Then Wooley noticed something else in the room. It was an odor, a rich pungent smell of tobacco smoke, the smell of a fine handmade cigar.
He stepped back toward the door, putting his arm around Leen Forth. But a lamp came on behind him and a soft gentle voice said: "It's good to see you, Doctor Wooley."
Wooley turned. Sitting on the couch was a dignified looking man with silver hair and piercing black eyes, wearing a dark pin-striped suit. Dr. Wooley had been frightened when he had first realized someone was in the apartment but when he saw the man, the gentility and nobility of his fine-featured face, the smooth, warm smile he flashed toward Wooley and his daughter, Wooley's uneasiness vanished. He didn't know his visitor but obviously such a man meant no harm to Wooley or Leen Forth.
The man rose.
"I am pleased to meet you, Professor. I am Salvatore Massello."
"Remo, wake up." Smith's voice was like ice in the darkened hotel room.
He heard a snicker from Chiun, sleeping on his grass mat in the center of the floor. Then Remo's voice:
"You came up the steps, instead of using the elevator. Probably so you wouldn't make any noise. You tripped on the second step from the top of the landing. Just before you opened the door to this floor you coughed. You jingled in your pocket looking for the room key before you found out the door was open. And now you tell me, wake up. I ask you. How's somebody supposed to sleep if you keep making all this racket?"
"Do not abuse the emperor," Chiun told Remo in the dark. "He was very quiet."
"Yeah? Then why are you awake?"
"I heard your breathing change," Chiun said. "I thought perhaps you had been attacked by a flying hamburger. I was going to come to your rescue."
"Oh, blow it out your ears, Little Father," Remo said. "Well, what is it, Smitty?"
"Do you mind if I turn on a light? I don't like to talk to people I can't see."
"Learn to see in the dark," Remo said. "Oh, go ahead, turn on the light. My night's sleep is shot anyway."
When Smith turned on the light, Remo sat up on the couch and turned toward him. Like a slow puff of steam, Chiun rose from his sleeping mat until he was in a lotus position looking at Smith.
"Well, what is it?" Remo said.
"I thought you might want to look at a house," Smith said.
"At this hour? What real estate agent is showing houses at this hour?" Remo asked.
It wasn't really being shown by a real estate agent, Smith explained. Actually, the house wasn't even on the market yet. But it probably would be soon. And anyway, Smith just kind of wanted to get an idea of the type of house Remo wanted.
There were a lot of etceteras and Smith's car was rolling toward the guardhouse outside the main entrance to Edgewood University when Remo began to suspect he had been euchred.
The guard stepped out from the booth and waved the salmon-colored Volkswagen to a halt.
"We want to see Professor Wooley," Smith said.
"Sorry. I've got orders to admit no one but students until tomorrow."
Remo leaned out the window. "It's all right, officer," he said. "He's the head of a super-secret organization that safeguards our country's freedom from domestic insurrection."
"Remo. Please," Smith said.
"Hah?" the guard said.
"And I'm a secret assassin with more deaths on my hands that I can count. Deaths, that is, not hands," Remo said.
"Remo, stop," Smith said.
"Yeah, sure, buddy," the guard said, taking a step back toward the booth to be able to reach the phone.
"Wait, don't go," Remo said. "I'd like you to meet Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, and a man who could be a household word, if you could find a household interested in talking about kvetches."
"I think you all better just turn around and get out of here," the guard said. "I don't want any trouble."
He was about fifty years old with a beer belly so big it looked as if his wide leather belt would cut him in half if he exhaled suddenly. Remo suspected that the last "trouble" the man had dealt with had been an argument about overtime with the campus police union shop steward.
"You're not going to let us in? A master spy, a master assassin, and a master kvetch?" Remo said.
"G'wan, get outta here," the guard said.
"Too bad." When he woke up the next day, the guard wouldn't really remember much of the conversation; he'd just remember that the man in back didn't really seem to lean through the window, but the guard caught a flash of fingers and then felt a pinching sensation in his throat, and then he went to sleep.
Smith got out of the car, pulled the guard into the booth, and turned out the overhead light.
Remo settled into the back seat of the car, and then felt a pain in his right leg, as if it had been pierced with a dull stick.
"Owww," he said. "What'd you do that for, Chiun?"
"A kvetch is a scold," Chiun said. "A corn-plainer. A whiner. A sniveler. I am not those things."
"Right, Chiun, right," Remo said. "Take the pain away."
Chiun tapped on Remo's right knee and the pain vanished as quickly as it had come.
"If I were a kvetch," Chiun said, "I would not treat you so lightly. I would complain and carp about your name-calling. I would remind you of all the years I have wasted on you, years spent trying to make something worthwhile out of a pale piece of pig's ear. I would scold you for frittering away what I have taught you in parlor tricks for fat men who stand in guard boxes. These things I would do if I were a kvetch. I would tell you about…"
Smith had slid back into the car and turned from the front seat and looked at the two men.
"What's the matter?" he said.
"Chiun is explaining how he's not a kvetch," Remo said. "He's certainly not complaining or carping."
"It is a minor thing, Emperor," Chiun said. "Drive on."
Before leaving the campus after the Dreamocizer demonstration, Smith had taken the precaution of driving by Wooley's house and now he was able to find the small brick and frame, ivy-covered building, nestled in a back corner of the large sprawling school grounds.
"Smitty," Remo said as they parked the car across a gravel-paved road from the house, "I know this is a put-on, so why don't you just tell us what you want?"
"This is Dr. Wooley's house," Smith said. "Tonight I saw his television invention. So did other people and I suspect he's going to be a target. I want you to make sure he stays alive until I can talk to him."