“Romeo,” Saxony breathed, “I want everything you’ve got.”
“Ah, well, I just came to meet you. I don’t want to coerce you into doing anything you don’t want to do.”
Saxony was amused. “I don’t know what to make of you, Romeo. You look like a dork and you kind of act like one, but you have these killer eyes. I think you hypnotized me or something.”
“No, I can’t hypnotize people. I’m just a guy, you know? See?” Romeo closed his eyes. “Now, maybe this will mean you don’t like me so much anymore.”
“Open them,” Saxony whispered.
Romeo opened them and found his killer eyes were on the same level as the highly insured, never-before- publicly-seen bare breasts of superstar Saxony.
“Hey, this is a public place!” Romeo protested, and looked up—directly into the camera that was taping them from the building across the street. “There’s probably somebody filming us right now.”
“Those jerks are always there. I don’t care anymore. Let them see everything.”
Twenty minutes later, Romeo said, “It’s been really nice getting to know you.”
“What?” Saxony had divested herself of all her clothing. The camera didn’t miss a thing when she jumped to her feet. “We didn’t make love yet.”
“Sorry, I can’t”
“But why?”
“You move a little too fast for me,” Romeo said. “Gotta go.”
“No, wait!” She ran after him, across the public dining patio, begging him to stay. “Please make love to me!” But Romeo had vanished into the street.
It was historic. As the lights came on, the executives of every major studio got to their feet for a standing ovation. Producer Dasheway beamed.
Remo Williams watched it all from behind the one-way glass in the back of the viewing theater. The video operator was slightly in awe.
“You, man, are the man.”
“I feel pretty sleazy,” Remo confided.
“So why didn’t you do her, man?”
Remo shrugged. “She’s a kid.”
“A kid? Have you seen her videos? She might as well be a porn star. You really should have done her, dude.”
Remo watched the discussion in the theater grow more excited. “As it is, I feel like the biggest male whore since Richard Gere,” he said as he left
The video operator was laughing in pure disbelief.
Chapter 20
The news was out by morning. The new reality TV show The Ladies’ Man had been purchased by a consortium of networks for an initial run of thirteen episodes at a cost of a quarter billion dollars.
The entertainment newspapers went berserk. What could possibly be worth that much money? How could they possibly get the first episode on the air by next Friday, the scheduled premiere? Why would the networks share a TV show—did they think viewers would want to watch the same program three times, with just two minutes of unique footage on each network?
It was so big it knocked into second place what would normally have been huge entertainment news. International pop diva Saxony had been seen naked chasing a man through an L.A. restaurant, begging loudly for sex. There were a hundred witnesses. Saxony herself had confirmed the behavior in her public plea for her paramour to contact her. More than a hundred thousand calls had come in to Saxony’s business offices, all claiming to be the man Saxony was trying to locate.
Remo felt someone kick him in the shoulder a little before 6:00 a.m.
“What did you do that for?” he asked.
Chiun was glowering at him in the orange sunlight coming into the RV. “What agitates you, Remo?”
“Little Koreans.”
“In your sleep you were disturbed. You were active as a dog who dreams of eating chickens. Were you dreaming of fowl flesh?”
“No. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“You have done something.” Chiun walked slowly toward the glass patio window, bathed in the brilliant gold of dawn, then he turned swiftly, hiding in the shadow. “You have sullied yourself.”
“I didn’t sully.”
“You rutted, did you not? You lay with another American horror, then washed yourself until her stink was undetectable.”
“Didn’t do that.”
“Then what did you do? How have you disturbed your own conscience, Remo? This is puzzling because you have few scruples. I think this irresponsible new undertaking of yours is unsavory somehow, even to a man such as yourself.”
“I’m going back to sleep.”
“You will tell me what this great mystery is, Remo Williams! Maybe it is not too late to save you from yourself.”
“Yeah. It’s too late. Good night.
“You will not tell me?”
“You’ll figure it out soon enough.”
“How soon?” Chiun demanded.
Remo sighed deeply. “Probably any damn minute.” Remo closed his eyes and ignored Chiun’s complaining, then almost found the peace of sleep when he heard the TV come on in the RV’s media center.
Chiun was channel surfing listlessly, but soon enough he found what he wasn’t looking for.
“This is the show you have been waiting for. Coming next Friday, The Ladies’ Man.”
The channel surfing stopped.
“His name is Romeo, and the women can’t keep their hands off him! You won’t believe which of the world’s biggest stars will fall under the spell of The Ladies’ Man!”
Chiun filled the Airstream with a shriek, and Remo Williams knew he wasn’t going to get any more sleep. Not today. Maybe not ever.
Chapter 21
Sherman MacGregor hated Romeo the ladies’ man.
“He’s hogging the publicity,” he growled. “The average Joe’s got only so much attention to devote to world events, and he’s taking all of it.”
Sherm MacGregor’s mother shrugged and said nothing.
“I know it’s just one day, but all day. That’s all I’ve heard all day is Romeo this and Romeo that. On the plus side, the public is tuning in to see just the advertisements for Romeo the ladies’ man, so our spots are getting a hell of a lot of extra viewership.”
His mother wasn’t buying it.
“Yeah, okay, so nobody cares about us with all The Ladies’ Man excitement. How could I know this’ would happen? I never even heard of this jerk until I turned on Good Day U.S.A. this morning. So get off my back.”
MacGregor turned away from the life-size portrait and used a tiny rake to make patterns in a little sand box. It was some Japanese thingamajig that was supposed to make him feel more calm.
“I don’t want to be calm. I want things to happen!”
There was nobody there to respond to this, so he summoned his receptionist.
“What’s up, Mac?”
“I want a report from Sydney.”
“Sidney in human resources?”
“Sydney, Australia,” MacGregor snapped.
“Sure, Mac.”
Steph Mincer was his receptionist from way, way back. Back in the old days he had encouraged people to call him Mac. Back then he was a different kind of man and MacGregor Biscuit Company was a different kind of dry-goods operation.
In the 1980s, MacBisCo was a smooth-running business that produced and sold economical foodstuffs in supermarkets across the United States, Canada and Mexico. They made pancake mixes and microwave popcorn. They manufactured butter-flavored crackers and were a leading supplier of par-baked dinner rolls. And they made breakfast cereal by the truckload.
Oat rings and marshmallow pieces and peanut butter balls and fruity-flavored little chips, they made them all. Half the supermarkets in America sold their own brand of value-priced cereals from MacBisCo.
Meet General Generic, proclaimed a trade magazine in 1997, with him on the cover as their man of the year. “Who else could make such a success without having a single branded product on the market?”