Of course, there were still some mysteries about the stone. He pondered one strange word. It translated roughly as one house, two heads of one master. Two plums on the vine. Was that poetic? Or was the stone more knowing, more accurate than he even dared hope? He looked now on the words for how he would kill and he saw they could also be translated as "need to kill." The stone knew. It knew about him.
He had needed the bonefish guide the evening before more than he had ever needed a woman, or needed water when he was thirsty. The man he had wrestled into the roots looked on helplessly as the water rose. Even now the man's words gave him a delicious little thrill.
"Why you laughin', mon?" Bonefish Charlie had asked.
He was laughing, of course, because it was such a delicious satisfaction, a little appetizer before the plums. Plums. That was what the stone said. Did that mean he would have to kill more than one Korean? If so, who was the other one?
He had already hired the best eavesdropping specialist to implant all the latest devices in the Korean's condo. This too had been written in the stone, thousands of years before these devices were invented. What else could be the meaning of "ears better than ears, eyes better than eyes will be in your power at the beginning of the kill?" They had known that his would be the age for revenge. Reggie would know the every spoken word of the Korean and the white man who was with him. Might plums mean two Koreans or a white and a Korean?
Outside, someone was knocking at the door and he ignored it. He wanted to think about the meaning of the stone's message.
Remo had a wonderful way to detect when he was being ignored. No one was answering. No one answered when he picked up the phone and pushed all the extension buttons. No one answered when he hit the courtesy buzzer that promised instant service. The sign had said: "We're here before your finger leaves the buzzer."
His finger had left the buzzer, then buzzed again. The comfort coordinator wasn't there, the headwaiter wasn't there, the assistant headwaiter wasn't there, maintenance wasn't there, nor was someone called the "fun facilitator."
So Remo used a little trick that always seemed to work for room service and should work at the "full-service condominium-the only way it's not a first-class hotel is that you own it."
He took out part of a wall and hurled a desk through it. The desk landed on a grove of aloe plants in bloom. Papers once securely filed in the desk now fluttered down to the beach. Then he took out a window. It was already loose: Most of the wall surrounding it was already in the aloe bed outside.
Three people in white with red sashes around their waists came running.
"Good. Are you room service?" Remo asked. The three looked nervously at the inside of the office, unobstructed now by a wall or a window.
It was a wonderful view. They didn't see any tools he had used to take it out. He must have done it with his hands, they realized, and in unison, all said: "You rang, sir?"
"Right," said Remo. "I would like some fresh water and some rice."
"We have the Del Ray Bahamas Breakfast which consists of corn muffins, bacon, eggs and toast, with sweet rolls to taste."
"I want fresh water and I want rice," Remo said.
"We can make you rice."
"No, you can't make me rice. You can't make rice. You don't know how to make rice."
"Our rice is delicate, each grain a separate morsel."
"Right," Remo said. "You don't know how to make rice. You've got to be able to clump it. That's how you make rice. Good and clumpy."
They all glanced at the missing wall. They wondered what the new owner would say about the wall, but they knew what they would say about the rice.
"Clumpy is right."
"Like delicious mush," said the headwaiter.
"Right," said Remo. He followed them into the main kitchen, past burning pig meat and rancid sugared rolls, their poisonous sugared raisins rotting in the morning heat. He made sure he got a sealed bag of rice because an open one might pick up the stench. In his days before training, he had longed for a strip of bacon and had been told that someday he would consider it as unpleasant as any other dead body of any other animal.
Now he couldn't remember how he had ever liked it.
He got the rice and said thank you. One of the cooks wanted to prepare it but was told Remo liked it sticky.
"He like it that way?"
"Nobody's asking you to eat it," Remo said to the cook, and to the waiter smiling for instructions, he said, "Get out of the way."
Someone had planted a palm tree the day before that was supposed to give shade to the entrance to his and Chiun's condo. Remo didn't like it there so he crushed its trunk. He didn't like the concrete stairs either so he turned the bottom one to sand and gravel to see how it would look. Inside, Chiun was making brush strokes on a historic parchment for Sinanju.
"Did Smith call?" Remo asked.
"Not today, not yesterday, not the day before."
"Okay," said Remo.
"Isn't this vacation fun?" Chiun said. "There is so much of history I must catch up on."
"You like it," Remo said. "I'm making the rice."
"This is your vacation," Chiun said. "Let them make the rice." He made the brush strokes for Sinanju. The brush itself seemed to make these sacred marks. For several years of the history he was writing, he did not mention that the new master he was training was white. Now he faced the problem of putting that fact into the history without making it look as if he had intentionally withheld it earlier.
He had once toyed with the idea of just never mentioning that Chiun, hopefully one day to be called the Great Chiun, would have passed on the secrets of Sinanju to a white. Nowhere else was the race of each Master of Sinanju mentioned. Was it mentioned that the Great Wang was Oriental? Or that he was Korean or from Sinanju? And what of Pak or We or Deyu? Was it mentioned that these Masters were all from Sinanju in Korea?
Therefore, would Chiun be to blame for not mentioning that Remo was not from the Orient or Korea or Sinanju? Chiun asked himself this question forthrightly. Unfortunately, he was interrupted before he had a chance to tell himself forthrightly that he could not be blamed for anything.
"Little Father," said Remo. "I am angry and I don't know what I am angry about. I knock down walls for no reason. I want to do something but I don't know what I want to do. I feel I am losing something."
Chiun thought silently for a moment.
"Little Father, I'm going insane. I'm losing myself."
Chiun nodded slowly. The answer was clear.
While he would understand it as natural for him and blameless of him not to mention that Remo was white, what would Remo do when he wrote the history of his Masterhood? Would Remo tell that he was white, thus indicating that for years, the Great Chiun had lied? Would Chiun then cease to be the Great Chiun? These things had to be considered.
"So what do you say?" asked Remo.
"About what," said Chiun.
"Am I going crazy?"
"No," said Chiun. "I trained you."
Chiun pressed in a few more brush strokes. Perhaps there might be hints of Remo's whiteness, then a feeling of how Remo became Sinanju and then Korean and, of course, from the village. It could appear that Chiun had found under that ugly white exterior a true Korean, proud and noble.
It could appear that way, but would Remo let it be? He knew Remo. He never felt any shame in his being white. He would never hide it.
"Chiun, I feel strange almost all the time, as if things are out of order in me. Is it my training? Did you ever go through this?"
Chiun put down the brush. "Everything is a cycle. Some things happen so quickly that people do not see them, and others happen so slowly that people do not see them. But when you are Sinanju, you are aware of cycles. You are aware that slow and fast are both invisible. You are aware of anger in yourself that others, in their sloth and their meat-eating and their crude breathing, do not see."