"What's that?" asked Wojic.
"You're going to."
"If you force me, my testimony will be thrown out of court," said Wojic triumphantly, very satisfied with his legal point. He was sitting in a very large chair encrusted with gold. He wore a purple robe trimmed in white ermine, and hand-tooled cowboy boots of Spanish leather peeped out from under the robe. Hemp rope did not pay for all these luxuries.
"I am not going to force you," said Remo, who wore just a white T-shirt and tan chinos. "I am not going to apply any untoward pressure to make you testify. However, I will push your eardrums out through your nostrils as a way of getting acquainted."
Remo clapped both palms against Robert Wojic's ears. The slap was not hard, but the absolute precision of the cupped hands arriving simultaneously made the Hemp King's eardrums feel that indeed they would come out of his nostrils at the slightest sniffle. Robert Wojic's eyes watered. Robert Wojic's teeth felt like they had just been ground by a rotating sander. Robert Wojic could not feel his ears. He was not sure that if he blew his nose, they would not appear in his lap. He did not, of course, hear his own men laughing at him.
And at that moment, Robert Wojic suddenly knew how to help this visitor to the prairie castle. He would give Remo the three pieces of information needed to help the prosecutor in his case. Wojic explained that the three pieces of information had to be the names of three cocaine runners. Wojic's hemp-import operation covered for them, and his international contacts allowed them to move the drug and the money freely. That was how Robert Wojic could afford such luxury from importing a material that wasn't much in demand since the invention of synthetic fibers.
"Right," said Remo. "That's what it was."
And Robert Wojic assured Remo that he would testify to this willingly because he never, ever wanted to see Remo come back for a second favor. Perhaps he would be killed by the angry cocaine runners; but Wojic wasn't concerned. He had seen death just moments before, and the man lying on the parapet with his brains blown out of his skull looked a hell of a lot more peaceful than Wajic himself felt as he checked his nose. Nothing was coming out. Then he felt his very tender ears.
"So long, friend. Will I see you in court?"
"Nah," said Remo. "I never have to go."
Robert Wojic offered to have one of his men give Remo a lift into town. All ten said they would personally have been willing to drive the stranger who climbed up walls, but they had immediate appointments in the other direction.
"Which direction is that?" wondered Remo.
"Where are you going?" they asked in chorus.
"That way," said Remo, pointing east, where Devil's Lake Municipal Airport lay.
"Sorry, that seems to be in the general direction of New York and I'm heading for Samoa," observed one of the triggermen. "I don't know about these other guys."
As it turned out, they, too, were headed for Samoa. Immediately. All of them. So Remo had to walk to the airport alone, back the way he came over the scorched prairie grass where hidden mines were supposed to reduce a company of men to a single quivering human being.
At a push-button pay phone in Minnewaukan, Remo had to punch in a code to indicate that the job had been successfully completed. The code was written on the inside of his belt, along with an alternate code that indicated a problem and the need for further instructions. This was a new system. He was fairly certain the "mission complete" code was on the right. He punched in the numbers, suddenly wondering if Upstairs had meant his right or the belt's right. When he got a car wash, he knew he had copied down the codes wrong. He threw away the belt and caught a 747 for New York City.
On the plane, he suddenly realized that throwing the belt away was a mistake. Anyone finding the belt could punch in one of the correct codes and throw the entire organization Remo worked for off course. But nowadays he wasn't sure what that was anymore. He went to sleep next to a thirtyish blond who, sensing his magnetism, kept running her tongue over her lips as though rehearsing a lipstick ad.
In New York City, Remo's cab let him off at a very expensive hotel on Park Avenue, whose elegant windows now reflected the dawn. About thirty policemen crowded the lobby. Someone, it seemed, had thrown three conventioneers thirty stories down an elevator shaft with the force of an aircraft catapult. Remo took a working elevator to the thirtieth floor and entered a major suite.
"I didn't do it," came a high squeaky voice.
"What?" said Remo.
"Nothing," said the voice. "They did it to themselves." Inside the living room, draped in a golden kimono trimmed in black, his frail body seated toward the rising sun, wisps of hair placid against the yellow parchment of his skin, sat Chiun, Master of Sinanju. Innocent.
"How did they do it to themselves?" demanded Remo. He noticed a small bowl of brown rice sitting unfinished on the living-room table.
"Brutality always begets its own end."
"Little Father," said Remo, "three men were hurled thirty stories down an open elevator shaft. How could they possibly have done it to themselves?"
"Brutality can do that sort of thing to itself," insisted Chiun. "But you would not understand."
What Remo did not understand was that absolute and perfect peace made any intrusion a brutal act. Like a scorpion on a lily pad. Like a dagger in a mother's breast. Like volcanic lava burning a helpless village. That was brutality.
The mother's breast, helpless village, and benign lily pad were, of course, Chiun, Master of Sinanju, at breakfast. The scorpion, dagger, and volcanic lava were the three exalted members of the International Brotherhood of Raccoons, who had walked down the hall singing "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall."
As Chiun had expected, Remo again stood up for other whites, explaining away their hideous brutality as "some guys high on beer singing a drinking song," something that in his perverted mind did not call for an immediate return to gentle silence.
"I mean, they couldn't very well throw themselves down a thirty-story shaft with the force of a machine, could they, Little Father? Just for singing a drinking song? Listen, we'll stay out of the cities from now on, if you want peace."
"Why should I be denied a city because of others' brutality?" answered Chiun. He was the Master of Sinanju, latest in a line of the greatest assassins in history. They had served kings and governments before the Roman Empire was a muddy village on the Tiber. And they had always worked best in cities.
"Should we surrender the centers of civilization to the animals of the world because you blindly side white with white all the time?"
"I think they were black, Little Father."
"Same thing. Americans. I give the best years of my life to training a lowly white and at the first sign of conflict, the very first incident, whose side does this white take? Whose side?"
"You killed three men because they sang a song," said Remo.
"Their side," said Chiun, satisfied that once again he had been abused by an ingrate. His long fingernails poked out of his elegant kimono to make the telling point. "Their side," he repeated.
"You couldn't have just let them walk down the damned hallway."
"And brutalize others who might be transcending with the rising sun during breakfast?"
"Only Sinanju transcends with the rising sun. I sincerely doubt that plumbers from Chillicothe, Ohio, or account executives from Madison Avenue transcend with the rising sun."
Chiun turned away. He was about to stop talking to Remo, but Remo had gone to prepare the rice for breakfast, and would not be aware of the slight. So Chiun said:
"I will forgive you this because you believe you are white."
"I am white, Little Father," said Remo.
"No. You couldn't be. I have come to the conclusion that it is not an accident you have become Sinanju."
"I am not going to start writing in one of your scrolls that my mother was Korean but I didn't know it until you gave me Sinanju."
"I didn't ask that," said Chiun.
"I know you have been struggling with how to explain that the only one to master the sun source of all the martial arts, Sinanju, is not Korean, not even Oriental, but white. Pale, blank, blatant white."
"I have not written the histories lately because I did not wish to admit the ingratitude of a white, and how they all stick together even when they owe everything they are to someone kind and decent and mild who thoughtlessly gave the best years of his life to an ingrate."
"It's because I won't write that I'm not white," said Remo. In his training he had read the histories, and knew the long line of assassins the way British schoolboys learned of the ancestry of their kings and queens.
"You said you were raised in an orphanage. Which orphan knows his mother, much less his father? You could have had a Korean father."