"I could use a shower," she said.

"So could I, but coffee first. I've got a curfew."

"Don't we all?" the woman said.

She had wanted coffee, but with every step they took away from the mammoth Emerson College Fieldhouse, the thought of food penetrated deeper and deeper into her mind.

"Food," Josie said. "I want food. Swooping large amounts of food, piled on my plate."

"A carbohydrate junkie," Remo said.

"Yeah. Everybody I know, after an event, it's roll out the pasta. Well, you know how it is."

"Sure," lied Remo, who had heard about carbohydrate depletion but knew nothing about it since his diet was largely restricted to rice and fish and occasional fresh vegetables and fruit, all Chiun's Korean food staples and all so damned tasteless that Remo truly didn't care if he ate or starved.

They found a Szechuan restaurant two blocks away from the college and Josie Littlefeather insisted that she wanted Chinese food. As they walked inside,

60

the pungent odors flooded Remo's nostrils and he remembered with a touch of hurt that he was never again going to eat noodles with cold sesame paste or spicy-hot General Chien's chicken, or sliced giant prawns in smooth red garlic sauce. However, he made sure he ordered all of them for Josie Little-feather and he sipped at water as he watched her eat like a gleeful satisfied animal and he recognized that she ate as she performed on the beam-with joy. And Remo realized also that he found very little joy in his life since learning the secrets of Sinanju. There was no joy in sex and no joy in food and there was never any joy in killing because it was both art and science and its purity was its own reward. In making him more of a man, had Sinanju made him somehow less of a human? He wondered. And he wondered, too, if it had all been worth it.

Josie started off eating with chopsticks which she maneuvered well, but found incapable of holding at one jab the amount of food she wanted to stuff into her face, so she resorted to a soupspoon.