The Asian man strolled around the side of the stairs, to the small compartment where the operator was seated, and nudged the stairs with his sandaled foot.
The compartment caved in, crushing the operator’s abdomen at the same time the stairs scraped sideways several inches. The solid rubber tires left black skid marks. Mark Howard noticed that the stairs were now perfectly aligned with the jet hatch.
Chiun put his hands into his sleeves and ascended with the dignity of royalty.
“What’s all the shouting?” asked the flight attendant, who reappeared to see Chiun arrive and bow deeply to Mark. “Oh, my God, the man is hurt!” The flight attendant gestured at the sight of the wriggling, bellowing operator trapped by his crushed stomach in the driver’s seat of the stairs.
“We’re ready to go,” Mark told her.
“We can’t go now!” she protested.
“Somebody will come and help him. Let’s get going,” Mark insisted.
“But the stairs have to be moved!”
The small Asian man had a smile on his face that never wavered, but he seemed to kick back briefly with his foot. The flight attendant was sure she saw him do that.
Another thing she was sure of—at that moment, the mobile stairs rolled across the tarmac with a rattle of failing mechanical brakes and, going faster than they were ever designed to, crunched into the fireproof brick face of the terminal building.
“Oh, my God!” she wailed, trying to process what she had witnessed. The small kick. The crash. They couldn’t be connected.
The steps, eleven feet high, wobbled and fell over with a clang and more shouting from the operator, which blended with the cry of an ambulance cart’s siren.
“There you go. Medical personnel are on the way. They’ll take care of him,” Howard said.
“May we begin our journey now?” asked the old man who could not possibly have done what the flight attendant saw him do.
“Yes,” she said with a stiff smile. “Please take your seats.”
The old man took his seat across the aisle from Remo, and they taxied away from the mayhem as more emergency vehicles arrived.
“My son,” Chiun said as he settled in.
“Little Father. Nice trip?”
‘Travel is monotonous,” sighed the old man, peering intently out the window at the wing of the aircraft.
“Here’s a factoid that will put a sparkle into your day—these things aren’t reusable.” Remo held up an air-sickness bag. “Says so right here. ‘Dispose after use.’”
“It is good to see you reading, my son,” Chiun said.
Chapter 8
The newspaper, Harold W. Smith decided, was drivel. Ever since a reporter with the New York Times admitted fabricating years of dramatic stories, journalistic integrity had gone down the tubes across the country. At least prior to that scandal, there had been lip service paid to journalistic integrity. Nowadays nobody even tried to pretend. The best papers in the nation had become tabloids.
Still, Smith couldn’t help but wonder at the report out of El Paso. The wires had picked it up, then pulled it. To Smith it looked as if somebody had tried to squelch the article.
But the CURE quartet of computers had snatched it out of the electronic ether before a seek-and-destroy internet spider could remove it from the world’s archiving mainframes, and had flagged it for Smith simply because it was anomalous and was in the proximity of his current watch zones.
An old man was dead in his shack not too far from one of the technology thefts at White Sands. He was found on his front porch with his head caved in against a wooden post.
What was odd was the letter he left, to his long-deceased father and dated the day of his death. Based on the coroner’s estimated time of death at between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., that meant the letter had been written in the wee small hours of the morning. The reporter who wrote the story saw it as a sad yet hopeful last message by a man who was looking beyond his world into the next.
‘“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all had a little Ironhand in our life?’” the reporter wrote in closing. “‘What better than a memory of our childhood to give us comfort in today’s world, especially as we embark on our last great journey.’”
It wasn’t poignant; it was pap. And the letter. Smith decided, was clearly the work of a delusional mind. After all, the man was eighty-nine years old.
He closed the screen with the article and forgot it. Or so he thought. Hours later he found his mind returning to the article from the El Paso newspaper.
The air was stifling and it smelled. The fresh breeze coming in from the Atlantic Ocean was poisoned at the seaside with the fumes of rotting fish and spilled petrochemicals. Long before the breeze worked its way to the inner slums of Casablanca, it was polluted and unbreathable. The people in the Casablanca slums had no choice but to breathe it, along with the stench of their own neighborhood. They died a little with every breath they took.
“I thought it was fog,” Remo commented.
“You thought what was fog?” Chiun asked, ignoring the stares he received from the locals.
“You know, in Casablanca, when Ingrid Bergman is getting on the plane and Humphrey Bogart is doing his lines and there’s all this mist swirling around them. I thought it was fog, but it was smog. Fumes.”
“Would it startle you to learn that the movie was not filmed on location?”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“G’dam!’
“Here we are.” Chiun paused at the archway entrance to a partially enclosed, exceptionally dreary-looking section of the city. The man on the ground watching them smiled with a mouth full of black teeth-nubs. He briefly revealed a battered old revolver under his vest.
“No zoo-veneers,” the man said in English, every syllable an effort.
The guard was astounded when the small Asian man replied to him in his own tongue—not Arabic, but a Berber dialect that was all but extinct in the twenty-first century. “We do not seek trinkets.”
“You may not enter, little old man,” the guard said harshly.
“Is this not where one might spend a great deal of money?” Chiun asked..
“You wish to purchase T-shirts, go to the hotel district.”
“Pah! I do not wear T-shirts. Only this pale piece of a pig’s ear does so.”
The gate guard smiled at the insult. The white man didn’t know he was being insulted, obviously. He looked bored.
“We have much money,” the Asian man said in the Berber tongue.
“How much?”
“Enough to purchase our own army, if there is one for sale.”
The Berber guard scowled, then shook his head. “You need an appointment, little old man.”
Chiun looked thoughtful, and smiled, and his hand whisked at the guard, who slumped forward where he sat. His forehead began dripping into his lap, and his Berber dialect took one step closer toward true extinction.
“He says we need an invitation,” Chiun said as they left the nodding corpse.
“I’m inviting you,” Remo said, waving magnanimously at the entrance to the dank, dark slum-within-a- slum.
“I would refuse if I could.”
Through the archway they entered what had once been a fine courtyard, but was now a dim, evil-smelling grotto. The corners were black with filth and trash. The deteriorating cobblestones channeled some sort of evil, greasy-looking liquid between them.
“Who are you?” demanded a voice from the shadows beyond a crumbling brick divider wall. The interior of the courtyard was filled with shacks that might house an extended family.
“We came for the auction,” Remo called back, scoping out the figures in the shadows. The shacks were abandoned at the moment, but there were five men in the walkway around the fringes, and they were the kind of men Remo didn’t want to see any better than he could. Unfortunately he saw almost perfectly despite the darkness.