“Where’d that come from?” asked Remo. “Who has left meat to rot?”
“You have, in your last meal. The meat is rotting in your stomach. You eat dead meat.”
“That reminds me. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since last night,” said Remo.
“So you ate,” said Chiun. “And besides you are too fat. You move like a pregnant yak. Live off your stored fat for a while.”
“I’m hungry,” said Remo. “And I am not going to sit around here breathing and starving to death waiting for you to show me how to break some board with my bare hands. I’ve done your breathing; now let’s get on with the training.”
Remo saw the finger. He saw the long nail of Chiun go forward. He saw it touch his bicep. And then he felt as though someone had dropped a safe on that bicep. His arm was broken. He was sure his arm was broken. He rolled on the floor and groaned in pain.
So close to the floor he could see the grain in the wood, he nursed his injured arm with the other, and heard Chiun speak.
“You did not ask to be here, I gather. No more than you asked to be white, or arrogant, or insolent. It is not your fault. So let us make this agreement. I will train. You will learn. And then I will leave.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. But how am I going to learn with a broken arm?”
Remo felt the fingernail touch the bicep again and then there was no pain. He moved the arm. He stretched it. He turned it. He felt it with the other hand. Miraculously the bone had been restored.
“How did you fix the break?”
“If you will listen,” said Chiun, “you will understand that bones and muscle do not make strength. Nerves make strength. Knowledge makes strength. The mind you do not use can make strength. The arm was never broken. It only had to feel like it was broken for you to listen to me. He who talks cannot listen.”
“Do you always talk like a Chinese fortune cookie?” asked Remo.
He saw the fingernail again, but this time he was ready to dodge it. Strangely it seemed almost attached to him, one with him, until the pain came to his solar plexus. Then after sufficient groveling on the floor that pain was released.
“Okay,” gasped Remo. “Korean cookie.”
Chiun nodded.
“You bastard,” said Remo.
“That is swear word, a curse of sorts. Swearing is a helplessness. You are not here to learn to be helpless.”
Learning to breathe was harder than Remo thought. Chiun kept blaming it on Remo’s immoral life.
“You grunt. You groan because of the poisons you have brought into your system,” said Chiun.
“It would help if you stopped standing on my stomach,” said Remo.
Every breath had to raise Chiun. The slippers were firm in his abdomen.
“Let the muscles go. You are holding me with your muscles.”
“Otherwise you’ll sink.”
“Raise me with the breathing. Feel the floor you are on. Sense the floor. Sense the air. Sense yourself. Be yourself. Breathe.”
Remo let the stomach muscles go, and at first tensed to keep Chiun’s weight from collapsing his stomach. But as soon as he thought of his breathing, sensed the air, even the dust in it, and the light in it, he felt he could breathe with lightness, as though the man standing on him was part of him, and breathing was right and steady. He did not feel the weight of Chiun on him or off him. His body understood. His breathing knew. He tasted light and darkness with his breathing.
One did not need eyes to see, or hands to feel, or even skin to sense the cold and the warm. The breathing made him one with all of it, in space and on the wood floor of this bare room two stories high, with the skylight and the vastness above it. Remo opened his eyes.
It was dark. He looked at Chiun.
“How long was I breathing like that?”
“As long as you needed,” said Chiun.
“Eight hours? It felt like a minute.”
“Time is something that takes place in the mind of the universe,” said Chiun.
“May I ask what you mean by that?”
“No,” said Chiun.
“When am I going to learn to dodge bullets and things?”
“You will learn everything you can, and no more than you can,” said Chiun. “Now go to sleep.”
“I’m hungry,” said Remo.
“Use your fat,” said Chiun.
“That’s not exactly a meal,” said Remo.
“I will tell you when you are ready for a meal.”
“I’m ready. I’m ready.”
“You ate Tuesday. Now quiet,” said Chiun.
It became clear in the days that followed that what Remo was learning was not hand fighting as he knew it. Chiun showed him a fingerboard Remo had seen karate students use. Actually, Remo had never seen them use it. Patrolman Sam Makin had seen them use it. The name was bothering him now. He had taken “Remo” assuming he would use it for a day or two, and then be free of everything. Now he dreamed in Sam Makin, and he thought in Remo. Sometimes he thought in Patrolman Sam Makin, and dreamed in Remo. Sometimes he didn’t know one from the other. But he always called himself Remo.
He had been in training three weeks, mostly breathing and starving, when Chiun showed him the fingerboard.
Remo tapped the soft pads of his fingers against the wooden board to toughen them. When he was done, Chiun told him to hang it on the wall. Remo asked how. Chiun showed him the proper way to train fingers on a board. Then, with two taps of his index finger, he put a hole in it.
“You build calluses on your fingers but build strength in your mind. You must believe; that is where your strength is. Man is the only animal that does not believe in his own powers.”
“I believe. I believe I am hungry. I believe I am Patrolman Sam Makin. I believe I am Remo Williams. I believe. I believe.”
“That is not belief, that is anger.”
“You should be happy with anger. You’re a killer.”
Chiun clutched a delicate hand to his bosom.
“This is the second thing you must learn, almost as important as knowing the difference between Koreans and lesser peoples of the naturally colored race.
“I do not train you to kill. A truck kills. Meat of cows kills. A professional assassin promotes harmony and brings about a more peaceful humor to the entire community.”
“You make it sound like a public service.”
“A professional assassin is the highest public servant,” said Chiun, who went on to tell him about the horrors of the last half-century, when governments spurned assassins for amateurs of their own kind.
“Yes, it is true,” said Chiun. “Every government seems to have these crude imitations in great number, and what is the result? Mass murder. Killing. They are the killers. When the world returns to the proper assassins you will see grace and harmony.”
“I’d like to see breakfast,” said Remo. Patrolman Sam Makin used to love breakfast. Sam Makin used to fry brown sausage, and cut onions and butter into steaming rich potatoes. Sam Makin used to spread sweet red jams on crisp rolls.
Even the nuns at the orphanage had allowed Sam Makin to have as many rolls and as much jam as he liked, as well as a hot cereal during the winter that Sam Makin used to call warm cement.
Remo Williams would have given cartilage for that cereal now.
Chiun said Remo did not understand starvation. Starvation was when the body did not get what it needed. Remo did not need food. He needed to memorize the names of the first hundred Masters of Sinanju. He needed to learn how Sinanju came about, how selfless the Masters were. How the world was.
“What do I care how castles are fortified?” asked Remo. “I am never going to crawl into a king’s bedroom.”
“You think everything you see is new just because you see it for the first time. But everything has been here before. It has just had different names. And they too, in times so far ago no word remains today, thought they were new. But even then, they were not new.”
Fina
lly, after weeks and weeks of breathing and moving, and learning about more dead Koreans than Remo thought ever existed, Chiun said Remo was ready to go outside. But he had better leave Sam Makin in the past or he might not survive the day.
Before dawn, Chiun had Remo walk outside with him. Now Chiun wore the dark kimono, which he explained was copied by the Ninja assassins of Japan.
“A nation notorious for cheap imitations,” said Chiun. They walked several blocks with Chiun peering into the night sky, looking for something above them. They entered a building with an elevator. Chiun pointed to the elevator doors.
“I like these. I rode in one yesterday,” said Chiun. “They’re called elevators.”
“I know,” said Remo. “I was raised in this country.”
“Shut your eyes,” said Chiun.
Remo did so. They entered the elevator, and Remo called off the floors with his eyes shut, right up to forty, where the elevator stopped. Still with his eyes shut he followed Chiun up a flight of stairs.
“You are now going to learn that one does not jump with his eyes,” said Chiun. “You are going to jump from one place to another with your eyes shut. You will sense me, sense where I land and then you will land there.”
“Okay,” said Remo. He was smiling. It was fun. It could be fun. Without looking he knew where Chiun was. If he were to be asked in feet and inches he would say Chiun was eight feet, seven inches in front of him. He knew it. And he didn’t question it. All of this came from the knowing that was in the air in his lungs with his breath. He had captured the rhythms of the universe, and had joined them.
The floor beneath him was somewhat soft to the footstep. He heard Chiun jump up two feet and land on something hard, hard as concrete. Remo jumped two feet and landed next to Chiun. Chiun moved forward and then jumped horizontally fifteen feet across this concrete floor. Remo stepped, breathed, jumped and landed fifteen feet forward. He could never jump fifteen feet in high school but this wasn’t just jumping. This was letting the body move where the mind wished. The body knew so much more about itself than the person did. It all came through the breathing. That which should have been alive all the time was alive now. And it was simple.
Yet there was a strange feeling as he spanned those fifteen feet; it was as though the concrete had become exceedingly light, very thin, like clouds beneath him. He opened his eyes to find the reason behind that odd lightness, and when he did, he gasped.
“Holy shit,” screamed Remo. He was looking down forty stories from the concrete railing of a roof. He had been jumping from one building to another with his eyes closed. He felt his legs give way and, terrified, he reached in toward the dark surface of the rooftop behind him. He fell to it, trembling.
“What is your problem?” asked Chiun. “If that railing were on the ground you would strut across it like a peacock.”
“That’s forty stories down. It’s not on the damned ground. It was never on the damned ground. You had me jump from one building to another with my eyes shut.”
“Why are you afraid? Do you want to fall?”
“That is a dumb question,” said Remo. The tar on the roof was sticky. That apparently was the softness he felt beneath his feet on the roof he had left before he jumped to the concrete railing. He stood up.
“Answer the question,” said Chiun.
“No. I don’t want to fall, of course.”
“You fall because you are afraid. Fear is nothing more than a feeling. Do not give it more due than it deserves. You feel hot. You feel hungry. You feel angry. You feel afraid. Fear can never kill you. So what are you afraid of?”
“Falling forty stories.”
“If you fill your mind with fear, you cannot fill it with the powers you have. And to do that you must breathe. Allow yourself to fall and you will not fall. Up. Come,” said Chiun, and beckoned Remo to the railing.
Remo forced himself up on the rail and avoided looking at the streets below.
“Do not tell yourself the fall is not there because your body knows it is a lie. Your body is becoming Sinanju through your mind. Come. It is easy,” said Chiun, and backing away in the dark robes he seemed to glide backward across the other building. “But remember, do not jump. Move. Believe. You are the power of yourself. You are one.”
Remo took a few steps back to get up a running start until he saw Chiun’s hand raise to stop him.
“I said, do not jump. I said move. Move your body. Move with your body. Look, beyond there over the ocean, dawn arises. That is your sun. You are becoming the sun source. See the sun. Run to the sun. I will never let you fall, neither will the sun or the universe.”
Remo moved. His legs sank his body into the concrete railing, feeling it, knowing it, being one with it in the cool dawn, and he sensed the world, he tasted it on his tongue and on his whole being. The sun was rising before him, and his body was moving. When he landed he saw he was on the far side of the Master of Sinanju. He had jumped past Chiun, across the narrow alley between the buildings and over Chiun. He didn’t even dare calculate how many feet it was, but it certainly would have been some sort of record, if he bothered to record it.
He smiled at Chiun. He had done it.
“Your elbows,” said Chiun. “They were too wide.”
“I would have set an Olympic record if someone were judging me.”
“I was judging you. You failed,” said Chiun.
“I’m not dead. I didn’t fall. I jumped I don’t know how many feet. Did you see what I did?”
“Most certainly. You let your elbows fly. I teach. And I teach and I teach. I give the best days of my life to you, and what do I get? Flying elbows. Now again.”
Remo went back to the other roof, keeping the elbows in.
“All right?” said Remo.
“Of course, all right. I told you how to do it,” said Chiun.
Remo was not certain when it happened, but he was sure one night when he woke up in a sweat.
“What is the matter?” said Chiun. Chiun was in the blue velvet sleeping kimono. He had tried to get Remo to wear a kimono but the young man didn’t seem to be able to adjust to it, and besides, a kimono on a white might attract attention and that would violate the peculiar wishes of the black Con McCleary and his superior, Harold W. Smith, equally if not more insane.
“I couldn’t remember my real name,” said Remo. “I couldn’t remember it. All I could hear about my name was that it was Remo because you were saying it was Remo.”
“No,” said Chiun. “You were saying it was Remo. Besides, who gave you your other name?”
“I think my parents. I never knew them. I was left at an orphanage. The nuns who raised me told me the name was pinned to my diaper.”
“Ah,” said Chiun in the darkness. “Discovery. I will tell you who your mother and father are, but you must be quiet within yourself to understand.”
When Chiun could hear the silence of the large room, and knew there was silence within the young Remo, he spoke.
“Some say a mother and a father are those who give knowledge and love. Others say they are those who pass on life through their bodies to you. But I will tell you who must be your mother and father. For you as for all of us, it can only be one person.”
“Me?” said Remo.
“Yes,” said Chiun.
His name was Remo.
5
Harold W. Smith moved efficiently. He had always moved efficiently. In fact, he had been so excruciatingly reliable ever since childhood that one of his teachers once turned to him and asked if he could possibly act like a child for a day.
“In what way, ma’am?” asked the young Smith.
“Harold. Do I have to instruct you on how to be a child? Break a rule or something. At least mess your shirt like the other boys.”
“Where do you want me to mess it?” asked Harold.
“I give up,” said the teacher. “If you do it on my instructions, you are not being a boy. Do you understand, Harold?”
&n
bsp; Harold Smith understood. Even in a New England town hardly noted for free expression, Harold was considered rigid. But he was not a fool. He would not drink until he was two years into the army because the law said he could not drink until age twenty-one. He honored stoplights at three A.M. at lonely intersections. How Harold Smith joined American intelligence services early in his life was somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps, as rarely happens, someone knew what they were doing, because Harold W. Smith had the sort of mind that could organize an avalanche. He saw order in all sorts of chaos. His rock-solid New England honesty enabled him to see things clearly. No reports were ever fudged for his advancement. This honesty would not let him, as happened to so many intelligence operatives, deceive himself. Thus when a now-dead President knew America needed an organization dangerously free of almost all controls, one man in the entire intelligence establishment stood out. Harold W. Smith.
The only one fit to run an organization outside the law was the one who had the most respect for the law.
As a result, admitting that the organization needed a killer arm was perhaps the most painful decision in Smith’s career. And he was still not sure that reliable Con McCleary had not hung them all out on a limb. Smith had seen too many men killed at a mile’s distance . . . blown up, shot, bombarded . . . to have faith in hand-to-hand combat, no matter what McCleary said. Yet they had to have it.
Smith glanced at the computer. There were still some problems with access to defense expenditures. Then he spotted the problem source. A computer at Grove Industries had blocked access to a military file. Regular auditing procedures by other agencies were being stalled. There was only one way to get past that kind of high-tech blockade: someone had to physically enter Grove offices, get access to their computers, and find the bug. Only then could Smith figure out how to remove it and let the government go about its business while making sure it wasn’t robbed blind. Smith would send McCleary to do the job when McCleary had a free moment, which should be soon. Then Smith turned to the most important matter of the day. The new man.
McCleary had promised miracles. Smith by his nature did not believe in miracles. He believed in reality. But reality too was a very modern bullet that could not hit the Master of Sinanju. According to McCleary, the former policeman had fired at least three shots at Chiun at close range.
Remo The Adventure Begins Page 5