Dangerous Games td-40

by Warren Murphy

  "What's wrong now? I did what you said, didn't I?"

  "Yes, but you did not win."

  "I had something else on my mind. Besides, I only had to finish third to get to Moscow. You said save the good stuff for the Games."

  "But I didn't tell you to embarrass me."

  Remo started to answer, then thought better of it. Chiun would have his say, no matter what.

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  "You will have to redeem me in Moscow," Chiun said. "There you can make me look like the greatest of all trainers. I will be approached to reveal my great secrets for making a lump like you into a runner. They will ask me to do television guest shots and I will make much money for my village. Maybe I will even get my own show."

  "Heeeeeeeeeeere's Chiun," said Remo.

  Chiun did not smile. "All this will happen in Moscow where you will atone for shaming me today."

  Remo bowed gravely and said: "As you wish, Little Father."

  Up in the stands, Vincent Josephs was not pleased.

  "That's your super runner?" he asked Mills. "He was never in the race."

  Wally Mills thought for a moment before replying. Should he tell Josephs what he thought he saw? That this Remo was busy pulling that other runner across the finish line? No. He couldn't tell him that. It was so unbelievable, he wasn't sure he believed it himself. Instead he said, "You're mistaken, Mr. Josephs. He was where he wanted to be every step of the way. He wasn't even trying for some reason, but he made sure to qualify. Did you see him close?"

  Josephs conceded to himself that Mills had a point. The guy did close fast to get up for third place. Of course, the blond guy closed fast too, but he was a loser, so ignore him. Well, why not? It wouldn't do any harm to go down and talk to this Remo, convince him to sign hi advance of the Olympics just hi case he did win something in Russia.

  "Maybe I'll go down and talk to him, just so this trip won't be a total waste of tune," Josephs said.

  "I'll go with you," Mills said.

  They made their way down to the field, hoping to catch Remo before he left,

  "Hey, pal," Josephs called. "You with the t-shirt."

  Remo turned, saw Josephs, and did not like what

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  he saw. He saw a big cigar, a couple of flashy rings, tinted eyeglasses, a well-tailored three-piece suit that couldn't hide a fat, soft body, and a loud mouth.

  "What do you want?"

  "You run pretty good, pal," Josephs said. "My name's Vincent Josephs. You hear of me?"

  "No," Remo said.

  Josephs frowned. Well, it didn't matter. Someday the whole world would have heard of him.

  "Listen, buddy, you and me might be able to make some money. Together, you know. Endorsements and things. I mean, you run pretty good in those dungarees and-"

  "Chinos," Remo said. "I don't wear dungarees."

  "Yeah, chinos. And loafers. Maybe you could run really fast if you wore shorts and running shoes."

  "Can't," Remo told him, as he turned and walked away with Chiun. He heard the pest padding up heavily behind him.

  "Why can't you?" Josephs asked him.

  "It's against my beliefs to flaunt my flesh."

  "Huh?"

  "Nothing. Forget it. Look, I don't need a promoter or an agent, thank you."

  "Excuse me, what's your name, Remo, but you're wrong. You need me to make a bundle."

  Chiun stopped and turned and so did Remo. Chiun shook his head. "All he needs is me," he said.

  "You?" Josephs laughed and turned back to Remo. "You and me together, kid, we can do it. I'll package you and-"

  "If you don't get out of here, I'll package you," Remo said.

  "Calm down, kid," Josephs said, gesturing with his hands. "If you want to keep the old fella, keep him. He can do your laundry or something."

  "You know, you talk too much," Remo said. He asked Chiun, "Don't you think he talks too much?"

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  "Not anymore," Chiun said. Neither Josephs nor Mills sat Chiun's hand move. Only Remo's eyes could follow the motion. But suddenly Josephs felt a great pressure on his throat.

  Josephs opened his mouth to cry out but no sound would come. His eyes bulged as he tried to speak but he could make no sound.

  "What-what happened?" asked Mills.

  "I paralyzed his vocal cords. His chatter was beginning to offend me," Chiun said.

  Josephs was clutching at his throat, trying to force sound, any kind of sound, but nothing came out.

  "Will he stay that way?" Mills asked.

  Chiun answered blandly, "It depends on how much damage I did. I only meant it to be a temporary silencing, but his constant noise might have thrown my concentration off."

  Remo shook his head at Mills. Nothing could disturb Chiun's concentration. "Temporary," Remo said. "Just temporary. Take him somewhere and tell him to relax. He'll be shooting off his mouth again in no time."

  "All right, Mr. Black," said Mills. "I'll do that." He took Josephs by the elbow and led him away. Josephs still held his throat.

  "I think we should go back to the hotel and let the emperor know you were semi-successful today even if you did disgrace me," Chiun said.

  "You go tell him that if you want," Remo said. "I'm going to hang around and watch some of the other athletes for a while."

  "Very well. But remember curfew," Chiun said.

  "Yes, Little Trainer," said Remo.

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  CHAPTER SIX

  In an arena filled with female gymnasts, anyone with a bosom would have been a standout, but the woman Remo was watching would have stood out in any company. She was in her early twenties and stood five-foot-five and weighed 120 pounds. This made her bigger, heavier and older than any other female competitor in the gym. And more beautiful. Her dark brown hair would have fallen to mid-back if it had not been tied up in a bun, her chin was square, and her cheekbones high. Her lips were full and her teeth even and white against the light coppery tan of her skin. Her eyes, he saw when she turned her head his way, were a soft, wet brown. She had the exquisitely shaped legs of a gymnast without the bulging lumpy muscle mass.

  Remo saw her as he strolled around the gymnasium and he stopped to watch. Even as he did, he reflected that this was curious behavior on his part. Among the lessons that Chiun had taught him as part of the wisdom of Sinanju had been a series of twenty-six steps for lovemaking, twenty-six steps to bring a woman to indescribable ecstasy. Remo had rarely found a woman who could go past thirteen and generally he didn't care. When the risk of failing at sex had been taken out of it, the fun went too. And so, seemingly, did the urge. Until this young woman. Remo wanted to meet her. There was something about her.

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  He was impressed, too, when he watched her perform on the balance beam, the four-inch-wide piece of wood on which women did ballet and acrobatics. Her size was a disadvantage she would have to overcome, but she was good and Remo saw the potential for more than just good. She could be trained.

  She finished her routine on the beam with a twisting somersault dismount, grabbed a towel and ran to the edge of the gym floor, where she stood anxiously looking toward the scorers' table. Remo stepped alongside her.

  "You were good," he said.

  She looked around, surprised at his voice, then smiled perfunctorily, and looked back toward the table.

  "Really good," he said.

  "I hope the judges think so."

  "What do you need to qualify?"

  "Nine-point-three," she said.

  They watched and waited until the judges posted her score. They gave her a nine-point-four. She squealed with joy as she jumped into the air. Remo was the closest person to her so she threw her arms around him and hugged him. He felt her firm breasts press against his chest and smelled the sweet cut-grass scent of her hair.

  "Oh," she said, suddenly recoiling, realizing she was hugging a stranger. She put her hands over her mouth, then lowered them. "I'm sorry," she said.

  "I'm not," Remo said.
"Congratulations."

  "Thank you. Are you competing?"

  Remo nodded. "Eight hundred meters. I qualified, too."

  "Congratulations back. What's your name?"

  "Remo Black. Yours?"

  "Josie Littlefeather," she answered, watching closely for a reaction.

  "Pretty," was all he said.

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  "Thanks. And thanks for not making some smartass remark."

  "One wasn't called for," Remo said. "Listen, since we're both celebrating, why don't we do it together? I'll spring for a drink."

  "Make it coffee and it's a go," she said.

  She walked to a nearby bench and shared hugs with a half dozen other gymnasts, all of them smaller and younger than Josie was. She put on a wraparound skirt and slid her feet into a pair of sandals and was ready to go. She looked more like the average girl on Main Street than an Olympic athlete, Remo thought, and then decided that with his t-shirt, chinos and loafers, he looked like an outboard motor mechanic.

  As they walked from the gym, Josie wrapped a silk handkerchief around her neck.

  "I could use a shower," she said.

  "So could I, but coffee first. I've got a curfew."

  "Don't we all?" the woman said.

  She had wanted coffee, but with every step they took away from the mammoth Emerson College Fieldhouse, the thought of food penetrated deeper and deeper into her mind.

  "Food," Josie said. "I want food. Swooping large amounts of food, piled on my plate."

  "A carbohydrate junkie," Remo said.

  "Yeah. Everybody I know, after an event, it's roll out the pasta. Well, you know how it is."

  "Sure," lied Remo, who had heard about carbohydrate depletion but knew nothing about it since his diet was largely restricted to rice and fish and occasional fresh vegetables and fruit, all Chiun's Korean food staples and all so damned tasteless that Remo truly didn't care if he ate or starved.

  They found a Szechuan restaurant two blocks away from the college and Josie Littlefeather insisted that she wanted Chinese food. As they walked inside,

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  the pungent odors flooded Remo's nostrils and he remembered with a touch of hurt that he was never again going to eat noodles with cold sesame paste or spicy-hot General Chien's chicken, or sliced giant prawns in smooth red garlic sauce. However, he made sure he ordered all of them for Josie Little-feather and he sipped at water as he watched her eat like a gleeful satisfied animal and he recognized that she ate as she performed on the beam-with joy. And Remo realized also that he found very little joy in his life since learning the secrets of Sinanju. There was no joy in sex and no joy in food and there was never any joy in killing because it was both art and science and its purity was its own reward. In making him more of a man, had Sinanju made him somehow less of a human? He wondered. And he wondered, too, if it had all been worth it.

  Josie started off eating with chopsticks which she maneuvered well, but found incapable of holding at one jab the amount of food she wanted to stuff into her face, so she resorted to a soupspoon.

  "We're going to swap life stories, Remo Black," she said, "but my mouth is going to be full so tell me yours first."

  Remo did. He made it all up. He invented a family and a hometown and a past and told her that he had always wanted to complete in the Olympics but it wasn't until he had hit the state lottery of ten thousand dollars that he was able to quit his job in the auto junkyard and go into training.

  "Sure, I'm older than the rest of the runners, but I don't think that's going to stop me from making a good showing," he said.

  "I admire you," she told him, chewing unabashedly. "You know what you want and you're not letting anything stop you from trying to get it." Which Remo knew was a crock because what he wanted was to yank the bowl of noodles with sesame

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  paste away from her and drop it into his mouth in one large sticky lump, and he was letting just the memory of Chiun's training stop him from doing that.

  He contented himself with, "How about you? Do you know what you want?"

  She nodded. "I'm an Indian. I want to give my people something to be proud of."

  "What tribe?"

  "Blackhand. A reservation in Arizona." She looked upward toward the ceiling as if her life's memories were written on the grease-saturated Celotex. "You know what it's like. People who are-well, limp. Even the children. Once warriors. Now they make a living selling junk blankets and doing phony rain dances for tourists. I can't change that, but maybe I can give them something to hang their pride on." She looked at Remo with an almost-electric intensity. "I want that gold medal. For my people."

  Remo felt something close to shame. Here was a woman-not a girl like most of the other competitors but a woman-who had spent God knows how many years trying to get to the Olympics, and to him it had all been a piece of cake. Winning a gold metal would be no more difficult for Remo than walking across an empty street.

  At that moment, he made up his mind to help Josie Littlefeather win a gold medal for her people. And for herself.

  She was talking to him. "And why do you want a gold medal, Remo?"

  He shook his head. "It's not important, Josie. Not half as important, or noble, as why you want it."

  Her laugh lit her face. Her eyes twinkled and she nodded her head in a mock curtsey. "Is that what I am? Noble?"

  "Noble and beautiful and I'm going to help you get that medal," he said. He took her hands in his

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  and squeezed them. He did not recognize these emotions. He had not felt this way in years, perhaps too many years, and he didn't want to think about the other women who had made him feel that way before because they were all dead. They were monuments to Remo's life and work. And they were all dead.

  "Are you entered in anything else?" Remo asked.

  "Yes. The overall. But balance beam is my best. Have you ever been on a balance beam, Remo?"

  "Surely you jest," Remo said. "I was born on one. And when I'm through with you, watch out, world. Nothing but tens."

  She squeezed his hands back. "Heavy promise, white man."

  "If I lie, you can hang me on your belt. Look. That fieldhouse must be empty by now. After all, you've been eating non-stop for six hours. Let's go back there and take a look at that balance beam of yours."

  She nodded. "After this buildup, you'd better not disappoint me and fall off the damn thing."

  If Josie Littlefeather had been a judge, watching Remo's performance on the beam, her only complaint would have been that she could not give a score higher than ten.

  Remo had kicked off his Italian loafers, hopped up onto the beam in the empty gymnasium, and done work she had never seen before, not even in her dreams. He executed front flips, back flips, double fronts, and double backs. He moved so swiftly and surely that sometimes there appeared to be more than one Remo on the beam. He finished with a dismount she had never even seen attempted before, a two-and-a-half somersault. And Remo did it from a one-hand hand stand. He finished with his feet together on the mat and raised his arms to eleven

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  o'clock and one o'clock, the way he had seen gymnasts do on television.

  He looked at her for approval and she applauded.

  "Tens?" she said. "Hell. Thiiteens. Twenties. You're a perfect twenty, man." She ran over and hugged him, but it was a different hug from the one she had given him earlier by mistake. This time he put his arms around her and hugged her back. Then he kissed her and for a moment her mouth was soft and yielding, but suddenly she stiffened and pushed away from him. He did not loosen his grip but instead held her at arm's length.

  "I'm sorry," she told him haltingly. "I guess I'm just not very experienced."

  "My fault," he said, letting his hands drop. "I shouldn't have done that." He did not like the way he felt. He was like a schoolboy with a crush. He turned back to the beam to mask the confusion on his face. "Why don't you do a routine for me and let me watch?"

  "Af
ter what you just did? I'd feel like a cluck."

  "Lesson number one," Remo said. "Don't think about anything except what you're doing. What were you thinking about when you did your last routine today?"

  She looked sheepish. "I was thinking I needed a nine-three to qualify."

  "Right. And that's why you almost didn't get it. From now on, you think about now. You don't even think two seconds ahead when you're on the beam." Even as he said it, he knew it was a lie and the wrong advice. He was trying to give her the art of Sinanju which required such a deep ingraining of technique that technique was never thought of consciously. One didn't think at all. Physical things were best when they flowed instinctively from one's body without thought. That was Sinanju and Chiun had given it to him, but it had taken more than ten labo-

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  nous years. Remo could make Josie Littlefeather the best balance beam artist in the world, but he could not give her Sinanju, not in time for the Olympics. But he vowed to try.

  As she walked toward the beam, a voice bellowed through the gymnasium, echoing off the walls and quonset-curved roof.

  "Well, well," the voice said and Remo turned to the door. It was the blond runner, the one who had promised to feed Remo dust and had wound up being pulled across the finish line. He seemed to have recovered both his wind and his sneer.

  "What's this, Pops?" he asked Remo. "Getting into girls' activities now? Or just trying to get into the girl?"

  "I never got your name," Remo said.

  "My name? Chuck Masters. The guy you screwed and the guy who's going to kick your ass back to wherever you came from."

  "What good's that going to do you?" Remo asked.

  "I break you up some and you have to pull out of the games. As next finisher, I move up into your spot and go to Moscow. We can do it my way or you can just volunteer to drop out. What do you say?"

  He looked at Remo with his hands raised in a questioning gesture, a small nasty smile on his mouth.

  "Go stick a javelin in your ear," Remo said. He turned back to Josie and Masters called, "Don't turn your back on me. And you, Littlefeather, what are you doing hanging out with him?"

  "None of your business," she said.

  Remo wondered how they knew each other and how well. He liked Chuck Masters even less now. He turned back in time to see Masters hoisting up to his chest a weightlifter's barbell, loaded with 150 pounds.