"What are we supposed to tell them when we ask for four dollars to use the bathroom?" Remo said.
"We always suggest saying that fuel consumption increased near the end of the flight and mumble something about flush-to-fuel comparative expenditures."
"I am not charging someone for a bodily function," said Remo.
"Then the loss comes out of your pay."
The first thing Remo did on the next flight was to give away the snacks and the sodas. He ripped the pay locks from the lavatory doors. He lent out the pillows without cost and urged the passengers to take them home as souvenirs. Then he carefully tried to see if anyone was setting someone up for a kill. He had learned that a college student who had been on his previous flight had been found murdered, strangled and robbed.
Yet, on that flight, there had been no one giving off any sense of death.
He asked Chiun about it later. "Do you give off a sense of death, Little Father?"
"For me, death is not evil. So I do not," Chiun said.
"Perhaps, then, there are others who don't think death is evil," Remo said. "Maybe they don't give off the sense of death either."
"Perhaps."
"I can't believe there are that many trained assassins who are petty robbers too," Remo said.
"Perhaps they are not trained assassins. Perhaps there is another reason," Chiun said.
"What reason?" asked Remo.
"We will see," Chiun said, and turned away to check the passengers on the plane. He liked being a flight attendant, provided passengers did what they were told. What he liked best was ensuring their safety, telling them what they should do in the event of a crash.
"The wings are always falling off planes like this," he would say. "When it happens, make your essence not part of the plane, but part of the pull of the planets."
"Yeah? And just how do we do that?" asked a rotund woman in the smoking section.
"Change your filthy eating habits first," said Chiun, who then decided that there would no longer be a smoking section on his just Folks flights. Instead, he told them to occupy their time with reading material. He passed out petitions and brief excerpts from an Ung poem praising the first petal of the first flower on the first morning of the new dawn.
"I don't like that flowery crap," said one young man. "I'd rather smoke." Chiun showed him how he really didn't need a seat beak to stay transfixed to his seat. He did it with the young man's spinal column, and instantly the youth's appreciation of poetry rose. He loved the poem.
Chiun said he did not want the young man to appreciate the poem because he was being forced to appreciate it, because then he would not really appreciate it at all. The youth swore over and over again that he was not being forced. There were tears in his eyes.
Chiun visited with passengers. He especially appreciated parents' tales of their children's ingratitude, and called Remo over to listen to many of them.
And then Remo noticed a young blond woman with milkmaid skin, very interested in an elderly gentleman who was going on about the meaning of spastic fabrics in a nonspastic world, as he called it.
Everyone around that seat was dozing, having been put under by the interminable Ung poetry. Except for the girl. Her blue eyes were wide, gaga with the wisdom of not trying to market nonspastic fabrics in a spastic world, and vice versa. The man was obviously a salesman of some sort. Remo knew this because the man talked in terms that could have been used reasonably only by Napoleon or Alexander the Great.
The man had New England and South America. He would control Canada. He wouldn't move into Europe because that was held too tightly.
Remo figured out that these were the man's sales areas. He never did quite figure out what a nonspastic fabric was, although he got the impression that it was used somehow in zippers.
Remo thought he recognized the girl. He looked at the passenger list and saw her name was Holly Rodan. He asked to speak to her privately.
"Don't be too long, honey," said the salesman. Remo brought the young woman up to the well between the cockpit and the seats. The copilot came out to talk to him.
Remo said, "I'm busy."
"Look, I'm a pilot and you're a steward. You're not even in uniform. You are going to make me a cup of coffee, do you understand?"
Remo twisted the copilot's arm in the shape of a handle, stuck his head into the coffeepot, then delivered him back to the cockpit soaking wet.
"You are now a cup of coffee," Remo said.
Remo tried to talk to the young woman, but a passenger came up into the well wanting a drink. "Speak to the other one," Remo said.
"He said to talk to you."
"What do you want?"
"I want a rum fizzle. Do you have a rum fizzle?"
"Take whatever you want," Remo said.
The passenger poked around in the liquor bin. Holly said she wanted to go back to her seat. She asked nicely and she was answered nicely. No.
"I don't see any rum fizzles," the passenger said.
"Take what's there," Remo said.
"Can I have a vodka and rum?"
"Sure. Take it and go," Remo said. "Can I have two?"
"Take them. Go."
"Two of them?"
"All of them," Remo said.
"Are you really a steward?" Holly asked Remo. She was not afraid. She had Her on her side.
"Sure," said Remo. "I've even seen you before. On this flight."
"Not on this flight," said Holly. "This flight only began a half-hour ago." It was a perfect answer. She liked putting people in their places. Mother had taught her how. It was the only thing her mother had ever been good for.
Remo suggested that now, since the coffeepot wasn't using the hotplate, she might like to sit there.
"You can't talk to me like that. There are regulations. You'll get fired."
"All right," said Remo.