An Old Fashioned War td-68

by Warren Murphy

Remo shrugged.

  "Poo's father says there will never be a son." Remo shrugged.

  "Poo's father has been nice enough to keep this horrible fact from the village. The fact is, Remo, you have let us all down."

  Remo rustled the scroll.

  "What am I looking for?" he asked.

  "I am looking for a grandson."

  "And I'm looking for Mr. Arieson. The next time I see him I want to be able to defeat him. Or is this your way of just tricking me into reading the scrolls?"

  "What you want is all there. Find the treasure of Sinanju and we will be able to handle Mr. Arieson."

  "Now I know you're pulling my leg. You've been trying to get that treasure back for years."

  "Without it, you will never be able to handle Mr. Arieson."

  "I don't want to handle him. I want to defeat him."

  "Only the dead have seen the last of him," said Chiun.

  "Now what does that mean?" asked Remo.

  "Why have you not treated Poo properly?" asked Chiun.

  "I'll get to it. I'll get to it. I'm good for it. What about this nonsense with the Greeks, and the servant to the Tyrant of Thebes?"

  "Read it," said Chiun.

  "I've read it. I've read it. The tribute goes on for pages."

  "And?"

  "And I don't understand."

  "Look around you at the empty rooms. If they were not empty you would understand."

  "If they were not empty this whole place would be gathering dust now with lots of junk."

  "It is that junk we need now."

  "I don't need it at all," said Remo.

  "You need something," said Chiun. "That precious blossom awaits untouched, losing the blush of her youth while you refuse your duty to house and home, and shame us before my good friend Baya, a good and decent man who has done nothing to us but give us his treasure of a daughter."

  "I'll do it. I'll do what I have to, but I don't have to do it right away. It would help if I didn't get a runaround with these scrolls, and got some clear answers."

  "You got clear answers. You were just too dim to see them," said Chiun. "There's nothing we can do about Mr. Arieson without the treasures anyhow. So enjoy the delights Poo has to offer."

  "I'm not giving up," said Remo, and returned to the room Chiun had set aside for him. It was not a room for living, but one of the treasure rooms. The scrolls had been neatly laid out on a pale square piece of flooring. Something had sat on it for centuries, and the wood had become indented even though it was rare and valuable African mahogany, one of the hardest woods known to man.

  The placement of the scrolls on this indentation in the floor obviously was some kind of message. But how could a place be a message? Remo rubbed his hand along the indentation in the wood. He could feel the crushed cells ever so slowly expand back from their compression, and he felt something else on his fingerpads. Dust. There was dust here in the four-foot-by-four-foot indentation.

  He captured the particles in the oils of the ridges of his finger and held the dust up to the light. It was pale white. A fine white powder. No. Not powder. Marble. Something made of marble had been where the scrolls of Sinanju had been set for him.

  He read the account again. It was a fairly typical service of Sinanju. A great and renowned philosopher had joined with a hero to demand an end to corruption and oppression in Thebes. The people were behind them, because the tyrant, like all basically weak people, was afraid to let anyone speak. The people had wanted to be more democratic, like Athens. They had even sent an emissary to Athens to learn their system of democracy.

  No one in Thebes was on the side of the tyrant. He could not speak well, think well, or govern well, and to boot he was a coward in battle, something that offended the Greek idea of heroism. However, he did have one thing. Knowledge of the Masters of Sinanju and a willingness to pay well.

  Naturally he won, and the philosopher and hero were found dead in a ravine outside the city one morning. It was said that they had dueled and the hero had desecrated the philosopher's body in a despicable way before attempting to return to Thebes, when he fell and cracked his head against a rock. Outraged, the people swarmed into the street, abandoning their loyalty to the two who were no better than murderers. Naturally it was a Sinanju service that had made the deaths seem like that.

  Remo read the story again. It was followed by the usual list of tributes, and the form was the same as the rest of the House of Sinanju histories. What was strange about this story was that it was not an introduction of a new technique. The sacrilege murder had occurred first many centuries before, in the East. It was just an adaptation. But there was not even a hint of Mr. Arieson or anyone operating like him.

  An old service not even new in 500 B.C., and an indentation from something marble on the floor of an empty treasure house in Sinanju.

  So what?

  So there was someone out there Remo couldn't get a handle on, and this wasn't telling him how. "Master Remo. Master Remo. It's for you," came the voice. It was a young boy who had run up from the village. "The telephone in the baker's house has rung for you. Gracious Chiun has given me a piece of gold to run up here and ask you down to the house."

  "He's there now?" asked Remo.

  "Yes, he left the great House of Sinanju and with the baker went to see your beloved wife, Poo. They are all there with the mother. They are waiting for you, too," said the boy.

  "Anyway, I can take the phone call up here."

  "Master Chiun had it transferred to the baker's house so you would not be disturbed on your wedding night. No one would dare change an order from the Great Chiun."

  "All right," said Remo. "I'll take it."

  The call was a relay from Smith. He was all but sure Arieson was at work again in Northern Ireland. Had Remo found anything that could stop him yet?

  "No," said Remo, staring at the tear-soaked moon face of Poo, the daggers of her mother's eyes, the distaste of her father, and Chiun totally, siding with that family.

  "Can you talk now?"

  "No," said Remo.

  "I think the man who calls himself Arieson is behind the kidnapping of the Prime Minister of England."

  "Arieson? Where in England?"

  "In Bath, obviously," said Chiun.

  "Ask him how he knows it's in Bath," said Smith.

  "If you take the scroll of the years of the horse, pig, and dragon, roughly your years for A.D. 112, you will not only find out why Arieson is in Bath but you will find out where in Bath."

  "He's kidnapped the Prime Minister there, Little Father."

  "And they can't find her, is that correct?"

  "Yes. That's what they're saying. They don't know how they could have lost her," said Remo, repeating what Smith was telling him.

  "They can't find her because they don't know where to look," said Chiun. "Take the scrolls with you. You'll find her. But you won't be able to stop Mr. Arieson, so don't even bother. This is where you should be bothering, with this poor, beautiful, lovely creature who wants only for you to deliver what you vowed here in your ceremony."

  "I'll be right over to England, Smitty," said Rema. Poo, he found out, had just learned another word. It was "Harrods."

  Chapter 8

  Remo parked Poo in the Britannia Hotel in a suite of rooms overlooking one of the many little parks in London.

  Before he left, she asked:

  "Will you deflower me tonight?"

  "If you got a petunia, I'll take it from you. But if you mean copulation, no. Not tonight."

  "Why not tonight? I'm alone again on my honeymoon."

  "Tonight is not the right night."

  "There will never be a right night," said Poo. Somehow she had discovered, with the aid only of a phone book in a language she did not understand, that seamstresses would come up to one's hotel room and make dresses for one while one waited.

  She could also order jewelers that way, too. And, of course, food. She was going to try that great English delicacy of b
angers and mash.

  If Poo had to be left alone again this honeymoon night, she did not know what she would tell her mother.

  "Five thousand pounds," said Remo.

  "I should tell my mother five thousand pounds?"

  "No, you get five thousand pounds not to tell your mother a thing about what goes on and what does not go on in our marriage."

  "The first night that would be a good sum. It is not unusual for couples not to consummate the first night. It does happen. But we are into many, many nights now. Now we are beginning a disgrace." Poo's moon face quivered. A tear came down one eye. She covered her face in shame.

  "How much?"

  The hands lowered. "We have to be talking ten thousand pounds at least. And what is the tribute you're getting for this service?"

  "I don't get the tribute. It all goes to Sinanju."

  "It all goes to Chiun."

  "It goes to the House of Sinanju. I am a Master of Sinanju. It goes to Chiun and me, I guess."

  "I am married to a Master of Sinanju who does not even know whether he gets tribute or not. Is that what I married?"

  "Divorce is possible. You can have that for a solution, Poo," said Remo, reaching the door.

  "Divorce is impossible in the Sinanju ceremony. No Sinanju Master has ever gotten divorced. It isn't done. It is," said Poo, pausing before that inviolate supreme word of Sinanju, "tradition."

  "There must have been one Master who got divorced. I'm sure there was," said Remo, feeling the outer edges of panic kiss his nervous system.

  "You should know," cooed Poo. "You had to read all the scrolls to become a Master. If you can find a divorce in the history of Sinanju, let me know. Until then, think about how you want to divide the tribute with Chiun. It is my impression you do most of the work in the current service to America."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Everyone in Sinanju knows what goes on in the House of Sinanju. It's a major topic of discussion. Am I right? Do you do most of the work?"

  "We never figured out who did what, Poo. It works. There is nothing better than something that works. So long."

  "But for whom does it work?" asked Poo as Remo shut the door behind him. He had to remind himself this girl was only twenty years old. What would she be like at twenty-one? What would she be like at forty, if he ever wanted to live that long?

  No divorce, he thought. Because I am a Master of Sinanju, I am married to this woman forever. And yet he was sure there had to be a divorce somewhere in four thousand years. It was probably covered up. That's how those things worked.

  But he had been poring over the scrolls more now than ever before, and every time a Sinanju Master was married, it was duly recorded. And every time a Sinanju wife died it was duly recorded, as was the departure of a Master. No Master ever recorded a separation. Every wife died married to a Sinanju Master, from the Great Wang to the Lesser Gi. Even Chiun's wife had died.

  Poo was Remo's forever. And vice versa.

  Remo arrived in Bath, in the southwest part of England, and ran into more English plainclothesmen than attended a royal wedding. It was a strange sight to see cars backed up at roadblocks for miles. Men with walkie-talkies occupied virtually every building.

  Remo was spotted as someone who didn't belong there as soon as he entered Avon county, home of the town of Bath.

  He brought with him only a bamboo satchel containing a Sinanju parchment.

  A bobby stepped in and courteously asked him what he was doing in these parts, and what was in the satchel.

  "Something to read," said Remo. The bobby examined Remo's passport.

  "You say you're visiting the mineral baths. May I ask why now?"

  "Keeps me young."

  "You're about twenty-eight, aren't you?"

  "Would you believe you're off by at least twenty years?"

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. I'm eight," said Remo.

  The bobby was not amused. Plainclothesmen desperatly looking for something, anything, closed in on Remo. Remo had stepped out of his taxi at the roadblock and the driver was now indicating he never saw Remo before, did not know the man, and Remo was just another fare who hadn't paid yet.

  "This isn't a laughing matter, Mr. Williams. Our prime minister has been kidnapped in this area, and we regret that certain precautions must be taken. These precautions may limit your freedom."

  "Fine, just tell me where not to go and I won't go."

  "I'm afraid, Mr. Williams, we cannot let you in this area."

  "And I'm afraid, old boy, I'm just going to have to go in."

  "Then I will keep your passport."

  "Frame it if you will," said Remo.

  "We're going to have to stop you physically."

  " 'Fraid I can't let you," said Remo, and whistling, walked past the bobby in the high blue hat. Apologizing, several plainclothesmen warned they would have to stop Mr. Williams. Apologizing, Remo said he couldn't let them do that.

  He whipped out the scroll and tried to get his bearings. From the center of the little resort city, he knew where he should go to look. But he had to get to the baths themselves first.

  Several arms reached out for him, and he let his body respond to the air pressure ahead of the hands so he could dodge the hands while thinking about something else. It was more an absentminded gesture than a calculated move, letting the body itself do the dodging as he walked down the road reading the scroll of Master Wa, who had been hired by Emperor Claudius of Rome to make sure a plot against him did not develop within the legions occupying Roman Britain.

  It was always a threat, Remo had learned from the scrolls, that some praetor would march his legions back from the frontiers and take over Rome. Caesar had done it. Others tried to do it, and this period of turmoil within the Western world, of plots and counterplots revolving around a corrupt and debauched center of authority, had proved to be what would be later called "one of the golden ages of Sinanju."

  For as Master Wa wrote:

  "No emperor slept nor senator spoke without fear of death in the night from the hand of an assassin. Sinanju, naturally, was the most in demand."

  Remo felt an officer whiz by him as his body curved out of the way of the officer's lunge. The officer went forward on the dark country road, skinning his hands painfully.

  Chiun had selected this scroll. He knew Mr. Arieson would be in Bath. Why?

  Was Mr. Arieson seeking out Remo? And if so, why? Obviously Arieson and the House of Sinanju went way back. But how?

  And what were the mysterious techniques Mr. Arieson used to avoid blows? Two more British policemen swung out at thin air. Did Mr. Arieson use techniques like Remo's, only more advanced?

  No. Mr. Arieson would have been dodging the air currents Remo had created back at Little Big Horn if that were the case. And what about the helmet and chest protector the Israeli archaeologist said were perfectly new, punctured using a technique more than two thousand years old?

  Remo hadn't even seen the helmet and chest protector. But there they were when his blows landed on metal aboard the USS Polk.

  "Stop that man. Stop him," came a voice from behind.

  "We're trying. He's made of air," answered one of the policemen.

  "Then bloody well follow him," came the voice. Remo nodded. That would be all right. They could follow him right up until he decided they might be in the way. And so Remo walked into the old Roman town of Bath, reading his scroll, certain now that Arieson was in some way taunting him. Arieson was trying to tell him something by coming to a city where Sinanju had worked. After all, hadn't Arieson phoned him, calling him "boyo"?

  The answer was here in a part of England that had once belonged to Rome.

  The town of Bath was pleasant, with old Tudor dwellings and modern dwellings, and what was left of Rome had been reconstructed in the mineralwater baths themselves. Bacteria had formed down at the base of the springs in the old Roman piping, which had to be removed. In the process, many coins and artifacts were
found.

  The baths were housed in a building, and in that building Remo went to a section where he was supposed to get dressed, and laid out the scroll in full. The Praetor Maximus Granicus had set up his headquarters here because he had aching bones. He had wanted to be near the springs as long as possible, until he and his legions left the Britannic shores for Gaul and Rome.

  Granicus, like most ambitious men, loved luxury, and along the military road two stadia north, he built himself a palace which was supposed to be impenetrable to entry by anyone but friends.

  "This Granicus domicile," the scroll went on, "had walls collapsing within walls, so that portholes were really traps. Secret entrances beneath the domicile were really mazes, and the beauty of this defensive structure was that the only way to enter it was to know how it worked.

  "While I as a Master would love to record a new defense overcome by me, Wa, I regret that it was not a challenge at all, although later I would tell the Divine Claudius how dangerous it was, describing the gigantic trap as the worst obstacle of all. This, of course, was in keeping with the rule of the Great Wang, that no assassination should ever be made to look easy. A client does not think you are more wonderful because the work was easy, rather he thinks you deserve less.

  "The great Granicus' defensive network was really only a weak imitation of Pharaoh Ka's lower cataract home, which was a brilliant interpretation of early Su-dynasty imperial residences. It was penetrated easily by an open confrontation in the main, not the auxiliary entrances, which could prove problematic. Granicus was completed with a simple death during sleep, a smothering with his own pillow. His legions were given to a more loyal Claudian servant, and the civil war was averted. Tribute: pearls, three saludia in weight, eighteen in number; gold in the sum of forty-two Hibernian pharongs; twelve minor rubies, seven obols apiece; and a lengthy laudation from Claudius with an offer of games in the honor of Sinanju, offer declined."

  Remo folded up the scroll. Since there was only one place mentioned in the scrolls Chiun had given him, and since Chiun knew before being told that the area where the Prime Minister had disappeared had to be Bath, therefore Remo concluded the place of action had to be the old defensive home of Granicus Maximus, two stadia north on the military road.