"Do you two always argue over airplane seats?" she asked as she sat next to Remo.
"No. Seating's not important. Not to me anyway."
"Nor to me," Chiun called out from across the aisle. "I don't care where anyone sits as long as it is not here in my favorite seat. This is my favorite seat I love it here."
"Why don't you let the old gentleman have his seat without all this bickering?" Reva asked Remo.
"Shut up, will you?" Remo said. "Next thing, he'll have you running errands for him." He half rose in his
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seat, watching Chiun from the comer of his eye. He just did not trust the old Korean. But Chiun's eyes were looking away from him, out the window, carefully watching the wing of the plane for any incipient signs of stress or fracture.
Remo pursed his lips in annoyance, then brushed past Reva Bleem and walked to the front of the plane and slid into a seat there. Within moments, Reva was sitting next to him.
"Where are you from?" she asked. "I don't know a thing about you."
"Everywhere and nowhere," Remo said.
"That's not much of an answer," she said.
Remo got up and brushed by her to sit on the other side of the plane. Reva followed him.
"Are you trying to avoid me?" she said.
"What gave you that idea?" Remo said. He moved again and she followed.
"Will you two cattle stop stomping around this craft?" Chiun snapped. The voice came from the left side of the plane, and when Remo looked back, Chiun was sitting in Remo's seat over the left wing. He smiled at Remo before going back to inspecting the wing.
Annoyed, Remo slumped against the window. Reva Bleem pressed her bosom against his left upper arm as she leaned toward him.
"Why are you being so unpleasant?" she asked.
Remo moved away from her breast. "Unpleasant? Who's unpleasant, goddammit?" Remo said. "All right. I'm unpleasant." He lowered his voice to a whisper. "I've got to find this stupid bacterium, and that's all your fault, you and your damned tax loss, and what the hell am I going to do with it when I find it? Punch it? And I've got him on the snot back there because he wants to go to work for somebody else and he's getting so he can't tell the difference between a plum and a pear."
"Can too," Chiun called out. "It was a pear."
"How long have you two been together?" Reva said, pressing her breast against Remo again.
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"A hundred years," Remo whispered back.
"Two hundred," called out Chiun. "It seems like only a hundred to him because he has enjoyed it so. And he repays those two centuries of pleasure with treachery and denial of a poor man's only wish."
"See?" Remo said. "On the snot. Because I won't go to work for some guy who's probably promised him Barbra Streisand, a new Betamax, and forty dollars worth of junk jewelry."
"Who would you rather work for?" Reva asked.
She was pumping. Remo knew, but before he could answer, Chiun called out again. "He would rather work for other ingrates like himself and for emperors who do not know what emperors are supposed to do or even how to be emperors. He wants to defend his Constitution. I ask you, can the poor people of my village eat a defended Constitution?"
"Those lowlifes could eat rocks, as long as they didn't have to work for them," Remo said. He turned back to Reva and said, "His poor village has a higher standard of living than Westport, Connecticut. Ingrates."
"Your responsibility," Chiun said.
"No, your responsibility," Remo said. "Never mine."
"How like a white man," Chiun said. "All the character of a peeled boiled potato."
Remo snorted and turned back to the window.
"I guess you don't feel much like talking," Reva said.
Remo snorted again.
"Go ahead and talk," Chiun called out. "I've got this good seat and I'll watch the wing. Heh, heh, heh."
The plane landed on a narrow sliver of concrete that Remo supposed had been designed for an Arab air force because it stretched for ten miles in either direction, making safe allowances for pilot error of up to 6,000 percent.
When he got off the plane, Remo saw nothing in all 129
directions but sand, and a narrow new road heading out over a hill. A Rolls Royce waited on the road.
Remo waited until Chiun joined him at the head of the plane's steps. "So this is it, Chiun, huh? Your great Hamidi Fareemi Areebi tradition, or whatever the hell you call it? Another name for freaking sand."
"There can be tradition in a desert of sand as well as in a city of buildings and people. There can be no tradition only in the heads of mongrels who remember no past and therefore have no future," Chiun said.
"You mean me by that, I guess," Remo said.
"Do not talk to me, Remo. I am ignoring you from now on," Chiun said.
"Come on," said Reva Bleem. "That's our car."
Walking toward the big sedan, Remo had a chance to look over Oscar, Reva's driver, for the first time. He was a tall, husky man with a smooth bald head that disappeared into ripples of neck muscles. His face was acne erupted and scar pitted. He held open the rear seat door for Reva. Remo started to get in after her, but Chiun brushed by him onto the wide seat.
"Move over," Remo said.
Chiun asked Reva, "This person with the lumpy face is your servant?"
"He's my chauffeur."
"Remo, ride in the front with the other servant," Chiun said. He turned back to Reva. "We had a servant once—a British butler. But Remo killed him for no reason at all."
"You know, Chiun, I love you when you're like this," Remo said.
"Sit in front," Chiun said.