They reached the top of the stairs.
"That is because there is no fish," said Chiun, without elaborating further.
They ate in the kitchen at a low taboret. The rice was white and sticky, steamed exactly the way Remo liked it, and served in bamboo bowls.
The duck lay supine in a light orange sauce.
Remo was surprised when the old woman who padded about the kitchen like a mute served Chiun a bowl of fish-head soup.
"I thought you said there was no fish," said Remo.
"There is no fish. For you."
"But there's fish for you."
"I did not fail in my mission," Chiun said aridly.
"Usually we eat the same thing."
"From this day until the honor of the House is avenged, you are reduced to duck rations. You will eat roast duck, pressed duck, steamed duck and cold, leftover duck. Mostly you will eat cold duck. And you will like it."
"I'll put up with it, but I won't like it," said Remo, poking at the duck's brown skin with a silver chopstick. "So, what's with the housekeeper?"
"I decided this today."
"She's South Korean, not North."
Chiun looked interested. "Very good, Remo. How can you tell this? By the eyes? The shape of the head?"
"By the fact that she hasn't eaten her way through the cupboard."
Chiun frowned. "Southerners make proper servants, but are of low character. I would not make a servant of a Northerner. Since she is Korean, but not of our blood, she is tolerable."
"You know, this might be a security problem."
"Her English is imperfect."
"I noticed," Remo said dryly.
"And I am weary of cooking for you and cleaning up after you."
"I pull my load."
"Not today. Today you lost an entire ship and its valuable cargo."
"That reminds me," said Remo, "what's Ingo Pungo mean?"
"You understand Korean."
"I don't know every word."
"You know ingo."
"Sounds familiar."
"You know kum."
"Sure. Kum is 'gold.'"
Chiun lifted one chopstick. "This is ingo."
"I remember now. It means 'silver.'"
With his silver chopstick, Chiun speared a fish head from his soup broth. "And this is pungo."
"A fish?"
"Not a fish. Fish is not fish. Fish have names. They have tastes and textures and even ancestries. River fish are different from ocean fish. Pacific fish are superior to Atlantic fish."
"Since when?"
"This soup is made from the heads of Pacific fishes."
Remo leaned over the taboret and scrutinized the fish head. It stared back.
"Don't recognize it," he admitted.
"It is carp."
"Ingo Pungo means Silver Carp?"
"Yes. It is a very worthy name for a vessel."
"Maybe. I never much liked carp."
"No, you are an eater of shark."
"It was a necessity," grumbled Remo.
"Not as much a necessity as bathing."
Remo looked at the Master of Sinanju.
"You smell of shark," Chiun reminded him.
"Better than the shark smelling of me," said Remo, who grinned even after the Master of Sinanju refused to return the grin.
It felt so good to be alive he even enjoyed the duck, greasy as it was.
Chapter 13
Although outwardly Dr. Harold W. Smith looked like a cross between an aging banker and an undertaker, there were days when he resembled an embalmed banker. This was one of those days.
Midwinter did nothing for Harold Smith's complexion. He was well past retirement age, and his hair had turned gray. Not white. A crisp white head of hair would have looked good on Harold Smith. It would have offset the unrelieved gray of his person.
Harold Smith was gray of hair, gray of eye, gray of demeanor and even gray of skin. The gray tinge to his skin was the result of a heart defect. Smith had been a blue baby. He was actually born blue. Like all newborn humans and kittens, Harold Smith had blue eyes at birth.
This soon changed. His eyes turned gray naturally. Silver idodine treatments for his condition had left his skin looking gray. It was as if, his mother had thought at the time, some dour cloud had come along to steal all the blueness from her dear little Harold.
No one knows exactly what forces dictate a man's destiny. Perhaps a man with a colorless name like Harold Smith was destined to enter some colorless field. His preference for Brooks Brothers gray and his chameleonlike ability to blend unobtrusively into social settings probably made the course of his life inevitable. No one named Harold Smith ever ran off with a busty starlet or broke the sound barrier or played music anyone wanted to hear.
It would have been the undeniable fate of Harold Smith of the Vermont Smiths to enter the family publishing business and toil steadily and doggedly and competently yet never brilliantly, but for Pearl Harbor. Harold Smith had enlisted. Smiths did not wait to be drafted. Smiths served their country in time of war.
Harold Smith's serious qualities were recognized early, and he spent the war in Europe with the OSS. This led to a postwar role with the new Central Intelligence Agency. Smith fit into the CIA perfectly. During the Cold War era, it was really a giant bureaucracy. There Smith learned computer science and gained a reputation and an inconvenient nickname, the Gray Ghost.
Smith would have retired from the CIA in the fullness of time were it not for a young President of his generation who saw the nation he loved spiraling into uncontrollable chaos. That President created a simple concept. CURE. An organization with no staff, no congressional mandate or sanction, but the ultimate power to right the keeling ship of state before the American experiment foundered on the shoals of dictatorship.
The President reached out to the supercompetent Harold Smith and offered him the responsibility for saving his nation from ruin. Smith responded to the challenge as he had responded to Pearl Harbor twenty years before. He undertook his civic duty. That was how he saw it, as a duty. He did not desire the post.
That was long ago. Many Presidents, many missions and many winters ago. Smith had grown grayer behind his desk at Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for CURE. He would never see retirement now. He would die at his desk. There was no retiring from CURE. And there was no end to the missions or the crises.
Now in the winter of his life, with the leaden skies making his gray personality seem beyond gray, he toiled at his desk and the computer terminal through which Harold Smith monitored the nation he was sworn to safeguard.
Smith had called up a simple data base, Flags of the World. Sometimes the deepest mysteries could be solved by simple resources.
Remo Williams had described to him a submarine with a white flag painted on its sail, framing a blue fleur-de-lis.
Smith had already looked up fleur-de-lis on his database. It was French for "flower of the lily." There was some historical confusion, he found. Because the flower represented by the fleur-de-lis was actually the iris, it was thought that the iris was originally called a lily. Thus the confusion.
It had been a symbol of French royalty since the reign of the Frankish King Cloris. The trouble was that the French royal flag was a gold fleur-de-lis against a blue background. A quick computer search of the flag data base showed no national flag depicting a fleur-de-lis of any color. The modern French flag was the simple tricolor. No fleur-de-lis.
Smith wasn't surprised. He possessed a photographic memory and recalled no such flag among modern nations.
Absently Smith plucked the rimless spectacles off his patrician nose and polished them with a disposable tissue. Decades of close computer work had made his eyes extremely sensitive to even the smallest dust particles on the lenses. He was forever polishing them.
Replacing them, Smith attempted a wider search. He called for any flag of any color depicting the fleur-de-lis.