Warren Murphy: Murder Ward

He smelled the salt Pacific breeze and felt the December cold that kept car windows closed and left many rear windows clouded with steam.

The cold he handled simply, by letting his body become one with it, as he was taught. The wind he handled another way. It was not that his body fought the wind; it was that his body became stronger than the wind by becoming part of the bridge, connected by his very thoughts to the support driven deep into the bedrock that bordered the Bay.

"Are you waiting for applause?" came the squeaky Oriental voice from behind him. "Or are you about to make a great production of a simple exercise?"

"Thank you for distracting me. I really needed a distraction. If there's one thing I needed standing two hundred feet above open water with a winter wind whipping at me, it's a distraction," said Remo, turning around to the wispy Oriental in a dark black kimono, whose strands of white hair flew in the wind like vagrant silk threads, but who stood just as securely on the pedestrian walk as Remo did on the railing.

"If your mind is a slave to every noise, do not blame the noise for your subservience," said Chiun, the Master of Sinanju. "It is not a master that makes a slave, but a slave who makes those about him a master."

"Thank you for a very merry Christmas, Little Father."

"If your heart remains with a white man's holiday, then perhaps I should stand on that bar with you lest you fall, for truly, not even the House of Sinanju can overcome treasured bad habits."

"Well, I'm not going ga-ga over the Feast of the Pig."

"It is not called the Feast of the Pig," said Chiun. "It is a day when those who feel obligated to someone who has given them much wisdom return some small little offering of thanksgiving."

"You're not getting Barbra Streisand," Remo said. "We don't give women like that around here."

"She would be good for bearing children. And seeing your shoddiness of performance, the House of Sinanju needs another male."

"She's not Korean, Little Father. She's as white as I am."

"For beauty, one makes an exception. The blood of Sinanju should overcome any inadequacies. And then I would get a pupil without learned bad habits and arrogance and talkativeness. Even the greatest of artists has difficulty moulding hardened clay."

Remo turned back to the cold wind. He knew its sound was there but he did not hear it. He knew the cold was there but he did not feel it. He knew the bridge was beneath him and around him but he did not sense it. He was moving along a thin bar at an outside angle above dark waters and his thoughts and feelings were the center of his balance. He could run for days like this, he felt, and though he was aware of the lights of cars moving at him and beside him, they were not in his world. His world was passing them faster and faster and as his world approached the far side of the bridge, he reversed it in a spin that stopped not with his feet because his bones could not support that sort of jarring pressure, but with the very stopping of his world. And then he was moving back toward Chiun, the Master of Sinanju.

It had all started so simply a decade before with exercises that caused pain that he had never known his body could endure. But then the pain became different and the exercises that were at first difficult became easy, until his body knew what to do from distant memory and his mind moved on to other things.

It was more than a change in the quality of his skills; it was a change of his very nervous system and his being. And if he had been truthful with Chiun, he would have admitted that most of his loneliness at Christmastime had left years before and he was now in his soul more a descendant of Sinanju, that tiny village in North Korea which had through the centuries produced assassins for the kings and emperors whose gold supported the rocky village where nothing seemed to grow.

Remo was the first Caucasian to be taught the secrets of Sinanju. For in hiring himself to "Upstairs," Chiun had agreed to train, instead of perform, and Chiun once admitted that he had given Remo more than what he called "the little tricks" of kung fu, aikido, and tae kwan do. He had given Remo the source of them all—Sinanju. And Upstairs had its white assassin who could move freely in a white society. Neat.

Remo's world moved back to Chiun, standing almost invisible on the walkway, and then Remo stopped, still motionless, still in perfect harmony with the deep-sunk bridge supports.

"You may begin," said Chiun.

"Begin? I've finished, Little Father."

"Did you really? I was not watching. I was thinking about my home across the waters. In the cold mornings, I think of Sinanju. I think of how there would be a gift waiting for me if I were home. I do not know what the gift would look like, or if she would be as gracious as the singer of songs, but it is not the size of the breast or hip, but the thought that counts. Oh, if I were but home."

"I can't give you a human being, Little Father."

"Who am I to expect a little nothing of a remembrance from one who has received so much from me?"

"If you want something warm, I'll get you a cow," said Remo.

"I already have a cow. He talks back to me," said Chiun, and Remo heard that cackle that indicated this saying would be coming back at him for several days. Along with the cackle.

"I have a cow already. He talks back to me," Chiun repeated. As much to get away from the tinkly laugh as anything else, Remo ran the Golden Gate again. This time he heard voices yelling, intruding into his moving world.

"That's him. Stop him. My God. He's going sideways. I don't believe it. Look at how fast he's going. He's going to jump. There. That guy on the bridge. Stop him."

When he returned to Chiun, he received a nod of recognition and hopped down from the railing.

"In Persia, the shah would have given a Master of Sinanju his own daughter. In Rome, the emperor once made an offering of a captured queen. In the great Selucid empire, ah, the great Selucid empire, they knew truly how to treat a Master of Sinanju. In Africa, the Loni [*See Destroyer #12, Slave Safari] showed before your very eyes the proper respect paid to a Master of Sinanju. But in America, in America, I get a cow. A cow who talks back to me."

"Fish again for the meal, Little Father," said Remo, referring to the day meal that was several hours away, but might change the subject.

"If the fish does not talk back to me," said Chiun. "Heh, heh, heh."

A patrol car, its bubble light flashing, dashed past them toward the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

"I attracted some attention back there, Little Father."

"Clumsiness always wins an audience. True perfection is a quiet, hidden thing."

"Thank you once again, Little Father, for a merry Christmas."

When they returned to the Marina apartment overlooking the Bay that Upstairs had rented for them during this rest period, Remo found one of the shrubs in the front yard had been uprooted and was sitting in the middle of the rug, scattering dirt around the carpeting. On the branches of the shrub hung two punctured tennis balls, a golf ball popped open with incredible pressure and a slice of an apple. A bare yellow anti-bug light topped it all.

Chiun smiled. "For you. For your remembered customs."

"What is it, Little Father?"

"I made it for you. Since you cannot overcome your past, you might as well enjoy some of it"

Remo pointed to the cluttered bush.

"What is that thing?"

"Do not make witticisms with me. It is a Christmas tree. For your enjoyment."

"That's not a Christmas tree, Little Father. A Christmas tree is a pine tree and the decorations are made of glass and the lights are coloured and…"

"It looks like a Christmas tree to me," said Chiun. "It looks just like a Christmas tree to me. It is green. It has things hanging on it. It has lights. It is a Christmas tree. I see no difference between that tree and the ones in the stores, except that I improved the form somewhat."