Remo was a Master of Sinanju, an honorific so rare that only twice in a century, on average, was a single man allowed to hold that vaunted title. Remo was the Apprentice Reigning Master. His teacher was the Reigning Master.
Chiun, for that was his teacher's name, had trained Remo in the most deadly martial art the world had ever known. And all had gone well-more or less-for three decades.
But being the world's most lethal assassin was only Chiun's vocation. To Remo's eternal regret, the frail old Asian with the fatally fast hands had an avocation.
For years, the Master of Sinanju had wanted to be a writer. Since both men were in the employ of CURE, a government agency so covert its existence was known at any given time to only four men, it was problematic for Chiun to fulfill his dream.
Ordinarily, the risk of exposing the most damning national secret to exist in the country's short two-hundred-year history wouldn't have mattered a hill of beans to the wily Korean. But fortunately for CURE, for a long time Chiun's attempts at writing had been universally rejected. That had all changed a year ago.
It had all started with a trip to Hollywood, when Chiun had managed to secure a movie deal from a pair of oily film executives. Remo had been forced to keep Upstairs in the dark about Chiun's activities, lest he incur the old Asian's wrath. It was an uncomfortable time.
Luckily for Remo and CURE, the studio producing the Master of Sinanju's movie had gone bankrupt. And while the lawyers swarmed the soundstages and offices of Taurus Studios, picking whatever they could from its dead carcass, Chiun's film had been vaulted.
With the quiet demise of the movie, Remo had thought that his headaches were over. He was wrong.
Chiun had been impossible to live with since his return from the West Coast. Never the poster child for temperate behavior, the old man's attitude over the past three months had been volatile in the extreme. And the bulk of his anger had been directed at Remo.
It had gotten so bad that Remo had taken to using any excuse to get out of the house. The New York protests in the wake of the cabdriver shooting had been a godsend.
Remo was ticked off by the initial reports of the demonstrations on the evening news the previous night. It was maddening to him that the protesters seemed to care little, if at all, for the man who had been shot. It was clear to anyone with a functioning brain stem that they were merely standing on a corpse to inflate themselves. And, given his current mood, their phony sanctimoniousness was all Remo needed to set him off.
The line on the staircase before him was still annoying in its sheer orderliness. The celebrity protestors were allowing the proles to be processed first. The owner of every famous face in the crowd wanted to be last to enter that building. No one wanted to give up a single second of free camera time.
As Minister Shittman wrangled the celebrities into a manageable pack at the rear of the throng, Remo stuffed a hand deep into one pocket of his Chinos. A handful of quarters rattled obediently. He'd picked up two rolls from a bank back home. More than enough.
A hopeful face appeared before him, blocking his view of the stairs.
"There's no shame in being homeless. I can take you to a shelter," the youthful police officer offered. "Or to a counselor. Would you like to see a counselor? We have several inside. Free of charge, of course. The city mandated that we hire them rather than buy bullets."
Remo peeked around the man, irritated.
"What I'd like to see is at least a scowl on one of these cops. How much manpower are you wasting processing these nits?" He waved a thick-wristed hand at the line of filing protestors. "You should be furious."
"Oh, no, no, no," the young officer rapidly insisted. His worried eyes darted around, hoping no one in the vicinity had heard Remo's suggestion.
"The new New York police force is very responsive to the needs and difficulties of the community at large. See?"
The cop removed a tube of coiled pamphlets from the holster where his gun should have been. He peeled one off, handing it to Remo.
On the cover of the flyer, a rainbow coalition of police officers grinned agreeably. Women, Hispanics, blacks, Asians-all were represented. Missing from the group was a single white face. Beneath the men and women, a colorful banner read, It's Your Police Force: We Love To Help ...And It Helps To Love!
Remo looked up at the officer. "I'm going to retch," he said.
"Would you like me to run down to the store and pick you up some Tums?" he offered helpfully, stuffing his remaining pamphlets back into his empty holster.
Remo ignored the offer, as well as the man's eager expression. "What do you do if you need your gun?" he asked, nodding to the flyer-filled holster.
"Weapons cause concern in poorer neighborhoods," the cop explained. "As part of the new Responsiveness to Community Issues Program, police officers are only allowed to carry firearms into those communities with a per capita income higher than thirty-two thousand dollars per year."
Remo was stunned. "What if you get shot at?" he asked.
The cop shook his head firmly. "Doesn't happen. Crime in lower-income neighborhoods is a media fabrication created to discourage investment in said neighborhoods. Page three."
He pointed to the pamphlet in Remo's hand.
"I don't know what kind of drivel they put in here, but I've been in those neighborhoods plenty of times," Remo said. "Any cop who doesn't go in armed to the teeth isn't likely to be coming home that night."
He spoke from experience. A lifetime ago, before being framed for the murder of a petty drug pusher and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work, Remo had been a simple Newark beat patrolman. As a cop, he had taken his life in his hands every day on the job.
The young officer before him was shaking his head firmly. "You're not a protestor, are you?" he said, the light finally dawning.
"Is my head up my ass?" Remo queried.
The officer thought very carefully, surreptitiously glancing at both body parts in question. "No," he admitted finally, brow furrowed.
"Then I'm not a protestor," Remo concluded. And before the man could speak again, he pointed to the first staircase. "Ron Silver looks pissed," he said abruptly.
A look of horror sprang full-blown on the face of the cop. Knowing that there'd be hell to pay if a Hollywood activist had somehow been left out of the day's mass arrest, the young officer quickly left Remo's side. Car horns honked as he darted back across the street to the police station.
As soon as the man had stepped from the curb, Remo brought a handful of coins from his pocket. The quarters were cool in his palm. Clenching his hand into a fist, he fingered a single coin onto the tip of his thumb.
He was trying to decide who would make the best first target when a limousine roared up the street. It squealed up to the curb near Minister Shittman.
The passenger in the rear didn't even wait for the driver to run around from the front. The door sprang open, and a familiar figure popped into view.
She was six feet tall and dressed in a pair of black jeans tight enough to launch her femur marrow up into her pelvis. Her white lace blouse was chopped at her sternum to expose a perfectly flat stomach.
Remo recognized Cheri, the unimonikered rock singer and Academy Award-winning movie star, the instant she got out of the limo. He'd had the misfortune of seeing part of one of her films a few years earlier. As far as he was concerned, as an actress, she made a great singer. Unfortunately, the opposite was equally true.
In a desperate and futile attempt to remain youthful in perpetuity, Cheri had spent more time in operating rooms in the past two decades than on movie sets or in recording studios. Behind her back, friends joked that she could no longer sit next to an open fire lest she run the risk of puddling. As the years of plastic surgery took their toll, her face began to take on the elongated shape of an Easter Island statue.