"I'm a man," he said softly to himself, his whisper lost in the wail of wind through the trees. "That's got to be worth something."
Then he was standing alongside one of the windows of the cabin, listening to the voices inside.
There were four of them, four men talking. They were talking with the fearlessness of men who know that no one could reach them because the only way up to the cabin was along a twisting road, and that
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road was spotted with detection devices, and, for the last seventy-five yards to the cabin, with buried land mines.
So the members of the Cypriot Liberation Alliance felt quite free to discuss which kind of babies were best to plant dynamite sticks under. Little black babies or little blonde babies.
"Nobody touch a baby carriage, especially when you wheel it into a maternity ward," said one aloud.
"What that got to do with mainland Greeks?" asked another.
"We show them, Tilhas," said the first, "what we think of how they not help us when we attack the Turks and lose. All we have are the Palestinians, our spiritual brothers."
A third voice spoke up. "Anyone who can see the moral imperative in dynamiting babies as part of revolutionary justice knows and understands Greek Cypriot values," he said.
A fourth voice spoke. "We are victims. Imperialists are the oppressors."
The man called Tilhas who did not seem to understand all this blood lust asked "But why assault Americans?"
"Because they supply the Turks."
"But they supply us also."
"How can you call yourself a Cypriot if you don't blame others for what happens to you? If you put up a bad roof, blame corporate imperialism. If your daughter gets pregnant, blame Hollywood movies. When you rob your father and he breaks your bones for it, blame the Egyptians. You must remember at all times you are a Cypriot and that means you will never invent anything or bund anything or grow any-
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thing anyone else will want. Therefore you can never be on the side of doers. They must always be your enemies, Tilhas. America is made up of the worst doers in the world. Therefore, we must hate them most. Besides, it's easiest to dynamite baby carriages here. If we get caught, nobody pulls our arms out our shoulders. Nobody peels our skin off our back. Nobody starts bonfires on our bare stomach. No one hurts us. They just put us in jail and let us go a little later."
"Wrong," came Remo's voice. He stood inside the door, looking around at the four men. "There are still some of us who think that evil ought to be punished."
"Who are you?" asked one of the Cypriots.
Remo raised a hand for silence. "Which one of you is Tilhas?"
A small man with a scraggly mustache and basset-hound eyes raised his hand meekly. "I Tilhas. Why?"
"I heard you from the window," Remo said. "I'm going to do you a favor. You're going to die easily."
He did. The others didn't.
Remo looked down at the thrashing body of the last one still to live.
"They'll find you in the spring," he said. "When they see what happened to you, I think everybody else in your ragtag little gang is going to go back to Cyprus and forget about dynamiting babies. So don't look at it like you're just dying. You're giving your life to save your fellow Cypriots."
The man mumbled.
"I can't hear, you," Remo said.
The man mumbled again.
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Remo reached down and removed the man's right elbow from his mouth. "Talk up now. What'd you say?" "To hell with fellow Cypriots," the man said. "That's what I'd thought you'd say," Remo said. "If I meet any more, I'll pass on the message."
And then he was back out into the cold windy night, moving smoothly across the snow back toward the icy cliff.
Yes, that's what he was, he was a man. Remo Williams smiled. Sometimes that wasn't a bad thing to be.
When he got back to the houseboat on Lake Win-nepesaukee, that illusion was shattered. He learned that he had two left feet and compared with him, hippopotamuses were ballet dancers and an elephant trumpeting was a whisper and "I don't know why I let you hang around with me."
Remo had changed from his black mesh suit into black chinos and a white tee shirt. He lifted his head up from the built-in couch on the houseboat and looked at the old Oriental who had spoken.
The man was sitting on the indoor-outdoor rugging of the floor. He was surrounded by inkwells and quill pens and on his lap, he had a large sheet of parchment. Behind him were a half dozen more sheets.
All the sheets, including the one on his lap, were blank.
"Can't write again today, huh, Chiun?" Remo said.
"I could write anytime I wanted," Chiun said, "if my heart were not so heavy."
Remo turned away and looked out the window
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over his head. The stars still twinkled in the nighttime sky but akeady the horizon was lightening as dawn grew near. Without looking back, Remo said:
"I suppose you better tell me how I'm ruining your life this time."
"You are very cooperative," Chiun said.
"Just thoughtful," said Remo. "I'm a thoughtful man. I figured that out tonight on the mountain. I'm a man. Nothing else. All your silly Korean legends about Shiva, the Destroyer, and me being a god are all just that. Hogwash. I'm a man."
"Hah," said Chiun. "Thoughtful, you say." His voice was a high pitched piping and his English was precise and unaccented. "It is to laugh. You. Thoughtful. It is to laugh. Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh."
"Yes, thoughtful," said Remo. "Because if I don't let you blame whatever it is you want to blame on me, then you'd have to face up to the fact that you just can't write a thing."
"I do not believe I am hearing this," Chiun said.
"Just what I said," Remo said. "Not a word. You can't write movies and you can't write books and you can't write stories and now, even when you conned some magazine guy into publishing it, you can't even write that icky-poo Ung poetry of yours. And God knows anybody can write that."
"Easily said," said Chiun. "How empty are children's boasts."