He wormed his way in that direction, left the surging crowd behind him as he broke into a trot.
JEAN CUVIER HAD NEVER made it with a Gypsy, and the more he thought about Aurelia Boldiszar, the more that lapse in judgment struck him as a critical mistake. She had the kind of look he had always liked in women: slim but not emaciated; elegant, even though her clothes were far from stylish; intelligent but quiet, keeping to herself a bit instead of showing off how smart she was.
The women in the past, let's face it, had been mostly bimbos. They were good at what they did, but without the bedroom and the shopping mall they had no purpose in life. With a Gypsy, now-this Gypsy, anyway-he had the feeling that he would be traveling uncharted territory. It excited him to think about it...but, predictably, there was a problem.
When Aurelia looked at him, which wasn't often, it was as if her eyes glazed over and kept on moving, anxious to find something else to focus on. Okay, the Cajun knew he wouldn't pass for Mel Gibson or that younger guy, Matt What's-his-name, but he had never been described as hideous. Some women went for him, some didn't. But none of them had ever told him that they couldn't stand to look at him.
The more he thought about it now, the more it troubled him. A part of his brain told him that his manly honor was at stake, he had to make the Gypsy really see him, but another part was getting worried. Cuvier was wondering if what he saw there, when her eyes glazed over, was in fact revulsion toward him as a man, or maybe something else.
He thought about the stories he had heard about the Gypsies when he was growing up. He had believed them as a child, and still believed enough of them to recommend that Remo seek out the Gypsies for information on the loup-garou. Some of the stuff he'd heard was crazy, while some other parts made sense. Jean Cuvier had never really stopped to dwell on whether Gypsies could predict the future. Tell someone when they were going to die, for instance. Maybe tell them how.
But what if this Aurelia babe could see his fate? Suppose that what she saw, just glancing at him from across the room, was so damn horrible it turned her stomach and she had to look away or lose her dinner right there on the coffee table.
What if she was seeing him dissected and devoured by old loup-garou?
The warmth that he had felt between his legs, watching Aurelia move around the room or simply sit there, paging through a magazine, was gone now. In its place there was tightness, as if his scrotal sack were shriveling to peanut size, attempting to retreat inside his body. Cuvier felt nauseous, dizzy, trying to imagine what the Gypsy's powers had revealed to her about the graphic details of his death.
He crawled back into the bed, tried to sleep but couldn't. He pictured monsters rushing at him from the shadows, tearing into him with fangs and talons, eating him alive. That was the worst part, fearing that the damn thing wouldn't kill him outright, that he would be conscious when it started gobbling his flesh and gnawing on his bones.
After a couple hours of that, he knew that he would have to face the Gypsy, find out what she knew. She might not want to tell him right off, but he had some money squirreled away. If that failed, or the price tag was beyond his reach... Well, he would simply make her tell him. Who was there to stop him? The old Chinaman?
He took it easy getting out of bed, no noise to warn the Gypsy or disturb the old man on the sleeping mat on the floor. Aurelia had the folding cot, had taken it when Remo left. Jean hadn't understood much of their whispered conversation, but he meant to hear the details now and find out what was coming to him, one way or another.
She seemed to be asleep as Cuvier crept to the cot on tiptoe. He stifled a curse as he collided with a corner of the coffee table and a bolt of pain shot from his shin up to his knee, and so on to his skull. He stood there, frozen like a statue, waiting for the pain to subside, afraid to breathe in case the sound had roused Aurelia from her sleep.
But she was still unconscious, with the sheet pulled up across her shoulder, bare skin showing in the dim light from the curtained window.
He knelt beside the bed and woke Aurelia with a hand pressed tight across her mouth. She was prepared to struggle, but the sheet got in the way, and he was leaning down to whisper in her ear by then.
"Relax," he said. "It's only me. We need to have a talk."
She glared at him, dark eyes above his hand, but then she nodded. He drew his hand away reluctantly, still feeling her soft lips against his palm.
"What do you want?"
"I seen you lookin' at me there, a while ago," said Cuvier. "Gypsies can see things, sometime, like what's coming, yes?"
"Sometimes," she said.
"So, what I wanna know is this-what's comin' after me."
"You know the answer," she informed him, "or you wouldn't ask the question."
He felt bright anger flare inside of him. "I don't need riddles from you, I guarantee," he told her, leaning close enough for her to smell the garlic on his breath. Aurelia tried to shrink from him, but there was nowhere for her to go. Her breasts made lumps beneath the sheet and set a faint alarm bell clanging in his head.
"You want to know if you're in trouble," the Gypsy said. "Well, you are. You made this trouble for yourself, and now you can't escape it."
Curiously, it aroused him, listening to her pronounce his death sentence. He couldn't help it. Even as he willed himself to concentrate on business, yet another part of him was thinking what did he have to lose?
"I wanna know what's left," he told her, climbing awkwardly onto the yielding mattress. "You're going to tell me how much time I got."
His left hand settled on her breast, began to knead the pliant flesh through layers of fabric. "How much time?" he said again.
"Not much," she answered, bringing up a knee between his meaty thighs.
The impact stunned him, overwhelmed him with a blast of pain eclipsing anything he could remember from a lifetime of hard knocks. He barely noticed as her right arm freed itself and whipped a rock-hard fist into his face.
The next thing Cuvier remembered, he was lying on the floor beside the bed. Aurelia was kneeling on the mattress, miles above him, cursing him in languages he didn't even recognize. The lights were on, and would have hurt his eyes if there had been a spare nerve left to carry more pain signals to his brain. Too late for that, though, with the piercing agony that clutched his groin.
The little Asian stood over him, regarding Cuvier with an expression that may have been curiosity, amusement or disgust.
"Sleepwalking is very dangerous," Chiun informed him, grinning now.
"You could have helped," Aurelia said.
"You needed no help," the old Korean answered. Next thing Cuvier knew, the wizened little man had picked him up with one hand, gripping the denim fabric of his shirt, and toted him back to the bed. He tossed Jean onto the mattress as if he were slinging a sack of dried beans.
"Sleep now," the scrawny apparition said. "No more chit-chat. No more hanky-panky."
Cuvier felt obligated to respond somehow. He found his voice-it had been hiding somewhere in the neighborhood of his left kidney.
"Hey, Chinaman!"
The little Asian faced the bed again, no longer smiling, and leaned over Cuvier, a slim hand reaching toward the junction of the Cajun's neck and shoulder.
"Too much noise," he said. "Too little brains." The Asian barely touched him, but at once the pain below his waist evaporated, swallowed in the sudden, wrenching agony that gripped his upper body. Cuvier was frozen, powerless to move or even scream, until the lights went out again and blessed darkness carried him away.
THE GROUND ON WHICH New Orleans stands has been so wet, historically, that corpses are entombed above the earth instead of buried in it. Wealthy individuals and families lean toward elaborate vaults and monuments, while those without the surplus cash on hand wind up in simple tombs resembling the foundations of so many narrow toolsheds swept away by tropical storms. The graveyard Remo chose that night was more elaborate than most, and offered countless hiding places.
The goon squad trailing him had the combined IQ of a normal human being. It took them a while to figure out where Remo had got to. "Criminy," he complained, making it easier for the goons by lingering at the curb outside the cemetery gate. Finally one of them spotted him and started bawling at the others, pointing out their quarry. Even then, Remo stalled until the first of them had churned free of the crowd and come toward him. Only then did he continue into the boneyard, merging with the night.
It was no challenge to avoid them. Remo could have led them in and crept around behind them, disappeared while they were hunting him among the tombs and monuments, but that wasn't his plan. The way he saw it, Fate had handed him four chances to improve upon the information he had gained from Etienne DuBois, and he would be a fool to throw that opportunity away.
The goons who stalked him now were leg breakers and killers, undeserving of sympathy. He heard the four gorillas fanning out. They called to one another in the darkness, sounding nervous, making noise enough to wake the dead around them as they combed the cemetery for their mark. Remo decided it would be a smart move to secure at least one POW first, in case it got too hairy later on, and so, while they were stalking him, he did a little hunting of his own.
As luck would have it, Remo came upon the human fireplug first. Like many small men with tough attitudes, this one had tried to compensate with iron. His weapon was a .357 Magnum Desert Eagle semiautomatic, stainless steel with jet-black plastic grips. He held the massive pistol well in front of him-his first mistake-and swung it in an arc before him, as if it had been a flashlight rather than a gun.
Remo came up behind him and pulled the punch that should have crushed his adversary's skull. The gunner's consciousness winked out as if someone had flicked a light switch, and before he crumpled, Remo plucked the Desert Eagle from his fist and twisted the barrel like a wrung-out washrag.
A quick frisk of his dozing captive turned up knuckle dusters, a blackjack, a switchblade knife.
It was a wonder that the little bastard didn't rattle when he walked. He squashed every weapon. "Sleep tight," he told the fireplug, and went off to find his friends.
The next one was a relatively tall man pushing six feet, with the shoulders of a high-school jock and waistline of a slacker who had lost the taste for exercise. The goon had reached a point where his physique could still go either way, but it was nothing he would have to be concerned about from this night on.
Remo sped up to intercept him, marking where the others were by their insistent jabbering. His chosen target didn't answer them, but as he closed the gap between them, Remo heard the shooter whistling softly to himself, and understood that these tough guys were frightened of the graveyard, more like children than the soldiers they aspired to be.