It wasn't a long chase. Not even three nautical miles. The huge gray knife of a prow loomed closer and closer, and its shadow fell on the Jeannie I, drowning it like the Shadow of Death.
In his slicker, Tomasso Testaverde swore and cursed and sweated, hot and cold alternately. "What do you want? What do you bastards want?" he screamed over his shoulder.
The remorseless gray ship nudged the Jeannie I once. She spurted ahead, her fat stern fractured.
Tomasso let out a pungent wail. "Mangia la cornata!"
For the cold ocean was pouring into the Jeannie I, washing her decks. It happened very fast. Taking on water, the lobster boat slowed. The gray prow lunged anew, splintering the wounded boat.
Tomasso jumped clear. There was nothing else for him to do.
By some miracle he swam clear of the foamy upheaval that was the Jeannie I going down.
The cold made his muscles shrink and his bones turn to ice, it came upon him so swiftly. He was intensely cold. With sick eyes he watched the big ship glide on past, its sides bumping aside the fresh driftwood and kindling that used to be the Jeannie I.
The warmth of death came over Tomasso quickly. He knew how one would grow warm just before succumbing to the cold of exposure and hypothermia. It was as true for a child who falls asleep in the snowy woods as for a man adrift in the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine.
Tomasso was a survivor. But he knew he would not survive this.
His body like lead, he began to sink. He didn't feel the hands clutching his ice-rimed hair and flailing arms, nor did he know he was being hauled into a dory.
He only knew that some time later he lay in the fish hold of a ship. It was cold. He tried to move but couldn't. Lifting his head, he looked down and saw that his body was blue and naked. It trembled and shivered involuntarily. It was his body. Tomasso recognized it, but he couldn't really feel it.
I am shivering and I don't feel it, he thought in a vague, wondering frame of mind.
Men were hovering around him. He could see their faces. White. Gleaming white. The blue tattoo that went from forehead to chin and spread out over nose and mouth and cheeks wasn't shaped like a lobster. It was something else.
Tomasso did not know what the design was, only that it was familiar.
A man stepped up and began to apply something white and gleaming to Tomasso's unfeeling face.
They are trying to save me. They are applying some warming salve to my face. I have been saved. I will survive.
Then one of them stepped up with a living fish in one hand, a fish knife in the other. With a quick slash, he decapitated the fish and, without ceremony, while the other man was calmly applying creamy white unguent to Tomasso's features, he inserted the bleeding stump of the fish into Tomasso's open mouth.
Tomasso tasted blood and fish guts.
And he knew he was tasting death.
He did not feel them turn his inert body over and perform an obscene act upon his dying dignity with another fish.
He never dreamed, not even in death, that he was destined to be the spark in a confrontation that would shake the world from which he took much but gave back so very little.
Chapter 12
Boston traffic was, for Boston traffic, almost normal. There were only two accidents, neither serious, although one looked as if someone decided to pull a U-turn onto the UMass off-ramp. The pickup truck in question had ended up on its back like an upset turtle, and the tires were nowhere to be seen.
When the cab he was riding swerved suddenly, Remo saw them rolling in different directions like big black doughnuts out for a stroll.
"Just another day on the Southeast Distressway," the cabbie muttered to himself.
Remo Williams never got used to turning the corner and seeing his house. It wasn't actually a house really. It was a condominium now, but the units were never marketed for several very good reasons, not the least of which was that before it had been converted, the building had been a stone church.
It wasn't a typical church. A typical church is typically topped by a witch's-hat steeple with a cross on top. Its lines were medieval, although it looked very modern with its fieldstone walls and double row of roof dormers.
Still, it had been built as a house of worship, not a dwelling. The Master of Sinanju had wrested it from Harold Smith during a contract negotiation several years earlier. Remo, of course, had had no say in the matter. Not that he really cared. After years of living out of suitcases, it was nice to have a permanent address. And he had one wing of the place all to himself.
What Remo hated most were the idle comments of the cabdrivers.
"You live here?" this one blurted when Remo told him to pull over. "In this rock pile?"
"It's been in my family for centuries," Remo assured him.
"A church?"
"It's actually a castle transported brick by brick from the ancestral estate in Upper Sinanju."
"Where's that?"
"New Jersey."
"They have castles in Jersey?"
"Not anymore. This was the last one to be carried off before state castle taxes went through the roof."
"Must be pre-Revolutionary."
"Pre-pre-Revolutionary," said Remo, slipping a twenty through the pay slot. He had replenished his cash supply at an airport ATM with a card he carried in his back pocket.
At the door Remo rang the bell. And rang it again.
To his surprise a plump dumpling of an Asian woman with iron gray hair padded up to the two glass ovals of the double doors. She wore a nondescript quilted costume that wasn't exactly purple and not precisely gray, but might have been lilac.
She looked at Remo, winking owlishly and opened the door.
"Who are you?" Remo demanded.
The old woman bowed. When her face came up, Remo studied it and decided she was South Korean, not North Korean. That was a relief. For a moment there, he was afraid she was some cousin of Chiun's come to visit for the next decade.
"Master awaits," she said in broken English.
"He in the bell tower?"
"No, the fish cellar."
"What fish cellar?" asked Remo.