King's Curse Read online

  “That’s nice. Have you had any problems? People looking for Willingham?”

  “No. I put out a directive that he was going on vacation. But he can’t stay on vacation forever. You’ve got to do something about it,” she said.

  “And I will. You have my absolute guarantee that I will,” Remo said sincerely. “Have you seen anybody? Has anybody been following you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Have people been coming to see the exhibit?”

  “No. Not since I’ve been back. I’ve kept the sign on the door that it’s closed, but no one comes.”

  “And no one’s been following you?”

  “Are you trying to make me nervous? That’s it, isn’t it? You’re trying to make me nervous. Probably to get me up to your room so you can have your way with me. That’s it, right?”

  “No, dear,” Remo said. “That most certainly is not it.”

  “Well, don’t think that some shabby trick is going to frighten me into going there. No way. Your silly maneuvers are transparent, do you hear me, transparent, and you can forget it, if, for a moment, you think you can frighten me and get me to—”

  Remo hung up.

  Valerie arrived before Bobbi, even before Remo was hanging up the phone from his conversation with Smith.

  No, Smith had not heard anything about Joey 172. With the closing down of Folcroft, the flow of information to him had stopped, except for what he was able to glean from the newspapers. When he wasn’t snowed in at his cabin.

  No, he had not seen anyone around his cabin, and yes, the skiing was fine, and if he stayed on vacation another month, his instructor told him, he would be ready to leave the children’s slope, and he would be happy to see Chiun and Remo if they came to Maine, but they could not expect to stay in his cabin because a) it was small and b) Mrs. Smith after all these years still had no idea of what her husband did for a living, and it would be too complicated for her to meet Remo and Chiun. And there was no shortage of motel rooms nearby, and what was that awful yawking in the room?

  “That’s Valerie,” Remo said. ‘”She calls that speech. You be very careful.”

  He hung up, just in time to wave down Chiun, who was turning threateningly on the rug toward Valerie, who had interrupted his concentration. Even now he was holding the writing quill poised on the tips of his fingers. In another split second, Remo knew, Valerie was going to have another appendage, a quill through her skull and into her brain.

  “No, Chiun. I’ll shut her up.”

  “It would be well if both of you were to shut up,” Chiun said. “This is complicated work I do.”

  “Valerie,” Remo said, “come over here and sit down.”

  “I’m going to the press,” she said. “I’m tired of this. The New York Times would like to hear my story. Yes. The New York Times. Wait until Wicker and Lewis get through with you. You’ll think you were in a meat grinder. That’s it. The Times.”

  “A very fine newspaper.” Remo said.

  “I got my job through The New York Times” Valerie said. “There were forty of us who answered the ad. But I had the highest qualifications. I knew it. I could tell when I first talked to Mr. Willingham.” She paused. “Poor Mr. Willingham. Lying dead in that exhibit room and you, just leaving him there.”

  “Sweet old Mr. Willingham wanted to cut your heart out with a rock,” Remo reminded her.

  “Yes, but that wasn’t the real Mr. Willingham. He was nice. Not like you.”

  “Swell,” said Remo. “He tries to kill you and I save you and he’s nice, not like me. Go to the Times. They’ll understand you.”

  “Injustice,” Chiun said. “You should understand it. You Americans invented it.”

  “Stick to your fairytales,” Remo said. “This doesn’t concern you.”

  The door to their suite pushed open and Bobbi came in. Her idea of cold weather garb was a full-length fur coat over a tennis costume.

  “Hello, hello, hello, everybody, I’m here.”

  Chiun slammed a cork stopper into one of the bottles of ink.

  “That’s it,” he said. “One cannot work in this environment.”

  “Were you followed?” Remo asked Bobbi.

  She shook her head. “I watched carefully. Nobody.”

  She saw Valerie sitting on the chair in the corner and looked absolutely pleased to see her. “Hello, Valerie, how are you?”

  “Happy to see you dressed,” Valerie said glumly.

  Chiun blew on the parchment, then rolled it up, and stashed it and the quills and the ink into the desk of the suite.

  “Fine, Little Father, you can finish that later.”

  “Why?”

  “We are going to Maine.”

  “Blaaah,” said Chiun.

  “Good,” said Bobbi.

  “I’m going to get fired,” said Valerie.

  “Why me, God?” said Remo.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FROM EUROPE THEY HAD COME. From South America and Asia they had come.

  They had come from all over the world, the bravest of the Actatl. Their strengths had been wasted in misadventures before Jean Louis deJuin had assumed leadership of the tribe, and this was what was left.

  Twelve men, wearing the yellow feathered robes and the loin cloths, stood barefooted in ankle-high snow, oblivious to the cold, looking down a hill at a small cabin nestled in a stand of trees.

  The cold Maine mountain wind whipped around them, and the gusts flattened the feathers of their robes against their bodies, but they neither shivered nor shook because the ancient traditions had held it that a child could not become a warrior until he had conquered a snake and a jungle cat and the hammer of the weather, and despite the passage of twenty generations all of them, even fat old Uncle Carl, knew they were Actatl warriors, and that warmed them and gave them strength.

  They listened as one now as Jean Louis deJuin, dressed in heavy leather boots and a hooded fur parka, gave them their instructions.

  “The woman is for sacrifice. The man I must speak to before we offer him up to Uctut.”

  “Will those two, the white man and the Oriental, come?” asked Uncle Carl.

  DeJuin smiled. “If they do, they will be killed—from within their own encampment.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MRS. HAROLD W. SMITH was frumpy.

  At thirty-two, she hadn’t known it; at forty-two, she had known it and worried about it; and now, at fifty-two, she knew it and no longer cared about it.

  She was, she often reminded herself, a grown woman and would act like one, and that included putting aside the childish fantasies about going through life doing exciting things with an exciting man.

  So she didn’t have that. She had something better. She had Dr. Harold W. Smith, and even though he might be dull, she no longer minded, because it was probably inevitable with all that dull work he did dull day after dull day at Folcroft Sanitarium, pushing dull piles of paper and worrying about dull educational studies funded by the dull federal government in Jacksonville, Arkansas and Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and other dull places.

  Harold—it wasn’t Harry or Har, but Harold. Not only did she always call him Harold, but she had always thought of him as Harold. Harold might have been a far different man, she often thought, if he had simply been placed in different circumstances.

  After all, in World War II he had done some kind of secret work, and while he would never say anything more about it than that he had been “in codes,” she had once run across a personal letter from General Eisenhower, apologizing that circumstances made it impossible for the United States to award Harold W. Smith the Congressional Medal of Honor, adding that “no man who served on the side of the Allies deserved it more.”

  She had never mentioned to her husband that she had found this letter inside the front cover of a book on a shelf over his desk. To discuss it might have embarrassed him, but she often thought he must have been exceptional “in codes” to have merited such praise
from Ike.

  The day after discovering the letter she got to worrying that she might not have returned it quite exactly to its spot inside the cover of the book, and she went back to look at it again. But it was gone, and in the ashtray in his study she had found bits of burned paper—but that couldn’t have been it. What kind of man would destroy a personal letter of praise from a man who went on to become President of the United States?

  No one would do that.

  She listened to the coffee percolating on the stove, filling the small kitchen of their rented Maine cabin with the oily sweet smell of coffee, on which she had come to depend to start the day, and she regretted nothing.

  Harold might be—yes, admit it, dull—but he was also kind and a good man.

  She turned off the electric burner and took the pot off the hot grill and placed it on the cool metal of the stove to stop the percolation and let the grounds settle.

  It had been so nice of him to think about coming up here to Maine for a few weeks. She took two cups from a closet over the sink, rinsed them, and poured coffee into them.

  She paused a moment.

  Inside the bedroom she could hear Harold Smith’s soft, methodical, regular breathing stop and surrender to a large sip of air, and then she heard the bed springs squeak. As he always did, Smith had awakened, had lain perfectly still for three seconds as if checking his surroundings, and then without any waste of time had clambered out of bed.

  Seven days a week, it was the same. Smith never luxuriated in bed, not even for a moment, after he was fully awake. He climbed out as if late for an appointment.

  Mrs. Smith carried the two cups back toward the small formica-topped kitchen table, glanced out the window, then stopped in her tracks. She looked again, then set the two cups on the table and walked to the window, pressing her face near the cold damp glass so she could see better.

  That was odd, she thought. Definitely odd.

  “Harold,” she said.

  “Yes, dear,” he answered. “I’m up.”

  “Harold, come here, please.”

  “In a moment, dear.”

  “Now. Please.”

  She kept looking out the window and she felt Harold Smith move to her side.

  “Good morning, dear,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Out there, Harold.” She looked at the window.

  Smith put his head close to hers and looked through the pane of glass.

  Coming down the small slope of a hill toward the cabin were a dozen men, naked except for loincloths and feathered headdresses and robes.

  They were dressed in the fashion of some sort of Indians, but they did not have the skin of Indians. Some were yellow, some white, some tan. They carried spears.

  “What is it, Harold?” asked Mrs. Smith. “Who are they?”

  She turned to her husband, but he was not there.

  Smith had darted across the room. He reached up over the door and took down a 12 gauge shotgun that sat in a rack made of two sets of antlers. He locked the door’s simple drop latch, then carried the gun to the small china closet in the room. From behind the dishes he took out a box of shotgun shells. Mrs. Smith watched him. She had not even known those bullets were there. And why was Harold putting them in that gun?

  “Harold, what are you doing?” she asked.

  “Get dressed, dear,” said Smith, without looking up. “Put on your boots and a heavy coat in case you should have to go out suddenly.”

  He looked up and saw her still at the window.

  “Now!” he commanded.

  Numbly, not really comprehending, Mrs. Smith moved toward their bedroom. As she stepped inside, planning to dress quickly, just to throw clothes on over the pajamas and robe she now wore, she saw Harold moving about the room, the shotgun folded in the crook of his arm like a hunter. He locked the windows of the small cabin, then pulled the curtains closed over the windows.

  “Does it have something to do with the bicentennial?” she called as she slipped her heavy snow-pacs over her footed pajamas.

  “I don’t know, dear,” he said.

  Smith emptied the box of shells into the left pocket of his robe. Into his right pocket he placed a 9mm automatic that he took from a niche between the couch and the warm air radiator in the main living room.

  He looked back into the bedroom. “Make sure that those windows are locked. Pull the curtains and stay in there until I tell you differently,” he said, adding “dear” without meaning it. Then he slammed the bedroom door closed.

  The dozen Actatl moved silently across the snow field toward the small house, nestled alone in the tiny valley alongside the hill. On a snowmobile atop the hill, Jean Louis deJuin watched as his men—his warriors, his braves—moved nearer the cottage. One hundred yards. Ninety yards.

  He looked toward the snowed-over dirt road that cut its way through heavy pine growth to the cabin.

  As the Actatl warriors moved nearer the house, deJuin saw what he had been expecting: a puff of snow coming along the dirt road to the Smith cabin.

  A car.

  This was it. The Actatl would win now or lose now. It was that simple. He smiled, for he had no doubt that the battle would be a victory for the Actatl.

  Smith punched out a pane of glass from the kitchen window with the muzzle of his shotgun and put the barrel of the gun through the opening.

  He sighted on the first of the feather-clad warriors, then coldly moved his aim toward the left, where a single shotgun blast might take out three men at once.

  How long had it been since he had fired a gun? To kill? It all flashed through his mind in a split second, the days in World War II when he had to shoot his way out of a Nazi trap after he had spent four months in occupied territory in Scandinavia, organizing a resistance movement and training its members in sabotage, aimed at one target: the secret Nazi installation where heavy water experiments, needed to build an atomic bomb, were being undertaken.

  A good cause then, a good cause now.

  His finger began to tighten on the right trigger, but he stopped when he heard a car jerking to a stop before the front door of his cabin.

  Was it more of them? Or was it Remo?

  The door was locked. He would wait a moment. The warriors were now thirty-five yards away, stumbling ahead through heavy snow, and Smith again took dead aim.

  At twenty-five yards he would fire.

  Before he could squeeze the trigger, he saw a flash of color to the right of his window and then Remo, wearing only a blue tee shirt and black slacks, and Chiun, clad only in a green kimono, moved around the corner of the building and ran toward the dozen spear-carrying men.

  The front pair of Indians stopped, set up quickly, and fired their spears. If Smith had not seen it with his own eyes, he would not have believed it. The projectiles sped toward Remo and Chiun. Both men seemed oblivious to them. At what seemed a fraction of a second too late, Remo’s left hand moved before his face. The spear cracked in half and both parts fell harmless at his feet. He kept running toward the Actatl. The spear that went at Chiun seemed almost to have reached his stomach, seemed sure to penetrate, seemed certain to be deadly, when Chiun’s long-nailed fingers reached down, and then Chiun was holding the spear in his own right hand. He had caught it in midflight. Neither he nor Remo lost a step in their advance toward the Actatl. Then they were on them, and Smith realized that in all his years as the head of CURE, he had never before seen Remo and Chiun at work together. And as he watched them, he understood for the first time the terror that the Master of Sinanju and his disciple, Remo, could strike into so many hearts.

  He understood too why Chiun believed Remo to be the reincarnation of the Eastern God, Shiva, the Destroyer.

  Remo moved in a blur, in among the group of twelve warriors, who had stopped their charge on the house to dispose first of the two intruders. About Remo all was speed, as if he were surrounded by a special kind of turbulence, and bodies flew away from him as if they held a different magnetic charge
from his and were thrust away by invisible forces.

  While Remo charged into the center of the Actatl, Chiun worked around the perimeter of the group. His style was as different from Remo’s as that of a rifle from a pistol. Chiun did not appear to move quickly; his hands and body were not blurred as he went from one spot to another. Smith noted almost scientifically that Chiun hardly appeared to be moving at all. But suddenly he was one place and then suddenly another place. It was like watching a film in which the camera had been stopped intermittently while shooting the picture, and Chiun’s movement from one spot to the next had occurred while the camera lens was closed. And the bodies piled up in a huge mound of yellow feathers, like some kind of giant canary graveyard.

  Smith noticed another movement to his right and turned his head. A girl in a fur coat came around the corner of the cabin.

  That would be Bobbi or Valerie, Smith thought. Bobbi, judging from the full length fur coat. She paused at the end of the cabin for a moment, watching as Remo and Chiun lay waste the Actatl warriors.

  Not knowing she was being watched, she reached into the right pocket of her fur coat. She drew out a pistol.

  Smith smiled. She was going to protect Remo and Chiun.

  She raised the revolver at arm’s length in her right hand. Smith wondered if he should call out to her and tell her to stop.

  He glanced back at the battle. All the Actatl had fallen. Only Remo and Chiun still stood, ankle deep in the powdery snow. They had their backs to Bobbi. Remo pointed up to the top of a hill, where a man sat on a snowmobile, watching the carnage below. Remo nodded to Chiun and moved off in the direction of the man on the hill.

  Smith glanced back at Bobbi. She extended her left hand and grasped her right wrist to hold the gun steady. She took deadly slow aim across the twenty feet between her and Remo and Chiun.

  She was going to shoot them.

  Smith wheeled in the window opening, moving to his left, and without aiming squeezed first the right trigger of his shotgun and then the left. The first blast missed. The second caught Bobbi in the midsection, lifted her in the air, folded her as if she were a dinner napkin, and set her down into the snow eight feet from where she had been standing.