Warren Murphy: Lost Yesterday

To read a current history of Chiun and the new world, America, “A happy but nervous people, quick to anger and even quicker to do nothing about it,” one could imagine that Remo could be a Korean. There were many references to Remo feeling an attachment to the waters of the West Korean Bay, when actually Remo had been to Sinanju only once, and then for a fight. Almost every time Chiun mentioned Remo he stressed how different his high cheekbones were from those of the normal white.

And the fact that Remo was an orphan meant to Chiun that he could not definitely say his mother or father wasn't Korean.

“I can and I do. I'm white,” Remo had repeated. So Chiun had taught Remo everything, but not how to make an entry into the histories of Sinanju. And Remo still did not believe the histories of Sinanju, even though as he relearned the wall ascent Chiun commented:

“The great Wang perfected that. We owe all ascents to the great Wang. If I were not here, you could have read the histories and known how to do it again.”

“If you were not here, Little Father, I probably would never read the histories of Sinanju. I don't read them now, come to think of it.”

“You must again,” said Chiun.

There was a banging on the door to the roof of the Miami high-rise.

“You out there, how did you get up there?”

Remo went to the door where the voice was coming from. It was locked. He enfolded the handle lightly in his palm and then, making sure the lock was tight against the handle, snapped it up. Metal parts flew like shrapnel and the door opened slowly.

A security guard stepped up onto the roof.

“Breaking and entering,” he said, noticing the lock was no longer on the door.

“I only broke it to let you out here,” said Remo.

“Then how did you get up?”

“You wouldn't understand,” said Remo.

“Notice his low cheekbones,” said Chiun to the guard. “That is a common ordinary white. Of course he wouldn't understand.”

“Who are you jokers calling common?” said the security guard.

“He doesn't mean what you think he means,” said Remo.

“Low cheekbones. Look at yours, buddy. You look like the old man, like a gook.”

The guard stood ready for a fight. He had his hand on a billy club. He weighed as much as Remo and Chiun put together. He was sure one blow would do it.

When the old one moved toward him, he raised his club, prepared to bring down all its force right into the flowing robes of the old Oriental. His arm was coming down when he felt something against his cheek. Two lips. Then he heard a smack. The Oriental had given him a kiss on his cheek as he was trying to hit him. And then, more smoothly than the guard's eyes could believe, the Oriental was behind him.

“A Western custom of thanks,” said Chiun, explaining the kiss, the first kiss he had ever given, much less to a white. In Sinanju there were tendernesses, but never delivered in this Western form. But the joy in Chiun's heart had demanded that he offer thanksgiving to the big white man in the guard's uniform of blue and the square badge of silver.

The guard somehow had missed the old man, but he wasn't going to miss the younger one. He swung the club at his midsection, swung it with the anger of a man who had tried to kill and been dismissed by a kiss on the cheek. Remo caught the billy club in his palm and pushed it back like a turnstile.

He had to catch up to Chiun. While the counterforce meant little to one whose every cell moved in unison, to the guard it was like swinging his body into an oncoming truck. The jolt of his body moving into Remo's shattered his pelvis, separated spinal disks, shredded the cartilage at the shoulders, and took a good half-hour out of his life as he waited unconscious on the roof.

Remo, on the other hand, did not miss a pace. He followed Chiun.

“That guard didn't see that well at night,” said Remo.

“He was white. He saw as whites see.”

“You yourself said whites have funny eyes, that they can't see well because round things never focus as sharply as pointed ones.”

“His could see well enough,” said Chiun. He was picking up speed. Remo followed. Down one flight after another to the tenth floor with the kimono whipping behind him, Chiun moved, faster than an elevator, faster than a sprinter on a dead run, but never without grace and flow in his movement. Into their temporary apartment he moved, right to the ink and scroll he moved, and then upon the rugged floor of this Miami condominium did Chiun, Master of Sinanju, write what he had beheld this very evening, even as Remo complained.

“Lo these many years, the Master of Sinanju had toiled with the new Master, Remo, as was his name, in the adopted country where Chiun had found him. And hence, he noticed the difference in him from his white surroundings,” inscribed Chiun. Even with his awesome speed, each Korean character was perfect, aligned with greater accuracy than if on a grid. This dawn the Master was inspired. This dawn he wrote with joy.

“And lo, one night a simple white stationed to guard the environs of one of their minor castles for the common man, did set eyes upon Chiun and his pupil, Remo. And in that peculiar red light of the morning that allows round eyes to focus better than normal, he saw what Chiun had seen so many years ago. He saw it in the cheekbones and in the eyes. And what he saw was resemblance.

“Even the most common white could not miss the absolute Koreanness of Remo, humble though the white was. And he bespoke this fact to Chiun.

“This, then, raises the one question that had long haunted Chiun, discoverer of America, the nation (not the continent which was discovered in the first realm of the Maya by Master Can Wi). Which Korean had been ancestor to Remo?

“Was it the lost Master? Had he secreted his seed in the new nation so that later, Chiun might harvest? To which Sinanju parent could Remo trace his unknown ancestry?

Chiun had curved himself over to the paper as a flower bent above a white parchment pond. Now he straightened, and with satisfaction he handed the brush quill to Remo.

“You cannot say that this is not the truth. Write now your first sentences of the history.”

Remo easily read the Korean. It was the old form, more influenced by Chinese than Japanese. But many of the characters — like the symbols for payment — were unique to Sinanju itself. Sinanju alone had brought the wealth of the West in tributes to the House of Assassins to the East. Things that were never seen before in the Orient had come to Sinanju by boat and caravan. The old Sinanju Masters, then, had to create characters in order to catalog their treasures. It was a labor of love.

Remo remembered Chiun showing him the scroll marked with his own first entry; his writings followed Chiun's father's entry, and that of his father's father. Cousins from way back were chronicled, as were second cousins, and so was a very supple entertainer who was half from Sinanju and half from the notorious city of Pyongyang, home of loose women and looser men, not a fitting place for the upright of the little fishing village of Sinanju.

Remo had been referred to in the histories of this house of assassins as “the half-breed.”

He took the quill in his hand and read again what Chiun had written. He knew the marks, and he knew future generations would judge his hand, if there were future generations. He wondered when he too would have to train a future Master. Originally he had learned Sinanju to serve his country, but now knowing Sinanju placed an obligation on him to teach it to someone else also. The tool had become at least equal to the purpose.

Remo read what Chiun had written yet again, then quickly drew the character he had been thinking of. It was a combination of the horns of a bull and the waste product of said bull. In America this phrase was a colloquialism for something that was untrue.