"No, no, you drink all, drink quick," TiTi told him. "Gon bui! Gon bui!"
He drank the rest quickly, marveling as he did so that the second swallow wasn't quite as vicious as the first. TiTi ordered another round for them both; she was drinking something dark and sweet, which smelled like tea. He wondered why she wasn't drinking mao-tais.
After his second drink, that didn't seem to matter, much.
They continued talking, with TiTi leaning close on folded arms that framed and nicely accentuated her naked breasts. He learned that she was from a village in the interior of Guangdong Province called Lian-ping, and she claimed to be just seventeen years old… though the crow's-feet showing through the makeup at the corners of her eyes made him suspect she was exaggerating on the low side for the tourist trade. She was fascinated by his stories of growing up in small-town Ohio and seemed dismayed that Ohio had neither rice fields nor sugarcane.
The idea, he assumed, was to have sex with this woman eventually, but she didn't seem to be in a hurry. He was embarrassed about not knowing the rules of the game and even more embarrassed about not knowing how to talk to this woman about it. He had had sex… once… two days before he'd reported to Great Lakes for boot camp. That had been with Tricia Brown in the backseat of his dad's Chevy, in the driveway of Trish's suburban home. Trish had never taken off anything but her underpants, though, for fear that passing drivers would see the two of them grappling in the car, and the exercise had been awkward, clumsy, and conducted almost entirely by touch. TiTi was wearing nothing but bright green thong panties, little more, really, than a tiny delta of silk and some string, and the sight of her small, perfect breasts transfixed him to the point where he was having trouble looking up at her face.
Damn. The closest he'd ever been to a woman's bared nipples before had been in the pages of Playboy. These nipples were large, erect, and appeared to be rouged, and there were tiny silver sprinkles adhering to the skin of her breasts. He wanted to reach out with his fingertips and see if the glitter came off… but still wasn't sure about the rules for such things.
For her part, TiTi chattered on in her accented singsong English, talking about this and that, but without any real erotic content to the conversation at all, which confused him. A third mao-tai appeared at the table… or was this the fourth? He couldn't remember. And by then TiTi was pressed up against him in a most arousing manner, her right hand kneading his thigh while her left rested on his shoulder or playfully stroked the back of his neck and ears.
"I… think I've had enough," he said. He felt strange, woozy and light-headed, unwilling to even try to stand up. He had doubts about whether he would be able to stay standing if he did.
"No, you finish drink, yes?" she said. "Gon bui!"
"What does 'gon bui' mean?"
"Is like…empty your glass. Drink up! Be happy!"
"I'm happy. But if I drink another of these things, I'm not going to be happy."
"You feel… sick?"
"No. I'm not feeling much of anything right now. Sort of like I'm dead."
"Okay, then, sailor. You rest now." She got up, picked up her drink, and walked away, buttocks twitching enticingly around her thong panties. He struggled to sit upright. Had he said something wrong? TiTi was joining three of the Russians and another topless hostess at another table, laughing vivaciously.
After a long time, he decided the need to use the rest room was overcoming his need to stay safely and immobilely seated. He managed to find the toilets, but a beefy guard demanded twenty Hong Kong dollars for the privilege of using them. By the time he made it back to the main room, an argument was in progress.
"Nyet! Nyet! Is not fair!" Dimitri was towering over one of the women, shouting at her. She was standing toe-to-toe with the Russian, staring at him defiantly and shouting right back in bursts of staccato Chinese.
Queensly joined Toynbee, Larimer, Ritthouser, and Bennett at one of the tables. "What's going on?"
"I think our Russian friends are a little bent about the bar tab."
"Hell," Bennett added. "I don't blame them! Do you know we're paying just for the privilege of talking to these girls?"
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Here's yours," Toynbee said. "They brought it out while you were in the head."
He studied the slip of paper for a moment, with dawning horror. If he was understanding these figures right, he was paying for five mai-tais, five "specials," whatever those were, and an hour of "companionship," plus a cover charge for the stage show, and tip… the total came to nearly HK$2,500.
The current exchange rate was about eight Hong
Kong dollars per U.S. dollar, but still, over three hundred dollars for a few drinks and a discussion about why you couldn't grow sugarcane in Ohio seemed a little steep.
"I don't think I had this many drinks," Queensly said, frowning.
Ritthouser looked at his tab and shook his head mournfully. "I had a different notion about what it meant to come here and get screwed."
"So did the Russkis," Toynbee observed. "Heads up, people. We've got trouble."
A pair of the tough-looking, gangster-stylish thugs had appeared, incongruous in their Hollywood-image dark glasses. One was the fireplug who'd met them at the door. The other was overweight and belligerent, but young, possibly still in his teens. They were confronting several of the Russians, shouting at them in broken English and rapid-fire Chinese. "You pay!" was the most intelligible refrain. "You pay and get out!"
"You know," Toynbee said, "I think the management of this place has changed. They didn't used to be this unfriendly."
The rest of the Russians were gathering around their shipmates, followed by several of the hostesses. Queensly saw with surprise that Haskell and Shaeffer were with them, enthusiastically joining in with the argument.
"We'd better get those two out of here," Larimer observed.
"Who's going to get us out?" Bennett said. He nodded toward another couple of teenage bouncers who'd just appeared behind them, blocking the way out. Both kids had their hands theatrically inside their jackets, as though drawing hardware.
"You make trouble, too?" one demanded. "You pay now!"
"You guys have a lot to learn about good public relations," Toynbee said. He reached for his wallet….
Queensly wasn't sure who threw the first punch. The fight appeared to break out among the Russians, but in an instant Ritthouser and Larimer had tackled one of the nearer thugs, and Toynbee and Bennett were wrestling with the other. Behind him, one of the Russians was flying head first across the bar as hostesses shrieked and scattered. Glass exploded. The naked dancers on the stage screamed and ducked behind the curtains.
A semiautomatic handgun skittered across the parquet floor. Almost without thinking, Queensly scooped the weapon up, fumbled with the safety, then pointed the muzzle toward the ceiling. "Attention on deck!" he screamed, his voice a little too shrill. He squeezed the trigger. But nothing happened. Two more bouncer types had entered the room, guns drawn. They didn't seem to notice that Queensly was armed, though; he dragged the slide back and chambered a round, then fired at the ceiling again.
The pistol banged, the noise impossibly loud in the curtain-draped room. "I said attention on deck! You guys, drop 'em!"
The bouncers, eyes masked by their sunglasses but jaws agape, dropped their pistols and raised their hands. The fistfight ended as suddenly as it began, and Russians and Americans were disentangling themselves from the Chinese.