Everyone looked to Remo with expectant and welcoming eyes. He felt like an alcoholic stepping into his first AA meeting.
"I don't want to talk about it," he said, and abruptly left the house.
REMO WALKED ALONG the beach. His face was a scowl, and there was an uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. Yet his feet left no discernible marks in the soft sand. Leaving no trace of his passing was so ingrained he was no longer conscious of the fact that he was doing it.
It was night now. The surf was murmuring in some ancient tongue, and the water swept up to spread a cold blanket of bitter cream on the sand. It would have erased his footprints had he left any.
Remo had been raised a Catholic. He had also been taught Western physics, which said it was not possible for a human being to outrun a speeding car, climb the sheer side of a building, dodge a bullet and drive a stiff finger into a block of steel-all feats Remo had learned to perform at Chiun's feet.
Just as his illusions about the physical world around him and his place in it had been stripped away by the Master of Sinanju, so had his religious beliefs been challenged.
When Dr. Harold W. Smith had hired Chiun to train Remo, he wanted only a Sinanju-trained white assassin who could operate in American society. What Smith got was a white man who grew to be more and more a part of the long lineage of Sinanju.
Twenty years later Remo stood with one foot in both worlds. He had learned to live with it. He was loyal to his country still. But a part of him was continually tugged toward the bleak fishing village on the West Korea Bay that had given rise to the House of Sinanju, which for centuries before the birth of Christ had served the thrones of the Old World.
Remo shared no blood with them, as far as he knew. But he was connected to all past Masters through powerful bonds of duty and tradition and honor. Only once or twice in a century was a Master of Sinanju created. And he was the first white man. It was an honor. Remo was proud of it.
Years ago, on one of their earliest missions, Chiun had told Remo about a prophecy of Sinanju, that one day a Master of Sinanju would train a white man who had died in the art of the sun source. And that white man-the dead white tiger, the stories called him-would be the avatar of Shiva the Destroyer. The Hindu god of destruction.
Remo had scoffed at that story. It was just another colorful fable told to mask a harsh reality, like sending the babies home to the sea. For a long time he figured it was something Chiun made up to cover his embarrassment over having to take on a non-Korean pupil.
But things had happened to Remo to make him wonder. He had experienced brief blackouts. When he emerged from them, he found he had done things. Sometimes it was as simple as an enemy lying dead at his feet and Remo having no recollection of killing him. Sometimes it was more. During the Gulf War he had lost several days' worth of memory.
That time Chiun had tried to explain that Shiva had possessed Remo, and the time was approaching when he would take total possession of Remo's mortal form.
That day Remo had walked out of the room, too.
On their last assignment, Remo had experienced one of those episodes again. This time he had a dim recollection of it.
Neither he nor Chiun had spoken of it then or after. But it had been an awkward, unspoken thing between them ever since. Remo wanted no part of any other life or consciousness. He just wanted to be Remo.
Chiun, he could tell, was growing more and more nervous about these episodes. Whatever the predictions had been, the reality was much more menacing. Chiun feared losing Remo to the Shiva consciousness. For to lose Remo was to have the Sinanju line end-a line that Chiun was convinced Remo belonged to by blood. Korean blood.
That was impossible, Remo knew.
And then there was Lu the Disgraced, the Sinanju Master who had served ancient Rome and through his weakness allowed the most important client Sinanju had ever had to fall.
Remo had scoffed at that story-until he had met and fell in love with Ivory, a Sri Lankan woman whom he had never met before but whom he had recognized the instant he met her-and somehow remembered. From another life.
Two thousand years ago they had been lovers, Chiun had told him. Remo was Master Lu and she was a priestess of Kali, the mortal enemy of Shiva. In that life, as in this, cruel death had sundered them at their moment of greatest fulfillment. Remo had moved on. And mostly buried the memories. Until now.
It had seemed so real at the time. The memories coming back were Technicolor vivid.
Was he really Shiva? Had he been Lu?
"Who the hell am I?" Remo muttered to himself as he walked along the sand.
Out in the Pacific the incoming waves were topped with thin white Bombers. He paused to watch them form, crest and collapse on the sand, as eternal as the stars over his head.
The waves formed and collapsed. The stars burned with a cold fire. Man was born and he died. Who could say that his spirit wasn't reborn in other times?
"Ah, the hell with it," Remo said, and started back to the house. One thing was sure. Squirrelly Chicane wasn't the Bunji Lama. That was just another of Chiun's legendary cons.
Chapter 10
Squirrelly Chicane lounged in her pink heart-shaped bed eating chocolate-covered cherries.
"Mom! Hi! It's me, Squirl. I have the most fabulous news."
"You met a man."
"Better than that. I met four men."
"Isn't that a little much even for you, dear?"
"No. It's not like that, mother. Really. Get your mind out of the gutter. Four men came to visit me today with the most unbelievable news."
"What? What?"
"I'm the Bunji Lamb. Or Llama. Or something like that."
"Squirrelly Chicane, have you been nipping at that Wild Turkey bourbon your father gave you last Christmas?"
"Will you stop? Will you just stop this instant? Now, as I was saying, I'm the forty-seventh reincarnation of the Bunji Lamb. In fact, I'm all of them-stretching back to the Wood Dragon Year. Don't even ask how many centuries ago that was. And it gets better. The Bunji Lamb is the reincarnation of-rum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-Buddha!"
"The fat ugly person with the big belly and the long earlobes?"
Squirrelly looked at her pink nails. "I don't know exactly which Buddha. I guess so. Will you stop interrupting? Oh, I'm so excited I can hardly think straight."
"Squirrelly dear, if you think you're the reincarnation of some heathen deity, you really aren't thinking straight. Stop being so giggly for a moment and think. How can you be all those persons when you've already told people you've been so many other persons?"
"Mother, have you ever considered the possibility that this just might be too cosmic for someone who's never left Virginia except to have a secret hysterectomy?"
"Leave my operation out of this. Even if you accept that rubbish, a body can have just so many lives. It's only common sense. Something you, I am sorry to say, have been shortchanged on."
"For your information, they proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt."
"How, pray tell?"
Squirrelly tucked her legs under her, noticing that she had to pull the left one in by hand. It would probably have hurt except that she was feeling no pain from the brandy in the cherries. She was on her second box.
"You know that Oscar I earned for Medium Esteem? The one, dear mother, in which I was playing a certain buttinsky older female relative whom I will not name but who bears an uncanny resemblance to your mother?"
"Yes."
"Well, it just so happens it was the spitting image of some Tibetan idol or something that the last Bunji Lamb, who was me in a male body, predicted that the future me, which is the me you are currently talking to, would own. Wasn't I wonderful? I had the foresight to think of all that. And I was just a mere man."
"Squirrelly, are you on drugs? Shall I call Betty Ford?"