This poor nit loved that poor nit, Remo realized. Maybe they were made for each other.

  “You gonna leave her alone?” demanded George.

  Yes, he loved her. No doubt. Maybe she could learn to love him too.

  “Make me,” Remo said.

  “You asked for it,” George said. He threw a roundhouse right-hand punch of the variety used by brown bears to catch swimming fish.

  Remo let it hit him high up on the left side of the head, moving his head just a fraction of an inch on contact. Like all noncombatants George stopped his punch as soon as it touched target. Remo felt the knuckles touch his skin, and he recoiled slightly as George pulled his hand back for another punch.

  Remo leaned against the trunk of the car as if he had been knocked there.

  “Had enough?” George asked.

  “I have not yet begun to fight,” Remo said. George jumped forward, his body as open as a dinner invitation, and threw another right hand. Remo let this one get him on the shoulder and made a display of rolling over on the fender of the car and groaning.

  “Ooooohhh.”

  “George, stop,” Sashur yelled. “You’ll kill him.”

  “Damn right, I’ll kill him,” George said. His voice was lower now, huskier. “And you too, if you cheat on me again.”

  “Oooooohhh,” groaned Remo.

  George nodded at him for emphasis and danced around to the left, throwing his left jab at air. “Want any more, guy?”

  “No, no,” said Remo. “Enough for me.”

  “Okay. Keep your hands off my woman. This is the second time I caught you. There won’t be a third time.” George leaned into Sashur’s car. “I’ll be at the school tomorrow when you get off work. You’re coming to my place and you’re staying the night.”

  “In a pig’s…”

  “No arguments, baby. You heard me. Tomorrow after school.”

  Heavy-footed, George stomped away. As he drove off, he peeled rubber.

  Remo waited until George’s car had turned the corner before he got off the fender.

  Sashur came to him. “Remo, are you hurt?”

  “Never laid a glove on me.” Remo touched his jaw as if it were tender. “Come on,” he said, “we’ve got to go upstairs.”

  He led Sashur Kaufperson into the motel, pleased with himself for perhaps having made the course of true love run a little smoother in Chicago.

  Chiun was awake when they got to the room and Remo was immeasurably pleased, because he did not enjoy the prospect of waking the Master of Sinanju at 3 A.M.

  The old man turned as Remo and Sashur entered. He had been standing at the window, looking out.

  “Oh, Remo,” he said. “I am glad you are here. Safely.”

  Remo squinted. “Safely? Why safely?”

  “This is a terrible city.”

  “Why? Because it’s not Persia where people like us are appreciated?”

  “No. Because there is terrible violence,” Chiun said. “Just now, for instance. I saw two men fighting out in the street. A terrible battle. A fat man was pummeling a skinny one into mush. Awful. Terrible. The skinny man took a terrific beating. I do not know how he was able to survive it.”

  “All right, Little Father, knock it off,” Remo said.

  “And I was so frightened. I thought, Remo might come home any moment and he might be attacked by these two terrible warriors, and I worried so. I am glad you brought this woman to protect you. She is the woman of the gold coins.”

  “Right. This is Sashur Kaufperson,” Remo said.

  “How do you do?” said Sashur, who had been watching the conversation from just inside the motel suite door.

  “Sashur Kauf is a very strange name,” Chiun said.

  “It’s not Kauf. It’s Kaufperson,” Remo said.

  “There is no such name as Kaufperson,” Chiun said. “Never had I heard it, even on the picture box where the names have all forms of foolishness such as Smith and Johnson and Jones and Lindsay and Courtney.”

  “It’s Kaufperson,” Sashur said.

  “I suppose you cannot help it.”

  “I’m glad you’re up, Chiun,” Remo said. “I’m going to call Smitty, and then we’ve got to get ready to go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to Fort Bragg.”

  “Good,” said Chiun. “Anything to get away from this violent city. Oh, you should have seen the battle. Epic. First the fat man threw a most fearsome punch. It was like this.” Chiun waved his right arm around him like a stone on the end of a string.

  “Frightening,” Remo agreed.

  “It hit the stupid man…”

  “Wait. Why stupid?” said Remo.

  “One can tell. Even at a distance. A pale piece of pig’s ear is a pale piece of pig’s ear. The blow hit the stupid man alongside the head. It would have scrambled his brains, had he any.”

  Chiun jumped back, as if shadow boxing.

  “The fat man continued on the attack with another brutal blow. Oh, the damage it would have done had it too landed on the head. But fortunately the stupid man took the blow on his shoulder. He surrendered instantly.”

  “Not a moment too soon, I guess,” Remo said.

  “He might have suffered permanent injury if he continued,” Chiun said. “His hamburger eating apparatus might have been broken. The physical centers that control his sloth, his ingratitude, his selfishness might even have been injured, and how then could a white man carry on in life?”

  “You’re right, Little Father. This is a violent city, and we have to leave. I’ll call Smith.”

  But when he looked for the telephone atop the desk, he could not find it.

  “Chiun. Where’s the telephone?”

  “The what?” said Chiun, turning again to the window.

  “The telephone.”

  “Oh. The instrument that brawks through the night when elderly people are trying to gain a few moments of god-sent rest from the travails of the day? The instrument that interferes with…”

  “Right. Right. Right, Chiun, right. The telephone.”

  “It is no more.”

  “What’d you do with it?”

  “I suffered its intrusion upon me the first time. The second time I decided to end its brawking misery.”

  “And?”

  “It is in the wastepaper basket,” Chiun said.

  Remo looked into the wicker basket. In the bottom of its white plastic liner was a pile of dull blue dust, all that was left of a powder blue Princess phone with touch-tone dialing.

  “Good going, Chiun,”

  “I did not ask it to ring. I did not telephone the servant below and ask him to ring the telephone at certain intervals.”

  “Oh,” said Remo.

  “Indeed ‘oh.’ One who would do that should be beaten up in the street.”

  “May I sit down?” asked Sashur Kaufperson, who was still standing just inside the door.

  “Sure,” said Remo. “The chair’s over there. On top of the couch. But don’t get too comfortable.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re going with us. To see General Haupt.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SO IT WAS, THAT WITHOUT notifying Dr. Smith, Remo, Chiun, and a reluctant Sashur Kaufperson headed for Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They arrived in a rented car in mid-morning, and the new army military policeman at the entrance to the post, deciding that the hard-faced white man and the elderly Oriental that General Haupt had labeled as secret assassins were obviously not the same as a hard-faced white man, an elderly Oriental, and a good-looking woman with big boobs, waved them through after only a perfunctory look at Remo’s identification which listed him as a field inspector for the Army Inspector General’s Office.

  They found General William Tassidy Haupt inside a field house, where he was inspecting his troops for the benefit of the photographer for the post newspaper, this being Clean Uniform Month in the new army.

  General Haupt stood inside the big barn-like building, facing a line of forty men. A small squad held M-16s at the ready. Clusters of grenades were clipped to their belts. Another squad held rocket launchers. Next to them were four men holding flamethrowers.

  “I think you men with the flamethrowers ought to get on the other end,” General Haupt called out. He wore an immaculate khaki gabardine uniform. His trouser legs were tucked into the tops of his highly polished airborne boots. On his head he wore a white helmet with two gold stars stenciled on it. On his side he carried a .45 pistol in a brown leather holster that matched exactly the color of his boots.

  “We get better symmetry if we’ve got the tall flame-tossing junk at one end and the tall rocket things at the other end,” he said.

  The four men with flamethrowers dutifully moved to the far right side of the line. The major in charge of the squad wondered if he was being moved to get him into a position from which he could easily be cropped from the picture. What had he done, he wondered. He would have to keep an eye on General Haupt, just in case he had somehow made the general’s crap list.

  In the center of the forty-man line stood assorted squads with hand weapons, two-man bazookas, mortars, rifles, and automatic weapons.

  The captain in charge of a four-man bazooka detail said, “General, should we get on an end too?” The major from the flamethrowers smiled to himself. That’s why the other officer was only a captain, volunteering to put himself in a bad position.

  “No,” replied Haupt. “Stay where you are. This way we’ve got a tall element at one end of the photo and a tall element at the other end and a semi-tall element in the center. That lends balance to the picture. I think it’s going to turn out real well.”

  “Major, how long are we going to have to hold these heavy things?” a master sergeant, sweating under the load of a flamethrower, asked the major.

  “Don’t worry, corporal. It’s just a few more minutes and we’ll have you right back at your personnel desk.”

  “I hope so,” pouted the sergeant. “It’s sergeant, sir, not corporal.”

  “Right. Sergeant.”

  “I don’t know why I get all these details anyway,” the sergeant said.

  “For a very simple reason,” the major said. “You’re six feet tall and you weigh one-hundred-ninety pounds. The general wants people just that size for this picture. Sort of a Greco-Roman ideal. There’s a good chance this picture might be used across the country. Billboards. Recruiting posters.”

  “If it is, do I get residuals and modeling fees?” asked the sergeant.

  “Afraid not. This is the Army.”

  “I’m going to ask the union anyway,” the sergeant said.

  “All right, men,” General Haupt called, facing the line of troops. “Time to look alert now.”

  General Haupt turned to the man from the post newspaper, a corporal in gabardine uniform who stood holding an old Speed Graphic camera.

  “How does that look?” the general asked.

  “Fine.”

  “What are you going to shoot at?”

  “I thought F 5.6 at a hundredth.”

  “I don’t think there’s enough light in here for that,” said General Haupt.

  “Well, I’ve got slave strobe units on both ends of the line.”

  Haupt mused for a moment. “Yes, Corporal, that might do it. But be sure and shoot a couple at a fiftieth too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. How do you want us?”

  “I’d like to shoot from behind you, General, at the line of men.”

  “Will you be able to see me?” asked Haupt.

  “Part of your profile,” the photographer said.

  “Okay. Then shoot from my left side. My left profile’s better.”

  “Hey, general,” called a voice from the ranks. “Is this almost a wrap? This rifle is getting heavy.”

  “Yeah,” came another voice. “I’ve got to work out the PX entertainment schedule for the next week. I can’t stay here forever.”

  “Almost ready, men. Just stay with it a while.”

  Remo, Chiun, and Sashur stood inside one of the large double doors of the field house, watching the troops shuffling into the right positions.

  “Is that him?” Remo asked Sashur.

  “That’s him. I’d recognize that voice anywhere.”

  “All right,” Remo said.

  “Carefully, my son,” said Chiun.

  Remo walked across the highly polished basketball floor of the field house to the general and stood behind him. The photographer, eye to his viewfinder, swore. Who was this person breaking up his picture just when he had it composed correctly?

  “General Haupt,” said Remo.

  The general turned. The look of concerned alert vibrancy that he had carefully constructed on his face for the photographer’s benefit disappeared.

  “You,” he said.

  “Right. Me. A little matter about murders.”

  Haupt looked at Remo’s face for a moment, then jumped back. He grabbed the camera from the photographer and threw it at Remo. If he got him, that would do it. He knew that kind of camera would hurt, because once he got hit by an Associated Press 35mm camera with a .235 millimeter telephoto lens, and it was real heavy because it went down to F 2.8.

  The camera missed.

  “Use your men,” Sashur Kaufperson shouted from the corner of the room where she had sidled away from Chiun and stood watching.

  But General Haupt had already thrown the only weapon he knew how to use. He began to back away from Remo. Over his shoulder, he called to the major at the end of the line:

  “Call someone from a combat battalion.”

  “The combat battalions are off for the day, General,” the major yelled back. “Remember, you gave them the day off for finishing second in the inter-Army shoe shining contest?”

  “Oh, yeah. Hell,” said Haupt. He was now backed against the wall. Remo stood in front of him.

  “Use your troops,” Sashur Kaufperson yelled again.

  “Troops,” General Haupt yelled. “Protect your commander.” He got those words out just as Remo dug a thumb and two fingers into Haupt’s collarbone area.

  Back in the line, the major with the rocket launchers asked the captain next to him “Do you think we should call the police?”

  The captain shrugged. “I don’t know if the police will come on the post. Federal property, you know.” He turned to a young lieutenant from the judge advocate’s office who stood in combat infantryman’s garb, holding an M-16.

  “Freddy, can the city police come onto the post?”

  “Not without express permission from the commander.”

  “Thanks.” The captain looked at General Haupt, who was writhing against the wall, his face contorted in pain.

  “I don’t think he’d want to sign a paper now inviting the city police in.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” the major agreed. “Maybe we could call the Marines. Marines are federal.”

  “Yes, but the nearest Marine base is far away. They couldn’t get here in time.”

  General Haupt was on the floor now. Remo knelt alongside him.

  “I wish violence was my classification,” the lieutenant from the judge advocate’s office said. “I’d like to put a stop to this.”

  “Yes,” said a captain in the middle of the line. “I would too but I don’t know how human relations would apply to this situation.” He was a psychiatrist.

  A lieutenant with a mortar suggested wrapping Remo up in telephone wire. He was in communications.

  The major at the end said, “Perhaps we’d better wait for further orders.”

  The officers nodded. “Yes. That’s probably best,” the captain said. He felt sorry that there was nothing in the manuals to cover this situation.

  Remo knew something that wasn’t in the manuals either. He knew that when you wanted to get someone to talk, fancy wasn’t important. Pain was. Any kind of pain, inflicted any way you wanted. Beat them with a stick. Kick them on the knee until it was puffed and bruised. Anything. Make them hurt, and they would talk.

  He was inflicting pain now upon General William Tassidy Haupt, but the general was still not talking to Remo’s satisfaction.

  “I tell you I don’t know anything about any children killer squads,” he gasped. “The Army’s minimum recruiting age is eighteen.”

  “They’re not in the Army,” Remo said, twisting the bunched mass of nerves just a little tighter.

  “Ooooh. Then what would I have to do with them? Why did you pick me?”

  “That woman over there. She identified you.” Remo jerked his head toward the door.

  Haupt squinted. “What woman?”

  Remo turned. Sashur Kaufperson was gone. Chiun was walking slowly toward the line of troops.

  “Well, she was there,” Remo said.

  “Who is she? What branch is she with?”

  “She’s not with any branch. She’s with the school system in Chicago.”

  “That settles it then,” said General Haupt. “I don’t know any school teachers in Chicago. I haven’t even talked to a school teacher for twenty-five years.”

  Remo twisted again and Haupt groaned.

  “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

  “Of course, I’m telling the truth,” Haupt said.

  Remo looked at the general, then let him go. He knew nothing. And it meant that Sashur Kaufperson had lied to him again.

  He left the general lying on the floor and turned back to the line of troops. Chiun was walking up and down the line, inspecting uniforms, straightening a pocket flap on one soldier, adjusting the field cap of another.

  “Shoes,” he said to the lieutenant from the judge advocate’s office. “Your shoes could be shined better.”

  “Yes sir,” the lieutenant said.

  “Take care of it before we meet again,” Chiun said.

  “Chiun. You about ready?” Remo asked.

  “Yes. I am done. This is a nice army.” He turned back to the line of troops. “You have beautiful uniforms. The nicest army since the Han Dynasty. You look very good.”

  Remo took Chiun’s arm and steered him away.

  “Chiun, where is Sashur?”

  “She said she went to the persons’ room.”