From what he liked to call his eagle’s nest, Jonas Breem, in his wine-red velour robe, gazed down on the blue early-morning reaches of Victoria harbor, pouring coffee from the sterling silver pot and pontificating on the stupidity of the Russian inventor, Kalashnikov, who had designed the most popular assault rifle in history, with millions now sold around the world, without Kalashnikov receiving a single royalty.
“Now, if the doddering old fool had done business with me,” he told Mi Yin, who was just waking up, “he would have been one of Moscow’s millionaires. But no, with the mind of a peasant and true revolutionary, he gave the patent to the party, and some other old fool laughed his way to the bank.”
Kalashnikovs were on Breem’s mind this morning because he had just brokered yet another delivery of five thousand K-74s between Moscow and Beijing for the PLA, and was reveling in his latest profit in excess of a hundred thousand dollars.
Ironically, not all of the shipment had come from corrupted Russian factory managers, but from U.S. sellers who had seen the end of the U.S. market for the assault weapon following a congressional ban on the Kalashnikovs and others of their ilk. Breem was highly amused by the certainty that many of the rifles sold to him at bargain basement prices in the U.S. were now killing Americans, or “army suckers,” as he referred to them.
“You want to be a loser, Mi Yin? Join the army. All the racking same, babe. Nowheresville. Know what I mean?”
Mi Yin murmured something, but Breem, turning from the enormous grand-view window of his skyscraper, could tell she hadn’t heard, and when Jonas Breem spoke, everyone was supposed to sit up and listen. He picked up a tulip glass, still half full of champagne, and taking a step toward the huge, king-size bed, threw the silk sheets aside and emptied the contents on her crotch. “Hey, that woke you, eh?”
Her mouth open in shock, Mi Yin shot up in the bed, quickly clasping a pillow protectively against her.
“Oh, spare me the modest virgin bit,” Breem said, walking back to the table. “You’ve been gone through more times than — hey, what are you doing?”
“Going to the bathroom,” she said petulantly. “Do you mind?”
“Yeah,” Breem said. “Come here.” Tossing her hair back, the pillow still in front of her, she looked to see if he was serious. He was — he nearly always was.
“C’mon. Come here.”
She walked toward him, around the bed, trying to affect a nonchalant air of self-assurance, but she was still clutching the pillow.
“Put that fucking thing down.”
“I–I have to have a shower.”
“You have it with a pillow? For Chrissake—” He snatched it away from her and tossed it on the bed. “You stink like a wino. You know that?”
“If you say so.”
“I say so.” Holding a cup of coffee with one hand, he gestured toward the bed with the other. “Go on, spread out. I feel like a dawn breaker.”
“Can’t I shower first?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” He smiled maliciously.
She understood him all right. She was supposed to lie flat on her back and let him lick her.
He undid the robe and flung it away from him, pressed a remote on the bed stand and the drapes opened wider. He liked to imagine everyone was looking up at him performing cunnilingus, “pissing themselves with envy,” as he put it.
“Know what I’m gonna do to you?” He waited. “You know, babe?”
“No,” she had to answer, even though she knew very well what they were going to do. They’d done it enough.
“I’m gonna lick your cunt till it’s dry.”
“No,” she said.
He knelt over her. Suddenly his hand flashed out, slapped her hard on the cheek. Her face flushed with the pain and humiliation. “What?” he said indignantly. “What’d you say?”
“No,” she repeated.
“You little bitch!” He hit her again, so hard she began to cry.
“Hey, hey!” He suddenly became solicitous of her well-being, kissing her. “You’re all right, babe — it’s all right.” The next instant, he slid back down her breasts, her body, and buried his head between her legs, his tongue darting hungrily like a lizard’s inside her, his hands bunching the sheets up beneath her to get her higher. Now he began licking her, his slurping noises like a cow with a salt lick. He stopped his breathing short, excited. “You like that, babe?”
She knew yes was the answer he wanted, but he liked her to pause a moment as if teasing him.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Don’t stop.”
“Love — you, babe — I—” He couldn’t say all the words, he was so aroused. Panting, he raised himself onto his elbows, his head sinking beneath her shoulders like a wildebeest at water. “Know what — I’m gonna do now?”
“Yes,” she said. Oh God, she’d made a mistake, but before she could recant, he was raging at her. “You stupid bitch! What do I pay you for, eh? What—”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what I pay you for?”
“No, no,” she said frantically. “I mean I don’t know what you’re going to do to me.”
“Ah…” He was on his feet, his tumescence already subsiding. She’d fucked up the script. It had to be perfect— goddamn it.
“You stupid bitch — go on, get! Into the fucking shower, you — incompetent whore!”
Mi Yin let the shower cascade over her, cleansing her, out of his grip for a few precious moments. The things she did for Beijing. She’d had enough. If she didn’t find out whether he was faking the well surveys, she’d tell Beijing he was anyway. The risk was they might want to see an original forged chart from which he’d made copies and on which potentially rich oil finds were hidden. It was a risk either way, but better be in the bad books with the party than stay any longer with this pig.
She could see him naked through the curved, bubbled, and transparent glass wall of the shower. She saw his hand on the handle, and so she quickly turned off the shower. “Turn it back on!” he commanded her. With the water falling on both of them, he pushed her against the glass-bubbled wall, and she stiffened as she felt him rubbing the bar of soap between her buttocks. He was hard again, pushing into her rectum.
“You like this, babe?”
“Yes.”
“You want it deep?”
She hesitated.
“You want it deep?”
“To split me,” she said.
“Atta girl.”