Oskar Gruenwald who had not been called Oskar Gruenwald since one wintery day in 1945 when he took the uniform from a dead Wehrmacht sergeant and surrendered to a British patrol outside Antwerp, locked the door of his shop so no one else could enter. Then he spoke to the young girl.
“Miss. Let me explain.”
“We don’t have time for explanations,” said Joan Hacker. “And don’t try anything funny. If anything happens to me, your wife and family will get it.”
“Miss,” said Gruenwald, lowering his massive frame into a chair beside the girl. “You do not look like a cruel person. You have never killed anyone, have you?”
“The revolution hasn’t required me to do that yet, but don’t think I’d cop out.”
“Miss, I have seen bodies stacked like mountains. Mothers with children, frozen together in ditches. I have walked on ground that oozed blood because of so many buried alive underneath. It is a horrible insane thing, this killing, and to think that you take it so lightly as a form of social medicine is beyond the anguished ken of all mankind. Please listen to me. You have discovered my secret. So be it. But do not put blood on your hands. It is a terrible thing, this killing.”
“You’re irrelevant,” said Joan Hacker. “We not only have your secret identity which the West German government would be very interested in, but we know that your son and grandchildren are right now in Buenos Aires, and they would look very unattractive after a bomb went off in their living room. On the other hand, if you do this thing for the revolution, no one will be the wiser.”
“How can I get through to you? I will not kill again,” said Gruenwald, knowing, even as he said it, that once again he had been cozened into murder. The first time, he did not know what he was doing. He was seventeen and his country had a leader who promised a new prosperity and pride. There were bands and marching and songs and Oskar went to war with the Waffen SS. Indeed, he did look good in his uniform. He was thin and blond and even of teeth. Before his twentieth birthday, he was an old man and a murderer. Oskar ordered people to dig ditches and then filled the ditches with the diggers. Oskar burned churches with the parishioners still inside. And the strange thing happened to him that happens to almost every person who, face to face, commits mass murder. He stopped caring about his own life and started taking incredible chances. He rose to captain and then was assigned to a special assassination squad, this old young man. Years later, he realized that people who kill wantonly seek their own death as well, and this is mistakenly called courage. Years later, when he had managed to build a new life and could see the massive horror at a distance, he knew he would never harm another person again. It was very hard learning to forgive yourself, but if you worked with children and donated much time to those who needed your time, bit by bit you could become human again and learn to build and love and care. And those were precious things.
Throughout the years, there was one reassurance. The insanity of the Second World War would never be repeated, the mass murder for the sake of extermination would never be again. And then, to his horror, Oskar Gruenwald saw the insanity beginning again, like a dormant disease that suddenly sprouts a new boil.
People, many of them well-educated, forgot World War II. Playing little mind games with themselves, they decided that a massive military bombing which killed a thousand people in ten days was worse than a war which killed more than fifty million people. And if it suited their purpose to support a charge of racism, then everyone forgot the hundred thousand Germans killed in one raid on Dresden, and said America would not have bombed a European country as it bombed Vietnam.
It was as if the world’s greatest holocaust was forgotten because it was a quarter of a century old, and now the new Nazis were on the march and they called their master race “the liberated” and their new world war was “the revolution.” Their stupidity was enough to make grown men cry.
“Little girl,” said Oskar Gruenwald to the pert coed who had threatened the lives of his offspring. “You think you are doing good. You think you will make things better by killing. But I tell you from experience, the only thing you will do is kill. I too thought I was improving the world and all I did was kill.”
“But you didn’t have consciousness raising,” said Joan Hackett, sure of her enlightenment.
“We did, but they were called rallies,” said Oskar Gruenwald, now Henry Pfeiffer. “The minute you kill other than to save your own life, the minute you kill for some new social order, then you have nothing but insanity.”
“I can’t reason with you,” said Joan Hacker, very annoyed and fervently wishing some of her friends were here to help her argue. “Are you going to do what we want or are you going to be exposed and watch your offspring get offed?”
“Offed is killed, is it not?” asked the aging Gruenwald.
“Yes. Like in ‘off the pigs,’” said Joan Hacker.
Oskar Gruenwald lowered his head. his past was coming home again.
“All right, Gauleiter,” he said, referring to an old Nazi rank for political officers. “I will do as you say.”
“What’s a Gauleiter?” asked Joan Hacker, and Oskar Gruenwald cried and laughed at the same time
CHAPTER EIGHT
REMO WAS STUNNED. HE WAS furious. He looked at the small piece of shaved rock and then back at Chiun. What angered him was Chiun’s self-assured conviction that Remo should understand immediately why they must flee and Chiun’s refusal to explain further.
China turned slowly, as if reading Remo’s thoughts, and said, “I am a teacher, not a nursemaid. You have eyes but you see not. You have a mind but you think not. You see the evidence and you stand there like a blubbering child, demanding to know why we must flee. And yet I tell you, you know.”
“And I tell you I don’t know.”
“Hit the rock,” said Chiun. “Take a piece off.”
Remo cracked down flathanded and sheared a chunk to the ground. Chiun nodded to the shaved section, its lines similar to the section which had so astounded him in the first place.
“All right,” said Chiun, as though granting Remo his most childish indulgence. “Now you know.”
“Now I don’t know,” said Remo.
Chiun turned and walked down the path, muttering in Korean. Remo caught a few words, basically dealing with the inability of anyone to transform mud into diamonds. Remo followed Chiun.
“I’m not leaving. That’s it, Little Father.”
“Yes, I know. You love America. America has been so good to you. It taught you the secrets of Sinanju; it devoted its best years raising you to a level that no white man has every achieved before. A mere handful of all men in history were as skillful as you are and you love America, not the teacher who made you so. So be it. I am not hurt. I am enlightened.”
“It is not a question of loving either you or my country, Little Father. You both have my loyalty.”
“That is something one tells his concubine and wife, not the Master of Sinanju.”
Remo started to explain when Chiun’s bony hand raised.
“Are you beginning to forget everything?” asked Chiun and then Remo noticed it, down the path, that very special stillness he could normally sense in his blood.
The stillness was behind a bush, perhaps fifty yards away. Chiun made a birdlike motion indicating he would stand where he was while Remo was to circle round whatever was creating the stillness in the wet spring fields of the Finger Lakes region.
Remo knew Chiun would pretend to walk forward and not move; pretend to cut into the bush and not move; seem to do what he was not doing and thus totally absorb the interest of whoever was behind the bush.
Remo moved easily off the path, as quietly as a morning sigh, across the rocks, body weighting only against that which did not snap or creak or rustle. He did not feel at home in the forest because like the true assassin, his home was the city where the targets invariably lived. Yet he could use this shrub—undergrowth and trees and soggy loamy soil—because the fore
st, too, was his tool.
Remo saw the flash of a white shirt behind leafy green and kept moving at an angle. He saw the top of a reddish bald head and then a beefy neck. A rifle stock pressed into an overlapping red cheek and the barrel went forward, aimed at a kimono fifty yards away. Remo moved up to the man. The man’s knee sunk into the wet spring soil. He was in kneeling position. An adequate enough way to fire a rifle and an even better way to lose a finger.
Oskar Gruenwald was not thinking about his fingers as he tried to sight on the kimono. He was wondering why he was having such a difficult time. He could not have forgotten what he was taught, not even after a quarter of a century. He could not have forgotten what was drilled into him and drilled into him and drilled into him. If you have two men, you pick the one behind the first, bang, squeeze off the next two shots against the leader, and then the fourth shot to finish the man you hit first. That was how he had been trained. His targets were the favorites of the Waffen S.S. Lithuanians or Ukrainians. It didn’t matter. Oskar’s instructor took him to the outskirts of a small village and told him to pick off men going to market. That was the first day of instruction. Oskar mistakenly shot the first, and the second had time to get away. It was then his instructor said:
“You see. What you did wrong was not only give someone time to get away, but you committed the cardinal sin of a sniper ambush. You stopped to think. You must never stop to think, but must have your shots planned in advance. That way all you have to do is aim.”
It had worked well. It worked in Russia, then the Ukraine, then Poland, and then back to the borders of Germany. It worked his last day in Waffen S.S. uniform before he changed to the uniform of the regular Army and took a new name, which had lasted until that morning in his shop.
But now it was not working. There were his two targets, the Oriental in back and the American in front. All right, pop one off at the Oriental. But he was beginning to move off the path. He was retreating. No. He was advancing. What the hell was that little yellow man doing? Now there was no more American. Where was the American? He wasn’t on the path. To hell with it. Get the Oriental and then hunt the American. The old, cold feeling of competence returned to Oskar Gruenwald. The mechanical competence of the professional killer.
He was just squeezing off a shot at the center of the kimono, when he realized this would be impossible to do. One needed a trigger finger for that sort of thing and Oskar Gruenwald now had only a bloody stump. No pain. Just no finger.
“Hi there, fella,” Remo said. “I’d shake but you can’t. This yours?” he said and offered the shocked sniper his finger back.
“Aaaargh,” said former S.S. Captain Oskar Gruenwald, suddenly feeling the delayed pain where his finger used to join his hand.
“All right, if you don’t want me to dismember you piece by piece, tell me who sent you,” said Remo.
The sniper looked at his right index finger—in his left palm.
“C’mon,” Remo said. “I don’t have all day.”
“A girl. She was a foolish girl. Do not blame her.”
“Her name?”
“There has been enough death and you will kill her, I know.”
“Her name?” said Remo, and it was not really a question.
Gruenwald lunged for the rifle with his left hand, but then his left hand no longer worked. He did not even see the American move, the stroke was so swift.
“The girl?”
“Her name was Joan Hacker,” said Oskar Gruenwald. “But please don’t kill her.”
“I don’t kill if I don’t have to,” said Remo.
“When one kills that becomes all he does.”
“It’s only you amateurs who are menaces,” said Remo.
Oskar Gruenwald snarled back. “I was not an amateur, sir. Waffen S.S. Captain.”
“And I’m sure you were a very good Waffen whatever-it-is,” said Remo consolingly, putting him away with a head shot.
Chiun glided past Remo with a casual glance at the fat corpse sinking into the damp soil. The head stroke must have been, perfect, thought Remo, or there would have been comment.
“First fat. Then thin,” said Chiun. “Then the dead animals and then all my work for nothing, because of your impatience.”
“Now I understand,” said Remo sarcastically. “First fat, then thin, then the dead animals, and then all your work for nothing. Why didn’t you say so instead of talking in riddles?”
“Even the morning sun is a riddle to a fool,” said Chiun. “Now comes thin.”
“Of course, thin,” said Remo. “What else comes after fat? I mean I could have told you that even before my training. Now thin.”
CHAPTER NINE
“YOU DON'T THINK I'M TOO thin?” said Rodney Pintwhistle.
Joan Hacker did not think Rodney was too thin at all. She thought he was esthetic. Joan didn’t go for all those muscles bulging around. She went for a man who was lean and lithe.
“Really?” said Rodney Pintwhistle, a blush coming up behind a face of acne. He patted his almost empty sweater. “I mean, you really don’t think I’m too thin?”
“I’ll show you how thin I think you are,” said Joan Hacker. “Come on up to my room and I’ll show you.”
Rodney Pintwhistle, whose main sexual activity was stroking himself while imagining coeds like Joan Hacker inviting him up to her room, coughed up his strawberry milkshake onto the Formica table top. People in the student union looked around. A waiter patted Rodney on the back.
“C’mon, Rodney, let’s get out of here,” said Joan, flaunting her full and bouncing breasts as she rose.
“Maybe I’d better have another milkshake.”
“Maybe you’d better come with me,” said Joan, grabbing him by the wrist. She jerked. Rodney came.
On the path to the dormitory, Rodney suggested that they get to know each other better.
“This is the best way,” said Joan, tugging his wrist.
Maybe they should stop and talk more?
“Talking is better after,” said Joan.
Rodney suddenly remembered he had a class.
“Cut it,” said Joan.
Rodney couldn’t. You see he already had two cuts and if he got a third cut, he might get below a B and then he wouldn’t make the dean’s list.
“You never made dean’s list, Rodney,” she said.
But this year Rodney had a chance. Really he did. He was taking easier courses and this year he really had a chance and if there was one thing he really wanted to do more than anything else in college, it was to make dean’s list one year, at least one year. That’s what he really wanted to do.
“You’re full of crap, Rodney,” said Joan Hacker, for if there was anything that raised her anger, it was weakness in someone else. It brought out the tiger in her, that tiger which seemed to disappear when someone else assumed command.
She tugged Rodney into the dormitory and then pushed him up the two flights of steps to her floor and then into her room. Her roommate sat on the bed, legs tucked raider her bare bottom, a sweat shirt covering the raised knee tops.
“Out,” said Joan Hacker, in a rare display of authority.
The roommate blinked, and never having seen the tiger in Joan before, dutifully got up, apologized for being there, and left the room. Joan locked the door. Rodney giggled.
“The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat,” said Joan, repeating a phrase she had heard in high school and resented years later as being oppressive and exploitative.
Rodney backed against the window. Joan advanced. Rodney covered his groin. Joan yanked his hand away and stroked. Rodney brushed her hand away. Joan kissed him on his scrawny neck. Rodney said that it tickled.
Joan grabbed his neck and brought his head down forcefully to hers. She invaded his mouth. She manipulated one hand behind his neck and the other in front of his trousers. She manipulated, she worked, and when she had him ready, she eased him to the bed. Ploing. It was all over. She fell on him.
&
nbsp; “You’re magnificent, Rodney,” gasped Joan.
Rodney averred that he hardly did anything at all. He was just a natural, he guessed.
“You must have hundreds of women, Rodney.”
No, not really. Could Joan believe that she was the first woman he had had at Patton College?
“No. I couldn’t believe that. You’re so magnificent But you don’t love me.”
Rodney felt no passionate warmth toward this attractive coed who had transformed his fantasies into reality, but having been accused of not loving her, his reaction was instinctive and immediate.
“That’s not true. I love you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I really do. I think you’re…you’re swell,” said Rodney, and this was not like his fantasies at all.
“If you loved me, you’d protect me.”
“I’ll protect you,” said Rodney.
“Now, you won’t. You’re just using me for my body. You’re exploiting me.”
“I’m not exploiting you. I’ll protect you.”
“Really, Rodney? Do you promise? You’re not just stringing me along, are you?”
Rodney was not stringing her along and his promise was his bond. Thus it was that Rodney Pintwhistle, who was excused from gym class because of asthma, chronic bronchitis, anemia and what one gym instructor called “an awesome lack of coordination,” found himself that afternoon standing before a hotel room with a knife in his hands, threatening America’s primary secret enforcer and the greatest assassin ever to walk the face of the earth, the Master of Sinanju.
Rodney took on the Oriental first because he looked easier.
“What are you looking at?” yelled Rodney, waving the knife at the Oriental in the flowing kimono.
“My hotel room,” said the Oriental, “Please be so kind as to let me pass.”
“You’re not passing anywhere, Charlie.”
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