The mute nodded and was gone.
?Six
The porch lights of Remo's villa were on. In the near distance, Remo blinked twice when he saw the opened front door. The doorway seemed to be crammed full of people, as though a busy party were in progress, only there was no sound. No music, no bursts of cocktail laughter, nothing but the drone of the cicadas and the chirping of grasshoppers.
Then he saw one of the figures in the doorway, a black man in a striped shirt, move. It was more a slump than a conscious movement, lodged as the man was between the other people clustered in the frame of the open door. Remo came closer. The man who had moved now slid to the floor, upsetting the balance of the other figures. In one confusing wave, they all tumbled out the door and onto the porch, where they lay inert as broken glass figurines.
"Now what the hell is going on?" Remo said as he stepped over the dead bodies of the toppled partygoers on the porch.
Chiun was inside, frowning, his arms folded across his chest and concealed inside the wide gold brocade sleeves of his robe. "Where have you been?" the old man grumbled, gesturing with a snap of his head at the lifeless forms cluttering the entranceway. "Move this rubble away."
"That's it, huh?" Remo said, kicking a limp arm out of his way in disgust. "Bump off half the men in the village so old Remo, the clean-up man, can come mop up the mess. Well, let me tell you, I've had it up to here with murders today." He mimed a slash across his throat.
"And what of me? The rudeness..." Chiun hissed. "Twice in one day have I been coarsely interrupted during the viewing of my beautiful daytime dramas. Emperor Smith, crawling through my window with the agility of a chained bear, is not enough. No. I must also suffer these..." His voice rose to a high-pitched shriek as he jounced up and down in a rage. "... These murderous hellions, shouting 'Hee Hoo Ha Hee' like hysterical monkeys as they went about their dastardly deed. It is a zoo, this sweltering armpit of an island. Vacation? Hah! Prison would be better. Poverty would be better than this."
"Now, just calm down—"
"Calm?" Chiun's almond eyes were little hazel o's. "You wish me to be calm— I, who have lost the single thread of beauty in life's tormented fabric? I, whose only pleasure in the dimming twilight of my years has now been shattered beyond redemption?"
"Will you get to it? What the hell are you talking about?"
Wordlessly, Chiun glided out of the living room, uttered a small cry of grief, and returned wheeling the television set with its Betamax hookup, which he kept in his bedroom. The blank screen was punctured by a gaping hole, out of which the machine's innards were visible.
"This," the old man said, choking hoarsely. "The lout did not even have the decency to die properly. Kicking, flailing everywhere like a wild chicken." He thrust his hand speculatively into the hole in the glass, then retracted it, wailing high and stridently. "Oh, never again to gaze on Mrs. Wintersheim's troubled countenance. Never to know the dark secret of Skip the podiatrist. And Rad Rex, the kindest of healers, the finest—"
"You've seen those shows a million times," Remo said.
Chiun turned on him, eyes blazing. "And if one sees the Mona Lisa a million times, is it then permissible to destroy her?"
"I'll go into town tomorrow and get you another set," Remo said impatiently.
"Tomorrow?" Chiun bellowed. "Tomorrow? What am I to do tonight?" He glared at the broken television. "This is worthless now, isn't it?"
Remo shrugged. "I guess you could use it for a coffee table if you wanted to..."
"Worthless. Gone forever, the lovely stories that lived within this magic box." He tossed the set into the air like a tennis ball and whacked it across the room, where it embedded itself in the stucco wall.
Remo jumped. "Remember what I said, Chiun. Calm. Let's be..."
"I am calm," Chiun hissed as he strode over to the heap of bodies in the doorway and propelled one of the dead men through the picture window with a crash of shattering glass. "Miserable, destructive wretches," he said. He kicked another into the kitchen. The body came to rest at the base of the refrigerator, which crumpled around it. "They have no respect for property," Chiun said, flinging another limp figure upward with a snap of his wrist. The body shot into the ceiling, where it stuck halfway, its corduroy-clad legs hanging limply down like a grotesque chandelier.
"Okay, you've made your point. I'll get rid of the bodies," Remo said, quickly pulling two of the dead men out into the yard. Chiun spun another through the back door, knocking it off its hinges.
"I'm doing it, I'm doing it," Remo shouted from the yard.
"Never will an old man find peace in these violent times," Chiun muttered.
An hour later, Remo had dumped most of the dead into the ocean and returned to the wreckage of the villa.
"Him, too," Chiun said tightly, gesturing with a thumb toward the man in corduroys whose lower half hung suspended from the ceiling.
"Oh. I forgot." Remo tugged gently at the legs, grunting as he tried to pry the body loose. "Hey, what were these guys doing here, anyway? Did you think to ask before you knocked them off?"
Chiun sniffed. "Who knows what lunacy impels men who smash televisions?"
"I mean, were they trying to rob you?"
The old man paused and gave Remo a puzzled look. "Actually, I think they were trying to kill me," he said.
"What for?"
Chiun made a face. "How should I know? The white mind has always been inscrutable. Stupid is always inscrutable."
"These men are all black," Remo said.
"Close enough."
"Well, what'd they do?"
Chiun rolled his eyes in exasperation. "The usual. They came inside, playing with their knives and guns." lie swept' an open ten-inch switchblade into the bushes with his toe. "They were hooting in that incomprehensible language, and in a moment they had all departed for the Great Void. Except for the one with the dancing feet who smashed my television. By the way, his remains are in the carpet of my bedroom."
"Oh, come on," Remo groaned. He trotted into the room to see. "This is gross," he called over his shoulder as he picked up the rolled-up carpet. "Couldn't you just kill him and leave it at that?"
"But he broke my television," Chiun explained. "Just as Mrs. Wintersheim..."
"Yeah, yeah." Too tired to stand on ceremony, Remo hoisted the carpet onto his shoulder and returned to the living room, where he yanked the other body out of the ceiling, with a shower of dust and plaster. The man in the corduroys tumbled to the floor like a sack of cement. "Well, I can't figure it out," Remo said. "Nobody even knows us here, and this makes three times today that someone's tried to ice one of us."
"You, too?" Chiun asked in a tone of voice that immediately struck Remo as too casual.
"Twice," Remo said, eyeing him slowly. "And you know something about it, so speak up. What's going on?"
"I know nothing." Chiun's fingers twitched toward the plaster-covered body. "Take this mad dog away."
Something caught Remo's eye. It was lying on the floor beside the dead man, coated with fallen debris. "This must have fallen out of his pocket," Remo said, picking it up.
It was a plastic card the size of a credit card, only it had no markings on it except for a wide metal band running along its length. "What do you think it is?" Remo asked, turning the card over in his palm.
Chiun snapped it out of his hand irritably. "Clean up this rubbish first," he said. "Later will we solve the riddles of this ill-mannered island." He tossed the card onto an end table while Remo dragged the corpses outside.
There was something strange about this night. Remo felt it as he hauled the dead men toward the cold mist of the ocean. He tossed in the rolled-up carpet.
Well, why shouldn't the night be strange? The day had been weird enough. Smitty, for one thing, with his transparent talk about taking a vacation on an island near the one that Remo and Chiun were on. Harold W. Smith didn't take vacations, not with his employees, at any rate. Then the murder attempts. Two for Remo and one for Chiun. Something was going on here, and whatever it was, Smith knew about it. Remo was here for a reason, although he couldn't imagine what it was. All he knew was that something lurked on this island paradise, something dark and frightening. Chiun was right. Some vacation.
A rustling sounded in the distance, Remo looked behind his shoulder. Nothing. That was what was strange about this night, he realized as his eyes moved from the night-blackened coastline to the sky. There was no moon. Sometime in the past hour a cloud cover had blotted out the moon and the twinkling stars that were the only light outdoors at night. Without them, the island was as black as the innards of Hell.
The rustling sounded again, closer, with the pat-pat-pat of approaching footsteps on the sand. Remo listened. They were coming from the west, the direction he had walked home from. He gathered his thoughts together, trying to remember. West was Fabienne's house and Devil's Mountain and that winding goat-herders' road he had taken with Pierre, and the shipyard with its modern security system...