Power Play

Chapter two

His name was Remo and he knew what justice was. Justice was time-and-a-half for overtime. Justice was not being given more jobs in a night than you could reasonably handle. Justice was being appreciated for what you did better than anyone else.

All those things were justice and Remo knew there was no justice.

So he knew the man he wanted would not be where Upstairs said he would be, and he resigned himself to having to trail him all over New York, finally winding up in some strobe-lighted disco whose sound level would turn sand to glass.

Remo slid into the empty seat at the small round-topped table and Kenroth Winstler looked up at him with a bemused smile on his face. The man sitting across from Winstler was certainly dressed strangely for a discotheque, even in an age of wrinkled cottons and baggy jumpsuits. The man wore black chinos and a black T-shirt. He had dark hair and deep-set eyes that were like pools of night and he seemed slim, except for thick wrists that he rested on the table. He looked at Winstler for a long time as if making sure of something.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Winstler said, nodding toward Remo and the chair he occupied. "But I'm expecting a lady."

"That's all right," Remo said. "I'll be gone and you'll be dead before she gets here. My name's Remo, by the way."

Winstler smiled. The din from the disco records was deafening. If he hadn't known better, he would have sworn that the man opposite him was saying that Kenroth Winstler was going to die.

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you," Winstler said.

"You heard me," Remo said. "Now I've got a lot of things to do tonight and not much time to waste, so just tell me, please, where is the Red Regiment?"

Winstler leaned forward to hear him better. He thought the man had asked him where the Red Regiment was.

"What?"

"Are you going to keep answering my questions with questions?" Remo said. He mouthed the words carefully and slowly. "The... Red... Regiment... Where?"

Winstler heard him clearly this time and turned around, looking for a waiter to throw the man out.

"That's all right," Remo said. "I don't want any thing. Well, maybe a glass of water. No, never mind. In this place, water would curdle."

Winstler ignored him and kept looking for a waiter. Remo sighed. He slid his chair around next to Winstler's. Winstler saw the waiter in the back of the room. He was about to wave to him, when he felt a bitter pain in his right knee, a pain so intense that it felt as if his knee were being cut into by a dull and rusty saw. He turned away, the waiter forgotten, and clapped his hand to his right knee. His hand landed on Remo's hand. Remo's face was close to his now and Remo was smiling.

"See," Remo said. "That's pain. Now if you don't want pain, we're going to talk nicey-nice. I told you already, I don't have a lot of time."

Winstler had no trouble hearing the thin young man now. The pain in his knee subsided briefly.

"Where's the Red Regiment holed up?" asked Remo.

"Did you say before you were going to kill me?" Winstler asked.

"See. There you go again. Asking questions instead of just answering." The pain returned to the knee. Winstler grimaced. He would have screamed except Remo's left hand had come around his back and was resting on his left shoulder and one finger was touching something in Winstler's throat and no sound came out.

"Yes, of course I'm going to kill you," Remo said.

"Why?" gasped Winstler.

"Now, you might reasonably think," Remo said, "that it's because you always answer a question with a question. But that's not the reason. I'm going to kill you because that's what I do. And do. And do. No one cares how much I work. No unions for me. If I ever get in a deal like this again, I'm getting me a lawyer, a fancy lawyer like you. Now, come on, the Red Regiment, where are they?"

Winstler hesitated and there was the pain again in the knee. He tried to scream and there was the finger again alongside the throat. The throat pressure lessened.

"I don't know," he gasped.

"Aww, come on," Remo said in annoyance. "What do you lawyers say, that's not responsive. You know and I know that you know and I've got to find out so I can go there and get that businessman they're holding free and now will you please tell me 'cause it's getting late and I've got a lot of things to do."

"What makes you think I know?" Winstler tried again.

"Because they're loonies and you defend all the loonies and besides your secretary's been dropping a dime on you all the while and letting Upstairs know who you talk to on the phone. And you been talking to the Red Regiment, so come on."

And then there was the pain again, but this time it was pointed, shafting pain. Winstler felt tears come to his eyes. It felt as if his kneecap had rusted onto his leg and this man was wrenching it free.

"See, real pain is like that," Remo said.

"You're really going to kill me." This time it was not a question. For the first time, Winstler believed that perhaps this man might mean what he had said. "Here? In this disco?"

"Why not? For supporting music like this, you deserve death. Where are they?"

"If I tell you, you let me live."

"No," Remo said.

"Why not?"

"Because I'm going to kill you whether you tell me or not," Remo said.

"Then why should I tell you?"

"Why not out of an overriding commitment to the truth, above all things?" Remo said. Winstler shook his head. "All right," Remo said. "Because of this. There are lots of ways to die. There are quick and painless ways and there are slow and painful ways and they only make you want the quick and painless ways. Now it's up to you. I only have five more minutes."

"Let me live," Winstler said.

The waiter appeared alongside the table. Winstler felt the slight thumb pressure on his throat again and his voice vanished.

"Would you care for something?" the waiter asked, looking at Winstler and ignoring the man in the black T-shirt.

"Yes, some privacy," Remo said. "Can't you see we're talking? Get out of here."

The waiter sniffed and walked away.

The pressure softened on the throat.

"Let me live," Winstler said.

"No. Absolutely not," Remo said.

"Let me live and I'll give you the Red Regiment. And I'll give you those saloon bombers in New York and the Pan-Palestinian skyjackers."

"I don't want them," Remo said.

"Why not?"

"Because I've got enough to do. I'm not volunteering for anything. The Red Regiment."

There was the pain again in the knee, this time even sharper than before and Winstler quickly blurted out an address in the east seventies. Lights from the disco Strobe-n-Globe flashed across his face and Remo saw panic in his eyes.

"And the guy they kidnaped is there too?" Remo asked. He had to speak up to be heard over the screech of the music.

"Right, right."

"Good," Remo said.

"You're still going to kill me?"

"Of course."

"But why? Who are you anyway? To come in here and talk about killing?"

"Just another overworked wage slave," Remo said.

"But who?" Winstler asked again.

"It's a long story," Remo said.

"I've got time," Winstler said. If he could get his knee free, he could bolt from the table. In the crush of bodies on the dance floor he'd be safe.

"No, you haven't," Remo said. "All right, three minutes. See, there was this cop in Newark, New Jersey. His name was Remo Williams. That was me. He got framed for a murder he didn't do and got sent to an electric chair that didn't work and then he woke up after everybody thought he was dead and they put him to work for a secret government organization. It's called CURE."

"What do they do?" Winstler asked. The grip was still a vise on his right knee.

"What do they do? They give a guy more work than he can possibly handle. Next thing they'll be handing me a broom for my butt so I can sweep the streets on my way."

"Besides overworking you," Winstler said.

"Yeah. Well, this organization works outside the Constitution to take care of people that hide behind the Constitution. Criminals. Troublemakers. Like that. People like you. We preserve the Constitution by violating it, in a way."

"And what do you do?" Winstler asked. "Remo Williams?"

"Right. Remo Williams. I'm the assassin. The only one. Of course, there's Chiun and he's an assassin too.

"That's fascistic," Winstler said.

"Sounds about right," Remo said agreeably. "Anyway, it shouldn't surprise you. You've been saying that for years. Even when I was a cop, I read about you. You were always calling America a fascist state."

"That didn't mean I believed it," the lawyer said. He was hoping. If he could keep this Remo talking, he might just stay alive. He remembered an old story about a court magician who fell out of favor with his king and was sentenced to death.

"Too bad," the magician told the king. "I was just going to teach your horse to fly."

Upon hearing that, the king lifted the death penalty and gave the magician a year to teach the horse to fly.

That night, a friend asked the magician why he had said that to the king. "A horse can't fly," he said. "Why'd you do it?"

"A lot of things can happen in a year," the magician said. "I might die. The king might die. Or, who knows. I might just teach that goddamn horse how to fly."

If he could only keep this Remo talking, he might yet be able to escape with his life.

"Time's up," Remo said. "I've got to go now."

"You can't just come in here and kill me," Winstler said. "It's not... it's not right."

"I don't want to hear about that," Remo said. "Everybody's always telling me what I can and can't do. I'm tired of that."

"But you can't. You can't just kill me."

Remo leaned closer and smiled at Kenroth Winstler. "You know what?" he asked.

"What?"

"I just did," Remo said.

The fingertips pressing into the kidney were so fast that Winstler never really felt pain. Remo wiped his right hand on the table cloth and stood up. He let Winstler's head slump forward softly on the table cloth and walked away.

Fascist, Winstler had called him. That annoyed him and Remo didn't believe it for a minute. Fascist. If it weren't for lawyers like Winstler who spent so much time and effort and other people's money getting criminals off, there would be no need for Remo and people like him. He wished he had not killed Winstler so fast, so he could tell him that.

Fascist? Remo? It was laughable.

He still wished he could remember something else he was supposed to do that night. It nagged at him.

On his way out, he tapped the waiter on the shoulder.

"Yes sir," the waiter said as he turned. He recognized Remo and his eyes frosted over. "What is it?" he said.

"That man at my table?" Remo said.

"Yes. Mr. Winstler."

"Well, he's dead."

"What?" the waiter said. His eyes peered toward the table where Winstler slumped forward, his hands under his face.

"I said dead," Remo said again. "I killed him. And if you don't do something about this noise in here, I'm coming back for you."

The waiter looked away from the table to Remo. But the thin man in the black T-shirt was gone. The waiter looked around, into the crowd, but saw no sign of him. It was as if the earth had opened and swallowed him up.

Downstairs at the party, they had only marijuana, and speed and LSD and snow and horse and fairy princess and HTC and amyl nitrate and aspirins in Coke and opium lettuce and Acapulco Gold and Tijuana Small and Kent Golden Lights so it was really a drag and Marcia went up on the roof with Jeffrey because he had some good shit and he didn't have enough to share with everybody else.

On the roof of the small apartment building in the east seventies, they unwrapped the package of Lightning Dust, following the careful directions Jeffrey had been given along with the drug by a guru with an eighth-grade education that qualified him to be a spokesman for the eternal power of the universe, which meant drug dealing.

They had to inhale a puff of the powder through the left nostril and exhale their breath through the right nostril. Then they had to inhale through the right nostril and exhale through the left nostril. Then, while humming their mantra, just hard enough for their vocal cords to vibrate, they had to touch their tongue to the powder on the small square of paper, wet it with saliva, swallow it down, and then lie back to wait for ecstasy.

The exact sequence was very important, Jeffrey had been told. They followed it precisely, then lay on the sharp-pebbled roof, waiting for bliss. It was longer in coming than they expected, which was not surprising because Jeffrey had spent sixty dollars for a quarter ounce of powdered milk, mixed one-to-one with powdered vitamin C. Its total cost to the dealer had been three-tenths of a cent. Its caloric content was higher than that.

Jeffrey interlocked his fingers with Marcia who lay alongside him, then closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the stars were still shining brightly in the dark night sky. He glanced from side to side. Nothing. He had been promised light shows and sonic booms and celestial pyrotechnics, but nothing.

"You getting it yet?" he asked Marcia.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't think so. Everything's the same."

They raised themselves into a sitting position, propped against the brick wall around the roof, and tried another dose. Left nostril, right nostril, tongue, saliva, swallow.

And then they saw it.

A man came over the wall of the roof, as if he had climbed up the side of the building. He was a thin man, dressed in black T-shirt and chinos and his eyes were dark and his hair was dark and his wrists were thick. As he moved across the roof, he nodded to them.

"Just keep doing whatever it is you're doing," he said. "I won't be but a few minutes."

Then he vanished over the far wall of the roof, and Jeffrey and Marcia looked at each other with surprise on their faces.

"There's no fire escape there," Jeffrey said.

"I know," Marcia said. "Wow."

They went to the edge of the roof where the man had disappeared. When they looked down, he was going down the smooth side of the brick building, as easily as if he were walking down a ladder. But there was no ladder and no fire escape.

"How you doing that, fella?" Marcia called. "Going down like that and all?"

"Shhhh," Remo called up. "It's an optical illusion. Actually, I'm staying still and you're going up."

"Hey, wow," Marcia said. "Jeff, you got any more of that?"

They sniffed and salivaed and swallowed and kept watching but they were quiet.

Remo would have preferred it if they had gone away because he didn't like performing in front of witnesses, but he didn't have much choice. And besides he had a problem.

There was a window about ten feet away that led into the apartment where the Red Regiment was holed up. If he went through the window, they might be able to kill the businessman before he could rescue him. That was why he had not gone through the apartment's front door. He not only had to get into the apartment quickly, but shockingly enough to stun the Red Regiment so it had no chance to react.

As Jeffrey and Marcia finished their new sniff of powdered milk and vitamin C, Jeffrey looked up to the sky, but the stars were still dully immobile.

"Nothing with the stars," he said. "Maybe this stuff only works with your perception of people."

Marcia nodded. She had not been able to take her eyes off the thin man since he had crossed the rooftop. There was something about his eyes and the way he moved, something that made her know that he could make her forget every other man in the world. She watched the apparition hang to the side of the building. He was holding onto the smooth brick with his left hand, with no more effort than if he had been leaning against the wall of an elevator. His right fingertips were being driven into the building.

"Look," she hissed. "He's pulling bricks out of the building."

Jeffrey looked down. One by one, Remo was removing bricks from the wall and dropping them down into the small dirty yard behind the old apartment building.

"How's he doing that?" she said.

Jeffrey's voice was thick. "Gotta remember," he said. "He's not doing nothing. Our heads are doing it. He ain't really there. We're here. We make him there in our heads. If we close our eyes and want him to go away, when we open our eyes, he'll go away."

Marcia tried it. She closed her eyes, squinted them together real hard, then opened them. Remo was still tossing bricks into the yard, making a hole in the building wall.

"Whooops," she said. She was happy he was still there.

Jeffrey had tried also. "Gotta practice some more," he said. "This stuffs not easy to use."

"How you doin' that?" Marcia yelled at Remo.

"I'm not doing it," he called back. "Actually I'm staying still and you and the building are moving backwards. Have some more grass."

"This isn't grass. It's Lightning Dust. Wanna come up and make it with me?"

"Later," Remo said. "Soon as I'm done."

"All right," Marcia said. "I'll wait."

Remo had the hole big enough now. The two-by-fours of the interior walls and the lathing strips and the rough inside surface of the wall plaster were clearly visible.

Jeffrey was looking at the sky, hoping for an aurora borealis.

"Hey, Jeffy, look," Marcia said.

Jeffrey leaned over and looked but all he saw was a pile of bricks in the yard.

"What?" he said.

"He jus' go through that wall. Like it isn't there," Marcia said. She giggled. Jeffrey leaned over to try to see better. As they both watched, a body soared through the hole in the rear wall and out into the yard where it hit the bricks with a wet, doughy thump and lay still. They heard a thwacking sound, and another body came flying through the hole into the yard. Then more sounds and another body and another. They all hit hard. Two of them bounced on contact. None of them moved afterward.

"Wow," Marcia said.

"You can say that again."

"Wow," said Marcia who thought it was stupid to say it again.

"I'm gonna see the guru tomorrow and get us some more of this," Jeffrey said.

Marcia didn't answer. She was waiting for the man in black to come back out of the hole in the brick wall and climb up to the roof and make love to her. And if he had to fight off Jeffrey, so much the better. And if he couldn't fight off Jeffrey, then she would fight off Jeffrey.

But Remo didn't come.

He found the kidnaped businessman in a closet, blindfolded, gagged and tied. Remo removed the gag and the ropes, but left the man's blindfold on.

"You're all right now," he said.

"Who are you?"

"Just another guy trying to do two men's work," Remo said.

The hostage reached for his blindfold but Remo stayed his hand.

"You can take that off when you hear the front door close," he said.

"Where are they?" the businessman asked.

"They left," Remo said.

"I heard noises. Like a fight."

"No, there wasn't any fight," Remo said truthfully. "Some scurrying, maybe, but no fight. Look, I'm going now. You take that off when I leave."

On the roof, three minutes had passed and Marcia had decided that that was long enough to wait for the one great love in her life. She would live with the tragedy forever, the sense of loss that the man in black had not come back. She would suffer. She would even give her body to Jeffrey out of her sense of remorse. She would try to find happiness in the arms of many lovers.

"Jeffrey," she said. "I'm yours. Take me."

She turned to look for Jeffrey. He was sleeping in a corner of the roof, snoring heavily. Marcia thought about it for a moment, then lay down beside him. She would give her body away tomorrow, to try to drown her sorrows in the arms of many men. But for now she would sleep.

Remo got a cab on the corner and told the driver he was in a hurry to get to Brooklyn.

"How much of a hurry?"

"A hundred dollar hurry," Remo said, flashing the bill at the driver.

"How much of a tip?"

"That includes the tip," Remo said.

"Okay. You're as good as there. Did you hear about..."

Remo touched the driver on the right shoulder.

"I also want it quiet. I'm trying to think of something. So every time you say anything from here on in, I'm taking ten dollars off the hundred."

"All right. I won't say a word," the driver said.

"That's ninety," Remo said.

The driver wouldn't make that mistake again. Ninety dollars to Brooklyn was all right and everybody knew that New York cab drivers were the smartest in the world, so he decided he would say nothing, not a word, he would just let that hundred dollar looney sit in silence, but there was that shine who looked like he might be going to cut him off and put a dent in the last unscarred spot on his left front fender and that was worth a yell, and hell, everybody wanted to hear some kind of comment on New York's weather, and the passenger must have an opinion about the New York Yankees, and maybe the passenger would like to see his polished rock collection because sometimes people bought rocks from him and a man who would pay a hundred dollars to get to Brooklyn might pay God knows how much for rocks that the driver got himself at this little place called Snake Hill, across the river in Secaucus, New Jersey, and by and by they reached Brooklyn and Remo hadn't had any chance at all to think and at ten dollars deduction per outburst, the driver owed Remo forty dollars.

He did not want to pay.

Remo extracted it from the man's pocket.

"If you want to wait," he said, "I'll give you the same deal going back."

"Hell, no," the driver said. "You think I'm made of forty dollarses?" He jammed the car into gear and drove off angrily, scratching the last virgin piece of fender on a heavy wire trash basket used by the neighborhood as a Dempster dumpster.

The building on Halsey Street was a tired, chalky old tenement. Outlined against the black midnight sky, with no lights on, it looked like dirt rampant on a field of dirt. Remo double-checked the address. This was it. The basement.

He went down the stairs in the back of the first floor hall. The cellar was dark but he moved easily between the ash cans and the stacks of newspaper to the locked door in the rear of the cellar. The old wooden door fit in its frame so tightly that no leak of light showed around its edges. He touched his fingertips to the wood and could feel the heat from inside that signified a light on.

Good. It was getting late and Remo wanted to be finished with this day.

Remo reached his hands up above his head, then drove the fingertips of his arched hands into the wood. They slammed in like nail punches. Remo yanked the door toward him, the lock snapped and the door came off the hinges easily. Remo tossed it to the side.

A big man was working at a bench. He was wearing boxer shorts and an undershirt. A heavy mat of hair covered his shoulders. He whirled toward Remo.

"What the..."

"Not a lot of time," Remo said. "You Ernie Bombarelli?"

"Yeah," the man growled. "Who the hell..."

Remo silenced him with a wave of his hand.

"Nice factory you've got here," he said. He looked around at the neat cans of powder and the long waxed cardboard tubes. "You could win a war with all these explosives."

"I could punch your face out, creep. Who are you?"

"You've been pushing these firecrackers in schoolyards. Last week, two kids lost their hands playing with your toys."

"I don't know nothin' about that," Bombarelli said.

"One of the kids was a concert piano player," Remo said.

Bombarelli shrugged. "Maybe he can learn to play with his feet."

"I'm glad you said that," Remo said.

Bombarelli's right hand was easing behind his back, toward a small drawer in the end of the workbench.

"Don't waste my time with guns," Remo said. "It won't do any good."

It didn't. Bombarelli had the gun out and in his hand and pointed at the skinny intruder. He squeezed the trigger but the gun never went off and then it was in the skinny guy's hands and then with two hands he snapped the gun apart and dropped the pieces onto the concrete cellar floor.

"Who..." Bombarelli started again.

"Who doesn't matter," Remo said. "What matters is that this is the kind of work I do. Every so often, I just get somebody who's a piece of garbage like you and fix him up so that he's kind of a lesson to the other pieces of garbage. It's your turn in the barrel, Bombarelli."

Bombarelli went for Remo's throat with his hands. He was a big man, with shoulders like the hams of a champion hog, but Remo met the hands with his own hands, and squeezed his thumbs into the inside of Bombarelli's wrists, and the firecracker manufacturer's fingers didn't work any more. He tried to yell, but there was another thumb in his throat and he couldn't yell. He tried to run, but there was a thumb in the base of his spine and his legs didn't work, not even to hold him up, and Ernie Bombarelli crumpled onto the cellar floor. All that worked were his eyes and they worked too well because as Bombarelli watched in growing horror, the thin man began scooping up M-80s from the work-bench, firecrackers almost three inches long and an inch-and-a-half thick, and with tape, he began fastening them to Bombarelli's thick, hairy fingers.

"No," Bombarelli tried to say but no sound came.

The only sound in the cellar was the thin man in the black shirt and the black chinos. He was softly whistling. He was whistling "Whistle While You Work."

He put a cluster of the lethal firecrackers around Bombarelli's neck and fastened them with tape. Then the looney had a piece of fuse, a long piece, and he was twisting it around the other fuses, wrapping it around the firecrackers, each of them the power of a third of a stick of dynamite, and he still whistled and smiled down at Bombarelli.

"Don't think about it, Bombarelli," he said. "There's no real why. It's just that every so often I do one like you. Kind of a Bum of the Month club." Remo dragged the fuse toward the cellar door. He dropped it on the floor and looked around in his pockets for a match. But he did not have one and came back to get one off the work bench, stepping casually over Bombarelli's body as he did.

"So long, Bombarelli," Remo said, as he struck a match and lit the long length of fuse. Then he was gone out into the darkness of the cellar. Bombarelli did not hear his footsteps going up the steps to the first floor, but he knew the man was leaving. All he could think of was the spark of the fuse, creeping its hissing way across the floor toward him, closer, closer, five feet, then four feet, then three feet, then closer and only inches, and then he heard the first blast and felt the heat, and then there was blast after blast, but the first one had provided all the pain to Bombarelli that his living body could register, and then the rest of the explosives went off and the cellar exploded in a flash of flame.

There was a cab stopped for a red light at the corner of Halsey Street. Remo waved at the cab. The cabbie pointed to his roof light; it was off, indicating that he was off-duty. Remo pulled open the locked door anyway.

"Hey," the driver said. "I'm off-duty."

"So am I," Remo said. "A hundred dollars if you get me to Manhattan without talking."

"Let's see the hundred."

Remo held it up.

"Okay. On to Manhattan," the driver said.

Remo nodded.

"How'd you open the door? It was locked."

"That's ninety," Remo said with a sigh.

Even though it was past midnight, Chiun was waiting for Remo when he entered the hotel room two blocks from New York's Central Park. The aged, wizened Korean sat in his blue kimono on a straw mat, staring at the door, as if he had waited there for hours for Remo's return.

"Did you bring them?" he asked. His voice was a high squeak with only two gears. Its range went from annoyance to outrage, with no steps in between.

"Bring what them?" Remo asked.

"I knew it," Chiun hissed. "I send you on a simple errand and you forget even what the errand was."

Remo snapped his fingers. "The chestnuts. I'm sorry, I forgot."

"I'm sorry. I forgot," Chiun mimicked. "I do not pay you to forget."

"You don't pay me at all, Little Father," Remo said.

"There are payments other than money," Chiun said. "All I ask for is a chestnut. A simple roasted chestnut."

"You asked for a pound, as I remember," Remo said.

"Nowyou remember. Just a few roasted chestnuts. To remind me of my childhood in the ancient village of Sinanju. And what do I get? 'I'm sorry. I forgot.' Remo, why do you think I even bother to come to this ugly city, except that they have chestnuts for sale on the street?"

"I'm sorry, already. Get off it. I'll get them tomorrow. All the chestnut salesmen have gone home by now and I had other things to do besides shop for you."

"If you really wanted to help, you would find where one lives and go there and get my chestnuts," Chiun said. He paused. "Your breathing was not correct tonight."

"How can you tell? It wasn't all that off."

"It does not have to be 'all that off,'" Chiun said. "The fall to death does not start with a dive. It starts with a slip."

Remo shrugged. "So the breathing wasn't perfect. You're not going to make me feel bad. I did some good things tonight."

"Oh?"

"Yes," Remo said.

"Did you send money to the poor and sick of my village?"

"No."

"Did you buy me some trinket to show your love for me"?

"No."

"I have it," Chiun said. He allowed his face to smile. It looked like a book, covered in yellow parchment, suddenly being opened. "Actually, you purchased for me the chestnuts and you are teasing me."

"No," Remo said.

"Pfaaaah," Chiun squeaked, turning away from Remo in disgust.

"I got rid of a lawyer who fronts for criminals. I freed a kidnap victim from a gang of revolutionary goons. And I got rid of a guy who peddles dangerous explosives to kids."

"And you call this good?" Chiun demanded. "Good is when you do something that helps the Master of Sinanju. That is good. Good is bringing me my simple chestnut. That is good. Bringing me Barbara Streisand would be even better but I would settle for a chestnut. Bringing gold and diamonds for my village is good. That is good. And what do you tell me is good? Something about a lawyer and a gang and a man who makes booms."

"Bombs," Remo said. "And getting rid of them was good and I don't care what you say."

"I know that," Chiun said. "That is exactly what is wrong with you."

"What I did was good and that means something, Chiun, and you know it. I used to think that what I did with CURE would improve America, then for a long time I didn't think it did. But it does. Maybe not the way I figured. Maybe I'm not going to stamp out crime and terrorism, but I'm stamping out some criminals and some terrorists and that's the next best thing. Not many people can claim to do even that much good."

"What you think is good is moral nonsense," Chiun said. "Chestnuts are good. Moving correctly is good. Not being sloppy is good. Breathing correctly is good. What does it matter who you practice on?"

Before Remo could answer, the telephone rang.

"That is Smith," Chiun said.

"He call before?"

"I presume so. Somebody called. But I do not answer telephones. Then a bell person came with a message and it was from Smith and said that he would call again."

"Thanks for the warning," Remo said.

He reached for the phone again.

"Remo?" Chiun said.

Remo turned. The old Oriental was smiling.

"Yes, Little Father," Remo said.

"If Smith is coming here, tell him to bring chestnuts."