"Okay. If you want it. You never spend the damned stuff anyhow. The house of Sinanju has mint-fresh coins frorm Cyrus the Great of Persia."
"That does not matter," Chiun had said. "It is a question of what is right and what is wrong."
"Okay. Take the gold," Remo had said.
And was it any wonder, therefore, that when the treasures of Sinanju were stolen, Remo was off somewhere supposedly saving the world? What the world had ever done for Remo, Chiun did not know. It had done even less than this country he said he loved.
Now Chiun listened with some faint hope that at last Remo had learned some respect for the proper tribute. His heart quickened as he heard Remo had gone to the place where the boy was taken and found someone who had apparently colluded in the abduction.
Then he went down to those who had taken ransom and not returned the child and visited wrath upon them. So far so good, thought Chiun. And then, perfectly concluding the mission, he returned the child to the parents, this despite Smith's babbling about some form of national security and friendly-neighbor policy. Even better.
"Pray tell, O gracious Emperor, how much did Remo take in tribute from these people who had been violated in your kingdom?"
"Money?" asked Smith.
"Yes, that is what is used in America. How much in money was their tribute, a tribute I might add which would reflect to your glory also since I am led to believe your area does cover this entire country."
"Oh, he didn't take money," said Smith.
"He didn't? What did he take?"
"He said it made him feel good."
Chiun, whose breathing was tuned to the center of the entire universe, now felt the very tips of his lungs quiver in horror at what he feared had transpired.
"What," asked Chiun, "made him feel good?"
"Doing what he did. Returning the boy. Now, I can see getting emotionally-"
Chiun did not listen to the rest of the sentence. He could see Remo now, having performed in complete accord with the traditions of Sinanju, using all the techniques of the sun source of all the martial arts, breaking the will of an entire city, returning the kidnapped one home in triumph, and then doing absolutely nothing but feeling good about it.
"Why did he do it? Why did he do such an insane thing?" asked Chiun, his voice rising in anguished frustration.
"I don't know," said Smith. "I hoped you knew."
"How would I know? I'm not white. What could have made him do such a thing? What on earth could have made him do such a foolish thing?"
When Remo finally got home, he found something very rare had happened. Both Smith and Chiun, two men from cultures as far away as time and space could allow in this world, were for the first time agreeing on something.
Remo had acted insanely.
Remo stuck out his tongue and gave them both a razzing. He hadn't felt this good in a long time.
Chapter 3
Joe Piscella and Jim Wiedznan did not expect to die that day when they brought their lunch pails filled with beer and sandwiches to work. By their own choosing, they led simple lives. Both had served in Vietnam and both had decided that construction work paid well and you didn't bring it home to bed with you like other jobs. When you left your shovel or carpenter's gauge at the job, you didn't think about it until the next day.
After coming out of that war alive they had no desire to risk their lives again, so they insisted on never working on tall buildings or in tunnels. Life, they would say, was too precious to risk. Their wives agreed with them. They would rather do without a few things than have their husbands work with worry.
On the day Joe and Jim died, they were at one of the safest construction sites in the business. They were building a one-story auditorium, laying the cement roof along reinforced girders. When the tons of gray cement dried, the roof would be as secure as a bunker.
Jim thought they were laying too much too quickly. Joe said he didn't care. All he wanted was his onion sandwich and beer for lunch.
"If I wanted to worry about how much cement we was layin', Jim, I woulda gone for foreman. We do our job. We break for lunch. We do our job some more, buddy, and then we go home for supper."
Jim looked back toward the main sluices vomiting the gray lavalike cement into the loose molds above the reinforcing girders. The thing about cement, wet cement in particular, was that it was heavy. And the roof was wide, wider than any he had ever seen for cement. To his eye the girders did not seem strong enough.
The sun was hot this summer day in Darien, Connecticut, and he and Joe worked with their shirts off. It was the best time of year for construction. Work was plentiful and there was none of the draining numbness of the cold days of winter.
No one laid cement in winter, because in cold weather it didn't dry properly. And it was the drying that was so important.
"You hear something, Joe?" asked Jim.
"I hear the Yanks aren't gonna be in the playoffs this year," said Joe.
"No. Under your feet. The cement. The girders below. Don't you hear nothin'?"
"Hey, I don' listen to this. I don' think about this. I just do this. C'mon. What's the problem? We fall twenty feet if the whole thing goes. Big deal. Now whaddaya think of the Yanks last night?"
Jim looked out over the expanse of glistening wet cement. He could not remember so much being laid in one day. Usually they would do sections and let it dry and then build on that, because not only was dry cement strong, it was much lighter.
"Never mind the Yanks, for Chrissakes. Listen! Somethin's moving!"
Like many disasters, it looked at first like a harmless curiosity. The middle of the auditorium roof seemed to be turning into a whirlpool. A giant dimple formed in the center of the roof, and then, as though the cement were actually consuming itself from the center, the rest began to flow there, sucked in like water down the bathtub drain.
Joe and Jim were carried with that river. Their heavy boots caught instantly in the thick cement, and although the collapse of the wet cement skin on the roof appeared to be happening in slow motion, Joe and Jim moved even slower. It was impossible to run in wet cement.
Other workers tried to throw poles to them. Someone tried to get a crane to lower a beam they could grab. Everything happened so slowly, Joe even began to laugh at their awkwardness.
But as they got closer to the center and the beams beneath the cement began to crack under the suddenly shifting load, Joe realized what Jim had been screaming about for the last five seconds. They were going under.
In Darien that day, Jim and Joe did not get to their lunch. Instead they died horribly in a gooey gray mass, their lungs filled, their screams smothered, and their bodies sucked into the center of what was supposed to be the auditorium roof. It wasn't the fall that killed them. It was the breathing, or the lack of it. On that very dry day, surrounded by nothing but land, they drowned.
Even in their grief, the widows were glad to see the young attorney from a Los Angeles law firm which specialized in this sort of litigation, Palmer, Rizzuto He knew exactly what the construction company had done wrong. Their husbands would be alive today if the company followed proper procedure. It was a perfect case of gross negligence. "In America buildings are not supposed to collapse. This isn't Russia, where it happens all the time. This is America. Your husbands shouldn't have died. "
At the company the engineers were dumbfounded. They couldn't figure out how it had happened. They knew they weren't supposed to lay cement over that broad an expanse all at once. And yet, somehow, every one of the daily construction orders called for that. It was as though some mysterious hand, a hand that knew exactly how the construction business worked, had cooked up a recipe for disaster.