The mugger blinked, sensing opportunity. "Kindness?" he asked.
"Yeah, can you believe it?" Remo asked, shaking his head. "Vague as all get out. And what's with that 'without he first'? Is that even proper English?"
The mugger didn't hear. "So you've got to, like, do a good deed?" he pressed.
Remo nodded. "All of a sudden now I'm a freaking Boy Scout," he said. "As a kid I was a Cub Scout for barely one day. Mrs. Callahan was the den mother. She smoked cigars, had fifteen mooching Callahan kids running all over the place and her kitchen floor had more sand on it than Pismo Beach at low tide. I quit after the first meeting."
"So this good deed you gotta do," Santa's mugger said, steering Remo back to the topic at hand. "You sure you don't know what it is?"
Remo scowled, annoyed at the interruption. "No." The man's face was hopeful.
"Maybe it's that you should let me go," he offered brightly.
Remo considered for a long moment. As he mulled over the man's words, the mugger grew increasingly optimistic. His hopes were dashed the instant Remo opened his mouth once more.
"Nah," Remo concluded firmly. "I'm pretty sure that isn't it. Besides, it's time for Santa's revenge." Even as the mugger's face fell, Remo was reaching out.
The mugger didn't have time to run.
Remo spun the man, tapping a spot at the top of his fifth vertebra. The mugger's arms went slack. "I hope you got all your Christmas stealing done for the next five years, because that's how long it'll be before you get back use of your hands," Remo announced as he deposited Santa's mugger headfirst into a garbage can.
Scooping up the small donation pail the mugger had stolen, Remo headed back out the alley. Someone had run into a nearby store to call the police, but a cruiser had yet to arrive. Santa was standing anxiously near his tripod. He was cautiously relieved when he saw Remo appear with his bucket. Relief became amazement when he found it still full of coins and bills.
"You're a real lifesaver, buddy," Santa said, pawing a green mitten through the bucket of money. "Here, have a five-spot. Hell, it's Christmas. Take ten."
"Isn't that for the poor?" Remo frowned.
"Yeah, and reindeer can fly," Santa said with a broad wink. He stuffed some of the bills in his pocket. Remo saw the pocket was already bulging with Christmas cash.
Realizing that there was little hope that this was the good deed he was after, Remo let out a frustrated sigh before sticking the bucket firmly onto Santa's head.
Loose change rained onto the sidewalk. Pedestrians promptly prostrated themselves on the pavement, their grabbing hands scooping up wayward coins. The last Remo saw of Saint Nick, the portly man was stumbling blindly into traffic, his belly jiggling like a bowlful of panicked jelly.
By the time Remo heard a squeal of tires and a Santa-size thump, he wasn't even looking. Chin in his hand, he sat morosely on the curb.
"Maybe it's something even simpler," he muttered.
He noticed a nearby stray dachshund on the sidewalk. He tried to pet the dog. With snapping fangs, the little dog tried to take his finger off. When the owner of the dog-which was apparently not so stray after all-saw someone near her precious Poopsie, she started screaming "Dognapper!" at the top of her lungs while simultaneously attempting to strangle Remo with her Gucci dog leash.
Remo snapped the leash in two and, resisting the urge to kick both dog and owner, slouched off down the street.
He wandered the city for another two hours. He was ready to call it quits and head back home when he came upon a crowd outside the theater on Seventh Avenue.
The men and women heading into the building looked exceptionally affluent, even by New York standards. Remo was surprised to find that he recognized quite a few of them.
There were pop music performers and movie stars. He spotted a fat woman from a popular television legal drama who was allegedly proud of her gross obesity and whose mouth he would have liked to fill with cement if it would have had time to harden around all the moistened pizza crusts.
Falling in with the crowd, he melted through the open theater doors. A sign in the lobby advertised the event as a fund-raiser for something called Primeval Society.
Tables had been set in a great hall before the stage. A lot more celebrities were packed inside. Remo saw many people who had been successfully annoying him for decades.
He wondered briefly if the nice thing he was supposed to do was to tie everyone to their chairs and set the building on fire. Deciding that the attendant risk to the theater staff and fire department made this unlikely, he wandered the hall, eventually finding his way backstage.
In the wings he found performers hurrying in every direction as they got ready for the night's entertainment.
For some reason two tiny barefoot men in loincloths lurked sullenly in the shadows. They looked as if they'd be happier spearing fish in some South American jungle.
A table was piled high with hair tonics, mousse, curling irons, crimping tongs, coloring agents and a hundred different plastic bottles filled with scented salon products. Fighting for both bottles and mirror space were ten young men whose attention to the intricacies of personal grooming would have made a primping Liberace look like a rugged lumberjack.
A theater employee with a radio headset was walking by. Remo collared the man.
"Hey, don't I know them?" he asked.
"Are you kidding?" scoffed the harried stage director. "Those are the two most famous boy bands in the world."
Remo blinked. That's where he'd seen them before. Prancing on television and preening on magazine covers. Although Remo couldn't fathom why, the bands Glory Whole and But Me No Butz were American cultural phenomena.
He nodded as he recognized the poodle-haired one with the mushed-up face and the doughy bleached one with the granny glasses and the muscle shirt.
"What are they doing here?" Remo asked.
"For one night only they're forming a supergroup called Harmonic Convergence to raise money for the rain forest."
"Oh," Remo said. "Haven't we paved over that yet?"
But the stage director was no longer listening. Barking orders into his headset, he hurried off into the darker recesses of the wings. The two natives exchanged a few words in some guttural language before trailing after him. They each carried spears in their hands.
For a moment, Remo watched the ten young men preparing for their act. And in a moment of sheer maliciousness, Remo suddenly decided that he'd had enough of trying to figure out what this nice thing he was supposed to do was. He decided to do something nice for himself.
The two bands suddenly got into a scuffle over a can of particularly heavy-duty Vidal Sassoon mousse. The instant they were distracted, Remo fell in with them.
There was a lot of pinching and slapping as the fight escalated to include other hair-care products. So bitchy did it become that they failed to notice the tap just behind the right ear Remo gave each one of them in turn. Once he finished with them he slipped away. He took up a sentry post in the wings, a contented smile on his face.
Ten minutes later the concert began with polite applause when a thin woman in a long black gown took center stage. She was apparently the wife of the benefit's organizer. In a British accent that was obviously phony, she droned on and on about the importance of trees and rocks and butterflies and fluffy clouds and Mother Earth. Only when some of the crowd began to nod off into their soup did she finally introduce Harmonic Convergence.
The boys from But Me No Butz pranced in from stage left. Those from Glory Whole minced from stage right. When they met in the middle of the stage, it was less a harmonious convergence than it was a postpubescent pileup.
They couldn't seem to find their equilibrium. Every time they tried to dance, they stumbled into one another. After a few vain, bumbling tries, their frustration and embarrassment changed to anger. The boys from the bands redirected their energies toward one another. The fight from backstage erupted anew, this time with biting, kicking and hair pulling. By the time the nipple twisters started, the crowd was already breaking up.
As he turned from the pile of goatees and leather writhing on the stage, Remo was nodding in satisfaction.
"If that doesn't get me honorable mention in the annals of good deeddom, I don't know what will." Whistling happily to himself, he ducked out the stage door and into the dimly lit alley.
Chapter 3
The traffic out of Manhattan was worse than it had been going in. Still, Remo didn't mind.