Voodoo Die td-33 Read online

  "Wait," said the captain, his hand on his bulging .45-caliber pistol on his belt. "What you mean, yellow man, that I sing nice?"

  "Very nicely," said Chiun, his voice as sweet as a nightingale. "You will this day sing 'God Bless America' and mean it so profoundly that all will say your voice is as sweet as lark's whisper."

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  "I choke on me tongue first, yellow man," spat the captain.

  "No," said Chiun. "You choke on your tongue later."

  There was a bit of delicacy required in this. The green trunk held tapes of American daytime television dramas and they might not have been packed that solidly. They had to come down gently from above the porter's head, where he still held the trunk, so with a smooth and constant rhythm Chiun's hands flashed out and closed on the left knee of the porter and then the right. It looked as if the old parchment hands were warming the knees. The captain waited for the porter to drop the trunk and crush the fool.

  But then the captain saw the porter's knees do what he had never before seen knees do. There were the shoes. There were the shins and the knees just seemed to sink inside the pants down into the shoes-and the porter was eighteen inches shorter. And then the waist seemed to collapse and the old Oriental in the kimono moved around the porter like a peeling machine and a look of horror was on the porter's face, his mouth opening to scream but the lungs were a . mess just beneath his throat and the trunk teetered on the top of his head momentarily, but then his chin was on the runway and his hands were stretched out lifeless beneath it and, with one long fingernail, the Oriental was under the trunk, working the porter's head, until the green lacquer glittered above its blood and pulp base. The television tapes were safe.

  The porter was not much more than a stain.

  "God, He bless America," sang the captain, hoping the tune somewhat resembled the gringo song. He sure smiled big for his American friends.

  "We all called Americans," laughed the captain.

  Those are not the word to that great nation's song

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  which has wisely chosen to employ the House of Sinanju, Remo will teach you the words. He knows American songs."

  "I know some of them," Remo said. "What are the words?" begged the captain. "I dunno," said Remo. "Hum something." The captain, who always loved the United States with all his heart-he had a sister in the States and she loved America almost as much as he-ordered his company to make sure not one ounce of harm came to any of the trunks. He would shoot the first man who dropped one of the trunks. Personally he would do the shooting.

  A corporal from Hosania Province, famous for the locals' laziness, complained about some dead and sticky meat underneath the green trunk on the runway.

  The captain shot him through the head as an object lesson to all the soldiers in his command how neighbors should love each other and no one loved America more than the captain. Especially yellow Americans.

  Eighty-five Baqian soldiers marched from the airport to the Astarse Hotel singing "God, He love America" to a conga beat. The fourteen trunks went atop their heads like some fat snake with shiny square parts.

  The procession passed the presidential palace and went into the front door of the Astarse. "Best room in house," said the captain. "I'm sorry, captain. But all the rooms are filled." "Rooms, they never filled at the Astarse. We have tourist problem."

  "They fill now, hey hey," said the clerk. "They got weapons upstairs you never see. They got "em big." And the clerk spread his arms. "They got 'em small."

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  And the clerk closed two fingers together. "And they use 'em good. We lose three soldiers yesterday. Yes, we do."

  "I work at airport," said the captain. "I hear trouble here, but I don't hear what kind."

  "Sure. Them soldier fellas, they don't tell you, captain, so when there's an order to come here, dummy fellas like you, you come and get killed, fella. That's what you get, fella."

  'The bastards," muttered the captain. He was thinking of his superior officers. They must have known. They were offering assignments to watch tourists at lower rates. A captain in the Baqian army, like other Spanish-speaking officers everywhere, no matter what their politics, engaged in rugged-individualism capitalism.

  They believed so fiercely in the free market system they would put a banker to shame. It was an honored tradition, no worse in Baqia than anywhere else in the Caribbean. One paid for a commission in the army. That was an investment. As an officer, you used your rank to earn back the investment with a profit. Sometimes, if you were poor, you repaid with loyalty. You bought good assignments. An airport with its commerce was fairly good. But a tourist hotel with its prostitutes and illegal smuggling sales was a delight in the generals' eyes. The captain had known there was trouble because the price for a hotel assignment was going down.

  He had thought it was worth the risk and was going to put in a bid for the job. But now this generous clerk had warned him. Generous? The captain had suspicious second thoughts.

  "Why you tell me this?" asked the captain. He hoisted his belly up briefly, a notch above his gunbelt.

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  "I don't want to be here when everybody tries to settle who has what room."

  The captain rubbed his chin. This problem. He looked back at the delicate Oriental with the wisps of white hair. The captain smiled very broadly. He was not about to forget the porter, who was now a form of tapioca on the main runway of the International Airport. Then again, if a clerk gave something for nothing, there must be something horrible upstairs.

  "I give you free information," confided the captain, "It is in return for your free information. You better give that nice little old yellow man a room."

  "I will, senor captain, right now. But first evict its occupants. You might want to start with the Bulgarians on the second floor. They have the machine gun covering the hallway and they put sandbags around the walls of their room, and this morning when I complained because they didn't send the bellboy back and they had no right to keep him upstairs that long, because we shorthanded down here, they send me this."

  The clerk took a hatbox from beneath the counter and, turning his head, removed the cover. The captain peered in. Wrapped in wax paper were severed human hands.

  "You look at remains of bellboy."

  "He must have been a wonderful bellboy," commiserated the captain.

  "Why you say that?" asked the clerk.

  "How much help has three hands?"

  The clerk peered into the box. "And the second cook, too. I didn't even know. And the Bulgarians are the peaceful ones."

  The clerk went down a list. There were Russians and Chinese, British, Cubans, Brazilians, Syrians, Is-

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  raelis, South Africans, Nigerians, and Swedes. There were also fourteen free-lance adventurers. All of them there to try to steal Baqia's new weapon.

  "And I'm not counting the liberation groups still in the field waiting for rooms," said the clerk.

  "Who's out now? Any of the rooms empty?" asked the captain.

  "I'm afraid to check, but I think the British lobbed a couple of mortar shells down a stairwell early this morning. They usually do that when they go out for tea or something."

  The captain clicked his heels and saluted.

  "Senor American, we have a wonderful room for you," he said.

  Crawling on their bellies, the first wave of Baqian enlisted men managed to get two trunks up the main stairway. One wedged open a door with a crowbar. The South Africans had opened up with small-arms fire that had been answered by the Russians, who thought the Bulgarians were at it again. Two Baqian corporals struggled back down the stairs, one clutching an arm shattered by a bullet that had left it dangling.

  They had opened up a passage to move all the trunks into the second-floor east room and, except for a small booby trap at the door, there seemed to be no British presence in the room.

  The clerk had been right. Second floor 2-E was temporarily unoccupied. All fourteen trunks man
aged to be winched and dragged into the room with only one more casualty. A young boy from the docks, who had just finished basic training a week before and whose father had paid to have him assigned to the airport, where he would have a chance for promotion without danger, caught a direct hit in the forehead.

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  He was brought down under a sheet that would have been white had it ever been washed.

  When the way was cleared for the yellow American with the very unusual hands, Chiun entered 2-E. He stepped over the white sheet covering the young man just outside the entrance.

  The captain waited nervously. He wanted to politely say goodbye to this dangerous American and also get out of the hotel with as many living men as possible.

  "Where are you going?" asked Chiun. "We have taken you to room, yes? You like, yes?" "The towels are not clean. The sheets are not clean." Chiun looked toward the window. "Where is the bay? This room does not have a view of the bay. Those beds have been slept in. Where are the maids? Ice? There should be ice. I do not like ice, but there should be ice." Chiun examined the bathroom.

  "The other rooms, they are no better, senor," said the captain.

  "The ones that look over the bay are," said Chiun. "I bet they have clean towels and sheets too."

  "Senor, we are greatly afraid, but someone of your illustrious wisdom and abilities and personage could succeed where we have failed. Should you arrange for another room, the Baqian armed forces stand ready to deliver your trunks. In salute to your magnificence."

  Chiun smiled. Remo muttered under his breath that now he was going to hear how Chiun was finally getting the proper respect. Groveling servitude, like the captain's, always brought out the best in Chiun. Speech down, the captain backed out of the room. Chiun raised a single long fingernail toward Remo.

  "As an assassin, you must learn not only to carry out your emperor's wishes, but to go beyond them to

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  what not only is good but appears good. Your President thinks he wants a machine, quietly delivered, and the respect of the people of Baqia, and the world."

  "Little Father," said Remo, "I think the President wants us in and out without trouble, with the doohickey that Corazon has. I think that's what he wants."

  "There is a lack of elegance to that, you know," said Chiun. "It is like a thief, stealing."

  "I was in the same oval office with the President that you were. I heard what he said."

  Chiun smiled. "And if he wanted typical shoddy workmanship, he would have used American. He would have given the assignment to you. But no. He gave it to me. He has chosen Sinanju and thus his name, whatever it is, will shine in history."

  "You don't know the name of the President of the United States?" asked Remo incredulously.

  "You keep changing them," said Chiun. "I learned one. He had a funny name and then there was someone else. And soon there was someone else. And one of those was an amateur assassination." Chiun shook his head. He did not like America's penchant for amateur assassinations, hate killings, and all manner of devilment that made these people barbarians. What they needed and what they would now get was elegance, the sun source of all the martial arts, Sinanju.

  Across the main street in the presidential palace compound, Dr. Bissel Hunting Jameson IV, second assistant director of the British Royal Academy of Science, did not know that his room had been taken by someone else.

  He and his staff were all immaculately attired in

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  white summer trousers, blue blazer with Royal Academy seal, white bucks, school ties, and Walther P-38's tailored into their shirts. They held straw skimmers in their hands and they were the only ones ever seen in Baqia who could cross Route 1 in midday, midsummer, wearing these clothes without raising a sweat.

  It was as if this race of men had been bred with internal cooling systems.

  The offer being made by Dr. Jameson, in rich aristocratic English emanating from the bowels and resonating out through the mouth, with each vowel a trumpeting declaration of basic natural superiority, was this:

  Britain shared Baqia's destiny. Britain too was an island. Britain, like Baqia, had national interests and faced currency problems. Together, Britain and Baqia could march forward exploiting both Baqia's new discovery and Britain's experience in manufacturing secret devices.

  By the time Dr. Jameson finished, if one did not know that Baqia was an island slum of shacks and abandoned sugar fields and Britain was an industrialized nation somewhat on hard times, an observer would have concluded that Her Majesty's government and the current dictator of a rock protrusion in the Caribbean shared a common heritage and future.

  Corazon listened to these white men.

  They had paid what was now the standard fee to see the machine in operation. In gold. Corazon liked gold. You could trust gold. He especially liked Kru-gerrands.

  Corazon's minister of treasury pocketed two coins as he counted. Corazon noticed this. Corazon felt good. He was an honest treasurer. A thief would have

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  stolen fifteen coins. There were stories about men who stole nothing, but they were just stories, Corazon knew. The gringos stole also, he knew. But they seemed to have it better organized, so you never saw the coins disappear while they explained they were really trying to help you.

  "For you," said Corazon, "we will execute a rapist right before your eyes with my great powers."

  "We wait anxiously," said Dr. Jameson. "Being somewhat of an expert on the subject of voodoo, although not of course such an authority as your excellency, we have never heard of a 'protector spirit' such as the one in your box." Dr. Jameson smiled.

  "The white man's powers are one thing, the black's and brown's are another. That is why you no understand. I do not understand this atomic bomb of yours and you do not understand my protector spirit," said Corazon, who had coined the phrase when the Russians had been there earlier that morning for their demonstration.

  "Bring on the vicious rapist that he may taste the vengeance of his community. Yes?"

  Dr. Jameson's delegation eased the minicameras and microinstruments out of their pockets. Sometimes, with an unsophisticated device in its early stages, its very design might divulge its secrets.

  Generalissimo Corazon kept the machine under a blue velvet drape at his left beside the gilded Presidential throne chair, which was set on a small platform.

  The vicious rapist turned out to be a middle-aged black woman with a red bandana and an orange dress.

  "Excuse me," announced Corazon. "We did the rapist this morning. That one is guilty of arch treason

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  and plotting to blow up Ciudad Natividado and other horrible things."

  The woman spat.

  "Sir," whispered an aide into Jameson's ear. "That's the madam of the whorehouse. She's a second cousin to the Generalissimo. Why would he be killing her on that obviously trumped-up charge?"

  Corazon watched the gringo aide whisper in the gringo ear and he had a question of his own. Criminals were one thing. But a second cousin who also had some control with spirits and who sent some of her brothel profits to El Presidente was another.

  "Why we kill Juanita?" asked Corazon.

  "She was making magic against you," said the new minister of justice.

  "What kind?"

  "Mountain magic. Saying you are a dead man."

  "A lie," said Corazon.

  "Yes. Most yes," said the minister. "You are all-powerful. Yes."

  Corazon squinted at Juanita. She knew her women and she knew her men. She knew her magic. Was this some strange game? Did she say it at all? Should he ask her? Wouldn't she lie?

  Corazon thought deeply about these things and finally he summoned her to him. Two soldiers held her wrists at the end of chains. They followed her.

  Corazon leaned forward and whispered into his second cousin's ear.

  "Say, Juanita, what is this they tell me about you, that you make the magic against me, heh?"

  One
of the Britons just behind Dr. Jameson eased a dial in his pocket and turned his left shoulder toward Corazon and the woman. Everything being whispered would be picked up by the miniature directional mike

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  built into the small shoulder pad on the left side of his jacket. Even if Corazon did not give Britain the secret of the machine, M.I.5 could break the secret, and that would at least come in handy to show the Generalissimo the power of Great Britain. Something along the lines of "We have ears everywhere."

  Juanita whispered something back. And Corazon asked again why she had made magic against him.

  And Juanita whispered something else in her cousin's ear.

  Generalissimo Sacristo Corazon bolted upright. Instead of the languid snakelike motions of a serpent ready to strike, Corazon himself jumped.

  He grabbed the velvet cover from the black box and threw it in the face of his new minister of justice. He spat on the marble floor. He spat on the box. He spat into his cousin Juanita's face.

  "Whore," he called her. "I make you into nothing."

  "No matter," said the woman. "Nothing, it matters. Nothing. Nothing."

  Corazon, not so wild as to forget his greatest enemies were always his closest allies, turned the phony dials he had mounted on the machine. Secret British cameras and other instrumentation among the Jameson party went into action.

  "I give you last chance. Last chance. Whose magic is strongest?"

  "Not yours. Never yours."

  "Goodbye," said Corazon. "And now look at whose magic is strongest."

  For a moment Corazon worried. The last time he had used the machine, it had taken too long to thaw the Umibian ambassador. He pressed the control button. The little gasoline engine whirred away, activating the cathode tube by providing electricity. The

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  cathode rays interacted with what the natives called mung and the power was built up. It was released with a crack and a green glow, and the brightly colored orange dress sighed and collapsed over a dark puddle that had been the madam of the finest brothel in Baqia.

  "Impressive," said Dr. Jameson. "We would like to join with you, Britain and Baqia, sister islands in a joint defense."