"Okay," said Remo in English.
"Thanks, Chiun. You're the decent one. You understand what I mean by saving the world."
"Until you know where the money goes you don't know what you're doing," said Remo.
"Why are you so negative? Even the reporters don't ask questions like that. Reporters never ask questions like that. They ask when I became so knowledgeable about world affairs, when I became so philosophical."
"You don't know until you know where the money goes," said Remo, and took a handful of Debbie Pattie's wires. They were thick, almost as wide as hot dogs, and they seemed to stick to his skin as he held them, as though they were covered with some form of gelatin. Remo looked around the stage to see if there were others like them, but there weren't. The others were the normal thin wires that didn't glisten with this strange substance on them. The closest thing to it in Remo's mind was the substance people used to make electrocardiograph electrodes more effective in reading the heart.
The first song was the now famous "Save." A hundred stars, amplified by a million megawatts, blared out that one word over and over again. "SAVE. SAVE. SAVE. WE SAVE. SAVE SAVE SAVE. PEOPLE SAVE. SAVE SAVE SAVE. WE SAVE. SAVE SAVE SAVE."
The crowd screamed. The singers screamed. The stagehands screamed. The noise onstage could have deafened people sitting outside the auditorium.
Chiun shouted into Remo's ear. "White music."
"Not all white music is like this," Remo yelled back.
"Doesn't have to be. This is enough."
The noise went on for fifteen minutes. When it subsided to the level of an avalanche, an announcer called it the most meaningful experience of the twentieth century.
Then one of the singers introduced Genaro Rizzuto and Remo discovered what Palmer, Rizzuto had up its sleeve.
"We have here someone who is fighting for the poor," said the lead singer. "We have here someone who takes his care and concern into the field. This man was on the scene even before the doctors. This man was Gupta. This man was the suffering. This man was the dying. This man was the first to say 'save.' He said we couldn't let our brothers die anywhere in the world, or we would let them die everywhere. "
The last piece of absurdity was met with hysteria, and when it died down the singer said, "I give you Genaro Rizzuto of the law firm of Palmer, Rizzuto They care. They save. And they have an important message for you."
Rizzuto came forward among the bangles, the rags, the glitter, the heat, and the noise. And he too managed a big smile.
He thought of the thousands of yelling people as a jury, and in so doing he felt at home.
"I'm just a lawyer," yelled Rizzuto.
The crowd screamed back. One girl fainted and another desperately lunged forward to touch his shoes before she died.
It was then that Rizzuto realized the rock crowd was better than a jury.
"I am just a lawyer, and I just defend the rights of people to live safely, to live in peace, to live in an environment that doesn't kill them, to drive cars that don't maim them, to visit doctors who will not murder them with their incompetence. I am just a lawyer."
The crowd screamed its answer. "Save. Save. Save."
"And we went to Gupta so that these people, these poor people, would not suffer in vain. And what did we find? We found that the world does not care. The world does not care about a person if he's brown, if he lacks power, if he doesn't live in some white country. The world does not care."
"Destroy the world," screamed out one young man with a peace symbol on his T-shirt.
"No. Let us save the world," yelled Rizzuto, ripping off his tie and popping buttons off his shirt, then flinging his arms wide, his chest exposed like the other stars, the lights playing off his glittering teeth. "Save the world. Save. Save. Save."
"Save. Save. Save," the crowd yelled back.
"We cannot put a price on a life because of the color of a man's skin."
"No," yelled back the crowd.
"We cannot put a price on a person's life because of where that person was born."
"No," yelled back the crowd.
"Everyone has the same right to life that we have. "
"Yes," yelled back the crowd.
"Everyone has a right to a life as good as everyone else's. "
"Everyone."
"Here. "
"Here," yelled back the crowd. "In America."
"America," yelled back the crowd.
Now Genaro's voice hushed, forcing the people to strain to listen. "But I am sorry to say, my friends, that big rich corporations know how the world works. The little people, you and me, the people who suffer, don't know how the world works. The big rich corporations with their rich lawyers know that if they put a dangerous plant in a poor country, the lives of the poor won't matter that much. They know all lives are not equal. They know they can make money from the suffering of the poor. And they know they're going to get away with it."
"No," screamed the crowd. Someone called out for the death of all corporations.
"No," said Genaro. "We don't want them to die. We don't want them to collapse. We just want them to stop killing our planet, killing our brothers, and there's a way to do it."
"Do it," screamed the rock stars along with the crowd.
"We can say to them, 'Hey! Our brothers' lives are worth something. You can't keep killing our brothers and getting away with it.' We can say to them, 'You've got to pay for your misdeeds, just as if you did them in our home. Just as if you did them in San Francisco or New York City or here in Chicago. Our brothers are our brothers wherever they are.' "
And thus with the mob screaming "Save our brothers," Genaro Rizzuto brilliantly made a public appeal for change of venue. He started a mass movement to make crimes committed in a foreign land punishable in the home country of the corporation, because in America a life was not worth an average of seven dollars, but more like a quarter of a million, and the fifty percent Palmer, Rizzuto would collect on a quarter of a million dollars would be enough to pay for Palmer's love life, Schwartz's investments, and Rizzuto's willingness to gamble with strangers who carried guns and didn't bet on hands they didn't deal themselves.
Remo listened to all this and both he and Chiun sensed something else was at work here, something far more dangerous than a change of venue, something that was going to kill.
They were right. What they didn't know was that it was about to happen onstage.
Chapter 8
At first everyone thought it was part of the song, a great new song, the rock hit of the decade. All the singers were screaming, some of them clawing to get off the stage. Others crawled and still others punched and pushed, and someone at a microhone cried out. "Lord help us. Help us. Help."
The audience applauded as the center of the wooden stage began to sag and then with a sickening crack, it collapsed. Bodies fell into each other. Guitars and bones cracked in the onslaught. The center-stage singers were crushed under the load, smothered by the bodies of those who fell on top of them. It was a full minute before the audience realized this wasn't the best rock piece they had ever heard but a disaster.
Remo and Chiun saw immediately that the people were in trouble, not singing about it. Using the wires, they pulled Debbie and her guitar free and then dove into the center of the surging mass of bodies, lifting off rock stars, passing them up over the side of the stage. Those on the bottom could not be saved, but they managed to get the upper layers free so that doctors could get to those who were still alive at the bottom.
At the lower levels the bodies were slippery from the blood.