"Get the uppity nigger. Get the high-pants nigger. Get the uppity nigger," the woman yelled again. She had a quart bottle of gin in one hand and a baseball bat in the other.
If the crowd had not been black, Remo would have sworn it was made up of the Ku Klux Klan. Remo did not understand the hate. But he knew someone was struggling for what he had built. And that was worth protecting.
Remo moved, edging through bodies like a bowling ball through pins, glancing his own force against the stationary mass of those in front. The movement itself was like an unbroken, uninterrupted run and there was a shotgun pointing at his belly, and the man in front of the iron gate was black, and his finger was squeezing on the trigger as Remo flipped up the barrel and the blast went off above his head.
The mob hushed for a moment. Someone up front tried to run away. But when they saw the shot had been fired harmlessly and that the man wasn't going to kill, they charged again.
But the black man turned the barrel around and using the stock of the gun like the end of a club swung at Remo and then the crowd.
Remo avoided the wild slow arch of the gun butt, then worked the edge of the crowd toward the middle, until the man realized Remo was on his side. Then Remo took the center. In a few moments, he
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had a small barrier made of groaning people in front of the fenced factory front.
The crowd stopped pressing forward. They called to others passing by to get the white man they had trapped there. But there was too much fun out in the streets, where the only credit card you needed was a hammer and friends to help you tear away any protection in front of anything. Besides, this white man had a way of hurting people, so they turned and ran.
Remo stayed the night with the man, who had come from Jackson, Mississippi, as a little boy, whose father had worked as a janitor in a large office. The man had gotten a job in the post office and his wife worked and his two sons worked and they had all put their money into this small meat plant. Remo and the man stood out front and watched other shops go.
"Ah guess that's why I stayed here out 'n front wif a gun," the man said. "Mah sons are off buyin' direck from some farms in Jersey and ah didn't wan' to face them sayin' everything is gone. Death'd be easier than seein' this here go. It's our lives. That why I stayed. Why did you help?"
"Because I'm lucky," Remo said.
"Ah don' unnerstand."
This is a good thing. This is a very good thing I do here tonight. I haven't done a good thing in a long while. It feels good. I'm lucky."
"That's pretty dangerous do-goodin'," said the man. "Ah almost shot you and ah almost banged you upside the haid with my shotgun, and if ah didn't get you, them mobs would. They's dangerous."
"Nah," said Remo. "They're garbage." He waved at the running crowds, laughing and screaming, dropping looted dresses from overladen arms.
"Even garbage can kill. You can get smothered by
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garbage. And you move slow, too. Ah never saw no one fight like that."
"No reason you should have," Remo said.
"What that fightin called?"
"It's a long story," Remo said.
"It ain' like karate. And it ain' like tae kwan do. Mah sons taught me that, for when I alone in the factory. You somethin' like that, but it ain' the same."
"I know," Remo said. "It only looks slow but it's really faster, what I do."
"It like a dance, but you very still about it."
"That's a good description. It is a dance, in a way. Your partner is your target. It's like you will do whatever you have to do and your partner is dead from the beginning. He sort of asks you to kill him and helps you do it. It's the unity of things." Remo was delighted at his own explanation, but the man looked puzzled and Remo knew he could never tell him what Sinanju was.
How do you explain to the whole world that it was, from its very first breaths, breathing wrong and living wrong? How did you explain that there was another way to live? And how did you explain to someone that you had been living that way and after more than ten years of it, you had decided it wasn't enough? There was more to life than breathing right and moving right.
When the sun came up red and glinted on the broken glass in the streets, when the police finally decided the streets were safe enough to return to duty, Remo left the man and never told him his name.
Without electricity, New York City was dead. Shows did not open and the arteries of the city's work force, the subway system, was a corpse of stopped trains waiting for the current of Me.
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It was hot and it felt like New York City had gone away for the day. Even Central Park was empty. Remo dawdled by the pond and when he got back to the Plaza Hotel it was noon. But he did not enter. He was stopped outside by a voice.
"Where have you been?" came the high squeaky voice.
"Nowhere," said Remo. "You are late."
"How can I be late? I never said when I'd be back at the hotel."
"Woe be to the fool that would depend on you," said Chiun, Master of Sinanju, folding his long fingernails contemptuously into his golden morning kimono. "Woe be unto the fool that has given you the wisdom of Sinanju and, in return for this supreme knowledge, gets white lip. Thank you, no thank you, for nothing." "I was thinking, Little Father," said Remo. "Why bother to explain to a fool?" said Chiun. His skin was parchment yellow and his wisps of white beard and tufts of thin white hair around the borders of his skull quivered with the anger that was in him.
The skin was wrinkled and the lips were tight He avoided looking at Remo. One might think this was a frail thin old man, but if one should test it out too thoroughly upon this Master of Sinanju, he would do no more testing on anyone ever.
"Okay, if you're not interested," Remo said. "I am interested. I am interested in how one can pour a lifetime into an ingrate who does not even say where he goes or what he does or why he does it. I am interested in why a venerable, disciplined, wise, kind leader of his community would squander the treasure of wisdom that is Sinanju on someone who blows about like a dried leaf."
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"All right. I was out last night because I had to think "
"Quiet. We don't have time. We are to go on a plane to Washington. We are now free of our bonds and we can work for a real emperor. You have never known this. It is far better than Smith, who I never understood. An insane emperor is like a wound to his personal assassin. We have been working with wounds, Remo. Now we are off."
With a flutter of his long fingernails, Chiun waved at bellboys. Fourteen ornately lacquered trunks stood on the white steps of the Plaza, partially blocking one of the entrances. Remo wondered how Chiun had gotten the bellboys to carry the heavy trunks down fourteen flights of stairs. When he saw one burly porter wince in fear as he passed Chiun, carrying a trunk to a cab, Remo knew. Chiun had that wonderful way of convincing people to help a poor little old man. It was called a death threat.
Two cabs were needed to go to the airport.
"What's going on?" Remo asked. He knew that Chiun never quite understood the organization or Dr. Harold Smith, who ran it. To Chiun, it did not make sense to have an assassin and then keep it secret. He had told Remo, if you make known your ability to kill your enemies, you will find yourself with very few enemies. But Smith did not listen.
And even worse, Smith never used Remo and Chiun "effectively," according to Chiun. "Effectively" meant for Smith to ask Chiun to remove the current President so Smith could declare himself emperor. Or king.
And of course, at the same time he would proclaim the House of Sinanju official assassins to the nation and the Presidency. Chiun had it all worked out. He
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had seen the recent American inauguration ceremony on television. Smith, who ran CURE and would under Chiun's plan run the country, would walk five paces ahead of Chiun in the parade and Chiun would wear his red kimono with the gold-threaded tana leaves. When Chiun told Smith how it would be, Smith said: