Remo thought that no one would ever call her any kind of boy, but he simply asked, "Antiquities? Are they like antiques?"
She nodded. "Only older. My clients want Greek wall friezes, lintels from Egyptian temples, things like that."
"Like old statues," Remo said softly, thinking of something else.
"Sometimes. As a matter of fact, I was looking for one in America and traced it all the way to New Orleans. But I lost it. The one who owned it sold it, then died, and no one knows who bought it."
"Was it valuable?"
"Very old, worth perhaps a quarter of a million dollars," Ivory said. "The owner's landlady said he sold it for forty dollars."
"Must be a beautiful statue to be worth that much," Remo said.
She shrugged. "I've never seen it myself, but I've seen replicas. A stone goddess with several arms. The exact number differs in the catalogs."
"Kali," Remo said, closing his eyes.
"I beg your pardon."
"Nothing. Never mind. Maybe you weren't meant to find it. Maybe it would have been bad luck or something."
"If I worried about curses or luck," she said, "I'd probably never buy anything more than a week old. But this statue might have been special."
Remo grunted. He didn't want to be reminded of the statue. It made him nervous. He imagined he could smell the scent of Kali on the airplane. But it would be gone soon. And perhaps Chiun could rid him of it forever.
He caught her staring at him. For a moment their eyes locked and a terrible sadness came over him. "You look so familiar," he said, his voice almost a whisper.
"I was just thinking the same thing about you."
As the engines began to rev up, he kissed her. He couldn't explain why, but he saw the haunting, longing look in Ivory's eyes and knew if he couldn't touch her, couldn't have her, his heart might as well be torn out of him. As his mouth touched hers, she accepted him with a hungry urgency. Time vanished. In the woman's embrace, he no longer felt like Remo Williams, assassin, running away from his fear. Instead, he was only The Man and Ivory was The Woman and they were in a place far removed from the noise of a twentieth-century jet engine.
"Oh, no," she said, pulling away abruptly.
"What's wrong?"
"My gifts." She rose hurriedly, squeezing past Remo's knees. Her face was suddenly lined with worry. "I bought some presents and left them at the check-in counter. I'll be right back."
"Hurry," he said.
Ivory argued for a few seconds with the stewardesses at the front of the plane before they let her leave. When she rushed down the steps, the two attendants looked at each other and shrugged. One of them picked up a microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are ready for departure. Please take your seats and observe the seat-belt sign." Remo looked at the small bag Ivory had left behind in front of her seat. He strained to see through the tinted glass of the airport. A woman's figure was running, stopping, fidgeting with something, running back.
The plane began to move.
"Hey, stop this," Remo yelled. "A passenger's coming."
Several of the other passengers looked over at him, but the stewardesses pointedly ignored him and went to the front of the plane. Remo pushed all the lights and buzzers he could find as he saw Ivory step out of the airport building. "Hey. Stop the plane. The lady wants to get on."
"I'm sorry, sir. No passengers are permitted to embark at this time," the frazzled stewardess said, turning off the fifteen call buttons Remo had activated.
"She doesn't want to embark," Remo said. "She wants to get on."
But the plane was moving away from the terminal. Through the window, Remo saw Ivory stopped by a maintenance man wearing headphones. She looked up at the taxiing plane in despair, then set down the boxes and bags in her arms and waved at the plane. It was a good-humored gesture, the resignation of a victim to one of life's little screw-ups.
Remo felt worse, hurt and cheated. He had barely known the woman named Ivory, but still he felt that he had known her forever, and now, as quickly as she had entered, she was gone from his life.
As the plane roared into takeoff, Remo picked up the soft fabric overnight bag Ivory had left under the seat. Perhaps there was some identification in it, he thought. But inside were only a couple of nightgowns, all lace and silk-like her, he thought-and a small bag filled with toiletries that carried the same soft scent he remembered from the brief moment he had held her.
It was a strange scent, not flowery like most perfumes, but deeper, somehow intoxicating. And for a moment he didn't know if he really liked it, but then he remembered her face, and decided he did.
But there was no identification in the bag, and sadly he put it back under the seat.
The plane was up now, barely a hundred feet in the air, but instantly turning west away from Lake Pontchartrain. Remo heard a deep rumbling from beneath the craft, as if it were a large flying bird noisily digesting its dinner. Within a half-second the sound had exploded into a deafening roar. In another second the whole front of the plane had ripped off and shattered into fragments before his eyes. A stewardess screamed, blood pouring from her mouth and ears, then fell backward toward the gaping hole, hit a ragged metal edge, then flew into space, leaving a severed arm behind. Everything loose in the plane fell through the opening. Some seat belts snapped under the strain and gave up their passengers to the gaping maw in the front of the craft.
The plane was tumbling toward the water. Remo heard someone whimper, "Oh, my God." And he wondered if even God could help them all now.
Chapter Twenty-two
It was late and Smith was bone-tired when he reached the ratty Seagull Motel on Penbury Street.
As he started to enter the building, he heard chanting coming from a nondescript structure almost directly across the street from the motel.
Chanting?
Across the street from where Remo had stayed? Smith's fatigue disappeared. His heart racing, he walked across the street, pushed open the door, and stepped inside. The big room was dark. Immediately he was assaulted by the acrid sting of burning incense and the overpowering heat from too many human bodies in an enclosed space.
The people were young, some of them barely into adolescence, and they were chanting at the top of their voices. The object of their attention was a statue set in a prominent position on a small platform at the front of the room. The chanters bowed frequently to the statue, raised their arms, and whirled around in improvisational ecstasy. It seemed to Harold Smith that every activity the group embraced was singularly useless and undignified.
He scanned the room thoroughly, then sighed and backed toward the doorway. His weariness returned. A. H. Baynes was not there, and neither was Remo. It had been an idea worth exploring, he told himself, even though it had led, like all his other ideas in this case, to a dead end.
He was at the door when a strange little Indian man shouted to him. "You. What do you want here?"
None of the chanters paid any attention to them, and Smith said dryly, "I doubt very much if I want anything here."
"Then why are you here? You just walk in?"
"The door was open. I did just walk in."
"Why did you walk in?" the Indian asked irascibly. "Are you looking for religion?"
"I'm looking for a man named A. H. Baynes. My name is Smith."
The Indian took a sharp, startled breath of air. "Baynes?" he squeaked. "No Baynes here. Sorry." He pushed Smith firmly to the door. "You find yourself another church, okay?"
"There's another man I'm looking for," Smith said. "Tall, with dark hair. He has thick wrists-"