"It is much too expensive, Pater," Harold had said flatly.
"Properly taken care of," his father had said, "a suit made by this concern will last half a lifetime. You may find less-expensive tailors, who use cheaper goods and inferior stitching. But I guarantee that the best three suits you can find elsewhere will all wear out before this one suit has fulfilled its duty."
Harold had frowned. He was going to Dartmouth College in the fall. There were textbooks to purchase and other incidentals.
But he had swallowed his horror and bought the suit. The concern was still in business, and approximately every decade he went back for alterations or a new suit. His father was correct. If that first suit he bought ever came back into style, Harold could wear it again without fear for the stitching.
When he was dressed and knotting his hunter green Darmouth tie, Harold Smith retrieved his suitcase, kissed his oblivious wife on the forehead and drove his habitual route to Folcroft Sanitarium.
It was an ordinary late-October day. It wouldn't remain ordinary very long.
All hope of ordinariness was shattered once Smith had booted up the desktop computer. The overnight trolling programs began announcing themselves.
Smith saved certain files as nonurgent. The strife in Mexico, Macedonia and the former Yugoslavia hadn't developed overnight complications. They could keep.
Smith let out an audible gasp when the screen announced it had been tracking the Master of Sinanju.
Smith called up the file. It showed a string of credit-card charges. The expenses would normally have made Smith pale. But the mere fact that Chiun had resurfaced after all these weeks overcame Smith's natural revulsion at wasting taxpayers' money.
The first charge concerned a flight from Yuma, Arizona, to Phoenix. From Phoenix the Master of Sinanju had flown to New York City.
Oddly enough he hadn't remained there very long. Arrival at LaGuardia was at one in the afternoon, and the next travel charge showed a New York City-to-Boston flight at 3:09.
There the trail ended.
Smith frowned. The last charge he had tracked back in July showed Remo and Chiun flying to Yuma, and after that it was as if they had fallen off the planet. No Yuma-based charges had surfaced.
In fact, no charges at all.
Now Chiun had returned to Boston, where he and Remo lived.
Smith accessed Remo's credit-card account but found it still inactive.
"Odd," he mused. "They go to Yuma then disappear. Now the Master of Sinanju has returned but without Remo."
What could have happened?
A chill washed over Harold Smith as he exited the credit-card files. Had Remo died? Was it possible?
Smith brought up Chiun's credit-card records again. There were incidental charges. Chiun had eaten at a Korean restaurant in midtown Manhattan whose name seemed to be the Soot Bull, but otherwise he hadn't remained in New York long. About three hours.
What business had Chiun in Manhattan? Smith wondered.
He was still wondering about that—and trying to remain awake by drinking successive cups of black coffee heavily sugared for the energy he knew he would need to get through a full workday on no sleep—when his secretary brought a Federal Express package to him.
"This just came, Dr. Smith."
"Thank you," Smith said, accepting the package.
It was a standard cardboard mailer the Federal Express people insisted upon calling letter size. Smith saw that the return address was in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the name of the sender was written in a familiar slashing approximation of English that suggested a Far Eastern calligrapher.
Chiun.
Zipping open the cardboard zipper seal, Smith extracted a single sheet of parchment. The note was written in the stylized English calligraphy the Master of Sinanju used.
Gracious Emperor,
Long, O long has the House served the Rome of the far west today. Long might it continue to serve. But the gods have decreed otherwise. We must submit to the will of the gods, even if we do not believe in the same gods. For if one sees sufficient summers, one will learn the bitter lesson that I have come to accept. It is too painful to speak of here, and so I will not spoil the acute ceremony of our parting. Farewell, O Smith. May your days be without number.
P.S. The enclosed tablet is yours. If the pain of loss proves unendurable, perhaps you will find comfort in its solace.
Harold Smith looked at the black ink letters as they swam before his bleary eyes.
The Master of Sinanju was abandoning America. There was no other interpretation possible.
But what was meant by the enclosed tablet? Smith looked into the cardboard mailer and found wrapped in pearly silk the coffin-shaped poison pill that Remo had taken from him months before, vowing not to return it until Smith had located Remo's parents, living or dead.
Smith returned it to the watch pocket of his gray vest and leaned back in his cracked leather chair, his face drained of all color and expression. He sat that way for a very long time.
It struck Harold Smith as he sipped his sixth cup of hot coffee for the morning. The coffee cup dropped from his shocked fingers to spill its scalding contents all over his gray lap. His gray eyes went round and grim behind the glass shields of his rimless glasses. His gray skin paled to a color that could only be called scraped bone.
Harold Smith knew the answer to the question in his mind even as he called up the AP news briefs.
The uproar in the General Assembly of the United Nations had occurred at approximately 1:30 in the afternoon. Less than an hour after Chiun had landed in LaGuardia. He had eaten at the Soot Bull about an hour later. Then he had departed for Boston.
Smith knew with absolute certainty who had addressed the General Assembly in that time frame. He also had an excellent idea of what had thrown the body into chaos. Why the delegates had rushed to their home capitals. Smith also had a distinct suspicion about what these delegates were discussing at this very minute with their leaders.
Harold Smith knew all this because there was only one possible thing the Master of Sinanju could have told the General Assembly that accounted for everything that had followed.
No one had declared war.
Instead, the House of Sinanju had offered its services to the highest bidder in the swiftest, most breathtakingly dramatic fashion possible. And in capitals the world over, treasures were being audited, offers calculated and the greatest bidding war in human history was about to begin.
A war for control of the deadliest assassin to ply his trade in this century. A war in which there could be but one winner and the price for losing was absolute and final.
A war the United States could not afford to lose.
The Master of Sinanju sat in the meditation tower of the castle bestowed upon him by the grateful Emperor of America. Sixteen were the chambers, and each chamber boasted its own kitchen and bathing room, as well as two bedrooms.
As he inscribed the words on a parchment scroll set on the hardwood floor and held flat with semiprecious stones set at each of the four corners, Chiun wondered if it would appear to future generations that Chiun, who was Master for the majority of what the West called the twentieth century but was actually the fiftieth—Western culture having flourished late—was a shameless braggart.
Chiun didn't wish to appear to boast to his descendants. Perhaps it would be better to strike the description of the chambers. Sixteen chambers was sufficient to convey to future Masters, especially considering that the land known to Koreans as Mi-Guk was unlikely to prosper much beyond this century.
Looking at the scroll with its fresh-inked pre-Hangul characters, the Master of Sinanju weighed the consequences of striking these offending lines. It would be messy. He didn't wish to be called Chiun the Messy Scribe.
On reflection, he let them stand. It would be better to move Castle Sinanju, block by block, to the village of Sinanju, where his descendants could examine it for themselves. This way no one could deny the generosity of America the Forgotten—and by implication understand that Chiun the Neat was a superb negotiator.