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  And so the answer was no. And Hareen refused even to see Master Sayak. Shortly thereafter there came five men with spears to take the life of the emperor, and these five did Sayak dispatch, but not before these five did again point the finger to the young captain in the quarters of the beautiful Hareen.

  And again Mujjipur forbade entrance, saying he had mentioned this to Hareen and that it had brought her to tears.

  The next killers came in a band of twenty, with arrows and slings and all manner of death in their hands, and Sayak through Sinanju prevailed, although this time the arrows were close, and the missiles closer, and he knew that while he could defeat the next in all probability and the one after that in all probability, sooner or later even a Master of Sinanju would suffer loss if all he did was sit as a target, like the emperor.

  And he told this to Mujjipur, saying the emperor must take back his word to the concubine Hareen. An enraged Mujjipur called Sayak a lesser Master of Sinanju.

  "All I ask is that you protect my life without harming my one blessed relief in a burdensome kingdom, and you say you have failed. Since when does Sinanju fail?"

  Now, knowing one should never call an emperor fool, Sayak accepted the rebuke and promptly entered the quarters of the beautiful Hareen.

  She was in the arms of the captain who had sent the killers one after another against her emperor. She told Sayak she would have him executed for violating the sanctity of her quarters. She told him her Mujjipur would never allow his ears to hear of infidelity. She told Sayak to leave the throne at Rhatpur and return like a dog to the kennels of Sinanju.

  Sayak heard her noise, but saw her predicament. This was a girl in love, for otherwise she would have accepted the favors of the emperor and grown rich and comfortable, a noble purpose for a courtesan, for in fact that would mean that her family and village would be secure from want. Sayak could appreciate this, for he provided the same security for his poor village, Sinanju, on the rocky slopes of the West Korea Bay.

  Seeing Hareen lying on the multicolored pillows with soft silk cascading about her and her lover in her arms, Sayak saw she had made an improper move for a courtesan. For she did not seek the crown, but someone else, and of course it was he who controlled the beautiful Hareen, the captain of her guard, the man who held her now.

  And with the inimitable grace of Sinanju, Sayak did move upon the multicolored pillows and snuff out the life of the captain, even while the beautiful Hareen screamed of murder, screamed of treachery, screamed she would see Sayak's death, no matter what the cost.

  Using the force of her anger, Sayak let the anger work around her body in traditional ways, as he prepared to move her from the tension of anger quite naturally into relaxation with common touching and breathing techniques of the first level of Sinanju, and then up to sexual tension. At the height of her transformed energy, he took her, bringing her to an orgasm of peak intensity.

  Since it was her body and not her mind that craved the captain, it was her body now that told her she loved Sayak.

  And indeed, this beautiful girl who was no more than sixteen offered some attraction for Sayak, for even though Masters of Sinanju are at one with their bodies, they are still men. And she was a most beautiful being, rounded perfectly in all the places that were to be rounded, and thinned in all the places that were to be thinned, and smelling too of lilacs and roses and all the fragrances of a thousand gardens on her perfect skin.

  But Sayak was Sinanju, and abiding by his responsibility he told her that first she must order the death of the emperor, order it from Sinanju, as a service. She did this readily, as she had gone along with the now dead captain.

  That night Sayak sent the Emperor Mujjipur from a peaceful sleep into the deepest sleep for which there was no morning.

  And by so doing, Sayak stilled the one voice that would accuse Sinanju of failure, though it had been the emperor's failure all along. But one could not be too careful about evil words from clients. Mujjipur had no right to defame Sinanju for his own faults, and thus justice was done, a necessary justice because Sayak knew that sooner or later even he would have succumbed.

  Now Hareen did not want her new lover Sayak to leave, offering him instead the throne at Rhatpur. But Sayak said, and it should be remembered by every Master unto the ages when all men leave the earth and assassins are no longer needed, "Beautiful Hareen, you offer me the throne at Rhatpur. But look now, a thousand years ago there was a kingdom here which you do not remember, and a thousand years from now, there will be a kingdom here which will not remember the throne of Rhatpur. But a thousand years ago, there was Sinanju, and a thousand years hence there will be Sinanju."

  And the lesson from this tale of Master Sayak was that an emperor who foolishly does not allow his assassin to do his job has not hired him. But he who will let an assassin be what he should be, that one is the rightful employer.

  Thus it was written in the histories of Sinanju that there was a time when a Master owed to Sinanju the correct move in seeking the right employer for the awesome talents and power of Sinanju.

  Millennia later, in a motel shower alongside Lake Booree in Colorado, getting the mud out of his body pores, Remo remembered the tale of Master Sayak and knew Chiun was right. He had almost died in saving that dam. He finished washing, dried off, and put on his slacks and T-shirt. He could travel with all his clothes in a briefcase. He had never gotten into wearing kimonos as Chiun had tried to have him do. He didn't like them, and Chiun attributed this bad habit to early training which could not be broken. Remo paused before the meditating Chiun.

  "I could never get myself to work for Palmer, Rizzuto " he said.

  And Chiun knew Remo had been thinking properly. "We can then leave. Insane Smith would never say we had failed; he is obsessed with keeping our glory hidden. Why would he not do the same for our shame?"

  "I guess you're right, little father," said Remo. "I guess it has come to that."

  In Chicago, Debbie Pattie had made a fantastic discovery. She had launched her team of accountants into the books of the Save concert. Out of the twenty-five million dollars raised, her accountants tracked down exactly what was reaching Gupta, India. It was sent in an express package two feet wide and one foot tall. Exactly thirty-five dollars' worth of Band-Aids.

  Enraged in large part because the man she wanted, Remo, had been right, and more important, didn't want to go to bed with her, Debbie immediately set out to raise a cry in the land about the fraud.

  She contacted the leading rock singers of the Save concert. One of them, who yelled about being an American and wore a bandanna around his head, showing lots of sweat and muscle, was Barry Horowitz, sometimes called The Man.

  He was strong. He was radical. He was concerned. "Barry, this is Debbie Pattie. I found out something horrible. Do you know that for all our work we are only sending thirty-five dollars in Band-Aids to Gupta?"

  "That's not my job, sweetie. I'm the strong outraged American. I scream my guts out. That's my job."

  "But if you'd been to Gupta, you'd have seen the suffering. We have to do more."

  "Hey, little shitheel, I sang my lungs out. You can't get no more out of this man."

  "But the people aren't getting anything."

  "I'm the voice of rage and justice, not the food-delivery man, baby. Get your act together. I got mine. "

  Some others thought it was terrible, but they had bookings they had to fill. And still others had attended the concert because everyone seemed to be doing it and they had never even known what the benefit was for.

  Debbie Pattie was alone and she couldn't even reach Remo. But she knew she had made it through a hard world right to the top, and if she could nail the thieves herself, she thought, then Remo, the one man she wanted and couldn't have, would have to come and admit she was someone special.

  The money, as it turned out, went to several places. Everyone made money. The auditorium management hoarded what little it had to pay damages to families of the injure
d and dead rock stars, the unions received special bonuses, and one dandy little tidbit was that almost half of everything collected went to Gadgets Unlimited, the company that provided the wiring and lighting for the stage. The accountants told her the people who arranged this were brilliant and knew just how benefits worked, even understanding that money could be taken out as security for future bills.

  "If you hadn't alerted us we never would have found this rascal. This is the best job of numbers manipulation we have ever seen."

  Gadgets Unlimited was in Grand Island, Nebraska. Debbie wouldn't go to Grand Island to die, but she would bring Grand Island to her. She phoned the company and got a machine. But this was the strangest answering machine she had ever heard.

  "Yes, I am an answering machine but I can answer your questions, hold conversations, and even give you three minutes of appropriate sympathy if that is called for."

  "I want to speak to the employee who handled the work on the Save benefit."

  "A tragedy, yes. But the Save concert also contributed to furthering the interests of stage delights."

  "There are a few million dollars' worth of bills here," said Debbie. She looked at the printout on the marble tabletop in her hotel suite. There were electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, and enough scientific gadgets to outfit a space capsule.

  "And every one of them going for improved and better sound, not only for today but also for tomorrow."

  "But wasn't this money supposed to go to the poor people of Gupta?"

  "Everything after expenses did go to Gupta, we are led to believe. I think they got the very latest in the 'ouchless' gauze bandage."

  "Look, to me that's fraud. And maybe you can pull off fraud against most people, but I got a friend, a good friend, and my friend Remo . . ."

  As soon as the word was out of her mouth she heard a fast click, and live noncomputer voice got on the phone. She knew it didn't come from a computer because no computer could be so grating on the ears. It twanged like a rusty nail across a piece of concrete.

  "Remo as in Remo and Chiun," came the voice.

  "Yeah. Them. You know them?"

  "Know of them? They're my heroes, little lady. My name is Robert Dastrow, that's D as in Data, A as in Arithmetic, S as in Silicone, T as in Titanium, R as in Robot, O as in Ohm, and W as in Wildebeest; heh, heh, sometimes I throw in an animal. I'm a card, you know."

  "Look, is there any way you can return some of that money to the people of Gupta? If you'd seen them suffering, you'd know we should do something."

  "Right you are, sweet lips," came the voice. "I think we ought to talk about it. We ought to talk about it some more. I'd love to give everything to Gupta, but I have to know what kind of person you are, not just some fly-by-night who wants a million here and a million there."

  "I'm a rock star. I'm rich," said Debbie.

  But it wasn't enough for Dastrow, D as in Data, A as in Arithmetic, and so on, and finally Debbie Pattie agreed to meet the man with the rusty voice.

  Robert Dastrow looked as he sounded. As though he should be in some hardware store west of Chillicothe. Ohio. He wore a plain starched white shirt with pencils in the pocket, wire-rimmed glasses, and a crew cut. If Debbie wanted to cast the perfect class nerd, she would call on Robert Dastrow.

  But if he was so backward, why was the conversation never going where she wanted and always getting strangely back to Remo and Chiun? You would think he had something for them and not her. He wanted to know what they ate, how she felt about their vibrations, how they made love (if she could be supposed to know such information). He wanted to know any strange things they might have talked about.

  "Well, it was like a family fight that went on all the time, like. You know what I mean? Like the old man was really his mother, you know? Not his father. His mother. Always telling him he didn't do this right or that right. You know, a mother who's always bitchin'. A normal mother."

  "My mother wasn't like that," said Dastrow.

  "Well, maybe where you're from they're different. But he was like his mother. And they were always arguing, sometimes in English. Sometimes in Korean."

  "Did the older one seem to know more than the younger?"

  "The older one didn't like this country, didn't like working here. Thought they ought to go."

  "And just what work did they do?"

  "I dunno. Those two were as mysterious about that as 'The Twilight Zone.' A weird pair. Bunch of stuck-ups. Who do they think they are, right? Remo thought he was better than everyone."

  "You had problems with him?"

  "Everyone had problems with him. The nice one was Chiun."

  "I'll tell you what I'll do. You seem like a dedicated person and this concert was for charity. There is one way I can make back my investment if I sign over all the equipment funds to the Save committee. And that's if you introduce my new electronic guitar tonight. Because if you use it, and everyone sees how good it is, then golly, I'm off and running."

  "All of the money you took goes to Gupta, right?"

  "Yessiree, little lady."

  "Is the guitar heavy? I can't work heavy. I move a lot. I'm a dancer too."

  "I'll make it light. It's got a lot of wires, though. It works sort of on your brainwaves too."

  And thus Debbie Pattie in the prime of her career allowed herself to be strapped into the new electronic guitar. Electrodes were set on her scalp and on her wrists and ankles, and when she began to play, this arrangement worked just as well as it did on any other electric chair.

  Debbie Pattie got enough volts while singing before her rock crowd to do away with half the capital offenders in New Jersey.

  Remo heard about her death on the television show Chiun was watching as he was packing his things, one extra shirt and one extra pair of pants. The problem wasn't packing the shirt and pants, the problem was getting them into Chiun's fourteen steamer trunks.

  To squeeze in Remo's clothes, Chiun would have to get rid of a sleeve of one kimono. He carried a hundred and fourteen with him for light travel in the trunks, and each one, Remo suggested, became at one time or another the most important one. Finally Remo pointed out that there was a high unlikelihood of Chiun needing one only for the Campobasso Festival of the Grape in Italy, since the Italians hadn't worshipped Dionysus since A.D. 200 or so.

  "Just when you discard a piece of a kimono is when you need it most," said Chiun. "But all right. Mutilate its beautiful wine essence. If you are ready to leave this insane asylum at last, I will endure it." Chiun was watching a soap opera he had loved in the early and mid-seventies but one which now he disliked for its filth and violence. However, on occasion he would tune it in, and this time it was interrupted to announce another rock star was dead as a result of the Concert of Death in which so many had died to save the suffering people of Gupta.

  The viewers were warned that the scenes might be too horrible to look at. To avoid the horror, people should not look at the scenes which would be shown now, at the six-o'clock news, and the eleven-o'clock news.

  "This is the Debbie Pattie concert," intoned the announcer, and intense noise and a heavy beat followed. Debbie's voice was barely a whisper, a whisper of talk, and then it grew louder, and her multicolored painted face turned a reddish hue and then she was screaming, and thrashing in the wires of the electronic guitar. She rolled on the ground screaming as the audience joined her in ecstatic yells. The drummer picked up pace and the fans were jumping in their seats. Some of them ran hysterically up onto the stage.

  When the song was over, Debbie Pattie stopped convulsing and was still as the audience went wild. Unfortuantely she remained just as still when the next number began. Men in white coats ran out, the necessary medical teams that always accompanied rock concerts. Normally they were used for the crowds. One of them placed a stethoscope over her heart.

  "It was only then," came the announcer's voice, "that the fans realized, that everyone realized Ms. Pattie was not singing, but had been electrocuted by a m
alfunction in her guitar."

  Within minutes there was another interruption, and Debbie's manager said the song would be released as a single, calling it her best work ever. A writer for Rambling Rock magazine appeared, calling it "the most powerful, sensitive interpretation of a larger scope of the dynamic of the frontiers of rock than Ms. Pattie had ever dared explore before. It was bold, yet in full knowledge of its absolute sensitivity, combined with a tonal daring that went beyond known frontiers of harmonization."

  And then there was the report that got Remo's interest. Half her money was going to the victims in Gupta, but with a special proviso: no organization would collect it, but it was to be handed directly to the poor people in cash.

  "Ms. Pattie had been investigating the use of the Save concert money at the time of her death," said an announcer.

  "She was all right," said Remo. "She was better than I thought. She cared. She really did. She smelled awful but she cared."

  Chiun looked up, alarmed. He sensed the sounds of American lunacy coming at him, specifically Remo's. These whites shared that insanity that he found almost nowhere in the Orient.

  "Let's go now," said Chiun. "We will phone Smith from Dakar, or Samarkand, or Calcutta."

  "I'll phone him now," said Remo.

  "Why break bad news right away? Allow Emperor Smith the kindness to still believe you work for him for a few more days. I will take upon myself the onerous chore of severing relations."

  "No," said Remo. "It's my job. I'll quit it."

  "No, my blessed son, great bearer of the thousand-year skills of Sinanju, glory of our House, allow me to do this delicate thing."

  "Don't worry," said Remo, who knew Chiun would not be saying nice things unless he wanted something badly. "I'll handle it."

  Chiun did not listen to the conversation. Instead he sadly packed both sleeves of the kimono for the Campobasso Festival of the Grape, the ones shaded to honor the god Dionysus. At least he wouldn't lose a kimono he might need. But when he would be able to free Remo from this insanity, he was not sure. Gravely Remo returned.