"You were confused before you got here," said Chiun. "You have always been confused."
"Right, right, right. You win. Now will you help me get to the house?"
"We could go over the hedges," Chiun suggested.
"Not with this one," Remo said, nodding toward Valerie.
"Or through them," Chiun said.
"She'd get cut. Then she'd probably start yelling. I couldn't take it if her mouth was going."
Remo reached a blank wall of hedge. Another dead end.
"Dammit," he said.
"If we cannot go through or over," Chiun said, "there is only one thing to do."
"Which is…"
"Find our way through this growth."
"That's what I'm trying to do," Remo said.
"Actually it is a simple little toy," Chiun said. "Once there was a master, this was many years ago in what you would call the time of the pharaohs, and while in the land of the Egyptians, oh, to what a test he was put with one of these labyrinths and it was only his-"
"Please, Chiun, no puff pieces for great masters you have known and loved. Bottom line. Do you know how to get through this thing?"
"Of course. Each master is privileged to share the learnings of all the masters who have gone before."
"And?"
"And what?" asked Chiun.
"And how the hell do we get through this thing?"
"Oh." Chiun sighed. "Put out your right hand and touch the wall of hedge."
Remo touched the spiny green bush. "Now what?"
"Just move forward. Be sure your hand is against a wall at all times. Follow it around corners, into dead ends, everywhere it takes you. You must eventually find the exit."
Remo looked at Chiun with narrowed eyes. "Are you sure this will work?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me before?"
"I thought you wanted to do it your way. Running down alleys until they disappeared and then yelling at the plants. I did not know you wanted to do this efficiently. It has never been one of the things you are most interested in."
"No more talk. Let's get to the house." Remo moved away at a trot, keeping Valerie close to his left side, his right hand extended, fingertips on the hedge wall.
Chiun moved along after them, seeming only to amble, but staying just a step behind.
"They found a telephone number in the room," Uncle Carl hissed to deJuin. "It is a number in the state of Maine for a Dr. Harold Smith."
"Smith?" mused deJuin, still staring into the maze. "Call Paris and have our computer run the name of Smith through its memories." He smiled as he watched Remo reach out his hand and touch the hedge. DeJuin had nodded. So the secrets of a maze were no secret to the old man.
DeJuin raised his hand slightly in a small gesture, careful not to call attention to himself.
"And let the fun begin," he said.
"There is someone in that window, Remo," Chiun said.
"I know. I saw."
"Two persons," Chiun said. "One young, one old." He was interrupted as a voice rang out over the maze. It echoed and seemed to come from all around them.
"Help. Help." And then there was a scream.
"That's Bobbi," Remo said.
"Yes," said Chiun. "The voice came from over there." He pointed at the wall of the hedges, in the general pilot's direction of ten o'clock.
Remo broke away into a run. He let Valerie go. She was unsure of herself, but suspecting she was safer with Remo than away from him, she ran after him.
As deJuin watched from the window, he saw something that even later he would find difficult to believe.
The old Oriental did not run after the white man. He looked around him, then raced into the hedge to his left. DeJuin winced. He could imagine what the prickers and thorns were doing to the old man's flesh. Then the old man was in the passageway on the other side of the hedge, moving across the six feet of gravel and charging again into another of the five-foot-thick growths of shrubs. And then he was through that, too.
"Help, Remo, help," Bobbi's voice came again.
When the maze was built, it had been designed around a small central court, and Bobbi Delpheen was there. She was tied to a high marble bench. Her tennis shirt had been ripped open and her bare breasts were exposed.
Behind her stood two men wearing the yellow feather robes. One held a wedge of stone, its two edges chipped into a knife blade.
They stood looking down at her, and then they looked up. Coming through the hedge directly facing them was a small Oriental in a golden robe.
"Hold," he called. His voice rang out like a whipcrack.
The men froze in position momentarily, then both turned and fled into one of the pathways leading away from the central court. Chiun moved to the side of the girl, whose arms and legs were tied to the corners of the bench.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes," Bobbi said. Her lips trembled as she spoke.
She looked up at Chiun then past him as Remo suddenly raced into the clearing. A few paces behind him came Valerie.