"Hold it!" said Sandy. "There's something in the water."
She called up to the pilot, "Kilkenny, take us around. I want to check something out."
The Falcon leaned into a slow turn, dropped and was soon skimming the cold, gray, inhospitable waters.
They saw the thing in the water clearly in the fleeting second they passed over it.
"Looks like a body!" Sandy shouted.
"It's a body, all right," said Remo. "Floating facedown."
Sandy got busy on her radio. "Coast Guard cutter Cayuga, this is Coast Guard One requesting assistance at this time. We have a floater at position Delta Five."
They circled the spot for some twenty minutes until a Coast Guard cutter showed up and took on the body.
They watched the procedure, Sandy through her binoculars and Remo and Chiun with their naked eyes.
Divers entered the water and brought it up like a sack of wet, dripping clay.
"Man alive, I never saw a floater with a face so deathly pale," Sandy muttered.
"I have," said Remo.
They looked at him.
"And if that isn't a fleur-de-lis on his face, I'll eat the next shark I see."
"Glutton," sniffed Chiun.
THERE WERE three strange things about the body when it was taken off the cutter at the Coast Guard station at Scituate.
First it was completely nude, and as blue as a human body could get. The blue was from exposure.
The corpse's face was the white of chalk, and spread over the dead man's features was a livid blue fleur-de-lis put on with what looked like clown greasepaint. The nose was completely blue, as were the lips. The upper and lower spears of the design touched hairline and chin, respectively. The wings curved over the cheekbones in perfect symmetry.
Clenched between the man's teeth was something thin and black. With a pair of pliers, Lieutenant Heckman extracted the thing. It turned out to be the tail of a small gray fish without a head.
"This is damn weird," she was saying.
"Nothing weird about a guy trying to stay alive as long as he can," Remo remarked.
Sandy looked at him dubiously.
"He was adrift in the water. Naturally he'd eat whatever he could catch to keep himself alive," said Remo.
"Nice theory. But unless he had stainless-steel teeth, it won't float. A knife cut off this fish's head."
"Open up his stomach, and I'll bet you find the fish head," Remo said.
"At least he did not stoop to shark," Chiun said aridly.
When they turned the body over to look for wounds, they discovered the third weird thing. It was definitely the weirdest of the three weird things.
There was a gray fish tail projecting from the bluish crack of the dead man's rear end.
"I have seen some pretty odd things, but I have never seen that," Sandy muttered.
"Maybe the fish tried to eat him and got stuck," said Remo in a voice that suggested he wasn't exactly embracing the theory.
"That's a turbot, if I know my fish. They aren't flesh eaters, and I don't see how, left to his own devices, one could cram his head into a human rectum."
"What other way could it have happened?"
"Two. The guy was queer for fish or someone jammed it up in there."
"Why would anyone do that?" asked Remo.
"Your guess," said Sandy, "is as good as mine."
"My guess is the fish tried to eat him and got stuck."
The Master of Sinanju reached out with delicate fingers and took the fish by the tail. He pulled. With an ugly sucking sound, the fish came loose. So did a cloud of gases that mixed the stink of blocked bowels and decomposition.
Everyone retreated several yards, Chiun still holding the fish. He lifted it so everyone could see. It was a small, putrid, gray fish with bulging eyes and nothing appetizing about it.
"Whatever it is," Remo said, "it's no prize."
"Halibut," said Chiun.
"Turbot," amended Sandy.
"If you say so," said Remo, holding his nose.
Everyone saw the fish's throat had been cut, making a pinkish smile under its gaping mouth. Chiun then tossed it so it landed on the body with a light smack.
"Someone cut this fish's throat and stuck it in," Sandy said slowly. "Probably the same someone who cut off the other turbot's head and stuck it in his mouth. This is not good."
"Not for the fish anyway," said Remo.
"Not good for anyone. This is a message. The question is from who and to whom?"
Remo looked at her skeptically.
"Look, the turbot is the symbol of Canada's victory over Spain and other high-seas poachers. This dead guy has callused claws for hands. That tells me he's a fisherman."
"So what's the design on his face mean?" asked Remo.