"Careful?" he hissed. "If you had learned this when it was offered you, it would be done twice as quickly and he would have more chance to live. If it goes wrong, do not blame me," he said. "I know how to do it. Because I have bothered to learn. It is just that I can never rely upon cheap white help for any-' thing."
"Right, right, right, right," said Remo. "Stay with it, Chiun."
To keep himself busy, Remo went to the front of
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the bed and began to monitor Lippincott's pulse. As he stood alongside the man, a flowery smell insinuated itself into his senses. It was a smell he had encountered before. Sweet and musky. He put it out of his mind, and with his hand on Lippincott's chest, monitored the heart rate and breathing rate simultaneously. When Chiun finished with the large vein in Lippincott's right ankle, the man's pulse was beating at only thirty beats a minute, his respiration rate was only one breath every sixteen seconds.
Chiun stopped and looked up. Remo lifted his hand from Lippincott's chest. "Will he live?" Remo asked. "If he does, I hope he never has to suffer the indignity of trying to teach something to some person who does not wish to learn, and who rejects the gift as if it were the f ootmud of a ..."
"Will he live, Chiun?" Remo asked again. "I do not know. The poison was much in his system. It depends on how much he wishes to live."
"You keep saying poison," Remo said. "What kind of poison?"
Chiun shook his head. "This is a thing I do not know, a poison that does not injure the body but changes the mind. This fighting one's clothing. This feeling that the air itself is a heavy blanket. These things I do not understand."
"It happened to his brother too," Remo said. "Afraid of Japanese."
Chiun looked at Remo quizzically. "We are talking about poison of the brain. What does that have to do with it?"
"His brother. He couldn't stand being in a room with Japanese," Remo said.
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"That is not mind poison," Chiun said. "That is just good taste. Can you not tell the difference?"
"Please, Chiun, no lectures about the pushy Japanese. Anyway, this guy's brother dove out a window because he couldn't stand them."
"How high a window?" Chiun asked.
"Six stories."
"And the doors to this room were not nailed shut?" Chiun asked.
"No."
"Well, perhaps that was a little extreme," Chiun said. "Six stories." He thought about it for a moment. "Yes, that was extreme. About three stories extreme," he said. "No one should ever jump out a window more than three stories high to avoid the Japanese, if the windows and doors are not bolted and nailed phut."
Remo watched Lippincott carefully. A sense of peace seemed to have overtaken his body. The tenseness that had bunched up his shoulders and hips was slowly passing from his body, which was softening into a relaxed and deep sleep.
"I think he's going to be all right, Chiun," Remo offered.
"Silence," thundered Chiun. "What do you know?" He touched Lippincott's throat, and then the pit of his stomach, probing deeply with the balls of his fingers.
"He is going to be all right," Chiun said.
"I wonder if that injection in the arm had anything to do with this," Remo said.
Chiun shrugged. "I do not understand your western medicine, ever since I stopped watching Rad Rex
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as Dr. Bruce Barton, when the show became vile and obscene. Since then, nothing is the same."
"I wonder who his doctor was," Remo said. He went back to the nurse's station, but the nurse only knew that every doctor in the hospital had looked in on Lippincott. She had a list of names a full page long.
Remo nodded and began to walk away. "When will I see you?" the nurse asked. "Very soon," Remo said with a smile. Lippincott was stiill sleeping when Remo returned and Chiun was watching him, a pleased and self-satisfied look on his face. Remo used the telephone in the room to dial a number that reported on the winning lottery numbers hi the 463 separate lotteries held in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area. To get all the numbers, a person at a pay phone had to drop nine dimes into the coin box. Remo listened as the tape recorded voice began to spin out the winning combinations of numbers, and Remo said deliberately: "Blue and Gold. Silver and Gray," and then gave the number he read on the base of Lippincott's telephone.
He hung up and within a minute, the telephone rang.
"Smitty?" Remo said as he lifted the receiver. " "Yes, what is it?"
"Randall Lippincott's in the hospital. He went some kind of crazy. I think it might be like his brother."
"Yes, I know," said Smith. "How is he?" "Chiun says he'll live. But he needs a guard here. Can you get somebody from the family or something?"
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"Yes," Smith said. "Ill have somebody there soon."
"We'll wait for him. Another thing. Check what you've got on the Lippincotts. There was a doctor here who might have shot Randall up with something to kill him. See if you can find any link among the Lippincotts. Same doctor or something." The smell of flowers was again strong in Remo's nose.
"All right," Smith said.
"Anything from Ruby yet?" Remo asked.
"Not a word."
"Hah. So much for women," said Remo.
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CHAPTER NINE
Elena Gladstone was asleep in the third floor bedroom of the brownstone on East Eighty-first Street. She slept naked and when the private telephone rang, she sat up in bed and cradled the telephone against her shoulder. The sheet slid from her body.
"This is Dr. Gladstone," she said. She listened as she heard a familiar voice, then sat straight up in bed, away from the headboard, as if startled.
"Alive?" she said. "He can't be. I administered the shot myself."
She listened again. "I saw them there but they couldn't ..."
"I don't know," she said. "I'll have to think about it. They are still at the clinic?"
She paused and pondered. "I'll talk to you tomorrow," she said.