down and spoke with a reverence he did not feel. 'Would you care for refreshment, Holy One?'
'Goat's milk, if it is by chance available. If not, plain water will be more than sufficient. And I thank you.'
'It is the privilege of the establishment,' said the tuxedoed man, bowing and moving away, trying to place a dialect he could not recognize. It did not matter. This tall, white-robed priest had business with the laoban, and that was all that mattered. He had actually used the laoban's name, a name seldom spoken in the Golden Mile, and on this particular evening the powerful taipan was on the premises - in a room he would not publicly acknowledge knowing. But it was not the province of the manager to tell the laoban that the priest had arrived; the berobed one had made that clear.
All was privacy this night, he had insisted. When the august taipan wished to see him, a man would come out to find him. So be it; it was the way of the secretive laoban, one of the wealthiest and most illustrious taipans in Hong Kong.
'Send a kitchen boy down the street for some fuck-fuck mother goat's milk,' said the manager harshly to a head boy on the floor. 'And tell him to be damn-damn quick. The existence of his stinking offspring will depend upon it.'
The holy man sat passively at the table, his zealous eyes now gentler, observing the foolish activity, apparently neither condemning nor accepting but merely taking it all in with the compassion of a father watching errant yet precious children.
Abruptly through the whirling lights there was an intrusion. Several tables away a bright camper's match was struck and quickly extinguished. Then another, and finally a third, this last held under a long black cigarette. The brief series of flashes drew the attention of the priest. He moved his shrouded head slowly towards the flame and the lone, unshaven, coarsely dressed Chinese drawing in the smoke. Their eyes met; the holy man's nod was almost imperceptible, barely a motion, and was acknowledged by an equally obscure movement as the match went out.
Seconds later the crudely dressed smoker's table was suddenly in flames. Fire shot up from the surface, spreading quickly to all the articles of paper on the surface - napkins, menus, dim sum baskets, isolated eruptions of potential disaster. The disheveled Chinese screamed and with a shattering crash overturned the table as waiters raced, shrieking, towards the flames. Customers on all sides leaped from their chairs as the fire on the floor - narrow strands of pulsing blue flame - inexplicably spread in rivulets around excited, stamping feet. The pandemonium grew as people rapidly slapped out the small fires with tablecloths and aprons. The manager and his head boys gestured wildly, shouting that all was under control; the danger had passed. The rock group played with even greater intensity, attempting to draw the crowd back into its frenzied orbit and away from the area of diminishing panic.
Suddenly, there was a greater disturbance, a more violent eruption. Two head boys had collided with the shabbily dressed Zhongguo ren whose carelessness and outsized matches had caused the conflagration. He responded with rapid Wing Chun chops - rigid hands crashing into shoulder blades and throats as his feet hammered up into abdomens, sending the two shi-ji reeling back into the surrounding customers. The physical abuse compounded the panic, the chaos. The heavy-set manager, now roaring, intervened and he, too, fell away, stunned by a well-placed kick to his ribcage. The unshaven Zhongguo ren then picked up a chair and hurled it into screaming figures near the fallen man, as three other waiters rushed into the melee in defense of their Zongguan. Men and women who only seconds ago were merely screaming, now began thrashing their arms about, pummeling anyone and everyone near by. The rock group gyrated to its outer limits, frantic dissonance worthy of the scene. The riot had taken hold, and the burly peasant glanced across the room at the single table next to the wall. The priest was gone.
The Zhongguo ren picked up a second chair and smashed it down across a nearby table, splintering the wooden frame and swinging a broken leg into the crowd. Only moments to go, but those moments were everything.
The priest stepped through the door far back in the wall near the entrance of the cabaret. He closed it quickly, adjusting his eyes to the dim light of the long, narrow