Feast or Famine td-107

by Warren Murphy

  As he pulled up before his home, Remo reflected that he wasn't looking forward to being back.

  The reason why greeted him at the door while he was inserting the key.

  The door jumped open. In the foyer stood a tiny Asian woman with iron gray hair and the same faded lavender quilted garment she had worn ever since taking up residence in Castle Sinanju, a former church converted into a condominium.

  "Hi," said Remo, who still hadn't learned her name.

  "Good riddance," the housekeeper cackled.

  "I'm coming back, not going out."

  "Bad riddance, then."

  Remo scowled. "Chiun in?"

  "In meditation room, gay-face."

  "Will you cut that out!"

  "You not die yet? What take you so long? Every night out on the town, and you still come back alive. Too skinny, but alive."

  "Get stuffed."

  "Stuff me. Change do you good."

  Remo just gritted his teeth. It had been like this since the day Remo had returned home boasting that stewardesses didn't like him anymore.

  "Faggot," the housekeeper had said, padding off in disgust.

  Remo had tried to correct the mistaken impression. "I happen to like women."

  "You supposed to love them. Coochie-coo."

  "The trouble is stewardesses love me too much," Remo tried to explain.

  "Too much love? No such thing."

  The next time Remo saw her, she had handed him a pamphlet on AIDS prevention and a box of rainbow-striped condoms.

  "Look," Remo had tried to explain, "women are drawn to me like flies to hamburger. I finally figured out a way to keep them at bay. Shark meat. I eat it by the ton. Something about it cancels out my pheromones and chases women off."

  "Pillow biter."

  "I didn't mean it like that!"

  "Hah!"

  It was the only fly in the ointment of Remo's current life. He had finally solved the stewardess problem only to find himself with a housekeeper problem.

  Remo still couldn't figure out why Chiun had hired a housekeeper in the first place. This one was old, cranky and she sometimes smoked Robusto cigars-always outdoors.

  Taking the steps to the bell-tower meditation room, Remo discovered it was empty except for the round tatami mat Chiun often meditated on. He stepped out of one shoe and touched the mat with a bare toe. Cool. Chiun hadn't been here in at least a half hour.

  Descending, Remo scoured the third floor. No dice. There was no sign of the old Korean in any of his usual rooms. Not the room where he kept all his steamer trunks. Not the rice room, which was stacked with enough varieties of exotic and domestic rice for all of them to survive to the year 2099.

  The room given over to Chiun's infatuation of the decade was padlocked, but Remo's highly attuned senses told him the Master of Sinanju's heartbeat and rice-paper personal scent were not coming from behind the door. Remo wondered why the door was padlocked. Chiun hadn't had an infatuation since he had grown sick of the news anchor named Cheeta Ching. Before that, he had been smitten by Barbra Streisand. He hoped Chiun hadn't fallen for the First Lady or someone equally inconvenient.

  Finally, Remo found the Master of Sinanju in the fish cellar. It had only recently become the fish cellar, since Chiun had grown concerned over the dwindling fish resources of the planet Earth. Sinanju diet was restricted primarily to fish and duck and rice in vast quantities. Without all three of the allowed Sinanju food groups, their lives would be unlivable.

  As Chiun once explained it to Remo, "We derive our powers of mind from the goodness of fish. Copious mounds of rice sustain our souls."

  "What is duck good for?" Remo asked.

  "Duck teaches us that no matter how monotonous fish and rice become, it could be worse. We could be limited to duck alone. Heh-heh-heh."

  Remo wasn't sure how much of Chiun's remark was intentional humor, but he personally only looked forward to duck when he got tired of fish.

  The fish cellar had been turned into a private aquarium. The walls were set with row upon row of fresh- and salt-water tanks. It looked like one of those multimedia banks of TV monitors all turned to a remote from the New England Aquarium. Except these fish were real. They were brought in from the seven seas, and delivered every month so that Remo and Chiun had their own private food stock. Chiun had won this concession at the last contract negotiation with Harold Smith.

  At the far end of the cellar were the ice boxes and smoke rooms where iced and smoked fish waited for their glorious destiny, as Chiun once put it.

  Chiun stood in profile before the stainless-steel door.

  He seemed oblivious to Remo. In this view, Chiun's face was something made of papier-mache and peeled off an ancient wizard's desiccated skull.

  Chiun stood not much taller than five feet. His bony, frail-seeming body was cloaked in a traditional kimono of raw, neutral-hued silk. Its sleeves hung down over the Master of Sinanju's cupped hands, which rested on his tight little belly.

  His head was down. He might have been praying. Shifting light from one of the fish tanks played on his wrinkled, impassive features.

  At Remo's approach, the Master of Sinanju didn't react.

  Instead, he said, "You wear a face I do not care for."

  "It's about that freaking housekeeper of yours."

  "Who?"

  "What's her name?"

  "I do not know to whom you refer," said Chiun, gaze not lifting from the fish in the tank.

  "I don't know her name. She won't tell me."

  "Perhaps it is Grandmother Mulberry."

  "Is that who she is?"

  "It is possible she is Grandmother Mulberry," said Chiun, nodding. The simple nod made his wispy beard curl in the still air like paper being consumed by an unseen flame. Over his tiny ears, clouds of white hair gathered like storm clouds guarding a mountain.

  "Well, if you don't freaking know, who does?"

  Chiun said nothing. Remo joined him, and found himself looking at a trio of silver-blue fish zipping back and forth. They looked too small to eat, and Remo said so.

  "Perhaps you would prefer suck-fish," returned Chiun.

  "Not from the sound of them."

  From his sleeve, a bony talon of a hand emerged to tap the screen with a long fingernail that was fully an inch longer than the others, which were very long.

  "Isn't it about time you clipped that one?" asked Remo.

  "I am enjoying the resurgence of this nail, which was formerly concealed from sight." And he tapped the glass with a metallic click. "There."

  The fish was black, as long as a man's palm, and it was attached to the side of the tank with its open suckerlike mouth.

  "That's a suck-fish?"

  "It is edible."

  "If you say so," said Remo.

  "But tonight we will enjoy Arctic char."

  "Sounds better."

  Chiun's eyes were hooded as they remained on the tank.

  "You are troubled, my son."

  "I am an assassin."

  "Yes?"

  "You trained me to kill."

  "Yes."

  "You showed me how to insert my fingers into the intercostal spaces in a target's ribs and nudge his heart into going to sleep."

  Chiun nodded. "You learned that technique well."

  "You taught me how to pulverize the human pelvis with the heel of my foot."

  "A remonstrance, not a killing."

  "You taught me the techniques for short-circuiting the spinal cord, bruising the brain and lacerating the liver without breaking the target's skin."

  "These subtle arts you also embraced in time."

  "But there's one thing you forgot to teach me."

  For the first time, the Master of Sinanju's eyes looked up at Remo, meeting them. They held an unspoken question in their clear hazel depths.

  "You forgot to teach me how to strangle annoying housekeepers."

  "You would not!"

  "She's worse than a fishwife, Chiun!" Remo e
xploded. "What the hell is she doing here?"

  "She performs certain services."

  "I'll cook every meal forever if you get rid of her."

  "She does laundry."

  "All the laundry. I'll do it. Gladly."

  "She mops floors. You do not mop floors. It is beneath you. I have heard you say this."

  "Buy me a mop. You'll have the cleanest floors in town."

  "You do not do windows. You have insisted upon this for years."

  "I'm a new man. Windows are my business. I'll lick them clean if I have to."

  "No," said the Master of Sinanju.

  "What do you mean, no?"

  "There are other duties she performs that you cannot."

  "Like what? Stinking up the back wing with cigar smoke. How come you tolerate it?"

  "It is a harmless habit."

  "She might set the house on fire."

  "Thus far, she has not. If she does, I will reconsider your request."

  "I don't get it," said Remo.

  "You are too young to get it." And with that, the Master of Sinanju reached out in the wavery light and touched the side of the fish tank he had been contemplating.

  It winked out like a TV.

  Remo gaped at the tiny white dot in the center of the abruptly black rectangle. "Huh?"

  "The Fish Channel," said Chiun. "It is very soothing. Especially when considering complaints of no merit."

  With that, the Master of Sinanju padded from the fish cellar, saying, "We will have Arctic char this evening. With jasmine rice. In celebration of the successful completion of your assignment in extinguishing the wicked general so that no one sees our hands."

  "I ripped his freaking head off."

  "Good. No one would suspect the hand of Sinanju behind such a clumsy and barbaric act. You did well."

  "I was planning to strike the breath in his lungs. But I kept thinking of that fishwife of a housekeeper and lost it."

  "Visualization is a good technique. Visualize success, and success follows."

  "Right now, I visualize a hanging."

  As he watched the Master of Sinanju pad up the stairs to the house proper, Remo muttered to himself, "Grandmother Mulberry... I'll bet my next three meals that's an alias."

  Chapter 6

  It was a stupid assignment.

  "Oh, come on," Tammy Terrill complained to her news director, Clyde Smoot, over the din of Manhattan traffic blare and squeal coming through the office window.

  "Slow news day, Tammy. Check it out."

  "A guy drops dead in midtown traffic, and you want me to cover it?"

  "There's some funny angles to this one."

  Interest flicked over Tammy's corn-fed face. "Like what?"

  "People said they heard a humming just before the guy keeled over. That smells like an angle to me."

  "No, it sounds like an angle."

  Smoot shrugged. "An angle is an angle. Dig up what you can. It's a slow news day."

  "You already said that," Tammy reminded.

  "Then why are you standing there listening to me repeat myself? Do your job."

  Grabbing her cameraman, Tammy blew out of the studio of WHO-Fox in downtown Manhattan. It was a stupid assignment. But that was what the career of Tammy Terrill had come down to. Covering stupid assignments for Fox Network News.

  In a way, she was lucky to be in broadcast journalism. Especially after she had been unmasked in national TV as a faux Japanese reporter.

  It wasn't easy being blond and white in TV news in the late 1990s. Everywhere Tammy turned, there was a Jap or a Chinese reporter, perky and stylish, stepping on her blond coif in their scramble to be the next Cheeta Ching-style superanchor. And Tammy wasn't the only WASP left out in the cold. If you were white-bread, you were toast.

  Tammy had decided that she wasn't going to let her all-American looks get in the way of her career. Asian anchorettes were the big thing. Her grandmother had been one-sixteenth Japanese, and so with the aid of a friendly makeup man, she had turned Japanese. For on-camera purposes only.

  It got her in the door and on the lower rung of network anchor. Until that dark day under the hot lights when her slinky black wig came off, and Tamayo Tanaka was exposed as a blond fraud.

  "So much for Plan A," Tammy complained to her agent after she was canned.

  "No sweat. You come back."

  "As what? A Chinese reporter? I can't claim to be one-sixteenth Chinese. It would be lying. Worse, it would be falsifying my resume--grounds for dismissal."

  "Pretending to be one flavor of black-haired, almond-eyed journalist is as legit as another. But this time you come back blond."

  Tammy frowned. "As myself?"

  "Why not?"

  "Blondes don't cut it in this business anymore."

  "Times change. Look, it's been nine months. A lifetime. Even Deborah Norville got a second shot at fame."

  "I won't do one of those hard-news shows," Tammy flared.

  "Look, I think the Asian-anchorette trend has peaked. In the last year alone, Jade Chang, Chi-chi Wong, Dee-dee Yee and Bev Woo have come on the scene. It's oversaturation city."

  "Bev Woo. She's been around forever."

  "You're thinking of the old Bev Woo. There are two of them now. Both up in Boston."

  "Is that legal?"

  The agent shrugged. "It's great publicity."

  "So I come back as myself?" mused Tammy.

  "Sort of. Tell me, what's 'Tammy' short for?"

  "Tammy."

  "Hmm. Let me think. What would 'Tammy' be short for. Tam. Tam. Tam. Tamara! From now on, you're Tamara Terrill."

  Tammy frowned. "Sounds Japanese."

  "It's Russian, but we won't emphasize that. And if it doesn't work, next time you can be Tamiko Toyota."

  "Are you crazy? I'd come across like a walking product-placement ad. What about my journalistic integrity?"

  "Don't sweat it. I already got the ball rolling."

  "Where?" Tammy asked eagerly.

  "Fox."

  "Fox! They're a joke. Half their newscast is UFO stories and Bigfoot sightings. It's scare news."

  "That's just to bolster 'X-Files' ratings. It'll pass. See a guy named Smoot. I told him all about you."

  "Except that I used to be Tamayo Tanaka ......

  "No. I told him that, too. He thought it was a brilliant career move, except it didn't quite pan out."

  "Pan out! I fell flat on my pancake makeup!" Tammy muttered.

  THE Fox INTERVIEW went too well.

  "You have the job," said News Director Clyde Smoot.

  "You didn't ask me any questions," Tammy had complained.

  "I just needed to see your face. You have a good camera face."

  Except that in the six weeks Tammy had been working at Fox, her face had yet to be seen. Instead, they sent her scurrying here and there chasing down rumors of saucer landings and haunted condos. None of it ever aired.

  "Don't worry. You'll break a story soon," Smoot reassured her.

  As the cameraman wrestled the news van through Times Square traffic, Tammy held no hope that this time would be the charm.

  "Always a reporter, never an anchor," she muttered, her chin on her cupped hands.

  "Your day will come," the cameraman chirped. His name was Bob or Dave or something equally trustworthy. Tammy had learned a long time ago never to get attached to a cameraman. They were just glorified valets.

  Traffic had gotten back to normal at the corner of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Cabs and UPS vans were rolling over a silver-spray-painted body outline.

  "Stop in front of it," Tammy directed.

  "We're in traffic," Bob-or Dave-argued.

  "Stop, you moron."

  The van jolted to a stop, and Tammy stepped out, oblivious to the honking of horns and blaring and swearing.

  "Looks like he fell on his face," she said

  "Get in quick!" the cameraman urged.

  Tammy looked around. "But what made the humming?"

/>   "Forget the humming! Listen to the honking. It's talking to you."

  Frowning, Tammy jumped back in and said, "Pull over."

  On the sidewalk, Tammy scanned her surroundings.

  The cameraman lugged his minicam out of the back and was getting it up on his beefy shoulder.

  "They say that if you stand on this corner long enough, anyone you could name will walk by. Eventually."

  "I saw Tony Bennett walk by my apartment last Tuesday. That was my thrill for the week."

  "The guy was struck down about this time yesterday. Lunchtime. Maybe someone walking by saw it."

  "It's a thought."

  Tammy began accosting passersby with her hand microphone.

  "Hello! I'm Tamara Terrill. Fox News. I'm looking for anyone who saw the guy who plotzed in the middle of traffic yesterday."

  There were no takers.

  "Keep trying," the cameraman prodded.

  Tammy did.

  "Hello. Did someone see the guy drop dead? Come on, someone must have seen something. Anyone hear a weird humming here yesterday?"

  A discouraging half hour later, Tammy gave up.

  "Why not try that traffic cop?" the cameraman suggested.

  "Because this is his beat," the cameraman said tiredly.

  Officer Funkhauser was only too happy to cooperate with Fox Network News.

  "I heard the humming just before the guy plotzed," he said.

  "Was there anything suspicious about his death?"

  "Between you and me, his eyes and brains got eaten out."

  "That wasn't in the papers."

  "They're keeping it quiet. But that's what I found. Just keep my name out of the papers."

  "What is your name?"

  "Officer Muldoon. That's with two O's."

  "See anything odd or out of place?"

  "Just the dead guy."

  "Any police theories you can share with me?"

  "My experienced eyes say a Mafia hit," Officer Funkhauser said flatly.

  "If it was a hit, there had to be a hit man. See anything or anyone who might have been a hit man?"

  "No. Just ordinary people. Unless you consider the street vendor."

  "Wouldn't that be a good hit-man disguise?"

  "Maybe. He was giving away candy samples."

  "What'd he look like?"

  "Tall. Thin. Wore a Charlotte Hornets cap and team jacket."

  "Isn't that kinda strange? A Hornets fan in the Big Apple?"