Political Pressure

10

The Master of Sinanju Emeritus sniffed as he approached the automatic doors. When they parted, the air from outside wafted in at full strength and he stopped.

"Keep moving through the automatic doors," said the young woman on the stool. She had a uniform, a security badge and even a billy club in her belt, but she wasn't really charged with handling airport security. Her responsibilities began and ended with keeping people from stopping between the automatic doors.

"Come on, Chiun, what're we waiting for?" Remo was balancing a lacquered chest on each shoulder. Each was a unique work of art, the wood hand-hewn, the exquisite designs startling in their beauty. Remo had no idea what was in the chests, but Chiun never went out of town without several of them.

"Remo, there has been a terrible mistake," Chiun declared. "The pilot of the wobbly winged aircraft has landed us in Mexico."

"Naw. It's just Denver."

"Sir, please move out of the way of the automatic doors. They may close unexpectedly," the young woman explained.

"Smell it if you dare," Chiun said. "It is the oppressive stench of Mexico City."

"It's just Denver," Remo insisted. "Sometimes the smog gets trapped by the mountains."

"Sir, the doors might close and cause injury!" said the door-minder urgently.

"It is the door that will receive injury if it dares to close on me," Chiun snapped. "Tell me, what town this is?"

Fearfully watching the doors, which quivered in the open position expectantly, she only half heard the question. "It's Denver, of course, what do you think?"

"Not Mexico?" Chiun demanded.

"Sir, the doors might close!"

"What's with the nutty Chink Munchkin?" demanded a business traveler in the gathering line of people waiting to exit.

"Hoo boy," Remo muttered.

"Remo! I demand to know the meaning of the word Munchkin!"

"Well, he's nutty but he's got good hearing," the businessman muttered.

"That's not all he's got good," Remo replied conversationally.

"Oh yeah? He a tough guy? What's he gonna do, gum my leg?"

"Sir," the young door-minder pleaded, "the door could close!"

Everything happened all at once. The door started to close. The door-minder shrieked, knowing she was about to see the little Asian man crushed. The businessman's chuckling became a gag. Remo became intensely interested in a Pomeranian in a nearby pet carrier.

"Hi, doggy."

The Pomeranian's snarl died as it witnessed a surprising flicker of motion.

"You are correct," Chiun announced. "It is not Mexico City. The stink is slightly cleaner."

Remo chose not to see the businessman who was now paralyzed, stiff as a plank and jammed in the doors to keep them from closing, although the servomotors were trying their darnedest.

The door-minder turned to Remo. "The little man! He, he..."

"I see nothing." Remo stepped over the businessman.

"We have been to this place before, and it was never so oppressive in its atmosphere," Chiun said.

"Blame El Nino," Remo said, nodding at a cab, eager to get out before airport security or the sky marshals charged to the scene.

The driver of the first cab in the queue was staring at them. He'd seen the whole business and he knew trouble when it was about to get into his taxi. He floored it.

"Hold these for me, would you, Chiun?" Remo asked, tossing him the trunks. There was a shriek from the tiny Korean and a chirp from the cab as Remo used his free hand to grab and lift it by the front end. The clonk and the honk were the driver's head slamming into the steering wheel and hitting the horn.

"Remo! You cast aside my precious trunks?"

"I did nothing of the kind. I handed them off to you," Remo growled.

"You," he said to the driver, who opened his door to flee but had it slammed in his face again. "Stay where you are. I need a ride and you're elected."

"Off duty!"

"You did not hand them off! You cast them away like worthless trinkets! They might have been scratched or— or worse! Just imagine if they had crashed to the ground!"

"You caught them just like I knew you would." Remo busily stowed the blemish-free trunks into the rear of the cab, then he got in back alongside the red-faced Chiun.

"You are an ungrateful ingrate!"

"Isn't that redundant?"

"No!"

"Look, Chiun, the only way your precious trunks would have gotten dinged is if you fumbled them."

"I, Chiun, never fumble."

"So the trunks were never in the slightest danger."

"Cannot drive! Off duty!" The driver gestured with shaking hands at the Off Duty sign on the fare meter.

The tiny Korean man weighed half as much as the cabdriver, but the dark-skinned man at the wheel could never in a million years have turned his face the same shade of boiled-lobster red. Other things the cabdriver could never have done included smashing the bullet-resistant Plexiglas safety panel with one bare hand and twist the fare meter out of the dashboard like an old village woman wringing a chicken's neck.

The fare meter went through the windshield of the cab, raining glass twenty feet in all directions.

Not only was the fare meter gone, but the radio, the glove box and most of the right half of the dashboard now littered the pavement in the Denver International Airport cab queue.

"On duty," Remo pointed out. "Can drive."

The cabbie used his fingertips to leverage the metal shard that had once been the gearshift, pulling into traffic with a longing look at the troops of sky marshals he glimpsed marching through arrivals to the scene of the suspected terrorist activity.

"Smitty is going to shit a brick," Remo commented. "You know, shutting down airports does not have to be standard operating procedure."

"I shut down no airport."

"That's funny, because you just left the airport and ten bucks says they'll shut it down to find the suspected door terrorist."

"It is you who carries chaos around with you wherever you go."

"Yeah."

"It is a potent cloud, it hovers around you, you cannot shake it loose but it still affects everything you come in contact with. It is like, like—"

"Like cabdriver BO," Remo said helpfully.

The cabdriver glanced into the rearview mirror, but it was dangling by a single screw and showed him his own flannel shirtfront.

"News flash, for you, Little Father," Remo said. "You started all the excitement. All I did was talk to an ugly rat-dog in a box."

"Already your memory of the sequence of events is degrading," Chiun said. "I was angry with you, my son, but now I am only sorry for you."

"I appreciate your sympathy, Little Father."

Chiun nodded, his yellowing chin whiskers dancing in the blast of air coming through the windshield. The cabbie managed to bend the rearview mirror back into place and he glared at Remo in the mirror.

"You I don't need," Remo warned.

"Kill me if you must, but do not insult my hygiene," the man said in a thick accent.

Remo snorted. "I have news for you. You got all this circulation and it still smells like an untreated septic tank in here."

Chiun was shaking his head.

"What?" Remo demanded. "What?"

The driver looked crestfallen. "You smell the city, not me."

Remo considered that.

He was still considering it as the cabbie dropped them off at a bank in a hotel district. Remo went inside for a minute and came out with an envelope.

"Listen, I'm sorry I insulted you," he told the cabbie as he extracted Chiun's trunks from the back of the cab. Chiun wandered down the street with his nose held a quarter-inch higher than necessary. "My dad gets me cheesed sometimes."

"One never grows accustomed to the insults. You are like many Americans who ride my cab," the cabdriver said with an odd mixture of sorrow and fear. Then he glanced at his missing dashboard and added quickly, "In your attitudes about foreigners, I mean."

"Yeah, you're right," Remo said. "Sorry."

The cabdriver was sure the tall man with the vicious eyes was being ironic as a prelude to throttling him. But the throttle never came, and the cruel-eyed man handed him the envelope. It was bulging with hundreds. He looked at the bank, sure the cruel-eyed man had just robbed it, but business was going on inside without sign of alarm.

When he looked again, the cruel-eyed man was jogging down the street with the beautiful chests balanced on his shoulders.

The cabbie had led a hard life. Tortured by the Baath regime that killed his family, he had escaped Iraq's despot during the opening mayhem of the Shock and Awe bombing campaign. He had never really believed in the American Dream, but in the past half hour his luck finally turned around.

He marched directly into the bank and opened a checking account, and the first check he wrote bought him a whole new cab.