Political Pressure

28

"What's with the look?" Remo asked.

"I am watching out for more careless dumping of my precious trunks." Chiun had been eyeing him suspiciously since they picked up the luggage.

"I'll whistle if I feel the need to throw them around anymore," Remo said. "See that guy?"

"You are trying to distract me?"

"No, just making an observation. Look at that guy."

Chiun glanced to the left, then returned his gaze to the trunks balanced, perfectly, on Remo's shoulders. "He is just another white man in a monkey suit. What of him?"

"Business traveler. See how he manages to pack all his paperwork and probably a laptop and a few changes of clothes into that one bag? And then he carries it on and never has to wait for the luggage to arrive. Plus, he doesn't have to have an argument with the security people at every airport when he checks his luggage. Isn't that cool?"

"I do not see your point."

"My point is, if that guy can travel with just a carryon, why can't you?"

Chiun sniffed. "Are you not weary of trying to convince me of this?"

"Not as tired as I am of carrying your trunks."

"I am a Master of Sinanju. I cannot travel with a carryon."

"Hello? I'm one of those, you know. All I carry around with me is a change of clothes and an extra pair of shoes."

"You dress in underwear. If you were a woman, you would have spent the last twenty-odd years globetrotting in lingerie. This is not a style I wish to emulate. What are we doing in San Francisco?"

"You heard Smith. We're looking for the next MAEBE cell."

"I don't like this city," Chiun announced.

"You've only just started complaining, if I guess right."

Chiun's suspicious squint became flinty. "Meaning what?"

"Meaning our first stop is in Japantown."

"Ach!" Chiun waved at the air as if to ward off a disgusting stench. "Now you'll be telling me our next stop is in Chinatown."

"Lord, I hope not," Remo said. "For Chinatown's sake."

Remo parked the rental in a no-parking zone and Chiun's disgust mounted exponentially. Remo vaulted out of the car and slammed the door before the old Korean could express himself, circled around the complaining parking meter reader and entered the Japantown Lenny's. The always-open chain of family restaurants had hundreds of outlets that looked exactly the same, but the franchise in Japantown, San Francisco, was an original. Vast open ceiling with a hanging fabric and wood-frame artwork and a menu that included sashimi as well as the usual UltraMelt line of roasted sandwiches. The smell of unfresh fish mixed with the usual fried-cheese odor.

"Revolting," Chiun said, standing at Remo's elbow. "Incidentally, the young woman on the sidewalk has threatened to kick you in the behind."

"What?" Remo asked absently as he scanned the clientele.

"Give you the boot."

"Oh. Let her."

"Like I would try to stop anyone from putting a shoe in your huge, pale backside?"

Remo saw Adam Clayton. Not that he recognized the man, but he was distinguishable enough among the booths occupied by mostly elderly Japanese men involved in animated discussion.

"You Remo Uberstock?"

"I suppose so," Remo said, breathing shallowly. Clayton's breath was eighty proof. Clayton was the man behind the expose on Griffin that would be teased on the evening news and run tomorrow in the newspaper.

Smith had arranged for Remo and Chiun to meet with the man, and Clayton had hinted over the phone that he had his own hypotheses, quite accurate ones, about MAEBE and the killings.

"Your friend is attracting attention," Clayton pointed out.

"No killing, Moses," Remo pleaded, trying to usher Chiun into the booth first. No such luck. Getting locked in the back of the both would have slowed down Chiun not at all anyway.

"Where's Griffin?"

"I don't know," Clayton said. "Hopefully he's got the hell out of San Fran. I told him MAEBE was after him. I told him he was dead meat. I don't think he bought it, though. He was too worried about his career going down the tubes."

"His political aspirations don't count for much when he's dead," Remo said.

"He thought I was full of shit, like I had bought into some sort of a conspiracy theory. But I've been covering politics for thirty years, and I know what a legitimate conspiracy smells like."

"He knows nothing of smells, or he would not have us meet with him in a place that smells like Japanese people," Chiun complained in Korean.

"Japanese people don't smell bad," Remo replied, also in Korean, the one language besides English in which he was fluent—and he had learned it purely by accident.

"You, too, are odor-ignorant, else you would be plagued with self-loathing."

"Where would Griffin be if he were still in San Francisco?"

Clayton shrugged, sipping his tea. "At home boozing or puking, or maybe at BCN trying to stop the commercials."

"The commercials?" Remo asked.

"See, once BCN starts airing the promo spots for the seven-o'clock news, there is no way they pull it. They're committed. They look like idiots if they run the spots, then don't run the piece. And once they run the piece, there's no way the paper will pull the story out of the morning paper 'cause then we'll look like idiots."

"So why'd he come to you in the first place?"

"It's our story," Clayton said. "I could stop it by coming up with some sort of rationale like one of our sources changed his story, something like that. That's what Griffin thought, anyway. Truth is, then I'd look like an idiot and the story would ran anyway because there are three or four reporters who helped put it all together and they're the ones with the sources, not me."

"Say Griffin left the city. Where'd he go?"

"Beats me," the editor said. "I don't know him socially. I don't even like the bastard. I just didn't want to see him killed. He's a bastard, but he doesn't deserve to die."

Another person who did not deserve to die was the obstinate middle-aged Japanese man in a loose tie. He was making loud jokes in Japanese and had his three companions laughing. Remo didn't need to understand the language to know the object of their ridicule.

"I'll handle it," he announced.

"You? You'll give them more reason to laugh," Chiun said.

"Just watch me. Excuse me, Clayton."

Remo stood, strolled to the booth holding the amused Japanese and bowed low, looking the joker right in the eye.

"Master of Sinanju," Remo said quietly.

Whatever the obnoxious office man had expected Remo to say, that wasn't it. His face went blank.

Remo went back to his own booth.

Behind him he heard one of the Japanese men ask the office worker what had been said. The office worker told him.

"What does that mean?"

"Sinanju!" hissed one of the other men in the booth. "Master of Sinanju?"

There was more whispering. The elderly Japanese were the first to start leaving. They were whispering among themselves, repeating "Sinanju!" Most of the younger men and women didn't understand what was happening, but they knew a mob action when they saw one. The crowd of elderly Japanese was soon followed by a thickening mob of younger people and a steady murmur of fearful voices.

Remo took his seat in the booth. "You know who might know where Griffin would go to if he were to leave town?"

Clayton was stunned by the abrupt and nearly silent stampede for the door, and he tried to drag his attention back to Remo unsuccessfully until, a half minute later, the evacuation was complete. Aside from a young woman in the rear, too busy with her toddler triplets to notice anything else, the place was empty of customers. The waitress at the counter was standing holding her order pad and her pen, trying to understand what had just happened. A waitress emerged from the kitchen with a round tray full of plates of noodles and stopped cold. She stared at the ceiling, looking for signs of crumbling masonry from a tremor she had obviously been too preoccupied to feel, but the building was intact and there was no movement under her feet.

But her customers had clearly fled. She began putting the noodles on the table in front of the triplets. "On the house," she explained.

"Friends? Lovers? Spouses? Griffin have any?" Remo persisted.

The editor finally heard him. "Executive assistant," he said. "And occasional concubine. Nadine Hannover. Try his office."

"Thanks." The waitress still had one wide bowl of noodles to dispose of, and Remo summoned her with a glance. She slid the noodles in front of Clayton, but she never took her eyes off Remo Williams as he slid out of the booth and gave her a warm smile. Even with her long, jet-black hair braided under her Lenny's visor and

her face flushed from hours of waiting tables, she was a very attractive young woman. Remo's elbow hurt suddenly.

"Let us go from this place, horny goat!" Chiun barked.

"In a second," Remo said. "Least I can do is buy lunch for our friendly journalist." He handed one of his slips of currency to the waitress. "Keep the change."

"It's a one," she said, but a sultry smile was coming to her lips by degrees, like a slow glow.

"Oh. Here."

"That's a hundred," she observed.

"Okay."

There was a sound like an asp about to strike, and Remo's elbow hurt a lot more. He went with Chiun to the rental car.

"She was cute," he pointed out, mostly because he knew it would get a reaction.

"She was Japanese!"

"I like Japanese."

"You would sully the pure bloodline of Sinanju with—with Japanese?"

"I said she was cute, I didn't say I was going to father children with her," Remo said. The meter maid was still there, hands on her hips and a smile on her face. A crew of city workers had just finished clamping on the heavy steel device that locked a wheel and made the car undrivable. Remo tapped it along the seams, and the two halves collapsed to the pavement. He extracted the half

that was under the rental car and handed it to the meter maid. She sputtered.

On the opposite side of the street a gathering of Japanese onlookers gasped and murmured among themselves. "Sinanju!" "It is true!"

"Congratulations," Chiun said. "The legend of Sinanju only grows in stature under the mastership of Remo the Traffic Scofflaw."

They reached the fifteenth floor of the BCN Building, with its commanding view of the Golden Gate Bridge. "Seems to me I recall one of the Masters had a Japanese wife," Remo said.

"Who?" Chiun demanded irritably.

"I'm trying to remember...."

"I mean who are we here to see, idiot." Chiun turned his attention to the woman at the crescent receptionist's desk. "Forgive my son. He is an idiot."

"News director. Guy name Bang." Remo pulled out an ID badge wallet for the receptionist's benefit. "FBI."

"A father-and-son FBI team? I don't believe it." "And yet you broadcast a television program last season based on that premise," Chiun pointed out.

"Nobody bought that, either," the receptionist said. "That's why we replaced it with Odd Couples who Shack Up."

"He's not really my dad," Remo said. "He's just old,

and, you know." He twirled his finger in the vicinity of his ear.

"He's crazy and old and he dresses like that and they let him in the FBI?"

"Yeah, can you believe it?"

"Shh!" She was busy jotting it all down on a tiny square sticky note. "Series about crazy old Jap cross- dresser (R. Machio dead yet?) and hunk (Keanu dead yet?), FBI team..." Remo read Bang's name and office number off a small laminated map next to her, and they went to find him while she finished her concept.

"He was here." News Director Bang chuckled. "Man, was he a mess! All wrinkled up and he smelled offal. Get it? Offal?"

Remo thought that, however much of a mess Griffin had been, he couldn't compare to Bang, who perspired profusely just from the effort of walking out of the production room.

"He couldn't talk you out of running the promos, I take it?"

"Naw. Besides, the tapes are already in New York, for running nationwide. They're promoting the story now, coast-to-coast. Too late to stop it, even if he had met my price." Bang chortled.

"Any idea where he went?" Remo was getting extremely bored chasing California State Representative Griffin.

"Naw."

"What is this?" Chiun asked, pointing to the muted television screen in the small room outside the video production studio.

"That's live." Banks chuckled. "MAEBE."

"Maybe it is live?" Chiun asked.

"MAEBE. That's MAEBE. That guy there is from MAEBE."

"It's live?" Remo demanded, not trusting the Live! banner in the top left corner of the display.

"Press conference. See that guy? He's gonna be the next President of the United States of America. Maybe!" Banks huge torso never stopped its amused jiggling.

"We know him," Remo said. "Don't we?"

"He used to serve under the presidential pretender," Chiun said. "He was the official glad-hander until he fell from favor."

"That's Orville Flicker. Used to be the President's press secretary. Remember the whole big controversy about the Office of Religious Activities?" Banks asked.

"No," Remo said.

"Excuse my son," Chiun explained.

"Yeah, I'm an idiot, so what about this guy and the office of God Activities?"

"When he was press secretary for the President, he came out one day and told the media that the President had decided to make the Office of Religious Activities a cabinet-level position and would have a say in all major executive decision-making," Banks said, clearly delighted by it all. "Don't know how you missed it— the Democrats went bonkers! The separation-of-church-and-state people started screaming from sea to shining sea. Man, it was wild for, like, three hours, and then the President comes on and says it was just a big he and Orville Flicker made it up! And that made everybody even more nuts! Half the people thought the President put Flicker up to it just to judge the public reaction. But he swore up and down it was all Flicker's doing and next thing you know, Flicker's out of a job."

Remo was trying to catch up. He hadn't heard a word about this, but, then, the only TV he got to see was Spanish-language melodramas and even that wasn't by choice. "Okay, but what is he doing on TV now?"

"He's the MAEBE nominee for president, if you can believe that."

Remo looked at Chiun questioningly. Chiun shook his head. "I cannot explain this. I find everything about this nation's process of leader-choosing to be baffling."

"Here's the really bizarre part," Bang said. "He just might do it."

"No way," Remo said, watching the tall, scrawny man in the nerd glasses speak to the crowd.

"Yes way." Bang had stopped laughing. "I know shit about politics but I know popular opinion, and this MAEBE bunch has got a rocket engine strapped to it in the popularity poles. If they keep climbing like they have been, and if they can hold on to a good chunk of it, then that fuck Flicker'll do what Ross Perot only dreamed of."

Remo briefly considered what it would be like to have the skinny PR guy calling CURE's shots. "Not good," he announced.

"Not good at all," Bang agreed, and now his flabby face was a bulldog frown. "They're so right wing they'll outlaw half the lifestyles in San Francisco. No ifs, ands or maybes."