By day, it had appeared different. The buildings were grimy; the city beyond the fringes of the seat of government for the most powerful nation on earth was a ghetto. But by night it breathed the high ideals on which it had been built.
Remo spanked pollution particles off his palms. He had picked up the grit climbing the cold obelisk that was the Washington Monument. Normal people did not get their hands dirty climbing the Washington Monument. But then, normal people took the indoor stairs during normal visiting hours. Remo Williams had climbed the north face of the marble needle with his bare hands.
He was a young-looking man in simple clothes-tan chinos and a black T-shirt. His eyes were brown, his hair was a darker brown, and his unblemished skin held a light tan which even the ground spotlights could not whiten. He looked normal. In fact, he looked average.
His one distinguishing feature was a pair of abnormally thick wrists which he rotated absently.
With eyes that were more than normal, he scanned the city for the teeming legions of homeless and displaced persons that the TV anchorman had said, in doleful tones, were so numerous in America that they swarmed in the cradle of Liberty itself. He called it America's shame.
Remo, who had been born in America and raised as an orphan wanted to see all these homeless people for himself. He wanted to help. That was all. It would be one of his final services for the land that nurtured him, before he left it for good.
The trouble was, he couldn't find any homeless in the streets of Washington, D.C. Not during the day. And not again at night, when the nip of early spring dwindled into the chill of late winter. The homeless would show themselves at night, Remo thought. They would come out to sleep on the steamy grates of the Washington subway or crawl into cardboard boxes just off Massachusetts Avenue.
But wandering the streets, Remo had found no homeless people. Just the ordinary citizens of an inner city-the winos, the drug addicts, the petty street crooks, and the other kind-who wore three-piece suits and held forth in law offices and corporate boardrooms.
As a last resort, Remo had climbed the Washington Monument, knowing that if there were any homeless prowling the streets below, his abnormally keen eyes would spot them from that high perch.
Finally Remo did see someone. An old woman pushing a shopping cart filled to overflowing with plastic bags stuffed with dirty clothes and old newspapers.
Remo pushed himself off the blunt top of the Washington Monument and twisted in midair so that he clamped the north and east faces of the obelisk with his body. Applying intermittent pressure with the toes of his Italian loafers and using the clamping force of his arms to maintain his vertical position, he slid down the monument like a spider slipping down his web.
It was not the normal way to descend. But nothing about Remo Williams was normal.
He had stopped being normal the day he woke up in Folcroft Sanitarium and discovered he was not dead. He had expected to be dead. After all, hadn't he been tried and falsely convicted of the murder of a drug pusher? And hadn't he been taken to the electric chair?
It was, therefore, a delightful surprise for Remo Williams to awaken in a hospital bed and discover that he was not dead. The trouble was, not being dead was a temporary condition. Unless Remo Williams went to work for a secret government agency called CURE, his death would not be merely official; it would be real.
Remo chose the lesser of the two evils and was put into the hands of a Korean named Chiun, the most recent Master of Sinanju. The last of a line of assassins, Chiun trained Remo in the fabled art of Sinanju, the sun source of all the lesser martial arts. After only a day in Chiun's stern hands, Remo had begun to think about true death with a certain wistfulness. But eventually he learned to unlock the inner power that all men possessed, but which only the practitioners of Sinanju could ever know.
In Chiun's hands, Remo stopped being normal. For CURE, he fought America's enemies for nearly two decades while the world got older and Remo seemed to become younger.
Remo's feet touched the grass at the base of the Washington Monument, his knees barely bending with the impact. He trotted toward Constitution Avenue, oblivious of the cold that did not so much as raise the hairs on his bare forearms.
Remo no longer worked for CURE. He no longer killed in the service of the organization that had been set up by a now-dead President to deal with America's security problems. In many ways he was no longer an American. He was of Sinanju-the discipline, the traditions, and the tiny village on the West Korea Bay, where he had started to build a home for himself and his bride-to-be, Mah-Li, upon his retirement.
For the moment, however, he was stuck in America for a year while Chiun worked off a final obligation to CURE. Remo ached to return to Sinanju to finish his house.
Remo caught up to the big lady. "Excuse me, ma'am," he called.
At the sound of Remo's voice, the bag lady whirled like a Hell's Angel on a motorcycle. She shoved her heavy cart around with surprising agility.
"What do you want?" she demanded. Her voice was a croak. Her features were shrouded by a ragged blue kerchief. Dead strands of gray hair poked out from its edges.
"Are you homeless?" Remo asked.
"Are you?" the woman snapped back, jockeying the cart so that it stood, like a defense, between her and Remo.
"More like displaced," said Remo. "But never mind me. I'm asking about you."
"I asked first," the woman said.
"Actually, I did," Remo pointed out. "Listen, don't get excited. I just want to help you."
"What do you know about homelessness?" the woman said, shoving the cart in his way when Remo tried to step around it.
"I was raised in an orphanage," Remo explained, backing off. "I know how it feels. I wasn't exactly homeless then. But I had no family. It never got better. Not in Vietnam, not after I got back to America. I've lived in just about every city you could name, drifting from one place to another. So I know what it's like. A little. That's why I want to help."
"You're a Vietnam burnout case?" the woman said loudly. Too loudly.
"I wouldn't say that," Remo replied. Something was odd here. Remo wasn't sure what it was. The woman seemed no longer afraid of him, but she kept that shopping cart positioned so that it always faced him, the heaps of plastic garbage bags practically in his face.
"What brought you to this pitiful state in life?" the woman asked. Her voice was clearer than it had been.
"Pitiful?" Remo asked.
"Look at you. No clothes. No possessions. Wandering the streets in the middle of the night in this freezing weather. You don't consider that pitiful?"
"I never feel cold."
"How many pints did it take to warm you tonight? How many the night before?"
"What are you talking-?" Remo began. Then he saw the gleam of glass in the green plastic bag that was advertised as a Shur-Lock Jiffy Bag. A dim whirring came to his ears.
Remo's hand drifted out and widened the hole in the plastic. The lens of a video camera stared back at him. Remo picked it up.
On one side it said "Property of Channel 55."
"Hey!" Remo said.
The old woman yanked back her ragged blue kerchief to expose a coppery wealth of blow-dried hair. Remo saw that her face was young, the skin dried out with makeup and stretched over cheekbones sharp from too-rigorous dieting.
"Cat Harpy, Eyewatch News," she said into a microphone that seemed to jump into her hand like iron to a lodestone. "I'd like your story, sir. Channel 55 is doing a five-part feature on homelessness in America."
"I'm not homeless," Remo protested. "Then why are you dressed like that?"
Remo looked down at himself. "What's wrong with the way I'm dressed?"