"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?"