Child's Play td-23 Page 6

  "As bad as a classroom," said another.

  Remo spotted two blue uniforms down the other end of the hallway. He still had his Justice Department identification. He used it.

  The two patrolmen nodded Remo into the office. He sensed something was wrong, not by any overt movement, but by a sudden disruption of their rhythms. Unless people were aware of it and purposely controlled it, a sudden realization of the mind was displayed in the body. With some people it was a roar, like a Gary Grant double-take. With others, it was a more subtle deadening of the facial muscles. One cop had it, turned his back to Remo and whispered to the other who, of course, did not turn around to look at Remo, but if you watched his shoulders, they jerked upward as his mind responded.

  A big cardboard sign hung outside the door to the inner office. It read:

  Special Advancement Progress,

  Warner Pell, Assistant Director for Coordination

  Inside, Pell was not coordinating anything. One arm rested on the side of a couch, the head was tilted back over a chest bib of blood. Someone had shot him several times under the chin. The dead eyes were directed at the ceiling. A police photographer clicked off a flash. Pell sat facing an undersized chair.

  Remo showed his credentials.

  "Know who did it?"

  A detective whose white shirt had surrendered to the summer heat outside and whose face had made a similar pact with his job years before, said:

  "No."

  "How was it done?"

  "A .25 caliber up through the chin."

  "Then the killer had to be below him?"

  "That's right," said the detective.

  Again, a hit from below. That was how Kaufmann had gotten it also.

  "Anybody see the killer leave?"

  "No. Pell was interviewing some problem kid. Kid was in such a state of shock, he couldn't talk."

  "Maybe the kid. How old is he?"

  "A kid. Nine years old, for Christ's sake. You guys from Justice are real screamers. A nine-year-old kid, not a suspect."

  "I thought he might have been fifteen or sixteen."

  "Nah. A kid."

  In the outer office, a white woman with a fierce Afro and an indignant scowl that could putrefy a mountain breeze, demanded to know what the police officers were doing disrupting her schedule. If the clothes had not flaunted such severe dark lines, with a heavy wide belt and a brass buckle that looked as it if shielded a foreign embassy instead of a navel, she might have been attractive. She was in her early thirties, but her mouth was in its fifties. She had a voice like boiling Drano.

  A nine-year-old boy stood meekly at her side, looking for directions.

  "I am Ms. Kaufperson and I demand to know what you police are doing here without my permission."

  "There's been a homicide, lady."

  "I am not your lady. I am a woman. You," she said to Remo. "Who are you? I don't know you."

  "I don't know you, either," Remo said.

  "I am the coordinating director of motivational advancement," she said.

  "That's the retards," said one detective.

  "No," said another. "Pell was the retards."

  "What's motivational advancement?" Remo asked, watching the two patrolmen from outside close in on the door. Their guns were out. All right, two at one door, he'd go through them when they crossed, making sure they didn't fire their guns and hurt somebody in the room, especially the little boy who was with Ms. Kaufperson.

  "Motivational advancement is exactly what it means. Through viable meaningful involvement we positively affect underachievers toward fuller utilization of their potential."

  "That's lazy kids," said one detective.

  Then the first patrolman at the door made his move. Stepping between Ms. Kaufperson and Remo, he pointed his revolver toward Remo, announcing: "Hold it, you. It's the suspect posing as Justice Department, Sergeant. He's the one. With that funny first name."

  It was really a juggling act more than anything else. Remo had to keep the gun at him and the one drawn by the other patrolman and the two guns being drawn by the detectives from firing at anyone, preferably himself. So as the first announced that Remo should not move, he eased behind one detective and pushed him inside the angle of the gun arm of the patrolman and spun the second detective off into the corner and then simply moved himself through the falling bodies toward the last patrolman whose gun was up and ready to fire. Remo put an index finger into the nerves of the gun hand. To an outsider it looked like a bunch of people suddenly collapsing into each other while one rather thin man seemed to walk through them quietly.

  None of the moves were particularly exotic, mere shoves. The difference was that for a trained person time moved more slowly. He was past the last patrolman and out when he felt a sting in the small of his back. He knew it could not be one of the officer's guns because there was not enough impact. He turned. None of them were pointing at him. Ms. Kaufperson had gone into a flailing of the arms. Yet some one apparently had gotten off a shot at him. He was glad the little boy had not been hit. Remo moved away from the office. The body had just accepted the intrusion of the object. He would be feeling the pain soon.

  Walking toward the front door, his back began to feel as if someone had stuffed a hot stove coil into it. He slowed the breathing process, and with it, the circulation. This meant that by the time he reached the taxi he was really moving slowly because the slowed blood stream slowed the legs.

  "I've been wounded," he said, falling into the back seat and now, by hand, closing off the circulation to the area.

  "Idiot," said Chiun, slapping Remo's hand away from the wound and inserting his own. He motioned the driver to go forward quickly. While ordinarily the driver would have told anyone fleeing that he wouldn't be part of it, he had already been educated not to argue with the Master of Sinanju.

  "Idiot," said Chiun. "How could you get yourself wounded to me? How could you do this thing?"

  "I don't know. I was making a simple move and I felt this pain in my back."

  "Simple move. Pain in the back. Were you sleeping? What were you doing?"

  "I told you, a simple move. It's only a tissue wound."

  "Well, at least I suppose I am to be grateful for that," said Chiun, adding in Korean that it showed incredible ingratitude for Remo to risk the destruction of all that Chiun had made of him. It was a desecration of the values of Sinanju that Remo should risk his life.

  "I'll remember that, Little Father," said Remo, though he was smiling.

  "It is not just another white life you are risking anymore. I hoped I had trained you out of the courage silliness of the West that leads men to ignore that most useful sense of fear."

  "All right, all right. Stop carping. I don't know where I got hit from."

  "Ignorance is even worse than courage."

  "I don't know what happened." And in Korean because the cab driver might be listening, Remo went through, in detail, everything he did in Warner Pell's office and everything everyone else did.

  "And what did the child do?" asked Remo.

  "The little boy? Nothing, I think," said Remo.

  "When you arranged the policemen's guns, you thought of guns. So those guns did not injure you."

  "Well, one must have."

  "Which?"

  "I don't know."

  "Then it was none of the policemen's guns. This is so. For many is the man who watches the sword that is killed by the rock and many who watch the rock and the sword who are killed by the club. But he who uses his full senses is not killed by the thing he watches."

  "I am Sinanju. I use my full sense."

  "There is an organ in the body called the grinder."

  "You mean the appendix."

  "We call it the grinder. Once a long time ago this organ ground coarse foods. But it no longer was needed when man began to eat simple grains. And it stopped working. Now if a man were to eat a fish with all its scales, his body would be hurt by the coarseness of it because the grinder
does not work, although he still has it in his body."

  "What are you saying? I need your little stories now like I need an abcess."

  "You always need my little stories so you will understand."

  "What does my appendix have to do with this whole thing?"

  "That which is clear is clear. That which is not clear is more clear."

  "Of course," said Remo. "Fish scales. It's fish scales that did it. For a minute, I thought it was a bullet in my back. I hope the worm and the hook aren't still in me."

  "Ridicule is merely another way of saying something is above you."

  "Beyond me."

  "One should not explain the mysteries of the universe to a toad."

  "Croak. Try again. Perhaps if we weren't talking Korean, you might ease up on the riddles." The pain was leaving Remo's back as Chiun's hand worked gently on the nerves surrounding the hole in his flesh.

  "Riddles? To an imbecile in the dark a candle is the greatest riddle of all, for where does the dark go? This has nothing to do with the candle and all to do with the imbecile." And at this Chiun was quiet.

  But Remo persisted and finally Chiun asked:

  "What sense that you do not need has been turned off?"

  "None."

  "Wrong. It is so turned off you are not aware of it."

  "Sense? Sense?"

  "When you looked at the guns, what sort of things did you not look at? Things that were of no danger to you, correct? And what was of no danger to you? Do you not know what was of no danger to you? Can you think of what was of no danger to you?"

  Remo shrugged.

  "Was the desk of no danger to you?"

  "Right. The desk."

  "Was the wall of no danger to you?"

  "You know I watch walls. Like you, I'm aware of walls when I enter a room."

  "Correct. But not a desk. Now we both know many walls are hidden traps. But not desks, so you did not watch the desk. Who were the people in the room?"

  "The two patrolmen, the two detectives, Ms. Kaufperson, and the corpse. You don't mean the corpse did it?"

  Chiun sighed. "We are so lucky, so infinitely lucky that you are alive. You should be dead now."

  "Who? C'mon, tell me."

  "I have been telling you and what I tell you most now is that your ignorance shows how dangerous these assassins are. They are not seen. You see them but you do not see them."

  "Who, dammit, who?"

  "The child," said Chiun. "Think of all who have died. Were there not children at the Army post, right in the house where Kaufmann died? Yes, there were. And where was that other victim killed but in a schoolyard with children? And if this is not clear enough for even your dull eyes, how were all these people killed? By bombs which a child could throw or leave. Or with bullets of a small-caliber gun. And what angles did the bullets make into the body? Under the chin and upward, the direction a child uses. A child who could conceal a small gun but not a large one, a child whom bodyguards would only attempt to shoo away, never to protect themselves from. A child who is never noticed as a person, not even by you who was injured by one."

  "Wow," said Remo.

  And Chiun watched the streets of Chicago go by.

  "Wow," said Remo again.

  "You guys talk funny," said the cab driver. "Is it Chinese?"

  "No," said Chiun. "It is language."

  "What language?"

  "Language," said Chiun.

  "Japanese?"

  "No. Japanese is Japanese. Language is language."

  The conclusion was inescapable. All white men were dense, as dense as Chinese or Africans. Or the Koreans to the south and even those in Pyong Yang in the north. Stupid. Only Sinanju was a fitting receptacle for the light of wisdom, except of course the fishermen by the docks and the woodworkers and the villagers who lived off the toil of the Masters of Sinanju.

  By a process of elimination, Chiun had reduced the world to the Master of Sinanju, who was worthy, and all others, who were not.

  And not even all the Masters had been perfect. There was he during the reign of the Tangs who had grown corpulent and lazy, preferring to let others do his work. And one could not always believe the tales about ancestors because sometimes uncles and aunts did not portray with the greatest accuracy the accomplishments of relatives.

  Even the Master who had trained Chiun to be Master had been flawed.

  The thought came sadly to Chiun that there was only one person in the world whose intelligence, wisdom, and force he could admire.

  And how could that person tell his pupil, Remo, that Remo might be defenseless ?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The bullet itself had done only minor tissue damage. In a small motel room outside Chicago, Chiun removed it with Remo's assistance. The long fingernails probed into the back. Remo eased and contracted the muscles. His face lay on a fresh white towel and he could smell the residue of detergent. The rug had been washed with an overpowering soap. His breathing was slow and meticulous and steady, to raise his pain threshhold. In this soft semi-sleep of breathing, Remo remembered the earliest training and his first life of hamburgers and sugar cola drinks and a pistol at his side when he was a patrolman in that New Jersey city before Dr. Smith's frameup had brought him to his new life.

  He remembered the cool beers and the dates and the suggestions that he marry Kathy Gilhooly, whose father was a deputy inspector and who would be a perfect match for him. And how one night in the hallway of her father's house, she reached down and aroused him by hand, and told him, "When we marry, you get the real thing. I'm saving it for you, Remo."

  Save it? She could keep it forever. After he was charged with killing that pusher, Inspector Gilhooly tried to get the evidence thrown out, make some deal with the prosecutor, but Smith's organization was already at work, and Gilhooly had to back off and tell his daughter to find someone else. Remo had often wondered what had happened to her, if she had gotten that two-family house with a husband, the half-carat ring with four children, and the new color television set every five years. A bar in the basement was her big ambition, and maybe if Remo had become a chief, then a summer home in Spring Lake, New Jersey, with the politicians. The Shore.

  Remo felt the bullet go. Oh, what great hand and what great eye can frame thy fearful symmetry? He had lost that life and been granted in return more than two thousand years of human genius, one with a tradition of self-power so old it undoubtedly preceded the written word.

  Chiun told tales of the first master who plied his fearsome art. How the flaming circle had come down from the heavens and told the first Master of Sinanju that there were better ways to use his body and his mind. Before the written word. What great hand and what great eye can frame thy fearful symmetry? Chiun's hands massaged the wound, and Remo brought himself down farther into his mind where he could feel the blood move in every vein and artery. Yogas did this, but Sinanju was older than yoga, old as the first bands that plucked the wild rice from the marshy swamp where lumbering dinosaurs plodded their last days as crawly little men prepared to take over the world. Was it that old? No, not that old. The inked printed words in all the books Remo could find told him 2,800 b.c.

  Old. Old as his heart, which now rested on that single beat, his body not needing blood; Hold. In the dark white light, hold. Still. One with all being.

  And beat. Once. Slowly again and up, up from the mind. Up from Kathy Gilhooly, whose white gloves covered the hands that did the job in lieu of the marriage contract and the real thing. "Remo, I promise. I can't wait for your body."

  Old. Older than the waking sun. The sun source of all. Sinanju and the rug smelled again of violent soap and the towel of its detergent and he was in a motel room and Chiun clinked a small metal object into a glass ashtray. Remo looked up. It was the bullet.

  "Your body did not even catch it as it should have. It tore right through tissue," said Chiun.

  "I wasn't expecting it."

  "That you do not need to tell me. I saw," said
Chiun. The long white fingernails were clean. "I hate bullets. With guns, as we feared, every man becomes his own assassin."

  "You know, Little Father, sometimes when I go deep into mind, I wonder whether we should bother with being assassins."

  "That, of course, is the danger of the deep mind, but do not worry. It passes."

  Remo stretched and breathed and finally drank a glass of water. Someone was training those kids to be killers. He had thought it was Pell but now Pell was dead. There was someone. Find the someone, take apart his organization and call it a day. The big thing had been solved. The how. It had been kids.

  Funny, none of them had talked by now. The training must have included that. Well, Remo had one lead. The boy who had taken a shot at him. The boy with Ms. Kaufperson. Funny name, Kaufperson.

  "Beware," said Chiun as Remo reached the door. "Beware of children."

  "Kids?"

  "Have you ever fought a child?"

  "Not since the fifth grade," Remo said.

  "Then how can you assume you can match a child? These things should not be assumed."

  "I haven't come up against anything I couldn't handle, and kids are weaker than everything I have handled. Therefore, Little Father, with great courage I go risking the playpen."

  "Fool," said Chiun.

  "I don't understand."

  "Just do not go squandering this precious gift given you, lo, these many years. Do not assume."

  "All right, Little Father. If it will make you happier, I will not assume."

  There was only one Kaufperson in the Chicago directory. Remo assumed it was the person he wanted. The listing followed a multitude of Kaufmans and Kaufmanns. Two N's meant German descent and one N Jewish, usually. If that was so, were there German Kaufpersonns?

  Roberta Kaufperson lived in a modern highrise with new carpeting, fresh-painted walls, and two patrolmen guarding her apartment. He moved back behind a corner as soon as he saw the uniforms. He entered a doorway marked Exit which led to a stairwell. He climbed twelve more flights of stairs until he was on the roof, then figuring just about which area would be directly above Ms. Kaufperson's apartment, he slipped over the small metal guardrail, caught an edge with one hand, popped out free, caught a window ledge again, popped out, one catch, one pop, twelve times going down and there was the back of the brunette Afro pointed at a television set showing "Sesame Street," up and lift the window, into the apartment, catch the vocal cords in the left hand and: