"Yeah. You've never listened to our Vice President."
"You mean if your President dies, his wife does not assume the throne?"
"No."
"Nor his children?"
"No."
"This Vice President, how is he related to the President?"
"He's not."
"He is not his son, this Vice President?"
"No," said Remo.
"Then we know who is behind this plot to assassinate, probably getting the work done for free too, so dishonorable is this person. He is the one who wishes your President dead. We will offer your President his head on a pole and be done with this dirty business where people kill others for free."
The four charged again, this time two coming in from each side. Since it appeared they were
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just going to keep it up and keep it up, Remo put one away with an elbow into the lower rib and another with a kick to the sternum and was about to finish the other two when Chiun said:
"Don't kill across me, please. It's very rude."
And with that the long-nailed fingers flicked out like a lizard's tongue and a small red spot appeared where an eye had been, the brain behind it jellied through the frontal lobe, and another hand caressed a wildly swinging blade so that its circular motion increased and with a thwuck stopped its motion in the man's own belly. The towel with the orange glass in the middle of it popped off the head. The eyes widened.
"Jesus Mercy," said Hamis Al Boreen who had discovered his new name while buying a Twenty Mule Team product by mistake when he had wanted cornstarch. After all, who ever heard of eating borax?
And then there was blood in his mouth and on hig face and he could not stand.
"Okay, Sun Valley," said Remo. "It's a resort, you know."
"Will I meet the stars?" asked Chiun who followed American entertainers on television during the day. He had not been watching regularly lately, however, since these programs had, as he said, "abandoned decency." There was too much violence.
He bent down to pick up the orange-colored glass. He held it up to a street light.
"Glass," he said disdainfully. "Is nothing real? Why, it is a bad imitation. There is no orange jewelry in the entire world. This fraud is not even an imitation anything." Chiun kicked the corpse. "Violence. Violence in my daytime dramas
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even. This is not a country worth saving. Your worst elements like human waste in one of your cesspools float to the top."
"You can watch the old shows, Little Father," said Remo, walking back in the night to the White House where they could get a cab to the airport.
"It's not the same. I know them all. I know the troubles of all the stars. The stars are not the same today. They have sex today. They punch people today. They talk obscenely today. Where are the good and innocent and pure?" asked Chiun, Master of Sinanju and lover of "As the Planet Revolves" which had gone off the air recently after twenty-five years. "Where is pure innocence and decency?"
"Where is it in life, Little Father?" asked Remo, not without a bit of wisdom.
"You are standing next to it," said Chiun.
There was no flight to Sun Valley until the morning, and while waiting at Dulles Airport Remo reflected on how many airports he had waited at for how many nights and how early he had given up the hope of ever having a home where he could rest his head and see the same people in the morning as he had seen the night before.
Instead he had something else, a oneness with the fullness of the use of his body that only a handful of people had ever had.
Because Remo was Sinanju, sharer of the sun source of all the martial arts, each like a ray from the original and the most powerful. And yet, there were too many nights in too many airports and he did not even have a home village to send money to. Chiun told him that Sinanju was is home, but that was a spiritual home if any-
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thing. Remo could not regard himself as an Oriental, as a Korean. He was an orphan, which was why Smith had chosen him as CURE'S enforcement arm, and a long time ago made him disappear to become a man who didn't exist, working for an organization that didn't exist.
Airports were a place where people ate candy bars and drank coffee until morning. Or got drunk until the bars closed. Or read magazines.
He had an urge to scream in this swept and clean expanse of modern construction, waiting to let out its people to the drone airplanes that came up alongside to swallow them. It was a place for people passing through and it was his home. He was passing through life and was as secure as a man hurling himself off a four-story building. He remembered the morning before and the exercise and how his home was that time and space between birth of the leap and the perfect landing.
So be it, thought Remo.
He did not yell out.
The next day, a local policeman dozed in the heat as he sat on the corner foundation of what had once been a house. There was a hole in the ground where Ernest Walgreen had spent his last days trying to survive an assassination attempt,
Chiun looked down into the hole and smiled. He beckoned Remo. Remo looked down into the hole. He saw what was left of the foundation in pieces, the shattering that could come only from explosives implanted in the foundation itself.
"Well?" asked Chiun.
The guard blinked himself awake. He told the Oriental and the white man they weren't supposed to be there. They told him they would implant that shotgun on his lap into his chest cavity
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if he continued to bother them. He saw the easy way the two moved, assumed they could do him harm, and went back to sleep. He had fifteen years to go before retirement, and he wasn't going to get there any faster by hassling troublemakers.
"Well ?"Chiun said.
"Case closed," said Remo.
"Is there nothing new except deterioration?" bemoaned Chiun. "Such an old thing."
"My first lesson. One of them," said Remo. "The Hole. And there is even a hole here which is funny because at the end of 'The Hole,' if it's properly done, the hole disappears."
Remo remembered well. It was a story each Master passed to his successor. It was a technique to do work that had at one time seemed impossible. And it went like this:
Once, before Sinanju achieved its full power and when Masters often got killed in vain attempts to achieve their ends, there lived a shogun of Japan in a great castle. And one of his lords wished that he be removed so that the lord could become shogun and rule the land of Japan. It was a time even before the Samurai or the code of Bushido. For the Japanese, it was a very long time ago. For Sinanju, some time.
This shogun had brave followers. They always were by him, in rows of three. Three guarded three guarded three.
It was like a beehive and the shogun was the queen bee. He was most powerful. He lived in a great castle. Now the Master of Sinanju was not the strongest and it was before the full and total use of the breath was known. He was called The
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Fly, because he would move quickly, then stop, quickly, then stop.
The Fly knew he could not kill the shogun in his castle. He was, being Sinanju, better than any Japanese fighter at that time. But he was not better than all of them added up. This was many many centuries before Ninji, the Japanese night-fighters who had learned by watching Sinanju and, of course, watching could only reproduce an imitation.
Now these were especially hard times for Sinanju and there was much hunger in the village. And the people looked to the Master and he could not tell them. "The shogun is too strong and I am too weak." You do not tell these things to babies. You tell starving babies: "Here is your food, loved one."
So that was what The Fly told them. He took part of the money payment from the lord who wanted the shogun dead and with it he bought food. The rest was to be delivered to the village when he succeeded.