Last Rites td-100 Read online

  "You were right, Little Father. It was the oldest trap in the world."

  "You resisted?"

  "I don't take advantage of women who are drunk on my Sinanju pheromones."

  "Unless they are hung like cows."

  "Women are not hung. Men are hung. The expression is 'hung like a bull.'"

  "Cows hang lower than bulls."

  "Okay, cows are hung, too."

  "They drag their udders through the grass."

  "I get the picture."

  "Just like the white women you fancy."

  "I don't fancy stewardesses. Stewardesses are always hitting on me. That's another thing I don't like about my life. I can have any woman I want. They can't resist me. It's no fun. Where's the chase?"

  "Coming up the aisle," said Chiun, nudging Remo with a bony, silk-covered elbow.

  The entire complement of stewardesses bustled up the aisle, their reproachful eyes fixed on Remo.

  "We're on strike until we get some satisfaction," one said.

  "Don't look at me," returned Remo.

  The stewardesses then sat down in the middle of the aisle-including the one still in her underwear.

  "No satisfaction," she announced, "no peanuts or drinks for anyone" And she gave a clenched-fist salute.

  "What's going on here?" a passenger dernanded. The underwear stewardess pointed an accusing finger at Remo and said, "That man disrobed and abandoned me."

  "Shame on you!"

  "I was helping her with her zipper," Remo said.

  "Looks like you got carried away."

  "And didn't have the balls to finish what you started," a little old lady added.

  "Skirt teaser!" another woman accused.

  "Remo, we will never get any peace unless you satisfy that poor waif," said Chiun.

  "She's no more waif than I am Steven Seagal."

  A passenger went forward to the crew compartment, and the copilot came back wearing a stiff expression.

  He had to step over three stewardesses in order to reach Remo's seat.

  "I understand you've been bothering the stewardesses."

  "Not me," Remo said defensively.

  "It is a federal offense to tamper with the crew of a commercial carrier, sir. Especially in flight."

  "Okay, okay, I'll do it. Anything to get some peace and quiet." Remo stood up. "Is that all right with everybody?"

  The stewardess in her underwear piped up from the floor. "Yes!" It was very a enthusiastic yes. Reluctantly Remo escorted her to the galley, and the stewardess stood with her eyes closed and her cleavage thrust forward as if on a serving platter.

  "You may begin wherever you like," she murmured. Remo lifted her left hand by the wrist and turned it over.

  "Oooh, I feel shivery already."

  "Me, too," Remo said without enthusiasm. Holding the underside of her wrist up, Remo began tapping on it methodically.

  "Whatever you're doing, keep it up."

  "It's called foreplay."

  "I never had foreplay like this."

  "And you never will again," said Remo.

  "Oh, don't say that!"

  Remo continued tapping, achieving a rhythm and bringing it higher and higher until the fleshy face of the stewardess began to tighten like a fine clock being wound.

  This was the first in the thirty-seven steps to sexual fulfillment the Master of Sinanju had taught Remo long ago. There was a sensitive nerve in the human wrist, unsuspected by Gloria Steinem, that could be manipulated until a woman achieved a delicious kind of whole-body orgasm.

  At least that was how it sounded to the expectant passengers and crew of the TWA 747 when the stewardess's screams of pleasure began rolling down the aisles and back up again like a very long wave sloshing between two stone jetties.

  When Remo stepped out from the galley, he was greeted with a standing ovation.

  The other stewardesses began lining up with expectant faces.

  "Sorry. One orgasm per flight," said Remo, brushing past them and sliding back into his seat, next to the Master of Sinanju, who sat with his hands clapped over his delicate ears.

  "It's over," Remo told him.

  Chiun removed his hands. "It is disgusting what these white women will do."

  "Actually she tended more to olive skinned."

  "Green is not a healthy color, but for a white it is healthier than the fish-belly coloring you unfortunate people are cursed with."

  Twenty minutes later they landed at Kennedy International Airport, and no one got off. Instead, the empty seats filled up.

  The black-haired stewardess was carried unconscious out of the galley and poured into a jumpseat, where she smiled dreamily all through the flight over the Atlantic.

  "So, where are we going?"

  "Iberia."

  "Oh, yeah? What's in Iberia?"

  "Us. Provided the wings do not fall off."

  TWO HOURS over the Atlantic, Remo had read every magazine and was bored. The stewardesses started looking at him with appealing eyes, and they kept moistening their lips with their tongues until their mouths became pale and their tongues turned assorted Maybelline colors.

  So Remo pretended to sleep in his seat. And because he was bored, he willed himself to drop off.

  Remo Williams dreamed.

  In the dream he was standing before a cave. It was an impenetrable black maw, but as he stood before the opening, mists began rolling toward him with a hungry eagerness.

  Remo tried to peer past the white swirl to see what was making mist emerge from a cave, but he saw only more vapor.

  The mist was white, vaporous, ghostly. It shone with an inner luminance.

  And deep within the cave, Remo heard the approaching sound of a beating human heart.

  "Who's in there?" Remo asked in his dream. The heartbeat continued its approach.

  In his dream Remo's own heartbeat began to accelerate. He willed it to stabilize.

  "Who's in there?" Remo repeated.

  The mist suddenly regathered, intensified and filled the cave entrance like flowing cotton spiderwebs. When it was as opaque as milk, it started to swirl outward. Remo dropped into a defensive posture, legs bent at the knees, hands hovering at his belt line, right hand a fist, left a spear point of stiffened fingers. When the man stepped out, he seemed to be clothed in mist. Smoky tendrils clung to his lean, wiry form. "Who the hell are you?" Remo asked.

  "I am the first," he said in a hollow, dead voice. "The first what?"

  "The first," repeated the tiny man dressed in mist.

  "What do you want?" Remo demanded, keeping his guard up.

  "You must best me. If you can."

  Remo grunted a confident laugh. "I could take you with both hands tied behind my back."

  "That you must prove," said the man dressed in mist. Only then did Remo get a good look at his face. It was Asian. The man had no eyes. The loose skin of his eyelids were sunken hollows and stitched shut with catgut. He advanced purposefully.

  Remo watched his movements, and the phrase that came to his mind was cream puff.

  The eyeless man walked right into a nerve punch that compressed his entire rib cage, exploded the air from his lungs and laid him flat on his back.

  As the mist from the cave strove forward to wash over him, the blind Asian intoned, "I was only the first."

  "Good for you," said Remo, eyes snapping open.

  "WHAT IS GOOD FOR ME?" asked Chiun, turning in his seat.

  The dull whine of jet engines filled Remo's ears. "Nothing. I was dreaming."

  "Quickly!" Chiun clutched Remo's arm. "What did the hussy say this time?"

  "Let go of me. She didn't say anything. I didn't dream of her. Not that last time was a dream."

  "You dreamed?"

  "Yes."

  "Sitting here next to me with a full six hours of sleep from last night and another ten minutes on top of that, you dreamed?"

  "Yes, I dreamed. Break my saber in two and tear off my chevrons, I dreamed."


  Chiun regarded his pupil with narrowing eyes. "Of what did you dream, Remo?" he asked, thin voiced.

  "Nothing."

  "Speak!"

  "A cave. I dreamed of a cave."

  "You had another vision?"

  "I don't think it was the same cave. Anyway, I didn't go in to find out."

  "Good. If you dream of that cave again, do not enter it. If you disobey me, then do not tell me what you saw in that cave, for I do not want to know. Unless it is very important, of course."

  "Something came out of the cave."

  "What?"

  "A guy."

  "Guy? What kind of guy? Speak his name."

  "He didn't give one. He challenged me to a fight for no reason."

  "And what happened?"

  Remo shrugged unconcernedly. "What do you think? I laid him flat with one shot."

  "Ah," said Chiun. "Good. You killed him"

  "Nah. I just laid him out."

  "Why did you say 'Good for you' in your sleep?"

  "He said he was only the first."

  Chiun's eyes suddenly thinned to unreadable slits. "What did this man look like, my son?"

  "He was Asian. Looked like someone gouged his eyes out and stitched the lids shut."

  Chiun nodded to himself. "Was this man Korean?"

  Remo shook his head. "Maybe. But he was covered in mist."

  "Mist?"

  "Yeah, mist. There was mist coming from the cave. It clung to him. That was the weird part. He was dressed in white mist. Wonder what that means."

  "Why should it mean anything?" snapped Chiun.

  "I read an article about dreams a few months back," Remo said. "Scientists say they're the unconscious mind's way of processing the day's events, mixing them with fantasy and crazy stuff so the brain can work through its fears and concerns."

  "Pah. White superstitions."

  "You should talk. You think I'm the reincarnation of Shiva the Destroyer."

  "You are."

  "And of an old Sinanju Master named Lu."

  "You are Lu, too."

  "I'm Remo Williams and I haven't had a real dream about Sinanju that I can remember since the Dream of Death. That's gotta be over ten years ago."

  "You are who you are. Just because you do not understand who you are does not mean you are not what you are."

  "I can understand the cave. It's my brain working through the vision. But who was the eyeless guy and why was he wearing mist instead of clothing?"

  "Perhaps he was a poor vagabond in search of a home."

  "I wish I understood dreams."

  "I wish I understood whites," said Chiun, dismissing the subject with a careless wave of his clicking fingernails.

  But when Remo glanced over at him a few minutes later, the Master of Sinanju's wrinkled visage was tense with a dark foreboding.

  Chapter 5

  When Remo deplaned, the TWA stewardesses were all lined up at the exit door, tears in their eyes.

  They waved him goodbye, patting him on the back, wishing him a happy stay in Madrid, and felt his strong lean biceps wistfully.

  One gave him an affectionate pat on the backside, and when he and Chiun reached the terminal, Remo sensed he was being followed.

  "Little Father, are those stewardesses following us?"

  "No," said Chiun.

  "Good."

  "They are following you."

  "Rats."

  Outside the terminal a fight started over who would share a cab with Remo.

  "No one's sharing a cab with me," said Remo, pulling spitting and clawing stewardesses off one another and making two piles.

  Instantly the stewardesses pulled nail files and pen knives and held them to their pulsing throats.

  "I'd rather die than not share a cab with you," one sobbed.

  "Me, too."

  Remo threw up his hands. "Okay. Okay. I surrender. Everybody into the cab."

  There was a scramble to enter the cab. Remo obligingly held the doors open for the eager stewardesses. When the back seat filled up, he held open the front passenger's door. The driver was pushed out the other side by the crush of perfumed, uniformed bodies.

  A stewardess reached out and clapped his cap over her head, rolling up the driver's-side window to prevent him from recovering it.

  "Everybody comfy?" asked Remo. "Yes! Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes."

  "Good," said Remo, going from door to door and welding them shut with the high-speed friction of his rubbing palms.

  He left the trapped stewardesses fighting the windows open so they could squeeze out.

  "What the hell's going on?" Remo complained to the Master of Sinanju as they walked away. "I always have problems with loose stewardesses, but never this bad."

  "You are obviously baiting them with your manly allures."

  "That's another thing. What about my rights as a man? That first stewardess all but tried to rape me, but I had to satisfy her. If it was the other way around, I'd have been the one up on charges."

  "Aggressor."

  "Get off it."

  When the next cab in line pulled up, Chiun entered and told the driver in perfect Spanish, "Pompelo."

  "Que?" said the driver.

  "Pompelo," Chiun repeated. And when the driver continued looking blank, he added, "San Fermin."

  "Ah," said the driver. He hit the gas just as Remo's foot left the pavement. Remo got the door shut in time to see the airport Exit sign flash by.

  "Where are we going?" he asked Chiun.

  "To a pleasant little town below the Pyrenees."

  "What's it called?"

  "It was founded by one of Pompey's sons. The cross-eyed one, if I recall the scrolls of my ancestors correctly."

  "Do you recall a name?"

  "Pompelo."

  "Never heard of it. I've heard of Pamplona, but not Pompelo."

  Chiun made a face. "These modern Iberians cannot even pronounce the names of their better towns. Pah." The cab took them out of Madrid at high speed and through lush, climbing Spanish countryside. The early-July air was brisk and invigorating. There were many white churches along the way.

  On the way, Remo saw a road sign that read Pamplona-300 km.

  "That's two hundred miles."

  "If we are going to Pamplona. We are not. We are going to Pompelo," said Chiun.

  They drove for nearly four hours through hills and valleys with the Pyrenees always looming off to the east. When the mountains petered out into a flat plain, they reached their destination.

  It was a plain-looking city dominated by industrial smokestacks and the brick of factory buildings. Remo said, "The sign says Pamplona."

  "It is really Pompelo."

  As they entered town, it became clear a festival of some sort was in progress. The streets were clogged by cars, tourists from all nations staggered about in various stages of inebriation. Soon traveling by car became more trouble than it was worth.

  In perfect Spanish, Chiun paid off the driver and they got out in a broad plaza that reeked of history. "What's going on?" asked Remo as two men stumbled by wearing red sashes and long ropes of garlic hung around their necks.

  "Some pagan festival," sniffed Chiun as a man in an ordinary suit coat and an exaggerated papier-mache head the size of a suitcase staggered by.

  "I'm not in the mood for festivities."

  "It is a Christian celebration, dedicated to a Moorish saint called San Fermin."

  "I didn't know there were Moorish saints."

  "The Moors once ruled this land after the Christian upstarts had pulled it down from its lofty Roman greatness. It was inevitable that in a moment of weakness one would succumb to carpenter worship. Perhaps while we are here, you would like to light a candle to San Fermin."

  "No, thanks."

  "Good," said Chiun, leading Remo to a street stall where a vendor sold an assortment of red cotton sashes and scarves.

  After bickering with the merchant, the Master of Sinanju purchased one of each i
tem and offered them to Remo with a polite dip of a bow and an air of quiet ceremony.

  "Don these."

  Remo examined the items critically. "What are they?"

  "What do they look like?"

  "A red sash and matching scarf."

  "Then you should know which to wrap around your neck and which goes about your flabby middle without instruction from me."

  "My middle is not flabby," said Remo, snatching the limp swatches of red cotton from Chiun's fingers. "You have gained over an ounce in the last five years. I suspect you of sneaking sweets when my back is turned."

  "Your back is never turned," said Remo, tying the sash around his waist so the broad end hung over his right front pocket. The red scarf went around his neck with a quick tie.

  "Now what?" he asked.

  Chiun beckoned with a crooked yellow finger. "Follow."

  At what appeared from the outside to be a stadium, Chiun bought them tickets and they took front-row seats among a growing crowd of drunken revelers. Many were passed out in their seats.

  "We going to see a bullfight?"

  "You will not," said Chiun.

  "Huh?"

  And the Master of Sinanju leaped without warning into the dirt-floored ring.

  "What are you doing?" demanded Remo, jumping down to join him.

  He looked around warily. There was no sign of any bulls or horses or matadors. In fact, the more he looked around, the more Remo was reminded of a rodeo ring. At one end a wooden corral gate lay agape. It led out of the ring and up a narrow chute obviously meant for the bulls.

  The Master of Sinanju ignored his pupil and instead went padding about the ring, his head bowed, his eyes intent on the ground upon which he walked.

  "What are you looking for?" asked Remo.

  "Shush," said Chiun, continuing his perambulations.

  When he reached a certain spot, Chiun indicated it with a pointing fingernail. "Dig."

  "For what?"

  "Dig, and the what will reveal itself."

  Shrugging, Remo dropped to one knee and began scratching dirt away from the spot where the Master of Sinanju pointed so sternly.

  From the stands they were watched. But not challenged.

  Remo used his hands to spank away the loose dirt that had been pounded dry by the tread of men and the hooves of beasts. When he reached the darker, moister subsoil, he used the tips of his fingers to excavate. A pile formed, pale at the base but darker as it grew.