Taking him by the hand, she pulled him off the dance floor. Ru looked around for Dano, catching a glimpse of his friend on one of the red benches with two others, snorting sand off a tray. Giggling, Juni led him around the side of the bar, where, to Ru’s surprise, behind a purple curtain there was another room with a couple of sofas and mirrors hung all over the walls so that whichever way he turned, he saw flushed, bright-eyed reflections of himself.
“Wow, a secret room,” Ru said, grinning. “I wonder why it’s here?”
“Who cares?” Juni grabbed him and they kissed, their colliding mouths hot and hungry. She tasted of vanilla lip gloss and lychee rum soda. “No one is going to bother us here.”
_______
“Stay here by the bar and make sure they don’t leave,” Tadino hissed to Bero. “I’m going to run outside and make the phone call. Just keep an eye on things.”
“I’m not going to stand here and listen to those kids fucking,” Bero said sourly. Most of tonight’s young crowd in the Little Persimmon was blissfully drunk or high. A few were passed out on the benches, and others were slipping out of the lounge in pairs. But Tadino had only let Bero have one drink. “We’ve got to stay cut,” he insisted. “Tonight, we’re going to start the next clan war and turn everything around.”
Tadino rushed out to the pay phone on the street to call Koben Ashi and inform him that his girlfriend was at the Little Persimmon lounge and some stranger was laying his filthy hands all over her. Koben Ashi, a mid-rank Fist in the Mountain clan, son of a prominent councilwoman and a close cousin of Ayt Ato, was a jealous bastard who would beat the shit out of any man who so much as looked at his woman for too long. According to Juni, she and Ashi were broken up at the moment, but apparently Ashi never got these notices. Every man in the Mountain clan knew Juni was a poisonous flower and wouldn’t touch her, which was why she sought other places to fool around. She didn’t seem to mind that Ashi put her conquests in the hospital, and in fact, she was always back together with him shortly thereafter.
Bero had to hand it to Tadino—it was a wildly unlikely but clever setup, the sort of risky thing that Bero himself might’ve come up with when he was younger. As a bartender, Tadino met a lot of people and heard a lot of gossip about both clans. He’d seen Juni at the Little Persimmon before, and when he discovered that he knew a college kid who was personal friends with Kaul Ru, he’d come up with a plan to put the pieces together.
“We’ve been stepped on like shit for long enough,” Tadino said. They had to fight back, to do something about the relentless persecution heaped on them by the clans. Starting a wildfire of clan violence would relieve the pressure. It would allow the CFM to regroup and recover.
Bero approved of the scheme, but he still had doubts. Over the years, he’d taken every possible run at the Green Bones. He was a killer and a thief, a grave robber, a smuggler, spy, and terrorist. It was a wonder he was even alive. Did he have anything left in him to try again? He wanted to believe he did, that his smoldering inner fire could be whipped up anew.
On the other hand, it would be a whole lot easier to stay away from it all and drink.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Tadino pointed out. “You just have to keep those kids here and make sure no one interrupts them. And then stay here as a witness. How about that? You can fuck things up for the clans by barely lifting a finger.”
That possibility was appealing enough to Bero that he agreed. Koben Ashi would arrive at the Little Persimmon and unknowingly hand the Pillar’s stone-eye son a savage beating. Kaul Hilo was sure to respond with ferocious retaliation, and the fragile cooperation the clans had maintained since the Janloon bombing would shatter.
Since Tadino had closed down the bar and left it unattended, Bero helped himself to another glass of hoji. Through a crack between the purple curtains, he could hear and see Juni and the Pillar’s son making out. Juni’s skirt was hiked up to her hips, and the buttons of Kaul Ru’s shirt were undone. They were all over each other, oblivious to being sorely used by people they didn’t even know. Bero was accustomed to feeling sorry for himself, but sitting at the abandoned bar, listening to the wet smacking sounds and moans of desire, he felt a pathetic kinship with the young man in the room next to him, whose uncle he’d opened fire on with a Fullerton machine gun on a dark pier, a lifetime ago.
At the age of forty, Bero had come to the cynical conclusion that he’d always been a piece of detritus tossed about on the tides of fortune. Good luck and bad luck were two sides of the same betting chip, thrown carelessly onto a cosmic games table to prolong the inscrutable amusement of the gods. Yet he was not the only one the gods abused. Even the Pillar’s son was a pawn to fate.