In Chicago, Debbie Pattie had made a fantastic discovery. She had launched her team of accountants into the books of the Save concert. Out of the twenty-five million dollars raised, her accountants tracked down exactly what was reaching Gupta, India. It was sent in an express package two feet wide and one foot tall. Exactly thirty-five dollars' worth of Band-Aids.
Enraged in large part because the man she wanted, Remo, had been right, and more important, didn't want to go to bed with her, Debbie immediately set out to raise a cry in the land about the fraud.
She contacted the leading rock singers of the Save concert. One of them, who yelled about being an American and wore a bandanna around his head, showing lots of sweat and muscle, was Barry Horowitz, sometimes called The Man.
He was strong. He was radical. He was concerned. "Barry, this is Debbie Pattie. I found out something horrible. Do you know that for all our work we are only sending thirty-five dollars in Band-Aids to Gupta?"
"That's not my job, sweetie. I'm the strong outraged American. I scream my guts out. That's my job."
"But if you'd been to Gupta, you'd have seen the suffering. We have to do more."
"Hey, little shitheel, I sang my lungs out. You can't get no more out of this man."
"But the people aren't getting anything."
"I'm the voice of rage and justice, not the food-delivery man, baby. Get your act together. I got mine. "
Some others thought it was terrible, but they had bookings they had to fill. And still others had attended the concert because everyone seemed to be doing it and they had never even known what the benefit was for.
Debbie Pattie was alone and she couldn't even reach Remo. But she knew she had made it through a hard world right to the top, and if she could nail the thieves herself, she thought, then Remo, the one man she wanted and couldn't have, would have to come and admit she was someone special.
The money, as it turned out, went to several places. Everyone made money. The auditorium management hoarded what little it had to pay damages to families of the injured and dead rock stars, the unions received special bonuses, and one dandy little tidbit was that almost half of everything collected went to Gadgets Unlimited, the company that provided the wiring and lighting for the stage. The accountants told her the people who arranged this were brilliant and knew just how benefits worked, even understanding that money could be taken out as security for future bills.
"If you hadn't alerted us we never would have found this rascal. This is the best job of numbers manipulation we have ever seen."
Gadgets Unlimited was in Grand Island, Nebraska. Debbie wouldn't go to Grand Island to die, but she would bring Grand Island to her. She phoned the company and got a machine. But this was the strangest answering machine she had ever heard.
"Yes, I am an answering machine but I can answer your questions, hold conversations, and even give you three minutes of appropriate sympathy if that is called for."
"I want to speak to the employee who handled the work on the Save benefit."
"A tragedy, yes. But the Save concert also contributed to furthering the interests of stage delights."
"There are a few million dollars' worth of bills here," said Debbie. She looked at the printout on the marble tabletop in her hotel suite. There were electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, and enough scientific gadgets to outfit a space capsule.
"And every one of them going for improved and better sound, not only for today but also for tomorrow."
"But wasn't this money supposed to go to the poor people of Gupta?"
"Everything after expenses did go to Gupta, we are led to believe. I think they got the very latest in the 'ouchless' gauze bandage."
"Look, to me that's fraud. And maybe you can pull off fraud against most people, but I got a friend, a good friend, and my friend Remo . . ."
As soon as the word was out of her mouth she heard a fast click, and live noncomputer voice got on the phone. She knew it didn't come from a computer because no computer could be so grating on the ears. It twanged like a rusty nail across a piece of concrete.
"Remo as in Remo and Chiun," came the voice.
"Yeah. Them. You know them?"
"Know of them? They're my heroes, little lady. My name is Robert Dastrow, that's D as in Data, A as in Arithmetic, S as in Silicone, T as in Titanium, R as in Robot, O as in Ohm, and W as in Wildebeest; heh, heh, sometimes I throw in an animal. I'm a card, you know."
"Look, is there any way you can return some of that money to the people of Gupta? If you'd seen them suffering, you'd know we should do something."
"Right you are, sweet lips," came the voice. "I think we ought to talk about it. We ought to talk about it some more. I'd love to give everything to Gupta, but I have to know what kind of person you are, not just some fly-by-night who wants a million here and a million there."
"I'm a rock star. I'm rich," said Debbie.
But it wasn't enough for Dastrow, D as in Data, A as in Arithmetic, and so on, and finally Debbie Pattie agreed to meet the man with the rusty voice.
Robert Dastrow looked as he sounded. As though he should be in some hardware store west of Chillicothe. Ohio. He wore a plain starched white shirt with pencils in the pocket, wire-rimmed glasses, and a crew cut. If Debbie wanted to cast the perfect class nerd, she would call on Robert Dastrow.
But if he was so backward, why was the conversation never going where she wanted and always getting strangely back to Remo and Chiun? You would think he had something for them and not her. He wanted to know what they ate, how she felt about their vibrations, how they made love (if she could be supposed to know such information). He wanted to know any strange things they might have talked about.
"Well, it was like a family fight that went on all the time, like. You know what I mean? Like the old man was really his mother, you know? Not his father. His mother. Always telling him he didn't do this right or that right. You know, a mother who's always bitchin'. A normal mother."
"My mother wasn't like that," said Dastrow.
"Well, maybe where you're from they're different. But he was like his mother. And they were always arguing, sometimes in English. Sometimes in Korean."
"Did the older one seem to know more than the younger?"
"The older one didn't like this country, didn't like working here. Thought they ought to go."
"And just what work did they do?"
"I dunno. Those two were as mysterious about that as 'The Twilight Zone.' A weird pair. Bunch of stuck-ups. Who do they think they are, right? Remo thought he was better than everyone."
"You had problems with him?"
"Everyone had problems with him. The nice one was Chiun."
"I'll tell you what I'll do. You seem like a dedicated person and this concert was for charity. There is one way I can make back my investment if I sign over all the equipment funds to the Save committee. And that's if you introduce my new electronic guitar tonight. Because if you use it, and everyone sees how good it is, then golly, I'm off and running."
"All of the money you took goes to Gupta, right?"
"Yessiree, little lady."
"Is the guitar heavy? I can't work heavy. I move a lot. I'm a dancer too."
"I'll make it light. It's got a lot of wires, though. It works sort of on your brainwaves too."
And thus Debbie Pattie in the prime of her career allowed herself to be strapped into the new electronic guitar. Electrodes were set on her scalp and on her wrists and ankles, and when she began to play, this arrangement worked just as well as it did on any other electric chair.
Debbie Pattie got enough volts while singing before her rock crowd to do away with half the capital offenders in New Jersey.
Remo heard about her death on the television show Chiun was watching as he was packing his things, one extra shirt and one extra pair of pants. The problem wasn't packing the shirt and pants, the problem was getting them into Chiun's fourteen steamer trunks.