"You would not!"
"She's worse than a fishwife, Chiun!" Remo exploded. "What the hell is she doing here?"
"She performs certain services."
"I'll cook every meal forever if you get rid of her."
"She does laundry."
"All the laundry. I'll do it. Gladly."
"She mops floors. You do not mop floors. It is beneath you. I have heard you say this."
"Buy me a mop. You'll have the cleanest floors in town."
"You do not do windows. You have insisted upon this for years."
"I'm a new man. Windows are my business. I'll lick them clean if I have to."
"No," said the Master of Sinanju.
"What do you mean, no?"
"There are other duties she performs that you cannot."
"Like what? Stinking up the back wing with cigar smoke. How come you tolerate it?"
"It is a harmless habit."
"She might set the house on fire."
"Thus far, she has not. If she does, I will reconsider your request."
"I don't get it," said Remo.
"You are too young to get it." And with that, the Master of Sinanju reached out in the wavery light and touched the side of the fish tank he had been contemplating.
It winked out like a TV.
Remo gaped at the tiny white dot in the center of the abruptly black rectangle. "Huh?"
"The Fish Channel," said Chiun. "It is very soothing. Especially when considering complaints of no merit."
With that, the Master of Sinanju padded from the fish cellar, saying, "We will have Arctic char this evening. With jasmine rice. In celebration of the successful completion of your assignment in extinguishing the wicked general so that no one sees our hands."
"I ripped his freaking head off."
"Good. No one would suspect the hand of Sinanju behind such a clumsy and barbaric act. You did well."
"I was planning to strike the breath in his lungs. But I kept thinking of that fishwife of a housekeeper and lost it."
"Visualization is a good technique. Visualize success, and success follows."
"Right now, I visualize a hanging."
As he watched the Master of Sinanju pad up the stairs to the house proper, Remo muttered to himself, "Grandmother Mulberry... I'll bet my next three meals that's an alias."
Chapter 6
It was a stupid assignment.
"Oh, come on," Tammy Terrill complained to her news director, Clyde Smoot, over the din of Manhattan traffic blare and squeal coming through the office window.
"Slow news day, Tammy. Check it out."
"A guy drops dead in midtown traffic, and you want me to cover it?"
"There's some funny angles to this one."
Interest flicked over Tammy's corn-fed face. "Like what?"
"People said they heard a humming just before the guy keeled over. That smells like an angle to me."
"No, it sounds like an angle."
Smoot shrugged. "An angle is an angle. Dig up what you can. It's a slow news day."
"You already said that," Tammy reminded.
"Then why are you standing there listening to me repeat myself? Do your job."
Grabbing her cameraman, Tammy blew out of the studio of WHO-Fox in downtown Manhattan. It was a stupid assignment. But that was what the career of Tammy Terrill had come down to. Covering stupid assignments for Fox Network News.
In a way, she was lucky to be in broadcast journalism. Especially after she had been unmasked in national TV as a faux Japanese reporter.
It wasn't easy being blond and white in TV news in the late 1990s. Everywhere Tammy turned, there was a Jap or a Chinese reporter, perky and stylish, stepping on her blond coif in their scramble to be the next Cheeta Ching-style superanchor. And Tammy wasn't the only WASP left out in the cold. If you were white-bread, you were toast.
Tammy had decided that she wasn't going to let her all-American looks get in the way of her career. Asian anchorettes were the big thing. Her grandmother had been one-sixteenth Japanese, and so with the aid of a friendly makeup man, she had turned Japanese. For on-camera purposes only.
It got her in the door and on the lower rung of network anchor. Until that dark day under the hot lights when her slinky black wig came off, and Tamayo Tanaka was exposed as a blond fraud.
"So much for Plan A," Tammy complained to her agent after she was canned.
"No sweat. You come back."
"As what? A Chinese reporter? I can't claim to be one-sixteenth Chinese. It would be lying. Worse, it would be falsifying my resume--grounds for dismissal."