"You taste like a redhead. I've tasted lots of redheads. And I'm in a stark, raving blonde mood today. Sorry."

  Without missing a beat, the redhead whistled up an ash blond flight attendant from the back of the plane.

  They huddled. The blonde, listening attentively, looked at Remo with eyes like small blue explosions of pleasure and nodded animatedly.

  They stormed back, the redhead taking point.

  "Can you come with us to the first-class galley, sir?" she asked with breathy politeness.

  "Why?" Remo asked suspiciously.

  "There's more room there."

  "For what?"

  "For you to jump Lynette here and me to watch."

  "You just want to watch?"

  "It's better than riding my vibrator to Minneapolis," the redhead said with resigned sincerity.

  "There's nothing in the first-class galley I want," said Remo, folding his lean arms stubbornly.

  "Well, I guess you'll just have to do him here," said the redhead to the blonde with an air of determination. "Scare me up a blanket, Lyn."

  "Nothing doing," said Remo as the blonde hurried back to an aft storage bin.

  "Sir, it's our duty as flight attendants to cater to your every need. You said blonde. So you're getting a blonde. And that's it," the redhead fumed, dropping into the empty seat beside Remo and reaching for his zipper.

  "Let me make you comfortable." That's when her tapered fingers encountered the tiny luggage padlock and her glossy red mouth made a tasty O.

  "What's this?"

  "A simple precaution," said Remo.

  "Where's the key?"

  "In my luggage."

  "Oh, my God. It's way down in the cargo hold by now."

  "You could go get it," Remo suggested.

  "I might miss the flight."

  "If you don't get that key, you'll definitely miss the show."

  "Don't let the plane take off without me."

  "Never happen," said Remo, who watched the redhead scurry up the aisle, not at all hindered by the broken shoe heel lost when taking the turn to the main exit door at 2 G's.

  When the ash blonde returned with a fluffy blue blanket, Remo put on an innocent face.

  "Your friend just quit."

  "Oh! Does that mean it's off?"

  "Catch me on the return flight."

  "I'll be there."

  "But I won't," Remo murmured as the 727 backed out of the gate and taxied to the runway with the redhaired stewardess running in her nylons after them, waving her pumps.

  When Remo gave her a little finger wave, she threw her shoes at the aircraft's tail assembly one at a time.

  Later the blonde stewardess brought Remo a silver tray from the galley.

  "I found you some liver pate."

  "Don't eat the stuff."

  "Gentlemen who prefer blondes usually like liver pate."

  "I only said I like blondes to discourage the redhead. Actually I'm into brunettes this week."

  "I'll be right back," the blonde said, rushing back to coach.

  When she came back, with a zaftig brunette in tow, Remo had locked himself in the first-class rest room, and no amount of pounding, threats or promises would bring him out until the jet's turbines were spooling down at the Minneapolis gate.

  Other than that, it wasn't a bad flight, and it did give Remo the idea for making liver pate.

  So when he wheeled the sterling service cart up to room 28-A of the Radisson South Hotel in his starched whites, a Chef Boyardee cap cocked on his head, Remo had his line of attack already planned out.

  The door opened, and an overfed hair-bag in a sharkskin suit grunted, "You the guy with the steaks?"

  "No, I'm the liver pate chef."

  "I don't want your liver," he snarled.

  "But I want yours," said Remo, running the cart in despite the best attempts of the hair-bag to block his way. The hairbag filled most of the doorway, so he was the most befuddled man in Minneapolis when Remo was suddenly behind him bringing the cart to a squeaky stop.

  The hair-bag turned with all the lightning reflexes of a wooden totem pole. It took him six careful steps to get all the way around.

  "I said we don't want your liver, jerk-ass!" he bellowed.

  "And I said I want yours," returned Remo in an unperturbed tone.

  By that time, the men in bad, tight-fitting suits with bunching unibrows over snarling eyes were getting out of their seats looking belligerent.

  "What the fuck is this?" asked a black man who wore a gold chain that linked his earlobes, nostrils and nipples and possibly other portions of his anatomy beneath his white silk shirt and tight-fitting white vinyl pants.

  "Liver-pate chef," said Remo, taking the silver domes off six serving dishes.

  The bodyguard stumped up, looked down, blinked three times real slow and announced the supremely obvious. "I see only fucking lettuce."

  "Haven't pated the livers yet," said Remo.

  "We don't want none," the bodyguard growled. "Tell him, Mr. D."

  Mr. D. looked all of thirty and as bright as a twenty-five-watt bulb. Remo pegged him for the D'Ambrosia honcho on the scene. That made the guy with all the chains the local supplier.

  "Look, we ordered the steak and lobster. You got the wrong room," Mr. D. insisted.

  The last dome clanged down, and Remo turned, smiled disarmingly and said, "You first."

  "Me first what?"

  "You first for liver pate. "

  "I don't want-"

  The man felt the dull pressure in his abdomen. Being a gangster for most of his short life, he assumed the worst-that the chef had stuck a knife in his gut. It felt like a knife. It punctured the fibrous abdominal walls like a knife, and made his lungs clutch up the way an inserted knife would.

  But when he looked down, his eyes horrified, Mr. D. caught a glimpse of his liver, pinched between two hardly bloody fingers, emerging wetly through a round hole in his shirt.

  The liver jumped up before his face, unfolded like a fat manta ray and the chef's two thick-wristed hands made some kind of prestidigitation. When the liver flopped down onto one of the service trays, it was a livid paste.

  "That's my-"said the late Mr. D as the life oozed out of him through the hole in his 180-dollar silk shirt.

  Not everyone had a clear view of what happened. Not everyone's comprehension skills were at their sharpest. Not with all the uncorked Chianti bottles lying around.

  But these were men who had come up from the mean streets, and the thud of one of their own hitting the rug was enough to make them reach for assorted 9 mm artillery.

  Remo started moving then.

  To his superhumanly developed eyes and senses, the surviving five men were moving in slow motion.

  A hand snaked out with a gun butt, and Remo's much quicker hand slapped the knuckles, unnerving the fingers. The gun dropped. While the hands, sensing emptiness, clutched for it, Remo's free hand slipped two chisel-stiff fingers into the man's abdominal cavity, located the liver, flopped it over like a fat, foldable steak and drew it out through the quartersized hole.

  Splat. It landed on lettuce, a purply paste.

  By that time, Remo was on to mafioso number three, who brandished a switchblade with an illegal-length blade. It went snick as it came out of his belt sheath, and Remo guided the blade so that it debuttoned the owner's sharkskin suit coat before bisecting the front of his white shirt.

  The man's exposed hairy belly opened up like a bearded man smiling. And out spilled his lower intestinal tract.

  Remo fished the throbbing liver out of the steaming mass of internal organs and slapped the liver between two hands, rolled it in a ball and tossed it casually over his shoulder.

  It landed perfectly. By this time, slow brains were beginning to grasp hard reality.

  "Get out of here!" the bodyguard started screaming. "It's a hit!"

  Remo let him scream.

  There was a bald guy with three rolls of fat at the back of his neck. He fumbled his 9 mm pistol out and was sweeping the room with it.

  Remo stopped being a moving blur long enough to deal with him.

  The gun snapped out shots, catching the bodyguard across the front of his chest. Blood came out of the holes, including his gulping mouth, and he pitched forward as Remo moved in on the rolls of fat from the side.

  The edge of Remo's palm connected with the doughy rolls, and the man's head all but jumped off the neck. The dislocation left him looking like a broken-necked puppet, and Remo allowed him to fall dead while he attended to the final live gunman in the room. The local guy festooned with gold chain like some alternative-life-style Christmas tree.

  This one had a wheelgun-a chrome-plated Colt Python. Remo handled it with a trick any ordinary man could pull off. He simply clamped the cylinder with his fingers and let the man try to pull the trigger. The trigger wouldn't pull. So Remo plucked the pistol from his hands and showed him a trick no ordinary man could perfect.

  He crushed the wheelgun to metallic fragments with a single hard squeeze.

  The goon goggled at the chrome bits dropping to the rug. "How'd you-?"

  "Do that?" prompted Remo, spanking his hands clean of steel shavings.

  "Yeah."

  "Easy. I gave it a good squeeze."

  "It's steel and you're not."

  "I'm alive and you're not," countered Remo.

  The "Huh" matched the gunman's dulled-by-shock expression, and Remo used his right index finger to hook the man's network of gold ropes. He gave a quick tug.

  The chains were solidly anchored. They came loose, pulling off red pieces of nose, lips, earlobes, nipples and navel.

  The belly button was especially well secured. It came out last, taking the twenty-four-carat gold stud and a big swatch of washboard musculature with it.

  Remo got another flood of internal organs and caught the liver on its way down.

  Quickly he collected the remaining livers of the dead and worked them into pate, which filled the remaining serving dishes very nicely.

  Recapping them, Remo smacked his hands together and surveyed the room. "Can I cook or what?"

  And he walked away whistling.

  Chapter 3

  It was Kwanzaa in the White House.

  The traditional Christmas tree stood on the White House's sprawling North Lawn. A Douglas fir this year, festooned with traditional holiday lights and decorations.

  It had been a tremendous relief to the President of the United States when the First Lady had announced that they were going traditional this year.

  "Does that mean no Star of David on top?" he asked, recalling one memorable tree-lighting ceremony he'd rather turn into a repressed memory. Like the 103rd Congress.

  "No Star of David," the First Lady had promised on the day after Thanksgiving, which was also celebrated in the traditional way, much to the Chief Executive's unbounded relief.

  "No kachina dolls, Eskimo totems or voodoo saints?" the President asked, burping up the fresh taste of turkey.

  "Red and green bulbs garnished with silver tinsel."

  "Your fans are going to think I had you killed and replaced with a clone," the President said warily.

  "I want to celebrate our fourth White House Christmas like Abraham Lincoln did."

  "Fighting the Civil War?"

  "No," the First Lady said, chewing on a dry turkey drumstick. "In the traditional, all-American manner."

  The President realized at last she was serious, grinned broadly and said in his hoarse Arkansas twang, "I'll make the arrangements right away." He bolted for the door before the bluebird of political correctness could settle on the First Lady's cashmere shoulders.

  "While you're at it . . ." the First Lady called tartly.

  The President froze. "New Year's?"

  "A traditional New Year's. See to it."

  "Done," said the President, relaxing all over again. His hand was on the door. He paused to issue a warm sigh of relief and forevermore regretted not flinging open the door and charging through to do his presidential duty.

  "But in between, we're doing Kwanzaa," said the Voice of Steel.

  The President whirled as if shot in the back. "Kwanzaa? The Black Christmas!"

  "It's not Christmas," she corrected gently. "Christmas is the 25th. New Year's is January 1. Kwanzaa is celebrated during the six days in between. And don't say 'Black: Say 'Afrocentric.' It's more correct."

  "Didn't we have this argument once before?" the President said, thick of voice and tongue.

  "And I let you win. But the election is over with. We have nothing to lose by celebrating Kwanzaa."

  "I won't have to wear a dashiki or anything, will I."

  "No, we light a candle a day and host Afrocentric cultural events."

  The President thought that wouldn't be so bad. And the election was behind them. What had they to lose-except a little more of their fading dignity?

  "I'll look into it."

  "No, you do it," the First Lady said, the familiar steel creeping back into her tone. Then she used her perfect white incisors to gouge a hank of dark meat from the bone.

  Closing the door behind him, the President was halfway down the red-carpeted hall when he thought he heard the crunching of dry bone. He hoped she didn't choke on a bone fragment. Even for a lawyer, the woman sure had peculiar appetites.

  The First Lady didn't choke. Not on the turkey thigh bone. And not on the Kwanzaa deal.

  And so on the second day after Christmas, the President of the United States found himself at a Blue Room photo op standing before the African candelabra called a kinara, lighting the red candle that the First Lady whispered in his ear stood for the basic principle of kuji-chagulia.

  "It means 'self-determination,'" she added.

  "Maybe you should be lighting this one," said the President, holding the long candle lighter, which smelled exactly like the punk cigarettes he used to smoke in his boyhood days in Arkansas.

  "Smile and light it," the First Lady urged with her most steely smile. "In that order."

  The President applied the flame to the red candle.

  "Now pick up the unity cup," she undertoned.

  The President blew out the lighter and laid it aside. He took up the small wooden goblet that sat on the table mat on which the kinara reposed with quiet dignity.

  "I drink to unity," said the President.

  Flashbulbs popped in his face. The President looked into the cup. The previous day, after lighting the green unity candle, the fluid had been clear. Water. Now it was red.

  "What's this?" he hissed through his own fixed smile.

  "Goat blood or something," the First Lady said vaguely.

  "I can't drink goat's blood!"

  "If you don't, you'll insult our Afro-constituents."

  "Let one of them drink goat blood."

  And overhearing that, the Reverend Juniper Jackman stepped out of the backdrop of Afro-American dignitaries, wearing a gigantic smile and saying, "Allow me to instruct our President on the ways of my people."

  The First Lady hissed like a cat. This was mistaken for the hissing of a steam radiator and unnoticed for what it was, while Black national leader and intermittent failed presidential candidate Juniper Jackman brought the cup to his lips and gulped it right down.

  When he smiled again, his teeth were as red as melting Chiclets.

  "What did I just drink?" he hissed through his own version of the fixed political smile.

  "Goat blood," the President and First Lady whispered in chorus.

  "We don't use goat blood in our Kwanzaa," Jackman said, still smiling his scarlet-and-ivory smile.

  "I improvised," the First Lady said.

  And the President clapped his hand on Jackman's back as the flashbulbs popped, stunning their unprotected retinas.

  The questions started as the popping subsided.

  "Mr. President. How do you feel about celebrating your first Kwanzaa?"

  "It's really fun!"

  "What is the significance of the red candle?" asked another.

  Jackman answered that while the President looked to the First Lady for guidance.

  "The red candle stands for the blood of the African people shed by the oppressive white man," he said.

  Again the low hissing of the First Lady was mistaken for a leaky radiator valve.

  "The green candle stands for our black youth and their future," Jackman continued. "While the middle black candle represents African-Americans as a people."

  "I agree with everything Reverend Jackman just said," the President added brightly, happy to be off the hook.

  "Mr. President, does it concern you that Kwanzaa has no traditional basis?" a reporter asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It was started in the sixties by a California political-science student who cobbled it together from African harvest feasts he observed during a field trip."

  The President looked to the First Lady with an expression that all but said, Is this true?

  The First Lady, looking blank despite her pearly, professional politician's smile, passed the ball to the Reverend Jackman.

  The good reverend looked as blank as anyone in the room as he stared expectantly at the President, who made one of the few snap decisions of his political career. He simply winged an answer.

  "Hell, a lot of things started back then that are cultural icons now. Look at Elvis. And the Beatles. Would you ask me the same question if we were celebrating Beatles Day in the White House?"

  Since the media never quoted reporters, only their questions, the President hadn't bothered to answer. Another reporter took up the bouncing ball.

  "Mr. President, what can you tell us about the event at the BioBubble?"

  "Gosh. You got me there," the President said in his best aw-shucks voice. "Are those folks celebrating Kwanzaa, too?"

  "No, Mr. President. The BioBubble ecosystem has been destroyed along with all aboard. It just came over the wire."

  The President's normally red face went flat deadfish-belly white. "Oh, my God," he said in a tiny, tight voice.

  "Let's get back to Kwanzaa," the Reverend Jackman said quickly, sensing the political spotlight about to shift away from him.

  "You do that," the President countered. "I need to look into this."

  And he left the First Lady and the Reverend Juniper Jackman to carry the Kwanzaa ball. At the door, he paused to shoot a reassuring wave to the White House press corps-and noticed the First Lady digging two fingernails into Jackman's backside with such pinching force it brought the opportunistic reverend up on his toes in pain. Additional redness came to his welded-on smile-probably from biting his tongue to repress the exquisite agony the First Lady was gleefully inflicting.