Remo pulled back the sheets. A middle-aged Caucasian, about five-feet-ten, dead at least a day. The corpse had released its bowels and had begun to swell. The skin had burst around the handcuffs. A brown blood-dried cross had been drawn near the right hand, which was now a caked pink and brown ball. On the floor, Remo found a gold emblem with a silver stripe on it, and pocketed it.
Remo resumed breathing when he left the room. Down the hall he heard crying. In an alcove with the picture of the fat-faced kid surrounded by flowers, a blonde girl sobbed into her cupped hands.
"Who are you?" asked Remo.
"I am one who was not worthy to accompany the Blissful Master. My life is shattered fragments. Oh, blissful, blissful, Blissful Master."
"Where'd he go?"
"Left for glory."
"Let's try this again, honey. What is your name? First and last. And specifically, what place did the Blissful Master go to?"
"Joleen Snowy. He went to America."
"Good. Where in America?"
"To Kezar Stadium."
"Which seat?" said Remo, who felt he was getting lucky.
"No seat. He will be the center of it. It's the big thing that's coming."
"Beautiful. What big thing?"
"The third proof of his truth."
"Which is what?"
"That he grows."
"What's he going to do when he grows?"
"Prove he is in truth the truth."
"And we were doing so well too," said Remo.
"Oh, where will I find another master?" sobbed Joleen.
Down the corridor, a bowl cupped in his hands, came Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, and Remo thought of ways to tell him he would not be going home right away. He would have to be diplomatic.
"What's in the bowl, Little Father?"
"My first good meal since I was home."
"Better enjoy it," said Remo diplomatically. "You're not getting another for a long time."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ferdinand De Chef Hunt crumpled the paper from his mid-morning Danish and flipped it over his left shoulder into a wastepaper basket three desks behind him. He knew it always gave his co-workers a little thrill to see a man know where something was without looking. Anything to distract the other analysts from the big board at the end of the room that blinked out the baleful truth about activity on the New York Stock Exchange.
As the stocks had plummeted, Hunt, a drug industry specialist and customers' man, in the New Orleans office of Dalton, Harrow, Petersen and Smith, member New York Stock Exchange, had found himself finding new euphemisms for the word "depression." The market was fluttering before flight, the market was experiencing a technical adjustment, the market was building a lower foundation for a more solid climb.
Into the second year of this depression, while government officials were debating whether the country was headed for a "recession," Ferdinand De Chef Hunt tried little levities when asked his opinion on the drug market.
"Take them intravenously," he would say.
"Heh, heh," his customers would say and somehow didn't phone back.
So on this morning, in what he calculated was the last month of his career in the stock market—a career that had taken the family estate in Plaquemens County into its third mortgage, the property having been free and clear since 1732 under a grant from the House of Bourbon—Ferdinand De Chef Hunt chose to pop papers up in high arcs behind his back into little wastebaskets.
He was twenty-eight years old, darkly handsome, and with the million-dollar inheritance left him by his mother four years ago, a self-made broke.
"Better not do that," said a customers' man behind him. "Dalton and Harrow themselves are here."
"In New Orleans?"
"Yeah, they got here real early. Locked themselves in the boss's private office, sent out for a personnel file, saw the boss for a couple of hours, then nothing."
"They're closing down the New Orleans operation," Hunt said.
"They can't. We're one of their more successful offices."
"Which means we're going broke slower than the others. Watch, you'll see. We're going under. I'm only sorry it didn't happen a few years ago when I still had money for lunch."
"If you think I'm flipping cards with you again for lunch, fella, you're off your num-num."
"Mumbletypeg?"
"I saw you in the park with that penknife. It looked like it had strings on it."
"Darts?"
"You were drunk for a week on darts. You were the only guy on Bourbon Street with cash in his pocket."
"Pool? Golf? Tennis? Squash? Skittleball?"
"Today I eat lunch. Hunt, if I had your talent, I'd turn pro. I'd be out on the golf circuit tomorrow. The tennis circuit. I'd hustle pool."
"Can't. I promised Mother. I can't use it for money."
"You call your talent 'it.' I never understood that."
"Good," said Hunt and was glad the conversation was interrupted by a secretary who said he was wanted in the manager's office.
"Should I clean out my desk now or after?" asked Hunt.