She thought about these things in the dim light of the Swiss airliner, totally satisfied by the miraculous hands of this wonderful man called Remo. Actually, Reemer seemed like most men to Kathy. But Remo was unlike all the rest.
"I've never met a man like you," she said. "You're so different from other men."
"No, I am not."
"Who are you like?"
"Someone else. Except he doesn't seem to function in the modern world. I don't know. Don't bring up that subject."
"Is he your father?" asked Kathy.
"Sort of."
"I'd like to meet him."
"Go to sleep," said Remo.
Before landing in Hanoi, the International Media Committee for Truth in Southeast Asia had discussed the main draft of their conclusion to their investigation of the truth. It declared that Hanoi had been maligned, that its living standards and freedom should be copied by the rest of the world. It blamed the American media for distortion.
The man reading the communique was an actor. He knew the news business as few did. He had played a newspaperman on Broadway and on television.
"We just want to see the truth come out," he said.
"What about the hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to die to get out of Vietnam now that it's liberated?" said Remo. There was no purpose in mentioning this. He wasn't going to change anything. It was just that these peopie were so sure that their intelligence was superior to the average American's. It had been grating to hear them discuss how provincial the Americans were, how distorted the American news was.
"They're not Vietnamese. They're Chinese," said the spokesman, his craggy face had appeared on many TV commercials announcing his willingness to work for the betterment of mankind.
"So?" said Remo.
"Well, they weren't Vietnamese who were fleeing, but families who had once come from China," said the spokesman for the truth committee.
"You mean they have to be racially pure to have rights?" asked Remo. He had heard this bandied about often in the States when it was obvious that Vietnam had become a bloody concentration camp. Otherwise, why would people flee?
This man, whose every other sentence was about fighting fascism, was unwittingly spouting the fascist line. He could have been a Nazi and not known he wasn't a humanitarian. The last thing in the world of which he could conceive was his own stupidity. By the time the plane touched down in Hanoi it was resolved that the American media grossly distorted the progressive nature of the Hanoi regime.
The news release for tomorrow was to be about the bombing of Vietnamese rice fields that destroyed the ground and created agricultural problems.
The truth committee was still working on the draft denying Hanoi still held American prisoners, but they had to get that cleared first by the Vietnamese military.
When they arrived in Hanoi there were reporters waiting for the leader of the group to read his statement. He tousled his hair and opened his shirt to look like a newsman. He read the statement with a sense of remorse that his own country's media were distorting the nature of a people whose only desire was to live in peace.
The committee had been scheduled to read a statement at the hotel about industrial progress, but they were late. The rickshas had broken down.
The nice thing about communism for this actor was that if the towels were dirty you didn't have to wait for new ones or suffer insolence from the help, the maid was beaten right on the spot by a policeman.
"How are we going to find the beam?" said Kathy. "It's obviously hidden."
"If it is hidden, then someone has hidden it. Therefore, someone knows where it is."
"How do you find that person?"
"Well, if it is not a person but the government, and everything in these places is, you grab the highest government official and get him to tell you about anyone who might know about a new device."
"What if he doesn't talk?"
"They always do."
"But if he honestly doesn't know."
"Too bad for him."
"I love it," said Kathy O'Donnell. "I love it. Start with that guy with the machine gun and the pith helmet."
"I'll start where I want," said Remo.
"Where are you going to start?"
"I don't know," said Remo. The streets were bleak and plain; even the trees seemed to be stripped of bark. Apparently the people had eaten it. No wonder there wasn't any garbage on the streets of Hanoi. The lucky ones had already found it and made it their dinner.
Soldiers were everywhere. Slogans were everywhere. Remo rcognized old Chinese formations of letters. Much of this land had belonged to China at one time. Chiun had talked of insidious rebellions against the Chinese emperors. What differentiated an insidious rebellion from other kinds was whether the emperor had paid a Master of Sinanju.
Often just a few people were behind a rebellion. What they did was work on the grievances of the many and get the people to follow them. The new liberation movements of the world were 3,500 years old at least.
Looking around the streets of Hanoi, Remo noticed that the only fat people he saw were of high officer rank. Everyone else was thin beyond belief.
"Look at how thin the people are," Remo said.
The leader of the truth committee heard this. He was standing in front of his hotel, stuffing a caramel bar into his face.
"Capitalism doesn't encourage them to eat properly," he said. He dropped the wrapper. The doorman fell to his knees to lick it, but was kicked away by the manager of the hotel, who also had the rights to lick the crumbs off the Americans' shirts.
The American actor was told what an intelligent man he was. He was told this often. He was also told how much smarter he was than the average American, who did not know the real truth about the world.
"I owe it to my countrymen," the actor said, "to make them aware of the real world, not some comfortable beerswilling Formica version of it."
"What is Formica?" asked a Communist minister.
"It's a shiny material that you can spill things on, and it never stains and you wipe it off easily. Always looks new. No character," said the actor.
"Could you get us some?" asked the minister. The actor laughed. They asked again. He was sure they couldn't want something as bourgeois as Formica.
He asked to be taken to visit a typical Vietnamese family. Remo understood what the two officials were saying, but not word for word because he had only been taught the emperor's tongue. Rather, little snippets of phrases these officials never knew had come from old Chinese lords. The Chinese this committee so casually dismissed as having no rights in Vietnam had been in that country longer than the Normans had been in England.
The words Remo recognized were, "Stall the fat fool until we get the family set up correctly."
"Won't he be suspicious?"