"Look, let's change the subject, shall we?" Remo suggested.
"Tennessee Williams is another famous Williams."
"Tennessee Wiliams is dead."
"But his greatness lives on in you."
"Cut it out. I'm sick of you ragging on me all the time."
Chiun's voice suddenly grew serious. "Tell me, Remo, why is finding your father so important now? It was not like this when we first met so long ago."
Remo looked out at the passing clouds. "I thought I had put it all behind me after I left the orphanage," he said quietly. "Until that time in Detroit when that hit man popped up using my name."
"A name which he pilfered from the gravestone where you are not buried."
"We know that now. But at first I thought he was my father. For a while there I liked the idea of having a father. Ever since then, I can't get the idea out of my mind."
Chiun said nothing.
"Mind telling me where we are going?" Remo asked suddenly.
"You are going to Hades."
Remo's brow clouded. "Hades is the Roman Hell, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Then why do our tickets say were going to Bangor, Maine?"
"Because that is where Emperor Smith assures me Cerberus dwells." And Chiun left his seat to inspect the galley.
"Cerberus?" Remo muttered. His mind went back to his childhood, and once again he could hear the voice of Sister Mary Margaret as if it were yesterday: Cerberus was the three-headed dog who guarded the gates to the underworld, who barred Hercules's path when he descended into the lower regions to complete one of his final labors.
Remo folded his arms defiantly. "Great. I'm getting near the end."
The seat-belt sign winked off, and the stewardess came up the aisle. Remo noticed that she was wearing no shoes. When she stopped at his seat and leaned down to whisper in his ears, he understood why.
"Go suck your own toes," he told her.
When the Master of Sinanju returned from his inspection of the galley facilities, Remo told him, "The stewardess invited me to suck her toes."
"Before Rome fell, its women insisted upon being on top."
"There's nothing wrong with being on top."
"If these unwholesome ideas take root, the House will have to look to Persia in the next century for its gold. Do you still possess the coins?"
"Sure."
"Let me see them."
Remo produced the coins, one from each pocket so they wouldn't jingle and give him away.
"What do they tell you, Remo?" asked Chiun.
"Spend it while the currency is still good?"
"You are hopeless."
Remo grinned. "But still on top."
Over a mountainous section of the country, Remo happened to look down and saw in life something he had seen many times in books and magazines.
"That looks like Meteor Crater," he said to Chiun. The Master of Sinanju looked out, sniffed and said, "I see a great hole surrounded by desolation."
Remo pulled from his wallet a square of paper that had been folded many times. It was sealed in plastic with Scotch tape. He undid the tape and unfolded the paper.
The black grease-pencil sketch featured a sad-eyed young woman with long dark hair, framing a handsome oval face. A police sketch artist had made it, based on Remo's description after his mother's spirit had appeared to him the first time months before. Ever since, Remo had carried it everywhere he went.
"She said my father sometimes lived among the stars and sometimes where the great star fell," Remo said softly.
"I see a hole in the ground. No star."
Remo hit the overhead stewardess-call button. Every stewardess on the plane was suddenly beside him, straightening hair and uniform skirts and moistening lipsticked mouths.
"What state are we over?" he asked the assembled stewardess crew.
"Suck my toes till they're wrinkled, and I'll tell you," offered one.
That particular stewardess was pushed to the rear and all but sat upon by the others.
"Arizona," the rest chorused helpfully.
"Thank you," said Remo, dismissing the flight crew. When they refused to dismiss, he carefully folded the drawing and replaced it in his wallet, taking his time and trying to look absorbed.
They were still there when he looked up. "Was that your mother?" one asked.
"How'd you know?" Remo asked, genuinely surprised.
"She has your eyes. Anyone could see that." Hearing that, the Master of Sinanju suddenly flew out of his seat like an angry hen and shooed the stewardesses to the back of the plane.
When he returned to his seat to receive the gratitude of his pupil, Remo had all but fallen asleep in his seat. The Master of Sinanju didn't wake him. But he did sit very close, with one ear cocked to catch any syllables Remo might speak in sleep.
RED POPPIES FILLED a valley where herons swooped. There was a clear, crystalline light that was everywhere but seemed to have no source. It was not sunlight. There was no sun in the vaulting blue sky.
Striding through the poppies, lifting his skirted legs in high, purposeful steps came a small-boned Korean. "Chiun?" Remo blurted.
But as the figure drew near, Remo saw that it was not Chiun. The man resembled Chiun. He was old, his face seamed and wrinkled and papery, his eyes the same clear, ageless hazel.
The figure walked up to Remo and stopped abruptly. No particle of warmth came over his face as he looked Remo up and down. "You are very tall."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"I have never seen a man so tall. Or so pale."
"That's how we grow where I come from. Tall and pale."
"Is the blood in your veins as red as mine?"
"Yep," Remo said warily.
"Your blood and my blood. They are the same blood?"
"Same color anyway."
"I cannot fight one of my own blood."
"Glad to hear it," Remo said dryly, not letting his guard down.
"I have something for you."
"Yeah?"
And reaching behind his back, the old Korean grabbed the jeweled hilt of a sword that Remo could have sworn was not there a moment before.
When it came into the clear light, Remo saw that it was the Sword of Sinanju.
"I give custody of this sword to you as a token of recognition that the blood in your veins is the same as the blood flowing through mine."
And the sword suddenly reversed in the old Korean's hands so the jeweled hilt was offered to Remo.
When Remo hesitated, the old Korean urged, "Take it."
"No," said Remo. "Why not?"
"I haven't earned it yet."
A warm light came into the old Korean's eyes. "That is an excellent answer. But I ask you to hold it for me because it is very heavy and I am very old."
"All right," said Remo, reaching out for the hilt. The moment he laid hands upon it, he knew he had made a mistake. Something coldly sharp pierced the pad of his thumb.
"Ah!" said Remo. "Damn it."
The other's voice turned cold and contemptuous. "You have disgraced the blood in your veins. For you do not know the lesson of Cho."
Remo looked at the blood coming from his thumb. There was a drop of it on the barb in the sword's hilt, which had sprung out the moment he applied pressure. "That had better not have been poisoned."
"It was not. But it might have been."
"You Cho?"
"No. I am Kojing."
And Master Kojing suddenly turned on his heel and stormed back into the field of red poppies.
"Kojing! Wait! Don't you have something to tell me?"
"Yes. Do not bleed over my poppies."
REMO WOKE up.
"Damn," he said.
"What is it?" asked Chiun. "I met Kojing."
"Yes?"
"He handed me the Sword of Sinanju hilt first, and I fell for it."
"I told you the lesson of Cho," Chiun hissed.
"A zillion years ago. I'm lucky to remember last Tuesday the way you're running my tail off."
Frowning, Remo looked out the window at the deeply ridged red mountains of Arizona and said to himself, "I wonder what Kojing was going to tell me?"