When Remo came out of the telephone booth, the luncheonette operator looked at him with open curiosity. This was Westport, Connecticut, and he was used to having strange people wander in, but someone yelling at a telephone booth across the room would be strange anywhere.

Not that Remo looked strange. He was about six feet tall, with dark hair and deepset dark eyes. He was as lean as a rope and he moved smoothly. Not quite like an athlete, but more like a ballet dancer, the owner thought. Come to think of it, he was kind of built like a ballet dancer in that black T-shirt and black chinos, but he had wrists that seemed as thick around as tomato juice cans. Remo had been coming into the store almost every day for three months to buy newspapers and a copy of the Daily Variety, the show business newspaper. The store owner didn't think much of his looks but one day his twenty-five-year-old daughter had been working in the store when Remo was there, and when he left, she ran after him to give him change from a ten-dollar bill.

"I paid with a five," Remo had said.

16

"I'll give you change for twenty."

"No thanks," Remo had said.

"Fifty? A hundred?"

But Remo had just driven away. His daughter had now taken to parking her car near the luncheonette to catch a glimpse of him, so the store owner guessed that even if he wasn't really handsome, he had something about him that women liked.

"You done with the phone?" he called to Remo.

"Yeah. You want to use it?"

The store owner nodded.

"Let the earpiece cool for a few minutes," Remo said. He walked to where the old Oriental continued to flick through magazines with his fingernails.

"I have looked through all these magazines," Chiun said, glancing up at Remo. The Oriental was aged, with white wisps of hair flitting out from his dried yellow skin. He was barely five feet tall and probably had never seen the fat side of one hundred pounds. "There is not one story in any of them that was written by a Korean. It is no wonder that I cannot sell my books and stories."