“What’s the verdict?” I ask.

“Mary say if Larry take dialysis tomorrow, she will stay three days.”

Despite himself Larry betrays a look of immense relief. “Deal,” he says.

“Our work here is done,” I say, standing up. I feel chastened, realizing how tentative the situation is, not just Larry’s health but everything. I don’t know who anyone is, what anyone knows or doesn’t know, when or where the next shoe will drop. “We go to our hotel now.”

Yuh-vonne hugs Mary in a mutual ballet move, the women patting each other’s shoulders ritualistically. Yuh-vonne kneels to hug Larry, her “Prime” T-shirt riding a third of the way up her bare backside. “Thank you, dear,” Larry says to her, and means it.

Yuh-vonne gives him a lingering look of fondness. “I hope you be happy every day,” she tells him.

Yuh-vonne wants to collect the headset she left in my hotel suite, and in a few minutes she’s back there with me, casually shuffling through my yoga CDs. “Yoga give you the soft bones?” she asks.

Is it a rebuke? A challenge? “No, yoga does not give me the soft bones,” I say.

“You mind if I smoke?” she asks.

Ordinarily I would. I would stop her both for general health reasons and because it must be smoke that has stained the backs of her teeth brown, where she’s forgotten to whiten them. Also because it’s getting late. But right now I’m too fatigued from the day’s machinations to object. Besides, it’s amazing to see her smoke, and with a rhinestone cigarette holder yet. Blue curlicues waft from her nose like in a movie from the 1940s.

“I am at your service,” she reminds me, stroking the back of my head.

“So this means what, exactly?” I say.

She answers the question sideways. “I see fortune-teller,” she says, taking her hand away to fetch her iPod from within her purse. “Fortune-teller say I marry two times.”

“What happens to the first husband?”

“Die,” she says with a smile. If that statement’s meant to woo me, it’s the strangest woo I’ve ever heard. She turns on her iPod and holds it up so I can hear the song: “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” by Air Supply.

“We go rooftop now?”

I’m a curious man. But mostly I’m a married man. Bye-bye, Batgirl.

A good fortune may forebode a bad luck, which may in turn disguise a good fortune.

Picking up momentum here. We’ve got Larry lined up for remedial dialysis, check. We’ve managed to procure a replacement passport, check. Now at last I can get moving on job number one, finding a secondhand kidney. What’s at stake is so dead serious that I find it essential to maintain a light touch. “Here, black market, c’mere boy…”

Establishing contact with China ’s black market is tougher than you might think. Turns out it doesn’t advertise in the yellow pages. Nor can you just go out and hail it the way you would a taxi. You can’t clap your hands and entice it like a puppy, Goo’ boy, want your belly rubbed? And maybe you don’t want to establish contact with it anyway, given that it might end you up in a jail cell with sadistic Chinese soldiers puffing smoke rings in your face…

So the next-best thing is to reach out to Beijing ’s international journalists, a loose and backstabbing confederacy, I realize, but I have to start somewhere. Ditching Yuh-vonne and her Happy-Go-Luck services and letting Mary take Larry to his makeup dialysis, I spend a day making discreet inquiries among the fraternity of Western journalists covering China. No dice. I spend another day discreetly calling Chinese reporters on the mastheads of native English-language newspapers. Additional no dice. As the days wind down, I find my inquiries becoming less and less discreet. The thin and subtle feelers I put out are turning into large and hairy vines. Eventually the vines turn into a shaggy net that I cast wider and wider. I know I’m supposed to be hush-hush, but on the other hand, as the Red Guards used to be fond of saying while bashing people’s heads, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. The net’s soon wide as can be, encompassing pretty much everyone I encounter. Private butlers, public bartenders, night watchmen, strip-club bouncers-all are left scratching their heads in my wake. “Kidney? What mean ‘lightly used kidney’?”

Elevators are a particularly promising venue. Here’s how it goes in one of them.

“From Seoul?” I ask a Korean businessman whose robust voice makes him seem wealthy.

“ SEOUL, YES!” he shouts. “YES, SEOUL! HA HA HA!”

I never knew I could be so funny by merely stringing two words together. But when I string together a few more, he begins guffawing so volcanically that I fear for the cable lofting us skyward, especially as he starts bouncing around the elevator, feinting jabs at my midsection.

“NO PRELOVED KIDNEY! HA HA HA HA HA! NO PRELOVED KIDNEY!”

Here’s how it goes in another elevator, with a Caucasian man helping a tiny Chinese baby girl hop across the floor. Something about the way he handles her, as though she were expensive porcelain, tells me he’s a new parent.

“Cute baby. You adopting?”

“Yes, just today.”

“Congratulations. Where are you from?”

“Spanish.”

We watch the little sweetheart for a while. There’s a bald spot at the back of her head where her hair has rubbed off in her crib; she probably wasn’t moved as often as she should have been in the orphanage. “New life for her, eh?”

“Yes.” He pats his heart. “And for us.”

I take a breath and consider asking whether the adoption agency would happen to have an extra kidney in the system, before coming to my senses.

“Hey, have a great day,” I say. “Good luck with your little charmer.”

Obviously I’m getting too close to the line. It even almost-crosses my mind to pass out flyers in Tiananmen Square-figuring I’m giving up on China in a few days anyhow. What’re they going to do, detain me for being desperate?

Uh, yes…

That’s when I decide I need a breather. It’s been three days since the fiasco at the dialysis clinic, and I treat myself to a swim around the perimeter of the hotel’s giant kidney-shaped pool-it feels like I’m tracing Larry’s organ, writ large-and afterward make for my favorite breakfast buffet on the sixteenth floor. I lift the lids of the silver chafing dishes to ogle the food items, which seem a cross between fifties-style Betty Crocker-type hors d’oeuvres and something from an agricultural country-fair display: demure heart-shaped marshmallows topped with overchewy corn niblets, pizza-type waffle wedges topped with dino-size sausages.

While I’m filling my plate, I’m approached by a waitress I haven’t seen before. The nameplate on her olive drab uniform says TRAINEE, but she tells me her real name is Jinghua.

“Jinghua,” I say, mauling the pronunciation.

“It mean ‘situation splendid.’”

“Jinghua,” I try again, but can’t get my mouth to do that nasal thing. That mouth thing.

“Give it up,” she says, smirking demurely. “Be content at call me Jenny or Jade.”

“Jade is nice,” I say.

“So you little fairy?”

“Excuse me?”

“You try a little fairy rice?”

“Fairy rice?”

“Sorry for my simple mistake. Fry rice. Or try neuter?”

“Noodles?”

“Yes, sorry once more. Noo-dle.”

After I settle into my bamboo-and-cane throne, Jade is still with me. She stands in attendance while I sip my surprisingly great orange juice. Then she trips over her own feet just standing there but betrays no embarrassment, no lack of composure. She’s like a pony, not quite used to her long legs. I’m charmed.

“What under you hat?” she asks.

“Nothing but hair loss. See?” I show her. She studies for a moment.

“Torrible,” she says. “How old you are!”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“No, that is my question. How old?”