Remo glared at Chiun.
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"A fine lot of help you are."
"I tried to help you before," Chiun said. His arms were folded stubbornly over his chest. "But no. You could not learn anything from the Great Master Ung. So you let the victim invite in the assassin and then you're surprised that he is the assassin. Remo, you are hopeless."
"That's enough carping. And that's also enough of the Great Master Wang and the Greater Master Ung and the Greatest Master of them all, Master Dingdong. No more. I'm done with all that."
There were sounds in the hall.
Chiun was off the bed like a windblown wisp of blue smoke.
"Unless it is your goal to murder the entire KGB," Chiun said, "we should leave."
Remo looked out the window, "The bobbies are already down there."
"Then go up," said Chiun.
With Chiun only a few inches behind him, Remo went out through the window like a pistol shot and gracefully somersaulted up onto the roof, eight feet above the window ledge. The roof was steeply pitched slate, wet and slippery in the foggy London night. They moved across it as surely as if on rails.
They went across four roofs before they came down a fire escape on Wardour Street and Remo hailed a cab to go back to the airport.
Remo sulked in a corner of the cab and Chiun was silent too, as if in commiseration.
"You don't have to be quiet, just because you're feeling sorry for me," Remo said.
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"I'm not feeling sorry for you," Chiun said. "I'm thinking."
"About what?" Remo asked.
"What will Ruby screech when you tell her you failed?" Chiun said.
Remo groaned.
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CHAPTER NINE
Mrs. Harold W. Smith was happier than she could recall having been in years.
At the start, she had had a moment's doubt. When her husband told her he had hired a new assistant at the sanitarium and then that the assistant was a young woman, well, she worried a little about that, because after all Harold W. Smith was a man and he might be reaching that age when men all seem to go temporarily or permanently crazy.
But the worry had been short-lived. She knew her husband well. And soon, she began to wonder why Harold-even in her mind, it was always Harold, never Harry or Hal-why he had not hired an assistant years before.
Because suddenly, Harold was getting a chance to go out in the afternoons and play golf and he was coming home for dinner for the first time in all his years of running that terrible dull sanitarium, and for the first time in many years, Mrs. Smith had other things to do with her life than meet with other members of the Ladies Aid Society and roll cancer dressings.
She had taken her cookbooks out of the shoe box in the hall closet and had begun again to en-
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joy working in the kitchen. Her mother had once told her that a well-cooked meal was a performance, but no performance had meaning unless it had an audience. Now, for the first time in years, she had her audience back.
Mrs. Smith was busy now pounding thin strips of veal into paper-thin slices for veal parmigiana. She glanced at the wristwatch Harold her given her as a present thirty years before. He would be home any minute. And she would put a glass of white wine in his hand and sit him in the living room with his slippers and fifteen minutes later she would have on the table a meal fit for a king. Or an emperor.
It had all happened very quickly. Harold W. Smith had been thinking about Remo and Chiun's failure in London. He had been fed the computer printouts of the Associated Press and United Press International wire copy filed on the mass murder at the home of the Russian ambassador in London. And he had been driving mechanically, his mind on Project Omega, rushing remorselessly to its conclusion which might just be the death of the Russian premier and the start of World War III.
Smith stopped at a red light, before turning off the main street in Rye, New York, up into the hill section of town where he lived with his wife in a modest tract house whose value had increased in the ten years he had owned it, from $27,900 to $62,500, and on which he often congratulated himself, it being the only good personal business deal he had ever made in his life.
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He wasn't looking and then there was a man in the car, leaning over from the backseat, with a gun stuck in Smith's ribs. He spoke with an accent.
"Drive straight ahead."
Two blocks later, the man directed him to pull to the curb and park. They both got out of the car and into a red Chevrolet Nova where a man with a cowboy hat was sitting behind the wheel.
Smith automatically recorded the car's license number in his memory as they got into the backseat. The man in the cowboy hat looked into the rearview mirror and his eyes met Smith's.
"Doctor Smith?"
Smith nodded.
He recognized Colonel Vassily Karbenko, head of Russia's spy network in the United States, but he decided there would be nothing to be gained, and perhaps much to be lost, by saying anything now.
"Good," said Karbenko. "We have much to talk about." He put the car into drive and pulled smoothly out into the late supper traffic. The man sitting next to Smith kept the gun pushed into Smith's ribs.
She called at twenty after eight.
"Miss Gonzalez," Mrs. Smith said. "The doctor isn't home yet."
Ruby pursed her lips. Smith had left the office an hour ago and told Ruby he was going straight home. Straight home for Harold Smith meant straight home, Ruby knew. It didn't mean stopping for gas, for a newspaper, for a pack of ciga-
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rettes, for a drink at the neighborhood saloon. It meant straight home. A nine-minute drive. Eight minutes and forty-five seconds if he was lucky and missed the light on the corner of Desmond and Bagley Streets.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Smith. The doctor was called into the city at the last minute," Ruby lied. "He asked me to tell you he's be late. I'm sorry."
"Oh," said Mrs. Smith. The disappointment in her voice struck at Ruby's heart. "Men just have no idea what veal cutlets cost."
"They sure don't, Mrs. Smith. As soon as I hear from him, I'll let you know."
"Thank you, Miss Gonzalez." Mrs. Smith hung up. She was annoyed. The least this Gonzalez girl could have done would be to call before she had gotten the cutlets ready for the oven.