Sue Me td-66

by Warren Murphy

  "They're only the things that caused the damned disaster in the first place," muttered Remo. He looked out the windows at the mountains of Gupta, majestic peaks of strong beauty, each veined with trails leading down to the city.

  "Who was responsible for the valves?"

  "The entire department."

  "Were there any new people in the department?"

  "The entire department was new."

  "And who was responsible before them?"

  "An American engineer and some untouchables. You know how crazy Americans are. They did not see the difference between an untouchable and a Brahman as you do, sir."

  "They are a peculiar race."

  "The British understood the difference."

  "The British understand these things," said Chiun. "Generally an intelligent people."

  "Except for Henry the Eighth," said Remo, "who did his own killing and didn't pay Sinanju. Right?"

  "Are you perchance from Sinanju, of the legendary Masters of Sinanju?" asked Palul.

  "The very same," said Chiun, looking over to Remo to see if he noticed the proper respect being paid. "Oh, gracious. No wonder you're friends of the P.M. By Jove, this is a most remarkable bit of good fortune. We must have you to dinner. Oh please, don't say no. You are our most honored guests."

  "No," said Remo.

  "He is affected by the sun," said Chiun.

  "The House of Sinanju, you know, served a lord near here."

  "Of course we know," said Chiun. "And so does he, when he studies his lessons. "

  "The House of Sinanju here in lowly Gupta . . ." said Palul.

  "Are you listening to this good man, Remo?" asked Chiun.

  Remo did not answer.

  "He has emotional problems," Chiun confided to Palul.

  "Get back to the valves. None of you guys from Nepal to Korea knows how a damned valve works. That's why you're all so damned backward," Remo said.

  Chiun chuckled. "He is the worst with any equipment. He cannot dial a telephone without falling over his own fingers. Nothing works when he attempts to run it."

  "Is he retarded?"

  "Only in some areas," said Chiun.

  "Back to business, please," said Remo. He thought about the little boy outside. The less everyone else cared about him, the more Remo felt sorry for him. He might not even make it to manhood, and no one would know. No one would care, and the rich would send their sons to school in the West to then make pronouncements about the disparity between north-south wealth and how it should be redistributed. All of these things said by the rich of those countries because the poor couldn't afford an education. None of these leaders of the poor countries would share so much as a crust of bread with their poor, and yet for some reason they expected other nations to do what they refused to do.

  "What has changed here in the last year?" asked Chiun.

  "If anything, safety and maintenance, which the American engineers blamed for the leakage, have been improved. Vastly. Our budget has grown in these areas."

  "Good," said Chiun. "And how did that come about?"

  "Well, there was a strong movement to replace the American engineer, to put Indians in that position. And we did. We put many in that position. We had three administrators to begin with."

  "And who watched these valves?"

  "I don't know. I don't bother with those things. I am president of this local branch, not some rag runner."

  "Please be so kind as to tell me who is in charge of the valves."

  "I don't know."

  "Find out," said Chiun.

  It took almost half a day to get the information, with one director after another coming in and out of the office and each of them thinking it was peculiar that someone so lofty as their president would care about some valve or other. They were all sure it was being taken care of by another department.

  They all knew it used to be taken care of by some American engineer and a group of untouchables. "How did the change happen?" asked Chiun.

  "What do you care, little father? Let's go down and look at where it happened."

  "It did not happen there," said Chiun. "How did the change happen?"

  "It just happened. There was a spontaneous demand to put our own people in charge."

  "Then nowhere was where it came from," said Chiun. And he asked from whom the president of the branch had first heard this spontaneous demand.

  "It was all over," said Rashad Palul.

  "No. Nowhere has to come from somewhere," said Chiun, and insisted that Palul question all his subordinates.

  Some had read about it in the papers. Others had thought a local administrator was behind it. The editorial writer of the English-language Times of Gupta claimed it was his own idea.

  "From my indignation at the arrogance of the racist West. From my firm rooting in third-world struggles. From my sense of being an Indian."

  Remo grabbed him by his legs, pressed his foot to the man's throat which now was adjacent to the rug in the office of the factory president, and asked the editorial writer to clarify his statement.

  "From voices. White-sounding voices. I overheard them saying insulting things."

  "And where did these voices come from?"

  "Outside my window."

  "And who were they?"

  "I did not see them. But they were your typical American racists looking down on everyone else. And they said the important thing not to let Indians have was the right to be in charge of important things. And that got my goat. Now will you please put me back on my feet?"

  Remo yanked the man's heels upward, slapping his head around on the carpet like a yo-yo, and then righted the man and set him firmly on his feet. "You just can't go around doing that to people," said the editorial writer.

  "I do it all the time," said Remo.

  "These voices really got you doing, didn't they?" asked Chiun.

  "Most assuredly."

  The other source Chiun finally tracked down was a regional administrator who claimed to be the first one to call for Indians in those jobs.

  And where, asked Chiun, did the administrator get the idea?

  "It is mine. I thought of it. I am a man who is being watched in Delhi itself, most assuredly," said the administrator.

  "And I am a friend of the prime minister. And he blames whoever thought of this as a walking disaster, an affront to the nation, an embarrassment to India because it makes people believe Indians can't run things. "

  "But it's the whites who are responsible. Everyone knows that. The lawyers know that. The people know that. The press knows that."

  "As a friend of the prime minister, I blame you."

  "Not me."

  "Then who?"

  "I will not say."

  "A son?"

  "I have no sons."

  Remo started the upside-down treatment again, but Chiun raised a frail-looking hand.

  "Please, don't be so uncivilized. Besides, a Master of Sinanju should not put his hands on anyone unworthy of the glorious death we deal."

  "Nothing glorious about death. Death is death."

  "You're so American," moaned Chiun.

  The administrator left the room, asking them to wait, and Remo chafed at being thwarted in his desire to apply physical incentives. But shortly Remo saw that Chiun was right. For the administrator came back, saying he himself wanted to hear from the prime minister. If he were being accused of something, he wanted to defend himself.

  "And who have you been speaking to?"

  "No one. Only my wife," said the administrator. And that night Remo and Chiun visited the wife in the gardens of her house, among the fragrant blossoms and the fishponds.

  At first she begged not to be beaten. Then, seeing she was not going to be harmed, she assumed the American and the Oriental were weak and threatened to call her husband. When this didn't work either, she cast a longing glance at the handsome American with the high cheekbones and mentioned her husband wouldn't be home for hours.

  "Mo
st beautiful and tempting maiden," said Chiun to the plump Indian wife, "as tempting as your beauty is, we must pursue a different course at this moment, to regret forever the losing of this rare moment of rapture in your splendid arms. Forgive us, we must be about your prime minister's business."

  "The prime minister?"

  "He is watching your husband closely for promotion. "

  "Then it was the right decision."

  "Of course, beautiful maiden," said Chiun. "But we know there are evil forces about that would harm him. It was not the decision that was bad but the person behind it. And we know she is not bad either."

  "You know so much, wise one. Yes, it was not me. It was a voice."

  "And who was attached to the voice?"

  "It is a strange thing. It came from strange places. It came from metal. But there was no one in the metal. "

  "I see. And what did it say?"

  "It mentioned that my husband was being overlooked in Delhi because whites still held the important jobs in the International Carborundum factory."

  "Ah, thank you," said Chiun, and when they left the house with the pastel exterior walls, Chiun said he had expected to find everything they had found that day. One only had to look at the mountains to know they would find all this. And he was disappointed to see Remo did not get that message when he was instructed to look at the mountains.

  "I don't understand," said Remo.

  "Obviously, when beggars are more important than your beloved teacher, the man who found you as nothing with white habits and made you into a Master of Sinanju, then you would of course not understand. "

  "Get off my back. What did I miss?"

  "Something as obvious as the mountain. The gas was more deadly because it was kept in a bowl of mountains. The gas was released because the wrong people were put in charge. The wrong people were put in charge because an editor was struck in his ego and a wife was struck precisely and exactly in her ambition for her husband."

  "I followed. What the hell does that have to do with the mountains?"

  "The person we cannot find, the voice from nowhere, knows how things work."

  "Well, that's obvious," said Remo.

  "You missed it, as you missed the mountains," said Chiun.

  Since the hotel was filled with American journalists and investigating engineers, Remo and Chiun accepted the hospitality of the plant manager, Rashad Palul, who lived in a house with twenty servants just as though he were a British official.

  There were guest rooms and servants for Remo and Chiun. Flowers adorned the doorways. Cool water was placed at their disposal. A footman fanned their brows.

  "And you," said Chiun, "still like America..."

  "All these servants make me nervous."

  "Yes. You are only comfortable with machines doing your bidding. You like steel and microchips and engines. But when a warm human being attempts to serve you, you are revolted. I am up against invincible ignorance," said Chiun.

  And that night he went to sleep saying nothing more to Remo, hoping that if he kept him in India long enough the boy would learn something of a superior civilization.

  In the morning there was a great commotion in the dining room. An American engineer was making a ruckus with Rashad Palul.

  He had a Midwestern twang that could penetrate concrete. His name was Robert Dastrow. He had short, almost crew-cut blond hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a white shirt with a tightly knotted blue tie. His sleeves were rolled up and his gray pants were smudged with engine grease. Four pencils, two pens, a slide rule, and a calculator bulged from his shirt pocket.

  He was gathering information about the disaster and he seemed to know Cyclod B in detail, what went wrong, and what could be done to prevent further accidents. He wanted to know first, however, who Remo and Chiun were. He did not like strangers hanging around while he discussed company business.

  "They are never strangers in my house," said Palul. "They are friends. Glorified and welcomed."

  "Yeah, well, you can keep your glory business. I have to work with details. Where are they?"

  "Sleeping," said Palul.

  "No we're not," said Remo, entering the room.

  "Good. Who are you?" said Dastrow.

  "The voice of Christmas past. Who are you and what are you doing here?"

  "I'm an engineer. Dastrow's the name. Robert Dastrow. D like in Diameter, A like Aerial, S like Sine, T like Trigonometry, R like Radius, O like Orbit, W like Wrench."

  "Do you have to talk to communicate? Your voice is the most unpleasant thing I've ever heard."

  "It's clear, isn't it?" said Dastrow. It sounded like a hundred wires being rubbed simultaneously. Remo's skin turned to gooseflesh at the sound.

  "All right. What do you want? Just get out of here. "

  "Most people feel that way about me," said Dastrow cheerfully.

  "Just ask and then go."

  "You're investigating this for who?"

  "A consulting firm," said Remo.

  "That's another word for your not wanting to tell me. All right, I can understand that. I've been looking around at the fine people of this fine country," said Dastrow. "A friendly, decent people you might find anywhere in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, or Indiana."

  "Make it brief."

  "You fellows seem to know your way around. You get along with the natives. You were all over. Everyone who was anyone seemed to end up in Mr. Palul's office with you. Everyone but a housewife you visited. Golly, you certainly are experienced travelers."

  "What do you want?" said Remo, toying with the idea of collapsing the man's larynx. If he collapsed the larynx, the twang would not resonate on his eardrums. He wondered if Chiun minded it as much as he.

  It was not the Midwest accent that bothered Remo. He liked it. But this man seemed to be cutting glass with every word he spoke.

  "I just have one request, from a fellow engineer. Would you fix this Roentgen gauge? It's microchip-activated, of course."

  "What?" said Remo, looking at a small metal box with a window and a gauge on it. "I don't know what that is."

  "How about your fine friend?" asked Dastrow. "He doesn't know mechanical things that well either. We're social-environment consultants."

  "All righty. Thank you for your time, " said Dastrow with the same unflagging cheery boosterism with which he seemed to greet everyone and everything.

  As he left the house, he told Palul that a little grease under the latch would probably save it for five more years. And that he should look at rewiring the house. The Indian climate was not kind to electrical equipment.

  He also fixed an old Mercedes truck on his way out the driveway, a truck a driver was having trouble getting started, just by seemingly touching one wire to the other.

  "Who was that?" asked Chiun.

  "No one," said Remo.

  "That is just who we are looking for," said Chiun.

  Chapter 6

  Robert Dastrow whistled while he worked. He knew it bothered people but he always bothered people. Robert Dastrow bothered everyone but his parents.

  Robert understood early that he was never going to win a popularity contest. At school dances he was the one who made sure Grand Island Nebraska High School had a public-address system that didn't make whooming noises. He did not have dates. Not that he didn't ask. Not that he didn't approach the problem in a systematic manner.

  In fact, because he was so systematic he knew there wasn't a single girl who would go out with him, except perhaps the most beautiful one in school. Unfortunately, she was the one always involved in social causes. She was willing to go out with him as a favor.

  "I didn't want favors from anyone, least of all someone I might want to marry and raise a family wth. "

  "I just was willing to go out with you. I didn't mention anything about marriage."

  "I don't want favors. I don't want favors from anyone. I don't need favors."

  "Well, I do feel sorry for you."

  "I don't want people
feeling sorry for me. I am the most capable person you have ever met. And if you hitch up to me, I'll make you rich. You'll never want for anything."

  "Actually, Robert, I'm sorry to say, the only thing I want from you is to spend absolutely no more than an evening with you."

  "Keep your favors. You'll see. I'll be the most employable graduate of this high school."

  "I'm sure you will, Robert. Everyone says you know how to make anything work."

  "And someday I'll know how to make people work, too. You'll see. I'll have the most beautiful women. "

  Robert was only partly right. He ultimately did get beautiful women, but his career did not go smoothly at all. Despite his high marks in both high school and college, despite the fact that he successfully held many jobs to work his way through his degree, despite the fact that he scored at the very highest level on engineering aptitude, Robert Dastrow was virtually unemployable in the United States of the 1970's.

  Every interview was almost the same. The personnel officer would be impressed with the young graduate and his high marks. He would be impressed with the young man's alertness, enthusiasm, and energy.

  And then he would ask what Robert's specialty was.

  "I just make things work," Dastrow would say. "I know how to make things work."

  "Design engineering then?"

  "Well, no. I'm not all that good at inventing. But you show me something somebody else has made and I'll show you how to make it work perfectly. I'll show you what's right or wrong about it. What's good and bad about it. I'll make it go. I'll make it hum. I'll make it buzz."

  "I see. Do you have any marketing experience? That's big. Engineers who have marketing experience are always in demand for top jobs."

  "Not my cup of tea," said Robert.

  "If you know how to make things work, then you know what to sell about them. Sales. A sales engineer is the best paid of all engineers."

  "Once had a newspaper route. Had to give it up. Couldn't afford to keep buying newspapers. Only people I ever sold a copy to were my parents. I couldn't sell an ice cube in the Sahara," said Dastrow.

  "I see. Well, do you have a sense for structure then? We can use structural engineers."

  "Not especially."