Warren Murphy: The Sky is Falling

"How did they do it to themselves?" demanded Remo. He noticed a small bowl of brown rice sitting unfinished on the living-room table.

"Brutality always begets its own end."

"Little Father," said Remo, "three men were hurled thirty stories down an open elevator shaft. How could they possibly have done it to themselves?"

"Brutality can do that sort of thing to itself," insisted Chiun. "But you would not understand."

What Remo did not understand was that absolute and perfect peace made any intrusion a brutal act. Like a scorpion on a lily pad. Like a dagger in a mother's breast. Like volcanic lava burning a helpless village. That was brutality.

The mother's breast, helpless village, and benign lily pad were, of course, Chiun, Master of Sinanju, at breakfast. The scorpion, dagger, and volcanic lava were the three exalted members of the International Brotherhood of Raccoons, who had walked down the hall singing "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall."

As Chiun had expected, Remo again stood up for other whites, explaining away their hideous brutality as "some guys high on beer singing a drinking song," something that in his perverted mind did not call for an immediate return to gentle silence.

"I mean, they couldn't very well throw themselves down a thirty-story shaft with the force of a machine, could they, Little Father? Just for singing a drinking song? Listen, we'll stay out of the cities from now on, if you want peace."

"Why should I be denied a city because of others' brutality?" answered Chiun. He was the Master of Sinanju, latest in a line of the greatest assassins in history. They had served kings and governments before the Roman Empire was a muddy village on the Tiber. And they had always worked best in cities.

"Should we surrender the centers of civilization to the animals of the world because you blindly side white with white all the time?"

"I think they were black, Little Father."

"Same thing. Americans. I give the best years of my life to training a lowly white and at the first sign of conflict, the very first incident, whose side does this white take? Whose side?"

"You killed three men because they sang a song," said Remo.

"Their side," said Chiun, satisfied that once again he had been abused by an ingrate. His long fingernails poked out of his elegant kimono to make the telling point. "Their side," he repeated.

"You couldn't have just let them walk down the damned hallway."

"And brutalize others who might be transcending with the rising sun during breakfast?"

"Only Sinanju transcends with the rising sun. I sincerely doubt that plumbers from Chillicothe, Ohio, or account executives from Madison Avenue transcend with the rising sun."

Chiun turned away. He was about to stop talking to Remo, but Remo had gone to prepare the rice for breakfast, and would not be aware of the slight. So Chiun said:

"I will forgive you this because you believe you are white."

"I am white, Little Father," said Remo.

"No. You couldn't be. I have come to the conclusion that it is not an accident you have become Sinanju."

"I am not going to start writing in one of your scrolls that my mother was Korean but I didn't know it until you gave me Sinanju."

"I didn't ask that," said Chiun.

"I know you have been struggling with how to explain that the only one to master the sun source of all the martial arts, Sinanju, is not Korean, not even Oriental, but white. Pale, blank, blatant white."

"I have not written the histories lately because I did not wish to admit the ingratitude of a white, and how they all stick together even when they owe everything they are to someone kind and decent and mild who thoughtlessly gave the best years of his life to an ingrate."

"It's because I won't write that I'm not white," said Remo. In his training he had read the histories, and knew the long line of assassins the way British schoolboys learned of the ancestry of their kings and queens.

"You said you were raised in an orphanage. Which orphan knows his mother, much less his father? You could have had a Korean father."

"Not when I look in the mirror," said Remo.

"There are diseases that afflict the eyes and make them mysteriously round," said Chiun.

"White," said Remo. "And I know you don't want to leave that in the history of Sinanju. When I take over the scrolls, the first thing I do will be to say how happy I am as the first white to be given Sinanju."

"Then I will live forever," said Chiun. "No matter how afflicted this old body is, I will struggle to breathe."

"You're in your prime. You told me that everything really comes together at eighty."

"I had to because you would worry."

"I never worry about you, Little Father."

Chiun was interrupted from collecting that insult and depositing it in his bank of injustices by a knock on the door, which Remo answered. Three uniformed policemen and a plainclothes detective stood in the doorway. Other patrolmen and detectives were at other doors, Remo noticed. The police informed Remo that they had reason to believe that three visitors to the city, three conventioneers, had been brutally murdered. Something had hurled them down from the thirtieth floor. They were sure it was from the thirtieth floor because the elevator doors on this floor had been ripped open and the cage jammed half a floor up to make room for the falling men. The problem was that they could find no trace of the machine that did it. Did the occupants of this suite hear any kind of machine this morning?

Remo shook his head. But from behind him, Chiun spoke up clearly and, for him, quite loudly:

"How could we hear machinery with all that racket this morning?" he demanded.

The police wanted to know what racket.

"The bawdy screaming yells of drunken brutals," said Chiun.

"He's an old man," Remo said quickly. He added a little smile to show the police they should be tolerant of him.

"I am not old," said Chiun. "I am not even ninety by correct counting."

In Korean, Remo told him that in America, and the rest of the West for that matter, no one used the old Wan Chu calendar, which was so inaccurate it lost two months in a year.

And in Korean, Chiun answered that one used a calendar for grace and truth, not for mere hoarding of time. Like Westerners so obsessed with each precise day that they think they have lost something if one day disappeared in a week.

The police, confronted with the spectacle of two men speaking in a strange language, looked to each other in confusion.

"Perhaps that loud noise was the machine that killed those men?" asked the detective.

"No," said Remo. "It was people. He didn't hear any machines."

"Not surprising," said the detective, motioning for the others to get going. "No one else heard the machine, either. "

"Because of the singing," said Chiun.

Remo shook his head and was about to shut the door when he saw something he should not have seen. Walking through the police line into a murder scene in which Remo and Chiun might be connected was a man in a tight dark three-piece gray suit, with a parched lemony expression, gray hair parted with painful neatness, and steel-rimmed glasses.

It was Harold W. Smith, and he should not have been there. The organization was set up to do the things that America didn't want to be associated with but that were necessary for survival. So secret was it that outside of Smith, only the President knew of its existence. So necessary was secrecy that a phony execution had been staged so that its one killer arm would have the fingerprints of a dead man, a dead man for an organization that could never be known to exist. The fact that Remo was an orphan and would not be missed was a significant factor in his selection. There had been another man who was almost, chosen, but he had a mother.