“I’ll be frank: I’m asking because that concerns me. You’re not going to give away any secrets, are you? You could get a lot of people in trouble…”

“No, ma’am, I won’t,” I say.

She looks me over. “Give me my card back.”

Is she rescinding her offer because she doesn’t trust me? But no, she only wants to add her cell number.

“Tomorrow,” she says. “But no promises.”

We hug and part.

Suddenly finding myself superfluous in the room, I try to locate Izzy to say good-bye, but he seems to be successfully avoiding me. Just as I’m at the exit ready to slip unnoticed down the stairs, the dean with the bow tie appears-Alfred somebody-tucking his business card into my breast pocket and telling me to keep in touch.

“I like what your cousin’s nurses said,” he says. “Did they really wish him well?”

I nod. “There aren’t any bad guys in this drama,” I say. “People may go about things differently, but everyone wants what’s for the best.”

He snorts appreciatively, passing me something under his arm like contraband: the black yarmulke with gold Chinese letters. “A little keepsake from one of the guys,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, as though we’re performing an undercover act. “He says to say you earned it.”

An hour later I find Larry in the lobby of his hotel, regaling the Robert Palmer quints, who are spellbound by the unstoppable flood of Larry talk in a tongue they don’t speak. “On the other hand, you may be too young to have heard the name Shaquille O’Neal, all those greats,” he’s saying. “What are you, seventeen years old? Seventeen is good in China, I can see you’re responsible citizens. Where I come from, seventeen is the worst. Let me give you an example. I had a friend whose daughter was seventeen. Name of Angela, I called her Angina. My friend asked Angina, theoretically, if she had a classmate in a wheelchair, would she be willing to be friends with her. Angina thought for a minute. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘because I’m so popular it wouldn’t hurt me a bit.’”

“Sorry to interrupt, ladies,” I say, pulling Larry aside. They seem disappointed as I escort their star performer to the other side of the room and give him the good news about Antonia and her connections. Larry’s visibly unimpressed-after a lifetime of disappointments, he’s learned to keep his emotions monochromatic-but does allow how excited he is that Mary has hand-washed his socks for him again while I was gone.

“By the way,” he says, “just FYI: I don’t do sunscreen, like you mentioned before you left. I consider it sissyish. Please don’t embarrass me like that in front of Mary again. I’m a big boy.”

I look him over. “That may be what you are most of the time,” I say, “but what you are the rest of the time, Commissioner, is a pain in the ass.”

Larry considers this. “That’s probably an accurate assessment,” he says.

One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.

Next morning, fuck market. I figure I can cheer up Larry if I grab him a Cartier knockoff for five bucks that would cost someone five grand on South Beach. Outside the hotel Jade comes hopping up to me waving both hands. I almost don’t recognize her in jeans and blouse instead of her olive drab uniform. “Excuse me, Eighty-four, but this moment the staff comes out,” she explains as she pulls me down the street away from the hotel entrance.

“Oh, that’s right, Twenty-four, you’re moonlighting on the sly?”

“Double agent, license to kill,” she snickers. “Martini shaken, not stirred.”

I love that she can make fun of all the spying silliness. Situation splendid.

“Heat so hot you shirt is wet already,” she notes. “You are very schvitz.”

“It’s hot, all right. Where’d you pick up the slang?”

“I jabber on Internet so make this day worthwhile for you.”

The market, when we get there, respires the electrifying odor of garlic and incense. We are jostled by local vendors with beaten-up toenails and Westerners whose toenails look as if they’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Merchants and customers alike use finger symbols to signify numbers, a kind of bartering sign language I don’t remember from last time I was here. It’s pleasant to be under the wing of my young protector. “Be wary of pickypocks,” Jade warns, and she shows me how to discern between antiques that are genuinely old and those manufactured two weeks ago. She scratches the surface of an ancient-seeming jewelry box where particles of sand have been glued to make it seem as weathered as something from the Ming dynasty, and sure enough there’s a shiny staple underneath. I’m impressed: The art of instant Minging manifests an ingenuity that’s almost worth the price. But Jade is embarrassed about her countrymen’s duplicity.

“Don’t worry, we have fibbing in our country, too,” I assure her. “We even have our own finger gesture to symbolize it.” I demonstrate crossed fingers. “It means the person is faking.”

Jade is confused-she thought crossed fingers meant hoping for good luck. I’ve never thought of it before, but I tell her that the gesture actually means both-faking and hoping. What an odd combination. Jade crosses her thin fingers. “Good luck, I trick you,” she says, grasping the double concept right away.

I don’t actually mind losing money at this sort of bazaar, because there’s some justice in having Westerners spread the wealth like this-paying a few extra dollars for an imitation Cartier helps make up for the ways we’ve always exploited the Chinese, sort of individualized reparations. But Jade seems determined to get me my money’s worth. At a stall with yellowing, chipped animal bones, I eye an eagle skull with a black beak. Jade confirms that the dried cartilage is real. But what’s this other beauty?

“Walf. Small walf,” Jade says. “Not find this on Canal Street!”

She decides I’ll never fully grasp the Chinese soul until I own a small Chinese wolf skull, and to negotiate with the vendor she uses a range of lovely sounds my brain scrambles helplessly to make sense of. “Boozy boozy Negev Desert!” she scolds with finger upraised. “Who has chiggers?

She! She! She!” she laughs, putting her hand on his forearm as they chortle together, all part of a prescribed game. She cajoles most artfully, tugging on his sleeve, swinging her hips coquettishly, calling him uncle- and periodically accusing him of trying to pass counterfeit bills. “But not too crispy to travel?” she asks me after winning the sale for two dollars. It’s just coming to me that she means “brittle” when my cell phone rings.

“What’d you lose now?” I ask, but it’s not Larry-it’s the Australian accent of Antonia, telling me she reached someone, something, somewhere…?

“Listen, Antonia, there’s a crowd around me, can you hold on while I go someplace that’s quieter?”

But there is no quiet place in the market. Jade leads me to the back of a booth away from the main foot traffic, yet even here my English attracts a small crowd, including three schoolboys with their arms affectionately around one another’s necks. While I cover my ears from the ambient noise, Antonia tells me she’s learned that kidney transplants have indeed been drastically reduced because of the Restriction, but that if I can promise confidentiality, there’s a surgeon out in the city of Shi a few hours west of Beijing who may still have access to some.

“How can he skirt the law? Will it be a healthy organ?”

“My understanding is that this Dr. X is so highly placed, if he wants an organ-which will be immaculately screened-he knows how to make the authorities look the other way. But time is of the essence. If you can get there by this evening, he’ll be able to meet you. Don’t fool around with trains; just take a taxi and go. The fare will cost maybe eight or nine hundred RMBs-less than two hundred dollars.”