The Mitsuzuki's giant screen blipped, and a man and woman appeared. They were seated behind a stylishly modern desk that conspicuously lacked a modesty panel. More annoying than their perfectly sculpted hairdos, than his impeccably tailored gray Armani silk suit or her red Adolfo, more annoying even than his reliance on dimples to drive home a point or her habit of crossing and recrossing her long legs under the table, were their matching, synthetically earnest expressions.
"Peephole USA" was one of those tabloid-news magazines that specialized in "T and T." Titillate and Terrify. And its producers were only truly content when they accomplished both objects in the one-minute feature story. With respective dimples and upper thighs bared, Jed and Molly were doing their standard chitchat wrap-up of a tale called "When Easter Bunnies Attack-the Texas Day Care Nightmare."
Chiun immediately read the handwriting on the wall. "You wish these two people dead for unspeakable crimes against the Emperor? Say no more. Consider it done."
"Off with the talking heads," Remo concurred.
"Shh. Just listen for a minute," Smith instructed them.
With a whirlpool flourish of computer graphics, "Peephole USA" plunged into its next feature, which was entitled "What's Got into Great-Great-Grandpa?"
"By now," began Molly's giggly voice-over, "all of America's heard about the past-ninety Southern senator and his beauty-queen girl toy. Well, this time tomorrow, Senator Ludlow Baculum and Bambi Sue Stimple will be on their honeymoon. It's her first, and his thirteenth. Last night's 1-900 viewers' poll tells us you think old Lud's robbing the cradle, but is little Bambi robbing the grave?"
As the screen filled with a panning shot of poolside at a Malibu Beach mansion, the "Peephole USA" reporter offered a few tidbits of pertinent background: that this was the May-December marriage to end all, Bambi being sixty-nine years her intended's junior, and that Baculum was the chairman of the powerful Term Limits and Election Finance Reform Ongoing Investigation and Research Committee.
To the strains of "Baby Love" by Diana Ross and The Supremes, the camera closed in on the pool's shallow end, where the former Miss Nicotine, glowing with youth and health, splashed around in her black thong bikini. At the deep end, Senator Baculum swam in slow, deliberate circles with his eyes and nose just above water. His bald, liver-spotted head bobbed like the top of a well-pickled egg. A fine fringe of silver hair brushed the tops of his large, protruding ears-ears with unusually pendulous lobes. The camera tightly framed the senator as he dog-paddled to the ladder and made his dripping exit from the pool.
"My, oh, my!" gushed Molly breathlessly. "What's got into great-great-grandpa?"
The crepe of the senator's chin formed a kind of international date line. Below it, Ludlow Baculum was neither stooped nor sagging nor withered. He was, in fact, a different man.
He was Tarzan.
To Remo, it looked like one of those computervideo morph tricks he'd seen a hundred times on MTV. The ancient Sunbelt legislator appeared to have monumentally broad shoulders, huge, densely chiseled muscles and zero body fat. In his zebra-striped Speedo, he padded across the pool deck with the animal grace of a teenager. As Baculum toweled himself dry, the camera lingered a fraction of second on the zebra stripes, just so Molly could gush, "My, oh, my..." one more time.
"What exactly is the problem here, Smitty?" Remo asked.
Chiun snorted at his pupil's impossible thickheadedness. "Obviously," he announced, "our Emperor wishes to make this Bambi creature his private concubine. Is the old man with a young man's body an impediment to Emperor Smith's pleasure?"
"Just watch!" Dr. Smith barked through the speaker with uncharacteristic impatience.
Then "Peephole USA" ran the "before" tape. It was a segment of a video taken eight months before, at the wedding of Baculum and his twelfth wife, a twenty-three-year-old part-time waitress at a highway restaurant outside of Mobile, Alabama. The ceremony took place in the honeymoon suite of the Holiday Inn next door to the girl's place of casual employment. On the tape, Ludlow looked every one of his ninety-plus years. Hunchbacked, sallow skinned, his shirt collar a mile too big, the senator used a walker to make an excruciatingly slow approach up to his wedding cake. As he did so, he leered, rheumy-eyed, at his gum-snapping bride's round bottom. Behind the wedding cake, along the wall, a row of oxygen tanks and a full-size defibrillator unit were visible.
"Until two weeks ago, that was Senator Ludlow Baculum," Smith declared.
"Peephole USA" cut back to Jed and Molly, who half turned in their chairs in order to react to the freeze-frame comparative shots behind them.
"Has Ludlow Baculum found a fountain of youth?" Jed asked his national audience. "That's what everyone on Capitol Hill wants to know, but so far the good senator is keeping his own counsel on the subject. Molly, you have to admire the guy for wanting to die with a smile on his face."
"From what I just saw, he isn't going to be the only one smiling tomorrow morning," Molly said as she did her scissor-leg shtick, extraslow.
Jed fanned himself with his blank sheets of copy while dimpling for the camera.
"I still don't see a problem," Remo said.
"Ah-hah!" Chiun exclaimed. "At last all becomes clear. You wish to trade this old man's young body for your own, and he is resisting the chance to be of service. Tell us where you want him delivered, Exalted One. Be assured there will be no further delay." A noise came through the speakerphone.
Remo would have sworn it was the sound of grinding teeth, only it was much, much too loud.
Chapter 5
Puma Lee had blood in her eye as she stalked her nemesis through the shifting press of the club crowd. Lanky in a hot lime spandex minidress, Vindaloo walked with an infuriating little-girl hop in her gait that set her shoulder-length white-gold hair a-swish and her various rounded baby-fat parts a-jiggle.
There was no longer any jiggle to Puma.
Bands of steel and cables of Kevlar interlaced under her almost transparently thin skin. Her breasts had lost a full cup size; once luxuriantly soft and resilient, they had turned to granite. Beneath her rock-hard bosom burned a desire more terrible than any she had ever felt.
And what she felt, felt so right.
People said things to her as she passed by, showering her with greetings, salutations and praise, fawning shamelessly because of who she was. She couldn't hear their words over the pounding of her own pulse in her ears. Their bright, eager faces meant nothing to her, either. Her fellow party-goers might as well have been stalks of tall, dry grass-spindly things to be pushed aside and walked over.
Ahead of her, the Swedish actress passed the entrance to the men's room, which was marked with a sign that said Hiss. Vindaloo pushed through the other swinging door, the one marked Not Hiss.
Only when Puma Lee entered after her quarry, stepping into the blindingly white tiled bathroom, did her sense of hearing return to normal; as the door swung shut, it came back with a rush of pressure against the sides of her head. The bathroom she surveyed was deserted; the Swede was nowhere in sight. To Puma's left, the brushed-steel stall doors were all closed. It was so quiet that she could hear the sawing, sixty-cycle hum of the fluorescent lights above the mirrored sinks.
Then, from the end of the row of doors, it began. Sudden. Thunderous.
The ralphing bark of the sea lion echoed in the narrow, tiled room.
A sound Puma recognized at once. Recognized and expected. Like most successful high-fashion models, Vindaloo was a puker. Had the Swede not been so thoroughly addicted to the hurl, her sylphlike form would have quickly assumed the waistless sausage shape dictated by her Scandinavian-fishwife genetics. Again, the sea lion called.
Oxfam's buffet spread might have been no-fat, but that didn't mean it was no-calories. Which left a figure-conscious individual with two options: lose it or wear it home. From the upchuck arpeggios raging in the bathroom's last stall, Vindaloo was hell-bent on getting rid of every last smear of that chocolate mousse cake.
Puma Lee sympathized with the need to vomit after taking one's absolute fill. And not simply to void unnecessary calories, as Vindaloo was doing.
One also vomited to make room for more.
As she closed in on her unsuspecting enemy, for the first time in her charmed life, Puma Lee knew exactly what she wanted.
She wanted it all.
Money. Possessions. Adoration. Acclaim. Power. Not just the mixed grill, the polite taste of each entree that untold thousands of wanna-be actors would have gladly sold their souls for. Puma Lee already had the fattest lamb chop, the biggest prawn, the juiciest filet, and it was not enough.
Puma wanted it all.
She even wanted the wanting.
The raven-haired actress had decided on her course of action the instant she'd laid eyes on her blond counterpart. There was no final straw, as such. No smirky expression from the Swede at the buffet table had tipped the balance. No ultimate, unforgivable stab in the back. No unfairly bestowed Academy Award. No plum lead role recently stolen.
Like other corporate giants, like auto makers or hemical companies, the two female megastars competed head-to-head for sales in the world market. As with other international conglomerates, when there were big profits and substantial losses on the line, industrial espionage ran rampant. Puma's underpaid screenwriters and sacked script doctors routinely fled to Vindaloo's studio, and vice versa, their heads bursting with ideas already under development, if not in production. Scripts appeared as if by magic on executives' desks in both camps, leaked by the competition's CPAs, security guards and night janitors. With the opposite camp's material in hand, a team of skilled hacks could quickly pound out a new star vehicle, and one just different enough to avoid successful legal action.
Which went a long way to explaining why every year the movie mills released two "flight attendant in jeopardy from terrorists" films, or two "just passed the bar woman lawyer in jeopardy from clients" films, or two "Las Vegas dancer in jeopardy from the mob" films. Whichever actress had started the process of cloning the other's work, up until tonight it had become the common practice of both, in order to hedge their box-office bets.
After tonight, all bets were off. What Puma had endured in the past, the irritating threats to her territory, she would endure no longer.
Puma stepped to within a foot of the door of the last stall. She reached for the door handle and gave it the lightest of tugs. The lock latch rattled in its striker plate.