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."