Warren Murphy: Lost Yesterday

Chiun read the word and slowly nodded.

“Now that you have explained what white gratitude is worth, would you care to corroborate what you heard on the roof.”

“He didn't mean what he said.”

“Ah,” said Chiun. “You have advanced in Sinanju to become a reader of minds. Please then, tell me what is on my mind.”

“You don't want to admit you trained a white.”

“If that is what you think, then you write that down here on the scroll,” said Chiun, his voice as cold as the polar depths. “Go ahead. Write it down. Each Master must write the truth.”

“Okay,” said Remo. “I am going to write that I work for the organization, and you are my trainer. I will write that in the course of training I learned something else and that what I learned made me become someone else, but I am white. A white person has mastered Sinanju, and is Sinanju. That is what I am going to write.”

Chiun waited, saying nothing. But when Remo was about to put the brush back to the scroll, Chiun quickly rolled it up.

“The histories of Sinanju are too important to write such nonsense. Without a history, man is nothing. The worst thing that you whites did when you enslaved the blacks was not to make them slaves. Was not to kill them. Was not to rob them of their lives, for others have done that throughout the ages. What you did most shamefully was to rob them of their past.”

“I am glad you are admitting I'm white now,” said Remo.

“Only the flaws. You couldn't help but adopt some of the flaws, having lived among them after birth.”

“Where my mother suddenly flew from Sinanju to leave me in downtown Newark where I was found, looking very white. There are the orphanage records, you know.”

“Believe what you will. I know what is true,” said Chiun.

“Little Father, what is so bad about admitting you gave Sinanju to a white? Does it not make you look better that you took a meat eater, cigarette smoker, whiskey drinker, punch-with-the-fist white man and found in him that which you could make Sinanju?”

“I thought of that,” said Chiun.

“And?”

“And I dismissed it. For centuries, thousands of years, none but Sinanju has mastered Sinanju. We have all accepted that. And here you come along. What does that do to our histories? If this is not true, then what else is false?”

“Little Father,” said Remo, “I have left most of my ways to follow Sinanju. Granted I didn't have much. I wasn't married. I had a pretty crummy job, I was a cop. No steady girl. No real friends, I guess. I love my country and I still do. But I do find something that was absolutely true. It's Sinanju. And I bet my life on it. And so far I have won.”

“You are too emotional,” said Chiun, turning away, and Remo knew it was because Chiun did not wish for him to see how moved he was.

The phone rang three times and stopped. Then it rang once. Then it rang two times and stopped. Upstairs was calling with an assignment.

Remo answered the phone. He was feeling good again. He needed his country and he needed to serve, just as he did when he volunteered for the Marines the day after graduation from high school. As for Sinanju, that had become who he was, and it was strange being part of a house of assassins already famous in the Orient when Rome was a muddy village on an Etruscan river. On the one hand, he didn't know his mother or father. On the other hand, he knew his spiritual ancestors further back than Moses.

All of this he brought to the telephone and to his country as he punched in the numbered response. One multiplied each code right by two. Upstairs had said that would be simple. If he heard two rings, punch in the number four. If he heard four, punch in the number eight.

What, he had asked, if he heard a nine-ring code?

“Then it won't be us,” said Harold W. Smith, the only American besides the President allowed to know of Remo's existence, the one who ran the organization once called America's hedge against disaster, more recently called in times of crises “our last hope.”

Remo punched in the proper code. Then he punched in the proper code again.

So important was secrecy, because the organization was itself outside the law, that the phone was supposed to activate a scrambler system from anywhere. He didn't know how it worked but even on an extension phone no one could listen in on him.

Remo got an operator in Nebraska telling him that the local service was glad to help him. Then he got switched to a national service which was also glad to help him. Then he was told how much money he was saving with another national service, and then back to a Miami operator, who asked which system he was using.

“I don't know,” said Remo. “Do you?”

“We are not allowed to give out that information,” said the operator. “Would you like to speak to my supervisor?”

“You don't know who you work for?”

“Would you like to speak to my supervisor?”

“You mean you don't know who you work for?”

“It's just like your telephone bill, sir. I get fourteen pages of explanation for who pays me and I don't understand a word of it.”

A sharp buzzing came over the phone, and a sharp lemony voice interrupted. It was Harold W. Smith, head of the organization.

“Sorry, Remo, we can't even scramble the phones without a hitch anymore.”

“You mean I didn't mess up the code?” said Remo.

“No. Ever since AT&T broke up, nothing has worked well. It was the greatest communication system on earth at one time. We were the envy of the world. Unfortunately, the courts decided otherwise. All in all, I guess I'd rather have some law and order in the country, than phones that work perfectly. Given a choice, you know.”

“I didn't know about the phone company breakup,” said Remo.

“Don't you read the newspapers?”

“Not anymore, Smitty.”

“What do you do?”

It was a good question.

“I breathe a lot,” said Remo.

“Oh,” Smith said. “I guess that means something. In any case, we have a problem with a witness in a big racketeering case. Seems someone has reached him. We want you to see that he testifies honestly. This one witness could take down the entire mob west of the Rockies. Are you up to it? How are you feeling?”

“Not peak, but more than good enough for what we have to do.”

Chiun, realizing Remo was talking to Harold W. Smith, the man who secured proper gold delivery in tribute to Sinanju for Chiun's and now Remo's services, said in Korean:

“That is no way to talk. If an emperor thinks you are serving him despite injuries, allow it. Allow as to how every living breath serves his glory. Provided of course the tribute arrives on time.”

Remo didn't even bother to explain anymore that Smith was not an emperor. He had explained to Chiun too many times already that the organization served a democracy which decided its emperor by voting, not be an assassin's hand or marching army or accident of birth. This Chiun not only thought of as a foul abomination, but also impossible in the affairs of men, and Remo was only a fool to believe it, like our Western fairy tales such as Santa Claus, or that God decreed who would rule. The saying in Sinanju had always been, “The divine right of all kings is crafted by the hand of the assassin.”

It had been a good selling point in the Ming and Chang Dynasties of China, and the court of Charlemagne.

“Is that Chiun there? Send him our regards and tell him the tribute shipment arrived on time,” said Smith.

“He knows that, Smitty.”

“How? I only found out this morning.”

“I don't know how he knows. There was a problem once with a delivery and the accumulated treasure of the house, and ever since, he has kept an eye on the accounts.”