"The statue, Emperor," said Chiun. "The one of which we spoke. Of Kali."
"Well, thank God we'll have no more talk of magical statues," Smith said. "Now all we've got left to do is get Baynes."
He handed the statue fragment to Remo, who said casually, "There's one other problem."
"What's that?"
Remo held the piece of statuary up to his nose. "It's the wrong statue," he said.
"What?" asked Smith.
"I don't feel anything. Baynes switched statues. This isn't Kali."
There was a long silence. Finally Chiun said softly, "There is another problem, Remo."
"Huh? What?"
"The woman."
"Ivory?" Remo looked around, but Ivory was nowhere in sight. He combed through the crowd, even slipping past the police to look into the wreckage of the van, but the woman was gone.
He stood in the middle of the street and yelled, "Ivory."
But there was no answer.
The three men returned to the ashram. Remo hoped that Ivory had gone there looking for the statue. But there was no sign of the statue, of Ivory, of A. H. Baynes. All had vanished.
Chapter Twenty-five
"Ivory," A. H. Baynes whispered to the beautiful woman who lay next to him in bed.
Outside, the sun was rising in the Rockies beyond the glass wall of the chalet. The tips of tall pines glistened with dew in the valley below the cliff where Baynes's mountain house stood, surrounded by earlymorning fog.
It was a perfect sunrise, and with Ivory's creamy body rubbing against his, Baynes was glad she had awakened him to see it.
"How did you know I'd be here?" he asked, stroking the inside of her white thighs.
"The girl. The stupid one with the blond hair."
"Holly? She told you?"
"Of course not. She was dead. She wrote C-0-L in the dirt. I assumed it meant you had a place in Colorado."
"Dead? What are you talking about?"
"You can stop the pretense, darling. I'm the one who wears disguises, remember? Anyway, I erased the message with my foot. No one knows we're here."
"All right," Baynes said. "She was getting to be a pain in the ass anyway. All of them with that chanting crap. I got a lot out of them anyway. Two new airlines to add to just Folks. If the feds aren't after me."
Ivory rose languidly and walked over to a creamcolored suitcase. She opened it. "And if they are," she said, "this will set you up all over again somewhere else." She tilted the suitcase to show neat rows of used hundred-dollar bills.
"I have something for you too," he said.
"I was hoping you'd say that."
Baynes hauled a large box from behind the sofa in the living room. He tore open the box and set the statue of Kali on a low table in front of the glass wall overlooking the cliff. Against the background of peaked mountains and clouds, the statue looked for a moment like a real goddess to him, serene and inscrutable, floating in the sky.
"She's magnificent," Ivory said in hushed tones.
"A hell of a lot of trouble for a hunk of stone," he said. "I can tell you I'm glad to get it off my hands." Ivory went back inside the bedroom to dress. She emerged wearing a pair of slacks and a heavy sweater. "Planning on going out?" he asked.
"No, just a little chilly," she said.
"Well, sit down and have a drink." He poured bourbon for both of them. "You are a marvelous-looking woman," he said, handing her a glass. "I'll never get over my surprise when I met you at that abandoned building. I thought you were a man, for Christ's sake."
"I was wearing cloaks."
"With nothing underneath. I've never been seduced like that before," he said.
"You never owned the statue of Kali before," she said.
His pride felt perforated and he said, "Damn that hunk of rock. Who's willing to pay so much money for it, anyway?"
"No one. Kali is for me. My people."'
Baynes guffawed. "Your people? Where are your people from? Scarsdale?"
She looked at him levelly. "I am from a mountainous region in central Ceylon. My ancestors created the statue. It belongs to their descendants."
"This piece of junk?"
"I would advise you not to refer to Kali as junk," she said.
"Hell, you believe it too. I used to have those ninnies at the ashram running around in circles, making believe that the airline tickets grew magically out of Her fingers every night. And all I did was stick them there."
"And the arms the statue grew?" she asked.
"That was Sardine's con. I never did figure out how he did it, but it worked. It kept the crazies in line pretty well."
"The Indian had nothing to do with it," she said.
"You really believe it," he said, making no attempt to hide his astonishment. "Growing arms, needing a lover, wanting deaths and all that slut. You believe it."
"How little you really know," she said. "I have spent six years tracking this statue."
"Well, if you think there's anything special about it, you ought to be disillusioned now. Look at it. It's junk, and it's ugly junk to boot."