Warren Murphy: Identity Crisis

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he never visited the grave with his name on it.

For that matter, he never visited Newark, New Jersey, where he had grown up in Saint Theresa's Orphanage as Remo Williams. For all he knew, he had been born in Newark. All the nuns knew was that one morning there was a baby on the doorstep, and the anonymous note said he was Remo Williams. They raised him under that name and, when the time came, they sent him out into the world, and he became Remo Williams, beat cop. Young, honest, he was a good cop, and Newark was his world. Except for a hitch in the Marines, he stayed inside that world. He died there, too.

It had been more than twenty years now. A pusher had been found beaten to death in a Newark alley. Next to the body lay a cop's badge. Remo Williams's badge. It had been an unusually fast jump from suspicion to trial and conviction. Remo had found himself sitting in the electric chair almost before it had sunk in that he hadn't been put through a show trial to satisfy Internal Affairs. He had been deliberately framed, but no one believed him. There had been no one on his side. No fancy lawyers, no last-minute appeals or stays of execution. It would have been different had it taken place today. But it hadn't. Remo finally understood he'd been framed. And then he'd been executed.

But the electric chair hadn't worked. It had been fixed. Someone else now lay in a grave marked with Remo Williams's name, and Remo's face had been fixed by plastic surgery, and fixed and fixed again. It was possible to go back to Newark with a new face, but Remo got tired of seeing new faces in the mirror every other year, so there was one last face-lift, and Remo had his old face back. More or less. That meant he could no longer walk the streets of his childhood anymore. Because the people who had framed him, and the people who had fixed the electric chair so that Remo Williams would be legally dead, couldn't let that happen.

So Remo had never paid his respects to his old self.

Arriving at sunset, Remo now stood looking down at his own grave for a very long time. His strong, angular face with its high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes might have been a death mask for all the emotion it revealed. Remo stood perfectly still. For nearly an hour he stood without moving a muscle.

The headstone had been bought on the cheap. There was his name, an incised cross, but no dates of birth or death. No one knew his birthday anyway. Not even Remo. Wildwood Cemetery was not exactly Potter's Field, but it wasn't much of a step above it.

A nameless hobo lay buried in the dirt under his feet. But Remo wasn't thinking of him. He was looking at all that was left of his old life. A name on a granite stone, a cross and nothing more. The leaves of autumn lay scattered about the ground, and from time to time the wind sent them chasing one another like frisky squirrels. For most of his life he had lived like one of those leaves, rootless and disconnected.

After a while Remo crossed his legs at the ankles and scissored down into a lotus position before his own grave. His body compressed the dry, dead leaves of the season, and they crumpled silently under him because he had perfect control over his body and was trained to make no sounds he didn't want heard.

Resting his unusually thick wrists, one on each knee, he let his loose fingers dangle. Remo closed his eyes.

The one who had trained him told him many years ago that all the answers he sought in life lay within him. It was true. He had learned to breathe correctly, not to put the processed poisons civilization called food into his body and to use all five of his senses fully and without succumbing to illusion. And once those things had been mastered, Remo Williams truly began to master his mind and body.

One day, when he was whole in mind and spirit and flesh, Remo had sat before his Master and asked, "I know how to breathe."

"Because of me."

"I know how to kill."

"Because I have taught you the blows."

"I know myself fully."

"Except in one way."

"Yes," Remo had replied, and was surprised. He was always surprised by his Master. "I don't know who I am."

"You are my pupil. You are next in line after me. You are of Sinanju. Nothing else matters."

"Knowing where I came from matters."

"Not to my ancestors who have adopted you in spirit."

"I am honored, Little Father. But I must know who I am if I am to go forward."

"You must go forward because to do otherwise is to wither and die. If on the path before you, you discover the answers to these unimportant questions, this will be good."

"Knowing who my parents were is not unimportant."

"If your parents did not deem you important enough to keep, why do you wish to honor their neglect?"

"I want to see my parents' faces."

"Look into a mirror, then, for no adult can do so and not see the familiar ghosts of those who came before him."

Remo had tried looking into a mirror and saw only disappointment written on his strong features.

Returning to the Master of Sinanju, he'd said, "The mirror told me squat."

"Then you do not wish to see the truth it holds for you."

"What do you mean?"

"In your face is reflected the face of your father. In it also is reflected that of your mother. But they blend in you, so that you may have the eyes of one and the nose of the other. It is necessary to separate the elements to determine the truth. For often a child takes more after one parent than another."

Remo had felt his face. "I never thought about it that way. Is there any way to figure out who I look more like-my mother or my father?"

The Master of Sinanju had shrugged helplessly. "With a Korean, yes. In your case, no."

"Why not?"

"One baboon looks much like any other. Heh heh. One baboon looks much like any other."

Remo had frowned but pressed on over the Master of Sinanju's self-satisfied cackling at his own joke.

"I still want to find my parents."

"Then look into the mirror of memory-your own mind. For no child is born into this world without seeing the faces of at least one of his parents. And while one's first memory may be buried deep, it is never buried forever."

"I don't remember my parents at all."

"But your mind does. You have only to unlock the memory."

Remo had gone away and meditated for five days, eating only cold rice and drinking only purified water. But no faces appeared in his mind's eye.

When he complained to the Master of Sinanju later, Chiun had dismissed his complaint with a curt "Then you are not ready."

"When will I be ready?"

"When your memory allows itself to be unfolded like chrysanthemum petals."

For years after that, Remo had shoved the question of his parents into the furthest recesses of his mind. He told himself that they must have died in a car accident, that he had not been abandoned, that there was a good reason someone had set him, an infant, in a wicker basket on an orphanage doorstep. To think otherwise was too painful.

Now, so many years later, Remo felt he was ready.

So he sat before his own grave and closed his brown eyes. If necessary, he would meditate all night until he had his answers.

The leaves swirled about him, and the rising moon was caught in the creaking copper beech branches that lay against the night sky like dead nerve endings. An owl hooted. He hooted again, and again and again until his calls became part of the lonesome night.

Remo looked deep into himself. Images came and went. The first face he remembered belonged to Sister Mary Margaret, her smooth face framed by the wimple of her habit. She, more than any of the other nuns, had raised him. She was quick with a ruler on the knuckles, but even quicker with a kind word.

The day he had left the orphanage to make his way in the world, the kindly light in her eyes was replaced by the glow of pride. But that was all the warmth she would give Remo Williams that day.