"How about your sex life?"
"My what?"
"Is that not what they call it in America, or is there new phrase? I wish to know the most modern American phrases so that when I go to America, I will not sound foolish."
" 'Sex life' is still in vogue," Remo said. "Except maybe for me," he added wistfully.
Fang Yu came over and took one of Remo hands in both of hers. Her hands were warm to the touch and Remo inhaled her delicate rose-petal scent once more.
"My work for Chinese tourist bureau too gets in the way of my sex life," she said sadly. "For I have none."
"I have an idea," Remo said suddenly. "Let's take a break from work."
"But I do not know what to do next," Fang Yu said, coloring modestly.
"Leave everything to me," Remo returned.
He drew her through the beaded curtain and to the bed.
Chapter 16
Remo Williams awoke to an empty bed.
He missed Fang Yu immediately.
Remo shot bolt upright, taking in all sounds around him like a human sensory sponge.
"Yu?" he said, even though he knew she was not in the modest apartment. There was no other heartbeat. Beyond the walls, yes. Other heartbeats, other sounds of sleeping apartment occupants. But not Fang Yu.
Remo threw back the thin covers. He felt great. He had not had sex like that in a long, long time. It made him feel refreshed, cleansed of subtle poisons.
Their lovemaking had started the way it usually began for Remo with a woman.
Fang Yu had been shy at first. Remo liked that. That, too, was refreshing. He wondered if the Chinese woman were a virgin. He decided not to ask. Better to be surprised. It had been a long time since sex had held any surprises for him.
Fang Yu had looked upward when she asked, "How does it begin with you and American women?"
"Like this," Remo had replied, taking up her left hand. He held it with one of his, aware of a faint trembling in her wrist. Remo began tapping with his right index finger, in the prescribed way of Sinanju. Step one.
It was designed to bring a woman to watery-kneed climax just standing there. This facilitated two ultimate Sinanju purposes--to bind a woman to a man by brute sexuality. Whether she wanted to or not, she would lie open to him within moments.
Or, when applied to a female enemy, it was an excellent interrogation technique. Simply stop tapping at a crucial moment, and the subject would beg, plead, even grovel for the withheld finger. Remo had known American women subjected to step one to become sexually aroused at the sight of male index fingers forever after.
"What is this?" Fang Yu had asked uncertainly.
"Step one," Remo replied. "Collect them all."
Fang Yu's eyebrows drew together in pretty perplexity as Remo continued tapping. Her trembling quickened. She looked up, and her ivory-hued face in the dimness was so appealing Remo said, "The hell with step one. Let's go directly to thirty-seven. Maybe we'll get lucky and land on Boardwalk. "
He withdrew his finger and began undressing her.
They fell into bed together, naked and tentative. Soon there was nothing tentative in the work they plunged into or the sounds they made.
It was not Sinanju. It was something even older and more powerful.
Remo enjoyed Fang Yu's responsive thrusts and matched them with his own. They climaxed together, shivering and passionate, and after a few tasty butterfly kisses, returned to the fray.
Remo remembered that they had fallen asleep in one another's arms, sweating, spent but satisfied.
Now he was alone. So where was Fang Yu?
As the delicious memories faded, Remo's training reasserted itself. Was this a trap? Remo went to the door. Locked. He flicked on the light and began going through the apartment, looking for something, anything, that would tell him if this really was Fang Yu's apartment.
Unfortunately, except for a cassette of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, several Madonna tapes, and a dog-eared copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, every bit of writing in the apartment was in Chinese.
"Damn!" Remo said. He wished Chiun were here. Chiun could read Chinese. He returned to the bed and drew on his clothes.
"When in doubt," he muttered to himself, "seek escape. So spake Chiun the Wise."
Remo slipped out into the night. The cold made the flesh of his bare forearms tighten, the hair lifting. He sucked in the cold distasteful air and blew it into every cell of his body. It was like firing up a zillion tiny subcutaneous heaters.
Remo walked, feeling warmer than if he were swathed in an electric blanket.
Having no idea where he was, Remo simply oriented himself by his inner compass. Tiananmen Square and his hotel lay to the southeast, he remembered, so he walked southeast.
The only foot traffic he encountered were stooped workmen shoveling waste from public lavatories into wheelbarrows. Remo remembered that they called it "night soil," and used it to fertilize their fields during the warm months. Probably it went into storage during the winter.
Beijing was honeycombed with narrow alleys called hutongs, so it was simple enough to avoid the nearly identical PLA soldiers and People's Armed Police. They walked the streets like an occupying army, always in pairs. Occasionally one would fly by astride a bicycle, bundled up against the cold and pumping the pedals like mad. They made Remo think of the Wicked Witch of the West in greatcoats and fur-trimmed hats.
As Remo approached Tiananmen Square, they became as numerous as bluebottle flies around a horse.
Remo tried to avoid the square itself, but the walls of the old Forbidden City blocked him. He doubled back and took a chance on the most direct route, East Changan Avenue, which formed the north boundary of the square.
Changan went through the vast stone-paved square itself. In his black T-shirt and chinos, Remo was as well-dressed as The Shadow for moving around unseen. But Tiananmen Square was well-lit by ornate standards to expose all hiding places. Remo flitted from clots of darkness, moving with ninjalike stealth behind the unsuspecting backs of sentry guards.
He paused in the shadow of the Great Hall of the People and its giant portrait of Mao, whose Buddhalike serenity belied his bloody reign. The Beijing rose up on the other side.
The square was so vast, Remo's best chance was to run.
He started off, keeping his elbows tight to his sides, not pumping because wild motions could be read by peripheral vision.
He was more like the shadow of a passing cloud than a man as he moved through the square right under the noses of PLA sentries.
Remo would have made it all the way to East Changan had it not been for the limousine coming toward him.
It ghosted up East Changan like a dreadnought, turning into the square.