The cabby stopped in midchew and said thickly, "I thought only geisha girls wore kimonos."
"Answer the question."
"Sure. He was watching the bulletin with the rest of us, gave a yip and grabbed the first cab."
The cabby was pointing to the large TV screen on One Times Square Plaza, which, like all the rest of broadcast TV, was as black as a hung crepe except for the tiny NO SIGNAL Chyron.
"Bulletin? The screen's blacked out."
"This wasn't a regular bulletin," the cabby explained. "It was more along the line of a ransom demand."
"Ransom?"
"Wait, here it comes again."
The screen suddenly flared to life.
And looking out over Times Square was the flat, scared-white face of Cheeta Ching. Her hair was a Medusan mass of split ends and her red mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out.
"She's saying that she's having-whadyacall'em-Braxton-Hicks contractions," the cabby explained.
"You can read lips?"
"Naw. The sound was coming in over the dispatch radio, last time. Whatever's messing up TV reception, it's put the radios on the fritz too." The driver obligingly got behind the wheel and turned his radio up.
"-sist that my network agree to all of this lunatic's demands at once," Cheeta was saying in a shrill, helpless tone. "I can't have my baby now. I look a wreck and I don't have my midwife and-"
The screen turned blue and the blue framed a graphic of a stainless steel nautical anchor in a triangular Warner Bros's-style crest.
"We interrupt this interruption of broadcast service," the sonorous voice of Captain Audion broke in, "to announce an escalation in our earlier demands."
The screen was again black.
"The price per network is up to fifty million, but for BCN, I'll throw in Cheeta Ching for an extra ten."
"I'd pass," the cabby opined. "That broad ain't worth last month's rent. Did you see her hair? It's terrible what they pay these people, and they can't even groom themselves right."
"That the message my friend heard?" Remo demanded.
"Yeah, I had my radio up full blast on account of everybody and his brother wanted to hear what she was saying. Fat lot of good it did me. Not one fare."
"Any chance you overheard where my friend went?"
"Sure. He told the first guy in line to take him to the ANC studio."
"You the second guy in line?"
The cabby gestured through his windshield. "You see anybody in front of me now?"
"Then you get to take me to ANC," said Remo, reaching for the passenger door handle.
"Okay, just let me finish my pastrami."
Remo reached over the roof of the parked cab and took hold of the roof light. He disengaged the fixture and handed it to the driver through the open window.
"What's this?" the cabby muttered, pastrami shreds dribbling from his lips.
"An example of what will happen to your head if you don't get your ass into gear," said Remo, dropping into the back seat.
He slammed the door shut as the cab left the curb.
There was only one reason the Master of Sinanju would race off to ANC without him, Remo knew.
Chiun was going to ransom Cheeta Ching by wringing the truth out of the person he believed was her abductor.
Dieter Banning.
Chapter 20
Everyone agreed that Dieter Banning was the most erudite, well-dressed, and polished anchor on American TV.
The truth was that Dieter Banning's early reading consisted almost exclusively of American comic books. Although his resume included Carleigh University in Ottowa, he had in fact enrolled in their night school. He lasted a single week, quitting because, in his words, "There weren't enough pictures in the texts."
He bought his clothes in bulk from a London discount house. But because they were British, he made the annual best-dressed lists.
No one questioned his lack of credentials, because Dieter Banning looked like an anchor should look, spoke the way an anchor was expected to speak, and did it all in an impeccable clipped accent that seemed above reproach.
But most of all, Dieter Banning had the credibility of a man who had the courage to wear his own hair on network TV.
Few viewers would have acknowledged it, in an age of toupees, blown-dry shag cuts and hair weaves, but news viewers subconsciously trusted Dieter Banning because he had the courage to let his thinning hair go out over the air unembellished and unaugmented.
"I'm a journalist, not a fucking Macy's mannikin," he had retorted when the unfamiliar American word "Rogaine" was uttered by the president of the news division. The occasion was Banning's forty-second birthday and the renewal of his first two-year contract.
"Need I remind you, Dieter, that there's an appearance clause in your contract?"
"Take it out, or I walk."
No one in network television had ever heard of such a thing. Dieter Banning was being paid a cool 1.7 million dollars a year to read off a teleprompter five nights a week and he was actually balking at a little career-enhancing cosmetics.
"You," said the news manager, "are either the next Edward R. Murrow or an utter fool."
Dieter Banning simply stared at his lobster Fra Diavolo and said nothing. He found that worked well with Americans. They usually filled the silence with some babble of their own, usually their worst fears.
His employer did not disappoint him.
"Okay, the clause goes. But the ratings better not erode or we're revisiting this whole discussion next renewal."