"Yes, City A said to Wang, you go compete on behalf of City B."
"These cities were not named City A and City B," Chiun said. "They were named-"
"Go ahead," said Remo. "I'm listening. Skip the cities as well as the soup."
"So Master Wang did as he was commissioned and he competed on behalf of the second city and of course won all the events. In most of them, the champion he had to defeat came from the first city, the city which had retained him."
"Why? Why would the first city hire Wang?"
"The Greatest Master Wang," Chiun corrected.
"Why would the first city hire the Greatest Master Wang to defeat them? That doesn't make sense."
"Just be quiet and let me finish."
"Go ahead," Remo said.
"When the Greatest Master Wang won every event, he was carried back to the second city as a hero. The people of the second city asked him what he wished as tribute to his great skill, which had brought them such honor. He told them he wanted their respect. He suggested that they cut a hole in the wall of their city as a symbol, because with such a great master as Wang as their champion, who needed city walls for safety?
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"So the leaders of that city broke a hole in the wall of their fortifications. When they showed him the wall, the Greatest Master scoffed. Such a small hole for such a great hero was an insult. The hole was made larger, much larger. That night when all slept, the Greatest Master Wang left the second city and went home. Later in the night, soldiers from the first city marched through the hole in the wall and disposed of all their enemies in the second city."
"Old Wang's a sweetheart," Remo said. "And the moral of this story is, don't ever trust a Master of Sinanju."
"There are many morals to this story and that is not one of them. First of all, the Greatest Master Wang did what he was retained to do. To break through the defenses of the second city. He did that. And he did it with style. In fact, I think that the Greeks adopted the custom for their Olympic games. Without paying. Nobody ever pays Sinanju for any of the things they steal from us."
"All right, all right. What has this got to do with terrorists?"
"Sometimes I think you are truly denser than stone. The Greatest Master Wang knew that the best way to break into someplace was to be inside in the first place."
"I don't understand what that has to do with anything."
"Stone," Chiun muttered. "Denser than stone."
Ill
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The list of "Official Rules For Visiting Olympic Athletes" was slid under Remo and Chiun's door ten minutes after they arrived in their room.
The list, printed in a tiny type face called Brilliant, which had not been used for a century in the United States for anything except shipping news and the lifetime records of also-ran horses, took up both sides of six sheets of pink paper.
"What does it say?" asked Chiun.
"I don't know. I don't have a year to read it," Remo said. "Try this, though. Don't try to leave the Olympic village. Don't talk to anybody. Don't take pictures. Rat on anybody who does those things. And don't even consider trying to beat the glorious athletes from the glorious Communist countries. If you want to defect, call for an appointment. They promise to get you on television. And there will be a bus ride in twenty minutes and all will go."
"I'm not going," Chiun said. "Russia is very depressing. Any country that stands in line for cigarettes has nothing to show me that I want to see."
"I'll probably go," Remo said. He was thinking of Josie Littlefeather. She should be on the bus ride. .
Chiun looked at him suspiciously. "Yes, you go," he said. "Tell me of anything interesting."
"Will you be all right here alone?" Remo felt, unaccountably, suddenly guilty.
"Of course I'll be all right. I don't mind being
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alone. In truth I have been alone since first I had the misfortune to encounter you. I will stay here and rest. Then I will walk around the village. Not for me the idle pursuits of youth. I will be about, doing my emperor's business. I will . . ."
"See you later, Chiun," Remo said as he walked toward the door. There was a kind of overkill of guilt common to both Jewish mothers and Korean assassins that, after a while, roused not guilt but amusement. Remo no longer felt guilty.
He waited at the staging area, where a long line of red, lumpy-looking buses without air conditioning were lined up. Secret policemen trying unsuccessfully to imitate tour guides kept trying to herd Remo onto one of the buses but he kept ignoring them, watching and waiting for Josie Littlefeather.
She walked up about twenty minutes later, part of a group of female gymnasts from the United States, and Remo was again struck by how much bigger and more mature she was than the rest of them.
Her face brightened when she saw him and Remo waved casually at her, trying to make it seem as if he had not been waiting for her but had just happened onto the scene.
She smiled and said, "Been waiting long?"
"Just got here," he said. She stared at him with a slight smile still toying with the corners of her mouth. "Twenty minutes," he confessed.
"Good," she said. "It gives me a sense of power. You haven't forgotten that you owe me some instruction on the balance beam."
"Put it out of your head. You're a guaranteed winner," Remo said. "You taking the tour?"
"They didn't seem to leave much choice on that executive order." She mimicked a Russian accent. "You vill show up at 2 P.M. for the bus tour of beautiful downtown Moscow. You vill not take pictures. You vill blow no bridges around here, American."
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Remo laughed then. "Let's go then. Mustn't disappoint our Russian hosts."
They sat in a back seat of a bus together, trying without much success to ignore their Russian guide who extolled the virtues of living in a Communist state over a handheld loudspeaker whose output would have shamed a New York disco.
"I don't mind comic book Karl Marx," Remo told Josie, "but top volume is a drag."
"He's talking loud so you won't notice the lines outside all the stores and how badly the people are dressed."
Remo glanced out the window and saw that Josie was right. The Russian cityscape looked like an old newsreel of Depression America. The people wore lumpy, shapeless clothing.
"It looks like a black and white movie," Remo said. "Grim."
"There is grimness in America too," Josie said. "My people have that look too. Maybe people who are held down, told to stay in their so-called place, have that look the world over."
"Don't start on that," Remo said. "I don't believe it first of all. And even if it was true, it's not my fault. I wasn't at Wounded Ankle or whatever the hell it is you people are always complaining about."
Josie started to answer when the guide told them in his loud, baritone, unaccented English that they were at the Tretyakov Gallery, one of the world's great museums, and that they would disembus now and go look at paintings for twenty minutes.
As they got up to leave the bus, Remo said, "Now we'll split."
"We'll get in trouble," she warned.
"Naaah," Remo said. "We'll be back at the Village before they are. We'll just tell them we got lost if anybody asks."
"If you say so," she said.
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The crowd of athletes turned left off the bus to follow the guide and Remo and Josie turned right and crossed the street toward a group of shops. Immediately Remo knew they were being followed. He decided not to mention it to Josie.
"Maybe we shouldn't have," she said.
"Don't worry about it."
"We won't get arrested or anything?"
"Not for strolling around," Remo said. By their reflection in a store window, he saw two men following them. They wore brightly flowered shirts and pants that bagged at the knees.