Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

But that was not Remo’s problem either, nor was secrecy about so many things anymore.

‘Hello,’ said the little girl. ‘My dog’s name is Puffin and mine is Nora and I have a brother J. P. and Timmy and an Aunt Geri, what’s yours?’

‘My aunt?’

‘No, your name,’ said Nora.

‘Remo. Remo Williams,’ said Remo who had been Remo Pelham and Remo Barry and Remo Bednick and Remo so many things, but now he was Remo Williams again and that was his name and it felt good in the saying of it. ‘Remo Williams. Do you want to see something amazing nobody else can do in the whole wide world, except a very few people from a far-off land?’

‘Possibly,’ said Nora.

‘I can run up that chairlift.’

‘That’s silly,’ Nora said. ‘So can I. Anybody can run up the hill.’

‘No. On the lines, right up over the chairs, along that steel band that goes from support to support.’

‘You cannot. Nobody can do that.’

‘I can do it,’ said Remo. ‘You watch.’

And he ran to a silent empty chair and with a leap was one hand on it, and without breaking motion, pulled himself above it and onto the wire.

Nora laughed and clapped, and then Remo ran upward, keeping the balance of his body centred, his bare feet hardly touching the metal, hot in the late spring sun.

It was not training, not as Chiun would call it training, because he was not using his mind, focusing his forces. Rather he was showing off for a little girl and just running, running upward, over a little depression in the ground that put him 45 feet above it, over the chair hooks to the wire, up to the top of the mountain, and when he got there, he stood surveying the now-green ski slopes, the other mountains rising green into the blue sky. He could if he wished buy a home right there. Or even the whole mountain. Or even an island somewhere and throw coconuts for the rest of his life.

He was, as few men were, free. Whatever had caused the condition red was Smith’s problem and not his. So Smitty would probably take his own life. So what? Smitty knew what he had volunteered for. He bought the package. And that was the difference. Remo had never volunteered. Maybe he would return to Newark, which had been placed off limits to him when he was dragged aboard CURE’s ship of fools. Maybe he would see what Newark was like. So many years.

He thought about Smith again and then forced the thought from his mind. Smitty had volunteered and Remo hadn’t and that was that. He wasn’t going to give it one more thought. Not one.

He thought about how he wasn’t going to think about it, all the way down the wire, past the clapping little girl whom he ignored and into the lodge. He waited, dandling his leg nervously, while As the Planet Revolves moved into Dr. Lawrence Walters, Psychiatrist at Large, and various other daytime dramas where nothing ever happened but all the actors discussed the action, Remo had long ago attributed Chiun’s liking of the soap operas to the first warning signal of senility. To which Chiun had replied that in all the crassness of America, it had produced one great art form and this was it, and that if Remo were Korean, he could appreciate beauty, but since Remo could not appreciate anything, not even the most valuable training in the history of mankind, how could he appreciate something as fine as a soap opera?

So Remo steamed as Dr. Carrington Blake explained to Willa Douglaston that her son, Bertram, faced a possible problem with Quaalude. Bertram, as Remo remembered from years past, had faced a problem first with marijuana, then with heroin, and then with cocaine, and now since Quaaludes were in, it was Quaaludes.

During one commercial, Chiun commented:

‘See an ungrateful son.’

Remo did not respond. What he had to say required more time than a mere commercial.

When the last show was to be continued and when Chiun turned from the set, Remo exploded.

‘I couldn’t care less what happened to Smith or the organization, Little Father. I couldn’t care less. I don’t care,’ Remo yelled. ‘You know what?’

Chiun sat silently.

‘You know what, Little Father?’ Remo yelled angrily. ‘You know what?’

Chiun nodded.

‘I’m happy,’ screamed Remo. ‘Happy, happy, happy.’

‘I am glad you are happy, Remo. Because if you are happy now, I would be most feared to see you when you were unhappy.’

‘I’m free now.’

‘Something has happened?’ asked Chiun.

‘Right. The organization is coming apart,’ Remo said. Chiun, he knew, had a vague understanding of CURE, vague to a large degree because CURE fulfilled the basic requirement of Chiun’s services by paying regularly, and after that it meant little to Chiun what CURE really did. He called it ‘the emperor’ because it was the tradition of the House of Sinanju to serve emperors.

‘Then we will find another emperor to serve,’ Chiun said. ‘See now my wisdom. Because we have faithfully served one, we always have employment in the future.’

‘I don’t want to work for anyone else,’ said Remo.

Korean mutterings emanated from Chiun’s mouth and Remo knew they were not complete sentences, just minor curses, a few of which he recognized such as ‘White man’, ‘pigeon droppings’, and something that could only be translated into English as ‘rotted bellies of untamed pigs’. There was, of course, the traditional casting of jewels into mud and the inability of even a Master of Sinanju to transform rice husks into a banquet.

‘And of your training, what of that?’ Chiun said. ‘Of the years given you that have never been given to white men before? What of that? You have, I must confess, in all your training, made an adequate beginning. Yes, I will say it. Adequate. You have achieved adequacy… for a beginner.’

‘Thank you, Little Father,’ Remo said. ‘But you’ve never really understood why I do these things.’

‘Understood, yes. Appreciated, no. You say patriotism, love of country. But who has given you the secrets of Sinanju—America or the Master of Sinanju?’

‘America paid for it.’

‘They paid money and for that I could have given you the master of Kung Fu, Aiki and Karate. They would not have known the difference. They would have thought how wonderful he can break bricks with his hands and arms and kick things with his feet. These are mere games compared to Sinanju. You know that well.’

‘Yes, I do, Little Father.’

‘We are assassins; these people are little dancers.’

‘I know that.’

‘Dr. Smith would have been delighted with a dancer, but I gave you Sinanju, to a white man I gave it honestly, and made even the walls of stone but powder in the wind before your steps. These things—I, Master of Sinanju, gave you.’

‘Yes, Little Father.’

‘And now you throw them aside like so much old clothing.’

‘I will never forget what you have…’

‘Forget. How dare you say you will not forget? Have you learned nothing? Each day you fail to remember, you forget. Knowing is not a question of not forgetting, it is a question of remembering with your body, with your mind and with your very nerves. That which is not remembered every moment is lost.’

‘Little Father, I don’t want to kill any more.’

Stricken with the statement, Chiun was silent for a moment, and Remo knew he could get the full treatment of the benevolent master and the ungrateful student. He would get the history of Sinanju, how this poor village, unable to support itself, rented its assassins out to the emperors of China, and how if a Master of Sinanju failed, the babies of the village would be drowned, because drowning was better than starving. It was called sending the babies home and Remo had heard it countless times. It came down to whether you killed your assignments or the innocent babies of Sinanju.