KINGPIN by poulsen kevin

Author:poulsen,kevin [poulsen,kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anobii, cover, english, archivio inglese
ISBN: 9780307588685
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2011-02-21T23:00:00+00:00

20

The Starlight Room

ine chandeliers hung over the lush velvet booths at Harry Denton’s Starlight Room, the light scattering off a two-hundred-pound mirror bal suspended over the dance floor. Heavy crimson drapes parted from the picture windows like a stage, revealing the glimmering San Francisco skyline beyond.

Positioned on the twenty-first floor of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, the Starlight Room was an opulent fixture in the city’s teeming nightlife—a flashback to 1930s style, strewn with deep red and gold damask and hand-rubbed silk. More garish than hip, the club kept people coming by hosting regular theme nights. This was Russian Wednesday, and tuxedoed servers were pouring vodka shots at the crowded bar while music from the motherland spil ed over the crowd.

In the ladies’ room, Tsengeltsetseg Tsetsendelger was being kissed. Tipsy from a night out, the young Mongolian immigrant wasn’t sure how it happened, or why, but a pretty five-foot-four girl with tumbling brown hair had decided to kiss her. Then Tsengeltsetseg blinked. There was another, identical woman beside her.

Michel e and Liz introduced themselves, and a wide, unaffected pumpkin smile crept onto Tsengeltsetseg’s face. She told the Esquere twins that they could cal her

“Tea.”

Tea was a regular at Russian Night and fluent in both Russian and English. Born in northern Mongolia at a time when the country was stil under Soviet influence, she’d learned Russian in school—until the Soviet empire col apsed and Mongolia’s prime minister declared English the landlocked nation’s official second language.

Looking for adventure and the proverbial better way of life, she won a student visa and emigrated to the United States in 2001. Her first thought upon landing at Los Angeles International Airport that summer was that Americans were awful y fat, but when she got out into the city she was more impressed; she enjoyed beautiful people, and L.A. was fil ed with them.

After one semester at a community col ege in Torrance, she moved to the Bay Area and got her green card. Now she was attending classes at Peralta Col ege in Oakland, paying her rent and tuition by dishing ice cream at Fenton’s Creamery.

Liz seemed strangely delighted to learn that Tea spoke Russian. The twins bought her a drink and then suggested they continue the party with some friends at their hotel four blocks away. It was after midnight when they got to Chris Aragon’s suite at the luxe Clift Hotel near Union Square.

Chris was relaxing there; Tea was struck at once by how handsome he was. He seemed interested in her as wel , particularly after the twins mentioned that Tea knew Russian. Joined by two of Chris’s female employees, they opened some booze and hung out until the smal hours of the morning, when the girls al left to go to their own rooms and Tea crashed in Chris’s for the night.

She was stil shaking off sleep the next morning when the room became a hive of activity. Liz and a handful of other attractive young women—al alert and cleanly scrubbed

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