He went back to the photograph of the stone. The pattern was clear now after so many centuries. Sword, fire, traps, one thing after another. Reginald Woburn III imagined how Prince Wo's followers must have been discouraged as each method appeared to fail. But they hadn't failed really. There were just six ways that showed what wouldn't work.
The seventh would.
Chapter Four
It was one of those painfully beautiful Bahamian mornings on Little Exuma, the first sun kiss of the horizon in purples and blues and reds like some lucky watercolor accident by a child with the sky for a canvas.
Herons perched on mangrove roots and the bonefish darted from flats to swamp just a little bit more safely that morning, because Bonefish Charlie was dead, and the first thing the constable said was not to let the tourists know.
Bonefish Charlie, who had guided so many tourists around the shallows of Little Exuma to catch the jet-fast game fish with the sharp teeth and fighting heart, let the water wash his eyes and did not blink, let the water wash his nose and made no bubbles, let the water clean his mouth and small fish swim around his teeth.
Bonefish Charlie had been maneuvered into the twisted mangrove roots in such a way that for a short while that night, as the tide rose, he could breathe. And then, as the tide rose just a bit more, he could only breathe water. Bonefish Charlie, who the natives had always said was more bonefish than man, wasn't. The proof positive was wedged into the roots as the tide went out. Bonefish thrived under the mangrove roots when the tide came in and Bonefish Charlie hadn't.
"It ain't a morder," said the constable in that strange chopped British accent of the Bahamas, part British, part African, part Carib Indian, and part anyone else who traded and pirated in these waters over the centuries. "Not a morder and don't you be tellin' de white people."
"I tell not a soul. May my tongue cleave to the roof of me mouth until it touch bone," said Basket Mary, who wove and sold baskets to the tourists down by Government House.
"Just don' tell de whites," said the constable. Whites meant tourists, and anything smacking of murder was bad for the tourist business. But the constable was her cousin and he knew that it was too much of a horrible incident for Basket Mary to keep to herself. She would, of course, tell it to friends until she died. She would tell how she had found Bonefish Charlie and what he looked like with "the fishes who was always his friends swimmin' in his mouth like they found a coral in his teeth."
And then with a great understanding laugh she would add that it probably was the first time his teeth were ever clean.
All people died sooner or later and better to laugh in the Bahamian sun than to go around like whites on the grim business of changing a world that never really changed anyway. There would be other bonefishermen and other sunrises and other men to love other women and Bonefish Charlie was a good man so that was that. But, for the morning, it was a grievous and dangerous thing to talk about among the natives, wondering who had killed Bonefish Charlie because the last place in the world he would have drowned accidentally would have been in the mangrove roots he knew so well.
It instantly replaced the news that there was a new owner of the Del Ray Promotions, owners of the new condominiums being put up for white folks. Strange fellows. Seemed to know the island a bit. Some of the friends of Basket Mary said there had been a family here like them with that name some time ago, but they had left to go to England and other places. Stuck together, they did, and some said they were here when the slaves were brought in, but of course it was not nearly so interesting a subject as the death of Bonefish Charlie in his mangrove swamp.
Reginald Woburn III met the apologetic constable at his office and heard with horror that his bonefishing guide would not be able to take him out again that day.
"Bad heart, Mr. Woburn, sir," said the constable. "But we got others just as good. You bought a good place here and we are glad you are here. We are a friendly island. We got the friendly beaches. We got the sun."
"Thank you," said Reggie. Fellow sounded so much like an advertisement, he thought. He waited until the constable was gone and then retired into a room without windows. He flicked on a harsh single-beam light set in the ceiling. It illuminated a great round stone resting on a green velvet table. He shut the door behind him and locked it securely, then approached the table and fell to his knees where he lovingly gave one strong kiss to the carved stone from a kingdom where his ancestors had ruled.
Somehow the message was even clearer when he read it from the stone itself. His time had come. He was the first son of the first son of the direct line of his family. If the seventh stone were correct, the Korean's head would go like a ripe plum from a thin vine.
Of course, there were still some mysteries about the stone. He pondered one strange word. It translated roughly as one house, two heads of one master. Two plums on the vine. Was that poetic? Or was the stone more knowing, more accurate than he even dared hope? He looked now on the words for how he would kill and he saw they could also be translated as "need to kill." The stone knew. It knew about him.
He had needed the bonefish guide the evening before more than he had ever needed a woman, or needed water when he was thirsty. The man he had wrestled into the roots looked on helplessly as the water rose. Even now the man's words gave him a delicious little thrill.
"Why you laughin', mon?" Bonefish Charlie had asked.
He was laughing, of course, because it was such a delicious satisfaction, a little appetizer before the plums. Plums. That was what the stone said. Did that mean he would have to kill more than one Korean? If so, who was the other one?
He had already hired the best eavesdropping specialist to implant all the latest devices in the Korean's condo. This too had been written in the stone, thousands of years before these devices were invented. What else could be the meaning of "ears better than ears, eyes better than eyes will be in your power at the beginning of the kill?" They had known that his would be the age for revenge. Reggie would know the every spoken word of the Korean and the white man who was with him. Might plums mean two Koreans or a white and a Korean?
Outside, someone was knocking at the door and he ignored it. He wanted to think about the meaning of the stone's message.
Remo had a wonderful way to detect when he was being ignored. No one was answering. No one answered when he picked up the phone and pushed all the extension buttons. No one answered when he hit the courtesy buzzer that promised instant service. The sign had said: "We're here before your finger leaves the buzzer."
His finger had left the buzzer, then buzzed again. The comfort coordinator wasn't there, the headwaiter wasn't there, the assistant headwaiter wasn't there, maintenance wasn't there, nor was someone called the "fun facilitator."
So Remo used a little trick that always seemed to work for room service and should work at the "full-service condominium-the only way it's not a first-class hotel is that you own it."
He took out part of a wall and hurled a desk through it. The desk landed on a grove of aloe plants in bloom. Papers once securely filed in the desk now fluttered down to the beach. Then he took out a window. It was already loose: Most of the wall surrounding it was already in the aloe bed outside.
Three people in white with red sashes around their waists came running.
"Good. Are you room service?" Remo asked. The three looked nervously at the inside of the office, unobstructed now by a wall or a window.
It was a wonderful view. They didn't see any tools he had used to take it out. He must have done it with his hands, they realized, and in unison, all said: "You rang, sir?"
"Right," said Remo. "I would like some fresh water and some rice."
"We have the Del Ray Bahamas Breakfast which consists of corn muffins, bacon, eggs and toast, with sweet rolls to taste."
"I want fresh water and I want rice," Remo said.
"We can make you rice."
"No, you can't make me rice. You can't make rice. You don't know how to make rice."
"Our rice is delicate, each grain a separate morsel."
"Right," Remo said. "You don't know how to make rice. You've got to be able to clump it. That's how you make rice. Good and clumpy."
They all glanced at the missing wall. They wondered what the new owner would say about the wall, but they knew what they would say about the rice.
"Clumpy is right."
"Like delicious mush," said the headwaiter.
"Right," said Remo. He followed them into the main kitchen, past burning pig meat and rancid sugared rolls, their poisonous sugared raisins rotting in the morning heat. He made sure he got a sealed bag of rice because an open one might pick up the stench. In his days before training, he had longed for a strip of bacon and had been told that someday he would consider it as unpleasant as any other dead body of any other animal.
Now he couldn't remember how he had ever liked it.
He got the rice and said thank you. One of the cooks wanted to prepare it but was told Remo liked it sticky.
"He like it that way?"
"Nobody's asking you to eat it," Remo said to the cook, and to the waiter smiling for instructions, he said, "Get out of the way."
Someone had planted a palm tree the day before that was supposed to give shade to the entrance to his and Chiun's condo. Remo didn't like it there so he crushed its trunk. He didn't like the concrete stairs either so he turned the bottom one to sand and gravel to see how it would look. Inside, Chiun was making brush strokes on a historic parchment for Sinanju.
"Did Smith call?" Remo asked.
"Not today, not yesterday, not the day before."
"Okay," said Remo.