King's Curse td-24 Read online

  "What about Valerie?" Smith said. "I'll keep her quiet," Remo said. He walked away. A moment later Smith heard the car's motor start and begin to move away.

  Smith waited a moment before reentering his house. He paused inside the front door and yelled out at the empty open countryside: "That's enough fooling around. If you fellas want to practice your games, go somewhere else. Before somebody gets hurt. That's right. Get moving."

  He waited twenty seconds, then closed the front door, and went into his bedroom.

  "You were right, dear," he said. "Just some fools practicing war games for the bicentennial. I chased them."

  "I heard shots, Harold," Mrs. Smith said.

  Smith nodded. "That warned them off, dear. I fired off into the trees. Just to get them moving."

  "The way you were acting before, I thought there was really something dangerous happening there," Mrs. Smith said suspiciously.

  "No, no. Nothing at all," Smith said. "You know what, dear?"

  "What?"

  "Pack. We're going home."

  "Yes, Harold."

  "These woods are boring."

  "Yes, Harold."

  "I don't think I'll ever be a good enough skier to get off the children's slope."

  "Yes, Harold."

  "I feel like getting back to work, dear."

  "Yes, Harold."

  When he left the room, Mrs. Smith sighed. Life was dull.

  Dull, dull, dull.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Across the river from New York City, in Wee-hawken, New Jersey, is a small exercise in concrete called a park, which commemorates the murder of Alexander Hamilton by Aaron Burr.

  The park is a postage stamp alongside a bumpy boulevard that snakes its way along the top of the Palisades, and it is supposed to commemorate the spot where Hamilton was shot, but it misses by some two hundred feet. Vertical distance.

  Hamilton was shot at the foot of the Palisades cliff, down in a rock-strewn area of rubble and debris that used to be cleaned up regularly when the ferry to Forty-second Street in New York was running. Since the closing down of the ferry, it had been ignored.

  So it was hardly likely that one more rock in that area would have captured anyone's attention.

  If it had not been for Valerie Gardner.

  After making good on his promise to clear the bodies of Willingham and the other dead Actatl out of the special exhibit room at the museum, Remo had found a way to put Valerie's big mouth to good use.

  And while she still thought he was a homicidal maniac, he had explained carefully to her that a successor would soon have to be named for Willingham, and who would have a better shot at the job than the young female assistant director who had worked so hard to preserve museum property?

  So after Remo had contracted with a special moving company in Greenwich Village, which was used to working at night because it specialized in getting people and their furnishings out of apartments between midnight and five a.m., when landlords slept, Valerie got on the telephone with the representatives of the New York TV stations, the newspapers, wire services, and news magazines.

  At one o'clock the next afternoon, when the gentlemen of the press arrived at the rock-littered site of the Hamilton-Burr duel, they found Valerie Gardner and a giant eight-foot stone, carved with circles and awkward birds, which Valerie informed them had been kidnapped from the museum and held for a "sizeable ransom," which she had paid personally, since she had not been able to contact the director, Mr. Willingham, for authorization.

  A strong north wind blew in the face of the stone statue, as Valerie explained that it was the ritual god "of a primitive Mexican tribe named the Actatl, a tribe which distinguished itself by vanishing absolutely with the arrival of Cortez and his conquistadores."

  "Any leads on who took the stone?" one reporter asked.

  "None yet," said Valerie.

  "How did they get it out of the museum? It must weigh a ton," another reporter asked.

  "Four tons," said Valerie. "But our guard force was depleted last night because some of our men were ill, and the burglars were able to break in and remove this, probably with a fork lift truck."

  The reporters asked some more questions, while cameramen took film of Valerie and the stone, and finally one reporter asked, "Does this thing have a name? How do we refer to it?"

  "To the Actatl, it was god," Valerie said. "And they called it Uctut. But that was its public name. It had a secret name known only to priests of the Actatl."

  "Yeah?" said a reporter.

  "Yes," said Valerie. "And that secret name was…"

  Cameras whirred almost noiselessly as Valerie spoke the secret name of Uctut.

  The case of the kidnapped stone was on the press wires and on the television all over the country that night. And across the country, even around the world, people who believed in Uctut watched as Valerie spoke the sacred name. And when the skies did not darken, nor the clouds fall, they sighed sadly and began to think that perhaps, after almost five hundred years in the west, they should stop thinking of themselves as Actatl, a hardly remembered tribe that worshiped a powerless stone.

  But not everyone saw the broadcast on television.

  After Valerie and the reporters had left, three men stood at the park atop the Palisades looking down at the huge monument.

  In the center, looking down upon Uctut, was Jean Louis deJuin, who smiled and said, "Very clever. But of course it was all clever. How did you find me?"

  The man to his right answered.

  "Your name was in Willingham's files," Remo said. "All the names were. You were the only Jean Louis, and that was the name Bobbi gave me."

  DeJuin nodded. "Information will be the death of us all yet." He looked to the old Oriental at his left side.

  Chiun shook his head. "You are an emperor and this is what you get for not hiring qualified help. Entrusting serious business to amateurs is always a mistake."

  "Now what is to happen?"

  "When this is all on the news tonight," Remo said, "sacred name and all, the Actatl will see that Uctut's a fake. And that's that."

  "And your secret organization will just pick up the pieces and continue as before?" deJuin said.

  "Right," Remo said.

  "Good," said deJuin. "Done is done and over is over. I don't think I was ever really cut out to be a king. Certainly not king of people who worshiped a rock."

  He smiled, first at Remo, then at Chiun, as if sharing a private joke with them.

  They did not smile back. Remo thrust a hand into deJuin's pocket, leaving there a piece of paper. And Chiun threw deJuin off the cliff down onto the statue of Uctut, which deJuin hit with a splat.

  "Good," Chiun said to Remo. "Over is over and done is done."

  DeJuin's body would be found that evening by sightseers who watched the news item on television and hustled to the foot of the Palisades to see the big stone.

  Police would find in deJuin's pocket a typewritten note that admitted that he had planned and carried out the murders of the congressman, Mrs. Delpheen, and Joey 172, in retribution because they had not prevented the stone Uctut from being defaced. The note would also say that Uctut was a false god, and that Jean Louis deJuin, as king of the Actatl, renounced the ugly hunk of rock and was taking his own life in partial penance for his part in the three savage, senseless murders.

  The press would cover all these events thoroughly, just as thoroughly as they would ignore the return to Folcroft Sanitarium of Dr. Harold W. Smith, sanitarium director, well rested after his vacation trip to Mount Seboomook in Maine and now busy revamping the sanitarium's sophisticated computer system.

  And Remo and Chiun would sit in their hotel room and argue about dinner.

  "Fish," said Chiun.

  "Duck would be nice," Remo said.

  "Fish."

  "Let's have duck. After all it isn't every day we kill a king," said Remo.

  "Fish," said Chiun. "I am tired of looking at feathered things."
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