"What does that mean?" Chiun asked suspiciously.
"It means you're too old for your opinion to matter," she explained. "Advertisers skew younger and-I hate to break it to you-you're way beyond that prized eighteen-to-forty-nine range. Like two hundred years beyond it."
"I will let that insult pass because you are obviously possessed of a deranged mind," Chiun said thinly.
"What she obviously is is some kind of TV exec," Remo said. "They're deranged on a good day. On the rest, they're just stupid as a sack of doorknobs." He was annoyed at his teacher for wasting time with the Australian ditz.
"I'm a producer," Cindee corrected.
"Same pot, different crack," Remo said.
"You do not listen to anyone older than forty-nine?" Chiun interjected, steering her back to what was now, for him, the main point.
"Not if I can help it," Cindee said. "No offense, but that's just the way the business works."
"What of the wisdom derived from age and experience?" Chiun said, astonished. "They mean nothing to you?"
"Sorry," Cindee said. "Now him," she added, pointing at Remo. "He's in the right demo group. His opinion holds weight."
"Go cuddle a kangaroo," opined Remo.
Chiun thrust his hands deep in the sleeves of his kimono. "You and my son have much in common," he said unhappily. "He, too, believes that people of a certain age have nothing more to contribute to the world. He has often said that he would send all of us over sixty-five on buses to the cemetery today, just to save the young the time and expense of having to bother with funerals later on."
"Not true. Not listening," Remo said. He was leaning over, hands on his knees.
Chiun nodded to Cindee. "It is true, no matter what he tells you," he confided.
"Hey, lady," Rema said, ignoring the old man, "you're a TV expert. Does this look like a little TV to you?"
Cindee went over to him. She peered down at the object that had so fascinated the two men.
"Yeah," she said. "It's one of those little handheld numbers you get at the mall."
The plastic case was cracked, the electronic guts spilled out onto the road. The mini-television set looked as if it had been crushed flat by hundreds of stomping feet.
"So that's one, too?" Remo said.
He pointed a few feet away. There was another small television there, no bigger than a person's palm. Near it were two others. All of them had been stomped by the mob.
When Cindee looked around, she saw that there were dozens of crushed televisions around the area. They were mixed in with the rest of the street litter.
Cindee's pretty little Australian nose crinkled in confusion. "Why are all those TVs here?" she asked.
"I don't know," Remo said. "Ordinarily, I'd say that a cop shot a black murderer and the community expressed its outrage that a killer got killed by helping itself to the inventory of the local electronics store. But this is Harlem. There isn't a lootable Circuit City within a trillion-mile radius."
He stood back up.
"Any thoughts, Little Father?" Remo asked.
"Why do you care what I think?" Chiun sniffed.
"Okay, had enough of that already," Remo said. He turned back to Cindee. "I wonder who dropped these here. How long have you been here?"
"I just got here about ten minutes ago," she replied.
"So you didn't see the mob?"
Cindee's face sagged. "Don't remind me," she griped. "By the sounds of it, we didn't get any usable footage."
"What do you mean, footage?" Remo asked.
Cindee huffed impatiently. "For 'Winner,'" she explained. "We're taping in the area."
Remo recognized the name of the program. It had been on the television in the lobby of General Zhii Zaw's hotel in Cancun.
"That stupid TV show?" he asked. "I saw part of it just the other day. It looked like you were filming in Bosnia."
"We're not," she said, sounding almost as if she wished they were. "We're right around the corner from here. And don't remind me that they decided to run more than just the Thursday-night episode this week. The network is going to run us into the ground putting us on two nights a week. They said it's only because of the holiday next week. It better be. We don't want a 'Millionaire' overexposure problem. Of course, it might be okay to double up if we had some action to blast into people's living rooms. That mob would have been great for background-you know, set the stage on the real-life hardships in Harlem. Show how gritty these streets can get. But the three cameramen we had on the scene panicked and ran. They didn't even get the murder on tape."
"What murder?"
Cindee clapped a hand over her mouth. "Forget I said that," she insisted.
"Gladly," said the Master of Sinanju, bored. He was watching the gathering crowd of reporters, which by now filled the sidewalks around the former president's office building in numbers greater than the previous night's mob.
"Was one of the people on the show killed?" Remo asked.
"I'm not confirming or denying," Cindee said quickly. "You'll have to watch and see. We're taping what will be week eight right now, and next week's episode will only be the second week of the season, so you have a while to go."
Rema shook his head. "Not me," he said. "I do reality, not reality shows. Your little friend wants you."
He pointed down the sidewalk. Cindee's assistant was waving for Cindee to join her. She and a Winner cameraman had cornered an interview subject on the sidewalk. Cindee hurried over to join them. Remo and Chiun followed.
The two Sinanju Masters were careful to avoid the many cameras. There were local and national reporters on the scene. Some were doing live interviews for the morning network news programs. They weren't lacking for interview subjects. In the wake of the riots, dozens of experts on the black community had swarmed into Harlem. They had done their swarming that morning from white communities. Like most experts on the black community, none of them actually lived in an actual black community.
Remo passed by four very angry women with bulging, lunatic's eyes who were screeching into cameras that the CIA and not poor, maligned Minister Shittman was actually responsible for the previous night's events. Three of the women were tenured professors at prestigious New York universities. One was a bag lady. The only difference Remo could see between the professors and the bag lady was that the professors apparently took off their tinfoil-lined hats while on camera.
The man Cindee's assistant had scraped up was a middle-aged black doctor with a kindly face who actually lived in the community and knew many of the people involved in the riot. He was soft-spoken and unobtrusive and, thus, no one was interested in anything he had to say.
"This could be good for a few seconds' footage," Cindee's assistant promised when Cindee and the two Masters of Sinanju arrived. "Tell her what you were telling me."
"Oh," said the man. "I was trying to tell these people that something is wrong here, but no one will listen."
His wet eyes were pleading with them to understand.
"Of course something's wrong," Cindee said. "A mob tried to kill the president last night and we missed getting so much as an inch of footage." She shot a dirty look at her assistant for wasting all their time.
"No," insisted the doctor. "That's what they wanted it to look like. But it couldn't be."
The doctor was on the verge of tears.
Remo would have dismissed him as just another one of the crowd of sidewalk apologists who had crawled out of the woodwork to offer excuses for the mob's actions, but there was something about the man. He seemed so sincere.
"Why isn't this riot like every other one?" Remo asked.
"The people involved," the doctor said. "Most of them were patients of mine. They weren't the kind of people to riot. They're just regular folks. There was even an elderly couple who were afraid to leave their apartment. I used to have to make house calls to them. It doesn't make sense that they'd come out in the middle of a mob like that."