"A piece of me, pops."
"I am no cannibal," said Chiun, and Remo knew that this offer would also be included in tales of America… how some not only were cannibals, but some were volunteer dinners. This strangeness did the Master of Sinanju commit to memory.
"Oh, no, not that," said Loretta and made a circle of her left forefinger and thumb and rapidly penetrated and withdrew her right forefinger. "This," she said.
"You have done nothing to deserve me," said Chiun.
"How "bout you, cutie?" she said to Remo, who stood just about six feet tall, with a lean, sinuous body that aroused many women just when he walked in a room. His eyes were dark, deep-set above high cheekbones, and his thin lips creased in a small smile. His wrists were thick.
"I've got to get rid of the body," said Remo, looking at the nude, dead man.
"No, you don't. There's a reward for him. Clete's wanted in three states. You're gonna be famous. Famous."
"See what you did," said Remo, and Chiun turned his head away, above it all.
It was a good thing, thought Remo, that the room was only a meeting place and that none of Chiun's heavy baggage accompanied them.
"Where are you two running to? The television cameras will be here. The reporters too. You'll be famous."
"Yeah, great," said Remo, and they went quickly down the motel hallway with the blonde yelling after them. They moved in such a way that the blonde thought they took off up the road for Texas when they really slipped down into the parched bed of the Rio Hondo and moved upstream along the bleached gravel 200 yards west of the motel, and there they waited and saw policemen and ambulance and newsmen. And on the second day, when a particular gray Chevrolet Nova came up the road, Remo ran out of the river bed and flagged it down.
"A little incident, Smitty," said Remo to the lemony-faced man in his late fifties, heading off any questions about why he was not in the prearranged motel room.
Remo signaled Chiun to follow him to the car, but the Master of Sinanju did not move.
"Will you come on? We've already spent a night in a frigging ditch because of you."
"I would talk to Emperor Smith," said Chiun.
"All right," said Remo sighing. "He'll only talk to you, Smitty."
As Remo watched Smith's gray head disappear into the river bed behind a large brown bush where Chiun sat, he could not help but think of the first time he had seen Smith. Remo had just come to in Folcroft Sanitarium on Long Island Sound, so many years before. As it was explained, Remo had been recruited, via a phony electrocution for a framed-up murder, to work for a secret organization, one that would work quietly outside the law to help give the law a better chance to work.
Smith was the man who headed the organization, and, besides Remo and the president of the United States, was the only person who knew it existed. Remo had lived with the secret for years. He was officially dead, and now working for an organization that did not exist. He was its one-man killer arm, and Chiun his trainer.
Remo watched Smith trudge back up the wash.
"He wants an apology," said Smith, who wore a gray suit and white shirt even in Roswell, New Mexico.
"From me?"
"He wants you to take back your racist remarks. And I think you should know we value his skills highly. It was a great service he did making you what you are."
"What was I while all this was going on? An innocent bystander?"
"Just apologize, Remo."
"Go dip a donkey," said Remo.
"We're not getting out of here until you apologize. Frankly I'm surprised that you are a racist. I thought you and Chiun had become very close."
"You're off limits," said Remo. "This is our thing. You don't understand it, and you don't have any business in it." Remo picked up a pebble and at 20 yards split a cactus at its base.
"Well, unless you apologize, all of us are going nowhere," said Smith.
"Then we're going nowhere," said Remo.
"Unlike you two, I happen to need water and shelter and food at reasonable intervals. Besides, I don't have a week to wait in a New Mexican river bed."
"With all your computers back at Folcroft, you don't need to know what we're all doing out here?"
"From what I gathered from Chiun, you're here because you changed some baseball rules on him and got another white to side with you. I gather he might be willing to forget this if a proper apology were offered. Something to do with tokens."
"Feed this into your computer. The last time Chiun wanted a token, it turned out to be Barbara Streisand. You ready for that?"
Smith cleared his throat. "Go tell him you're sorry so we can get on with the matter at hand. There's work to do. Important work."
Remo shrugged. He found Chiun where the Master had been sitting, his legs folded under him, his arms at rest on his lap, the dry desert breeze playing with his wisp of beard. Remo spoke to him only briefly and returned to Smith.
"Get this. The token he wants to mend his hurt is fourteen fatted cows, a prize bull, flocks of ducks, geese and chickens in the hundreds, bolts of silk the length of castle walls, or Folcroft's walls since he still thinks of the sanitarium cover as a castle, ten handmaidens and a hundred carts of our finest brown rice."
"What's that?" said Smith, unbelieving.
"He wants to bring it home to Sinanju with him. That was your mistake, telling him last week he could visit his village. Now he wants to bring home something to show that his time in the West hasn't been wasted."
"I already told him you've got to go in by submarine. That's how the gold is delivered to his village. I think it's enough. You know we're supposed to be a secret organization, not a circus. Tell him providing transportation to take him home is enough."
Remo shrugged again, and again returned to Chiun, and again returned with an answer. "He says you're a racist too."
"Tell him we just can't make the delivery of all that stuff, not until we establish diplomatic relations with North Korea. Tell him we'll give him a ruby the size of a robin's egg."
Chiun's response through Remo was that every Master of Sinanju who had ever ventured across the seas before had returned to Sinanju with tributes to his glory. All except the one who was unfortunate enough to work for racists.
"Two rubies," said Smith.
And when it was agreed under the hot New Mexico sun that the tribute to Chiun would be two rubies, a diamond half their size, and a color television set, Smith was informed that the good thing about Americans was their ability to see the flaws in their character and to attempt to amend them.
In the car Smith outlined the problem. CURE, the organization he headed and for which Remo and Chiun worked, had lost four agents checking out the Divine Bliss Mission, Inc. While the criminal potential for the DBM, Inc., was minimal, just another money hustle, its implications worried Smith. Thousands of religious fanatics loosed upon a country and directed by—there was no other word for it—a hustler.
Chum, in the back seat, thought this was horrible.
"There is nothing worse than a hustler," said Chiun. "Woe be to the land to which a hustler comes, for the fields will lie fallow and the young maidens will abandon their chores for the flimsiness of his words."
"We thought that you, with your knowledge of the East, would be especially valuable in this, beyond just your training of Remo," said Smith, checking his rear-view mirror. Remo had early observed how Smith drove; every ten seconds he looked in the rearview mirror and for every five looks in the rearview mirror, there was a glance in the outside mirror. He drove this way on a highway or in a driveway, a routine, controlled discipline that never varied. The dead president who had started CURE had picked the right man for the job, a man of stern self-control, a man whose ambition would never drive him to use the organization to control a country, a man incapable of ambition because ambition implied imagination, and Remo was sure that the last fantasy that had ever entered Smith's crusty New England mind was goblins in the closet and would Mommy turn on the light so they would go away.
"Sinanju is here to serve in truth and honesty," said Chiun, and Remo looked out the window, nauseated.