Warren Murphy: Holy Terror

Since that day that Upstairs had gotten riled over something that had happened in India—why India, Remo didn't know, since India had about as much to do with Upstairs' mission as potato soup did with the hypotenuse of a triangle—since that day Chiun had been collecting injustices, the long-suffering Korean in a land of white racists.

He would return to his village to tell them what he had endured for them, while hiring out his talents so that the payments could support the aged and the infirm and the poor of the village of Sinanju.

"If I were white, it would be a home run," said Chiun.

"First, Little Father, we were exercising. I was, at least. And we weren't playing baseball."

"You wouldn't play with a Korean. Like your Little League. I understand. You whites are all alike. Bigoted. Yet, I maintain myself above your pettiness."

Through the crack in the motel room wall, a face peered. As the face retreated, Remo and Chiun saw a ten-gallon Stetson on top of the face that was on top of a bare chest, bare waist, and bare everything else. The man retreated further from his side of the wall. There was something on the bed, however. Blond and ass sassy and nude as a defrocked tick.

"Hi, there, fellas," she cried.

"Shut your mouth, woman," said the man from under the hat. He turned back to the wall. "You there. You and the gook."

"Aha," said Chiun. "Gook."

"Shit," said Remo.

"You heard me. Gook. Gook. Gook."

"Aha. Aha. Aha," said Chiun. "I stand here humbly insulted. Yet enduring, for I am a man of peace. Of love. Of tranquility."

"Here we go," said Remo.

"You make this hole in the wall?" asked the man under the hat.

A long, bony finger disengaged from the tranquility of rest with the other hand and pointed accusingly at Remo.

"You did, fella, right?" said the hat to Remo.

"You have brought grief into my life," said Remo.

"You want gree-yuf? You gonna get gree-yuf," said the man under the hat, and Remo saw him put on tooled leather cowboy boots, pick up a shiny six-shot revolver from the clothes pile, and walk out of sight. Remo heard the door in the next room open and close and then heard a knock on his door.

"It's not locked," said Remo.

The man entered, six-feet-four of him, six-feet-eight of him in his boots. The gun pointed at Remo's head.

"You sumbitch, you fuck round with me and my woman, I blow yo' head off."

"You do it, Clete," shrieked the girl through the broken wall. "You down and do it. Shoot me somebody. If you love me, you'll shoot me somebody." She bobbled off the bed, her chest poppity popping up and down in front of her. She stuck her face close to the hole in the wall. Remo could smell the sickening booze on her breath.

"Which one you want first, Loretta?" said the man with the gun.

"The violence of Americans is shocking," said Chiun.

"Get the little talky gook, honey," said Loretta.

"Violence against a minority," intoned Chiun. "Whipped and scorned and abused."

"When have you ever been scorned, abused, or whipped? No Master of Sinanju has ever suffered," said Remo.

Clete cocked his gun. Chiun looked heavenward in beatific innocence. A martyr to violent racism. There was one small drawback to his suffering. As the gun cocked, ready and raised, and the finger closed on the trigger, a white plate moved at such a speed that its blur followed it and made its way underneath the hat to where Clete's mouth had been, to where Clete's cheek had been, so that now there was the hat and the top half of a face biting down on a white plate filling red with blood and the remnants of a lower jaw spread out red and bone fragments on a hairy chest. The gun dropped, unfired.

"Drat damn," said Loretta. "I never get anything I want. Clete? Clete? Clete?"

Clete went forward, clumping into the gray-carpeted floor. Around his head, the gray darkened in an ever widening pool.

"He couldn't raise it too good, neither," noted Loretta. "How 'bout you fellas, you want a piece?"

"A piece of what?" asked Chiun, who was suspicious of all Western dietary practices. He had promised Remo a real meal when they got to Sinanju, glory home of the East, pearl of the West Korea bay.

"A piece of me, pops."

"I am no cannibal," said Chiun, and Remo knew that this offer would also be included in tales of America… how some not only were cannibals, but some were volunteer dinners. This strangeness did the Master of Sinanju commit to memory.

"Oh, no, not that," said Loretta and made a circle of her left forefinger and thumb and rapidly penetrated and withdrew her right forefinger. "This," she said.

"You have done nothing to deserve me," said Chiun.

"How "bout you, cutie?" she said to Remo, who stood just about six feet tall, with a lean, sinuous body that aroused many women just when he walked in a room. His eyes were dark, deep-set above high cheekbones, and his thin lips creased in a small smile. His wrists were thick.

"I've got to get rid of the body," said Remo, looking at the nude, dead man.

"No, you don't. There's a reward for him. Clete's wanted in three states. You're gonna be famous. Famous."

"See what you did," said Remo, and Chiun turned his head away, above it all.

It was a good thing, thought Remo, that the room was only a meeting place and that none of Chiun's heavy baggage accompanied them.

"Where are you two running to? The television cameras will be here. The reporters too. You'll be famous."

"Yeah, great," said Remo, and they went quickly down the motel hallway with the blonde yelling after them. They moved in such a way that the blonde thought they took off up the road for Texas when they really slipped down into the parched bed of the Rio Hondo and moved upstream along the bleached gravel 200 yards west of the motel, and there they waited and saw policemen and ambulance and newsmen. And on the second day, when a particular gray Chevrolet Nova came up the road, Remo ran out of the river bed and flagged it down.

"A little incident, Smitty," said Remo to the lemony-faced man in his late fifties, heading off any questions about why he was not in the prearranged motel room.

Remo signaled Chiun to follow him to the car, but the Master of Sinanju did not move.

"Will you come on? We've already spent a night in a frigging ditch because of you."

"I would talk to Emperor Smith," said Chiun.

"All right," said Remo sighing. "He'll only talk to you, Smitty."

As Remo watched Smith's gray head disappear into the river bed behind a large brown bush where Chiun sat, he could not help but think of the first time he had seen Smith. Remo had just come to in Folcroft Sanitarium on Long Island Sound, so many years before. As it was explained, Remo had been recruited, via a phony electrocution for a framed-up murder, to work for a secret organization, one that would work quietly outside the law to help give the law a better chance to work.

Smith was the man who headed the organization, and, besides Remo and the president of the United States, was the only person who knew it existed. Remo had lived with the secret for years. He was officially dead, and now working for an organization that did not exist. He was its one-man killer arm, and Chiun his trainer.

Remo watched Smith trudge back up the wash.

"He wants an apology," said Smith, who wore a gray suit and white shirt even in Roswell, New Mexico.

"From me?"

"He wants you to take back your racist remarks. And I think you should know we value his skills highly. It was a great service he did making you what you are."

"What was I while all this was going on? An innocent bystander?"

"Just apologize, Remo."

"Go dip a donkey," said Remo.

"We're not getting out of here until you apologize. Frankly I'm surprised that you are a racist. I thought you and Chiun had become very close."