“Is there anything I can give you?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “You’re sure we can’t make some sort of deal?”

  “Right.”

  “That sounds impossible,” Lippincott said. “Everyone wants something. What do you want?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Sounds reasonable although I don’t understand it. If you should ever want anything of me, please let me know because I want your help and somehow I think I’ll figure out a way to get it.”

  Remo heard a scream from outside and he saw Lippincott switch on an intercom.

  “It’s all right, Miss Watkins. No cause for alarm.”

  “There’s a madman in your office, Mr. Lippincott.”

  “It’s all right. First clear-talking man I’ve met since grandfather died.”

  “I’ll get the police.”

  “Nonsense. Get a doctor. We have wounded men in here. We don’t need the police.” He switched off the intercom. “A pleasure meeting you, Mr. Mueller.”

  “Same here,” said Remo.

  “If only these clowns knew how to talk to people. That’s the trouble with having so much money. Everybody thinks they know what you want and they don’t bother to find out what you really want. They do all sorts of horrid things in your name. I take it you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine,” said Remo.

  “You weren’t going to destroy that Seurat, were you?”

  “I was,” said Remo, returning the painting with dots.

  “To prove that money meant nothing to you, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” said Remo.

  “I’ll buy it back.”

  “No need,” said Remo. “It wasn’t mine to begin with.” And he left Lippincott’s office feeling that if only people made their positions clear, half the problems in the world could be solved by reasonable men, reasoning together.

  4

  WHEN Remo returned to the Berkshires, upstairs had left a message. Chiun, who did not follow telephone codes, recognized the words “Aunt Mildred.”

  “Aunt Mildred what, Chiun?” asked Remo.

  “Aunt Mildred. I do not play your little word games. If Dr. Smith wishes to see you, why doesn’t he just say, ‘I wish to see you?’ Instead, Aunt Mildred is very sorry she cannot come or Aunt Mildred will have dinner ready or Aunt Mildred will refurnish the blue room.”

  “Do you remember which one?”

  “I do not,” said Chiun imperiously, as if Remo had overstepped his bounds by asking.

  “I only ask because one of the things you mentioned means we should run for our lives and another means that everything is hunky dory.”

  “Running for one’s life is the surest way to lose it.”

  “That’s not the point, Chiun. It’s that they mean different things.”

  “They mean nothing to me.”

  “But they mean something to me.”

  “Then you should be here to answer the telephone instead of fulfilling boasts,” answered Chiun, thus closing the conversation to his satisfaction.

  Remo waited until early dawn for the phone to ring again, but it did not, and he was about to nap when he heard a car pull up to the driveway. Just by the slow, careful and neat way it parked, by the careful opening of the door so as not to wear the hinges unduly, Remo knew that it was upstairs, Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of CURE. The message must have been Aunt Mildred will have dinner ready. That meant stay where you are. Will contact in person.

  “I see Chiun got the message correct,” said Smith, not bothering to thank Remo for opening the door or even acknowledging his greeting. “You really shouldn’t complain that he can’t relay codes. He did very well this time. You’re here.”

  Smith wore a dark suit and a white shirt and striped tie. With the crispness of a mail clerk he walked onto the sun porch. The sun was sending little red cracks into the gray early morning sky over Lake Patusick.

  “I don’t suppose you have any coffee,” asked Smith.

  “Right. We don’t have coffee. Want some cold duck?”

  “Alcohol this early?”

  “No alcohol. Leftover duck from last night’s dinner.”

  “Sounds awful,” Smith said.

  “Tastes worse.”

  Remo eyed Smith and the small bulge in his left jacket pocket that looked like an overstuffed envelope. He wondered how many people played small unknowing roles in collecting what went into that envelope … a secretary who made an extra income by adding a file in a magazine office that said Remo Mueller was a writer who could be counted on for Africa stories … a banker who a month before had quietly opened a bank account and a line of credit for a man he had never seen, but whose name was Remo Mueller and who came highly recommended by friends. CURE was in that envelope, hundreds of people doing little jobs and not knowing the overall picture.

  “I see you’re interested in the envelope. Your tickets to Busati and your passports are in here along with an article under your byline. You should read it. You wrote it.”

  “I read it,” said Remo.

  “It hasn’t been published yet.”

  “Some clown who works for Lippincott showed it to me. They offered to hire me.”

  “Excellent. Beyond my fondest hopes. Perfect. We had planned to get you into Busati as a journalist, let the blame fall on the magazine. But working for Lippincott is even better. For the first time, Remo, I see operations proceeding even better than planned, which is unusual for you.”

  “I won’t be working for Lippincott,” Remo said. “I sort of explained to him that I couldn’t.”

  “You met Laurence Butler Lippincott?” asked Smith, with a tinge of reverence in his voice that Remo resented.

  “Yeah. I met Lippincott. I threw a few of his employees at him.”

  “You what?”

  “I told him I didn’t want to work for him.”

  “But he’d make an excellent cover. We need someone to take the heat if you get messy in Busati.”

  Remo shrugged.

  “You haven’t even been committed yet,” Smith groused, “and you’ve already created your first foul-up.”

  “So, don’t commit me,” said Remo and left the sunporch for the refrigerator where he grabbed the carcass of a cold duck and a bowl of cold rice and, against previous warnings by Chiun, ate even though his mind was not at peace. Smith had followed him into the kitchen.

  Remo tore off a greasy drumstick and began to chew the mouthful into liquid. The problem, Smith explained was not just that James Forsythe Lippincott was missing in the Africa bush. Those things happened. CURE wouldn’t bother to get involved for that, not even for a Lippincott. No, a dangerous pattern was emerging. Very dangerous.

  Remo took a little ball of rice between his fingertips and placed it into his mouth. How he would love a hamburger, he thought.

  “A pattern that could undermine the American people’s faith in the ability of its government to protect them,” Smith said.

  Perhaps if he mixed the rice and duck together in his mouth, thought Remo, it might taste better.

  “The basis of any government is the protection it gives its citizens,” Smith said.

  Remo tried mixing a sliver of duck with a few grains of rice.

  “We don’t have final proof, but we believe that someone is raiding America for slaves.”

  Perhaps if Remo washed down the duck and the rice with warm water. Maybe that would improve it.

  “In the last year, several wealthy young girls from branches of the Lippincott family have met violent deaths. Or at least we thought they had. But now we have found out that the girls did not really die. In their coffins there were other bodies. We believe someone is somehow smuggling these girls out of the country to Africa, as slaves. Sort of a reverse slavery.”

  Remo turned the water faucet on hot and filled a glass. He sipped it and that didn’t help either.

  “Reverse slavery?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Smith said. “Blacks taking whites.”

  “Doesn’t sound reverse to me,” said Remo. “It’s slavery.”

  “Correct,” Smith said. “It’s just that historically, whites took blacks.”

  “Only an idiot lives in history,” said Remo repeating something Chiun had once told him and which he had never understood.

  “Right,” Smith said. “It’s really a rather simple sort of operation. Get into Busati, find out what happened to the missing Lippincott, free the girls, and get out.”

  “Why not do it through the government?”

  “We can’t,” Smith said. “Our sources indicate that General Obode, the President of Busati, is somehow behind this. If we try to approach him directly, he’ll just kill the girls. No. We’ve got to get them freed first. Then our government can deal with Obode, and he can’t lie his way out.”

  “Can I kill Obode?”

  Smith shook his head. “Too risky. He’s a nut, but he’s our nut. Killing him might cause us real problems in that part of the world.”

  “You say your sources say that Obode’s in it. How good are your sources?” Remo said.

  “Impeccable,” Smith said. “CIA type sources.”

  “Do your sources know where the girls are?”

  “No. All we’ve heard is that there’s a white house with an iron gate in the capital city of Busati.”

  “You don’t know though, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you don’t know how the girls are being kidnaped, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you were trying to get me fixed up with Lippincott, but you didn’t tell me you were doing it, right?”

  “Right,” said Smith.

  Remo returned the duck and the rice to the refrigerator. Nothing would improve its taste.

  “You know, Smitty,” he said, “nothing works right in America anymore. Nothing.”

  5

  PRESIDENT General Dada “Big Daddy” Obode would see no one that morning. The stars were wrong. Hadn’t a jackal made its way into the palace grounds the night before and howled three times, yet no one saw the jackal? Where was the jackal? This he demanded out loud on the balcony of his sitting room, once the sitting room of the former British governor—whom Big Daddy had served as a sergeant major in Her Majesty’s Kenya Rifles.

  “Where is the jackal?” he yelled. And had not the elephants at the Busati Army compound been seen wandering, even before the dry season? Why were they wandering? Who were they looking for? And what of the Minister of Public Safety who had been found nailed to a tree?

  General Obode asked these questions of himself and there was no answer. His wise men were not wise, his generals were not courageous, his counselors lacked counsel.

  He walked before a large ornate mirror, and looked at his massive frame and his thick dark features. A Hausa among Hausa he was.

  “Dada, I ask you to search your heart with honesty and truth,” he said to his image in the mirror. “Is it possible that you are the cause of your own problems? Be honest now, because I will brook no deceit, especially from you, you … sergeant major.”

  General Obode furrowed his brows and thought. He thought a very long time. He looked at his gold watch. Fifteen seconds. Enough thought. He had the answer.

  “It is not your fault, General Obode. You are a good leader. It is the fault of your enemies. Destroy your enemies and you will destroy he who was responsible for the jackal.”

  With that he clapped his hands for his clothes, changed his mind and decided he would hold his morning audience. There was a full schedule today. The Ambassador from Libya—that was important because of the money; the representative of the Third World Liberation Organization—that was unimportant because all they did was talk and there were a lot of yellow men. He did not trust yellow men any more than he trusted Indians or white men, at least those white men who were not English officers.

  He liked English officers. English officers never bothered anyone, especially during operations when they knew they would muck things up and so left the business in the hands of sergeants major who knew how to get things done. He thought another ten seconds and decided he did not like Arabs either, even though he had been a Moslem from birth.

  “Who do you like—honestly, General Obode?” he asked himself.

  “I like you, big fella,” he said. “You’re all right.” With that he laughed a booming laugh and laughed, while servants put on his boots and white uniform pants and shirts with the medals and general’s pips on the shoulders.

  When he was ready for the day, he called for Colonel William Forsythe Butler, who had been insisting that the general see a magazine writer named Remo Mueller, because Remo Mueller had written a nice story about General Obode and nice stories were rare nowadays.

  “Nice story today, bad story tomorrow, to hell with him,” General Obode had told his American-born chief of staff, who had all sorts of mixed blood mucking up his veins and who called himself black. He was a clever one though, this Colonel William Forsythe Butler. A good man to have around. He was not a Hausa, so he would not be jealous of General Obode’s magnificence; he was not a Loni, so he would not hate General Obode for no reason at all. He was, he once had explained, “just an American nigger, but I’m working on that.”

  A good man. General Obode would humor him. Today, he would try to see this pipsqueak writer with the funny name of Remo.

  Colonel William Forsythe Butler was the first to enter. He appeared thin, but General Obode knew him to be a most powerful man, the only one in Busati to have wrestled him to a draw one afternoon, after Obode threw two generals and three sergeants simultaneously before the cheers of his troops. He had been a football player, this Colonel Butler, Morgan State, and then the New York Mammoths—or was it the New York Giants? These names Americans had were all peculiar.

  “Good morning, Colonel,” said General Obode, sitting down in the ornate high-backed governor’s chair which was now the president’s chair. “Did you hear the jackal last night?”

  “I did, Mr. President.”

  “And what would you make of a jackal in America if it howled at night? Three times?”

  “We don’t have jackals in America.”

  “Aha,” said General Obode, clapping his hands. “And we do not have jackals in the palace grounds, either. Then what would you make of a jackal in your New York City?”

  “I would think it strange, Mr. President.”

  “And so do I. I will teach you another lesson in governing that even your CIA didn’t teach you.”

  “It would be an honor to learn, Mr. President.”

  General Obode clapped his hands and in marched eight men in neat Western suits and neat Western shirts and neat Western ties. When they talked, they talked in neat British accents. They were Obode’s civilian council of state to whom he gave no power at all, preferring to surround himself in important jobs with military men. Six of the civilian council were Hausa, the other two were Loni, appointed reluctantly by Obode at Butler’s urging. Butler had told him that the Western world would recognize this as an act of greatness, assimilating into his government the members of a once hated and hunted enemy tribe.

  “A jackal howled three times last night,” announced Obode. “Now to you Oxford and Cambridge people, it is nothing. And I’m sure it is nothing at some fancy United Nations office where all they have to do is worry about the air conditioning staying on. But this American here, this Butler, who has come home to his rightful land, he thinks it is something and he is CIA formerly. Now all of you have heard of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is not Oxford. It is not Cambridge. It is not the United Nations.”

  “It is a vicious, dangerous organization, Mr. President,” said the chairman of the council who was a Hausa. “It will stop at nothing to achieve its ends.”

  “Right,” said General Obode. “Therefore we can have some respect for it. And this former CIA man tells me a jackal howling at night is something strange. What do you think?”

  While Obode spoke, Butler looked down at the floor, his left fingers twisting a ring he wore on his right hand, a ring fashioned of miniature golden chain links.

  It was the consensus of the council that the howling jackal was definitely strange. The strangest thing they had ever heard of.

  “Not the strangest thing,” said General Obode angrily. “A strange thing. We will investigate CIA-style.”

  He dismissed the council with a wave of his hand. Seven of them, while leaving, caught Colonel Butler’s eye with a conspiratorial look, the look one gives a partner one trusts when there is really nothing to talk about.

  Obode summoned the captain of the palace guard who was a Hausa, and whose hatred of Butler fairly oozed as he entered the president’s quarters and saw the American there. The captain had also heard the jackal last night, and he had arrested a lieutenant for imitating the animal, just to intimidate the president.

  “From the Loni,” said the captain, looking at Butler. “This lieutenant was a Loni and he was the jackal.”

  “Let us see this jackal,” said General Obode. When the captain of the guard left, Obode explained his logic to Butler. Jackals did not live in the palace. Soldiers did. Therefore the jackal was a soldier.

  “I don’t think so,” said Colonel Butler.

  “What is your rank, Butler?”

  “Colonel, Mr. President.”

  “And what is my rank?”

  “General, Mr. President.”

  “Did they teach you discipline in your CIA?”

  “They did.”

  “Then you know that when a colonel disagrees with a general, a general is right.” Big Daddy clapped his hands gleefully.

  “No, Mr. President, they taught me that the general gets his way. But any man can be right.”

  Obode frowned, a deep dark frown. He summoned Butler’s ear forward with a finger.

  “When I want logic, Butler, I’ll ask for it,” he said.

  “The lieutenant is innocent, though,” whispered Butler, hearing the captain again approach the door.

  “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. He could be the jackal.”

  “He’s not,” Butler said. “I am the jackal.”