Warren Murphy: The Arms of Kali

"All I ask," Remo said, "is that no matter what happens, you will never tell anyone about me, what you have seen, or why you have decided to turn state's evidence."

"I promise. We are brothers," sobbed the man.

And Remo repeated a line from a dating club that advertised trips to the Caribbean. "You meet such nice friends here." And then his smile faded and he said, "And if you speak the wrong things, I will meet you again." The voice was ice cold.

He flew out on Prinair to Miami, and from there to a hotel in Boston which he had been calling home for the last month. He was a man without a place, attuned to the forces of a universe which did not contain one roof he could ever get used to.

Inside the penthouse of the Ritz Carlton, overlooking the Boston Common, the floor was strewn with posters, some of them in English, some with Korean lettering.

They all said either "Stop" or "Halt."

On a small table just inside the door was a petition with three signatures. One in Korean headed the list, and then there was the scrawl of the maid and the room-service waiter.

"We're growing," came a squeaky voice from the parlor of the hotel suite.

Remo walked inside. An old man in a sun-yellow afternoon kimono, embroidered with the gentle dragons of life, pored over the lettering on a new poster. The man had small wisps of a beard and parchment-yellow skin. His hazel eyes shone with joy.

"I didn't hear you sign the petition," he said.

"You know I am not going to sign. I can't sign," said Remo.

"I know now that you are not going to sign. I know now that gratitude has its limits. That the finest years of a lifetime have been for naught, that the very blood of life I poured into a white thing has proven again to be worthless. I do deserve this," the old man said.

"Little Father," said Remo to the only man in the world he could call friend, Chiun, Master of Sinanju, latest grand assassin of the House of Sinanju, keeper of all that house's ancient wisdoms which Remo too now had in his being, "I cannot sign that document. I told you that before I left. I told you why before I left."

"You told me why when we had only my signature," Chiun said. "Now we have others. We are growing. This city and then the nation will be the pioneer group of a new mass movement, returning the world to sanity and mankind to justice."

"What do you mean, justice?" Remo asked.

"All movements talk of justice. You can't have a movement without a call to justice."

"This isn't justice we're talking about," Remo said.

"It is just," Chiun said solemnly. His English was precise, his voice high-pitched. "The most just. And for the public good, for their safety and eternal freedom."

"What safety? What freedom?" Remo said.

"Read," said Chiun proudly. He handed Remo the rough copy of the new poster he had been drawing. The English letters were scrawled like the writing of a palsied man, but the Korean characters were clean and artistic, with a clarity that approached grace. Remo had never been good at foreign languages, but he had learned Korean over the years as Sinanju had been drilled into his body and mind and soul. So he read.

The poster called for an end to amateur assassins: "STOP WANTON KILLING," it read. "THE AMATEUR ASSASSINS LITTER YOUR STREETS WITH BLOOD, YOUR PALACES WITH CORPSES, AND RUIN A VITAL PART OF ANY ECONOMY. BRING BACK ORDER. BRING BACK A SENSE OF DIGNITY TO THE KINGDOM. END THE BLIGHT OF THE AMATEUR ASSASSINS WHO KILL WITHOUT PAY OR REASON. HIRE ONLY THE PROFESSIONAL FOR YOUR NEEDS."

Remo shook his head sadly. "What do you think this is going to do, Little Father? It's already against the law in America to kill someone."

"Of course. And why? The amateur assassin, the spouse-basher, the political murderer, the thrill-seeker who does not care about professional standards. Of course it is outlawed. I would outlaw it too the way it is done nowadays."

"It is killing, Chiun," said Remo, and he went to the window overlooking a very old piece of real estate, acres of lawns and gardens in Boston that once the goodly citizens were allowed to use as common pasturage, now called the Boston Common. Those citizens had belonged and now their descendants belonged. A sharecropper from Georgia could come to the Roxbury district of this city and belong. Someone could sail in from Portugal and find a community where he belonged. But Remo did not belong; he would never belong.

"It's killing, no matter how well it's done," he said, without turning around. "That's what it is and maybe those old emperors feared Sinanju and paid Sinanju, but they didn't want them around for breakfast or for an afternoon party."

"They were emperors. They had their ways. Every great emperor had his great assassin," said Chiun. He smoothed his kimono and assumed the posture of powerful presence, the one of dignity and respect which another Master of Sinanju, many centuries before, had demanded that the Ming Dynasty rulers show him.

"They had them where no one could see them," Remo insisted.

"Where everyone saw them. Where everyone saw them," Chiun said, his squeaky voice rising to tea kettle shrillness from the indignity of it all. "For here is the truth. Only in this country is it a thing of shame."

Remo did not answer. How many hundreds of times, thousands of times, in fact, had he tried to explain that they worked for an organization which had to remain secret? Two decades before, the people who ran the United States had come to realize that the country could not survive the coming turbulent years while living within the strict confines of its Constitution. So they set up an organization that did not exist, because to admit that it did would be to admit that the basis of the country-the Constitution itself-did not work.

The organization was named CURE and it would operate outside the law to try to preserve the law and the nation.

Of course, eventually, there had to be an enforcement arm to mete out the punishment that the courts could not or would not mete out. The enforcement arm was Remo Williams, former policeman who had been framed for a murder he did not commit, and sentenced to die in an electric chair that did not work. It had happened a long time ago in a state Remo had once called home. A long time ago, when he had had a home. Now his only place was not a place at all. It was his training as an assassin, given in full measure by Chiun, the reigning Master of Sinanju, only because he expected Remo to follow him as the next reigning Master.

CURE thought it had paid, in gold, for Chiun to train Remo. It did not understand that what Chiun had given Remo could not have been purchased at any price. It had been given to Remo because Chiun had found no one in Sinanju, a rocky windswept village in North Korea, who had the character to become the next Master in the long unbroken line of assassins from Sinanju. Chiun never admitted this in so many words to Remo. Chiun did not admit such things to whites. And there was another reason also. One of the ancient scrolls of the House of Sinanju talked about a white man who would be dead, but who would nonetheless, be trained to become the Master of Sinanju. This white man would become the greatest Master of all, because he was more than just a man: he was the enbodiment of Shiva, the Destroyer God. Chiun believed that Remo was this white man. Remo thought that this was a porcelain crock of crap. But he did not tell Chiun that, one did not tell Chiun such things.

Remo was still silent and Chiun said, "Sulking is never a sufficient response to anything."

"I could tell you again but you wouldn't hear it."

"I have given the best years of my life, the sacred years of my life, to breathe Sinanju into your soul, and now you are ashamed of it."

"I'm not ashamed."

"Then how can you label what an assassin does as killing? Simple killing. An auto kills. A fall kills. A mushroom kills. We do not kill."