Graciousness would probably be the right approach, so he smiled at Saffah, a smile of acceptance that said there would always be between them a special bond of friendship.
She smiled back, the smile a teacher gives a student who has not thrown up on his desk that day, then turned and extended an arm toward the hut Butler knew was hers.
The entrance to the hut was empty, and then framed in the doorway, wearing a yellow robe stood the small Oriental of the hotel and the airport.
He stood there benignly, his arms folded in front of him.
"Sinanju," the villagers cried as if in one voice.
"Sinanju."
The old man smiled and raised his arms for silence, with all the sincerity of Jack Paar trying to quiet the opening applause.
Saffah turned back to Butler. "He is the Master for whom we have waited. He has come these many miles across the seas. The legend comes true."
"But… but… but what of the man who gave up his life?" Butler asked.
Just then, Chiun stepped aside and Remo came out of the hut. He saw Butler, nodded a greeting, and then snapped his fingers.
"I got it now," he said. "Willie. Willie Butler. I saw you against the Packers one day at the Stadium. I've been trying to place you since the first time I met you. Well, I'll be… old Willie Butler." He advanced toward Butler as if to shake his hand, but General William Forsythe Butler turned on his heel and walked away, trying to put distance between himself and the memory of the Willie Butler who once was an entertainer of white men.
By dinnertime, Butler had regained his composure and begun to make his plans. When his men had told him they had found no trace of the American and the Oriental, he had thought they had left the country. But they were here now, and so a new plan had to be set up. There had been fulfilments of the legend before, and they had turned out false. And so it would be again. When Remo and Chiun were dead, the Loni would recognize that only in Butler was the legend come to life.
Butler ate with Saffah, Chiun and Remo, in the large hut which Chiun had taken over. They sat on reed mats around a rock slab table that reflected the scarceness of hardwood in their barren hilly empire, and ate the flesh of fowl.
"You have come from Sinanju?" Butler asked.
Chiun nodded.
"Why?"
"Because there is a debt owed to the people of the Lord. A debt unpaid is an affront to my ancestors."
"So you will restore the Loni to power? How?"
"As it is written. In the purifying rites of the fire." Chiun ate delicately, then wiped his mouth with a silken cloth from one of his streamer trunks.
"And you?" Butler said to Remo.
"Me? I'm the man who accompanied Chiun to Loni-land. Just a second banana. Tell me, you ever hear of a white house behind an iron gate?"
Butler hesitated. Of course. A U.S. agent, come to solve the mystery of the girls. "Why?" he asked.
"Because I understand there's something there I ought to see."
"There is such a house," Butler said. "But it is under the personal protection of General Obode," he added, repeating the lie he had told to his CURE contact.
"His house?" Remo asked.
Butler nodded. "He is a man of curious tastes." A plan was beginning to form in his mind.
"I want to see it," Remo said.
"I can tell you where it is, but I cannot take you there," Butler said. "Being discovered would put an end to my career with Obode and I need that career to help my Loni people."
"You a Loni?" Remo asked. "A Loni from Morgan State? You're probably the only guy in the tribe who ever played cornerback. Old Willie Butler."
"The location of the house is in the capital city of Busati," Butler said coldly. "From my sources, I know that it is guarded. It will be very dangerous."
He gave Remo the location of the building. "We'll be careful," Remo said.
Butler nodded. "One can never be too careful in this land."
It was agreed Remo and Chiun would visit the house before dawn. Butler left the camp shortly after dinner, on the pretext that important business awaited his return to Busati.
But the only business on his mind was the warning he wanted to give General Obode about the two imperialist American agents who were planning to assassinate him, but who would be vulnerable tonight because Butler had enticed them into visiting his house of many pleasures.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In an American city, it would have been a ghetto, a slum, the final demonstration that capitalism could not work unless it allowed the hog robber-baron rich to step on the poor man's neck and grind his face into the dirt
But in Busati, it was one of the better streets. And the whorehouse behind the iron gate was definitely one of the better buildings.
It had once belonged to a British general who had come to the country planning to teach the heathen savages a thing or two, and who had instantly developed a letch for black women of all sizes and shapes. He had had his throat slit one night by a woman whom he thought loved him for his obviously superior soul.
She took his wallet and the seventy-three British pound notes it contained and returned to her native village where she was as venerated as Marjorie Meriwether Post.
The house meanwhile was recaptured by the Busati government for non-payment of the four-dollar annual real estate tax—Busati facing its own urban crisis at the time, the necessity to buy another four push-brooms for the one-man street cleaning force who was charged with keeping the city immaculate.
The house had since that time belonged to the Busati government, remaining vacant until now General William Forsythe Butler took it over and decided to use it for his own purposes.
"Look. In the tree," Chiun said. "Have you ever seen such foolishness?"
In the dark, Remo's eyes made out the figure of a soldier with a gun, notched in the fork of the tree across the street from the white house.
"And in the window of that building over there," Remo said softly, gesturing with his eyes toward the window where he had just seen a glint of light that could come only from a rifle barrel. "It looks as if General Obode is expecting company tonight."
Remo and Chiun stood in the shadows, half a block away from the large white house behind the metal gate.
"And look," Chiun said, "there are two… no, three more behind that motor vehicle over there."
"I guess no one told them that the Master of Sinanju was coming," Remo said. "They're not properly impressed."
"We must do our best to remind them of their good manners," the old man said.
Before Remo could say a word in answer, Chiun was up at the large stone wall. His fingers bought a hold in the wall and he smoothly clambered up it, paused momentarily on the top and then vanished into the grounds behind the fourteen foot high barrier.
Remo moved close to the wall and heard Chiun say, "Shall I send a litter bearer for you, my son?"
"Up yours, My Father," Remo said, but too softly for Chiun to hear. Then Remo, too, was up and over the stone wall.
He stood alongside Chiun. "Better be careful," he said. "There are probably more soldiers in here."
"Oh, thank, you, Remo," Chiun said.
"For what?"
"For alerting me to danger. For helping to prevent me from falling asleep and into the hand of these terrible dangerous men. Oh me, oh my." This was Chiun's new phrase which he had picked up from Rad Rex on the last instalment he had seen of As the Planet Revolves, the one show, Remo swore, in all of television history in which nothing not only never happened, but in which nothing even threatened to happen.
"Buck up, Chiun," Remo hissed. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I'll protect you."
""My heart soars like the eagle."
They moved through the darkness toward the house. "Are you sure," Chiun said, "that this is what you want to do?"