She put down the trunk.
‘Animal,’ she yelled at Remo. ‘Ungrateful animal. Look at him, everyone. The animal who would make his aged father do heavy lifting. C’mon over and see the animal.’
Remo smiled pleasantly for one and all.
‘The animal. Look at him,’ said the woman, pointing to Remo, Chiun stood off to the side, innocent of the commotion, a mere aged Korean hoping to enjoy the golden years of his life. Chiun could have, if he had wished, taken the trunks and the volunteer porters to boot and hurled them all back up the luggage ramp. But Chiun considered carrying things to be ‘Chinamen’s work’, meaning work unworthy of a Korean. It was for Chinese or whites or blacks.
He had once complained that Japanese did not like to carry things because of arrogance. When Remo had pointed out that Chiun was not known to like lifting, Chiun had responded that there was a difference between the Korean and Japanese attitudes.
‘Japanese are arrogant. They think the work is beneath them. Koreans are not arrogant. We know the work is beneath us.’
Now Chiun had a gaggle of tourists doing Chinamen’s work.
‘C’mon over here, sonny, and help your father,’ yelled the woman.
Remo shook his head.
‘C’mon, lazy bastard,’ joined in other volunteer porters.
Remo shook his head again.
‘You animal.’
At this, Chiun shuffled to center stage just a bit more slowly than usual. He raised his thin hands, the long fingernails pointing upward as if in prayer.
‘You are good people,’ he said. ‘So good and kind and thoughtful. So you not realize that everyone is not so good as you, that their decency is not so great, that it can never be as great. You are angry because my adopted son does not share your goodness. But you do not realize that some people from birth are denied this goodness. I have tried so hard to teach him, yet for a flower to grow from the seed, that seed must be planted in good soil. It is my great sadness that my son is rocky soil. Do not yell at him. He is incapable of your goodness.’
‘Thanks, Little Father,’ said Remo.
‘Animal. I knew it. He’s an animal,’ snarled the woman. Turning to her husband, a giant of a man that Remo estimated at six-feet-five, 325 pounds, the woman said, ‘Marvin, teach the animal some decency.’
‘Ethel,’ said the gigantic Marvin, in a surprisingly timid voice, ‘If he doesn’t want to help his old man, that’s his business.’
‘Marvin. How could you let that animal get away with what he’s doing to this sweet, old, precious lovely mensch?’
Ethel, overcome by warmth, dashed to Chiun and hugged him to her overly ample bosom. ‘A mensch. A pure mensch. Marvin, teach the animal some manners.’
‘He’s half my size, Ethel. Come on.’
‘I’m not leaving this poor soul with that animal, Marvin. What an ungrateful son.’
Marvin sighed and Remo watched him approach. He would not hit him hard. Maybe just take the wind out of him.
Remo looked up at Marvin. Marvin looked down at Remo.
‘Hit the animal,’ yelled Ethel, clasping the world’s deadliest assassin to her chest, while her husband faced the second deadliest.
‘Look, buddy,’ said Marvin softly, reaching into his pocket. ‘I don’t want to get into your family business, know what I mean?’
‘Are you going to hit him or are you going to talk?’ yelled Ethel.
‘You are such a sensitive woman,’ said Chiun, who knew that gross-sized people liked to be called sensitive because they were called that so rarely.
‘Break his head or I will,’ yelled Ethel, hugging tighter her precious bundle.
Marvin pulled out of his pocket some bills, which was probably the luckiest thing his hand had ever done for itself.
‘Here’s twenty bucks. Help your old man with his suitcases.’
‘I won’t,’ said Remo. ‘You don’t know him and you’re not the first he's hornswoggled into doing his heavy lifting. So put away your money.’
‘Look, buddy, it’s my family problem now. Help him with the suitcases, will ya?’
‘If you don't slam that animal right now, Marvin, you'll never know my bed again.’
Remo watched Marvin’s face light up in joyous surprise.
‘Is that a promise, Ethel?’
Remo saw this as a good opportunity to disengage, but Chiun, ever the gallant, said to the woman: ‘He is unworthy of you, precious flower.’
The precious flower had always known this and putting Chiun down, she hurled herself at her brute of a husband, slamming his head with her pocketbook.
Remo ducked out of the way and left them squabbling with a crowd forming to watch the family fight.
‘Proud of yourself, Chiun?’ asked Remo.
‘I brought happiness into her life.’
‘Next time, get a porter.’
‘There were none to be found right away.’
‘Did you look?’
‘People who do Chinamen's work should look for me, not me for them.’
‘I’ll be out tonight. I've got some work.’ said Remo.
‘Where are our quarters?’
Remo looked astonished. ‘I forgot that,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ said Chiun. ‘See how valuable an emperor can be?’
Chiun was right of course. But what he did not realize was that their ‘emperor’ - CURE—was in danger of being destroyed and only Remo could save it. If—and it was a big if—if he could straighten out the mess of the ‘The League Affair’.
CHAPTER SIX
Willard Farcer, fourth deputy assistant commissioner of elections, woke up with the first rays of sun glinting from his swimming pool into his bedroom, the telephone receiver whining away. It had been taken from its cradle so he could get a night’s sleep. Willard Farger couldn’t be bothered by just any reporter anymore.
It had taken him exactly one hour and fifteen minutes, or approximately his third interview with the press several days before, to forget how he would formerly hound reporters to include his name in stories about picnics, Boy Scout festivals and party fund-raising suppers.
Then he would personally deliver press releases from party headquarters, try to tell jokes to anyone in the city rooms of the Miami Beach Dispatch and the Miami Beach Journal, and excitedly await the next edition home or office.
Sometimes on a slow news day, he would get: ‘Also in attendance was Willard Farger, fourth deputy assistant-commissioner of elections.’ On those days, he would ask his colleagues at the county administration building if they had read the papers that day. He would wait around the press room to see if reporters wanted anyone to go out for sandwiches, and he never passed up a chance to buy a reporter a drink at a bar.
These chances did not come often, since reporters thought of him as a publicity hound and a nuisance. To be bought a drink by Willard Farger, fourth deputy assistant-commissioner of elections, meant you had to speak with him while downing it, and possibly longer.
With one television press conference, all this changed. Willard Farger now stood against the government with ’proof of the most insidious danger to our freedoms in the history of the nation.’ He was news, growing national news, and only at the insistence of his political bosses did he begin to talk to reporters from the local papers. After all, hadn’t he made the front page of the New York Times?
‘You can’t ignore the Dispatch and the Journal,’ the sheriff had told him.
Secretly Farger suspected the sheriff was jealous. Did the Washington Post ever do a profile on a mere Dade County sheriff?
‘I can’t localize my image either,’ Farger had said. ‘In one two-minute network newscast, I reach twenty-one percent of all the voters in the nation. Twenty-one percent. What do I get from the Dispatch and the Journal, a fiftieth of one percent?’