Lost Yesterday

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was learning again. But it seemed slower this time, the wall did not seem as exciting this time. His body did not seem as alive this time.

The beach sands blew on the stone walk around the luxury high-rise building, collecting around bushes and posts and his bare ankles. Behind him, the sun rose red over the dark Atlantic. Miami Beach was quiet but for the distant scratching of rats in the garbage cans. He felt the salt sea air on his skin, moist and warm and fertile as the things of the sea. His lips tasted faintly of salt and white brick wall loomed up above him, straight up above him fifty stories into the last of the night sky.

It had been so easy for so long, and now he was doing it again. The first time, so many years before, he had started at the top and descended. But that was a test of fear, that was a test of controlling the one thing that stopped the body from moving at its optimum.

He touched his open palm to the brick and felt the mortar joints, concrete crumbling under his fingerpads. His body moved into the wall so that there was a true pressure against it, from his spine, from his breathing, from the human form that so rarely in all history was used to its full. His toes felt the moisture on the brick, and set themselves ever so precisely to balance his body against the wall with an even force. And then fingerpads against mortar, toes against brick, the body moved upward into the building, so that Remo could feel with his cheek the very vibrations of the foundation sunk into the supporting rock of Miami Beach.

The brick brushed the cheek, and the hands, as though swimming, pressed down against the wall as his toes pushed upward. And the trunk rose, smooth as a yawn, hands up and down, feet together, toes pushing down, hands up, toes down, hands down, toes up, faster and faster until the yawn became a rapid whisper up the walls. As he moved past windows and ceilings, as the brick went by and the roof came down to the rising figure, it was all the same again. Smooth again. Perfect again. As he had been told it would be.

If someone had been watching he would have seen a man swim up a wall. That was how it would have seemed. But the miraculous thing about it would have been that it would not have seemed miraculous at all, because the way this man moved his body was in unity with all living things. Someone seeing it would have seen the most natural thing in the world.

“Not jerky,” came the high-pitched voice from the roof. Remo topped like a diver at the apex of his jump, and landed on the roof. He was thin but with thick wrists. He had dark eyes and high cheekbones and thin lips. He wore dark slacks and a dark shirt.

“Maybe,” he said, “I am feeling at one with myself again.”

“That is not the one to be at one with, yourself. I am the one to be at one with. That's why you got into trouble. That's why we are relearning. What will happen when I am not here anymore?”

“I'll probably have a moment's peace, Little Father,” said Remo.

“Death is the most relaxing experience of all,” came the squeaky voice from the shadows. The breeze on the roof rustled the dark robes of the old man who had just spoken. The wisps of hair around his ears floated like pennants, but the body was centered with more firmness than the very foundation of the building. He raised a single finger, its nail like a curving quill, long and smooth. “Death,” said Chiun, “is the easiest thing of all.”

“Well then, Little Father,” Remo said. “It's my death.”

“No,” said Chiun. “Not anymore. You do not have a right to die, any more than I did before I found a Master to take my place, a Master of Sinanju.”

Remo did not answer. He knew the old man was right. He had endangered himself by exposing his highly sensitive nervous system to radioactive materials. Normally he would have noticed, sensed it. But Remo had been desensitized by anger. Chiun had declared that the substance was cursed, and Remo did not believe in curses, especially not the curses recorded in the histories of the House of Sinanju. Therefore he did not listen to his body, which would have warned him about the radioactivity. After he had been weakened by it, he could sense it even less.

Chiun had nursed him back to health, but had never let him forget that the histories of Sinanju would have saved him. Remo's problems with the histories of Sinanju began with Chiun, because he read what Chiun wrote, and he knew the reports were highly shaded. For one, Chiun avoided mentioning that he had trained not only the first nonresident of the village of Sinanju, but also the first non-Korean to be a Master, and the first non-Oriental to boot. A white man.

To read a current history of Chiun and the new world, America, “A happy but nervous people, quick to anger and even quicker to do nothing about it,” one could imagine that Remo could be a Korean. There were many references to Remo feeling an attachment to the waters of the West Korean Bay, when actually Remo had been to Sinanju only once, and then for a fight. Almost every time Chiun mentioned Remo he stressed how different his high cheekbones were from those of the normal white.

And the fact that Remo was an orphan meant to Chiun that he could not definitely say his mother or father wasn't Korean.

“I can and I do. I'm white,” Remo had repeated. So Chiun had taught Remo everything, but not how to make an entry into the histories of Sinanju. And Remo still did not believe the histories of Sinanju, even though as he relearned the wall ascent Chiun commented:

“The great Wang perfected that. We owe all ascents to the great Wang. If I were not here, you could have read the histories and known how to do it again.”

“If you were not here, Little Father, I probably would never read the histories of Sinanju. I don't read them now, come to think of it.”

“You must again,” said Chiun.

There was a banging on the door to the roof of the Miami high-rise.

“You out there, how did you get up there?”

Remo went to the door where the voice was coming from. It was locked. He enfolded the handle lightly in his palm and then, making sure the lock was tight against the handle, snapped it up. Metal parts flew like shrapnel and the door opened slowly.

A security guard stepped up onto the roof.

“Breaking and entering,” he said, noticing the lock was no longer on the door.

“I only broke it to let you out here,” said Remo.

“Then how did you get up?”

“You wouldn't understand,” said Remo.

“Notice his low cheekbones,” said Chiun to the guard. “That is a common ordinary white. Of course he wouldn't understand.”

“Who are you jokers calling common?” said the security guard.

“He doesn't mean what you think he means,” said Remo.

“Low cheekbones. Look at yours, buddy. You look like the old man, like a gook.”

The guard stood ready for a fight. He had his hand on a billy club. He weighed as much as Remo and Chiun put together. He was sure one blow would do it.

When the old one moved toward him, he raised his club, prepared to bring down all its force right into the flowing robes of the old Oriental. His arm was coming down when he felt something against his cheek. Two lips. Then he heard a smack. The Oriental had given him a kiss on his cheek as he was trying to hit him. And then, more smoothly than the guard's eyes could believe, the Oriental was behind him.

“A Western custom of thanks,” said Chiun, explaining the kiss, the first kiss he had ever given, much less to a white. In Sinanju there were tendernesses, but never delivered in this Western form. But the joy in Chiun's heart had demanded that he offer thanksgiving to the big white man in the guard's uniform of blue and the square badge of silver.

The guard somehow had missed the old man, but he wasn't going to miss the younger one. He swung the club at his midsection, swung it with the anger of a man who had tried to kill and been dismissed by a kiss on the cheek. Remo caught the billy club in his palm and pushed it back like a turnstile.

He had to catch up to Chiun. While the counterforce meant little to one whose every cell moved in unison, to the guard it was like swinging his body into an oncoming truck. The jolt of his body moving into Remo's shattered his pelvis, separated spinal disks, shredded the cartilage at the shoulders, and took a good half-hour out of his life as he waited unconscious on the roof.

Remo, on the other hand, did not miss a pace. He followed Chiun.

“That guard didn't see that well at night,” said Remo.

“He was white. He saw as whites see.”

“You yourself said whites have funny eyes, that they can't see well because round things never focus as sharply as pointed ones.”

“His could see well enough,” said Chiun. He was picking up speed. Remo followed. Down one flight after another to the tenth floor with the kimono whipping behind him, Chiun moved, faster than an elevator, faster than a sprinter on a dead run, but never without grace and flow in his movement. Into their temporary apartment he moved, right to the ink and scroll he moved, and then upon the rugged floor of this Miami condominium did Chiun, Master of Sinanju, write what he had beheld this very evening, even as Remo complained.

“Lo these many years, the Master of Sinanju had toiled with the new Master, Remo, as was his name, in the adopted country where Chiun had found him. And hence, he noticed the difference in him from his white surroundings,” inscribed Chiun. Even with his awesome speed, each Korean character was perfect, aligned with greater accuracy than if on a grid. This dawn the Master was inspired. This dawn he wrote with joy.

“And lo, one night a simple white stationed to guard the environs of one of their minor castles for the common man, did set eyes upon Chiun and his pupil, Remo. And in that peculiar red light of the morning that allows round eyes to focus better than normal, he saw what Chiun had seen so many years ago. He saw it in the cheekbones and in the eyes. And what he saw was resemblance.

“Even the most common white could not miss the absolute Koreanness of Remo, humble though the white was. And he bespoke this fact to Chiun.

“This, then, raises the one question that had long haunted Chiun, discoverer of America, the nation (not the continent which was discovered in the first realm of the Maya by Master Can Wi). Which Korean had been ancestor to Remo?

“Was it the lost Master? Had he secreted his seed in the new nation so that later, Chiun might harvest? To which Sinanju parent could Remo trace his unknown ancestry?

Chiun had curved himself over to the paper as a flower bent above a white parchment pond. Now he straightened, and with satisfaction he handed the brush quill to Remo.

“You cannot say that this is not the truth. Write now your first sentences of the history.”

Remo easily read the Korean. It was the old form, more influenced by Chinese than Japanese. But many of the characters — like the symbols for payment — were unique to Sinanju itself. Sinanju alone had brought the wealth of the West in tributes to the House of Assassins to the East. Things that were never seen before in the Orient had come to Sinanju by boat and caravan. The old Sinanju Masters, then, had to create characters in order to catalog their treasures. It was a labor of love.

Remo remembered Chiun showing him the scroll marked with his own first entry; his writings followed Chiun's father's entry, and that of his father's father. Cousins from way back were chronicled, as were second cousins, and so was a very supple entertainer who was half from Sinanju and half from the notorious city of Pyongyang, home of loose women and looser men, not a fitting place for the upright of the little fishing village of Sinanju.

Remo had been referred to in the histories of this house of assassins as “the half-breed.”

He took the quill in his hand and read again what Chiun had written. He knew the marks, and he knew future generations would judge his hand, if there were future generations. He wondered when he too would have to train a future Master. Originally he had learned Sinanju to serve his country, but now knowing Sinanju placed an obligation on him to teach it to someone else also. The tool had become at least equal to the purpose.

Remo read what Chiun had written yet again, then quickly drew the character he had been thinking of. It was a combination of the horns of a bull and the waste product of said bull. In America this phrase was a colloquialism for something that was untrue.

Chiun read the word and slowly nodded.

“Now that you have explained what white gratitude is worth, would you care to corroborate what you heard on the roof.”

“He didn't mean what he said.”

“Ah,” said Chiun. “You have advanced in Sinanju to become a reader of minds. Please then, tell me what is on my mind.”

“You don't want to admit you trained a white.”

“If that is what you think, then you write that down here on the scroll,” said Chiun, his voice as cold as the polar depths. “Go ahead. Write it down. Each Master must write the truth.”

“Okay,” said Remo. “I am going to write that I work for the organization, and you are my trainer. I will write that in the course of training I learned something else and that what I learned made me become someone else, but I am white. A white person has mastered Sinanju, and is Sinanju. That is what I am going to write.”

Chiun waited, saying nothing. But when Remo was about to put the brush back to the scroll, Chiun quickly rolled it up.

“The histories of Sinanju are too important to write such nonsense. Without a history, man is nothing. The worst thing that you whites did when you enslaved the blacks was not to make them slaves. Was not to kill them. Was not to rob them of their lives, for others have done that throughout the ages. What you did most shamefully was to rob them of their past.”

“I am glad you are admitting I'm white now,” said Remo.

“Only the flaws. You couldn't help but adopt some of the flaws, having lived among them after birth.”

“Where my mother suddenly flew from Sinanju to leave me in downtown Newark where I was found, looking very white. There are the orphanage records, you know.”

“Believe what you will. I know what is true,” said Chiun.

“Little Father, what is so bad about admitting you gave Sinanju to a white? Does it not make you look better that you took a meat eater, cigarette smoker, whiskey drinker, punch-with-the-fist white man and found in him that which you could make Sinanju?”

“I thought of that,” said Chiun.

“And?”

“And I dismissed it. For centuries, thousands of years, none but Sinanju has mastered Sinanju. We have all accepted that. And here you come along. What does that do to our histories? If this is not true, then what else is false?”

“Little Father,” said Remo, “I have left most of my ways to follow Sinanju. Granted I didn't have much. I wasn't married. I had a pretty crummy job, I was a cop. No steady girl. No real friends, I guess. I love my country and I still do. But I do find something that was absolutely true. It's Sinanju. And I bet my life on it. And so far I have won.”

“You are too emotional,” said Chiun, turning away, and Remo knew it was because Chiun did not wish for him to see how moved he was.

The phone rang three times and stopped. Then it rang once. Then it rang two times and stopped. Upstairs was calling with an assignment.

Remo answered the phone. He was feeling good again. He needed his country and he needed to serve, just as he did when he volunteered for the Marines the day after graduation from high school. As for Sinanju, that had become who he was, and it was strange being part of a house of assassins already famous in the Orient when Rome was a muddy village on an Etruscan river. On the one hand, he didn't know his mother or father. On the other hand, he knew his spiritual ancestors further back than Moses.

All of this he brought to the telephone and to his country as he punched in the numbered response. One multiplied each code right by two. Upstairs had said that would be simple. If he heard two rings, punch in the number four. If he heard four, punch in the number eight.

What, he had asked, if he heard a nine-ring code?

“Then it won't be us,” said Harold W. Smith, the only American besides the President allowed to know of Remo's existence, the one who ran the organization once called America's hedge against disaster, more recently called in times of crises “our last hope.”

Remo punched in the proper code. Then he punched in the proper code again.

So important was secrecy, because the organization was itself outside the law, that the phone was supposed to activate a scrambler system from anywhere. He didn't know how it worked but even on an extension phone no one could listen in on him.

Remo got an operator in Nebraska telling him that the local service was glad to help him. Then he got switched to a national service which was also glad to help him. Then he was told how much money he was saving with another national service, and then back to a Miami operator, who asked which system he was using.

“I don't know,” said Remo. “Do you?”

“We are not allowed to give out that information,” said the operator. “Would you like to speak to my supervisor?”

“You don't know who you work for?”

“Would you like to speak to my supervisor?”

“You mean you don't know who you work for?”

“It's just like your telephone bill, sir. I get fourteen pages of explanation for who pays me and I don't understand a word of it.”

A sharp buzzing came over the phone, and a sharp lemony voice interrupted. It was Harold W. Smith, head of the organization.

“Sorry, Remo, we can't even scramble the phones without a hitch anymore.”

“You mean I didn't mess up the code?” said Remo.

“No. Ever since AT&T broke up, nothing has worked well. It was the greatest communication system on earth at one time. We were the envy of the world. Unfortunately, the courts decided otherwise. All in all, I guess I'd rather have some law and order in the country, than phones that work perfectly. Given a choice, you know.”

“I didn't know about the phone company breakup,” said Remo.

“Don't you read the newspapers?”

“Not anymore, Smitty.”

“What do you do?”

It was a good question.

“I breathe a lot,” said Remo.

“Oh,” Smith said. “I guess that means something. In any case, we have a problem with a witness in a big racketeering case. Seems someone has reached him. We want you to see that he testifies honestly. This one witness could take down the entire mob west of the Rockies. Are you up to it? How are you feeling?”

“Not peak, but more than good enough for what we have to do.”

Chiun, realizing Remo was talking to Harold W. Smith, the man who secured proper gold delivery in tribute to Sinanju for Chiun's and now Remo's services, said in Korean:

“That is no way to talk. If an emperor thinks you are serving him despite injuries, allow it. Allow as to how every living breath serves his glory. Provided of course the tribute arrives on time.”

Remo didn't even bother to explain anymore that Smith was not an emperor. He had explained to Chiun too many times already that the organization served a democracy which decided its emperor by voting, not be an assassin's hand or marching army or accident of birth. This Chiun not only thought of as a foul abomination, but also impossible in the affairs of men, and Remo was only a fool to believe it, like our Western fairy tales such as Santa Claus, or that God decreed who would rule. The saying in Sinanju had always been, “The divine right of all kings is crafted by the hand of the assassin.”

It had been a good selling point in the Ming and Chang Dynasties of China, and the court of Charlemagne.

“Is that Chiun there? Send him our regards and tell him the tribute shipment arrived on time,” said Smith.

“He knows that, Smitty.”

“How? I only found out this morning.”

“I don't know how he knows. There was a problem once with a delivery and the accumulated treasure of the house, and ever since, he has kept an eye on the accounts.”

“He doesn't trust us anymore?”

“Sort of,” said Remo. How could he explain it to Smith? Chiun didn't trust anyone beyond the suburbs of Sinanju proper and did not have all that much use for everyone inside those boundaries either. He trusted Remo because he knew Remo. He most certainly was not going to trust a client.

“We have a minor court reinforcement in California,” said Smith. There wasn't too much more to be said, except for the name and place.

Remo had done it many times. Made sure witnesses didn't clam up. It was part of the original purpose of CURE, as the organization was called, to make sure the nation could survive within the Constitution. That meant making the courts work. But so many witnesses had been bought off or frightened off that in entire states the justice system barely creaked along. It was the one thing Remo could say CURE had actually improved. The rest of the work was keeping the world from falling apart, and he was fairly certain that in that area, CURE was losing.

“You're not ready yet,” said Chiun.

“For you, no. For what I have to do, yes.”

“The first step into eternity is a missed breath.”

“I'm good enough.”

“Good enough? Good enough?” said Chiun. “Good enough would be to hit someone over the head with a brick. Good enough would be to use a gun. You are Sinanju, not some... some white gangster in a uniform.”

“I'm still white, Little Father.”

“You sound it.”

“Didn't you say that emperors couldn't tell perfection from duck dung? That all they cared about was putting a head on a wall?”

“Yes, but we care. That is who we are. Besides, in this country they do not put heads on walls. They are crazy. They are ashamed of their assassins.”

“Right, Little Father. We're a secret organization.”

“See. You are ashamed of what you do. And that is the fault of the mad Smith. In any civilized country he would have used me to openly declare himself emperor. He would hang all his enemies' heads on the palace wall to show his strength. But no, we must skulk around like criminals.”

“Right, Little Father. Secret,” said Remo pleasantly.

“Only a worm is pleased to live under a rock,” said Chiun.

“No time to argue, Little Father. I've got to get going.”

“To do what? To remove a rival for a great throne, adding honor to the history of Sinanju? What should I write down now that you do? Deliver packages? Watch over machinery like a slave at a water wheel? What new misuse for the talents of Sinanju?”

“I am going to make sure a witness testifies.”

Chiun rolled up the scroll and capped the ink.

“You are all crazy. All crazy. If Emperor Smith wants a decision from a judge, why doesn't he buy the judge like in any civilized country?”

Remo had packed everything he needed for the trip. Everything was a wad of cash in his pocket.

“That's what we're fighting against,” said Remo.

“Why?” said Chiun.

“It has to do with the Constitution, Little Father, and I don't have time to explain it now.”

Chiun shrugged, folding his long delicate fingers underneath his robe. He would never be able to explain it in the histories of Sinanju. Here was a piece of paper Smith and Remo held sacred. The very existence of what they called the organization violated that piece of paper, but the organization was created to protect it. And therefore everyone had to be secret about what they did. Even for whites, this was puzzling. Remo denied Smith had plans for becoming the emperor, which they called the President here. But if that were not his real plan, what was it? It certainly could not be protecting a sacred piece of paper. There weren't even any jewels on it. He had seen it once in a glass case.

“That's it?” Chiun had asked, looking at the simple old parchment.

“That's it, Little Father,” Remo had said proudly. “A lot of men died for that.”

“Who killed them?”

“Lots of people. People who would destroy America mainly.”

“You mean if that piece of paper burned up, America would no longer exist? It is magic then. The magic paper that holds America together.”

“Yes. In a way. In a definite way, yes,” said Remo. Chiun remembered how happy he had been when he said that. Actually happy. He wasn't lying either. Remo didn't lie. A frightening characteristic in a human being, like an inability to blink one's eyes, but nevertheless a characteristic of Remo.

And so there was Chiun standing before the glass case in a white man's building, listening to Remo happily explain a fairy tale about a piece of paper, claiming its words ran America.

But nowhere in the document was there any mention of king or emperor. Nowhere. All it talked about was what the government could not do to its subjects. Remo had read through about a half page of citizens' rights when Chiun had asked to be excused. He was going to vomit if he heard any more.

To the service of this nonsense was the awesome magnificence of the power of Sinanju now dedicated. Chiun thought about that as Remo, happy, left the apartment.