"No offense, sweetheart, but unless you take a bath, Attila the Hun wouldn't want your underpants."
"Attila the Hun?" she asked. "They New Wave?"
"Old," Remo said. "Back before the Beatles, even."
Helen pondered this possibility, clutching the valued Hoffman underwear to her chest. "Before the Beatles?" she asked, astonished. "Was there life back then? Was there even LSD?"
"Hard to tell," Remo said. "They can only guess by carbon-dating the bones of old guitar players."
"Huh?"
"Never mind. Do you come here every day?"
"Ever since I left the High Riders."
"Did you find ^anything interesting today— besides those?" He indicated the contents of her hand.
80
"Nah, today was pretty dull. I thought I made a real find this morning. A movie reel. Well, it wasn't exactly like a real movie, it was this small." She cupped her hand to show the size of her find. "I thought maybe it was a dirty movie or something. But it was just numbers. Every frame was numbers, or else paper strips with holes in them."
"What did you do with it?" Remo asked.
"I took it home, just in case. Sometimes you can make a trade. I figured who knows, maybe some freak'U be into numbers and maybe trade me something terrific like Nick Nolte's old dental floss for it."
"Where do you live?"
"Gower Gulch. Want to hang out with me?" she asked hopefully.
"Lead the way."
The girl's eyes suddenly brightened. "Hey, nobody except the High Riders ever wanted to come home with me before. You're real nice, you know that? I'll give you a good time, honest. I'll even shave my armpits if you're not into natural."
"Let's see the tape," Remo said.
The apartment in Gower Gulch was a maze of Day-glo posters and dust sculptures heaped beneath furnishings salvaged from the eight a.m. sanitation pickup, and decorated with artifacts from the garbage of the stars. Helen Wheels rooted behind a skeletal mass, which she designated as Faye Dunaway's douche bag, for a small spool of film on a chipped plastic reel.
"Here's the tape," she said. "A bummer. No screwing, nothing. Just numbers and holes."
81
Remo held it up to the light. The entire tape seemed to consist of zeros and ones jammed between algebraic symbols, spliced with long streams of punctured green paper.
"I think I need this," Remo said.
The girl shrugged. "You saved my life. It's yours."
"Well, I'd better go now," Remo said, trying to control his intake of air in the fetid room.
"They all do," Helen said. "That's okay, though." Absently she scratched her arm. A thin line of pale skin showed beneath the layers of dirt. "Hey, can I ask you a question?" she said timidly.
"Sure."
"Why don't you want to sleep with me? I mean, you're in my apartment, and I'm not fighting you off or anything."
"Because you're a dirtball," Remo said.
"Oh." She thought about it for a moment. "If I got cleaned up, do you think I'd be pretty?"
"Could be. I can't see enough of whatever's under all that crud to tell."
"Just a minute," She walked into a filthy bathroom and closed the door. Remo heard an old faucet squeaking to life for what must have been the first time since the apartment had been occupied, then a rush of water. Billows of steam gushed from beneath the door.
In a few minutes a pale, skinny waif appeared naked in the doorway, her blue eyes sad beneath the blue crew cut.
"You're not half bad, after all," Remo said.
"Look at mel" she wailed. "I'm a mess. What
82
about my identity? I can't go back to the dump looking like this. I smell liker'soap. My skin's showing. My friends'11 run me out of town."
Remo slid a hand down her back, over her buttocks.
"Screw the friends," she said. "Let's get married."
83
CHAPTER EIGHT
Remo wrapped and mailed the tape to Harold W. Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. There, under cover as the director of Folcroft, Smith would take the tape into his private inner office and close the door. He would press a button, and one entire wall would slide away to reveal the most sophisticated computer hookup in the world.
Every piece of information available to any stationary computer on earth could be pulled out of Smith's terminal. The lemon-faced, middle-aged man was a genius at his trade, Remo knew. If anyone could figure out what was on the strange tape Helen Wheels had unearthed, it was Smith.
When Remo returned to the Forty-First Street Inn, Chiun was sitting on a tatami mat in front of the television, a look of sublime contempt stamping his ancient features as the Channel 3 News came on.
85
"News," Chiun spat. "What is new about war, famine, pestilence, and plague? Never do these programs relate the serene doings of a Master of Sinanju in their very midst."
"So don't watch it."
"I must watch it," Chiun said, staring raptly at the screen. "The news is the only program which features persons of the right color."
Remo glanced at the TV, where the Channel 3 anchorwoman, Cheeta Ching, was staring darts at her audience while spewing out the day's events in a voice that would sharpen razorblades at fifty feet.