"Sounds like you're hurting too, Smitty."
"I am, Remo. I feel like a big piece of my life was replaced, only to be ripped out just when I was adjusting to being whole."
"Yeah. I feel that way about Mah-Li. Funny how that is. What do you want me to do about these guards?"
"They're not dead?"
"No, I just put them to sleep. They'll recover."
"I'll handle this as an internal problem. I must keep the police out of this. Entirely."
"Your call, Smitty. Catch you later."
The flight from New York's La Guardia Airport to Baltimore, Maryland, was advertised as fifty-five rninutes. It was accurate if you didn't include the thirty-six-minute boarding delay, the approximately two hours in which the plane sat on the runway with its air conditioner off to save fuel and increase passenger irritability, and the forty-two minutes stacked up over Baltimore-Washington Airport.
It was dawn before Remo Williams found himself in downtown Baltimore, and he considered himself lucky. The other passengers were delayed another five hours while their luggage was rerouted from Atlanta, where it had accidentally been sent. Remo had no luggage.
A cab deposited Remo in front of the Lafayette Building. He tried to pay the driver.
"What's this?" the cabby demanded.
"Look, I don't have any American money on me, all right? Don't give me a hard time."
"Don't give ine a hard time. The fare is twenty-three eighty-seven. Pay up."
"This is a genuine gold coin. It's worth over four hundred dollars."
The cabby took the coin in his hand and hefted it. "It's heavy like real gold," he said slowly.
"It is real gold," said Remo wearily, wishing he had thought to ask Smith for a cash loan. Remo had made his way from Seoul, South Korea, to the United States on a handful of ounce-weight gold ingots he had taken from the treasure house of Sinanju. He overpaid outrageously for every fare, but because he paid in gold, the true item of value behind the world's paper-money supply, he had received nothing but a hard time. People were willing to accept cash, checks, or credit cards, but not gold. Not the one thing that was of true value in the world.
"If it's real gold, why are you overpaying me by over three hundred and fifty dollars?" the cabdriver wanted to know.
"I'd appreciate change," Remo said sweetly, and he smiled.
"Nothing doing," said the cabby, who was beginning to suspect the gold was genuine. Especially after he bit into the yellow ingot and saw toothmarks. A get cash or I keep the whole thing."
"Then keep the whole thing," Remo said in a pleasant tone while he rubbed a finger against the lock on the driver's side. A wisp of smoke came out of the lock aperture. When the driver next tried to open the door, he would find he couldn't. He would learn that the door would have to be replaced, but that it could not be removed for replacement without dismantling the taxi.
It wasn't as good as exact change, Remo thought as he took the elevator to the penthouse, but true satisfaction is without price. He decided to write that down somewhere. It would be the first thing he wrote in his histories of Sinanju when he got around to writing them.
The elevator took Remo to the penthouse floor. When the doors opened, he found himself confronted by an unusual sight.
A man stood facing the elevator, as if he had expected visitors. The man was short, very short. He wore sunglasses. A bowler hat sat on his head, canted at a rakish angle. The hat was green, Christmas-package green. So was the tiny man's neat jacket. The pants, however; were canary yellow, as was the man's shirt. He wore a purple tie. Silk.
"Excuse me, I'm looking for Ferris Wheel."
"D'Orr," the voice said, pitched very low.
"Which door?" asked Remo, looking around. The little man followed him.
"Not door. Not wheel. D'Orr. Ferris D'Orr," the little man said, his voice rising to a squeaky pitch. "Honestly, Remo, have you so soon lost command of your native tongue?"
Remo spun as if on a pivot. He looked closer. The little man beamed, and Remo noticed for the first time the wisps of white hair on the little man's face and the Korean sandals peeping out from the trouser cuffs.
Remo lifted the green hat and exposed a balding head with tufts of white hair over the ears.
"Chiun?"
The Master of Sinanju removed his sunglasses and did a delicate pirouette to show off his new American attire.
"Brooks Brothers," said Chiun happily. "Only the best. How do I look?"
"Like a lemon-lime sherbet," Remo said, hardly believing his eyes.
"You must have searched far and wide to find me," said Chiun with satisfaction. "You must have covered all of Asia before you knew I was not there. Africa's sands must have known your implacable step before that continent, too, was eliminated from your arduous search. Lo, in the generations to come, future Masters will sing of how Remo the Unfair shunned his bride, telling her she was no longer important, bade his villagers a tearful farewell, and said to the heavens, 'I must go, though it take me to the end of my days, and seek out the Master who made me whole, and throw myself at his feet to beg his forgiveness. Though it take me decades, and Chiun the Great spit upon me when I find him, I will do this gladly, for I owe him everything.' "
The Master of Sinanju stepped back a pace to allow his pupil groveling room.
Remo frowned, putting his hands on his hips.
"You left a trail a pig could follow. A blind pig," he said.
The countenance of the Master of Sinanju assumed a hurt expression.
"You are not here to grovel?"
"I'm here to take you back. To Sinanju."
"Impossible," said the Master of Sinanju, turning on his beef. "I am under contract."
"We'll break it. You've done it before."
"I have a new appreciation for America." Chiun said.
"You didn't ever have an old appreciation for America. It was a barbarian land, remember? It was a land of round-eyed whites who smelled of beef and pork fat and had feet so big it was a miracle they could walk."
"I was younger when I said those things. Much younger. I have grown in wisdom since those long-ago days."
"Since last week?"
"What's that racket?" asked Ferris D'Orr, poking his head out of his laboratory.
"Who's he?" asked Remo peevishly.
"That is Ferris. Do not mind him. He always gets irritable when he is around metals. He is a metallurgist, poor fellow."