"Play nice," he instructed the gang lords.
They immediately raised their guns like duelists, aimed at each other's faces, and pulled the triggers.
The guns boomed and bucked in their hands. Tarantula's bullet went wide and slammed into an emergency exit's steel latch-bar. It whined away with a grinding snap. Faroom's round cut a chunk out of the stage next to Remo's elbow.
"I said nice," said Remo, and flicked a popcorn kernel into Faroom's eye.
As the other gang leader was cycloped he screamed, firing off another round into the ceiling.
Both gang leaders looked at each other through their one good eye, each holding their free hand over their destroyed ones. They were both hunched over, both gasping for breath, and both got the same idea at the same time.
Faroom aimed at Remo. Tarantula aimed at Remo. They transferred their hate for each other to this amazing white man. They pulled their respective triggers and held them down, so that all the remaining bullets in their fifteen-round clips were pumped out. Too late.
Both men danced and jerked as the projectiles ripped into them.
Faroom was perforated from his forehead to his crotch. Tarantula got ten rounds directly in the head, all but blotting out his two-ounce brain.
Remo watched Tarantula crumple to the floor, a big smoking hole in his head. "He who lives by popcorn," he intoned by way of eulogy, "dies by popcorn."
And he walked out into the warmth of the Newark, New Jersey, afternoon.
It was not the Newark he had grown up in. Not the Newark of the orphan Remo Williams, ward of the state, who had left St. Theresa's Orphanage-now a parking lot-for the Newark Police Department, pulled a tour in Nam, and returned to the force only to be framed for the murder of a pusher in the Ironbound section of town.
He had not killed the man, but the state saw it differently. Remo had gone to the electric chair thinking he was about to die.
After the juice had caused him to black out, Remo woke up in the place called Folcroft Sanitarium and discovered that the frame-up had been engineered to erase him so a government agency known as CURE could have its own White House-sanctioned assassin.
Remo Williams.
They had taken away his last name. They had erected a tombstone with his name chiseled in marble. They had destroyed every record with his name, face, and fingerprints on it.
And most cruel of all, they had subjected him to plastic surgery, so that when Remo awoke to the chill unexpectedness of still walking the earth, his own reflection was unsettling and alien.
Over the years Remo had had his face fixed several times, each time getting further and further away from the face that was genetically his own.
But now, over twenty years after it had all begun, Remo. walked the streets of his childhood with his original features.
He reveled in the knowledge that if Dr. Harold W. Smith, his superior, were even to suspect he had ventured back to his childhood haunts, he would stroke out. But twenty years was twenty years. Newark had changed. There was no one to remember even the true face of Remo Williams. He would tell Smith that, and that would be the end of any talk of going under the knife again. He hoped.
Remo found himself in the Ironbound section of the city. It had not changed so much. He paused before the alley where the pusher had been found, Remo's badge gleaming in his drying blood.
The place where Remo Williams' life had taken the wrongest turn possible was no shrine. It stank of urine and maggots and rancid leftovers. Remo tried to remember the pusher's name. It wouldn't come. There was a time, when he was imprisoned up at Trenton, when those kinds of unanswered questions had kept him awake at night.
Now Remo Williams no longer cared.
So long ago . . .
He found his car-it was registered to "Remo Meyers," another in a string of disposable aliases-and drove north.
As he drove, he thought back on the events that had given him his old face.
It was hard to tell where it had all begun. Was it Palm Springs? Or Abominadad, Irait? Or Folcroft Sanitarium, where the surgery he had been tricked into undergoing had taken place?
On reflection, Remo decided it all tied together. If it had not been for Palm Springs, where Remo and his mentor had found themselves playing button-button with a live neutron bomb, he would not have ended up in Irait, a tool of the government that had triggered the Gulf War. And if he had not become the official assassin to Irait, his face would not have been broadcast to the world, making it public and forcing Harold Smith to resort to plastic surgery.
The joke had been on Smith, and on the Master of Sinanju.
The plastic surgeon had discovered that Remo's face had been pared down almost to the naked bone. So he had gone in the opposite direction, building up the nose, the chin, the modeling.
And inadvertently, restoring Remo Williams' original face with nearly one-hundred-percent faithfulness.
Smith had been furious. The Master of Sinanju had been aghast. He had attempted to cajole the surgeon into giving Remo Korean features-Remo still wasn't certain his eyes hadn't been given a slight elongation. No one seemed to agree on this point.
Still, for all Remo's pleasure, there had been a downside. He and Chiun had been forced to vacate their private home, to return to the old cycle of switching residences often.
This time they were in a tower condominium complex on the former site of another landmark of Remo's lost childhood, Palisades Park in Edgewater, New Jersey.
It was there that Remo had left his Master. It was to there he was returning.
Since they had moved, Chiun had lapsed back into his mood of pique, blaming Remo for the fact that the Master of Sinanju had spent three months in a virtual coma at the bottom of a desert structure, where Chiun had taken refuge to escape the exploding neutron bomb.
Three months in which Remo had believed his Master dead. Three months in which Chiun had slept in a watery grave, his spirit appearing before Remo, pleading and attempting to communicate his desperate plight.
And during those three months the Master of Sinanju had hibernated through his one-hundredth birthday, a milestone called the kohi.
Chiun had been bewailing that missed moment of glory ever since. And blaming Remo for it.
Remo decided that he had had enough of the missed birthday. Screw the date. Chiun's hundredth-and-first wasn't far off. They'd have a celebration, regardless. Maybe it would get Chiun off his back once and for all.
On the way home, Remo stopped in at a Japanese supermarket to buy a whole duck.
He selected an oxymura jaimaicensis, better known as ruddy duck, because it was the most succulent, taking care to select a bird with the least subcutaneous fat content. A lifetime of alternating between duck and fish had made Remo, of necessity, an expert on both species.
Whistling, he grabbed a pound of the kind of Japonica rice that had the nutty aftertaste Chiun liked so much.
Yeah, he thought happily as he stepped out into the cool air that smelled of the nearby Hudson River, this will bring Chiun out of his snotty mood.
Chapter 3
The thirty-seventh annual Cahill picnic was memorable, to say the least.
They held it, as always, in the back lot of the Fairfax, Virginia, high school, on the sunniest day of the spring. Back when they started the tradition in '55, the extended Cahill family struggled to predict the sunniest day of the season with the help of almanacs, psychics, palm readers, and astrologers. But soon they discovered that the less they tried, the sunnier it was. Old Mother Cahill started to take for granted the fact that the day she chose for the reunion-picnic-barbecue would be the sunniest day of the year.
And while it wasn't always a perfect blue, never had a drop of rain disturbed so much as a single lock of hair on any Cahill head during the annual reunions, or turned any of their paper plates into soggy cardboard leaves.
They came from all over the South, hauling their pots of picnic necessities and vats of regional delicacies. Ted and Cathy Cahill came all the way from New Orleans with their tongue-searing jambalaya. Jack and Ellen Cahill came from Baltimore with red pepper-steamed hard-shell crabs. Don and Chris Cahill came from Sarasota with their onion flowers-whole sweet onions cut into the shape of roses, deep-fried, and tasting like an apple made entirely of onion rings.