He felt as a newborn child must feel, but there were no arms to hold him and give him warmth and stroking; there was only his discipline and the need to learn. He had not volunteered to learn. He had been hijacked into CURE by a man who had framed him for murder. And he had learned and learned and now he had a new life, and whether he liked it or not, it was his whole life.
As Chiun had said, "One does not ask for life. But it is all you have and you must live it and honor it and at the right time surrender it with the dignity and grace befitting the best that is in you."
And Remo had answered, "But Little Father, I thought all your training was so that I would not have to surrender my life."
"We all surrender life. It is the time and manner I hope to teach you. The fool sprinkles his life away like confetti upon the ground, a sacrifice to the passion of the moment. When your life goes, the very bowels of the earth will shake."
"And when your life goes?" Remo had asked.
"I had not thought of that yet. It is very far away. I am only in my eighth decade. But the way your training is progressing, I would think of it every day if I were you."
Remo stopped in front of a jewelry store. It was 11:05. He had ten minutes. At 11:15 there would be the weekly line open at Folcroft. The daily line had not yet answered. While Remo had never faced this problem before, he was sure that the weekly open line had to work. He believed it was much more secure because it was routed through Kansas City, up to Canada, and back down to Folcroft.
A frowsy blonde with a droopy print dress and perfume that would make a sewer snake retch asked Remo if he wanted honey for twenty dollars.
"No thanks," said Remo.
"Ten dollars. C'mon. It's a slow day. I'll clean your pipes."
"My pipes are clean."
"Five. I haven't done it for five since high school."
Remo shook his head. It was 11:12.
" I ain't doin' it for two. Five is the best price you can get."
"For what?"
"Me."
"Why would I want you?"
"You're queer, ain't you?"
"No," said Remo matter-of-factly and went off to a street telephone booth. The blonde followed.
"Look. I need the fast cash. Four. Four dollars, you should see a price like that again never."
"It's a good price," said Remo.
"A deal?"
"Sure," said Remo, reaching the phone booth. He slipped her a five. "I'll meet you around the corner in ten minutes. Don't run out on me."
She took the money, assuring him she wouldn't run out on such a handsome fellow. Which corner did he say?
"That one," said Remo, waving his left hand vaguely.
"You sure got big wrists."
"Runs in the family," said Remo.
"I don't have change."
"When I see you again, you give it to me."
It was 11:14. At the half-minute, Remo dialed. He heard the relays click, whine and gurgle, and then he heard the ringing.
The phone was answered mid-ring. Remo was surprised at how happy he was to hear even Smitty's voice. But it wasn't Dr. Harold Smith. Remo must have gotten the wrong number. He hung up quickly in hopes that he could still get in on the 11:15 line before it was closed down. He dialed again, heard the clicking and waited. Three seconds, five seconds, seven seconds. Then the ring. And it was again answered mid-ring, but it was not Smith's voice.
"Who am I talking to?" asked Remo.
"New man in the office." The voice had that plastic California quality.
"Which office?"
"I believe the recipient of the phone call is supposed to do the asking. Who are you?"
"Is this Folcroft Sanitarium?"
"Yes."
"I must have a wrong line, I'm looking for Doctor Smith."
"He's on vacation. Can I help you?"
"No," said Remo.
"Look, fella, this is sort of a strange new job to me and you're coming in on a special line I have here. I gather you're sort of important. Now I think we're going to work together fine as soon as I get this project functioning along more effective directional lines. But you're going to have to work with me. I can tell you, I'm looking people over rather carefully."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm asking who you are and what you do for us."
"Where's Dr. Smith?"
"I told you he's on vacation."
"Where?"
"There's a high-priority restriction on his place frame."
"Are you a person?" asked Remo, who had known what every one of the words meant, but could make no sense out of the sentence.
"I think you ought to come up to Folcroft and we'll have a little meeting, if you tell me who you are."
"You got a pen?" asked Remo.
"Yes."
"It's a long name."
"All right. Shoot."
Remo glanced across the street at a sign over a rug shop.
"Velspar Rombough Plekostian," he said, reading the sign. Remo spelled out the name two times, starting with V as in vasectomy and ending with V as in nut-nut.
"I don't see you listed in the personnel wrap-up."
"I'm there. You'll find me. Who are you?"
"Blake Corbish, I'm the new director here at the sanitarium."
"You've taken over all of Smith's duties?"
"All of them see," said Remo and hung up. There was something very wrong. No one but Smith was supposed to answer the weekly number. If something had happened to Smith, Remo was supposed to get a tape-recorded message from the computer on the line which would tell Remo what to do and how to contact Smith again, if ever. It was obvious that the computers had already been tampered with. But then only Smith knew the computers and that was probably because the cold-blooded unemotional Smith was related to them. One of them might have been his mother.
Remo did not know what to do. This would be important to Chiun, also, but Remo did not know whether or not to tell him that the House of Sinanju might have to seek a new employer.
It was possible that Smitty was dead. Perhaps a heart attack or an auto accident. Remo visualized a bloody Dr. Harold Smith in a mass of twisted auto wreckage. But to bleed, a man had to have blood in his veins. To have a heart attack required, first of all, a heart.
Smith wouldn't die. He wasn't that human.
Whatever happened, Remo intended to keep it from Chiun for a few days. The Master of Sinanju might be the master of many mysteries, but he was also somewhat unattuned to the Western world. His understanding of the West came only from television soap operas, and he sometimes had trouble telling the difference between a jet and a helicopter. He had often confused whole centuries and cultures, thinking of the Russians as good because their czars paid well and overestimating the importance of a small African tribe because the House of Sinanju had rendered services to them before the time of Christ.
Remo planned to return to the hotel suite, perhaps read a magazine and think in peace, and figure out their next moves.
A frowsy blonde waved at him from the corner. It was the hooker.
"Hi, I've been waiting."
"I thought you were supposed to walk with the money. All hookers do."
"For you, I'd wait."
"There's a rug merchant down the block who could use you. Pays good too. His name's Velspar Rombough Plekostian. Twenty bucks, guaranted."
The hooker's face brightened and she followed Remo's finger.
Well, though Remo, into each life some rain must fall. Because this rug merchant had a sign outside his shop with his name, he would soon be under investigation by a secret agency and plagued by the overperfumed attentions of a hooker.
But then life was never fair, and if Remo hadn't been an orphan and had not been seen in Vietnam by one of Smith's operatives, and if, and if, and if… Life as not fair for Remo Williams, nor was it fair for Velspar Rombough Plekostian, although Remo thought, he liked Velspar's name better.
When Remo entered the su
ite, he heard the low, whiney conversation of the daytime soaps. Remo was careful not to walk in front of Dr. Ranee Remerow who was talking to Mrs. Jeri Tredmore about Mrs. Tredmore's daughter who was dying of leukemia while about to give birth to a baby everyone believed sired by someone other than her husband, perhaps by Brace Wilson, the noted black nuclear physicist who was torn between working for science or for Black Revolution.
Remo remembered one scene in passing because Dr. Bruce Wilson, the noted nuclear physicist, had been referring to "bofe nuchrons" when he meant "both neutrons." This was somewhat better that Dr. Remerow who referred to netrones and Mrs. Tredmore who twice referred to neuters.
Chiun watched all of this in rapture, and Remo for the first time felt grateful that these shows absorbed Chiun's attention, while Remo thought.
When the last commercial faded into the afternoon movies, Remo strolled casually through the parlor of the suite, looking for the phone to call room service for rice and fish, no sauces, no spices, no butter. Boiled rice and only slightly warmed fish.
"We must talk about your deep troubles," said Chiun.
"What troubles?" said Remo with a casual shrug.
"The trouble that has been bothering you since you returned."
"No trouble," said Remo, as he dialed the base of the table lamp and waited for the shade to say hello.
CHAPTER FIVE
Chum gave the problem much thought. Indeed, he said, they both had a problem. An emperor's fall, if it should be a fall, was a serious thing. People might start thinking, even though they might not say it, that the House of Sinanju was responsible for the emperor's fall, that this Emperor Smith had hired the House of Sinanju and look, there he is, dead.
But this would not be fair because the House of Sinanju had been hired only to train for Emperor Smith. But would people know that? The problem both Remo and Chiun now faced was explaining that the House of Sinanju had been hired only to train personnel and that if Sinanju had been commissioned to serve fully, which it had not, Smith would be alive and well today, ruling peacefully and sublime.
"That's not exactly the problem, Little Father," said Remo.
Chiun looked puzzled.
"What else could be the problem?"
"I don't know what's happened to Smith. I just believe he has been injured or killed."
"Then why not go to the palace and find out?"
"Because I am under orders never to return to Folcroft where you first trained me. I'm not supposed to be connected with that place. I've never been able to get this through to you. Smith's organization is not supposed to exist."
"Congratulations," said Chiun. He sat in a lotus position on the floor while Remo sat on the couch.
"On what?"
"Once again not getting that through to me. I do not understand. Smith is most inscrutable. No palace guards. No concubines. No servants. No treasures. Ah, the mysteries of the West. Smith was a mad emperor whom the House of Sinanju could not save from his madness. That is it. The world will understand that."
Remo got up from the couch and paced. "Only half a dozen people in the world have ever heard of Sinanju and they don't talk, so that's not our problem," he said.
"Then what is our problem? We will always find work. When the world has no more use for artists or doctors or scientists or philosophers, it will still need good assassins. Do not worry. A crazy Western emperor will not hurt our reputation."
"This is going to be very hard to explain, Little Father. But I love my country. Smith was not my emperor. We both served another emperor and that was the country. If CURE, Smith's organization, still serves this nation, then I wish to continue serving CURE."
"On your back," said Chiun. "Quickly."
Remo dropped to the floor and flattened on his back.
"Take the air to the very essence of yourself. Hold. Hold it. Hold the air and live on your will. Emit the air. Live on your will. Your organs slow now. Your hearts slows. Only your will survives. Now. Snap. The air. Snap the air. In far. Out far. Much air."
Remo felt his very mind bathed in freshness and light. He sat up and smiled.
"Do you feel better now?"
"Yes," said Remo.
"It is a good thing. You were beginning to talk the madness of the mad Emperor Smith."
Remo threw up his hands. "Let me explain it this way, Little Father. If there is a new emperor, I wish to serve him. I'm an American."
"I never held that against you. There are some very nice Americans."
"I will serve this new emperor," Remo said. "I hope you will, too."
Chiun slowly shook his aged head.
"First, what right have you to take the gift of the teachings of Sinanju and squander it? What right do you have to take the years I gave you and cast them at the feet of any unknown?"
"You were paid, Little Father."
"I was paid to teach you killing tricks, not Sinanju as I have taught you. What I gave was a gift from many generations of Masters of Sinanju. Before what you call your ancient Rome, we were. Before that mud swamp barbarian village on the Seine, Paris, we were. Before the island people of Britain, we were. When the Hebrews wandered in the desert, we had a home and we knew the discipline of Sinanju. You have been given Sinanju, not because your emperor's coin, or your country, or any contract your mind can conceive demanded it, but because you, Remo Williams, were a vessel worthy to receive it."
Remo stopped pacing. He stood motionless on the rug. He felt the words come hard and felt strange tears form behind his eyes.
"Me, Little Father. Worthy?"
"For a white man," said Chiun, lest his pupil run amok at such praise and succumb to arrogance, the one impenetrable barrier against wisdom.
"I… I…"
Remo was speechless.
"Secondly," said Chiun, for he too felt things he did not wish to express, "you cannot serve another emperor. No Master of Sinanju serves a succeeding emperor. For this, there are good reasons. One, people might say the Master arranged the death of the first emperor. Secondly, and this you may not understand for many years, for you are not even four decades old yet, but a new emperor buries the sword of his predecessor."
"I don't understand, Chiun."
"A new emperor wants his own power. It does not happen today, but when ancient rulers died, they were often buried with their most trusted and highly placed ministers. This was not as some have come to believe so they could serve him in another world. No, it was because the new emperor or pharaoh or khan, or whatever men wish to call a president or chairman or czar—because truly they are all alike—it is because the new emperor does not wish other powers than his to be present. Today, a new emperor comes to power and the servants of the old emperor retire, which is a different form of death. But in our world, they must die, as was the way in the past. You cannot serve the new emperor because he does not want you around. He wants his own ministers. This I know."
"We don't work like that in America. This isn't the Orient or 1,200 B.C. This is America in the twentieth century."
"And your country is inhabited by human beings?"
"Of course."
"Then your country is the same. You are just not wise enough to perceive what I tell you, because you are a little baby still short of four decades of life."
"You've made my mind up for me," Remo said. "I'm going to Folcroft."
"I will go with you for you carry more than a decade of my life and we have a saying in Sinanju that babies should not wander the streets alone."
"I wonder when your ancestors ever had time for training," said Remo angrily. "You're so damned busy shooting off your mouth with sayings for this and sayings for that. You ought to go on television like that social worker in the funny Western hat."
"I know the one," said the Master of Sinanju. "Kung Fu. The white man whose eyes are made to look normal."
What Remo did not consider, and what many Americans had never conceived, was that America did have royalty. Not bestowed by acciden
t of womb, but by personal accomplishment, by inventing, discovering, creating, or performing.
And a true lord of the nobility of merit spit the blood from his aging mouth, tried to focus eyes that had been filled with tears of torture, and sat up in the lead-lined basement of a hilltop house near Bolinas, California.
He did not know where he was, not even the continent for sure, or even the week or month. He knew his body was covered by painful welts, that his right leg had suffered nerve damage, and that breathing itself was very hard. But as he swallowed the water that felt like razor blades going down his throat, he knew one more very important thing. His adversary had made an incredible blunder. Dr. Harold W. Smith was alive.
He should not have been alive, not at his age, not after the shock to his body. But he had been reared in the Vermont countryside where winters whipped physical hardship upon a young boy who had wanted above all things to be a lawyer, then a judge. In school, when others cheated on exams, Harold Smith covered his paper, even when he sat next to the class bully. As he had tried to explain to the much larger boy, he would be doing him no favor by helping him through school painlessly. The struggle to learn was part of the growing up process, young Harold had said.
The bully took a much simpler view of cheating. He didn't want any lip from Harold Smith, he wanted the answers. He would get the answers or Harold would get a bloody nose. Nobody, not even his parents, called Harold Smith Harry. It was always Harold. He was somber, even in diapers.
The whole class gathered around to watch Harold get his. Get it, he did. A bloody nose the first day. A black eye the second. A chipped tooth the third. On the fourth day, the class bully explained he did not want to fight after school anymore. If Harold didn't want to give him the answers, then Harold could keep his old answers. Who needed them anyway?
Harold reminded him there was unfinished business. He drew a dusty line with his shoe in the school yard and dared the bully to cross it. The bully did and decked Harold again. By this time the class sympathy had shifted in favor of the school wet blanket against the bully, who tried to explain that it was Harold who started the fight this time.
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