Warren Murphy: Balance of Power

"Till he shows up, I guess."

"Perhaps I will return to the car."

"Hold it, Chiun, that's him coming in now. The one in the white suit." Remo indicated Daniels, whose appearance was only slightly more presentable than it had been in the newspaper photograph taken after he had emerged from three months in the Hispanian jungle.

Daniels sat next to the Grand Vizier. The men at the bar stared. They were dressed in rough checkered shirts, with short jackets and dirty fedoras whose years of internal sweat had clearly overwhelmed their sweat bands and stained the hats a darker shade. They all drank beer, slowly enough so that the foam was left in rings down toward the bottom of the glass where the beer looked dead and yellow.

As the Grand Vizier stared stonily into his glass of ginger ale, the white men discussed the worthlessness of some persons who only liked to drink, fornicate and fight. That was all some persons were good for.

This concept intrigued Barney and he asked if any of the gentlemen at the end of the bar had personally developed a polio vaccine, discovered penicillin, invented the radio, discovered atomic power, invented writing, discovered fire or made any great contributions to the thought of man.

The men at the other end of the bar disclosed that the late President John F. Kennedy was not black.

Barney informed them that not only was President Kennedy not black, he was not related to the men at the end of the bar any more than he was to Barney's tall black friend.

They said that perhaps the president was not related to them but that Barney obviously was related to his dark friend. This, they thought, was very funny. So did Barney, who said that for a minute the men had given him a fright because he thought he might have been related to them instead of to the Grand Vizier, who knew how to dress like a human being, which they did not. Then he inquired of them which ditches they had dug and if any of them had seen their wives sober in the last decade.

For some reason the discussion seemed to end there with someone throwing a punch in the cause of Irish womanhood, honest labor and killing the dirty nigger lover. It was a magnificent fight. Bottles, chairs, fists. Fast. Furious. Destruction. Courage.

Barney watched every minute of it, and the Vizier did himself proud. Single-handedly, he seemed to be able to fend off the entire population of the establishment. Chairs broke over his head, fists smashed into his nose, broken bottles drew blood. But the Vizier did not fall, and continued to drop men with single strokes of his oaken arms.

Barney would have liked to have seen the finish of the fight and to tell the Grand Vizier what a magnificent man he was, but this was impossible since he was already out the front doors of the saloon, and knew that it was only a matter of seconds before the thin young man and the old Oriental seated in the far corner would be able to fight their way through the melee to get to him.

Remo blocked a body that came flying toward him. "Excuse me," he said to two men who were punching one another's faces. They did not move out of the way. "Excuse me," he said again.

"This'll excuse you," one of the men said, directing a left hook at Remo. Remo caught the man by the wrist and snapped it in half.

"Aghhhh!" the man screamed.

"Hey," the other man yelled, grabbing the back of Remo's tee shirt. "What do you think you're doing to my buddy?"

"This," Remo said, breaking the man's wrist in two between his thumb and index finger.

"I seen that," another man shouted, charging Remo with a pool cue. He swung it over his head and brought it down full force over where Remo was standing, but the stick missed its target and before he knew it the man was lifted in an arc toward the ceiling and then was crashing into the display of bottles at the back of the bar.

Bernard C. Daniels, smiling benignly in the doorway, arched an eyebrow in approval at Remo's bar-fighting abilities.

Remo did not acknowledge it, although he felt a small flush of pride at the subtle display of admiration. Almost everyone who saw Remo in action was either awestruck or terrified, except for Chiun, who could find flaws in even the most perfectly timed maneuver. Rarely did Remo get a sincere "well done" from anybody, and even if this one had been from a man whose life he was going to snuff out in less than thirty seconds, it felt good.

A thankless job, Remo thought as he lodged the bridgework of a man wielding a gallon jar of pickled eggs into his gums. Shrieking the man threw the jar onto a nearby table where it splintered into a thousand glass shards. The mauve-colored eggs inside rolled onto the floor, causing a half dozen men to slip and fall and continue battling one another lying down.

Then came a high-pitched wail so piercing, so pitiful, that Remo had to take his eyes off Barney Daniels, who still stood in the doorway.

It was Chiun, leaning crookedly against the bar near where the Grand Vizier stood battle, a heap of unconscious men at his feet. "Remo," Chiun cried. The front of the old man's red kimono was stained dark. "Remo," he said again, his voice a gasp.

Remo broke the legs of a man who stood in his way. He sent bodies flying across the room with his feet. He hacked his way through the crowd, dropping men like bowling pins, the panic inside him boiling to his core.

"I am here, Little Father," he said softly, picking up the old man as if he were a small child. How light his bones are, Remo thought as he raced outside with his precious bundle, weightless as bird's feathers.

Outside, he placed Chiun carefully on his back on the sidewalk. The old man's eyelids fluttered. "That was the worst experience of my life," Chiun said, shuddering.

"I swear I'll kill every last one of them. How bad is it?"

"How bad is what?" Chiun asked.

"The wound," Remo said.

"Wound? Wound?"

Slowly, Remo opened the kimono where the deep red stain was.

"What... Remo... stop that, you animal," Chiun sputtered, slapping Remo's hands.

"I have to see, Little Father." Remo pulled the kimono open over a flash of intact yellow skin.

Chiun bounded to his feet, his eyes bulging. "You have become insane!" he screeched, jumping up and down wildly, the wisps of white hair on his head streaming out behind him. "The stench of that vile place has turned you into a pervert." He clapped his hands over his sunken cheeks. "And you choose to perform your odious acts with me, with the Master of Sinanju himself. Oh, crazy one, this is the end. You have gone too far now."

He stomped off, spitting on the ground and cursing his fate to have wasted so many years on a pupil who dared to attempt the unspeakable with his own master.

"Chiun... Chiun," Remo called, racing after him. "I only wanted to see where you were hurt."

"Hurt! My heart is broken. My very soul has been desecrated. You attempted to disrobe the Master of Sinanju on a public sidewalk. Oh, this day, this day is cursed. Never should I have arisen this day. First a foul-smelling meat eater tosses purple egg juice onto my hand-woven kimono. Then my own son... no. Not my son. A perverted white man whom I was duped into believing was my good creation, whom I nurtured and taught the secrets of ages. With his own hands, this white beast dares to expose my very flesh on the street. In the debris of a saloon. Oh, shame. The house of Sinanju will never recover from this shame."

"Egg juice?"

"As I was defending myself from the lunatic assault of a drunken person with a bottle, a sea of putrid purple egg juice struck my garment. This is a foul day, a day I shall never be able to forget." He shook his head.

"You mean you're not wounded?"

"I am deeply wounded. Grievously, irreparably wounded. I must go now to burn incense and seek purification."