“Why?” asked Chiun. He had stopped calling Smith “emperor.” It seemed appropriate when he was away from Folcroft and met Smith infrequently. But close up, Chiun dropped the convention lest Smith think it was an acknowledgement that Smith was of higher rank than Chiun.

  “Because I am worried that those people might find Remo. I want him protected.”

  “How could they find him here?” asked Chiun.

  “Because I have told them he is here,” Smith said.

  “That is a very good reason,” Chiun said slowly.

  “Chiun, we have to get these creatures. I know you may be upset because I’m possibly endangering Remo’s life. But I have to look at more than that. I have to think of the whole country.”

  “And on its own, how many Masters of Sinanju has this wonderful country produced?” Chiun asked.

  “On its own, none,” Smith said.

  “And you think the country is worth Remo’s life nevertheless?”

  “If you put it on those terms, yes,” Smith said.

  “Worth Remo’s and mine?” asked Chiun.

  “Yes.”

  “Remo’s, mine, and yours?” Chiun persisted.

  Smith nodded.

  “How many lives does it take before it is no longer worth those lives?” Chiun spat on the floor of Smith’s office. “Remo’s life just because some fat people in some chilly city got themselves eaten?”

  “It’s not just them and not just Boston. Unless we can stop these… these creatures, it could spread nationwide. Worldwide. Perhaps even to Sinanju.”

  “Sinanju will be safe,” Chiun said.

  “They can even get to Korea, Chiun.”

  “But Sinanju exists where Remo and I exist. Where we are, there is Sinanju. I will see that Remo stays safe,” Chiun said. “For you and your emperor there may be no safety, but Remo and I will survive.”

  For a moment, the two men’s eyes locked, until Smith turned away from Chiun’s burning hazel eyes.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “Remo just doesn’t seem right. It’s not just that he’s injured,” Smith said. “He’s smoking. And last night he ate a steak. When was the last time he ate any meat besides duck and fish? What is happening to him. Chiun?”

  “His body has suffered a shock from his injuries, a shock so great his body has forgotten what it is.”

  Smith looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  “Sometimes, when someone suffers mental shock, they have what you call the forget disease.”

  “Amnesia,” Smith suggested.

  “Yes. The body may suffer the same illness. Remo’s has. His body is returning to where it was before I undertook his training. There is no way of stopping it from happening.”

  “Does that mean… does that mean that’s it for him? That Remo’s done? His special skills are done?”

  “No one knows that,” said Chiun. “His body may return all the way to where he began or may stop only part of the way there. It may stop anywhere and never again change or may reach bottom then return to what it was before his injury. There is no way to tell because each man is different.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I would think you forgot,” Chiun said, “since you regard Remo as just another man, just another target for these tiger people, without considering he is a Master of Sinanju too.”

  Chiun’s eyes narrowed with intensity. Smith could feel, as he so often did when dealing with Remo and Chiun, that he faced an elemental life-and-death force: Smith suspected he was on a swaying bridge.

  “Fortunately, he’s Shiva, the Destroyer God, isn’t he?”

  He essayed a small smile, pushing it into the conversation like inadequate seed money.

  “Yes, he is,” said Chiun. “But even the dead night tiger can be victim to the tiger people. What happens to him will be on your hands, and your head. Now, if you would be wise, you will keep those guards and their guns away from Remo’s room because I will be there.”

  Chiun had stood during the conversation. Now he spun and walked away, red robe trailing behind as if he were a bride racing down the aisle of a church because she was late and they’d started the wedding without her.

  He turned back at the door. “When Remo is well enough, he and I are leaving. You will deal with your tiger people yourself because he will be elsewhere.”

  “Where will you go?” Smith asked glumly.

  “Anywhere. Out of your employ.”

  Sheila Feinberg restrained herself from laughing aloud when she saw the picture of herself in the guard’s building just inside the large, stone wall surrounding Folcroft Sanitarium.

  It was a picture of the old Sheila Feinberg with hook nose, saggy eyes, and the desperate hairdo. It told Sheila clearly, and not without some shock, how ugly she had been before the changeover. It told her too that Folcroft was one giant trap waiting to spring shut.

  “Who’s that, your wife?” Sheila asked the guard, a gaunt man with a disproportionate beer belly and sweat rings showing on his blue shirt under his armpits.

  “No, praise God,” he said, smiling at the beautiful buxom blonde standing in front of him. “Just some dip we’re supposed to keep an eye out for. Maybe an escaped patient or something. Look at her. She won’t be back. Probably went and joined the circus.” He smiled harder at Sheila. “Anyway, I’m not married,” he lied.

  Sheila nodded.

  “Those kind of people will be your responsibility now, Doctor, I guess,” the guard said. He looked again at the letter of appointment to the psychoservices division.

  “This is all in order. What you do, Doctor, is go inside. Your division is in the right wing of the main building. When you get yourself organized, go get yourself an ID card. Then you won’t have any more trouble at the gate. Of course, when I’m on, you won’t have any trouble ’cause I’m not likely to forget you.”

  He handed back the letter. Sheila moved in closer to take it from him and brushed her body against his.

  The guard watched her walk away and felt a tingle in his groin he hadn’t felt since his second year of marriage, eight emotional centuries ago, a tingle he thought was no longer possible. Who knew? One thing he had learned from working at Folcroft was that shrinks were nuttier than the people they were supposed to treat. Maybe this one liked old skinny guards with big beer bellies. He looked at her name again on the sign-in sheet. Jacki Bell. Dr. Jacki Bell. It had a nice ring to it.

  A white coat and clipboard are passports in any healing institution in the world. When she got them from a hall closet, Sheila Feinberg was free to roam Folcroft as she wished.

  She quickly realized the big L-shaped main building was divided into two parts. The front section of the old brick structure was given over to the sanitarium’s main business, treating patients. But the south wing, the base of the L, was different.

  It housed computers and offices on the first floor. Upstairs where hospital rooms. On a lower level, built into the natural slope of the land, was a gymnasium that stretched almost to the back of Folcroft’s property, where old boat docks gnarled like arthritic fingers into the still waters of Long Island Sound.

  And sealing off the entire wing were guards.

  At a different time in her life, Sheila Feinberg might have wondered just what was going on that required such security in a sanitarium, but she no longer cared about that. She cared about finding Remo, and she knew he was in the building’s south wing.

  Sheila went back to the main building and posed in the Special Services office for a Polaroid picture.

  “Interesting place,” she said to the young woman clerk who ran the office.

  “Not bad. They leave you alone, which is better than some jobs I’ve had.”

  “My first day,” Sheila said. “By the way, what’s in the south wing that they have so many guards? Something special?”

  “It’s always like that. I hear from the grapevine they’ve got a special rich patient there.” The girl cut the photograph’s edges with a paper cutter and mounted the picture on a heavy card, using rubber cement. “They do some kind of government research over there, computers and stuff. I guess they don’t want to take a chance on damaging the equipment.”

  Sheila was more interested in the special rich patient. “That rich man over there? Is he married?” she asked with a smile.

  The young girl shrugged as she placed the photo card into a machine that looked like a credit card printer. She pressed a switch and the top of the machine lowered. There was a faint hiss of air and Sheila could smell the acrid fumes of heated plastic.

  “I don’t know if he’s married. He’s got his own servant with him. An old Oriental. Here you are, Doctor. Pin this on your coat and you can go anywhere.”

  “Even the south wing?”

  “Anywhere. You can’t treat your nut cases if you can’t get to them,” the girl said.

  “Yeah,” Sheila said. “Let me get at them.”

  Sheila skipped lunch in the main dining room and strolled down the rocky ground behind the buildings, leading to the old docks. They were obviously unused but still looked sturdy enough. She filed that information away in her head.

  Looking back at the main building, she was surprised to see the glass in the south wing was mirrored one-way glass. People inside could see out, but no one outside could see in. She thought for a moment that the white man might even be watching her. The thought, instead of frightening her, made her tingle with anticipation. She yawned, a big cat’s yawn, then smiled at the second floor windows over the gymnasium building.

  After lunch, her badge got her past the guards outside the second-floor entrance to the south wing. She was in an ordinary hospital corridor, exuding its traditional scent, Clorox and dead air.

  She did not have to see Remo to know where he was. She smelled him as she walked along the narrow corridor. She followed the scent to a room near the end of the hall. The scent was Remo’s but was somehow different. There was an acrid smell of something having been burned. She recognized it as cigarette fumes.

  She neared Remo’s door. For a moment the urge to push the door open and walk in was almost overpowering. She caught herself when she sensed another scent. It was the smell of jasmine and herbs. It came from the old Oriental. She had smelled it in the Boston attic apartment after she had cleared her nose of the pepper that had been sprinkled in the hallway.

  The room number was 221-B. She went down another corridor and found a stairway that opened onto a fire escape leading down the outside of the building. At the corner of the building, the fire escape platform split and ran all around the outside of the patients’ rooms on the second floor.

  Perfect, she thought. Perfect, and she went back to the psychoservices department in the main building to kill some time and draw a plan.

  In room 221-B, Chiun said to Remo, who was puffing gently on a cigarette, “They are here.”

  “Now how do you know that?” Remo asked. He was a little weary of Chiun’s alarms about tiger people. What would be nice, he thought, would be a Caribbean vacation. And a large piña colada.

  “The same way you would have known it but a week ago,” Chiun said. “With my senses.”

  “Forget it,” Remo said.

  “They are here nonetheless,” Chiun repeated dully. How could he save Remo from the tigers when Remo was not only unable to protect himself, but didn’t even seem to care? Moments ago, footsteps in the hallway moved toward the door, stopped, then retreated rapidly. They were not the footsteps of a normal human. Instead of the infinitesimal time lag between putting down the heel and putting down the sole of the foot, these footsteps had come down with one faint, but continuous sound, as if the bottom of the foot were round and padded. Like a tiger’s.

  “You take care of them,” Remo was saying. “I’m thinking about pork chops. And applesauce and mashed potatoes. Yeah, pork chops.”

  Three members of Sheila Feinberg’s pack who had accompanied her to Rye, New York, entered Folcroft that night by going over the wall she told them at precisely the time she told them. Eight P.M., sharp.

  At 8:12 P.M., they hit the corridor leading to Remo’s room. The guard who had been stationed inside that hallway had been pulled off duty by Smith, at Chiun’s demand. No one was there to stop the three as they sniffed and growled their way down the corridor toward Room 221-B where Remo lay in bed, his belly full of lobster and pork chop.

  But the three were not unseen or unheard.

  In Remo’s room, Chiun rose from his small grass mat and moved so quietly toward the door, Remo did not hear him stir.

  Dr. Smith in his office directly below the corridor, glanced at a television monitor and saw two women and a man walking down the hall. What he saw gave him a chill, the kind he had not felt since witnessing the results of Nazi atrocities in World War II.

  The three tiger persons hunched over, their fingers almost touching the floor as they moved from closed door to closed door, sniffing. One turned, directly in front of the stationary hall television camera. Her lips were pulled back exposing her teeth. Her eyes glinted inhumanly. Smith realized for the first time just how much animal and how little human these tiger people had become.

  He yanked open his center desk drawer, grabbed a .45 caliber automatic and ran from his office to the flight of stairs leading to the upstairs corridor.

  Chiun waited inside the door of the hospital room while Remo started to sit up in bed.

  “They are here,” Chiun said.

  “I gathered that,” Remo said.

  “So what are you doing?” asked Chiun.

  “Going to help.”

  “Help who do what? Rest your bloated belly.”

  “Just because I ate something good doesn’t mean I can’t help you,” Remo said.

  Chiun turned away in disgust, dismissing Remo with a wave of his hand.

  Outside the door, the three tiger people scratched on the fire-retardant metal covering the wooden door. All they had to do was turn the knob to enter the room, but they did not. They scratched at it. Their fingernails made a soft insistent noise, like the mewing of cats left outside by mistake with night coming on.

  They purred.

  Smith pushed through the set of double fire doors leading to the corridor. He choked back a gasp at the sight of three persons scratching on the door. He moved to the corner of the hallway where he could not be surprised by anyone who might follow him through the doorway. He raised his gun and called out, “All right, all of you. Away from that door. Down on the floor.”

  The three turned to him. The expressions on their faces would have been appropriate only if Harold W. Smith was a lamb chop.

  Inside the hospital room, Chiun and Remo heard Smith’s voice.

  “What is that idiot doing here?” Chiun said.

  The three members of Sheila Feinberg’s pack moved away from the door toward Smith, their arms raised over their heads, fingers curled in imitation of deadly claws, mouths open and drooling.

  “That’ll do,” Smith said coldly. “Hold it right there.” The gun was unwavering in his right hand, near his hip.

  The two women and a man kept moving toward him. Smith waited until they were away from the door and repeated his command.

  “The three of you. Down on the floor.”

  But instead of dropping, the three separated and came at Smith, breaking into a run, charging, growling. Smith fired a shot which hit the man’s chest and lifted him off his feet before plunking him back onto the marble floor.

  In Room 221-B, Remo started up again from bed.

  “That’s Smitty. He needs help,” he said.

  “Get back in bed.”

  “Screw it, Little Father. I’m helping.”

  “You?” said Chiun disdainfully. “I will go.” He pushed his way out into the hall, and left Remo sitting, strangely tired and empty, on the edge of the bed.

  On the fire escape outside Remo’s room, Sheila Feinberg rose to her feet from the position in which she had lain for the last four hours. She stretched once. Her muscles were loose and ready.

  She looked through a tiny scratch she had found in the corner of the mirrored window in Remo’s room and saw Chiun going out into the hallway.

  As the door closed behind him, Sheila, with a running start, threw her body against the window, crashed through it, and landed gently on her feet alongside Remo’s bed.

  Remo looked at her with shock.

  She purred at him.

  “Hello, sweet meat,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

  In the hall, the two women crouched in front of Smith, separated from each other and from him by five feet. Smith seemed reluctant to fire. He covered first one, then the other with his automatic, and again ordered them to lie flat on the floor. They hissed.

  Chiun saw tensing of the calf muscles protruding from under the women’s skirts. The attack leap was impending.

  Like a cold blue wind, he moved between the women and Smith.

  He slapped the gun away from Smith’s hand. It hit the floor with a loud metallic clank, like a hammer dropped onto ceramic tile. The women leaped at Smith but Chiun was between them and their target.

  A raised left hand stopped one of the women as completely as if she had impaled herself full speed on a spear. The second woman turned her head to give her open mouth a clean bite at Chiun’s throat. He merely slid below the woman’s head and came up, almost casually, with an elbow into a point slightly above the pit of the woman’s stomach. The air went out of her with a sibilant hiss and she fell onto the other woman.

  Smith brushed past Chiun and knelt over the two women.

  “They’re dead,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Chiun.

  “I wanted them alive,” Smith said.

  “They wanted you dead,” said Chiun. “Maybe they were wiser than you.” He looked at them. “Neither is the one who was here earlier.”

  Chiun ran toward the hospital room, Smith following at his heels.

  When they entered the room, it was empty.

  Broken glass from the window cluttered the floor. Chiun ran to the window and looked out. On the ground below, running toward the docks behind Folcroft, was a woman. She carried Remo’s body over her shoulder, seemingly without effort, like a big man carrying a small rug.

 

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