“Nothing important,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “I am inviting you and Remo to dinner tonight. As my guests.”

  “Oh, well…”

  “You must,” Chiun said. “You and I must be friends.”

  She paused, then acceded. “If you insist.”

  “I do. I insist. Remo will call for you. I will see to it.”

  Ludmilla laughed. “I have already seen to it, old man. He will call for me whenever I wish.”

  “As you would have it,” Chiun said and walked away angered because the woman was right. Remo was her slave.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I DON’T KNOW WHY you keep that old man hanging around anyway,” Ludmilla said.

  “I’ve grown accustomed to his face,” Remo said, and sipped his mineral water to turn off the conversation.

  They sat at a front table in the Crystal Hotel supper club. Chiun had insisted that all the arrangements be left to him, and when Remo and Ludmilla arrived, the headwaiter smiled at them, showed them to a front row table, was polite, and set the indoor record for Las Vegas—a mark that would live forever, Remo decided—by refusing a tip.

  Ludmilla persisted. “It would be different if that old goblin gave something to you. But nothing except complaints. This is how you spend your life? Listening to him complain? Why is he here? Why is he with us?”

  “He’s really a nice old geezer,” Remo said. “Besides, he has his strong points.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” said Remo.

  “Tell me one of his strong points.”

  Remo thought a moment. How to tell her that Chiun was more deadly than a whole military division, more powerful than plutonium, more accurate than calculus. How to tell her?

  “He’s all right,” Remo said. “He knows a lot of things.”

  “He knows how to get old and sponge off his betters and his youngers,” Ludmilla said. “Too bad for you that you do not send him away.”

  “Well…” Remo was noncommittal. “That’s the way it goes.”

  He was spared further conversation by the crowd. Instead of a roar, there was a hush and then every voice in the room was silent, and Remo turned toward the entrance to the supper club.

  Walking down the aisle through the cables was Chiun, wearing a black robe, and on his arm, towering a head over him, was Miss Jacquanne Juice, headliner of the show at the Crystal Hotel. She wore a scanty white gown and nothing else.

  Remo looked at them, as did every other pair of eyes in the room.

  “Stop looking at her,” Ludmilla said.

  “I’m not,” Remo said. “I’m looking at Chiun. The old fox is enjoying this.”

  There was a spattering of applause. Like a heavyweight fighter, Chiun waved, a king’s gesture to quiet the unruly mob.

  Then Chiun and Jacquanne were at the table and the headwaiter helped seat them, and slowly the room returned to its steady buzzing as customers went back to their drinks.

  Chiun smiled. “Remo, this is Miss Jacquanne Juice. Or something like that. This is Remo, who is better than he looks.”

  Chiun stopped and Remo cleared his throat.

  “Oh,” Chiun said. “This…” He waved toward Ludmilla. “This is a Russian woman. This is Miss Jacquanne Juice.”

  Ludmilla nodded. Jacquanne looked at her, then said, “You’re beautiful.”

  Chiun nudged her under the table, but Remo said, “Yes, isn’t she?”

  “So are you,” Chiun said to Jacquanne. “You are most beautiful. The most beautiful woman Remo has ever seen. Isn’t that right, Remo?”

  Remo shrugged and looked at Ludmilla.

  “Isn’t that right, Remo?” Chiun persisted.

  “What is your name?” Jacquanne asked Ludmilla.

  “Ludmilla.”

  “You are beautiful. Truly beautiful.”

  “Thank you.” It did not occur to Ludmilla to return the compliment; it did not occur to Jacquanne to hint at it.

  Chiun said, “You are truly beautiful” to Jacquanne. “Don’t you think so, Remo?”

  Remo nodded, reluctantly.

  “And she makes a very good living, Remo. She has her own band, and people who walk around fastening her brassieres and everything,” Chiun explained.

  Remo nodded again.

  Ludmilla said, “Remo, I have a headache. I think I’d like to go back to my room.”

  “All right.” Remo stood.

  “You are coming back, though, Remo, right?” said Chiun.

  “I doubt it,” Ludmilla answered for Remo.

  Chiun looked dejected. Jacquanne could not take her eyes off the Russian woman. Remo shrugged.

  “Good night, Chiun. Good night, Miss…” Remo said.

  “Juice,” said Chiun. “Jacquanne Juice.”

  “Good night, Miss Juice,” Remo said.

  “Good night,” said Ludmilla. “Miss Juice. Old man.” And when Chiun met her eyes, she winked—the wink of a winner to a loser, and then she turned and led Remo from the supper club.

  They had gone only two steps toward the exit when Remo was stopped by an order, barked by Chiun in Korean.

  Remo turned. He felt Ludmilla stop and look back also. Chiun, speaking a fast flow of Korean words, picked up the dinner knife at the table. He held it in his left hand, handle between his fingertips, then with the tip of his right index finger struck the knife three times, with no more apparent force than if he were poking someone in the chest to make a point. The first two pokes broke off pieces of the steel knifeblade; the third poke split the silver alloy handle into two pieces, which fell on the table in front of Chiun.

  He nodded to Remo who nodded back before pulling Ludmilla toward the door. She was looking over the shoulder at Chiun and the pieces of knife in front of him.

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  “It was Korean,” Remo said. “‘Even a knife may shatter; even a strong man may fall.’”

  Ludmilla was still looking over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed.

  “How did he do that with the knife?”

  “Who knows?” said Remo.

  “Can you do it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Chiun understands more about objects than I do. It has something to do with vibrations.”

  They were at the door and Remo led the way out. Ludmilla kept staring at Chiun until the door closed behind them.

  The next day Marshal Denia arrived in Las Vegas.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LUDMILLA HAD BEGGED OFF the trip to the desert to see Remo’s magic spring, pleading an upset stomach; Remo had gone out to walk around Las Vegas; and Chiun was alone in their room when a messenger came.

  “I must see you. L.”

  Chiun crumpled the message and dropped it on the floor, then walked up to Ludmilla’s room.

  When he entered, she was seated at her dressing table, her back to Chiun, wearing only a bluish robe that made her skin seem to glow a pale yellow. She smiled at Chiun in the mirror, a dropped-eyes coy smile, then carefully closed her open robe before she spun on her chair and faced him.

  “I have asked you to come so I could apologize to you,” she said. “I have treated you badly.”

  “I am always treated badly,” Chiun said.

  “I know how it must be. No one understands you; they ask much of you but give nothing in return.”

  Chiun nodded. The faint tendrils of hair over his ears continued nodding after his head had stopped.

  “Well, I do not wish to be one of those ungrateful ones,” said Ludmilla. She rose and walked to Chiun who stood just inside the door. She took his two hands in hers. “I am sorry,” she said.

  “Why?” said Chiun.

  “I am sorry for my rudeness, but more for my stupidity. I realize all I could learn from your wisdom and your gentleness, and like a fool I have rejected that gift of friendship you offered me.”

  Chiun nodded again.

  She reached her right hand to touch the side of his face. As her left arm left her side, the front of her dressing gown slipped open. She moved even closer to Chiun, so close their bodies almost touched. “Can you forgive me?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Chiun. He looked down at Ludmilla’s flawless skin, shadowed yellow by the blue of the gown. “You are a lovely woman,” he said.

  She smiled at him again and left her hand on the side of his face. “Thank you,” she said. “But beauty is a gift of God; wisdom is an achievement of character.”

  “That is true,” Chiun said. “That is true. Most never see that truth.”

  “Most never have their eyes fully open,” she said. She leaned even closer to him.

  “And what of Remo?” Chiun said.

  Ludmilla shrugged. The movement almost, but not quite, released her breasts from her gown. “Who looks at the sapling when he stands on the edge of the forest?”

  And again Chiun nodded, and as he did, Ludmilla leaned forward and moved her face down to his, searching for his lips with hers. As she found them, she said softly, “I have never been made love to by a Master of Sinanju.”

  And afterwards, she said—and meant it—“Never before like that.”

  She lay next to Chiun in her bed, his body still clothed in his red kimono, hers covered by a sheet, and laughed.

  “To think of Remo telling me his power came from a magic spring.”

  “The child likes to joke,” Chiun said.

  “But the power is Sinanju, isn’t it?” she said.

  “No, beauteous one. The power is within each person: Sinanju is the key that unlocks the power.”

  “And you are the Master.” She said it in a tone of reverential awe, as if she could not believe that Chiun was with her.

  Then she rolled on her side toward him, put her left hand on his face, and said, “Show me a trick. Do something for me.”

  “Sinanju is not meant for tricks,” he said.

  “But for me? Just once. Just let me see some of your awesome power. Please?”

  “Only for you,” Chiun said.

  “Remo told me it was vibrations,” she said.

  “Sometimes it is vibrations,” Chiun said. “It is in knowing what you deal with that you make each thing a weapon. Each thing has its own vibrations, is its own central being, and to use it, you must first understand it, then become it.”

  As he spoke, Chiun used a fingernail to bust open the pillow under his head. He sat up and pulled out two small feathers, each an inch-long piece of fluffy down.

  “What could be softer than the feather?” he said. “Yet, it is soft only because we use it for softness. We need not.”

  Hands moving faster than eye could follow, Chiun raised the two feathers, one in each hand, to his eyes, and then splashed his hands forward, toward the opposite wall of the room.

  The two small feathers left his fingertips like supersonic darts, hit the wooden wall with simultaneous “pings,” and buried themselves into the wood panel where they stayed, vibrating, in the breeze of the overhead air conditioner, like miniature plumes.

  “Marvelous,” Ludmilla said. “Can I do that? Can I learn?”

  “Only after much practice. Much time,” said Chiun.

  “I have much time,” she said, pulling him back onto the pillow next to her. “And I want to learn everything you can teach me.”

  “And I will teach you,” Chiun said. “Things you never even dreamed of before.”

  Later, Ludmilla had a wonderful idea. Her upset stomach had vanished, so why didn’t she and Chiun drive out into the desert and look for a spring, then tell Remo they had found his magic spring. It would be a joke. A wonderful joke, she thought. And if Chiun wanted to change, he could; she would arrange for a car and driver, and meet him in front of the hotel in fifteen minutes.

  Chiun looked at her and she could see in his eyes that he wanted to do this thing very much, so without even waiting for an answer, she patted his face again and walked with him to the door.

  He stopped in the doorway and looked up at her violet eyes.

  “You are a most beautiful woman,” he said.

  Ludmilla blushed and then closed the door behind him. She had things to do and she didn’t need Chiun around. No fool like an old fool, she thought, as she went to the telephone.

  · · ·

  Twenty minutes later, she and Chiun were sitting in the back of a Rolls Royce on its way out of Las Vegas on Boulder Highway. Chiun wore a thin black robe.

  In the front seat was their driver, a pudgy mustached man, and two other men who, Ludmilla explained, were guides to the desert around Las Vegas. Each had a neck as big as the average man’s thigh. They wore hats and stared straight ahead. Ludmilla’s eyes looked up and caught the eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror.

  Field Marshal Gregory Denia smiled at her. The courtesan had done her work well. First, they would finish this old man, and then even the score with the American, Remo. The courtesan had done very well.

  · · ·

  Remo lost $2,350 playing roulette but won $4.00 in nickels playing slot machines before getting back to the hotel, where the first thing he saw was the crumpled note Chiun had dropped on the floor.

  “I must see you. L.”

  He would talk to Chiun about that. Intercepting a note obviously meant for Remo, and then just throwing it away. He steamed on his way up the stairs to Ludmilla’s room.

  There was no answer to his knock, but the door was open and inside, in an envelope, he found another note: this time for him.

  Remo,

  I do not wish to see you again. The old one has shown me what true love is.

  I am heart and body the woman of the Master of Sinanju. Goodbye.

  Ludmilla.

  Remo crumpled the note and dropped it. His brain whirling in confusion, he spun and looked at the room. The bed was unmade, and Remo could see that it had been used, but not for sleeping.

  “Chink bastard. Dirty two-timing conniving slant-eyed Korean fink,” Remo shouted. He slammed his fist into the wall, splintering the wood panel, and then, the blood rising up in his temples, he walked from the room with a mission in his mind. He was going to find and kill Chiun. Search and destroy.

  It took him five minutes to learn that Chiun and Ludmilla had driven out into the desert in a rented Rolls Royce and only five seconds to steal a car to follow them.

  Minutes later, Remo was racing across the desert highway, his foot holding the gas pedal down to the floor, the stolen Ford a projectile, moving at 120 miles an hour down the straight-as-string, two-lane road.

  And ten minutes later he saw the big Rolls Royce parked alongside the highway, and he saw footprints through the sand leading toward a small hill seventy-five yards from the road.

  He turned off the key and skidded the car to a stop and was out, on the ground, before the car stopped rocking on its springs.

  There were a lot of footprints leading through the sand but Remo was interested only in one pair—those of Chiun’s sandals, which scuffed along in the middle of all the other footprints.

  Remo took the hill in three giant strides. He was looking down into a natural depression, a bowl in the ground surrounded by an almost perfectly circular hill. Sitting in the sand, his black robe swirled about him, was Chiun. His arms were folded and he looked implacably ahead.

  “Dink bastard,” Remo shouted and ran down the hill into the natural amphitheater, before it occurred to him to wonder where Ludmilla was.

  “Rat bastard,” Remo yelled again.

  Chiun looked up. “I have waited for you.”

  “And so have we.” The voice came from behind Remo. He turned and saw three men and Ludmilla coming down the hill toward him. The three men carried pistols in their hands.

  Remo looked from Ludmilla to Chiun, then back to the woman and the three men.

  Two of the men stopped behind Remo and trained their weapons on him, while the third man—Marshal Denia—and Ludmilla walked past Remo and stopped in front of Chiun.

  “Ludmilla,” Remo called weakly. She did not respond. She did not even look at him. Denia did.

  “This is a better catch than I hoped for. First the old man, and then you, American. The spilled blood of the Treska will be avenged.”

  “Go ahead,” Remo said. “Kill the son of a bitch.”

  Denia cocked his revolver and pointed it at Chiun, who sat still only six feet away from him, his arms still folded.

  “Chiun,” Remo called. But Chiun did not answer, and Remo suddenly realized the truth. Chiun was going to let himself be killed.

  “Chiun,” he yelled again.

  “Only one can save my life,” Chiun said finally.

  “I’ll save it,” Remo said. “I’ll save it. Just for the pleasure of killing you myself, you two-timing fraud.”

  Chiun shut his eyes. “The House of Sinanju has lived on a frail thread for thousands of years,” he said. “If it must be broken now by a Master I have chosen and I have trained, then these eyes will not see it. I welcome this Russian death.”

  As if to oblige, Denia raised his pistol at arm’s length before him, taking aim at Chiun’s forehead. Remo saw Ludmilla reach into her handbag and remove her cigarette case and begin to light a cigarette.

  “I’ll save it,” Remo yelled. “I’m going to save it and then I’m going to wring your scrawny neck.”

  He lashed back with both feet, kicking up and out. He felt the backs of his shoes crack into two gun-bearing hands. His own hands hit the sand and Remo pulled his weight up and forward, then slammed back with the toes of his feet into two throats. He knew without turning that both men were dead, and he used their throats for a toehold to break across the sand toward Denia and Chiun and Ludmilla.

  “Gregory,” Ludmilla said when she saw Remo coming toward them. Denia turned and pointed his pistol at Remo who stopped ten feet away, apparently neutralized by Denia’s gun.

  “So these are the tricks of Sinanju,” Denia said with a smile. “In some other age, American, I would have liked to learn them.” He sighed heavily. “But this is not the time or the place.”

 

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