The Arms of Kali td-59 Read online

  The diving instructor was sure to give Remo the third tank from the right. Remo let them strap it on and listened to all the talk of how to operate the air-demand valve, assured them he had done this before, which he had, but did not mention that he had forgotten all of it. None of it mattered.

  With the tank on his back and flippers on his feet, he put the mouthpiece in his teeth and dropped into the glass-clear waters of the Caribbean. He allowed himself to sink, down as far as a man, then a story down, then a frame house down. Ten stories down into the deep ravine, he snapped the air hose to let air slip from the tank in goblet-size bubbles to imitate the breathing of a man. They rose like slow white balloons toward the great silver-white covering of air above him.

  The other divers followed, more slowly, checking their gauges, equalizing the air pressure inside their lungs with the water pressure outside their bodies, counting on gauges and dials to do what Remo let his body do better. Man had come from the sea, and blood was basically seawater. Remo felt his pulse level drop as he let his body attune itself to the sea, feeling a harmony in a thin body a hundred feet beneath the sea, still as a cave shark: part of the sea, not just in it.

  Two yellow fish swam up to this strange creature who moved as if he belonged here, and then swam away as if conceding that he did. Remo saw them quiver as they passed through his air bubbles. Then they convulsed in crazy circles and floated up, out of control, to the surface.

  The air tanks held poison gas, he realized. Given that, he should be dead by now, so he let his arms float loosely, opened his mouth to release the breathing device, and floated like a corpse, slowly up toward the surface like the two yellow fish.

  His two killers grabbed his wrists, as if assisting him, but slowly they stopped his ascent and then tugged him down with them, eleven stories, thirteen, sixteen, almost two hundred feet down, where the surface was just a memory in the hazy darkness of this clouded world.

  They tugged him to a dark opening in a volcanic hole, wide as a door and tall as a doghouse, and pushed him through. They followed to make sure he got through all the way, then pushed him upward in dark waters broken by sudden sharp lights from their flashlights.

  Remo heard the water break and felt the water drain from his body. It must be an underwater cave with a trapped pocket of air, he realized. The two men pushed his body along on a rocky ledge, but they did not take off their scuba mouthpieces while doing it. Remo realized why. He could feel it on his skin. There was death here, rotting human bodies in a cave beneath the sea, a stench like sour soup. He continued to hold his breath.

  This was where all the bodies that disappeared from Bonaire went. This was where the dope smugglers put them. One of the divers' flashlights shone on a pile of bales in dark blue plastic, all of them sealed tight. Those were the drugs. The drug storehouse was in the body storehouse.

  They left Remo's body on the ledge, food for the fish and the eels, and took one of the blue bags of drugs. But as they were about to leave, they felt something on their wrists.

  Remo had them.

  Before they could slip back under the water to exit from the cave, they heard Remo say: "Sorry, boys. Not just yet."

  In shock, the man with the gold tooth opened his mouth. His mouthpiece dropped out and he tried to breathe without it but caught a lungful of stench without much oxygen. He gagged and vomited and tried to breathe, then reached under the water for his artificial air. Remo helped push him under. The rapid bubbling showed the he hadn't found his mouthpiece. Soon there was no more bubbling.

  Remo said, very softly, to the diving instructor's two fear-widened eyes, visible through his mask, "You and I have a problem. Do you agree?"

  The mask nodded with incredible sincerity, especially after Remo tightened his grip on the man's wrist.

  "You see, my problem is if I stay here, I get bored," Remo said as he threw off the tank with the poison gas in it. "Your problem's different," he said. "You stay here and you get dead."

  The instructor nodded again. Suddenly a knife flashed out from his leg sheath. Remo caught it easily, like a very thin Frisbee, and flipped it over onto the rock ledge, where it would not again interrupt their conversation.

  "So how do we solve our problems?" Remo asked. "Your life and my boredom?"

  The diver shook his head, indicating he did not know. He noisily sucked the air from his mouthpiece. "I have a solution," Remo said, raising a forefinger in the air for emphasis. "You tell me your employer." Tears formed inside the diver's mask. The sound of his breathing became louder.

  "You're afraid he'll kill you?"

  The man nodded.

  "I will kill him. If I kill him, he will not kill you." The diver made a motion with his hand that could indicate many things.

  "Is that one or two syllables?" Remo asked. "Sounds like ... ?"

  The diver pointed in despair.

  "You'll tell me everything on the surface?"

  The diver nodded.

  "And you will be a witness against the survivors?"

  The diver nodded again.

  "Then let's get out of here. This place has nothing to recommend it. It's even more boring than the island." Back on the boat, it looked as if the diving instructor had rescued Remo by sharing his mouthpiece and air after Remo had lost his tanks. Remo did nothing to change anyone's opinion, but after they left the cruise boat, they went down to the beach for a nice quiet chat.

  The diver's employer was in Curacao, a neighboring Dutch island, a piece of quaint Holland in a warm azure sea.

  Remo went there and visited four very important businessmen who had suddenly become very rich. Remo wanted to inform them in person that first, their bodyguards and fences were useless; second, their careers in the commerce of the islands was over, since they had been dealing in drugs; and third, since they had killed American agents and other law-enforcement people, their lives were over. He explained that they wouldn't be needing their windpipes anymore, so he would take them with him and feed them to the beautiful ocean fish. He did and they died.

  Later, he had one last favor to ask the diver who had led him to the four main drug smugglers.

  "We've been together only a day now, yet I feel we're real friends," Remo said.

  The diver, who had been held two hundred feet beneath the sea by a man who needed no air, by a man who seemed to melt over fences and virtually through radar beams, and who took out the throats of powerful men as though plucking fleas from a dog, expressed his desire that they should always be such friends. A barroom of drunks on Christmas Eve never felt such true depth of friendship.

  "All I ask," Remo said, "is that no matter what happens, you will never tell anyone about me, what you have seen, or why you have decided to turn state's evidence."

  "I promise. We are brothers," sobbed the man.

  And Remo repeated a line from a dating club that advertised trips to the Caribbean. "You meet such nice friends here." And then his smile faded and he said, "And if you speak the wrong things, I will meet you again." The voice was ice cold.

  He flew out on Prinair to Miami, and from there to a hotel in Boston which he had been calling home for the last month. He was a man without a place, attuned to the forces of a universe which did not contain one roof he could ever get used to.

  Inside the penthouse of the Ritz Carlton, overlooking the Boston Common, the floor was strewn with posters, some of them in English, some with Korean lettering.

  They all said either "Stop" or "Halt."

  On a small table just inside the door was a petition with three signatures. One in Korean headed the list, and then there was the scrawl of the maid and the room-service waiter.

  "We're growing," came a squeaky voice from the parlor of the hotel suite.

  Remo walked inside. An old man in a sun-yellow afternoon kimono, embroidered with the gentle dragons of life, pored over the lettering on a new poster. The man had small wisps of a beard and parchment-yellow skin. His hazel eyes shone with joy.

/>   "I didn't hear you sign the petition," he said.

  "You know I am not going to sign. I can't sign," said Remo.

  "I know now that you are not going to sign. I know now that gratitude has its limits. That the finest years of a lifetime have been for naught, that the very blood of life I poured into a white thing has proven again to be worthless. I do deserve this," the old man said.

  "Little Father," said Remo to the only man in the world he could call friend, Chiun, Master of Sinanju, latest grand assassin of the House of Sinanju, keeper of all that house's ancient wisdoms which Remo too now had in his being, "I cannot sign that document. I told you that before I left. I told you why before I left."

  "You told me why when we had only my signature," Chiun said. "Now we have others. We are growing. This city and then the nation will be the pioneer group of a new mass movement, returning the world to sanity and mankind to justice."

  "What do you mean, justice?" Remo asked.

  "All movements talk of justice. You can't have a movement without a call to justice."

  "This isn't justice we're talking about," Remo said.

  "It is just," Chiun said solemnly. His English was precise, his voice high-pitched. "The most just. And for the public good, for their safety and eternal freedom."

  "What safety? What freedom?" Remo said.

  "Read," said Chiun proudly. He handed Remo the rough copy of the new poster he had been drawing. The English letters were scrawled like the writing of a palsied man, but the Korean characters were clean and artistic, with a clarity that approached grace. Remo had never been good at foreign languages, but he had learned Korean over the years as Sinanju had been drilled into his body and mind and soul. So he read.

  The poster called for an end to amateur assassins: "STOP WANTON KILLING," it read. "THE AMATEUR ASSASSINS LITTER YOUR STREETS WITH BLOOD, YOUR PALACES WITH CORPSES, AND RUIN A VITAL PART OF ANY ECONOMY. BRING BACK ORDER. BRING BACK A SENSE OF DIGNITY TO THE KINGDOM. END THE BLIGHT OF THE AMATEUR ASSASSINS WHO KILL WITHOUT PAY OR REASON. HIRE ONLY THE PROFESSIONAL FOR YOUR NEEDS."

  Remo shook his head sadly. "What do you think this is going to do, Little Father? It's already against the law in America to kill someone."

  "Of course. And why? The amateur assassin, the spouse-basher, the political murderer, the thrill-seeker who does not care about professional standards. Of course it is outlawed. I would outlaw it too the way it is done nowadays."

  "It is killing, Chiun," said Remo, and he went to the window overlooking a very old piece of real estate, acres of lawns and gardens in Boston that once the goodly citizens were allowed to use as common pasturage, now called the Boston Common. Those citizens had belonged and now their descendants belonged. A sharecropper from Georgia could come to the Roxbury district of this city and belong. Someone could sail in from Portugal and find a community where he belonged. But Remo did not belong; he would never belong.

  "It's killing, no matter how well it's done," he said, without turning around. "That's what it is and maybe those old emperors feared Sinanju and paid Sinanju, but they didn't want them around for breakfast or for an afternoon party."

  "They were emperors. They had their ways. Every great emperor had his great assassin," said Chiun. He smoothed his kimono and assumed the posture of powerful presence, the one of dignity and respect which another Master of Sinanju, many centuries before, had demanded that the Ming Dynasty rulers show him.

  "They had them where no one could see them," Remo insisted.

  "Where everyone saw them. Where everyone saw them," Chiun said, his squeaky voice rising to tea kettle shrillness from the indignity of it all. "For here is the truth. Only in this country is it a thing of shame."

  Remo did not answer. How many hundreds of times, thousands of times, in fact, had he tried to explain that they worked for an organization which had to remain secret? Two decades before, the people who ran the United States had come to realize that the country could not survive the coming turbulent years while living within the strict confines of its Constitution. So they set up an organization that did not exist, because to admit that it did would be to admit that the basis of the country-the Constitution itself-did not work.

  The organization was named CURE and it would operate outside the law to try to preserve the law and the nation.

  Of course, eventually, there had to be an enforcement arm to mete out the punishment that the courts could not or would not mete out. The enforcement arm was Remo Williams, former policeman who had been framed for a murder he did not commit, and sentenced to die in an electric chair that did not work. It had happened a long time ago in a state Remo had once called home. A long time ago, when he had had a home. Now his only place was not a place at all. It was his training as an assassin, given in full measure by Chiun, the reigning Master of Sinanju, only because he expected Remo to follow him as the next reigning Master.

  CURE thought it had paid, in gold, for Chiun to train Remo. It did not understand that what Chiun had given Remo could not have been purchased at any price. It had been given to Remo because Chiun had found no one in Sinanju, a rocky windswept village in North Korea, who had the character to become the next Master in the long unbroken line of assassins from Sinanju. Chiun never admitted this in so many words to Remo. Chiun did not admit such things to whites. And there was another reason also. One of the ancient scrolls of the House of Sinanju talked about a white man who would be dead, but who would nonetheless, be trained to become the Master of Sinanju. This white man would become the greatest Master of all, because he was more than just a man: he was the enbodiment of Shiva, the Destroyer God. Chiun believed that Remo was this white man. Remo thought that this was a porcelain crock of crap. But he did not tell Chiun that, one did not tell Chiun such things.

  Remo was still silent and Chiun said, "Sulking is never a sufficient response to anything."

  "I could tell you again but you wouldn't hear it."

  "I have given the best years of my life, the sacred years of my life, to breathe Sinanju into your soul, and now you are ashamed of it."

  "I'm not ashamed."

  "Then how can you label what an assassin does as killing? Simple killing. An auto kills. A fall kills. A mushroom kills. We do not kill."

  "What do we do, then?" Remo asked.

  "There isn't a good word in English for it. It lacks majesty."

  "Because it's the right word," Remo said stubbornly.

  "Never," Chiun spat. "I am not a mushroom. Maybe you are but I am not and I never will be. I have tried to take what was given me, ignoring the fact that you are white. I have always ignored it."

  "You've never stopped mentioning it, Little Father."

  "You mention it and bring it on yourself. Ignoring the fact that you were white, I gave all to you. I gave you Sinanju."

  "Nobody in Sinanju could get it right. That's why. You thought you would teach me a few blows, pick up a bag of gold, and go home. I know why you stayed on to really teach me. Because I was the only one who could learn. This century. Not in the Mings or the Fus or any dynasty from Persia to the golden blossom courts of Japan. Today. Me. I was the only one."

  "Trying always to ignore the fact that I was dealing with an ungrateful white, I gave you what centuries have blessed only one house of assassins with," Chiun said solemnly.

  "And I learned."

  "And if you learned, then you cannot call what we do ... that word."

  "Killing," said Remo. "We do killing."

  Chiun clasped his breast. Remo had used the word. Chiun turned his head away.

  "Killing," Remo repeated.

  "Ingrate," Chiun said.

  "Killing."

  "Then why do you do it?" Chiun asked.

  "I do it," said Remo, "because I do it."

  Chiun lightly waved a long-nailed, delicate hand into the air of the penthouse suite.

  "Of course. A reason without a reason. Why should I have ever expected that you would have performed for the House of Si
nanju or for me? What have I done to deserve the slightest inkling of respect from you?"

  "I'm sorry, Little Father, but . . ."

  Remo did not finish. Chiun had clapped his hands over his ears. It was now the proper time for sulking and Chiun was doing it. He had one last word for Remo before he went to the large picture window where he could best be seen sulking.

  "Never say that word again in my presence." Chiun lowered himself into a lotus position facing the window, his back to the room and Remo, his head in perfect balance with his perfect spine, his face a rhythmed stillness of poise and silence. It was a graceful sulk. But then again, he was the Master of Sinanju.

  It was only when he heard the door to the suite slam shut that he remembered there had been a message for Remo from the head of CURE.

  "I will come up there to meet him," Smith had said.

  "We wait with delight your coming, O Emperor," Chiun said.

  "Please tell Remo to wait there for me."

  "It is inscribed in the stone of my soul," Chiun had promised.

  "You'll give him that message, then?" Smith asked.

  "As the sun informs the spring flowers of its presence," Chiun had said.

  "That's yes?" Smith asked.

  "Does the sun rise in the morning and the moon at night, O Emperor?" said Chiun.

  Remo had often corrected him, saying that Dr. Harold Smith was not an emperor, and did not like to be called an emperor. He just ran CURE. He was a man chosen, Remo would explain, precisely because he didn't like such things as titles and because he would not use such a powerful organization for his own self-aggrandizement. Chiun had always smiled tolerantly, knowing that Remo would eventually grow out of holding such silly notions about people. He could not learn everything at once.

  "So he will be told as soon as he gets there," Smith had said warily to Chiun.

  "He shall not see my face before he hears your words," Chiun had said, and having taken care of Smith, he had gotten back to more important things, namely his posters assailing amateur assassins.

  He remembered the message only when he heard the door slam behind Remo. But it didn't really matter. Smith shipped the gold for Chiun's services to Sinanju whether messages were delivered or not. Besides, even though he hadn't delivered the message, Chiun could always figure out something to tell Smith when the time came. One had to know how to handle emperors. Someday Remo would learn that.