"How can you disagree? I am the Master."
"I just don't think the money is that important."
A moan came from Chiun. "No. Not you, Not you, 59
Remo, who I taught with the golden years of my life. Not you, Remo."
Remo sighed. He had known what was coming. Every time he said that money itself was not important, but the art of Sinanju, the mystery of being that was encompassed in its power, Chiun would accuse him of betrayal to the highest ideals of Sinanju.
"Amateur," Chiun hissed. "Not you, Remo. You cannot think like an amateur. Your country and the world bleeds from amateurs taking weapons into then-own hands, and when you, who have been trained in Sinanju, who have been give Sinanju despite your dead-fish white color, when you talk like the lunatics who perform these services for nothing, you have pierced the very heart of your Master."
"Sinanju now gets tribute from what I do," Remo said. "I work for Smith and I do what he wants, and those ingrates in your village get a shipment of gold to keep them alive and not working. Because of what I do."
"Because I trained you," said Chiun. "It is only just."
"I don't care about tribute," Remo said.
And then Chiun's wailing would not stop. Remo was going to be an embarrassment to Sinanju. Already in the world, people were going around shooting popes. Murdering babies. Now Remo was going to let it be known that he would kill for nothing. That the tribute did not matter.
So many years and so much pain, and now Remo had done this to Chiun.
"Even for a white, this is not gratitude," said Chiun, and Remo had known further arguing was useless. He was not going to get the tape machine. And Chiun would not be speaking to him for a while. Remo had to be careful to notice that Chiun was not speaking to him, however, because if Chiun thought Remo was not noticing how he was being ignored, Chiun would make noises or interrupt in some manner whatever Remo was doing. If there was anything that bothered the
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Master of Sinanju, it was someone being oblivious to the fact that he was ignoring them.
Remo watched the three TV news shows as best he could, flicking back from channel to channel, and realized that he was going to have to come up with something better.
So the next day at the lab, he ordered the six months of The Boston Blade. He also tried to devise a system for monitoring all the media to see if a contact was being made.
The Blade had one interesting story. A Professor Keating had been killed during a racial incident. Remo remembered that Keating was the one who had promised the contact through the media.
Remo almost missed the story on his death because the headline read: "Racial Killing in Cape Cod." The racial part was two blacks being horribly mangled. There were quotes from community leaders about Cape Cod's shame. Apparently, the professor's body was found in his Cape Cod home, along with those of the two blacks.
There was an editorial in The Blade about this. It called for an end to racial killing and the establishment of a special board to root out the racist nature of Cape Cod, where, as everyone knew, it was impossible for a black welfare family to buy a home.
But neither editorial nor news story carried much information about Keating's death. Remo phoned the newspaper, hoping he could get someone who knew more about it. One could tell from the kill sometimes why it was done.
He finally was connected to a reporter at a Blade bureau on Cape Cod.
"Yeah. He was butchered just before the racial incident," the reporter said.
"How?" asked Remo, glancing over to the window to let Chiun know that he was aware he was not being spoken to. Chiun was by the window, grandly examining the Charles River. It was a saying of Sinanju long before the world had so many great cities that one could
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never be lost on a river, for wherever it flowed, there was always a city where it entered the ocean.
"I think the guy—what's his name, Keating—had his ribs broken out," the reporter said. "A bloody mess."
"Mangled?" asked Remo.
"Yeah. After his belly had been cut open by some crude kind of knife. I wasn't paying too much attention to that body."
"How did the other two men die?"
"Racially," said the reporter.
"How do you know?" asked Remo.
"It was a white neighborhood."
"Time out," said Remo. "You mean, if a black guy gets killed in a white neighborhood, it's automatically a racial killing? What if they were killed by a black guy? You know, people kill for other reasons than race hatred."
"Some do it for nothing," said Chiun, still looking at the river. "Some give away the finest training in all history."
The reporter told Remo that until proven otherwise, any time a black man was killed by a white or probably killed by a white, then it was racial.
"Why?" asked Remo.
"Because Massachusetts is a racist state."
"Why?"
"Because it's The Blade's policy. Speak to Mr. Wakefield, if you don't like it, but I tell you now, anyone who thinks differently is a racist."
"Who says?"
"Mr. Wakefield. Why do you think I got shipped up here to work, when my house is in Boston? I wrote that a store owner shot a burglar."
"What was wrong with that?" asked Remo.
"The store owner was white. The burglar was black. I'll never- make that mistake again. But I didn't even recognize a racial incident until then."
"So Mr. Wakefield controls the news at The Blade," said Remo.
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"No, no. Never say I said that. Mr. Wakefield does not interfere ever. He just makes sure we maintain the highest standards. And you'd better know just what those standards are."
Remo hung up and looked at the stack of six months of The Blade. It almost reached the ceiling at the far corner of his lab. And there were months and months of television news shows. How the hell was he going to find out how somebody had reached other scientists through the media?
Suddenly the phone was ringing. As long as Remo was answering the phone, he wouldn't have to be reading those newspapers.
It was a woman's voice. She was terrified. She was the office manager of this section of the lab, and she was telling Remo that he and the other professor had better jump out the window now.