And Palmer, Rizzuto was there with ready proof of the fault of the design, even with some inside papers from an engineer who had been fired when he warned that putting the gas tank in the bumper was an invitation to disaster.
The hundreds of people who died or were badly maimed in these accidents quickly learned of a law firm that seemed to have the company dead to rights.
There was even a television investigative report on the car and Rizzuto appeared for the partners. Schwartz worked out the words to be said, and Palmer worked out the fact that they had to use this television program to advertise themselves nationally as the one law firm that could win the big judgments against the manufacturer.
When Robert Dastrow saw his first ugly picture of a burn victim, he had his first regret. This poor girl could never get her face repaired or her body mended. Her parents were gone, and she was alone.
Dastrow thought about this for all of twenty minutes, and then realized that the art of making things work was to know what could not be changed. He couldn't bring back the dead, but he could certainly buy himself a cyclotron. With this new arrangement with the greedy lawyers in Los Angeles he would now have the entire world to tinker with.
And all the American manufacturers who had no use for Robert Dastrow, the young man who only wanted to make things work, would now be shown up for what they were. He would see their embarrassed faces on television as reporters interviewed engineers and asked how they could design a car that worked more like a bomb than transportation.
He would see aircraft designers get hauled over the coals for a faulty wing structure. He would see contractors sued out of business because they didn't know how to lay concrete properly. He would be vindicated and he would be rich.
And of course, everything worked the way Robert Dastrow had planned.
And since tinkering was life to him, when he noticed his main source of revenue under a new form of attack, he just had to find out what it was.
While International Carborundum and the international media looked at the valves in the Gupta plant, only two people looked at the real cause of the accident. They had spoken to the newswriter and ultimately the wife who goaded her husband into violating the basic rule of how to make anything work: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
What he had done was to use the social structure to convince most of the people in the city that the administration was broken because it used Americans in previously undesirable jobs.
And the Oriental and the American who did not really have credible cover stories found that out within one day.
None of his work had ever been discovered so quickly. And of course as any good tinkerer knew, Robert Dastrow had to find out what was going on here. Who were these two new people doing the right things?
Did they have the same abilities that he did? A simple test proved they did not, when neither of them could fix the gauge. Therefore there had to be something else they had, and Robert Dastrow would have to figure it out, before he killed them. He had no doubt that he would. There wasn't anything in the world he couldn't figure out. He knew how everything worked.
The remnants of families in Gupta crowded around waiting for their meager emergency rations, wondering why all the foreigners were coming to them and telling them they were going to be rich.
They cared for their survivors and prayed that this thing would never happen again. In their own minds they believed that they were cursed and therefore some of them were embarrassed.
But a few older women found out that when they cried before the cameras they could at times get a bowl of rice. And so they cried more, and kept crying until their families were fed. Sometimes there were too many women crying in front of the cameras, and that drove down the reward. Little wars between the surviving Indian women developed as to who would have crying rights before which cameras.
Stories were other things. The people quickly found that those who had the most gruesome stories to tell were the ones who were visited most.
But all of this enterprise was nothing compared to the savior of Gupta and what he did for the people there. He brought rice, he brought doctors, he brought promises of rich compensation for the evil done to them by the American factory. He told them they should not let the Americans get away with it.
He was an American himself and he knew how bad the Americans could be. He was here to make them rich, to give them rice for the rest of their lives. Naturally, the offer sounded too good and no one signed up right away. But when he returned with the blessings of some high government officials, the survivors all happily lined up to give their palm prints as signatures to a contract that said he would give them ten percent of all he earned from making the American factory pay.
His name was Genaro Rizzuto, and he bet them all he would win.
Remo and Chiun found this out the second day they were there, but they had great difficulty talking to the people. Gupta was now an official international disaster, and being labeled as such attracted more stars than Remo had ever seen in one place.
Chiun pointed them out. He counted fourteen movie stars with their own camera crews, each posing with the same blinded woman, seven actors with current series on television, and a multitude of American organizations.
There were the directors of Aid to the Famished, International Help, Pity the Children, Save All Humanity, End Racism, Fight Racism, and International Alliance Against Racism. Starring in all this was a woman dressed like an untouchable who had just scavenged through a dime-store garbage can left outside the plastics department. Her eyes were shaded neon green. Her hair looked like a swamp that had gotten caught in a yellow-spray-paint machine, and her clothes were as tattered as though she had been the center of attention at a ragpickers' convention.
"There's Debbie Pattie," said one TV newsman who had already gotten his tear shots for the day. "She's new. She's not known for social causes."
Immediately a crowd formed around the young singer. She was used to people forming crowds around her. What she was not used to was being ignored. And past the row of poor huts the victims lived in she saw two men, one Oriental and one white, who were not even bothering to look her way.
She made fifteen million dollars a year, was on the cover of almost every major magazine in the West, and she was of absolutely no interest to these two. This she spotted despite the fifteen microphones in her face, cameras whirring behind them.
"I soytinly don't need no more publicity in case yer asking," she said with a New York accent that advertised itself better than Broadway. "I'm here to help da people. All right? Whyn't youse guys go talk to da people. Dare the ones what's sufferin' around here. "
"What do you think of the negligence of American factories?"
"I'm against anything that hurts," said Debbie. "What hurts people is what I'm against. I hate unhappiness and they oughta outlaw it."
"Do you think America has failed to outlaw unhappiness because it's racist?"
"I don't know. I know the people of Gupta need our help. And I'm here to see what I'm singin' for. We're gonna save the people. All us rock stars and singers are going to save the people of the world and we're gonna start here for the people of Gupta. Ain't no reason they should suffer and die just 'cause they was born here. They gotta get treated fair, see?"
"Since when has your new philosphical approach taken over your career?"
"I always believed this stuff. 'Cept youse guys never asked me about that."
Debbie left a half-dozen television reporters commenting on how she was showing new and deep spiritual feelings, how she was revealing a political sensibility she never had before. However, she wasn't considered too knowledgeable about international politics because she had failed to blame everything on America.