"No ploy. No tricks up my sleeve. I promise you I'll give the lessons a shot."
THE WING SEEMED well anchored to the fuselage of the aircraft, but wings and limbs could become separated from their bodies easily enough. What Chiun had never understood was why such great masses of metal could not be made inflexible. But he had been assured that they were designed to wobble in the wind. And they all did. Wobble.
There had been a time when Chiun was worried about his unlikely protege for much the same reason he was worried now. It was just after Remo had, miraculously enough, passed through the Rite of Attainment.
Common sense decreed that Sinanju skills should never have flourished inside the inherently clumsy body of a white, but Remo had such skills in abundance. His proved Sinanju lineage only partially explained it.
But after his Attainment, after he solved the mystery of his parentage and offspring, there was a time when Remo had become, of all things, content.
Contentment was no good. Contentment led to complacency, and complacency could get a Master annihilated.
Then came a time of increasing hardship as the leaders of the world seemed to descend en masse into idiocy. The U.S. put in place a puppet president whose only possible qualification could be for entertainment purposes. The challenges to Remo became greater, as well, as he became afflicted with the Master's Disease and was haunted by the manifestation of the Master Who Never Was, foretelling worsening hardship.
It all seemed to culminate at the time of the Rite of Succession, when Remo's ritual assumption of the title of Reigning Master of Sinanju was interrupted by the resurrection of old and powerful enemies. Chiun himself was wounded emotionally and almost broken. He still carried in his mind the image of a decimated village of Sinanju. The image was false, a mirage, but for a short time he had believed it, and the distress he felt had left a scar.
When the danger was over, and Remo was Reigning Master, his strange behavior began. Despite his new burden of responsibility, despite new dangers foretold, Remo seemed at ease. Why?
Even for a man of far-reaching wisdom such as himself, Chiun found answers elusive. Could Remo be bluffing through the burden of being the Reigning Master? Could it be that he was in truth straining under the weight of this awesome responsibility? What if, unknown to Chiun, Remo was in distress and approaching an emotional breakdown?
Chiun had thought Remo was sleeping, but then the young Reigning Master sat up straight in his aircraft seat and spoke aloud.
"Pork tamales."
Remo sounded quite pleased with himself.
Then Chiun knew the truth. As good as his body was at making the motions of the martial arts Sun source that was Sinanju, his feeble white brain had simply been unable to keep pace and it had finally folded in upon itself.
Ah, well. Folcroft Sanitarium was a pleasant enough place for an imbecile. Chiun would make sure that Smith gave Remo the nicest room in which to spend his remaining years doodling, sloppily, on the walls.
Chapter 14
It was well past regular hours and the outer office was empty. Folcroft Sanitarium felt abandoned in the depth of the night, and they met no one on their way up to the office of Director Harold W Smith. As they reached the outer office, domicile of Smith's longtime secretary Eileen Mikulka, Chiun turned to Remo.
"Wait here."
"What for?"
But Chiun was already gliding inside Smith's office and closing the door behind him.
"Hey, Chiun, what's the deal?" Remo asked, following him inside and finding the old Korean leaning close to the gray, patrician features of the CURE director, whispering fiercely.
Chiun wheeled on him. "I told you to remain outside!"
"Yeah, but I didn't. You planning a surprise parry for me or something?"
Chiun sniffed disdainfully, but there was a look of worry on his brow. "Yes, something."
Remo tried to read the old man's expression, but it was an inscrutable combination of distrust and-what, concern? Smith revealed nothing. Mark Howard sat in the couch looking like a man who had no clue what was going on around him.
"So let me in on it," Remo demanded.
"Later perhaps," Chiun said, and gave Smith a prompting glare.
"Uh, yes. Tell me about Nashville."
"Southern inhospitality, too much money, too little taste. What else you want to know?"
Smith's gray face puckered sourly. "Anything. A clue. A hint."
"Nope. None of that. Lots of crazy dead dancers, and later lots of crazy bikers. That's about it."
"We're still getting reports on the murders at the Rock Hard Cafe," Smith said. "All the police are releasing is that the biker gang called themselves the Nashville Road Sharks. The gang stormed the Rock Hard seemingly without provocation."
"That's about the size of it," Remo agreed.
"'That's nuts," Mark Howard objected. "There has to be motivation for it."
"You'd think," Remo admitted, relaxing in one of the chairs before Smith's desk. Chiun chose to stand, unusually guarded, Remo noticed. Guarded against what? "We asked the bikers. Politely at first, and then we got persuasive and they wouldn't tell us why. Said they were just really angry."
"Were they hiding their motive?" Howard asked. "They could not hide their intentions from a Master of Sinanju," explained Chiun. "They claimed they were simply filled with rage."
"Here's what we found out," Remo said. "They were at their usual hangout, you know, just having a few beers like every night, and they were talking about overpaid monkey suits at the yuppie bar down the street," Remo explained. "Only this time they decided it was time they stop talking about bashing heads and actually go bash some heads."
"Skilled killers they were not," Chiun sniffed. Remo explained how they stopped in for a visit at the biker bar that had been the Nashville Road Sharks hangout. After delivering the sad news of the demise of Bork, Virgil, Maurice and the rest, they questioned the tearful, mourning patrons about anything unusual that happened in the bar that evening.
"Only one thing out of the ordinary," Remo said. "That night the Road Sharks came in with a friend. A new guy the locals had never seen before. Claimed to be a TV commercial producer looking for a real, honest-to-goodness biker gang for a new ad campaign for beer-flavored vodka."
"You think he was just trying to get close to the gang?" Smith asked.
"Looks like it." Remo shrugged. "He bought them a few rounds and said he would be in touch, then left. Half an hour later the Road Sharks had transformed from peace-loving Harley huggers into homicidal maniacs with a taste for yuppie blood. That's when they headed for the Rock Hard."
"And nobody got a good look at the man who claimed to be a TV commercial producer, I suppose."
"The clientele of the tavern were inebriated, Emperor," Chiun explained. "They remembered a man in his twenties with ridiculous face whiskers. Not another pertinent detail could any of them provide."
Smith sighed. Mark Howard put his hands behind his head and stretched back in the couch, staring at the ancient ceiling tiles, so yellowed with age their original color was impossible to discern.
"Well?"
Remo looked at Chiun. Howard and Smith looked at Chiun.
"Well what?" Remo asked.
"Do you not have more you would like to say?" Chiun said.
"Like what?"