"Remo, what's going on?" Harold Smith demanded.
"Just hold on, Luigi."
"You a cop?" the dealer demanded.
"Just an interested bystander."
"If you ain't a cop, then you're moving in on my territory!" Reaching into the back of his pants, he yanked out a snubby handgun. "Hand it over."
Remo extended the dope and let go of it. In the moment the drug dealer's attention was distracted by the plummeting bag of controlled substance the handgun somehow became turned around in his hands, with his thumb depressing the trigger. He started to shout, and Remo nudged the muzzle of the weapon into his mouth. A great red mess suddenly covered the sidewalk. Remo snatched his bag of drugs before it hit the ground.
"I'm here, Smitty."
"Are you calling me from the middle of a job?"
"No, job's done. I just got tangled in some superfluous details and now they're untangled."
A man in a sleeveless undershirt and a dirty apron stepped out of the front of the grocery, looked down at the corpse and the mess on the sidewalk, then peered quizzically at Remo. Remo shrugged. The grocer retreated inside.
"You get any samples?" Smith asked.
"Got 'em. You were right about the perpetrators. They howled like dogs."
"Get those samples shipped here ASAP and maybe we'll figure out what's making it happen."
The wail of a siren filled the dingy block, and a Nashville Police Department squad car rolled around the corner. As the crowds gathered, Remo slipped through the cops trying to take control of the scene. A scene that appeared, as unlikely as it seemed, to be a suicide. The victim was on the ground with the front end of his handgun wedged squarely in his mouth, hand on the trigger.
If only a few more drug dealers took care of themselves like that, one of the cops observed, the world would be a better place.
The police never even saw Remo slip past them.
Chapter 7
The colors of the late-afternoon sun played over the peaceful community of cookie-cutter duplexes in Stamford, Connecticut, painting bright colors on the windows and lengthening the shadows of hopscotching children. Inside one of the duplexes a phone started to ring.
The ringing lasted twenty minutes. It stopped, then rang again, for twenty more minutes.
The childlike figure in the kimono sat cross-legged on the mat in the empty-looking living room, performing a nearly impossible feat: ignoring the ringing. Truly ignoring it. The endless electronic jangling did not annoy or even distract him. This was not a child at all, but an old Asian man. So old, in fact, he could have used his age to make himself a celebrity, had he chosen to.
There was a sheaf of empty parchment pages on the mat. There was another such stack on a mat across from him. A quill pen was placed next to each stack of paper. He ignored these as well. He was staring into space, not smiling, but somehow with contentment on a face that was as dry and pale as the parchment but far more wrinkled. When the phone paused and started to ring yet again, the Asian rose and lifted the receiver from its wall mount. He put it to his ear, saying nothing.
"Master Chiun, is that you?"
"Yes, Emperor Smith."
"Were you out?"
"Out of what?"
"Is something wrong, Master Chiun? Were you sleeping?"
"I have been reciting Ung."
"I see. I've been letting the phone ring for the better part of an hour."
"I was reciting Ung. It is an absorbing and beautiful literature."
"I see. Well-"
"The people of the Western world cannot allow their attention to rest on any one thought for long. They are children who become bored with playthings and look for another plaything and then another."
"I suppose that's true-"
"I blame Homer."
HAROLD SMITH HAD been struggling to change the direction of the conversation. He knew little of Ungian poetry, other than it was extremely lengthy and endlessly repetitive, and he knew the old Korean named Chiun could lecture about it for hours, interweaving his diatribe with discourses on the inadequacies of those who didn't enjoy it-a population that likely included everyone on Earth save Chiun himself.
But now the old Master of Sinanju had piqued his interest. Smith studied the classics during his university years, which was decades earlier, and was proud that he retained much of his classical education.
"Surely you don't mean the Greek poet Homer?" Smith asked.
"Of course I mean the Greek poet," Chiun sniffed. "Has there ever been another famous Homer?"
"Not that I know of," Smith agreed. "But Homer penned the great epics." He knew he shouldn't be having this conversation, but somehow he couldn't steer off the subject.
"Pah. He made outlandish adventure tales," Chiun retorted. "He put sex and violence and low-brow ribaldry on every page to keep the dim-witted entertained, and he broke his stories into convenient segments that could be read quickly before the reader lost his concentration. From there it was just a few short centuries before that abominable playwright popularized the formula for the masses. Now the West produces hackneyed films and miserable, fatuous 'literature' that is all derivative of the abhorrent formula Homer scribbled on vellum three thousand years ago."
"I don't think you understand the true impact his writing had on the world," Smith insisted.
"Ungian poetry, on the other hand, is written without the artificial structure of a series of events that lead a character careening without purpose into one hair-levitating quandary after another. Ung explores a single, simple aspect of nature. It gives full value to its subject, be it a flower or a cliff face or a lichen mass in a tidal pool. It is truly in harmony with the nature it celebrates."
"But Homer can be appreciated by the common man," Smith countered. "In fact, the Iliad was likely a transcription of stories that had been in the oral tradition for centuries-the Odyssey may have been, as well."
"Circuses for the rabble," Chiun declared. "Thank goodness his rivals in certain neighboring empires saw wisdom in hiring competent assassins to carry out a literary coup de grace before he could distribute his other stacks of quill scratchings. I can't imagine what seventeen more 'epics' would have done to further degrade the Western intellect."
Smith was flabbergasted at the implication. "Are you saying Homer was assassinated by Sinanju?"
"Trust me, Emperor, the other epics are as lacking in merit as the two that are known to the modern world."
Smith's dismay deepened. "Master Chiun, are you saying Sinanju possesses them? That you've read them?"
"What is the purpose of your call, Emperor Smith? Remo has not yet returned, and when he arrives he will be indisposed for many hours."
Harold W Smith, with an effort, forced himself to focus on the cold data windows filling the display under the surface of his great, black onyx desk. These dispassionate reports were his world. Why had he become so distracted? "I am afraid Remo's not returning to Connecticut tonight. He's in Nashville."
"I see," Chiun said after a frosty silence.