"Trying my best," Remo said.
"I think that's cute," she said. She gave no sign of leaving, so Remo got up, left the fire and left the lodge, and began walking in the snow. It was a sun-crisp day in the Rockies and the autumn snows had begun and the world was alive, so incredibly alive.
And there were people out there who welcomed death. Young people. Killing happily and dying happily, in some nightmare of a world.
He saw skiers use the edges of their skies to turn, the better ones in tighter control, knowing that when they put pressure on the edge of the downhill ski, the skis would turn. But what would they do, thought Remo, if they cut with their downhill ski and there was no turn? Like him, with those crazies off the just Folks Airlines. Everything he had been trained for, things that had become instinctive, suddenly were no longer useful. It was like leaning on a downhill ski but not turning. He paused to think about that and squatted in the snow and idly let the fresh powder sift through his fingers. He had met religious fanatics before and he had killed them when he had to without even a look back. He had fought and killed political zealots, maniacs who were sure their cause was right to the point of death.
Why was it different this time? What was it that had stopped him from simply killing that little bubble-headed blond girl and closing the book on that particular assassination squad?
He didn't know the answer, but he knew he had done the right thing outside of Raleigh-Durham airport. Somehow, he knew, it would have done no good to finish off that girl. She really did love death. So did the two young men he killed. They all loved death. And something inside Remo was all knotted up and he knew he could not give them all the death that they lusted for. Some reason, some instinct, something stopped him. And he didn't know what it was.
He headed across the slopes, past warning signs of deep powder and unmarked trails. He wore a light jacket but did not need it. He knew the temperature was low; he did not feel the cold as pain but instead as something that automatically made his body generate its own heat. Everyone's body could do the same thing if it were trained properly. In bed, it was never a blanket that made heat; it only kept in the heat that was made by the body. Remo could do the same thing, but he didn't need a blanket. His blanket was his skin, and he used his skin the way all men did before they invented clothing.
This was Remo's explanation to himself of why Sinanju worked; it harnessed all those vestigial powers in the animal body, all the powers that man had let die, and the ability to do that was the major accomplishment of an ancient house of assassins from a village on a west Korean bay.
It was colder now and Remo walked into deep snow and his body began to swim through it, without his knowing it, moving like a fish, a shark of the airy snow. His mouth breathed in the air in the snow and it tasted of the fresh pure oxygen no longer found in the cities. He lost track of time. It was perhaps only minutes, or maybe hours, before he was out of the snow, standing on rocks, and then he found the place. It was a small cave, an opening in the great stone mountain, and when he entered, he realized he was retreating from everything.
And there he sat, his body quieted, waiting for his mind to work out for itself just what was going on. He had sat for several days when he heard movement outside the cave. It was not the sound of feet compressing snow, but a pure gliding movement, as soft as a breeze.
"Hello, Little Father," Remo said without looking up.
"Hello," said Chiun.
"How did you know I was here?"
"I knew where your body would take you when you were frightened."
"I'm not frightened," Remo said.
"I did not mean fear of being hurt or being killed," Chiun said. "I meant another kind of fear."
"I don't know what is going on, Chiun. All I know is I don't like it and I don't understand it." He looked up at Chiun for the first time and he was smiling. "You know how you're always saying we should leave this country and go to work for this king or that shah, and I've always said no because I believe in my country the way you believe in your village?"
"Not the village. The village is just where the House of Sinanju is," Chiun corrected. "The house. The house is what we are and what we do."
"Whatever," Remo said. "Anyway, let's do it. Let's go to another country. Let's just pick up and go."
"No. We must stay," Chiun said.
"I knew it," Remo said with a sigh. "All these years, you've just been waiting for me to say 'go,' so you could say 'stay.' Right?"
"No," said Chiun, sitting down in the cave, spreading his thin white winter robe beneath him. "Today we stay not for your foolish loyalty to this foolish country. We stay for Sinanju. We stay because we must not let it happen again."
"Let what happen again?" Remo said.
"You have heard of your Western empire, Rome?"
"Sure. It conquered the world once."
"How white of you to think of it that way. Only the white world was conquered by Rome, and not even all of that."
"All right, all right. It was still the greatest empire the world has ever known."
"For whites," Chiun said. "But I have not told you about ... about Lu the Disgraced."
"Was he a Roman emperor?" Remo asked.
Chiun shook his head. The wisp of beard hardly moved in the icy chill cave, where no wind cut or sun entered.
"A Master of Sinanju," Chiun said.
"I know all the Masters of Sinanju. You made me learn them and I never heard of this Lulu."
"Would that I never had to tell you of Lu the Disgraced."
"I take it he screwed up," Remo said, and Chiun nodded.
Remo said, "No reason to keep him a secret. Sometimes you can learn more from what's wrong than from what's right."
"I did not tell you because you did not have to know. I did not tell you because you might mention his name one day to someone."
"Who would care?" asked Remo. "I care, but who else would care?"
"Whites would care," said Chiun. "Whites would never forget. They are a treacherous gang, just waiting for Sinanju to fail."
"Little Father," Remo said patiently, "they don't care."
"They do," Chiun said.
"No," said Remo. "The line of assassins of Sinanju is not exactly a major study course at American universities. "
"Rome is. The fall of that empire is," Chiun said.
"What are you getting at?"
"Rome fell because we failed it. Sinanju failed Rome. Lu the Disgraced failed Rome."
He folded his long-nailed hands in front of him as he often did when about to begin a lecture. Remo clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the cold wet rock wall of the cave.
As Chiun began to tell it, he slowly started slipping into the familiar phrases of old Korean, the language of the older legends with its sharper cadences.
He related how Sinanju had discovered the Romans many centuries before their prime and marked them as a coming civilization, although in those matters no one ever really knew. So much was left to chance, and this was the way of nations too. The only sure thing about kingdoms and empires was that they came and they went.
Still, the Masters of Sinanju put Rome on their list as a place worth watching, because if it grew and prospered, its emperors would want assassins to prolong their reign, and that was the business of the Masters of Sinanju.
Finally, in the year of the pig, Rome was growing. It had two consuls who ruled together, and one, because of vanity, wished to rule alone. So it came to pass that he employed a Master of the House of Sinanju and paid him, and soon he ruled alone.
Thus Rome became an important city, and often, when there was no call for their work among more civilized courts, Masters of Sinanju would journey to Rome and visit the Western city where people had strange eyes and big noses.
Now, it happened that Lu, in the 650th year since the founding of the city of Rome, which was roughly A.D. 100 by Remo's calendar, came to that city. Rome had changed. There was an emperor now, and
the games, once small religious festivals, were now filling giant arenas. Men fought animals. Men fought men. Spears and swords and tigers. So great was their lust that the Romans could not see enough blood.
But because they did not respect life, they could not appreciate a professional assassin. Death was just death to them, nothing special, so there was no work for Lu.
Yet, Chiun related, it came to pass that the emperor heard of the one from the East and wished to see his eyes and his manner, and Lu appeared before him. The emperor asked what weapons Lu used, and Lu answered that the emperor never asked his sculptor what chisel he used or his carpenter what lathe.
"Do you kill with your funny eyes?" asked the emperor.
Lu knew that this was a new land, and so he did not show the disdain he felt. He answered, "One can kill with a thought, Emperor." The emperor thought this empty boasting, but his adviser, a Greek, who were at that time smarter than the Romans, although, Chiun said, it is now a tie for who is stupidest in the world, spoke to Lu and said that Rome had a problem. The problem was with Rome's roads, Lu was told. Rome used them to move legions around the empire, to allow farmers to bring goods to market. The roads were the lifeblood of the empire, this adviser said, and Lu nodded. Masters of Sinanju had already noted that there was only one permanent truth about the prosperity of an empire. With roads, they flourished; without roads, they didn't.
Chiun now pointed out to Remo in the cave of the Rocky Mountains that China's great wall was no wall. The Chinese, Chiun said, are slothful perverts, but they have never been fools. They never thought that a wall would stop an army. It never had and never would. The secret of the Great Wall of China that no one understood these days was that it was not a wall at all. It was a road.
Remo remembered seeing pictures of it. Of course it was a road. It was a raised road, for moving armies and goods. People only called it a wall because they felt safer behind walls, although Remo knew that walls were only illusions of safety.
The Roman emperor's adviser told Lu, "We have bandits on our roads. We crucify them by the roadways so that will serve as a reminder to others not to rob again."
"Do they rob much?" Lu asked.
"What they rob is not important. That they rob at all is. It is the fear of the people we are concerned with. If they fear the roads, if they fear to travel, they will begin to mint their own coins, they will begin to withhold crops."
"But it is not a problem yet," said Lu, who could not help but notice that these barbarians with the big noses had floors of marble as fine as any Ming emperor had ever had.
"The best time to solve a problem is at the beginning," said the adviser. "The robbers know that only a few will be caught and crucified by the roadways. But if something they did not understand was killing them and it was said that it was the will of our divine emperor in Rome, then the robbers would diminish and we could make the roads of Rome truly safe for all."
And to Lu this was wise, so he set forth south toward the city of Herculaneum. Between Brundisium and Herculaneum, he sought out the robber bands and with swift and sure hand dispatched them, even some of them who were in league with local governments. For it happened then, as always, wherever there was money, it could find its way from the robbers to those who were supposed to stop them.
And from Rome the word went out. Divine Claudius had decreed that robbers would die by his will alone. They would suffer in the night the broken neck, the split spine, the crushed skull-all by the emperor's will alone. And none knew that Lu, the Master of Sinanju, was the emperor's secret power.
The sudden terrible deaths were more effective than even crucifixion. Robbers left the roads. Never had the highways been so safe, and travelers and merchants moved along them in confidence, making the empire even stronger and giving an unwarranted reputation for excellence to the fool emperor Claudius. So said Chiun.
And then, just as everything had become successful, the fool Claudius, who was a glutton for the blood arena, wanted more entertainment. He wanted the assassin from far away who was busy protecting the roads of Rome to perform for him.
Now, it is an emperor's right to be a fool, Chiun told Remo. But it is an assassin's everlasting disgrace.
Lu, remembering the fine marble floors and finding boredom and hot winds between Herculaneum and Brundisium, accepted and did perform for the emperor. And also for the crowds in the arena. In three appearances, he made more than he had before in his entire lifetime, and he left. But not only did he leave Rome, he left behind his vow to protect Rome's roads. "He took material wealth and left," Chiun said.
"I saw Roman jewels in your village," Remo told Chiun.
"Those. And a baggage train of marble for the floors, and gold, of course. Always gold."
"So how did Sinanju cause the fall of the empire?" Remo asked.
"The roads went back to the robbers," Chiun said. "Soon the people knew that, and soon none would travel those roads."
"But Rome didn't end then. It took a few more centuries, didn't it?" Remo said.
"It died then," Chiun said. "It took a few more centuries to fall down, but it became a corpse the day Lu forgot his mission and left."
"But no one blames Sinanju for that," Remo said. "Only you know about it."
"And now you."
"I'm not telling anyone. So Sinanju doesn't have to be blamed for losing an empire at all."
"Blame is blame, but facts are facts. Lu lost Rome. I will not be the Master who loses America," Chiun said.
"What happened to Lu the Lunkhead?" Remo asked.
"Much more happened, but that will be for another time," Chiun said.
Remo rose and looked out at the cold whiteness of the Rockies. The sky was a delicate pale blue, cold, severe, and demanding. It reminded him of the code that bound him to Sinanju and to his duty. He knew he was returning to the battle. He was returning to those people who so unnerved him by their willingness to die. He would do it, but he didn't want to. He just knew he had to.
"What is troubling you?" Chiun asked.
Remo looked at him and said, as Chiun had said of the rest of Lu's story, "That will be for another time." And Chiun merely smiled and took Remo's arm and led him from the cave.
In the ashram, Kali the goddess, Kali the invincible, stretched out a shining new arm and pushed it forward so that even the worshipers could see she was bringing something to her bosom. But there was nothing in the hand yet.
"He is coming. Her lover is coming," the disciples chanted. And Holly Rodan, the overprivileged child from Denver, was the happiest of all. She knew who the lover would be. She had seen him kill in North Carolina.
"What was he like?" the others asked.
"He had dark hair and dark eyes, and high cheekbones. And he was thin but he had very thick wrists."
"And what else?"
"You should have seen him kill," Holly said.
"Yes?"
"He was. . ." Holly Rodan gasped, her body quivering with memories of that day. " . . . he was wonderful."
Chapter Nine
A. H. Baynes lived in days of honey and sunshine. If he could have whistled or sung or danced on his desk, he would have, but he had not learned any of those techniques at the Cambridge Business School.
What he knew was that the deaths had stopped aboard just Folks Airlines and that International Mid-America Airlines was as good as dead. Its stock had vanished through the floor of the stock exchange, but just Folks's was soaring and would go even higher when his new promotional campaign-"Just Folks, the Friendly, Safe Airline"-hit the newspapers in another week.
He thought that he had performed very well, even though, for some reason, his father's image popped into his mind and he knew his father would have called it cheating. "You've always been a smart-ass cheat, A.H."
But the Cambridge Business School philosophy that had directed the industrial thinking of America since the sixties and had remolded the armed forces according to its management systems was something that
A. H. Baynes thought his father was ill-equipped to comment on. Daddy had run a little grocery store in Beaumont, Texas, and on his only visit to Cambridge had told A. H. that the school was filled "with a pack of pissants with the morals of rattlers and the brains of cactus weeds."
"Dad is such a card," A. H. had said, trying to laugh it off.
"You pissants don't know bucks and you don't know goods," his father had said again. "You know talk. God help us all."
When Cambridge graduates had redesigned the armed forces along modern management lines, Daddy had said, "There goes the army."
But his father didn't understand that it did not matter that the American military leadership was becoming more comfortable in Bloomingdale's than on the battlefield. That wasn't important. It wasn't part of the new code.
Armies didn't have to win and cars didn't have to run and nothing manufactured had to work to be a success, according to the new code. What had to be ensured was that the graduates of Cambridge Business School were always employed. That was a maximum-priority item and its graduates learned that lesson well.
The days of honey and sunshine that A. H. Baynes now enjoyed were due to that training. But lately he had begun to wonder if maybe there was something else involved. Maybe there was a god and maybe that god had singled him out for special success. And maybe, just maybe, that god had something to do with the ugly multi-armed statue in that storefront church in New Orleans.
Accordingly, one day, the entire A. H. Baynes family, except the dog, showed up at the ashram and presented themselves to Ban Sar Din.
Ban Sar Din did not like their looks. The woman had a mousy face and wore a neat white suit. The boy had on a little green blazer, white shirt, tie. His gray pants were pressed sharp and his black shoes were shined.
The girl wore a white skirt and carried a little white pocketbook.
"This is my family. We want to join your services," A. H. Baynes said. He wore a dark blue suit with a striped red-and-black tie.
"It's not Sunday, Daddy," said the boy.
"Shh," said Mrs. Baynes. "Not everyone worships on a Sunday, dear. There are other places to worship than in a big church."
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