He hoisted himself into the shower and stood there a long time, unable to soap himself, but letting the water wash Lynette Bardwell's dried blood off his body.
The warm water washed away some of his pain, too, and Remo was able to think. Nuihc was coming after him. The next attack, the fourth blow, would be deadly.
He got out of the shower, leaving the water running. He stopped in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at his own image. "You're kinda young to die," he told the face that looked back at him. But the face didn't seem frightened; it seemed puzzled as if it were trying to remember something. Looking at the face was like looking at a stranger, and that stranger was puzzled. There was something in the back of his mind, some tiny memory that he knew he should remember. But what was it?
Remo dragged on his pants and congratulated himself on wearing a button-front shirt because at least he could slip his arms into it. Yesterday's pullover would have been out of the question.
What was it?
Something Lynette had said. Something.
What?
What?
"After you…" After Remo, what? What?
"After you," she had said. "After you," and then he remembered as the words jumped back into his ears as if someone were shouting at him.
She had said:
"After you, the old man."
Chiun.
Remo hobbled to the telephone. He was able to cradle the phone between left ear and shoulder and, thanking God for pushbutton dials, banged out an 800-area code toll-free number.
"Yes?" came the lemony voice.
"Remo. What time is it?"
"It's two-twelve P.M., and this is an unauthorized time for you to call. Don't you remember that…"
"I need help. I'm hurt."
In Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith sat up straight in his chair. In ten years he had never heard those words from Remo.
"Hurt? How?"
"Muscles torn. I can't drive. Send someone for me."
"Where are you?"
"Home of Lynette Bardwell. Tenafly, New Jersey. You can tell me from Lynette 'cause I'm still alive."
"Are you in any danger of compromise?" asked Smith.
"That's it, Smitty. Good for you. Up the organization. Worry about security."
"Yes," said Smith noncommittally. "Is there any danger?"
"I don't know." Remo sighed. It hurt to talk and now the telephone was hurting his shoulder where it rested. "If the security of this operation depends on me, start looking for a new job."
"Stay where you are, Remo. Help is coming."
Smith listened. There was no joking, no wisecracking in Remo's voice this time, as he said: "Hurry."
Smith rose, carefully buttoned his jacket, and walked from his office. He told his secretary he would be gone for the rest of the day, which announcement she greeted with open-mouthed astonishment. Dr. Smith, in the past ten years, took off only every other Friday afternoon, and on those days he arrived early in the office and worked through his lunch hour, so he had already put in his full eight hours before leaving for his golf date at the nearby country club. A date which, she had one day learned, he kept with himself, playing alone.
He boarded a medical helicopter on the sanitarium grounds and was flown to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey where he rented a Ford Mustang, even though a Volkswagen was cheaper and there would be one available in just an hour or so and he liked the Volkswagen's gas economy.
With the help of a telephone directory and the driver of a mail truck, he found the Bardwell house. He parked behind a brown Ford in the driveway and went to the side door leading to the kitchen. No one answered his knocking. The door was unlocked.
Smith entered a kitchen filled with plastic clocks that looked like fried eggs sunnyside up, cooked too long, and with ceramic spoon rests that looked like smiling babies, and with coffee, sugar, and flour canisters that looked like overgrown soup cans, and a room in which everything looked like something else.
Smith had no mind for philosophy so it did not occur to him that a vast portion of America made its living by making things look like other things, and that this was a little strange because it might have been better to make the first things good-looking enough so that they had no need for disguises.
The lean pinched-face man moved quietly through the first floor of the house, efficiently searching the rooms, the kitchen, dining room, the living room, the bath, the television room in the back, decorated with a shelf holding a collection of plaques and trophies from karate competitions, set up in rows, that looked like nothing so much as an advancing army of Oriental men and women fighting their way through unfriendly air to reach their enemies.
He found Remo upstairs on the floor of the bedroom, lying next to the bed. Next to him was the body of a naked blonde woman, her face and head caked with dried brown blood.
Smith knelt quickly next to Remo and put his hand inside Remo's open shirt. He saw Remo's mouth move into a grimace of pain. Smith looked at his watch. He counted the heartbeats for fifteen seconds. Twelve. He multiplied by four. Remo's pulse was forty-eight.
If that had been Smith's pulse rate, he would have rushed to a cardiologist. But Smith, who read his medical bulletins on CURE personnel like a financier read the stock market tables, knew that for Remo a pulse of forty-eight was in the normal range.
"Remo," he said.
Remo's eyes opened slowly.
"Can you walk?" Smith asked. "We've got to get out of here."
"Hi, Smitty. Keep an eye on the paper clips. Every time you turn your back, someone's stealing them."
"Remo, you've got to get up."
"Get up. Right. Got to get up. Can't go lying down on government time."
He closed his eyes again.
Smith put his left arm under Remo's thighs and his right arm across the top of Remo's right arm and under his back and hoisted Remo into his arms. He was surprised, despite himself, at how light Remo was. He had weighed two hundred pounds when the organization had found him ten years ago, and Smith had known that his weight had come down some forty pounds, but like all gradual weight losses it had not been visible.
Leaning backward to counteract Remo's weight in his arms, Dr. Smith descended the steps to the first floor. Every time he reached his foot down to touch a new step, the slight jar to his body brought a squint of pain into the corner's of Remo's closed eyes.
In the kitchen, Smith deposited Remo into a chair at the kitchen table, then went outside to start the car's motor and drive it up as close as he could to the kitchen door.
He opened the passenger's door. When he got back into the kitchen, Remo's eyes were open.