Then she looked at Remo, the handsome dark-eyed man with high cheekbones. His sharp gaze sent gushers of passion through her body. She wanted him. All of him. She wanted him in death, in life, his body, his hands. Death or passion, it was all the same thing. She now knew the secret of Kali. Death was life itself. They were the same.
Holly Rodan threw herself at Remo's feet and began kissing his bare ankles.
"Kill me too," she said. "Give me death. For Her." The feet moved away and she crawled after this beautiful force of death. She crawled down the path, her knees scraping on stones, bleeding. She had to reach him. She had to serve him with her life.
"Kill me," she said. She looked up into his eyes, imploring him. "Kill me. For Her. Death is beautiful." For the first time in his new life, Remo ran. He ran from the clearing and from something he did not understand. He did not even know what he was running from.
Back at the airport, he met Chiun, who was stopping passersby and asking them to sign his petition. But when Chiun saw Remo, he knew something was wrong and put the petition away inside his kimono.
All the way back to New Orleans, Chiun made no criticism, expressed no annoyance at having had to train a white man, and on leaving the plane, even paid Remo a compliment. "You move and breathe well, Remo."
"I'll be all right, Little Father. I just have to think."
"Of course," said Chiun. "We will speak when you are ready."
But that night, at their new hotel, they still did not speak. Remo looked at the stars and could not sleep. Chiun watched Remo, and late, during the night, he put away the petitions in one of his large steamer trunks.
They would have to wait; something more important had happened, he knew.
Chapter Six
Ban Sar Din ate his way through the forty dollars before breakfast. And it wasn't even at his favorite restaurant; he couldn't afford that.
He left the restaurant and wandered the streets. Something was wrong with America. If you bought a plane ticket and sent three people out to do a job and then all you earned was less than the price of a full meal with dessert, something was seriously wrong. With the economy. With everything.
People were making fortunes on fund-raisers for revolutionary movements that were little more than bandit gangs. There was one yogi who was even selling a secret word for two hundred dollars a pop and he had the suckers lined up waiting.
Some cults had mansions. Others had corporations that came close to being listed in the Fortune 500. Some yogis bought their own towns, drove around in Rolls-Royces, and the suckers threw flowers at their feet.
And what did Ban Sar Din have?
He had an ashram full of crazies who thought nothing of killing someone for forty dollars just to see the victim wriggle a bit. And he was losing money. The Kali thing had started out all right, but now the crazies seemed more interested in the killing than in the robbing, and he was going bust.
In a land of opportunity, if you couldn't make money through murder and theft, how could you make money?
He felt like taking one of those bonus-fare coupons from just Folks Airlines and flying off somewhere. But his hands had gotten too fat for picking pockets and he had gotten used to being a spiritual leader to America's youth. What bothered him most of all that troubling evening was that he knew there was a fortune to be mined somehow, somewhere in that ashram. He had free personnel and a cult that seemed to have caught on.
How to make a buck out of it? A reliable buck.
He couldn't send out more of the killer teams. If each one showed a loss, increasing the volume just meant increasing the loss. Expenses? He couldn't cut any more than he had already. Handkerchiefs any cheaper and they wouldn't be able to hold a throat. He had tried white handkerchiefs once, but the faithful insisted on the yellow, and how could you argue with people you weren't paying anyway?
He couldn't even cut expenses by going to a totally unchartered airline. Who knew what kind of poverty-stricken passengers that kind of line might be carrying? His loonies would wind up killing and come home with a handful of food stamps.
He was in a circle growing smaller and there was no way out.
And then, in his despair, Ban Sar Din heard voices, a beautiful song rising with faith and gusto toward the heavens. He looked around and saw he had wandered into a poor black neighborhood. The voices came from a church. He entered and sat down in a rear pew.
The minister sang with the chorus. He preached of hell and he preached of salvation, but most of all he preached of the magic prayer cloth that would answer problems, and when treated with the magic blue juice, would cure the gout, rheumsey, cabob disorder, and lung cancer.
After the prayer meeting, Ban Sar Din went up to the minister.
"What ails you, brother?" asked the Reverend, Tee Vee Walker, a boom of a man with a rutted black face and large hands that glistened with gold and diamonds. His was the Church of the Instant Savior. "Business is bad," said Ban Sar Din.
"What business you in?" asked the Reverend Walker.
"Religion business," said Ban Sar Din.
"You in the life, then?" chuckled the Reverend Walker, and when Ban Dar Sin explained he was running an Indian religion, the Reverend Walker asked his weekly take.
"It used to be good, but costs have gotten out of hand."
"Don' know how to handle costs, excep' don' have none. What I always do is take the ugliest woman in the choir and give her some heavy lovin' and then make her in charge of all the costs. She figure out how to pay. Learned from my Daddy, he be a preacher too, one of your basic no-frills yell-in-their-face gospel preachers. You can go anywhere with that. Yell in their faces."
"I have a different sort of gospel," Ban Sar Din said.
"They all the same. It be what people buyin'."
"It's not the same. I'm afraid of my congregation."
"Pack one of these," said the Reverend Walker. It was a little silvery automatic. He explained that it was unseemly for a minister to carry a large pistol, but a pearl-handled automatic could fit in a jacket or trouser pocket. His father, he said, used to carry a switchblade.
"But mine are crazy," Ban Sar Din said. "I mean real crazies. You just can't yell in their faces. You don't understand."
"Listen, little fat fella. I'm not rescuing yo' congregation for nothing. I'll show you how to work the pulpit," the Reverend Walker said. "But I get the day's offerings. "
"You can yell in their faces?"
"I can whip yo' congregation into a pack of little puppies. And when I got them where you want 'em, remember ... give the ugliest woman some loving and let her solve yo' problems for you."
Ban Sar Din gauged the big man's size again. Perhaps. Perhaps he might get them in line. And once they were in line, Ban Sar Din might be able to get them into more profitable areas, might be able to convince them that coming back with forty dollars in a rumal was a sin, especially in these times when forty dollars didn't even get you a first-class meal with dessert.
"All right, nigger," Ban Sar Din said. "A deal."
"What's that word yo' say?" asked the Reverend Tee Vee Walker.
"It's wrong?"
"Only a nigger can use the word 'nigger.' "
"Everybody calls me 'nigger,' " Ban Sar Din said, in great confusion. "I thought that made us blood brothers or something."
"Not you. You brown enough, but you talk funny."
"The British imperialists forced us to learn this funny talk," said Ban Sar Din, catching in a single sentence the basic doctrine of the third-world theology; namely that no matter what happened, one had to blame it on some white men. That done, anything was acceptable.
The Reverend Walker did not find a pulpit in the ashram. There was a bare wood floor, well polished, a statue of their saint, which had too many arms and an ugly face, and not even the smell of something cooking somewhere. Just some very quiet, very white, very young people walking around.