of the yard, he performed the difficult exercises he had begun when he was a child. He was twenty-four years old now. He had been slowly mastering the exercises for fourteen years.
The Dutchman came out of a sustained three-finger stand and vaulted in two triple flying somersaults to the straw figures standing like sentries. With a stroke of his hand, he lopped off the head of one of the dummies, which had been affixed to its body by a four-by-four-inch post. He removed the arms with thrusts of each elbow, the thick wooden supports cracking and splitting with each lightning-fast jab.
He took on the dummies as he had the women, swiftly, methodically, emotionless. When he had finished, the courtyard was strewn with straw and sawdust and splinters of wood. The Dutchman was at peak now, his muscles prepared, his mind ranging like a predator around the isolated yard.
He had never learned to control the wild, awesome thing inside his brain that sought release only through destruction. Perhaps it was impossible to control. There had only been a few cases like it throughout all of human history, and those rare specimens had spent their lives in confinement, under the fearful scrutiny of scientists. They had lived like rats in a laboratory cage.
The Master had seen to it that Jeremiah had not shared their fate. Instead, he had prepared the boy's body to become as lethal as his mind. Together, the combination was to have helped the Master gain the world.
But death had claimed the Master before the boy came of age, and his murder had gone unavenged. During that time the Dutchman trained and practiced and waited for his twenty-fifth year— the year when, according to the Master, Jeremiah would be ready to undertake the responsibilities of his destiny and come a man into his Master's world.
"There are only two others on the earth who can match me," the Dutchman roared into the silence of the courtyard. "Two who can match me in strength and skill. And even though I face them before my time, they will be dead before the week is out because they do not possess my mind!" In a rage, he lifted up one of the blocks of wood that had fallen from the straw dummies and hurled it high into the air, over the courtyard wall, beyond the castle grounds, and out of sight.