This time when Chiun squeezed Remo's arm, there was a look of questioning joy on the old man's face. He was watching Lorraine intently.
"Can it be?" the Master of Sinanju whispered under his breath to his pupil.
Something else down the block caught the old man's eye. With sudden glee he bounded a few yards away.
Brow furrowed, Remo tracked his teacher. The wizened Korean stopped near a college-age man. The Barkley University student was passing out colored fliers to pedestrians. Remo noted that they were printed in the same colors as those the woman at his feet was cutting.
"In case you didn't hear out on Neptune, Johnny Carson retired years ago," Remo said to the seated woman. "Thanks for the directions."
He started to leave, but Chiun was hurrying back toward him, dragging the pamphlet-hawking student in his wake. The old man's face was rhapsodic.
"I have found another one!" Chiun squealed.
"Another what?" Remo scowled. "And stop pointing that thing at me."
He leaned back from the kid the Master of Sinanju held before him. The young man had a black sweatshirt, scraggly goatee and a shaved head.
"You wanna know the truth behind all those cattle mutilations?" the college student confided to Remo. "Think genetically engineered supercows. It's the secret Ronald McDonald doesn't want you to find out about."
He stuffed a photocopied flier into Remo's hand.
On the bright pink paper several stick-figure dead cows formed a bovine border around illegible text. "Next time you might want to write your manifesto after they let you out of the straitjacket," Remo suggested. He crumpled the paper and tossed it over his shoulder.
"Litterbug!" snarled the woman snipping out the papers. She snatched up the flier and began carving it up.
"Thought I had an easy target," Remo said. "I was aiming for your mouth. What's up?" he asked Chiun.
"Do you not see?" the old man asked, delighted. He held out his hands in proud presentation. "This, Remo, is a village idiot. It is a wonderful old English tradition."
"There's nothing wonderful about the English, Grampa," Lorraine insisted as she worked. "Just a bunch of dead white males spreading syphilis and the language of conquerors."
"Lady, I got news for you," Remo said. "I've been almost everywhere there is to go on this benighted rock, and the most civilized places by far are the ones where they speak English. Furthermore, even a dead guy would jump out the window before spreading syphilis to you."
The sidewalk-squatting woman didn't even hear the last of what he said. At his use of the demeaning and sexist term lady, she immediately tried to stick the blunt end of her childproof scissors into Remo's leg.
"See?" Chiun said, ecstatic. "She is another village idiot. And there!" He pointed out to the road. "There are two more!"
Two flabby middle-aged men in short shorts and too-tight tanktops were just pedaling past on a bicycle built for two.
Chiun clasped his hands together with giddy glee. "Why did you not tell me this was a training ground for village idiots, Remo?" Chiun asked. "Or perhaps it is a national secret. When the time is right, wave after wave of idiots will be dispatched from this province to amuse and delight the citizenry of this land. Look!" he squealed.
Wrinkled face rapturous, he flounced down the street.
"Yeah," Remo agreed as the Master of Sinanju began joyfully stalking a placard-wearing vegan. "And that time comes every spring at Barkley U graduation. Will you knock it off?" he snapped down at the sidewalk.
Lorraine was still trying to jab him with her scissors. When he walked off, she gave up and instead stuck the nearby college kid in the calf. Yelping in pain, the young man promptly dropped all his fliers. As he rubbed the bruise the blunt scissors had made, Lorraine swept all of the colored papers between her folded knees.
"Go litter on someone else's planet," she accused.
Ever on the lookout to do her part to save Mother Earth, she began recycling the college student's discarded trash into more respectable, environmentally conscious daisies.
Chapter 10
Boris Feyodov was trotting down the broad front steps of Barkley's city hall when the voice called out to him.
"General. I mean, Supreme Military- Hey, you!"
Feyodov considered ignoring the man altogether. With great reluctance, he paused in midstride. He turned.
Gary Jenfeld was huffing down the staircase, a container of Jane Funday Sundae Ice Cream in his hand.
"I am already late," the Russian said impatiently. Feyodov was not wearing his Red Army uniform. He had agreed to that ridiculous term only on the condition that he not have to march around the street in it.
"Yeah, I know," Gary said. "You gotta get that special part. I didn't want to keep you, but-" he cast a glance back up the steps "-it's about Zen."
The look on Feyodov's face made clear his opinion of Gary's partner in the ice cream business. "I'm not allowed to tell you some of what's really going on here," Gary whispered conspiratorially.
"It's all very hush-hush. But me and the rest of the council are getting kind of worried. Zen seems to be losing focus."
Feyodov raised a bland eyebrow. "That is of no concern to me," he said. "I am aware that you receive your money from some secret source. You pay me, and I supply that which you need. That is as far as I care."
"But I'm not sure you should leave," Gary hissed. "He's been coming unglued ever since that takeover of our ice cream company a couple years ago. With everything that's going on now, he's getting this Oliver North glint in his eye."
Feyodov scowled. "That is your problem, not mine. He leads your council until someone else takes over. If you are bothered by him, do what has been done to political opponents in Communist nations for a hundred years."
Gary's brow dropped in confusion. "Prison?" he asked.
Feyodov's eyes were flat. "Kill him."
This was obviously not the solution Gary had been hoping for. "No one ever built a socialist utopia by murdering people in cold blood," the ice cream man scolded.
"No," Feyodov agreed. "But it was not for lack of trying. Excuse me."
He turned on his heel and began marching back down the steps. Behind him, Gary hesitated for a moment before waddling unhappily back up the staircase.
Feyodov reached the main walk in front of the building and was hurrying across the grassy town square when something across the park caught his eye.
Two men were walking toward Barkley's civic center.
His eye had first been drawn to the robe the older one wore. It was red and shimmered like wet blood. Swirling patterns of embroidered gold danced across the material.
The crowd in the square was focused mostly around the building where the American cable network's charity event was being held. Even though the mob was thick before the hall, the two men moved through it like a pair of unwavering phantoms. In the great shadow cast by the huge stone statue Huitzilopochtli, they glided through the gleaming glass front doors of the distant hall and were gone.
As they vanished through the doors, Feyodov frowned.
His glasses were in the car, so he had not seen the two men well. Yet something about their comfortable gliding movements was familiar.