And because he had just heard on the news that inflation was caused by excess money in circulation, he started a fire in the fireplace and burned the money before he left.

Remo had left his car in the parking lot of the Ding-Dong Diner, only three miles away, so he walked because it was a nice night. The birds sang in the trees under the bright Southern moon and there was just enough breeze to cool the air, and it was the kind of night that made a man glad to be alive, Remo thought.

Chiun was still sitting in the passenger's seat of the rented automobile, watching the front door of the diner which had been converted from an old railroad car.

The frail old man did not turn around as Remo opened the unlocked door and slid behind the wheel. Instead, his hands folded inside the billowing sleeves of his dark green evening kimono, he watched the front door of the diner with intense concentration.

"All done," Remo said.

"Shhhh," said Chiun. "This is very interesting."

"What's very interesting?"

"This is a place to eat, correct?" Chiun asked.

"That's right."

"Everybody who goes inside is already fat," Chiun said. "If they are already fat, why are they going in there to eat?"

"Even fat people have to eat," Remo said.

Chiun turned his hazel eyes on Remo and stared at him with disdain.

"Who told you that?" he asked.

"Listen. I do a big night's work and all you're interested in is fat people eating?" Remo started the car and drove over the pitted ruts of the diner driveway, out onto Route 123, heading north.

Chiun sighed. "I suppose now I must listen to your boring account of how you spent your evening," he said.

"No, you don't. It's not important. Twenty-seven guys, that's all. Twenty-eight if you count the one who wasn't a nice person."

"Paaaah. And faaaaah. It is a nothing," Chiun said. "Numbers are not important. What is important is attitude and performance. Was your elbow straight? Did you take pride in doing adequate work? These things are important."

"Strangely enough, Little Father, I did," Remo said as he turned off Route 123 and headed east toward the coast on County Road 456, a narrow, unlighted two-lane road. "I thought to myself that all I have in this world is self-respect for a job well done."

"Adequately done, knowing you," Chiun said.

"Well done," Remo insisted. They were silent for a few moments. Remo said, "Funny, to think of being proud about killing."

"Killing?" said Chiun. His voice scaled the heights of outrage. "Killing? You call the work of an assassin mere killing? Booms kill..."

"Bombs," Remo corrected.

"Yes," said Chiun. "And they are not proud. Bullets kill. They are not proud either. Are germs proud? Yet who kills more than germs? I remember once, a particular bad sort of germ which carried off almost half my native village of Sinanju."

"Halfway measures are never any good," Remo said. Chiun ignored him.

"But those germs were not proud. Now, you are not a boom..."

"Bomb."

"Or a bullet or a germ. You are an assassin. If you do well or, in your case, adequately, you must be proud. Really, Remo." Chiun's hands had come from his sleeves and fluttered in front of his face as he spoke. "Really, you surprise me. If you were a doctor or a lawyer or some other menial, I could understand not being proud. But an assassin? Trained by Sinanju? Not being proud? It staggers me."

"No," Remo said, "you're wrong. I am proud. I'm proud of your teaching me Sinanju and me learning it. I'm proud of being an assassin. I'm proud of keeping my elbows straight when I work. I'm proud of kill... ooops, assassinating twenty-eight men tonight."

"Good," said Chiun, warmly. "Perhaps you will yet learn what is important in life."

"And I'm proud to be an American, fellas," Remo said. "Really proud. When those 'Stars and Stripes Forever' come marching by on the Fourth of July, I get this warm feeling that I'm ten feet tall and put on earth by God to help the little folks of the rest of the world solve their problems, the good old-fashioned American way. Yessirreebob, proud to be an American."

Chiun sniffed. "There are some types of river mud which one not only cannot make into diamonds, but cannot even make into bricks. Woe is me. It was my misfortune to find one such as you."

Their motel room was on a spit of land that jutted out into the Atlantic Ocean and when they returned to it, Chiun immediately went to his thirteen lacquered steamer trunks that went with him wherever he went and began to check the contents. Chiun said, depending on his mood, that the trunks contained his few meager possessions, or that they contained his most valuable treasures without which he could not live. Remo, however, had seen inside the trunks and knew that they contained primarily a year-long supply of satin and silk kimonos, Cinzano ashtrays, hotel towels, free matchbooks, coaster and cocktail stirrers, complimentary Frisbees, plastic shoe-shine cloths, key chains and everything else that Chiun could pick up free or on the cheap. One trunk was filled, top to bottom, with Gideon Bibles that Chiun had stolen from the hotel rooms they had stayed in over the last ten years.

"Why do you keep checking those things?" Remo asked. He addressed the question to Chiun's back as the old Oriental was bent over a trunk, examining its contents.

Without turning, Chiun raised a finger as if making a high point in his lecture on life.

"Chambermaids. They steal things."

"But cheap Cinzano ashtrays? Who'd steal those?"

"There are more things in my trunks than ashtrays," Chiun said and his voice was chilled. "Many valuable things."

"I know," Remo said. "But I don't think the chambermaid would risk getting killed so she could rip off your complimentary dinner napkin from Disneyworld."

"You know nothing," Chiun said. He continued his inspection. The telephone rang, and Remo knew it was Dr. Harold W. Smith, checking on the evening's work.

"Done," he said. "Yeah. All of them."

"Good," Smith said.

"Yes, I was," Remo said. "Very good tonight."

"Tell him you are proud to be an American," Chiun suggested.

"I'm proud to be an American, assassinating people for you," Remo told Smith.

"Yes, yes. Well, there is something I want you to do," Smith said.

"Dammit, Smitty, how about some time off?"

"This is time off," Smith said.

"I'm not going to kill anybody," Remo said. "No matter how proud I am."

"Good," said Smith. "That's just what I want. I don't want you to kill anybody. I just want you to look around."

"Look around at what? Where?"

"Bay City, New Jersey. Something's going on up there and we want to get a little handle on it. I'd like you to go up there and just try to get the feel of the town. Tell me what you think."

"You don't have anybody else you can send in there? This isn't my kind of work," Remo said.

"Nothing is," Chiun said.

"I know," Smith said. "But as a favor to me."

"Say that again?" Remo asked.

"Do this as a favor to me."

"Since you put it that way," Remo said. "Bay City, here we come."