But there had been changes. Chiun was less prone to being the harping teacher to Remo's inattentive student. Sometimes. Well, almost never. For a while the old Master had become extra-antisocial, spending hours watching TV or pretending to. Remo knew he was engrossed in deciphering whatever it was that had happened to him in Sinanju at the Time of Succession.
Remo didn't know what actually had happened to Chiun, and Chiun wasn't talking.
Chiun appeared in the gravel parking lot, slowly strolling away from the hotel in a sort of walking meditation.
Lately Chiun had become impatient with Remo's gaps in learning. The trouble was that Remo had learned the art of Sinanju years ago, and all that was left for Chiun to teach was the boring stuff-occasional bits of obscure philosophy that the old Korean always seemed to be making up as he went along. Legends of Sinanju Masters who were so unimportant or dull that they hadn't been mentioned in all these years. Then there was the stilted prose of the endless written histories.
Remo had experienced a new sense of pride and responsibility when he achieved the title Reigning Master. He had even agreed to undergo training in Chiun's archaic form of Korean calligraphy.
Oh. That was supposed to happen yesterday.
"Ah, crap," he announced to the empty room. "I forgot about the writing lesson."
Far across the parking lot the figure of the Master of Sinanju Emeritus turned and offered Remo a scowl that told him he had at least had the brains to figure out what he'd done wrong.
So that was what was bugging Chiun. But for some reason Remo thought it wasn't what was bugging him. So what was it?
He sensed the tiny surge of electricity inside the phone and snatched the receiver as it started to ring. "Yeah?"
"It's happening." It was Mark Howard. "Not far from you."
"Where's your dad, Doogie?"
"At home, getting some rest. Remo, listen-there's a disturbance going on at one of the bars in town. The police scanner feed says there's some bikers tearing up the place."
"Let me get this straight. You think a brawl in a biker bar is out of the ordinary?"
"Of course not," Howard said. "It's the Nashville Rock Hard Cafe. It's strictly an upscale place-you know, all kinds of expensive rock-star memorabilia and stuff. Caters mostly to tourists. The bikers are outsiders. I don't know what they're up to, but it sounds like they're laying siege to the place."
REMO DROVE across the lot and pulled to a stop behind Chiun, who was facing resolutely in the other direction, his scarlet kimono shimmering in the distant lights.
"The Fresh Prince of Folcroft says it's time for work," Remo called.
For a moment the old Master was motionless, then he turned, the picture of dignity, and entered the car. They drove into the heart of Nashville.
After some silence, Remo spoke. "Little Father, I am sorry I blew off the writing lesson."
"You deliberately avoided it," Chiun said evenly.
"Hey, no, it wasn't like that. Smitty needed me here to look into all the crazy types."
"You could have delayed the trip."
"Aw, come on! What good would that have done?"
"What good have you done since you arrived?" Chiun asked innocently.
"All right, so I'm batting zero. I told Smitty to get his investigators on this instead of me."
"But you did not insist. All this is a sham. Do you even wish to learn the most basic of skills necessary for a true Master of Sinanju?"
Remo was getting ticked. "What the hell have I been wasting my time on for all these years?"
Chiun stared at him coldly. Then he faced forward again. "You have learned just enough to make you the most uncouth and unmannered Master in five thousand years. You're a Mongol. A barbarian."
"Remo the Barbarian?" Remo asked.
"Yes. Exactly. That is how I shall address you in the scrolls. Remo the Barbarian is what I shall call you as I record your history during my waning years-because clearly you will not be able to record your own history."
"You make me sound illiterate," Remo protested.
"Your scrawl is hideous. It is an abomination made worse by the unbeautiful Roman characters you choose to use and the despicable hodgepodge of a language you employ. You must learn to make graceful hangul characters in order to keep the chronicles of Sinanju history."
"I'm not gonna be keeping the books in Korean, Little Father. I'll keep them in English."
Chiun turned his head sharply at Remo. "What are you saying? You absolutely will not allow mankind's most important historical record to be sullied with the use of English! It is unthinkable!"
"But that's how it is," Remo said firmly.
"I will not allow it! The writing of the Sinanju Masters has always been in Korean dialects."
"Yeah, well, up until a few years ago the Masters were always Korean. That's changed, too. Now I'm the Reigning Master, and I'm not Korean, mostly."
"The blood of the Sinanju Masters flows in your veins."
"True. But every Master before me was born in Sinanju and grew up speaking Korean and I wasn't. I was born in America and I grew up reading and writing American."
The large and garish Rock Hard bar and hotel came into view. It was past two in the morning, but the lights were blazing and the music was thumping from inside loud enough to rattle the dashboard of the rental car. Crowds seethed in the streets and on the sidewalk. "Lively place," Remo commented.
A human being crashed through one of the glass doors, moving fast, moving backward, and his feet never touched the ground until he crumpled in a broken heap.
"Getting less lively every second, though," Remo added, pulling to the curb.
VIRGIL "VIRGIN KILLER" Miller liked the way the body sounded when he hoisted it into the doors. The doors cracked and the body made breaking noises, too, and then made more breaking noises when it landed. At some point during his brief flight the victim had stopped being alive.
Served him right!
Virgin Killer didn't dwell on the fact that he really didn't have a reason for hating these people. Him and Bork and all the guys, the Road Sharks, they was finally doing what needed doing.
He spotted a weasel in a light blue sport jacket.
"You!" Miller's meaty hand shot out and intercepted the man as he bolted for the exit. Virgin Killer spun Mr. Blue Sport Coat, and the man's spine met the steel support beam between the front doors. Miller grabbed him again just before he fell.
"You make me wanna puke!"
"I don't even know who you are," his prisoner stammered.
"But I know you! Coming in here in your prissy clothes like some fairy boy! I hate you all!"
Virgin Killer Miller turned on the interior of the bar, carrying Mr. Blue Sport Coat over his head. "You hear me, you people! I hate you like I hate my own mother!" He hurled his victim into a lounge area, breaking tables, chairs and bones.
A large crowd of patrons was trapped in the middle of the Rock Hard Cafe. Miller and the other bikers were blocking the doors and the rear emergency exits. Virgin Killer had lots of choices.
"Well, look at all these fancy clothes," he snarled. "You people must spend a lot of money to make yourselves look so fine. You sure are a bunch of prissy-assed bitches and pretty boys."
Miller grabbed one young man by the shirt collar. He went limp with terror. "You know I can't stand pretty boys. I want to do things that'll make them look really ugly. And hey! You're about the prettiest of them all."
"Well, it sure isn't you I'm going to see on next month's GQ," said somebody just behind Virgin Killer Miller. Miller could have sworn there was nobody there a second ago.
Then a hand with unnaturally thick wrists came from behind him and clamped onto Miller's forearm. Miller released his hold on the pretty boy because he couldn't help it. Over his shoulder he saw that the thick wrists belonged to a skinny guy with dark eyes.
Miller put all his considerable body mass into an explosive roundhouse punch with his free fist, but somehow
he missed. Miller's weight carried him in a circle, and he found himself facing the same direction he had started in. His head gyrated wildly, but now he was alone. Could he have possibly hallucinated abut a skinny guy with thick wrists?
Something blurred at him from very nearby. Miller's last thought was, Oh, there's the skinny guy now.
DON "FORK" BORK, leader of the Nashville Road Sharks, couldn't believe what he was seeing when the shrimpy little guy did some sort of a judo jab that sent Virgil into a sudden spin. Virgin Killer Miller was a massive slab of meat that should have taken hydraulics and diesel power to manipulate.
Then the shrimpy guy who did the judo trick vanished, reappeared out of nowhere and poked Virgin Killer in the face. Not a two-finger Moe-poke to the eyeballs, but a one-finger stab at the forehead. A red blossom appeared an Virgil's forehead. Virgil rolled his eyes up at the gaping hole, then collapsed without a sound.
Fork wouldn't have thought it possible to get more angry than he already was. The Road Sharks had been so filled with their righteous indignation that Fork postponed their plans for the night. That liquor store and its gook owner would be there for the taking tomorrow. The Rock Hard was an insult that needed to be avenged now. Every man and woman in the place was an enemy of every Road Shark.
And now one of those men had just killed Fork's blood brother.
"You'll pay for that, sonny," he growled.
Remo Williams found himself on the receiving end of a real-estate broker who had been reduced to a mess of wild limbs in a thousand-dollar suit. The real-estate broker made a noise like a siren, which ended in a question mark when he was intercepted with amazing gentleness.
Remo put the guy in the expensive suit on his feet. "Well, don't just stand there," Remo said, waving at the door.
The man sped off. Fork Bork bellowed and came at Remo, and Remo moved to intercept. Fork never saw him coming.
What Fork saw was his own arms leaving, one in either direction. The blood was leaving his body, too, in gushes. That couldn't be good.
As sneering bikers closed in on Remo from all directions, he grabbed Fork about the beer belly and twisted the armless one into a spin. His impromptu sprinkler sent blood splattering in a perfect circle in all directions. Bikers slipped and slid until they collided in a messy jumble around the legs of their friend without the upper extremities, who collapsed atop the pile, his eyes fixed and open.
Amid the confusion and shouts, one of the bikers rose out of the tangle of bodies. And he just kept rising and rising until he stood at seven feet six inches.
"Cripes," Remo observed, now standing outside the mess. "The beer-and-cigarettes lifestyle agrees with you."
"You. You will die."
"Not before he trains his replacement," Chiun announced, emerging from the darkness with a pair of bodies skidding across the floor before him. His nimble feet seemed to reach out here and there to nudge the bodies and guide them in the direction he wished them to go.
"Souvenirs?" Remo asked.
"Did you not say we need to get information from the rabble before they are rendered into rubble?" Chiun bent over the battered bodies and asked in his most polite singsong, "Which is the leader?"
The bodies stirred. One of them raised a quivering finger at the armless corpse. "Him. Fork."
"And Virgin Killer." The dying man pointed at the one with the head puncture.
"Fork and Virgin Killer?" Remo asked incredulously.
"Good work, Remo." Chiun sighed. "I see you've managed to kill just two hoodlums thus far and one of them happens to be the one we needed to keep alive."
"Give me a break," Remo answered. "Hey, you." He snapped his fingers over Chiun's bodies. "Who's next in the line of command?"
One of the bikers who still clung to life raised his eyes to the giant. Then he raised his eyes to heaven and said a strange word, which ended in a final hiss of breath. "What did he say, Belltower?" Remo asked.
"He said Belfagore," intoned the seven-plus-footer. "I am Belfagore."
"What kind of name is that?"
"It is one of the names of Satan," the giant thundered.
"Oh, brother."
"And I will dispatch you straight to hell, little man!" By this time the surviving ranks of the Road Sharks biker gang were on their feet, and Remo saw deranged vitality in their eyes. He'd seen it the day before in a certain crack house.
Belfagore raised one long arm and stabbed the air, shouting, "Kill them!"
The Road Sharks struck fast, overpowering the throbbing music with banshee battle cries. Their movements were adrenalized out of human proportions as they tore into the two Masters.
The two Masters were gone, though. The small mob stumbled to a halt, shouts dying in their throats until the shouters started dying themselves. Remo pushed a pair of skulls against each other and removed his hands fast before the gore splashed them. He leaped around their collapsing remains and reached wide with both hands, inserting a finger deep into the ear of one Shark and the chest of another.
Chiun stood watching Remo as the heart-puncture victim flopped to the ground. The old Master was the picture of peaceful composure, hands tucked in his kimono sleeves, as if he were unaware of the three Road Sharks sprawled dead at his feet, let alone claimed responsibility for them.
"What was that 'Kill them' all about?" Remo demanded of the Road Sharks' new leader. "You trying to do a whole Batman TV show thing on us? Were you expecting some CRAACKK!s and KERPLOW!s? Notice that the real world doesn't work that way?"
Belfagore was astonished at the nearly instant annihilation of his gang.
"So?" Remo demanded. "What's the deal? Why are you doing this? What's your problem?"
The Shark closed his mouth and began to quiver.
"He is mad," Chiun declared resignedly.
"No kidding. Belfagore's got serious bats in his belfry."
"No. I mean he is angry."
Belfagore made a sound like a komodo dragon whose goat haunch has been taken by another komodo dragon.
"Ya think?" Remo asked Chiun, then stepped aside and nudged the charging giant, who tumbled with tremendous momentum across the bloody floor and crashed through the last few upright lounge tables. Then he leaped to his feet, shouting incoherently and charging again.
Charging fast.
Belfagore launched himself at Remo but Remo stepped out of the way, so Belfagore was sliding again, head-first this time. A wall stopped him hard.
"Ah, crap," Remo said.
But Belfagore wasn't dead or even unconscious. He used the wall for support as he rose to his feet, and his eyes seemed incapable of focusing.
"I'm surprised you don't make accordion sounds when you breathe, Belf. I think you're three inches shorter. Don't you think, Little Father?"
"Four inches," Chiun said.
Belfagore staggered at the Reigning Master of Sinanju, grunting and croaking.
"Oh, just give it up, would you?" Remo stepped aside and tripped the giant. Belfagore fell down, and it was a long way down.
"That was for your own good." Remo crouched beside the biker. "You'd have killed yourself running around like a maniac, which would rob me of the pleasure."
Belfagore made agonized sounds when he was flipped onto his back. He coughed blood and didn't have the strength to grab Remo by the throat.
"Okay, so you're dying anyway," Remo said. "You've got maybe ten minutes. So why not just tell me what I wanna know?"
Belfagore made animal sounds, gnashing his teeth. "Why'd you guys get all freaked out? Who put you up to this?"
Belfagore's collection of sounds settled into a long, menacing growl.
"He's mad," Chiun pointed out.
"You said that."
"I mean, he's insane."
Remo nodded reluctantly. "Who isn't? I wanna know." He grabbed the dying biker by the base of the neck and turned him off. Belfagore went limp.
"I am not insane," Chiun said indignantly. "You, however, are behaving oddly. For
example, I see you have now taken up the noble pastime of looting the dead."
"Ha!" Remo had extracted the biker's wallet, a huge black leather affair on a stainless-steel belt chain, and flourished the driver's license. "Belfagore's real name? Maurice."
Chiun said nothing, but his brows grew heavy as he observed Remo moving among the corpses, pulling out wallets one after another. "This guy's named Bork. This guy is Virgil. No wonder the weird nicknames!"
"This has some meaning to you'?"
Remo grinned and shrugged. "Just looking for the common thread tying these losers together."
"What is common is they are all dead," Chiun noted.
CHIUN WAS STARING at the wing of the 737 as if it might, just might, fall off right then, before they even pushed back from the gate.
"Slowpoke," he said.
"Who? Me?" Remo asked from the next seat. "When was I slow?"
"I've already explained that."
"Did I miss something?"
"You missed me on the way in," said a woman in a blue blazer and a blond hair helmet. "I'm Johlene, and I'll be your stewardess on this flight."
"Fine. Thanks." Remo avoided eye contact and said to Chiun, "Explain it again."
"Who buckled this seat belt?" Johlene demanded playfully. "It's all wrong."
"You know, I've done ten thousand airplane seat belts and I think I've got the hang of it. " Remo shoved her groping hands away from his lap. "Now, when was I slow?"
Chiun sighed. "During the poke. As I explained."
"What poke?"
"Against the smelly bicycle riders in the loud nightclub," Chiun said.
"My poke was not slow."
"I could use a slow-" Johlene interjected.
"Can it!" Remo barked at the stewardess. Her eyes opened a little wider. They glinted. Remo wasn't looking. "Your form was imperfect, as well," Chiun complained.
"You're making up stuff."
"Your form is perfect. Don't listen to him," Johlene said comfortingly to Remo.
"What does it take to offend somebody these days?" Remo demanded.
"Who knows?" the stewardess asked, leaning her bosom into his chest. "Why not call me a few dirty names and see if I leave in a huff."
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