Remo The Adventure Begins (2 page)

“Twenty-one sixteen,” said Sam.

“You got another couple hours on the graveyard shift,” came the sergeant’s voice.

“Great,” said Sam. He had been counting on a pizza with extra cheese, and a glass of beer. The closer his shift came to an end, the more he could taste the sharp smooth cheese and the rich foamy beer. The respite that had been fifteen minutes away had now become a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute stretch.

“Look at it this way. You can hear the rest of the Knicks on city time.”

Sam smiled. The sergeant knew him. Actually the two hours didn’t matter. It had been one of those weeks. Hell, it had been one of those months. Sam Makin would remember in the hospital that it had been one of those months. It had started with the reaction time drills. Apparently some idiot in Washington had decreed that for cities to get certain matching funds for their police departments, every patrolman under a certain age had to take a battery of reflex tests.

Sam didn’t know he had scored well until he was rewarded, with another test. And this was even crazier. It was a psychological evaluation. Sam recalled question number five as if the printed form were still before him.

“How do you imagine your mother and father would look if you saw them?”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that everyone in the examination room was an orphan. Then there were other questions. Finally some he just refused to answer.

He had brought the test up to the proctor. An honest woman from Toledo, Ohio.

“You can take this, lady, and do you-know-what. You can have the job. I am not answering these questions. There are some things I just will not do.”

“Very good,” she said and smiled.

At the time, three weeks before the night he spent waiting near the East River, the night he would die, Sam had been dating a psychology major at City College. Like so many before her, Sam had thought she could have been the one, the right woman for him.

She recognized some of the questions he repeated for her.

“That’s the standard test for the compulsive-obsessive, authority-oriented, social-avenger types.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s a kind of a patriot.”

“What do you mean some kind of a patriot?” Sam asked, hoping Sheila wouldn’t turn out like all the others. Sheila Winsted had seemed so reasonable up until this point. Reasonable, in addition to a dynamite smile and a body that could turn heads a hundred yards away.

“There is a type that can function alone driven by a compulsion. And that compulsion is socially oriented. They feel that things are not right in the world, and that they should be made right. They have a very strong sense of justice.”

“That’s good,” said Sam. “That’s a good thing to have. Why are you describing it like some sort of insanity?”

“Well, it is a form of deviant behavior. All heroism is.”

“That’s the trouble with schools today. That’s the trouble with America. When you start calling the patriots sick, then the country is sick.”

“Sam, were there some questions on that test you refused to answer?”

“You’re damned right.”

“Then they got you. Those are the key questions that nail them every time. Sometimes these patriots can hide behind the answers they give, but they can’t hide behind the questions they won’t answer.”

“Those questions were obscene. They had no right to get answers to them.”

“Sam,” said Sheila Winsted with the dazzling smile. “You are one.”

“And you’re a ball buster,” said Sam.

“Like all the rest of them?” asked Sheila.

“Yeah. Like all the rest of them.”

“Often your kind has an inability to establish a lasting contact with anyone, although you do have a great need for love.”

“Hey, Sheila,” said Sam, grabbing her shoulders. “Look at me. I am a human being. I am a person. I’m not a type.”

“Don’t take it personally,” said Sheila.

“You’re calling me a nut, and I am not supposed to take it personally? You’re crazy, Sheila.”

And that of course had ended the affair with Sheila Winsted, leaving Sam Makin with the only one who was always there for him—Miss Piggy. Miss Piggy was with him that night. The last night.

The desk sergeant had just checked in one more time, when Sam saw a thin black youngster zipping sneaker-fast across the front of his squad car. Two white men ran after him. When the youngster careened toward a warehouse pier the whites stayed right on his tail.

Sam, headlights off on the squad car, slowly eased it out of position onto the street, following the running men. The two whites caught up with the black man just at the warehouse wall. Sam drove the squad car right up behind them, and drawing his 38-caliber special, slammed on the brakes and was out of the car in an instant.

“Freeze,” he said. He had the convincer right in his hands, sighted on all three of them. He could drop them all in less than a second. He was a top marksman at the range.

The trio got the message. Sam Makin had that kind of a voice. People knew he would shoot. Their hands went up above their heads.

“Over to the car,” said Makin. “Move it. Hands on the car. That’s it.” The two white men leaned against the car as though they had done this before.

“Spread ’em,” said Makin. The young black man was not that young, close up. He looked all right, just a bit groggy. Makin turned his back on him. He would help him later.

But he didn’t have a chance to help. He knew he didn’t have a chance to help when the bat came cracking across the side of his head. Trying to swing it again was the black man he had been trying to save. He was panting out some kind of instruction to the whites. Sam felt the warm blood on the side of his face, the dullness that would precede great pain, the ringing in his head. His legs wanted to give out, but there was something in him that didn’t let him fall. He looked for his gun. It was on the wharf, sickeningly spinning away from him as the bat came back at his head. He felt his own hands on the bat, catching the force, catching the numbing hurt in a myriad of delicate bones and tissue, but the hands held. Screaming out in pain, he yanked the bat free and rammed it back, handle forward, into the giving groin of the black, who gasped like a broken water bag and fell useless to the wharf.

Makin wasn’t thinking. He was swinging. He felt the reassuring crunch of a jaw under his elbow. One of the white hoods had a hammerlock on his head and was trying to bring him down. But Sam smashed his own head into the man’s nose, butting hard, feeling nothing. And then there was that reassuring crack of a face under his fist, and he kept sending it back into the teeth, into the jaw, hitting until the face was falling from him.

And then there was one. But that one had a switchblade. Sam could run for his car and get help. He could dive for his gun and probably get the knife in his back. He could also back away. The man wasn’t coming after him.

Sam decided to make him move—take a run at him. On the first step, the hoodlum turned to flee. But Sam got him in three good strides, kicking the feet out from under him, sending the hoodlum crashing into stacked garbage cans.

It was over. Sam casually went over to the man, grabbed his belt buckle and with one hand hoisted him up, and then head forward dumped him into an open can.

“Don’t eat too much,” said Sam. He retrieved his gun, handcuffed the one hood who seemed most able to run. It was the black man.

“What was that about?” asked Sam. “You working with them? Why were you running if you tried to help them?”

The black man didn’t answer. Sam lifted him in the air by his armpits and informed him of his rights. He informed him he had a right to remain silent. But he also informed him that he did not have a right to be held aloft over the wharf planking. And on that Sam dropped him. Then lifted him. And informed him of these rights again.

This invariably changed a criminal’s mind about talking. In fact, this simple technique had always worked so well that despite five citations for bravery, Sam Makin was still a patrolman. A patrolman with four charges for police brutality. He had been warned a good half dozen times just to do his job.

“We are policemen, Makin. This isn’t good guys versus bad guys. Everyone is equal under the law. And whether you like it or not, people are innocent until proven guilty.”

“And what if someone has a knife in the back of a little old lady?”

“You arrest him, and let the judge decree punishment.”

He had heard that several times. And it struck him as odd on that wharf that night, with New York City twinkling massive across the dark East River, that the very same questions Sam had asked his sergeant had appeared on that funny test, the one whose last questions he refused to answer. It also seemed strange that after three drops onto the wharf planking the hoodlum was still not talking.

In a curious way, Sam Makin admired the man for not talking. At least he had guts. Sam admired him one more time, then the man went headfirst into the wharf.

Sam walked the few paces to his car to phone headquarters. One of his problems was that while he was a good alley fighter, he was a bad liar. He had been told in so many words from his superiors that if he had to bash the skulls of hoods would he please carry a weapon, to insert into their pockets so it would at least look like self-defense. He never did. It was bad enough to consider a lie, inconceivable to carry one.

But this time, he didn’t have to lie too much. He was attacked three against one. He picked up the mike, and for one moment he let his breath come back to him.

He did not see the large van with the reinforced metal grid, set in front like a battering ram. He did not hear it slowly move forward. Sam radioed the sergeant, and was reporting how he tried to save one man from two and how they all three turned on him, when the squad car screeched forward. Instinctively he rammed the brakes. But the scream of his tires told him they were holding. It wasn’t the brakes. Behind his car, a large van was slowly pushing his car forward. Then it stopped, backed off, and with increased speed smashed into the rear of the squad car, sending Sam’s forehead into the model of Miss Piggy and then into the windshield, and the whole works went plunging off the pier into the dark waters with the radio voice of the sergeant screaming at him, asking what was wrong.

The car paused only briefly before it sank into the putrid darkness. Sam tried to open the door, but it was locked. Someone, somehow, had locked it. He was going down and the world was getting dark. He did not see the frogmen scramble to the door, nor feel them strap an oxygen mask on his face. He did not see them put the corpse in his place, the body of a man whose face had been smashed to a pulp as though an accident had done it.

If the body had not been recovered from the police car with Patrolman Makin’s wallet in its pocket, badge on his lapel, the county coroner might have checked the fingerprints; might have, if the fingers hadn’t been so damaged in the accident. And if it wasn’t so dreadfully obvious what had killed Patrolman Makin the coroner might have done further tests, tests that would have indicated the victim had been dead for an hour before the accident, and that a large brain cancer had claimed his life, not the East River.

But here was the smashed-in face, here was the water over the uniform, and because there was no water in the lungs, the coroner labeled it not death by drowning, but by concussion.

Patrolman Sam Makin was dead.

And a day and a half later he came to and remembered it all.

“Why did you kill me?” asked Sam.

“Because we needed Remo Williams.”

“Who is Remo Williams?”

“You’re going to save the country, sweetheart. And a live man couldn’t possibly do it.”

“Who is Remo Williams?”

“You are,” said the man who called himself Con McCleary, the man who would later tell him he had driven the truck that sent his police car into the river. “You are. Here. Let me help you see yourself.”

He removed the bandages around the head. And held up a mirror for the patient to see. The cheekbones were higher, the lips thinner and the nose straightened in such a way as to become strong and dominant. The bandages had not been for a head wound. Someone had given him a new face.

“That’s not me,” said Sam. “I don’t know him.”

“Remo, you never looked so good,” said McCleary.

“Where’s my face? What did you do with me?”

“Remo, don’t worry about the past. You may even have a future,” said McCleary. “I happen to like that face better. And I chose the name myself; don’t you like it?”

“Why, certainly. There’s nothing quite like being killed and waking up as someone else.”

“Remo, you will get to know and love your name. You’ll find out it is who you always should have been. Remo, you’re going to save our country, or . . .”

“Or what?”

“Well, you know we can always fill a coffin,” said the well-dressed black man. “And Sam Makin is already dead.”

2

H
is name was Chiun. But in the village, the village of Sinanju, they called him Master. This day after so long, there was celebration again in the village on the West Korea Bay. Gongs clanged, women dressed in their most decorative kimonos and children were given sweet cakes. For this day, after several decades, the reigning Master was going forth again, as his forefathers had over the centuries, to earn tribute for the House of Sinanju.

Famines might come to other villages on the Korean peninsula, but not the little fishing village of Sinanju, for even if the fish failed to swim into the nets, this village would always eat. Just one jewel or trunk of gold from the House of Sinanju would feed everyone for years. And there were many trunks of gold, and many jewels, in that great house.

Foreign soldiers might come to other villages on the Korean peninsula, taking the women, humiliating the men, but never in Sinanju. The Japanese had ruled Korea. The Chinese had ruled Korea. But not one of those soldiers dared set foot in Sinanju lest their emperor have them beheaded.

For if a soldier might not know of the power of the House of Sinanju, the king did. The emperor did. The tyrant did. From ancient Rome to the thrones of Japan, from Greek conquerors to Mogul lords, all knew no ruling throat was so regally protected as to be beyond the awesome hands of the Masters of Sinanju.