Timber Line

Chapter Seven

At last. Alone at last. The only sound in the A-frame was the crackling of the hardwood logs in the fireplace and Remo sprawled out on a chair in front of the hearth. He needed a nap. He had not done anything particularly strenuous during the day, but accommodating the body to the extremes of outside temperature took a toll on one's endurance. His batteries needed some recharging.

He had just closed his eyes when he heard the door to the cabin open behind him and a set of light footsteps come across the room. They were too light to be Peer LaRue's or Oscar Brack's; they were even more tentative than Roger Stacy's; and they were not rhythmic enough to be Joey Webb's. And they could not have been Chiun's because if Chiun had entered the cabin, Remo would not have heard him.

He would ignore whoever it was and maybe they would take mercy on a sleeping man and go away. Whoever it was walked past him. Then Remo could hear the person turn around and look in his direction. Then he heard the person settle down into a chair alongside the fireplace, facing him.

Remo waited, but there was no further sound. Finally he opened one eye and looked up.

The man who was sitting there reminded Remo of a mouse; like a mouse close enough to his hole to be assured of safety might watch the goings-on in a busy, catless kitchen, this man was watching him intently.

A mouse. Maybe it was the way he was dressed: a polyester, double-knit, reddish-brown suit; an off-brown dress shirt; a cocoa-brown tie covered with white splotches; brown Hush Puppies. Maybe it was the watery brown eyes that looked at Remo, then darted around the room, on the lookout for God-alone-knew-what. Or the way the man sat with his cheap brown government-issue vinyl briefcase upright on his knees, holding it tightly with both hands and hunched over its top. Or maybe it was the way the little guy's nose kept twitching and moving around, always sniffing the air, managing to give the impression that he didn't quite approve of what he smelled. Maybe it was the little guy's high, squeaky voice when he saw Remo's eyes open.

He finally introduced himself. "Mr. O'Sylvan, I'm Harvey Quibble."

A mouse. Definitely a mouse. Harvey Quibble. It was even a mouse's name. "Will it wait till morning?" Remo asked.

"No, sir. It will not wait until morning. No, definitely not, sir, it will not wait till morning."

"Can I get you something?" Remo asked. "A piece of cheese?"

"No, sir," said Harvey Quibble. "I don't believe in mixing business with pleasure."

"I don't think there's much chance of our doing that," Remo said. "What's on your mind?"

"We have a dreadful problem," Quibble said. He opened his briefcase.

"Maybe you ought to tell me who you are," Remo said.

"I am from the federal job occupational survey team," Quibble said, "and we find that your agency is trying to define your occupational title in an entirely inappropriate manner."

Remo sighed, got up, and walked to the fire, where he rubbed his hands together. He wondered if Harvey Quibble would burn if thrown into the fireplace. Did mice burn? Or melt?

"Mr. Quibble, I'm very tired. Can we talk about this in the morning?"

"No. Problems should be solved as they arise," Quibble said. "Now, the Forestry Service wants to define your worker-function rating as a three-nine-eight-four seven-six, and I'm afraid we could never agree to that."

"Well, then, change it," Remo said.

"I thought I should talk to you," Quibble said. "I'm sure you'll agree, Mr. O'Sylvan, that your worker function is hardly a three, which after all is synthesizing. I mean the title of your job, to say nothing of its description, almost certainly makes it a six, which is only comparing."

"Sounds good to me," Remo said.

"And I'm sure that your 'people-function' is certainly not mentoring, which is what nine means. In fact, Mr. O'Sylvan, I would dare say that it really hardly amounts to 'taking instructions — helping,' which is an eight. I would make it a nine, perhaps, if it were only up to me, but of course, it isn't, and besides I really think an eight or maybe even a seven is more accurate."

"Fine, Mr. Quibble," Remo said. He walked back to the chair, sat down and glowered at the small man. "Anything you want."

"Good. You can trust me to do right by you. A lot of people resent my work, but I have to tell you I'm really delighted by your attitude. I mean, it's important to know exactly what federal workers do. For instance, your setting-up classification — that's what that eight means, you know — it seems to me that what you're doing is really more on the order of handling, which is actually only a five. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. O'Sylvan?"

"I think you've hit it right on the head," Remo said. "I was worrying about it myself."

Harvey Quibble stood up and carefully put on his brown stocking cap, wrapped his dark brown knit scarf around his neck, closed his briefcase, and put on brown plastic mittens. "I'm so glad you feel that way, Mr. O'Sylvan. You have no notion of how nasty some people can become."

Remo was trying to close his eyes for sleep. "Anything you want," he said. Then he realized Quibble was standing in front of him. The little man had thrust out a mittened hand for him to shake. Remo took it.

"Good," Quibble said. "I'm glad you agree with my assessment. I'll send the paperwork through to Washington the first thing in the morning."

"What paperwork?" Remo asked, suddenly suspicious as he always was of anything called paperwork. He did not trust people who called paper work. Paper was paper and work was work.

"Why, the papers that will cut your salary by seventy-five percent, Mr. O'Sylvan. Just as we agreed." Then the mousy little man was gone.

Remo just wanted to sleep where he was, but who knew what Harvey Quibble's second wave might look like.

He went to the bedrooms in the back of the A-frame and found one that looked unoccupied. He slipped off his loafers and lay on the bed. A hell of a day. Two men dead before he could get anything out of them. So tomorrow, instead of having this all wrapped up, he was starting from square zero again.

He closed his eyes. He slept.

The night sounds filled the room and Remo sampled them, first one by one, then in combinations: the howls of coyotes and the echoes of their howls; the screeches of night-hunting owls; the death shrieks of tiny, furry creatures; some cat-pawed creature stalking along the tree line; the fire crackling in the main room; snow shifting in its drifts; ice melting and water running; someone moving in the corridor outside his room and stopping at his door. It took a split second for that last sound to penetrate.

He lay still on the bed, waiting for whoever it was to make a final decision and come through the door. He did not want to kill anybody tonight; that meant having to get up later and get rid of the body.

The door creaked open, then squealed shut. There were no lights in the room, but Remo did not need them. He knew where it was.

Joey Webb carefully extended one foot hi Remo's direction, set it down on the floor, and transferred her weight to it. The floorboard squeaked, and the night-walker pulled back, startled, causing the floor to squeak again.

She let out a little gasp at the noise she had made.

"Hello," Remo said casually.

"Hello," Joey replied.

There was a pause while Remo waited for her to talk.

"This is very awkward," she said.

Remo looked her up and down in the darkness. She was dressed in only a lumberjack shirt and brief silk panties. Remo noticed that her legs were remarkably long and beautiful. There was something appealing about the way she looked, nothing blatantly sexual, but a look that could make a man want to cuddle her for a long time, until she could be gently joined and then ridden like a bronco until a body-shaking explosion of passion. It was a shame, Remo thought, that sex held about as much appeal for him as did his breathing exercise. It had all become a matter of body control, mixed in equal parts with dedication to perfecting his skills.

"Then why'd you come?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "To talk to you, I guess. To ask what happened tonight."

Her fingers fiddled with her shirt.

"If you keep doing that, I'll never believe you," Remo said.

"Doing what?"

"Unbuttoning your shirt."

"Oh," she said. Her hand fell away from her shirt as if the garment was hot. Then she blushed, deeply and thoroughly. She rebuttoned her shirt, right up to the neck.

"Can I sit down?" she said.

"Go ahead," Remo said.

She sat on the end of the bed.

Remo waited a few seconds and when she didn't speak, he said, "Well?"

"I really botched this all up," she said.

"What all?"

"Finding out who you are and why you're here."

"You know who I am. I'm a tree inspector here to look at your trees."

"I don't think so," Joey said.

"Why not?"

"Because of that act you were putting on earlier. I don't think you're that much of a jackass."

"Just doing what comes naturally," Remo said.

"I don't think so," said Joey.

"Why not?"

"Because anyone who can leave Pierre hanging in a tree has been doing something besides hanging out in Jersey City ward clubs. I think..."

She stopped in mid-sentence because Remo suddenly sat upright in bed and put his hand over her mouth. For a moment, Joey's eyes filled with shock and surprise. She was certain that she had badly miscalculated this thin, dark stranger and that she was about to pay a price. Then he put his mouth next to her ear, and she felt a shiver of anticipation — one that she reluctantly admitted to herself was a pleasant shiver.

But Remo only whispered in her ear. "Be quiet," he said. "There's someone outside. Understand?"

He looked at her, and she nodded yes.

He took his hand away from her mouth and moved to the curtained window in a motion that would have made a cat look clumsy.

"I don't hear..."

The hand was back over her mouth.

"I told you to be quiet," he" whispered in her ear again.

Joey could feel the short hairs on the back of her neck prickle, and a shiver run down her spine. Then she surprised herself and felt a warmth between her legs. My god, she thought, it's impossible. I'm not one of those neurotic bitches who fantasize rape. Then she began to tingle and shiver all over again.

"Quiet," Remo said. "Understand this time?"

It took all her concentration to ignore the feeling of warmth in the lower part of her body and to nod yes. Then he released her and moved away again. The door closed behind him.

Remo was out in the now dark and quiet main room of the lodge. He stopped at the front door and listened again. This time there was no sound. Remo opened the door and slipped outside, waited again, heard the sound he had been listening for, and moved off to the right.

Alongside the A-frame he found Chiun.

The old man was sitting on the snow, in a lotus position. With his long-fingered hands, he was scooping up snow and throwing it at the wall of the cabin.

"I thought you were going to watch the machinery," Remo said, "not throw snowballs to try to wake everybody up."

"There are so many people up there, I do not need to watch the machinery. Everybody else is. So I tried to sleep. But could I sleep? First, there was you sloshing around with your big feet. Then guns going off. Then that big bulhnoose shouting with that funny accent. Then more people. Then that machinery going on and off. I could not sleep. And then I knew I was freezing to death. So I came down here so that, when I die, you can easily find my body before it is eaten by the jackals and bury me correctly."

Remo laughed.

"Go ahead and laugh. I know about you Americans, how brutal and unfeeling you are. Go ahead and laugh at this freezing-to-death old man."

"Little Father," said Remo, "in a furnace you would not sweat, and buried in a glacier you would not shiver. Tell the truth. You missed me."

"Once I had a sore inside my mouth," Chiun said. "I had it for many months. Then one day, it healed and was gone. I tried to touch it with my tongue, but it was not there. So, if I could be said to have missed that sore in my mouth, yes, I suppose I miss you."

"Come on inside," Remo said.

"You are not much, but you are all I have," Chiun said in Korean.

"The apple rots in the shade of its own tree," Remo responded in Korean.

"Aaaaaa-choooao!"

The sound came like an explosion from behind them. Remo turned to see Joey Webb standing in her bare feet, legs uncovered, in the doorway to the lodge. Remo could see the tiny white flecks already starting to form on her toes and the goosebumps rising on her inner thighs. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if it would be possible to find pleasure there, but the image of the girl's guardian — dour, sour-looking Harold W. Smith, standing over the girl — loomed in his mind like an impassable chastity belt, and the spell of her cold, smooth skin melted away.

"You'll catch cold if you keep standing there half-naked," Remo said. "Go back inside."

"I heard you talking to that man," Joey said.

"So?"

"You weren't speaking English."

"You're very perceptive," Remo said.

Chiun was on his feet and moving past the young woman into the lodge.

She said to Remo, "What language was that?"

"Chinese," Remo said.

"Korean," Chiun said from inside the lodge. "Chinese is a barbaric tongue, fit only for politicians and pig traders. It has no beauty, no style. No poet has ever been able to write anything worthwhile in it. They write thirteen-syllable poems. This is because thirteen syllables is the absolute most anyone can stand without throwing up."

The three of them were now in the main room of the lodge. Remo closed the door. Joey seemed suddenly aware of the amount of flesh she was showing, because she sat down in a chair and pulled her shirt forward, like a tent, to cover her legs. She looked from Chiun to Remo, then back again.

"You speak Korean?" she asked Remo.

Remo did not answer.

Chiun said, "No. I speak Korean. Remo grunts replies, usually wrong."

"Let's get some sleep," Remo said.

"Not until you tell me just who you are," Joey said. "You owe it to me."

"Sure. I owe it to you."

Remo turned toward Chiun, who was warming his hands in front of the fireplace.

Chiun began to unroll his fiber sleeping mat and spread it in front of the fireplace. Remo was walking toward his bedroom door. He heard the outside door swing open, then bang shut. Dear god, what now? He turned to confront six-foot-six of cold, wet, and angry-to-the-marrow lumberjack standing inside the main room.

"You," Pierre LaRue bellowed, pointing a thick, hairy index finger at Remo. "You."

"That's right," Remo said. "I'm me."

Chiun continued unrolling his mat and smoothing it out. LaRue was in his way.

Chiun brushed him aside. "Excuse me, please," he said. "I need my sleep."

LaRue looked down at the tiny figure and said, "Sure. I understand. I help you with that?"

"No, thank you," Chiun said.

LaRue started to talk to Remo again, then changed his mind, and squatted down on the floor next to Chiun.

"Tell me something, old man. Who is this person?"

"My student," Chiun said. "The burden I bear in life."

"What is he doing here?"

"It was ordered by the emperor," Chiun said. He had finished smoothing out the bedroll.

"Emperor?" LaRue scratched his head. "What emperor?"

"Emperor Smith," said Chiun.

"Who he?" LaRue asked. "What is he emperor of?"

"The United States, of course. What else would he be emperor of?" Chiun demanded.

LaRue stood up and shrugged in puzzlement.

"What's this all about, Pierre?" Joey asked.

"This man," he said, pointing to Remo, "he put me in a tree. And those two dead people, I think he do it."

Remo shook his head. "A tragic accident. They shot themselves, I told you."

"I be keeping an eye on you," Pierre LaRue told Remo, with a chilly tone in his voice. "Peer LaRue trusts you not a bit."

"Is that what you came here for?" Joey demanded. "To start a fight?"

"No. I come to tell you the trees okay. I start the heaters again. More guards up there now."

Joey stood on tiptoes and kissed the big man on the cheek. He blushed through his cold redness.

"I don't know what I'd do without you, Pierre," she said.

"Is nothing," he said. "Is less than nothing. Is another reason I come. Big trouble."

"What now?" Joey asked

"Can't anybody schedule anything in the morning?" Remo said. "All I want is some sleep."

"The Moonten Eyes are here."

"Oh," said Joey. Her voice did not conceal her disgust.

"Wait, wait, wait," Remo said. "You sound disgusted, and I don't even know what he said. What are the Moonten Eyes?"

"The Mountain High Society," Joey said. "One of those ecology groups. They're trying to close down this whole logging camp and forestry operation."

"Why?" asked Remo.

"I don't know," Joey said. "They talk about the death screams of trees when they're cut down and how that causes poverty and insanity and crime in the big cities by destroying the ozone or something like that."

Chiun had lain down on the floor. "If you three wish to talk all night, would you mind stepping outside?" he said.

"Maybe I better go take a look at these Mountain Highs," Remo said.

"Why?" said Joey. "You're just a simple treecounter or something. Remember?"

Remo ignored her.

"Will you take me to the Mountain Highs?" he asked Pierre.

Pierre thought for a moment. Then he said, "Sure. Peer cannot be mad long at somebody who stick him on a tree like a target. Sure. We go right now."

"Wait a minute," Joey said. "I'm coming too. I have to put on some clothes. Peer, go to the cabin next door and get Oscar. He will want to see this too."

LaRue nodded and went out.

Joey ran into her room and threw on some heavy woolen slacks. She was lacing her thermal boots when she came back into the room.

A moment later, LaRue broke through the front door again.

Chiun sighed and said, "I think I'd rather sleep in the woods than in this bus station."

LaRue said, "Big trouble. Oscar, he gone. And there is blood all over the place."