"How do you figure that?" he asked. "I've been chasing these guys all across the country and they get away."
"That is why you are fortunate," Chiun said. His hands came out of the folds of his flowing sleeves and waved in the air. Remo had rarely seen him so agitated.
"Are you paying attention?" Chiun demanded.
"Of course I am, but this isn't going to run into one of those long stories, is it?"
"I can tell this one in no more than an hour," Chiun said. "That should be short enough even for you and your limited attention span. Then we will go see the place where this fire was."
"I've got a wonderful idea," Remo said.
"Your having any idea is wonderful," said Chiun.
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"Talk in the cab," Remo said.
Chiun tried to. Unfortunately, so did the cab driver, who wanted to know why two nice gentlemen wanted to go to that neighborhood, even if one of them was, you know, not American.
Chiun asked Remo, "Is this person in training to be a cutter of hair?"
"I don't know," Remo said. "Why?"
"Why then will he not be quiet?"
"He will," Remo said. He leaned forward and whispered something to the driver, who stopped in mid-sentence.
Remo sat back. Chiun asked, "What did you tell him?"
"I told him you were a homicidal maniac who would visit revenge on seven generations of his family if he didn't shut up."
Chiun nodded as if pleased. 'This is a terrible story I am about to tell you," he said.
Remo looked out the window at St. Louis. "They all are," he grumbled.
"This one is even more tragic than all the rest," Chiun said. "It is about Tung-Si, the Lesser."
"Not to be confused with Tung-Si, the Greater, no doubt," Remo said.
"Yes," said Chiun, "but I would appreciate your not interrupting this story with guesses, even if they are correct."
"Yes, Little Father," Remo said.
"Tung-Si the Lesser was the only Master of Sin-anju ever to fail," Chiun said.
"He got stiffed on a bill?" Remo asked.
"Excuse me?"
"He didn't get paid? Somebody didn't pay him?"
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"You are really crass," Chiun said. "All you think about is money. Sit silently and listen."
"Yes, Chiun."
"Tung-Si the Lesser failed. He took upon himself, for the good of the village, a mission and he failed in it. It is for this reason that his name has been erased from the records of Sinanju. Oh, failure."
"How'd you learn about it?" Remo asked.
"Masters have access to other records," Chiun said. "Otherwise we would never learn anything. Anyway, this happened in a land far off from Korea, in what you would now call Mongolia."
"Now we call it Russia," Remo said.
"Yes. It was a very bad time for the village of Sinanju. For many months, the villagers had been sending the children home to the sea because there was no food for them to eat. Nor was there a mission for Tung-Si the Lesser, because the truth is that he was a lazy, slothful man who did not show initiative. Like an American."
Remo grunted.
"And then an assignment came to him from across the sea in Mongolia, and even though Tung-Si the Lesser would rather have stayed in the village, he went on the mission. And never returned," said Chiun.
Remo drummed his fingers on the side window of the cab. St. Louis was ugly. When he had been a young cop in Newark, he had been a pretty good drinker, and since then, looking at cities all over the world, he wondered if city people drank more than country folk in plain response to the ugliness of their environment. Did a drink help you to put up with the ugliness of a city? Then St. Louis would take a barrelful. Two hundred proof. And Newark?
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His Newark? An ocean of booze. Grain alcohol. Swim in it.
"And he never returned," Remo mumbled.
"He went off to far-off Mongolia," Chiun said.
Remo sighed. "And there he met the people who lived with fire and the fire consumed him and he never came back and that was the end of Tung-Si the Lesser, not to be confused with Tung-Si the .Greater. Or even with Tung-Si the Medium," said Remo.
"None of this is funny," Chiun said. "When you are sizzling and splattering suet drops on the floor, you will hope that you listened."
"Sorry," said Remo.
"At any rate, in Mongolia, Tung-Si the Lesser met the people who lived with fire and the fire consumed him and he did not return. But a message did and it told of a battle between the Master and a boy who could create fire out of the air without flame, without fuel, without tapers. And this young boy had been laying waste the countryside, because what else is there to do in Mongolia? And when the Master went to stop him, as was his mission, he was burned by the boy. But he knew of the danger the boy could bring to the people of Sin-anju and so, despite his pain, he lingered long enough to write the message to the village and to the Master who would succeed him."
The cab driver pulled to a stop. "Geez, that's a beautiful story," he said.
"Why don't you ride with him?" Remo said. "I can walk."
"We're here," the cabbie said. He pointed to police barricades on the corner by Barlin's Sports Emporium.
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'Tip this man well," Chiun ordered Remo. "I will finish this tale later."
The fire was out and although it had been water-soaked and gutted, the building still stood. Remo's interference had stopped Sparky from incinerating the building to nothing.
Policemen stood guard outside the building. Water still dribbled from upstairs windows and out from under the doors.
Remo led Chiun through an alley, and they slipped to the rear of the building and then inside through an open door.
"Where did he stand?" Chiun asked in a whisper.
"He was here," Remo said. He pointed to a spot on the old wood floor. Chiun bent down and touched the floor with his fingers. Remo had not had a chance to notice it before, but there were two footprints branded into the floor, as if by hot irons.
"And where were you?" Chiun asked.
Remo backed away about a dozen feet. "I was here."
Chiun turned, as if gauging the distance from himself to Remo.
"And he produced flames across this distance?"
Remo nodded. When he looked down again, he saw the almost perfectly circular ring of fire around where he had stood, where Sparky had started fire after fire. Above him, the beams of the ceiling were visible, charred black and flaking charcoal.
"Let us leave," Chiun said. Without waiting for Remo, he walked out through the shattered front glass of the door. Remo walked out behind him.
Two policemen on duty saw them and spun,
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their right hands at their sides, their fingers creeping toward their holsters.
Remo rubbed his eyes.
"Hey, you," the first cop called. "Where you been?"
"We were sleeping," Remo said. "There a fire here?"
"Sure was. Where were you?"
"In the back apartment," Remo said. "We musta slept right through it." As he spoke, he and Chiun kept walking past the policemen toward the corner, where Remo had parked bis rental car earlier that day.
"You're lucky you didn't get hurt," one of the policeman said.
"You betcha," Remo said. "I'm hauling my butt tomorrow to a lawyer. Sue the ass off that landlord. You two can be my witnesses."
Remo's suggestion had the effect he expected. The two cops turned away at the threat that they might spend untold hours in court, without pay, as witnesses. "Naaaah," one said. "Don't sue," the other said.
Remo and Chiun turned the corner. Behind them, the policemen looked at each other. After a few seconds, the small, fat one said, "They couldn't have stayed in there without being found. The firemen went through every apartment."
The second cop nodded. "And if they were in an apartment, how come they came out the door of the store? Maybe they were the ones who set the fire. . . ."