Again, a hit from below. That was how Kaufmann had gotten it also.
"Anybody see the killer leave?"
"No. Pell was interviewing some problem kid. Kid was in such a state of shock, he couldn't talk."
"Maybe the kid. How old is he?"
"A kid. Nine years old, for Christ's sake. You guys from Justice are real screamers. A nine-year-old kid, not a suspect."
"I thought he might have been fifteen or sixteen."
"Nah. A kid."
In the outer office, a white woman with a fierce Afro and an indignant scowl that could putrefy a mountain breeze, demanded to know what the police officers were doing disrupting her schedule. If the clothes had not flaunted such severe dark lines, with a heavy wide belt and a brass buckle that looked as it if shielded a foreign embassy instead of a navel, she might have been attractive. She was in her early thirties, but her mouth was in its fifties. She had a voice like boiling Drano.
A nine-year-old boy stood meekly at her side, looking for directions.
"I am Ms. Kaufperson and I demand to know what you police are doing here without my permission."
"There's been a homicide, lady."
"I am not your lady. I am a woman. You," she said to Remo. "Who are you? I don't know you."
"I don't know you, either," Remo said.
"I am the coordinating director of motivational advancement," she said.
"That's the retards," said one detective.
"No," said another. "Pell was the retards."
"What's motivational advancement?" Remo asked, watching the two patrolmen from outside close in on the door. Their guns were out. All right, two at one door, he'd go through them when they crossed, making sure they didn't fire their guns and hurt somebody in the room, especially the little boy who was with Ms. Kaufperson.
"Motivational advancement is exactly what it means. Through viable meaningful involvement we positively affect underachievers toward fuller utilization of their potential."
"That's lazy kids," said one detective.
Then the first patrolman at the door made his move. Stepping between Ms. Kaufperson and Remo, he pointed his revolver toward Remo, announcing: "Hold it, you. It's the suspect posing as Justice Department, Sergeant. He's the one. With that funny first name."
It was really a juggling act more than anything else. Remo had to keep the gun at him and the one drawn by the other patrolman and the two guns being drawn by the detectives from firing at anyone, preferably himself. So as the first announced that Remo should not move, he eased behind one detective and pushed him inside the angle of the gun arm of the patrolman and spun the second detective off into the corner and then simply moved himself through the falling bodies toward the last patrolman whose gun was up and ready to fire. Remo put an index finger into the nerves of the gun hand. To an outsider it looked like a bunch of people suddenly collapsing into each other while one rather thin man seemed to walk through them quietly.
None of the moves were particularly exotic, mere shoves. The difference was that for a trained person time moved more slowly. He was past the last patrolman and out when he felt a sting in the small of his back. He knew it could not be one of the officer's guns because there was not enough impact. He turned. None of them were pointing at him. Ms. Kaufperson had gone into a flailing of the arms. Yet some one apparently had gotten off a shot at him. He was glad the little boy had not been hit. Remo moved away from the office. The body had just accepted the intrusion of the object. He would be feeling the pain soon.
Walking toward the front door, his back began to feel as if someone had stuffed a hot stove coil into it. He slowed the breathing process, and with it, the circulation. This meant that by the time he reached the taxi he was really moving slowly because the slowed blood stream slowed the legs.
"I've been wounded," he said, falling into the back seat and now, by hand, closing off the circulation to the area.
"Idiot," said Chiun, slapping Remo's hand away from the wound and inserting his own. He motioned the driver to go forward quickly. While ordinarily the driver would have told anyone fleeing that he wouldn't be part of it, he had already been educated not to argue with the Master of Sinanju.
"Idiot," said Chiun. "How could you get yourself wounded to me? How could you do this thing?"
"I don't know. I was making a simple move and I felt this pain in my back."
"Simple move. Pain in the back. Were you sleeping? What were you doing?"
"I told you, a simple move. It's only a tissue wound."
"Well, at least I suppose I am to be grateful for that," said Chiun, adding in Korean that it showed incredible ingratitude for Remo to risk the destruction of all that Chiun had made of him. It was a desecration of the values of Sinanju that Remo should risk his life.
"I'll remember that, Little Father," said Remo, though he was smiling.
"It is not just another white life you are risking anymore. I hoped I had trained you out of the courage silliness of the West that leads men to ignore that most useful sense of fear."
"All right, all right. Stop carping. I don't know where I got hit from."
"Ignorance is even worse than courage."
"I don't know what happened." And in Korean because the cab driver might be listening, Remo went through, in detail, everything he did in Warner Pell's office and everything everyone else did.
"And what did the child do?" asked Remo.
"The little boy? Nothing, I think," said Remo.
"When you arranged the policemen's guns, you thought of guns. So those guns did not injure you."
"Well, one must have."
"Which?"
"I don't know."
"Then it was none of the policemen's guns. This is so. For many is the man who watches the sword that is killed by the rock and many who watch the rock and the sword who are killed by the club. But he who uses his full senses is not killed by the thing he watches."
"I am Sinanju. I use my full sense."
"There is an organ in the body called the grinder."
"You mean the appendix."
"We call it the grinder. Once a long time ago this organ ground coarse foods. But it no longer was needed when man began to eat simple grains. And it stopped working. Now if a man were to eat a fish with all its scales, his body would be hurt by the coarseness of it because the grinder does not work, although he still has it in his body."
"What are you saying? I need your little stories now like I need an abcess."
"You always need my little stories so you will understand."
"What does my appendix have to do with this whole thing?"