"They wished to intrude on a delicate flower in second bloom. They wanted to destroy the peace of a kindly old man whose only desire was to steal a moment of tranquillity in order to meditate on his place in the world. They desired to insult the memory of what I was by thinking they could threaten the Master in Retirement with mere firearms."
"So I take it they didn't have a chance to say much of anything before you kacked them?" Remo said dryly.
"When whites speak, who listens?" Chiun replied.
Remo fixed him with a level eye. "I'll be back. Try not to kill anyone in the next twenty seconds." He ducked out into the hallway.
Two suites down, Remo spied a pile of luggage through a partially open door. Someone was checking in, presumably a Globe Summit mucky-muck, given the elegance of the suitcases. He heard a shower running but saw no one around.
Ducking into the room, Remo selected two trunks that seemed to be around the right size. He cracked the locks and dumped the contents onto the floor. An empty trunk on each shoulder, he headed back to his room.
Chiun was still at the glass doors. The sun was setting over the garbage-mounded scows in the Caribbean.
Muttering Korean curses, Remo placed the trunks next to the bodies. He went into the bedroom and stripped the sheets and blankets. Wrapping the bodies, he stuck one in each trunk. They didn't fit at first. A few strategic crunches and they folded up nicely. All that was left were the two bloodstains. Remo went to work tearing up the carpet.
"And who is your company?" Chiun asked as he worked.
"Huh?" Remo said absently. "Oh, just some spy or something I met. Chiun, the least you could do is put down a drop cloth or something. Or use the tub. You ever think of killing them in the bathroom? Bathroom cleans up nice."
"If you spent as much time working as you spend figuring out ways to avoid work, you would be finished by now."
"I'll finish you," Remo grunted.
He had a big square of carpet up. Tearing it in long strips, he tucked it in the trunks around the bodies. As he was snapping the lids shut, he felt a familiar rumble.
Realizing he might have just gotten lucky for one of the first times in his life, he stacked the trunks on top of one another and made a mad dash for the door. He ran down the far end of the hall where a common balcony overlooked the street. Eight stories below, another trailer truck was driving by on its way up to the hills above New Briton. The open back was filled with garbage.
As the truck passed directly below, Remo tossed the trunks over the balcony railing. They plunged the eight stories, landing neatly in the back of the passing truck. It continued up the street.
When he turned, he saw two elderly women sitting at a metal table on the corner of the balcony. He smiled at them.
"Almost missed trash day," he told them. Brushing imaginary dust from his hands, he headed back inside the hotel.
"This better not be the start of a revival," Remo announced as he came back into the suite. "I did my time already. I'm not about to start hauling dead bodies for you every other day again."
"That is only fair, for you are now Reigning Master," Chiun agreed. "You may limit the disposal of bodies to those days that fall in between every other day."
"That's not what I meant," Remo said.
He was eyeballing the hole in the carpet. He found one of the sheets he hadn't used to wrap a body. He stretched it over the exposed floorboards. He was just finishing up when the room phone jangled to life. Simultaneous with the ringing phone there came a knock at the door.
The phone was cordless. There was apparently a button on it somewhere Remo was supposed to push. He pushed one. The phone stopped ringing. When he put it to his ear, there was no one on the line nor was there a dial tone. He shook the phone and checked again. It didn't help.
Phone in hand, he headed for the door. As he was pulling it open, the phone started ringing again.
A smiling waiter with a serving cart stood in the hallway. "Room service," he announced.
"I didn't order room service," Remo said.
"I did," announced an authoritative voice from the hall.
Petrovina Bulganin breezed into the room.
The phone in his hand still ringing, Remo spun around Petrovina and the waiter, who had pushed the cart in after the Russian agent.
"I thought you were eating in your room," Remo said.
"I decide is perhaps too dangerous," Petrovina replied. "Hello," she said to Chiun.
The old man eyed the young woman with bland contempt.
"This is your company?" he said to Remo in Korean. "A Russian female? I thought you were past that phase."
"Can we not pick that particular wound right now?" Remo answered darkly in the same language. Petrovina didn't understand what they were saying. Nor did she care. She was looking at the ringing telephone, her beautiful face twisting in a frown of irritation.
"Are you going to answer that?"
Remo looked at the still-squawking phone. "Can you get this for me?" he asked the waiter, who was in the process of setting up Petrovina's meal on the cart.
The waiter took the phone and pressed a button. Remo swore it was the same button he had pressed. But this time instead of dead air, he heard the familiar lemony voice of Harold W. Smith.
"Remo? What took so long? Is everything all right?"
"Just a sec, Smitty," Remo said. "We're reenacting the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera here."
He told the waiter to bill the meal to Petrovina's room, threw him a tip and hustled him from the suite. When he came back into the living room, Petrovina was lifting the sheet on the floor with the toe of her shoe. She was frowning at the bare floorboards. "I've got to take this in private," Remo said, pushing her cart toward an adjacent room. "You mind?"
She looked through the doorway. "You want me to eat in lavatory?" she asked in bland disbelief.
"Hey, I've been to Moscow," Remo said. "This is five-star ambience."
He rolled her cart in, pushed a protesting Petrovina in after it and stuck a chair up under the knob. "Okay, Smitty, we can talk now," Remo said.
"What was that commotion?" the CURE director asked.
"Just a Russian agent I picked up. She was sent here to figure out what's going on, too."
Smith's voice grew concerned. "Who is this Russian?" he asked.
Remo frowned. Stepping over, he knocked on the bathroom door. "Hey, dumpling, what's your name again?" he called.
"Let me out!" Petrovina shouted. "That your first name or last?"
There was a furious hiss and a stream of muttered Russian on the other side of the door. It was followed by the angry sound of silverware clanking on dinner plates.
"She's not talking, Smitty," Remo said. "I think she said Bulganov, Balganan or something like that before."