The Sing Along Song Club was a walk-up assembly-hall space in the White Tiger Crane Kung Fu Academy. The school was operated by the Hip Chings on weekdays only. The hall was recast as the Sing Along from nine at night until three a.m. every night of the week.
Young men from the Association came each night and rolled out the tables, laid on the tablecloths and topped them with candles. Liquor was inside locked wall cabinets that folded out into a display shelf behind a long, low wooden bar, with red-topped barstools that the students sat on during Kung Fu practice. The other long wall was lined with mirrors.
It was a turnkey disco-ball operation. Hit a switch, dim the lights. The huge flat-screen projection TV lit up the backwall. Pin spots of light spun off the mirrored ball. The Samsung CD-OK laser karaoke machine kicked in. Pick up a microphone and follow the bouncing ball.
Every half hour, smoke rolled in from the Fogmaker 200, and they punched up the audio. The girls in black mini-dresses came out with trays of Remy XO cognac and served them at the covered tables.
Dragons were posted near the doors, and they screened for weapons.
The place usually opened with Hong Kong college students and got cooking after midnight when the hardcore older crowd came in from the gambling joints, the tracks, the late action at OTB. The siu jeer, young lady hostesses, arrived at twelve-thirty and picked off the single men.
The CD-OK machine had a capacity of fifteen thousand songs and videos in a single compact disk, and featured auto-mike mixing and echo for giving the singer a pro sound even after a fifth of XO.
The cognac had been stolen from Chin Wah Distributors, twelve bottles a case, twenty-five cases in all. A twenty-five-thousand dollar score by the Dragons, more when the girls served it out at a hundred-fifty each fifth. Counting the five-dollar cover, they cleared a thousand a night, easy. Not counting the fifty-dollar bags ofJamaican, the hundred-dollar glassines of Chinese Number Three, balown sooga.
The Sing Along had contest nights during which the collegiate Hong Kong wannabees partied hearty. Toward the Double Ten parties, celebrating the anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China on October tenth, more people crushed in from out of town, hungry for the action, and the Association gladly fed the volatile mix.
It was past midnight.
Johnny watched Mona follow Uncle Four up the flight of stairs into the Sing Along. He had been told to return in an hour, and was considering what to do with the hundred dollars he had left after his losing streak at Yonkers.
He decided he was hungry and went for a quick sieve yeh at the Harmonious Garden. The chef boiled him up some noodles and chopped in pieces of soy-sauce chicken and roast pork. There was a Hong Kong Star magazine for him to read and after that there wasn't enough time to go to Fat Lily's so he went back to the Sing Along and waited.
The karaoke game wasn't for old men. They sat around smoking cigars and drinking cognac, watching thirty-year-old ladies chirp wistfully about better times and romances lost and found.
It was only the second visit for Mona, the Sing Along not being one of her favorite places. Too many gang kids and hom sup, horny, Chinatown men. Still, she sat in her place beside Uncle Four, who had met up with Golo Chuk, the three of them at a table beside the mirrored wall. She glanced at her reflection in the candlelight and noticed the group of men at the next table, smiling, making eyes at her. She flashed her eyes, then ignored them. The club was crowded and the hostesses were working the room, but there weren't enough of them to go around.
The men were Taiwanese, Mona judged by their accents, banker types, from their suits and ties. They were working on their second fifth of XO and smoking up a storm cloud.
Golo picked up on them, figured them as bok los, northern Chinese, slumming for southern Cantonese snatch.
"Shan mei," one of the bankers said across the tables. "Don't you remember me?"
Uncle Four and Mona exchanged looks, hers saying, He's mistaken, I don't know them.
Golo thought, How dare they insult us in our own place!
"n ma da," he said in his best cutting Mandarin. "What the fuck are you looking at?"
That started it.
Two of the suits closest to Golo stood up as he pushed back from the table. In a single motion, Golo kicked out one man's kneecap, and driving his hung kuen, red-style fist, full force, split open the other man's face. Glass tumblers flew across and crashed into the mirrored wall, shattering onto Uncle Four and Mona.
Suddenly, the Sing Along was in pandemonium, emptying out as the Black Dragons beat the hell out of the Taiwanese, trying to cool out Golo Clink.
The pin spots of light kept whirling and the song machine kept wailing even as the Dragons dragged the bloody men across the empty hall.