"I took out a wall because I couldn't get room service fast enough, Little Father."
"Did you get it?"
"Yes," Remo said.
"Then you are the first person in the Caribbean ever to get something when he wanted it." Chiun added to the parchment another sign for great teaching. He had many of them in his history.
"I want to do something, anything. This rest is making everything worse," Remo said. He looked out onto the beach. Pure white, stretching miles. Turquoise-blue water. White-bellied gulls with dip and pivot, moving on the sun breezes of the morning. "This place is driving me crazy."
"If you need something, we will study the histories," Chiun said.
"I studied them," said Remo, reeling off the facts of the lineage of the House of Sinanju, starting with the first who had to feed the village and moving on through the centuries to the feats of the Great Wang, the lesser Wang, what each had learned and each had taught and what someday Remo would teach.
"You've never learned tributes," Chiun said. "The very lifeblood of the village of Sinanju has never been learned."
"I don't want to learn tributes, Little Father. I'm not in this for the money. I'm an American. I love my country."
"Eeeeeyah," wailed Chiun, a delicate hand clutching his breast. "Words that stab this bosom. Lo, that I should still hear such ignorance. Where, O great Masters before me, have I gone wrong? That after all these years, a professional assassin should still utter such words?"
"You always knew that," Remo said. "I never cared about the money. If Sinanju needed the money, I would supply it. But you've still got gold statues from Alexander the Great in that mudhole in Korea and they're never going to starve. So we don't have to kill for some make-believe-poor villagers to live."
"Betrayal," said Chiun.
"Nothing new," Remo said. He looked out at that stinking white beach again. He and Chiun had been here for days. Maybe three of them.
"I've got to do something," said Remo. He wondered if he could break a beach. But a beach was already broken. Broken rock or coral in small parts. He wondered if he could put a beach back together again, since it was broken to start with.
"Then let us learn tribute. Or, as an American merchant might say, billing and accounts receivable."
"I am so jumpy, even that. Okay. Let's go through tribute. You don't have to use English. You taught me Korean."
"True, but I am beginning to mention in my histories that sometimes the language of English was used in my training of you."
"Only now? Why now, when now I'm learning only in Korean and at first I learned only in English?"
"Get the scroll," said Chiun.
The scroll was in one of the fourteen steamer trunks Chiun always had moved from residence to residence. Only two were needed for his clothing and the rest carried mostly bric-a-brac but also many of Sinanju's scrolls. Chiun had tried putting the scrolls on a computer once but the computer had erased a page with his name on it and Chiun had erased the computer salesman.
Remo found the first scroll of tribute which included geese and goslings, barley and millet and a copper statue of a god now dead.
By the time they were into Cathay kings and gold bullion, Remo's mind was wandering. When they got to a point that Chiun said was the most important of all so far, Remo got up to cook the rice.
"Sit. This is most important." And Chiun told about a prince who was willing to pay, but not publicly.
"Is that the last?" Remo said.
"For today, yes," Chiun said.
"Okay. Go ahead," said Remo. He wondered if gulls thought. And if they thought, what did they think? Did sand think? Was the rice really fresh? Should he wear sandals that day? All these things he thought while Chiun explained that it must never be thought that an assassin was not paid, because then others would try not to pay. This had happened once and it was why this one prince had to be chased throughout the known world.
"One defense after another, until six of his defenses were shown to be useless; from one land to another, thus showing Rome and China and Crete and the Scythians that Sinanju was not to be dishonored."
"So where was he killed?" asked Remo.
"He didn't have to be killed. The purpose was to defend the sacred immutable truth that an assassin must be paid. While you, you don't even care about tributes and then you complain to me that you are going crazy."
"What happened to that prince who didn't pay?" Remo asked again.
"He was shorn of kingdom and safe place to sleep, shorn of glory and honor, sent like a thief into the night, cringing like the lowest vermin."
"Did we miss?" Remo asked. "Did Sinanju miss?"
"Make the rice," said Chiun.
"We missed, didn't we?" asked Remo, his face suddenly sparkling.
"Now, you listen. With happiness on your face. If you could see your evil white grin, such shame you would feel."
"I don't feel shame. I want to hear how the prince was finished. Show me his head. That was a popular one in Baghdad, hanging the head on a wall. I want to see that one."
"He was humiliated," Chiun said.
"We didn't get him, did we? What's this about only one world to hide in and we are in the same world so there is never a place to hide. No one can hide. Even we can't hide. Where did he hide, Little Father?"
"The rice."
"I am enjoying my vacation now," said Remo. "I want to know where he hid. Athens? Rome? Cathay?"
"This," said Chiun, "is not a good vacation."
"Was it the Great Wang who missed or who?"
"Now, you listen," said Chiun and folded his robe and put the scroll away inside it. There was a reason Rerno had never wanted to study tributes to Sinanju. It was obvious. He wasn't ready for it and Chiun was not going to try to transform a pale piece of a pig's ear into a real Master of Sinanju. Some things were beyond even the Great Chiun.
Warner Dabney hated two things. The first was failure and the second was admitting it, and now the two things he hated most he had to endure with a client who had more money than a gang of Arabs.
He saw his commission go down the drain in the handful of bugging devices, some still covered with plaster, that were in his briefcase as he tried to explain to Mr. Woburn why the pair could not be bugged.
Mr. Woburn had the coldest eyes that Dabney had ever seen in a human skull. His movements were strange, strange even for a really rich kid used to being waited on. Slow. Slow hands and face like stone. And because this rich Woburn kid wasn't talking, wasn't saying anything, like some damned king on some damned throne, Warner Dabney of Dabney Security Systems Inc. had to say more than he wanted.
He went through descriptions of bug implants in the wall, beam riders that could hear on a focused beam, and what he finally had to tell Mr. Woburn was:
"I failed. I friggin' failed, Mr. Woburn, and I'm sorry."
"You say there is nothing you picked up from any of their conversations?"
"Not exactly nothing. We got a word."
"What's the word?"
"Rice ... nothing else. It mean something?"
"It means that Koreans frequently eat rice," Reginald Woburn III said.
"I mean these guys picked up everything. Everything. Like it was spring housecleaning. You know. Like you and I could go into a room and see a cigarette in an ashtray and like pick it up, you know. They went into their place and like it was cleaning up, they got rid of all the bugs. I was outside during some of it and they didn't even discuss it. Here I am with my beam listeners and computer chips and I'm using my own ears to eavesdrop and these guys, it's the weirdest thing. They're not talking about the bugs, they're just unpacking, and out go the bugs with an empty box of Kleenex."
"You will be paid in full," said Reggie.