"Why strange?" said Remo. "A duffer with one lucky hit and three bad ones."
"There is a custom in Sinanju. When you wish to disgrace someone, to show that he is not even worth the killing, the ancient custom is to deliver four blows, then walk away and let your opponent die."
"You think that's what happened here?" Remo.
"I do not know what happened here, but I tell you to be careful until you join me in Sinanju."
"I'm not coming, Little Father," insisted Remo.
"By the next full moon," said Chiun, and then he signed the insurance form Smith put in his hands with a complicated ideograph that looked like the word IF drawn between two parallel lines.
As Chiun's plane took off, Smith said, "A mysterious man."
"Mysterious is just a western term for rude and thoughtless," said Remo as he felt the chill from nearby Lake Michigan whip over the guard rail at O'Hare.
"Mysterious is my term for what you and he are able to accomplish, what you do. For instance, without using guns."
Remo watched the white painted 707 with the stripes of red thrust into the air, its jets bellowing heat and smoke.
"It's not that complicated when you know," he said. "It makes a lot of sense. It's simple when you know, but in its execution it can be complicated. Especially in its simplicity."
"That's not really clear," said Smith.
"Look at him," said Remo as he saw the plane circle. "Look at him. Just going home like that. Well, I guess he's got a right to."
"You didn't say why you didn't use a gun."
"A gun sends a missile. Your hands are more controlled."
"Your hands are. But it's not karate, is it, or one of those?"
"No," said Remo. "Not one of those." Chicago was a cold and lonely place.
"Why you? Why Chiun? What makes you different?"
The plane too quickly became a speck. "What?" asked Remo.
"Why are you two so effective? I've had comparison readouts done with the martial arts, and once in a while there is an isolated instance of one of the things you do, but by and large it's just nothing like what you do."
"Oh, that," said Remo. "The guys with the wooden boards and their hands and stuff like that."
"Stuff like that," said Smith.
"Well, I'll try to explain," said Remo, and he explained as well as he could, as well as he had tried to explain it to himself. For he had not learned it in terms of almost anything he had known before meeting the Master of Sinanju.
First, the main difference might be the simple comparison of a professional football player and a touch football player. An injury that would send a Sunday touch passer to the sidelines wouldn't even be felt by a linebacker in the National Football League.
"The pro does it for his living. It's beyond those levels of entertainment or even ambition. It's survival. The pro lives by what he does. There's no comparison. The second is Sinanju itself. It was, like, born out of desperation. I've heard it from Chiun. Farming and fishing were so poor in that village that they had to drown their own babies."
"I know that the Masters of Sinanju supported their village by renting themselves out," Smith said. "Frankly, with the communists in North Korea I thought that might end."
"Well, it might end in fact, but where Sinanju started, the method and the thought, was every Master knowing it was the life of his target or the life of his village's children. Every Master. For thousands of years. Down to Chiun."
"Okay," said Smith. "For them, survival. But why your high competence?"
"Well, in learning, the Masters of Sinanju found out that most human muscles were on their way to becoming vestigial organs like the appendix. They learned that most everyone uses maybe ten percent of his strength or intelligence or what have you. Chiun's secret is teaching the muscles and nerves and stuff to use maybe thirty per cent. Or forty."
"That's what he does? Forty percent?"
"That's what I do," said Remo. "Chiun's the Master of Sinanju. He does one hundred per cent. On his bad days."
"And that's the explanation?"
"That's the explanation," said Remo, turning from the guardrail. "As to whether it's the truth, I don't have the vaguest. It's the way I explain it."
"I see," said Smith.
"No, you don't," said Remo. "And you never will."
CHAPTER FOUR
When Hawley Bardwell killed his first man with his hands, he knew he had to kill another. It was not like his first tackle in a football game where he heard the knee of the halfback pop in his ear. That was good. But to see a man going to die when you hit him with just your hand was beyond satisfaction.
It was like discovering you had this tremendous need only when it had been filled, and then, in a rush of feeling so good, Bardwell had stepped back on the bare, new polished wooden floor of that drafty castle and watched the black belt guy spin backward, reaching to support the shoulder that would never move again.
It was so simple it was laughable. The guy, named Ashley something, Bill Ashley or Ashley Williams or whatever, had taken that sanchin-dachi stance and had made a simple block, and then the left blocking arm itself was used to crack back into the joint. With the first pain of that, Bardwell had his second stroke right into the joint, and that was the beginning. Of course, he didn't have that guy all to himself. He had to share him, but he knew it was his blow that started it and when they left the guy squirming on the floor, that cold floor, pinned by the pain in his own joints, Bardwell knew football, karate, even three years boxing professionally, was like 3.2 beer compared to white lightning. It just didn't compare.
So when Mr. Winch promised him his own kill, personal, nobody else to share, Hawley Bardwell almost fell down and kissed his instructor's feet. Mr. Winch was what he had always wanted as a coach or as a commander in the Marines. Mr. Winch understood. Mr. Winch had given him the power. No matter how tempting so far, Hawley Bardwell, six-feet-four of hard knotted muscle and chilling blue eyes and a face that looked as if it were hacked out of a stone wall, kept his hands to their purposes assigned by Mr. Winch.
And when he had to wait by the cemetery in Rye, New York, and when a man who looked like his hit, but really wasn't, came to pay respects to one of the graves, that William Ashley, Hawley Bardwell held back. It was not the man. He was almost six feet tall with high cheekbones and deepset brown eyes, but he didn't have those thick wrists. So Hawley Bardwell waited his week as Mr. Winch had told him, and then drove down to New York City, parking his car in one of those incredibly expensive garages his wife had warned him about, and went to the Waldorf Astoria where he asked for Mr. Sun Yee as Mr. Winch had instructed.
Mr. Sun Yee was, of course, Mr. Winch, who said that he took many names, "Winch" being closest to what his name really was.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Winch," said Bardwell to the shorter man who met him in a shimmering green kimono.
"Come in, Bardwell," said Winch. "I take it you did not see your target."
"Right. How'd ya know?"
"I know many things," said Winch and smiled. Bardwell felt uneasy about the smile, like a tickle in his stomach. If Lynette had not been so specific when they had started their journey to Scotland about Mr. Winch being the best thing—next to her of course—in Hawley's life, he might, even with his great respect, be suspicious of Mr. Winch. Great man, but that smile was something else.
"Well, let's see how much you have remembered," said Mr. Winch and Hawley Bardwell assumed the stance he had been drilled in and then redrilled in, and redrilled in. Knowing enough about the martial arts he knew there were other stances, but Mr. Winch had always said he must get this one right and feeling a hand on his spine, he knew he still didn't have it down perfectly.
This was the stance from which he had struck the blow in the castle. You stood with your weight within yourself, not rested on any foot, not so much evenly distributing the weight, but keeping the weight inside yourself, and being within yourself, you struck from the inside of your weight. From the outside, it looked like someone standing with feet slightly apart, almost slouching, and the blow came pop, first pushing the left-hand block back into your man's shoulder, then following. It sounded like po-pop when done right. Standing in the hotel suite, Hawley remembered the delicious sound of his hit's shoulder going po-pop.
Mr. Winch clapped and Hawley's big right arm slapped out first flat for the block and then instantly turning into the nukite hand sword it was supposed to be.