Bottom Line td-37 Read online

  "How can you call yourself a Cypriot if you don't blame others for what happens to you? If you put up a bad roof, blame corporate imperialism. If your daughter gets pregnant, blame Hollywood movies. When you rob your father and he breaks your bones for it, blame the Egyptians. You must remember at all times you are a Cypriot and that means you will never invent anything or bund anything or grow any-

  24

  thing anyone else will want. Therefore you can never be on the side of doers. They must always be your enemies, Tilhas. America is made up of the worst doers in the world. Therefore, we must hate them most. Besides, it's easiest to dynamite baby carriages here. If we get caught, nobody pulls our arms out our shoulders. Nobody peels our skin off our back. Nobody starts bonfires on our bare stomach. No one hurts us. They just put us in jail and let us go a little later."

  "Wrong," came Remo's voice. He stood inside the door, looking around at the four men. "There are still some of us who think that evil ought to be punished."

  "Who are you?" asked one of the Cypriots.

  Remo raised a hand for silence. "Which one of you is Tilhas?"

  A small man with a scraggly mustache and basset-hound eyes raised his hand meekly. "I Tilhas. Why?"

  "I heard you from the window," Remo said. "I'm going to do you a favor. You're going to die easily."

  He did. The others didn't.

  Remo looked down at the thrashing body of the last one still to live.

  "They'll find you in the spring," he said. "When they see what happened to you, I think everybody else in your ragtag little gang is going to go back to Cyprus and forget about dynamiting babies. So don't look at it like you're just dying. You're giving your life to save your fellow Cypriots."

  The man mumbled.

  "I can't hear, you," Remo said.

  The man mumbled again.

  25

  Remo reached down and removed the man's right elbow from his mouth. "Talk up now. What'd you say?" "To hell with fellow Cypriots," the man said. "That's what I'd thought you'd say," Remo said. "If I meet any more, I'll pass on the message."

  And then he was back out into the cold windy night, moving smoothly across the snow back toward the icy cliff.

  Yes, that's what he was, he was a man. Remo Williams smiled. Sometimes that wasn't a bad thing to be.

  When he got back to the houseboat on Lake Win-nepesaukee, that illusion was shattered. He learned that he had two left feet and compared with him, hippopotamuses were ballet dancers and an elephant trumpeting was a whisper and "I don't know why I let you hang around with me."

  Remo had changed from his black mesh suit into black chinos and a white tee shirt. He lifted his head up from the built-in couch on the houseboat and looked at the old Oriental who had spoken.

  The man was sitting on the indoor-outdoor rugging of the floor. He was surrounded by inkwells and quill pens and on his lap, he had a large sheet of parchment. Behind him were a half dozen more sheets.

  All the sheets, including the one on his lap, were blank.

  "Can't write again today, huh, Chiun?" Remo said.

  "I could write anytime I wanted," Chiun said, "if my heart were not so heavy."

  Remo turned away and looked out the window

  26

  over his head. The stars still twinkled in the nighttime sky but akeady the horizon was lightening as dawn grew near. Without looking back, Remo said:

  "I suppose you better tell me how I'm ruining your life this time."

  "You are very cooperative," Chiun said.

  "Just thoughtful," said Remo. "I'm a thoughtful man. I figured that out tonight on the mountain. I'm a man. Nothing else. All your silly Korean legends about Shiva, the Destroyer, and me being a god are all just that. Hogwash. I'm a man."

  "Hah," said Chiun. "Thoughtful, you say." His voice was a high pitched piping and his English was precise and unaccented. "It is to laugh. You. Thoughtful. It is to laugh. Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh."

  "Yes, thoughtful," said Remo. "Because if I don't let you blame whatever it is you want to blame on me, then you'd have to face up to the fact that you just can't write a thing."

  "I do not believe I am hearing this," Chiun said.

  "Just what I said," Remo said. "Not a word. You can't write movies and you can't write books and you can't write stories and now, even when you conned some magazine guy into publishing it, you can't even write that icky-poo Ung poetry of yours. And God knows anybody can write that."

  "Easily said," said Chiun. "How empty are children's boasts."

  "Ung Poem Number One Thousand Three Hundred and Six," said Remo. "Oh, flower. Oh, flower with petals. Oh, flower with pretty petals. Here comes a bee. It is a big bee. Oh, bee, see the flower. Oh, flower, see the bee. Open, flower. Accept the bee. Fly fast, bee, and greet the flower."

  27

  "Enough," screamed Chiun. "Enough." He rose to his feet in a flash like steam suddenly released from a kettle. He was a small man, barely five feet tall, and his yellow skin was wrinkled with the age of eighty years. His yellow brocaded robe swirled about his body, and his hazel eyes glared at Remo.

  "More than enough," Remo said. "It's crap. Anybody can do it. Want to hear another one?"

  "No one can write with these distractions," Chiun said.

  "Anybody can write Ung poetry. Anytime," Remo said. "The only thing that's kept it from being the laughing stock of the world for two thousand years is that it's written in Korean and nobody can understand how bad it is."

  "I do not understand how someone can start a conversation so agreeably and turn so perverse so quickly," Chiun said. "All you white people are crazy but you are an exceptional specimen."

  "That's right," Remo said. "I forgot. I was going to let you blame it all on me how you couldn't write. Go ahead. What was it, Little Father? My breathing. I was breathing too loud."

  "No," said Chiun. "Your breathing was no noisier than it always is. The snorting of a warthog."

  "What then? My muscles. You heard them rippling and the rhythm was wrong, right?"

  "Wrong. Not your muscles," said Chiun.

  "What then?" demanded Remo.

  "Where were you tonight?" asked Chiun. His voice was soft and Remo was immediately wary.

  "You know where I was. I had to go up the mountain and take care of those bomb-throwers."

  "And where was I?" asked Chiun.

  28

  Remo shrugged. "I don't know. Here, I guess." "That's just it," Chiun said. "You go out all the

  time, and I stay here. All by myself."

  Remo sat up. "Wait a minute, Chiun. Let me get

  this straight. You want to go out on jobs with me?" "Maybe," said Chiun. "I'd like to be asked." "I thought you liked to be alone," Remo said. "Sometimes I do." "I got this place just so that you could be alone

  and write," Remo said.

  "Snow is depressing. I can't write when it snows." "We'll go someplace warm. Florida. Miami's

  warm."

  "The old women in Miami talk too much about their sons, the doctors. All I can talk about is you."

  "Chiun, what do you want?"

  "That is what I want," Chiun said.

  "What is?"

  "I want you to ask me once in a while what I want. Maybe some times I would like to go out on assignment. I would like to be considered as a person with feelings, not a piece of furniture that one leaves when one goes out, knowing that it will be there when he returns."

  "All right, Chiun. From now on, I'll ask."

  "Good," said Chiun. He began to pick up his parchment, pens, and ink from the floor. "I'll put this away."

  He stashed all the equipment in a large orange lacquered trunk, one of fourteen placed against the walls of the houseboat.

  "Remo," he said as he leaned over the trunk.

  "What, Little Father?"

  "Dr. Smith hired me to train you, correct?"

  29

  "Correct."

  "Nothing was said about my going out on mission
s, correct?" "Correct."

  "Therefore if I go out on missions, it would seem the tribute should be renegotiated."

  "Not a chance," Remo said. "Smitty'd go through the roof. He already delivers enough gold to that village of yours to run a South American country." "A small country," Chiun said. "No raise. He'll never go for it." "Suppose you ask him," suggested Chiun. Remo shook his head. "He thinks I spend too much as it is."

  "Suppose I offer to stay within the President's guidelines for noninflationary wage increases," Chiun said.

  "Try it. What've you got to lose?" "You think he will increase the tribute?" "No," said Remo.

  "I will try anyway," Chiun said. He closed the trunk lid and stood looking out across the dark waters of the lake. Both men were silent and then Remo began to laugh.

  "What do you find humorous?" Chiun asked. "We forgot something," Remo said. "What did we forget?" Chiun said. "Smitty doesn't negotiate contracts any more." "No? Who does?" "Ruby Gonzalez," said Remo. Chiun wheeled about and looked at Remo, searching his face for truth. Remo nodded. Chiun groaned. "Oh, woe is me," he said.

  30

  CHAPTER THREE

  The fourteen Japanese businessmen were ready. Each of them had admired the suits of the other thirteen. Each of them had passed out thirteen of his own business cards and received back thirteen from the other men, all of whom knew each other well. Each of them paused to admire either the printing or the card stock of each business card, and sometimes

  both.

  Nine of them had carried cameras and had insisted upon taking pictures of all the others, arranged in as many combinations and permutations as was possible. Three of them had shown off their new tape recorders installed in their attache cases, along with their cordless telephones, their new micro-chip printed circuit information processors, and their print-out calculators.

  Finally they were seated, waiting. They talked politely among themselves, even as they glanced at their gold LCD watches, wondering why Elmer Lippincott Jr. was late for the meeting, particularly since he had asked them to the secret meeting and particularly since all the men at the table knew its purpose was to use Japanese intermediaries to open up vast new trade contacts between the United States and Red

  31

  China, in order to shore up the American dollar, which had been taking an international pasting for two years.

  All the businessmen had been advised by the Japanese Trade Council that Lena Lippincott had met only two weeks earlier with the President of the United States, and so all knew what the meeting was about, and they were surprised he was late.

  Around the table, the times on the LCD watches ranged from five minutes and twenty seconds after eleven to five minutes and twenty-seven seconds after eleven.

  Mariko Kakirano said mildly in Japanese: "I wish he would hurry. I have other pressing business."

  There were thirteen nods of agreement, and all looked toward the door of the oak-panelled board room of the Ginza Bank, Tokyo's largest.

  "I'm sure he will be here shortly," said another businessman. Thirteen faces turned to him as he spoke and nodded agreement when he was finished. In a small conference room twenty feet away from where the Japanese businessmen sat, Lern Lippincott was having a different thought.

  "I don't want to go," he told his secretary. Lippincott rubbed his fingertips up and down along his smoothly shaven pink cheek.

  "I don't understand, sir," said his secretary, a young man who wore a black suit, white shirt and black tie so naturally that it looked as if he had been born in a morgue.

  "Nothing to understand^' said Lippincott. "I just don't want to go. I don't feel like it. Something doesn't feel right." He stood up. He was a tall man, the only one of

  32

  the three Lippincott sons to be tall like their father, but unlike his father, whose rail-lean figure still looked like the body of an oilfield roustabout, Lem Lippincott had a big soft belly and a wide behind.

  He walked to the window and looked down on the teeming street, then turned away quickly as if he had seen something he didn't like.

  His secretary was worried. Lippincott had insisted upon being flown into Japan in a private airplane. He had insisted upon being driven to the hotel room from the airport in an American car, driven by an American. And he had literally sneaked into the hotel through a back entrance, first sending the driver up to make sure he would not meet any hotel personnel on the way. Once in his room, Lippincott had given his secretary instructions that he wanted no maids to come into his room.

  "But your bed, sir?"

  "I'll make my own damn bed," Lippincott had said.

  They had left the hotel for the morning meeting the same way. Down a back elevator, into a waiting car with curtains over the windows, and up a back flight of steps to this meeting room.

  It occurred to Lippincott's secretary that the American businessman had been in Tokyo nearly twelve hours and had not yet seen a Japanese.

  Lippincott paced the delicate patterned rug in the small room like a caged animal. He rubbed his hands together over and over, as if washing them of some infinitesimal speck of dirt.

  "I hate this yellow rug," he said. "They got small rugs in this country. Small, yellow rugs. Everything

  33

  small and yellow. You're not getting enough sun, Gerald, you're getting pasty."

  The secretary sighed under his breath. Breakdown.

  "I'll tell them that you've been taken ill, sir," he said.

  Lippineott looked up as if, for the first time, realizing that his secretary was in the room.

  He shook his head.

  "No, no, that'll never do. Don't you know, boy, we Lippincotts never get ill. Father wouldn't hear of it. We'll go to your freaking meeting. Let's just get it over with fast."

  As they walked down the short hallway to the conference room, Lippincott leaned next to his secretary and whispered, "Stay close to me. I may need you."

  The secretary nodded, even as he wondered what Lippincott meant.

  He stepped ahead of the taller man to open the door to the conference room, then moved aside to let Lippincott go in first.

  The fourteen Japanese businessmen, as they saw Lippincott in the doorway, rose to their feet as a sign of respect.

  The secretary saw the American recoil a step, as if expecting an assault on his person.

  Lippincott froze there a moment and the secretary walked around in front of him into the room.

  "Thank you, gentlemen," he said. "Will you please be seated?"

  The fourteen men sat down. The secretary turned to Lippincott and smiled at him, as if to reassure him. Lippincott nodded, but came into the room slowly, seemingly searching for land mines.

  34

  He came to the end of the table nearest the door and pulled the chair out. He pulled it four feet from the table, turned it sideways and then sat on the edge of it. It was as if he was expecting to have to make a dash for the door at any moment and this would give him the biggest headstart. The Japanese looked at him with polite curiosity. Manko Kakirano stood up at the table and moved his chair four feet from the table too, then sat down again. The other thirteen businessmen did the same. To get something from their attache cases now, they would have to stand and walk to the table.

  The secretary saw beads of sweat appear on the Lippincott forehead. The businessman hissed to him:

  "Gerald, you get a chair. Sit between me and them."

  Definitely a breakdown, the secretary thought. Unless he was very mistaken, Lern Lippincott would soon be spending some time at the ha-ha house.

  The Japanese sat quietly, smiling, until Gerald was seated. He put his chair halfway between Lippincott and the table, but at an angle so he could watch both the Japanese and Lippincott. The American businessman was sweating now like a marathon runner, looking around the room, from yellow face to yellow face. Was he searching for someone? Or something? the secretary wondered.

  Lippincott opened his mouth to speak.


  Each word seemed to be a labor to produce.

  "You gentlemen know why we're here," Lippincott said haltingly, a pause between each word.

  There were fourteen nods at the table.

  "The President wants the Lippincott companies, through your companies, to open up trade with Red

  35

  China, as a way of increasing trade and helping the dollar. That's what he thinks."

  Fourteen more nods.

  "I know better," Lippincott said. His speech was speeding up.

  "I know you little yellow devils can't be trusted," Lippincott said. "You think I forgot Pearl Harbor?"

  The secretary looked in shock at Lippincott and then around the table. There were stunned looks on the Japanese faces, then murmurs of protest.

  "Don't argue with me, you heathen midgets," Lippincott said. "I know what you're like. Trying to catch us unawares, trying to do us in. When you and those Chinks get together, the first thing you'll do is try to figure out how you can pick on our flesh." Lippincott's knuckles were white where he gripped the arms of the chair.

  Mariko Kakirano rose in his chair. "Mr. Lippincott, I must protest."

  Before he could say anything more, Lippincott shrunk back in his chair. "Stay away from me, you. I'm warning you. Stay away from me. No more Ba-taan death marches. Remember Corregidor." He cringed like a child waiting to be struck.

  "You have no right," Kakirano said.

  The thirteen other businessmen rose to their feet, too. Some of their faces were angry. Most were just startled or confused.

  But before Kakirano could say any more, Lem Lippincott jumped to his feet. He put his hands out in front of him, as if warding off invisible blows from the fourteen men standing in front of him.

  "No, you don't, you yellow devils. I know what

  36

  you're after, trying to pick my bones, eat my flesh. You won't get away with it."

  The secretary rose. Lippincott was waving his arms in front of him, fighting imaginary hordes of

  insects.

  "Sir," the secretary said, "I think we'd better . . ."

  Before he could finish his sentence, one of Lippincott's flailing arms caught him alongside the head and knocked him back into his chair.

  "You too, eh? In league with these vultures."