Uh-oh, thought Remo. Here we go again. Another I'm-in-my-last-days spiel. What's the old reprobate angling for this time?
"Tell me something new," Remo joked. The hazel eyes of the Master of Sinanju focused suddenly and Remo lost the transparent-as-glass feeling. Chiun's frank regard was devoid of warmth.
"I have seen many summers," Chiun began.
"I know," Remo said in a subdued voice. "You're what now? Eighty-something?"
"I was eighty when I first laid eyes upon you, white man with death in his heart."'
"That's right. That makes you, what-over ninety?" Remo blinked at the realization. "Christ, where does the time go?"
"In all the years we have known one another, never have you acknowledged my birthday, never have you honored me for each year successfully completed. So it was last year. And the year before. So it would have been this very summer."
So that's it, Remo thought. Well, I got him there. "Wait a darn minute here!" Remo said. "I never celebrated your birthday because you never let on when it was. In fact, I distinctly recall once asking, and being told to mind my own business."
"A truly worthy seeker of truth is not so easily dissuaded as that," Chiun said, his voice flint.
"Your exact words," Remo persisted, "'Mind your own business, pale piece of pig's ear.' That was me in those days, a miserable pale piece of pig's ear."
"You have gained some color since those long-ago days," Chiun said without emotion. Remo tried to read the remark for humor. But Chiun had resumed speaking.
"In the land of my birth, Korea, men by custom cease to celebrate the days of their natural span with their sixtieth birthday. Their age is not acknowledged after that. To the end of their days, they remain eternally sixty."
"Kinda like a Korean thirty-nine," Remo remarked.
"But a Master of Sinanju is different," Chiun went on solemnly. "He celebrates his sixtieth year and his sixty-first and so on until he reaches the illustrious age of eighty."
"When is your birthday, anyway?" Remo asked suddenly. "I know you're a Leo. That's in what? June? July? A couple of months from now, at least."
"Beyond eighty," Chiun continued coldly, "a Master of Sinanju does not acknowledge the passing years until he reaches a certain milestone. This he acknowledges, and yet remains forever eighty. For it is an important event in a Master's life."
"Yeah?" Remo said, wondering where this was going.
"You wonder why I have shunned you of late?" "It had crossed my mind," Remo said sourly. "Once or twice. Yeah."
"It had been my hope that you would come to this knowledge of your own accord."
"Sue me."
Chiun's button nose wrinkled in disdain.
Let him work for it, Remo thought. Two can play this game.
"Once," Chiun began, launching into the low, wavering tone he used to offer the legends of Sinanju, "the Master Songjong, who was young, being only sixty-"
"Is this a real sixty or a Korean thirty-nine?"
"Sixty by anyone's reckoning," Chiun said tartly. "Now, the Master who trained him, who was Vimu, was approaching the great milestone fortunate Masters reach. A summons came out of Egypt. It was a minor thing. Something about a princeling who lacked the patience to become a natural pharaoh. So he sought to slay the one who was ahead of him in the natural order."
"An old story," Remo noted.
"With the usual ending. And when word came to Vimu, he summoned Songjong and said to him, 'A summons has come out of Egypt. Since in these days Sinanju enjoys the luxury of two Masters to earn its gold, one of us must go to Egypt and the other remain to guard the gold earned in times past. Which do you prefer, my son?'
"And Master Songjong, who had been a good Master until now, meditated upon this. Instead of considering Vimu's age, he thought of a Korean maiden called Nari, with whom he was smitten. Being fifty, he had decided to take a wife. And he hoped to make this come to pass soon, for his loins burned with a lust for Nari."
"Late bloomer, huh?"
"And so did Songjong say unto the Master Vimu, 'O Master, you are old and approach the venerated age. The task in Egypt is modest, but the responsibility of guarding our village is great and must fall upon my shoulders in coming times. I should remain here now to perfect my skills of guardianship.'
"Vimu nodded gravely, although this was not the answer he had expected. The task would take him far from his ancestral village, and he would not return until after his coming birthday. Vimu was disappointed, since Songjong had knowledge of this fact, but he surrendered to the decision. For Vimu had placed the matter before Songjong as a test of his competence. And while Songjong had failed, it still remained for Vimu to go to Egypt."
Chiun's voice fell into a mournful singsong cadence.
"With much heartache, Master Vimu ventured into the sands of Egypt. The princeling was dispatched as easily as most princelings are. But saddened and advanced in age, Master Vimu did not survive the long journey back through the dark desert. He died, parched of tongue, and his skin hardened to iron."
Chiun raised an ivory-nailed finger.
"One day short of his hundredth birthday."
"Tough," said Remo carelessly. Then it sank in. "Wait a minute! Did you say hundred? That's the venerated age?"
Chiun nodded gravely.
Remo pointed to Chiun's sunken breast.
"You! You're a hundred!"
Chiun shook his aged head. "I beheld my ninety-ninth summer last year. This summer, if I live to see it, I will attain the venerated age all Masters strive for, for it means that they have completed their mission in life. For ever since the days of Songjong and Vimu, it has been decreed that upon attaining the exalted age, a Master of Sinanju may retire if he so desires."
"Are you telling me you're planning to retire?"
"No, ignorant one," said Chiun. "I am telling you this for two reasons. The first is that you are obviously too blind to discover the truth for yourself, as I had hoped. And there are great ceremonies which are your responsibility to initiate."
"What's the second?"
Chiun rose. His face was like beige stone weathered by a thousand years of wind and rain. His eyes were bleak and animal sad.
"The second reason is that I do not believe I will attain the venerated age."
And with those words the Master of Sinanju whirled and returned to his room. The door closed quietly. Remo stared at it a long time. But he wasn't looking at the wood. Remo Williams was seeing the afterimage of Chiun's stooped figure in his mind's eye. It was as if he beheld the Master of Sinanju's true frailty for the first time.
"A hundred years old," Remo whispered. "He's a hundred freaking years old."
He felt a cold wind blow through the room, even though it was a warm spring day.
A shiver rippled along the bare skin of his forearms.
Chapter 18
Connors Swindell's decade was taking a turn for the worse.
It was the next morning. His secretary, seeing the ashen look on his usually flush-with-prospects face as he entered his Palm Springs condo, accidentally pricked herself with the needle she was busily wielding.
"Ouch!" she said, sucking on her thumb. She threw down the needle and tossed the now-bloodstained condom into the wastebasket, saying. "That one's no good now."
"That's what I want," Connors said savagely. "You fetch it back, hear?"
Reluctantly Connie Payne fished the rolled-up condom from the basket, and wetting a Kleenex with her tongue, wiped the blood off. Then, after holding it up to the light to make sure the pinhole went clean through the lambskin, she slipped it into the slot of a small device on her desk that resembled a high-tech stamping machine. As she tapped the lever, the device hissed and spat out the condom, now sealed in foil stamped with the name Connors Swindell on one side. The other side held a strip of Velcro. She affixed the packet to a similarly Velcroed business card and flipped it onto a growing pile.