I slunk down in my seat.
“Is there perhaps a back door?” Louis-Cesare asked quietly.
But not quietly enough.
“It was justi—there!” Rashid pointed straight at our table, and he and Bahram made a beeline for us, despite being beaten up every step of the way.
Fortunately, the club’s patrons seemed to view this as entertainment. Unfortunately, Zheng did not. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, his brows lowering.
“He kill Bertha!” the small woman said, pointing at Rashid.
She was an attractive, thirtyish, Chinese woman with long black hair and an expensive yellow suit made out of flowered cheongsam silk, but in a Western style. And she was human, something I knew without needing to ask. She lacked the statuesque frame of the fakes, and also their exaggerated charms. But the big giveaway was that she was hopping mad, to the point that veins were standing out on her temples.
Lily, I assumed, although I had no chance to ask.
“You killed someone?” I asked Rashid, in disbelief.
“No! I killed—it was an abomination. I do not have words—”
“Find some,” Louis-Cesare suggested.
But it was not Rashid who found the words. It was Bahram, and they weren’t exactly words. He put his hands well in front of his chest and cupped them in the unmistakable, universal gesture for big boobs.
I felt my spine turn to water.
“Oh, thank God.” I sat back against the booth.
“No, no thank God! He killed Bertha!” Lily was clearly out for blood.
Louis-Cesare still looked confused, probably because Bahram was turned away from him, and he hadn’t seen the universal gesture.
“He shot the tits,” I told Louis-Cesare.
“No! He no shoot,” Lily said. “He push, right over the edge!”
“Seriously?” I asked Rashid, whose cheeks were burning.
“It assaulted me. I have the right to defend myself!”
Zheng was still standing there, with an I-don’t-believe-this-is-my-life face. “You’re gonna have to pay for that,” he told Rashid.
“I was attacked!”
“Yeah, by a pair of tits.” Zheng looked him over. “You are a vamp, right?”
“He’s a master,” Bahram said, munching on something. It wasn’t chicken feet, so I guessed they’d made a stop.
Rashid’s cheeks went puce, a fact that did not stop his mouth from opening. But Lily wasn’t finished yet. “What about poor Bertha?”
“He’ll pay for another one,” Zheng assured her.
“I not want another one! I have Bertha long time. I want her.” Her eyes suddenly went huge. “What if she not dead? What if she down there, all alone? Hurt and—” Her hand went to her mouth. “What if monsters get her?”
“What monsters?” I said.
Zheng put a hand to his forehead. He stood like that for a few seconds, while Rashid continued to be assaulted. He didn’t push anybody else over any ledges, however, so I supposed he’d learned something.
“Alright,” Zheng said. “You,” he pointed at Rashid. “Pay for the damned tits. You,” he pointed to a couple of his guys, who were just standing in the back, watching the show. “Take a car and have a look down below—carefully. You,” he pointed at me. “Come this way. I’d like to talk where I can hear myself think.”