However work was work, and upstairs wanted it to look like a relatively simply homicide. Brother George had gone berserk and killed Arnold Quilt, Brother Che, and Sister Alexa, who, dying, managed to get her slayer. Remo had not been informed that Brother George and Sister Alexa were lovers, which annoyed him. Upstairs was slipping.
Remo put the gun back in George's still hand and took the tipped section of the Tucson program. He felt sorry for Quilt. Working for Smitty at Folcroft could lead a man to do anything. Then again, he should have gotten along with Smith fine. Computers and Dr. Harold Smith had the same emotional quotient. What did computer expert Arnold Quilt expect from human beings anyway? Humanity?
There would be no trouble with fingerprints. The police might find a strange set on the gun, but no cross reference ever devised could dig up the prints of a man certified dead more than a decade ago, certified by the drunken doctor at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where the man once known as Remo Williams had been electrocuted. After, of course, being neatly framed for a murder he didn't commit. And when Remo Williams came to in a sanitarium, he was offered a new life and he took it.
The name of the sanitarium was Folcroft.
Remo ran out of the hotel room, the computer program safely folded in his pants pockets, screaming: "Murder. Murder. There's been murder. There, down the hall. Murder."
He got into a down elevator with four startled men who were wearing Kiwanis buttons introducing themselves as Ralph, Armand, Phil, and Larry. The buttons said they were glad to meet anyone looking at the buttons.
"What happened?" asked Armand.
"Horrible. Murder. Twelfth floor."
"Any sex in it?" asked Ralph, who was in his late fifties.
"Two of them loved each other."
"I mean, you know, sex," said Ralph.
"You ought to see the bodies," said Remo with a big wink.
When the elevator reached the lobby, Remo left. The four Kiwanians stayed. Ralph pressed twelve.
Remo strolled out into the lobby of soft leather chairs, bathing in the new spring light that beamed through tall street windows. A confused patrolman was talking at the desk to a hysterical clerk.
"Twelfth floor," said Remo. "Four guys saw it all. Big sex scene. They're wearing buttons. They're Ralph, Armand, Phil, and Larry."
"What happened?" asked the patrolman.
"I don't know," said Remo. "Those four guys were just yelling 'murder.' "
An hour and a half away by car was Cape Cod, not yet blossomed into its full tourist season, a town built for summer pleasure and populated during the winter by people who served that pleasure and complained about those who enjoyed it.
Remo saw that the driveway to a small white cottage overlooking the dark foaming Atlantic was empty. He jammed the brakes and let the car skid into the driveway. He did not like using a gun and his body felt and resented it. What police technicians could pick up only with a paraffin test, his body could sense through its nervous system, now so acute that even food seasoned with monosodium glutamate would have the effect of knockout drops. A few years before, when he had still hungered for meat, he had eaten a chain-food special and been hospitalized. The attending physician discovered medically what Remo had known only philosophically: that when something becomes very much different, it becomes something new.
"You don't have a human being's nervous system," the doctor had said.
"Blow it out your stethoscope," Remo had said, but he knew the doctor was right. He had eaten the hamburger not out of the hunger of his body but out of a remembered hunger, and had found what writers always seemed to learn first-you can't go home again.
Remo opened the door to the Cape Cod cottage. The guns still bothered him.
In the center of the living room sat a frail man in lotus position, his golden morning-kimono flowing down around him. Wisps of white hair, like smooth gentle strands of silk, played from his temples and chin. The television set was turned on and Remo sat respectfully waiting for "As the Planet Revolves" to come to a commercial so he could speak his mind to the old man, Chiun.
Fourteen ancient lacquered trunks stood packed against a far wall, seeming almost to wait their own turn to speak.
"Disgusting," said Chiun when a commercial came on. "They have ruined great dramas with violence and sex."
"Little Father," said Remo, "I don't feel very well."
"Did you breathe this morning?"
"I breathed."
"Properly?"
"Of course."
"It is when one says 'of course' to anything that one loses what he takes for granted," said Chiun. "It is not uncommon for one to squander the greatest wealth in the world by not watching it. You alone have been given the teaching of Sinanju and therefore the powers of Sinanju. Do not lose them through improper breathing."
"It was proper. It was proper," said Remo. "I used a gun."
The two long-fingered hands opened in an offering of innocence. "Then what would you want of me?" Chiun asked. "I give you diamonds, and you prefer to play with mud."
"I wanted to share my feelings with you."
"Share your good feelings. Keep the bad for yourself," said Chiun and in Korean he spoke about the inability of even one so great as the Master of Sinanju to transform mud into diamonds or a pale piece of pig's ear into something of worth, and what was even the Master to do when an ingrate came back with handfuls of mud and complained that it did not sparkle like diamonds?
"Shared feelings," mumbled Chiun in English. "Do I share a belly ache? I share wisdom. You share stomach pains."
"You never had a belly ache," said Remo, but he stopped talking as soon as "As the Planet Revolves" resumed. The shows were basically the same as a few years before, but now they had blacks and abortions and people no longer looked longingly at each other; they shared a bed. Yet it was still attenuated gossip, even though its star was none other than Rad Rex, whose autographed picture Chiun carried wherever he went.
Remo saw a country cleanup crew ride past in a pickup truck. A banner announcing a bicentennial art exhibit fluttered from the side panels. Chiun got along with the local people well. Remo felt like an outsider. Chiun had told him that he would always be an outsider until he recognized that his true home was Sinanju, the tiny village in North Korea from which Chiun came, and not America, where Remo was born.
"To understand others you must first realize they are others, and not just you with a different face," Chiun had said. They had been living in the house only a week when Chiun explained the hostility local people always felt toward tourists.
"It is not their wealth they resent or that they come for the most pleasant of seasons. It is that a tourist will always say goodbye and goodbyes are little deaths. So they cannot like anyone too much for they will be hurt. The problem is not that they dislike tourists but that they are afraid to like them, for fear of hurt when parting."
"You don't understand Americans, Little Father."
"What is there to understand? I know they do not appreciate fine assassins, but have amateurs practicing hither and yon, and their great dramas have been ruined by evil men who wish only to sell things to wash garments. There is nothing to understand."
"I have seen Sinanju now, Little Father, remember. So don't go talking about the wonders of North Korea and your own little bit of heaven by the bay. I've seen it. It smells like a sewer."
Chiun had looked surprised.
"Now you tell me that you don't like it. You loved it when you were there."
"Loved it? I almost got killed. You almost got killed. I just didn't complain is all."
"For you, that is loving it," Chiun had said, and that had closed the subject.