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."
"Unless their son who coveted their possessions sent them out in the hope that they would not survive the civil unrest," the Master of Sinanju pointed out.
"Put a sock in it," Remo suggested. To the doctor he said, "So what do you think happened with them?"
"Not just with them," the doctor said. "With the whole mob. It looks like some sort of dissociation to me." He noted all their blank faces. "It's a psychological state," he explained. "Internally, the mind can disconnect certain ideas and behaviors from the main body of a person's belief system. An individual in a dissociated state acts and talks and reacts in ways they never would consciously."
"You're saying this is some sort of sleepwalking," Remo said dubiously.
"In a way. That's what it looks like to me. Normal people don't just run out and join a mob if they're not divorced from their conscious minds."
"Nonsense," Chiun sniffed. "You whites do nothing but play around in mobs. Then the mobs get too big and you have to have a war to make them smaller. That is what what's-his-name did in Europe a few years ago. The one with the funny little mustache. He was white like these people."
The doctor's face grew hard. "Not that it matters, but these people were black."
"Were they Americans?" Chiun asked blandly.
"Of course."
"White as rice," Chiun concluded.
"I don't know," Remo said, steering the doctor away from the Master of Sinanju. "A mob's a mob till someone proves otherwise. I mean, what would cause this dizzy-what's-it?"
"Dissociation," the doctor repeated. "And I don't know. I've never heard of anything like this. To my knowledge, dissociation is always manifested in individuals, not groups. It wouldn't make sense the other way. Sleepwalking, psychotic delusions, certain forms of amnesia, automatic writing are all accepted forms of dissociation. Not this."
"Automatic writing?" Cindee asked.
"Just an aspect of the phenomenon. An individual's hand writes messages without conscious control."
"Pretty much explains every screenplay in Hollywood," Remo commented.