"Oh," said Remo.
"I'm sorry," said Consuelo.
The boat turned into a tributary, and the crew became nervous. The guide did not. Remo picked up little comments about something called the "Giri."
The guide said it was nothing to worry about. There were no more Giri near here. They were less than fifty miles from Rio. Would poor pitiful savages remain near Rio?
Remo checked the map. On the map, everything outlying Rio was built up but the dark green patch and the brown line they were traveling on. All it said was "Giri."
"What is Giri?" Consuelo asked a crew member when the guide had gone into the cabin to briefly escape the bugs. The Amazon and tributaries had bugs that feasted on normal insect repellent.
"Bad," said a crew member.
"What's bad about it?"
"Them," said the crew member. And then, as though even the sky might be listening, he whispered, fearful even to mention the name.
"Giri all around here. Bad. Bad." He made a motion with his hands about the size of a very large cantaloupe; then he made his hands smaller, to the size of a lemon. "Heads. Take heads. Small."
"Headhunters. The Giri are headhunters," said Consuelo.
"Shhh," said the man. He looked to the thick foliage on the banks and crossed himself. Consuelo went directly to Remo and Chiun to warn them.
"Not Giri," said Chiun. "Anxitlgiri."
''You know them?" asked Consuelo.
"Those who know their past respect the past of others," said Chiun. The warm winds rustled his pale yellow kimono. He looked to Remo. Remo did not look back. He was watching the bugs. Any kind of bugs. Intently.
"He knows them," said Consuelo. "Will you listen to him?"
"You don't understand," said Remo. "He doesn't know them. What Sinanju remembers is who pays the bills. We probably did a hit for them, a half-dozen centuries ago or so. Don't even ask. He doesn't know."
"My own son," said Chiun.
"You poor man. What a beast he is."
"That's all right," said Chiun.
"I am sorry. I misjudged you at first because you made a sexist remark. I'm sorry. I think you are a wonderful person. And I think your son is an ingrate."
"They're still headhunters," said Remo, now looking at the riverbank. He had seen them. And they were following the boat. He was just waiting for the first arrow as Chiun described the Anxitlgiri: they were a happy people, decent, honest, and loving, with perhaps some tribal customs that would not seem familiar to whites.
Francisco Braun knew them only as Giri. He had bought heads from them before. They were dishonest and deceitful as well as vicious. But they loved gold. They loved to melt it and then pour it over favorite things, for decoration. Some of those favorite things happened to be captives whom they made slaves.
The Giri welcomed missionaries. They liked to eat their livers. A road crew, with the Brazilian army there to protect them, tried to build a highway through Giri territory. Their whitened bones ended up as hair ornaments for the Giri women.
Francisco Braun knew that one day he'd find a use for people this vicious and untrustworthy. That day in La Jolla, California, when he found that the pair could not be surprised from even a great distance out at sea, was the day he found the Giri's niche.
What Francisco knew he needed was a distraction. And the finest distraction in the world was a Giri warrior. While the pair were fighting against the poisoned arrows and spears of the Giri, Francisco would put them away.
The question was how to get two men and one woman down to a miserable patch of jungle.
The answer was James Brewster, the man he knew they would follow. And the vehicle was the woman who was chasing him, Consuelo Bonner. She trusted Francisco. And even if she did not trust, Francisco trusted the fact that her desire for him was strong enough to overcome any wariness.
That was the way he routinely made use of her kind.
Knowing they would follow, he had come down the day before and gone through the nauseating ritual of buying the Giri. The bugs had turned his fair skin into a painful red mottle. Even the repellent burned now.
Carefully he had laid out a small pile of gold at the edge of the jungle and sat down. This showed the Giri they could kill him anytime. It also indicated that the gold was a gift. If that was all there was to it, these ugly little men with haircuts like upside-down bowls would kill him as soon as eat a snack.
But Braun knew their minds. Within a half-hour the little men with their bows and arrows, wearing bones in their noses, were poking around his clearing. The first one there took the gold. The second one there took the gold from the first one. The third and fourth took it from the second. Four of them were dead and rotting in the jungle before anyone thought to speak to him.
In Portuguese, he told them there was a great deal of gold to be had. Much more than the small pile he gave them today. He said he would pay this gold for whatever they could pillage from three people who would be coming up the Giri tributary very soon. They would come on a boat. One would be a yellow man, one a white man, and one a white woman.
Who, they asked in broken Portuguese, would get the liver and the heads of the people?
He said they could keep them. He just wanted what the people had and, in exchange, he would pay ten times the amount of gold he offered as a mere gift.
Francisco knew how their minds worked. First, they would think he was an incredible fool to give up the best parts of the victims. Second, they would assume that the trio had to have much more gold with them than he was offering to pay; otherwise why would he pay it at all? And third, they would plan to kill the three, keep the best parts, take their gold, and then collect the gold Francisco offered, as well.
For the Giri it was a foolproof scheme.
For Francisco it was a way to finally eliminate the men with the incredible powers. While a hundred men fired hundreds of little poisonous arrows, Francisco would get off three good clean shots. Then he could fly out of this armpit of the planet and return in triumph to Harrison Caldwell.
When Francisco heard the coughing engine of the river craft, he knew it would only be a few moments. The forest seemed to wriggle with the beetlelike bodies of the Giri. The whole tribe had heard of the great treasure and the good pickings that would be coming up the river. The warriors packed themselves into the slice of jungle that overlooked a narrow bend in the river. Some of the women brought pots for cooking, old iron pots taken from Portuguese traders now of course long passed through the intestines of the ancestors of the Giri.
"The Anxitlgiri are an innocent people," Chiun said as the craft chugged up the churning mud of the tributary toward a leafy point so dense with foliage no light shone through. "They do not know evil, but are susceptible to the blandishments of the more sophisticated. They served the ancient great empires as hunters and guides. What has become of them now, who knows, but they were good hunters at one time."
"Probably hunted babies," said Remo.
"Don't you ever give up?" said Consuelo.
"I've known him a bit longer than you," said Remo. "Ever heard of Ivan the Good?"
The crew did not notice the leaves in the brush, but Remo saw they did not move with the wind. They jostled in peculiar ways. Up ahead, at the point, he sensed a great mass of men. Something was going to happen. He thought of moving Consuelo behind the cabin of the river craft now, keeping her facing the farthest shore.
But Chiun refused to let him do this. Instead, the Oriental raised a single finger and ordered the boat to go directly into the shore.
"What are you doing, little father?" Remo asked in Korean.
"Shh," said Chiun.
The boat headed into the hidden mass of men. Chiun strode to the prow, letting the wind rush against his flowing yellow kimono, a small man like a flag in the front.
On shore the Giri could not believe their good luck. Sometimes riverboats got through their arrows and they would have to chase in their canoes. Sometimes they lost many men storming a boat. But this one had come ashore among them. Some of the women asked if they could start the fires now for the pots. The Giri saw the wisps of white hair floating on the breeze. They watched the beautiful pale yellow cloth billow in the wind. The men were already planning to cut it into strips for loincloths when they saw the yellow man on the prow raise his arms. And then the Giri heard a strange sound, an ancient sound, a sound they had heard spoken only around their campfires during the great ritual times.