"Which cliff?"
"Dis one."
Remo checked again out the window, where the truck teetered near the edge. "Speaking of the cliff, Pierre—"
"My cousin, he seen it happen," Pierre said stubbornly. "It turn out the old man change his will that day, just before he fly off the cliff saying he's a bird, and he leave everything to the Dutchman. Then, when the Dutchman take over, he put up the electric fence and the TV cameras." With that, the rear of the stopped truck settled noisily into the soft shoulder of the cliff.
"How are we going to get this tank moving again at this angle?" Remo asked irritably.
Pierre smiled. "No problem, boss." After a scream of grinding gears, he yanked the truck into reverse and whistled cheerfully as they careened backward down the darkened, one-lane road.
"Watch it!" Remo yelled. "You don't have any lights. What if somebody's coming the other way?"
"Oh, don't worry, Mister Remo. This here's big truck. Anybody come in our way, we cream 'em."
Remo shut his eyes and waited for the inevitable crash. It figured, he thought. More than a decade of the finest physical training on earth, and he was going to be killed at the hands of a lunatic island truck driver.
After a few minutes of Pierre's reverse roller coaster ride down the mountain, the truck drifted to a halt.
" 'S'okay, boss," Pierre said with confidence.
Remo opened his eyes cautiously. Pierre was holding a flashlight to the window. "We back at the bottom. Now we just go up again."
Before the truck stretched two roads. One was the treacherous, winding climb up the mountain they had just descended with such hellish speed. The other was a straight, gravel-paved, two-lane road leading up the same hill. Pierre switched off the flashlight decisively and punched the truck into gear to begin the tortuous climb up the first road.
"Wait a second," Remo said. "The other road looked a lot better. Why don't we go that way?"
The islander shook his head elaborately. "Nuh-huh. No way, suh."
"Why not? Don't these roads intersect?"
"Yes," Pierre agreed amiably, bouncing in his seat from the rutted potholes in the road.
"Then why don't we use the other one, for crying out loud?"
"Dat road lead to Devil's Mountain. Ain't using it."
"This is nut-house time," Remo said, exasperated. "You're telling me you won't even drive a truck on a better road just because it happens to lead to the place where this weirdo. Dutchman lives?"
"Yup," Pierre said, snapping his jaw shut.
There would be no more discussion of the route after that, Remo knew. He had seen Chiun use the same final gesture often enough. He sat back, accustoming himself to the ordeal of the long drive up the hill, when he heard a sound like the buzzing of insects. "What's that?" he asked.
"Motorcycle. Dirt bike, maybe. People's got 'em up here, where folks got money."
"I don't see any lights."
Pierre shrugged. "Who need lights?"
Remo sighed. Then the buzzing grew louder, came up beside the truck, and flew ahead.
"Funny," Pierre said. "I still don't see nothing."
Remo peered into the darkness. "It's funny, all right." In front of them, the dirt bike slowed down to stay just ahead of the truck. The driver was clad all in black, hiding him in the night. As Remo watched, a black face turned around, and an arm came up holding a pistol.
"Get down," Remo yelled, pulling Pierre down into his seat as the biker squeezed off two shots into the truck's cabin and took off.
The bullets left two round o's encased in spider-webbed glass on the passenger side of the windshield.
"You fast, boss," Pierre said, wiping the sweat off his forehead. "Plenty fast."
"Got any enemies?" Remo asked.
"I don't know." Pierre smiled. "Guess so, huh?"
* * *
Fabienne's sprawling island ranch house stood nearby in Bilboquet, the Beverly Hills of Sint Maarten. The homes in the area belonged mostly to wealthy foreigners who lived in them a few weeks out of each year, leaving them fully staffed but vacant the rest of the time. Few of the residents were permanent— the founder of the Sint Maarten Bank of Commerce, Mr. Potts, the rum king, whose distilleries dotted the coast, an East Indian merchant-prince whose chain of boutiques catered to tourists looking for "genuine" island fashions, a Japanese importer of Sony electronics and Seiko watches, and a nineteen-year-old American millionaire with a penchant for disco music who, it was reputed, had made his fortune smuggling one single shipment of cocaine into the United States. All in all, the motley group "on the hill," as the natives referred to Bilboquet, were not particularly fascinating to Fabienne de la Soubise.
Her father, Henri, had built the house on the hill only when his wife had deemed intolerable the old stone mansion near the shipyard, where his family had lived for four generations. The three acres on Bilboquet separated them from their jet-setting neighbors, but not enough for Henri or his offspring Fabienne, who had inherited his temperament as well as his features. Fabienne had grown up loving the island and the big ships full of blustering, rough-talking seamen with whom her father did business. When the first surge of tourism came, her mother reveled in their new-found social life with its glittering parties and expensive European shops. Of course, her mother would explain, those were the real people, the wealthy nobs who sailed their party yachts to the island for a stay of a month or more, not to be confused with the late-coming honeymooners and week vacationers who arrived via package flights to stay at the newly built Holiday Inns. Fabienne didn't care. She liked the islanders much more than the tourists— real or otherwise— and had learned their tongue early from her father.
When her mother left them both to fly back to Paris, her father had taken her desertion hard. He spent interminable hours at the shipyard office, building an even greater fortune than he had inherited, which was reflected in the magnificent furnishings of the house in Bilboquet, although he rarely saw it: Louix XV dining chairs; twin waist-high Ming Dynasty vases of translucent green; an enormous eight-by-four-foot table carved from a single California redwood, shipped from America; a silk divan from Napoleon's sitting room at Fontainbleau, restuffed with eiderdown. He had wanted Fabienne's life to be as luxurious and patrician as his own was lonely and overworked.
Thank God for the furniture. Selling it had kept her alive, she thought as she strung a small gold loop through her ear. They were the last earrings she had left. Henri would roll over in his grave if he saw the state in which he had left his only child after his inexplicable bout with lunacy, which ended his own life and gave everything his family had worked for 200 years to a strange young man no one on the island had ever known except by the most outlandish rumors. She had sued the occupant of the Castle, whatever his name was, for a return of her legacy, but even at best, legal proceedings moved with elephantine slowness on the island, never mind when no one could be found who was willing to serve court papers on the man. She had tried herself, but was effectively driven away each time by his servant, a small, menacing-looking man with an arsenal of hand-to-hand weapons strung in his belt and whose only sounds were the eerie moans of someone who'd suffered irreparable damage to his voice mechanism. She would try again. There was nothing else to do.
The bell rang, and a smile spread across her face as she walked through the rambling house to the front door, once answered only by servants. These were bad times, she knew, but there were bright spots even now. Like the young man behind the door.
Remo smiled almost shyly as she took his hand and led him past the vestibule into the living room. His smile turned to surprise as he looked around. She laughed; she had become used to the small embarrassments of her rare guests.