The Arms of Kali td-59 Read online

  On their way to the Holy Temple, where Kali received the kiss to Her followers, Her loyal servants ate the traditional raw sugar and said the prayers again. They wrapped the forty dollars in the holy rumal, and with songs of praise and the raw sugar still on their lips, went before the Holy One, who had been brought to America by Kali. They intoned prayers for Kali and recitations of the victim's pain, which was wine for Her lips."

  Ban Sar Din heard the prayers, heard the recitations of devotion from the followers, and waited until the holy rumal was placed at his feet. Then he nodded sagely at the bowing devotees.

  "Kali has tasted the sweetness of death again because of you, beloved followers," he said, and then added something in the language of Bangalore, his native Indian city. Americans liked that. Especially the kids. The kids were the best. They were complete jerks.

  Ban Sar Din gave the holy strangler phansigar a fresh rumal and took the closed death cloth with a grunt of gratitude. A quick glance inside told him only forty dollars.

  Impossible, he thought. Even on a just Folks consumer-fare flight, they would be losing money on a forty-dollar take. And that was just one fare. What about the other fares? What about those times when there was no one for them to set up? The overhead was enormous. The lights alone for the temple cost $120 a month. What was the matter with these kids? Forty dollars. Impossible.

  When Ban Sar Din retreated for private devotions into his solitary office, the cold brutal fact hit him when he saw three tens, a five, and five singles. It was forty dollars. This group of yo-yos had wasted a consumer-bonus fare for forty dollars. He wanted to run back into the temple and kick them out.

  How the hell did they think he was going to meet his budget?

  The yellow handkerchiefs were going up. He used to be able to get a gross for $87.50, and that included the printed likeness of Kali. Now a gross of something barely strong enough to strangle a neck bigger than a chicken's cost $110, and if you wanted printed pictures, forget the whole thing. And the other pictures of Kali. They went well, but prices were rising there too. And candles. Everybody in America was burning candles, and prices had gone up like smoke.

  So with strangling cloths going up, candles out of sight, printing prohibitive, and it only a matter of time before just Folks raised its fares to meet the competitors', Ban Sar Din realized he was going broke at forty dollars a pop.

  But how was he going to tell these American hooples to at least look to see if the victim was wearing an expensive watch? Was that too much to ask? Look for an expensive watch before you send the demon on his way to Kali.

  That didn't seem like a lot to ask. But he didn't know. He never knew about Americans or America. He had come to the country seven years before, with only a six-month visa and his quick wits. Back in Bangalore, the ruling magistrate had let him know that he wasn't wanted on the streets of the city and if he were caught picking another Indian pocket, the police were going to take him into an alley and beat his dark brown skin purple.

  Then a friend told him about the wonders of America. In the United States, if you were caught picking a pocket, you were given a room to yourself and three good meals a day. It was supposed to be punishment. Americans called it jail.

  You could even get free legal help, and because Americans thought that any kind of punishment was too harsh, they were even experimenting with making the opposite sex available so that prisoners wouldn't be lonely. They had taken away the bars too, and given prisoners free education so they could make money outside jail by working if they chose to, although not too many did. And who could blame them, when jail was so good?

  "I do not believe such a place like this exists," Ban Sar Din had told his friend.

  "True. It is like that in America."

  "You lie. No one is that stupid. No country."

  "Not only do they do all these things, but if a person who is rewarded for killing and robbing kills and robs again, guess who they blame?"

  "I don't know."

  "Themselves," his friend had said.

  "You lie," Ban Sar Din spat.

  "They gave India fifteen billion dollars in grain, and look at how we treat them. Fifteen billion when a billion was a lot of money even for Americans."

  "They can't be that rich and that stupid. How do they survive?" Ban Sar Din asked.

  "They have a very big ocean on both sides of them." Ban Sar Din crossed one of those oceans with his very last penny and immediately went about picking pockets, expecting to get caught and go to this wonderful place called jail. Then one day some white man on a park bench near Lake Pontchartrain spoke to him. "Where did I go wrong?" the white man said.

  Ban Sar Din would have left, but his hand was solidly inside the man's trouser pocket.

  The man furrowed his brows. "We are a vacant, empty society," he said.

  Ban Sar Din tried to get his hand out but couldn't, so he nodded.

  "I am vacant, too," the man said.

  Ban Sar Din nodded again. He was only five feet tall and weighed less than one hundred pounds. He did not have the leverage to just yank free.

  He had black hair and eyes and dark brown skin and he had expected people in America to single him out because of that. Everyone in Bangalore had the same coloring, but in America people were different colors, but none of them ever died in the streets no matter what their color. In Bangalore, there were often demonstrations on behalf of the racially oppressed in America, and everyone marched, except of course the untouchables, who, when they tried to demonstrate along with the other castes, were beaten to death or flogged from the streets.

  "What can I do to make amends?" the white man asked.

  "Lean forward a bit to I can get my hand out of your pocket," Ban Sar Din suggested.

  "Forward. Yes, of course. I've been looking at the past, turning in on myself and the tragedies of the past. I have to look forward."

  "And twist a bit," Ban Sar Din said.

  "Of course. Twist. Change. Are you telling me all change is possible?" asked the man on the bench. Ban Sar Din smiled.

  "You smile. Do you think my struggles ludicrous?" asked the man. "Or do they have a deeper, more transcendental meaning?"

  The hand was almost loose from the pocket now. "Up," said Ban Sar Din.

  "Higher than transcendental?"

  "Stand, please."

  "You are beyond me in your wisdom," said the man, slowly getting to his feet. "I know money is meaningless to you, but here, let me give you something."

  He took the wallet out of his rear pocket along with the limp brown hand that was clutching it. Ban Sar Din knew now he had succeeded. The man would surely call the police. Then, glorious jail.

  "You knew I wanted to give you everything, didn't you?" the man said. "You understood my problem." He kissed Ban Sar Din's limp hand and pressed the wallet forward. "Yours," he said.

  Ban Sar Din backed away, suspicious, and the man said, "No. Yours, please. I have been enlightened. I have been freed from the bonds of materialism. I am going to free myself from everything that binds, and I owe it all to you. What can I do for you, friend?"

  "Do you have any change also?" asked Ban Sar Din as he made a great realization: picking Americans' pockets were not nearly as profitable as picking their minds.

  It was a revelation and it proved to be a turning point. Ban Sar Din found that in America nothing was unsellable, no matter how stupid, if you put a towel on the head of a salesman and called it mystical.

  The problem was which religion. Most of the good ones were taken already and were doing land-office business. One of them even had people paying good money in the belief that they would be able to learn to levitate.

  Then, on a rainy afternoon in downtown New Orleans, Ban Sar Din remembered the old robbers of the highways.

  Before the British came, an Indian could hardly travel from one province to another without an army to guard him.

  But during the British oppression, as he had learned to call it, schools wer
e started, courts of law were established, and roads to enable the peasants to engage in commerce were established.

  But there was a problem on the roads. There were the servants of Kali, called the Thuggees. Their religion told them to rob travelers, but never to spill blood. It was so successful that both Hindus and Muslims, in a rare sharing of a doctrine, formed Thuggee bands, from which the word "thug" came into use through the English-speaking world. The British Colonial Office, in their rigid backwardness, thought it improper to have bands of killers prowling the roads, preying on travelers, so after years of constant policework, they finally hanged the last of the lot.

  Ban Sar Din checked around. No one was using Kali. He went to an old junk shop and found a statue of the goddess. The price was surprisingly low, and after paying it, and safely holding the statue in his arms, he asked the store owner why he had sold it so cheaply.

  "Because the damn thing's haunted, that's why," the store owner said. "Came in on a ship a hundred years ago, and anybody who owned it died badly. It's all yours, my friend."

  Ban Sar Din was no one's fool, and certainly not fool enough to believe in one god from a country that had twenty thousand of them.

  He rented an old storefront for use as an ashram and installed the statue at the front of it.

  And then things started to happen. Students made the first good converts. They told him stories of how before their conversion, they had been timid and frightened. But as soon as they had placed their first rumal around a throat, power had come to them.

  The converts themselves taught Ban Sar Din, whom they called the Holy One, new intricacies of the cult of Kali, the goddess of death. He never knew where they were getting their information or how they were learning Indian words. Then, one horrible night, he had a dream and the goddess with all her arms talked to him.

  "Little pickpocket," she said in his dream, "I have let you live because you have brought me to my new home. Little pickpocket, I have hungered these many years for the death struggles of victims again. Little pickpocket, do not interfere with the rituals of death. I love them."

  He ran out into the deserted ashram and looked at the cheap statue, which he had not even bothered to repaint. It had grown another arm, and there was no seam, no paint, nothing to show that the arm had not always been there, nothing but Ban Sar Din's memory. It frightened him so much that he decided he had been wrong about the number of arms and put it out of his mind.

  By this time, the little Indian weighed 240 pounds and looked like a giant M the candy coating. He was also wearing one-thousand-dollar suits and driving a Porsche 911SC. He was wintering in Jamaica, summering in Maine, and hitting the French Riviera twice a year in between, all for handing out little yellow handkerchiefs and getting them back with money in them.

  He knew, therefore, to leave well enough alone. So when forty dollars came back in a rumal, he gave the little jerks the Indian hocus-pocus they wanted and took the money. Although forty dollars in New Orleans would not even buy him a top-of-the-line meal.

  He did not know, during that evening of despair, that his money troubles would soon be over and that he would become far more dangerous than any little band that had ever terrorized an Indian highway.

  And as he went to sleep at his luxury penthouse that night, he did not know that back at the ashram, the chants were reaching a hysterical pitch.

  Holly Rodan, who had just that day made her first offering, noticed it first. That was her privilege for pleasing Kali.

  "It's growing, it's growing," she cried. A small brown nub was sprouting from the side of the statue, so slowly it looked as if it had always been there, so very slowly, but yet, when one blinked, one could see several smaller bumps, little things, like the beginnings of fingers on the beginning of a new arm.

  Kali was speaking to them, they all realized. She was growing another arm.

  And it too would have to be fed.

  Chapter Five

  Just Folks Airlines was making a few adjustments in flight-attendant profile-performance packages. Remo didn't understand what that meant, and a supervisor told him:

  "When someone has to go to a lav, you don't give him a lecture on bladder control."

  The supervisor was an attractive dark-haired woman with a pleasant smile and that sort of helpless determination people get when confronted by the reality that things are not going to work out well. She had already adjusted to just Folks no-frills consumer fare, and far from being embarrassed at the airline's policy of charging to use the bathrooms, she now regarded it as somewhat of a sacred duty.

  "We get a quarter every time they use a lav," she told Remo. "Four dollars near the end of the trip. So please don't have your partner give instructions on how not to go to the bathroom."

  "Why do you charge four dollars at the end of the trip?"

  "Mr. Baynes figures that people have to go worse at the end of a flight, so you can get a premium price. There's a lav-increment scale. Twenty-five cents on boarding, fifty cents right after takeoff, and so forth."

  "That's robbery," Remo said.

  "No one is forcing them to take our lav-time."

  "Where else are they going to go?"

  "They could plan ahead and use the johns at the airport."

  "What are we supposed to tell them when we ask for four dollars to use the bathroom?" Remo said.

  "We always suggest saying that fuel consumption increased near the end of the flight and mumble something about flush-to-fuel comparative expenditures."

  "I am not charging someone for a bodily function," said Remo.

  "Then the loss comes out of your pay."

  The first thing Remo did on the next flight was to give away the snacks and the sodas. He ripped the pay locks from the lavatory doors. He lent out the pillows without cost and urged the passengers to take them home as souvenirs. Then he carefully tried to see if anyone was setting someone up for a kill. He had learned that a college student who had been on his previous flight had been found murdered, strangled and robbed.

  Yet, on that flight, there had been no one giving off any sense of death.

  He asked Chiun about it later. "Do you give off a sense of death, Little Father?"

  "For me, death is not evil. So I do not," Chiun said.

  "Perhaps, then, there are others who don't think death is evil," Remo said. "Maybe they don't give off the sense of death either."

  "Perhaps."

  "I can't believe there are that many trained assassins who are petty robbers too," Remo said.

  "Perhaps they are not trained assassins. Perhaps there is another reason," Chiun said.

  "What reason?" asked Remo.

  "We will see," Chiun said, and turned away to check the passengers on the plane. He liked being a flight attendant, provided passengers did what they were told. What he liked best was ensuring their safety, telling them what they should do in the event of a crash.

  "The wings are always falling off planes like this," he would say. "When it happens, make your essence not part of the plane, but part of the pull of the planets."

  "Yeah? And just how do we do that?" asked a rotund woman in the smoking section.

  "Change your filthy eating habits first," said Chiun, who then decided that there would no longer be a smoking section on his just Folks flights. Instead, he told them to occupy their time with reading material. He passed out petitions and brief excerpts from an Ung poem praising the first petal of the first flower on the first morning of the new dawn.

  "I don't like that flowery crap," said one young man. "I'd rather smoke." Chiun showed him how he really didn't need a seat beak to stay transfixed to his seat. He did it with the young man's spinal column, and instantly the youth's appreciation of poetry rose. He loved the poem.

  Chiun said he did not want the young man to appreciate the poem because he was being forced to appreciate it, because then he would not really appreciate it at all. The youth swore over and over again that he was not being forced. There were
tears in his eyes.

  Chiun visited with passengers. He especially appreciated parents' tales of their children's ingratitude, and called Remo over to listen to many of them.

  And then Remo noticed a young blond woman with milkmaid skin, very interested in an elderly gentleman who was going on about the meaning of spastic fabrics in a nonspastic world, as he called it.

  Everyone around that seat was dozing, having been put under by the interminable Ung poetry. Except for the girl. Her blue eyes were wide, gaga with the wisdom of not trying to market nonspastic fabrics in a spastic world, and vice versa. The man was obviously a salesman of some sort. Remo knew this because the man talked in terms that could have been used reasonably only by Napoleon or Alexander the Great.

  The man had New England and South America. He would control Canada. He wouldn't move into Europe because that was held too tightly.

  Remo figured out that these were the man's sales areas. He never did quite figure out what a nonspastic fabric was, although he got the impression that it was used somehow in zippers.

  Remo thought he recognized the girl. He looked at the passenger list and saw her name was Holly Rodan. He asked to speak to her privately.

  "Don't be too long, honey," said the salesman. Remo brought the young woman up to the well between the cockpit and the seats. The copilot came out to talk to him.

  Remo said, "I'm busy."

  "Look, I'm a pilot and you're a steward. You're not even in uniform. You are going to make me a cup of coffee, do you understand?"

  Remo twisted the copilot's arm in the shape of a handle, stuck his head into the coffeepot, then delivered him back to the cockpit soaking wet.

  "You are now a cup of coffee," Remo said.

  Remo tried to talk to the young woman, but a passenger came up into the well wanting a drink. "Speak to the other one," Remo said.

  "He said to talk to you."

  "What do you want?"

  "I want a rum fizzle. Do you have a rum fizzle?"

  "Take whatever you want," Remo said.

  The passenger poked around in the liquor bin. Holly said she wanted to go back to her seat. She asked nicely and she was answered nicely. No.