And no Westerners, of course.

“We are friends?” I venture.

“Oh, yes, no problem.” Big pat on the back from Abu, who all but says, “We are family of patients together!” But he doesn’t need to say it. We’re in neutral territory facing the ultimate common adversary. The usual rules are suspended. We even find it possible to chitchat about the state of the world-stuff that’s easy to agree on. For ten or fifteen minutes, we swap geopolitical truisms, and then it’s time to ask the question that’s preying on my mind.

“So how long you been waiting?” I ask.

“Two for me. Two also for him.”

“Two weeks? That’s not so bad,” I say, doing some rough calculations. At this rate I’ll be able to see my family again before the weather turns colder.

“Not weeks, months,” says Abu.

“Months? You’ve been here two months already?”

“Two, maybe three months more,” comes my reply.

Wait-maybe five months altogether? I run some more numbers in my head. That would bring us to Christmas. Be without my family all autumn? Not see Spencer starting drum lessons? Not see Jeremy rehearse his role of Tiny Tim?

Untenable. Gotta go.

“Pound it,” Abu says, giving me another fist bump before I race off to the elevator bank. “Keep it real.”

Maybe five months? At the rate he’s going, I doubt that Larry will be alive in five months. I need to hunt down the truth behind these terrible numbers. Cherry’s at the nurses’ station down the hall from Larry’s door, jumbo pocketbook in hand, conferring with the resident who looks like Judy. I pull her aside.

“Cherry, you and I need to talk hard balls,” I say. “I’ve been speaking to some of the Middle Easterners-”

She cuts me off. “Every case different,” she reminds me. “They have no Restriction, therefore less hazard, less hurry.”

“Is it possible we might have to stay here four or five months?”

Giggling is the last thing I’d expect at this juncture, but giggling is what Cherry gives me, her hand in front of her mouth, modestly covering her teeth. “Oh, no,” she says. “You special guests with many friends on Chinese soil. Big guanxi, not little guanxi. Don’t have to wait so long.”

“Then how long? Larry’s weaker every day.”

“So I think we give you the answer to this question other day.”

“Really? I don’t recollect getting an answer.”

“That answer is we do not know.”

“Oh, yeah, that answer I remember. But can I at least set up a meeting with Dr. X to discuss the time frame, and also the price, because Larry is not a rich man…?”

“He on the fly, very difficult to catch. You may try his secretary on floor four.”

“May I try her now?”

“She also difficult to catch: in, out, everywhere. Also, this after-hour.”

“It’s only ten to five.”

“Yes, but this Chinese time. Maybe she gone already. In China if you want to be sure, better choice to see early morning, say six A.M.”

Suddenly it hits me. Ow my God, is Cherry not to be trusted? Her evasiveness may or may not be legitimate, but is there something else going on? Is she keeping us in the dark on purpose, the better to keep tabs on us? Is that what the pocketbook’s about-it contains secret files on us?

And just as suddenly she seems to sense that I’m onto her. Her face widens into an extra-sweet smile as she tosses her hair.

“Hey, tonight Friday, big hoedown party night, could be? You want take Larry to restaurant? Par-tay! Par-tay!”

I’m thrown. Perhaps I’m meant to be thrown.

“What do you mean, outside the hospital?”

“Good for patient morale,” she says.

“But-”

“Larry say he like Peking duck,” she says sweetly. “Very good restaurant for just such a treat around the corner.”

“But…is he okay to go? I mean, how could we even get him down all the stairs from the ninth floor?”

She finds me amusing. I’m the one who called her from the backseat of the kidnap cabbie, after all. Oh, it pains me to recollect the message I left on her answering machine. I blush anew as she chuckles at me.

“Elevator not still broke, Daniel. Only one day broke. How you think your brother get to dialysis on sixth floor?”

My cousin, I want to say. But there’s so much going on in my brain, trying to figure out whether I’m being paranoid again, that for once I hold my tongue.

I open the door to Larry’s room, and there he is already dressed for dinner in heavy trousers, short-sleeved business shirt, and wool sport coat. So wait-Cherry suggested Peking duck to him before I grew suspi cious? Maybe she didn’t make this offer to throw me off the scent? The truth, once again, is that I can’t tell friend from foe. Perhaps she’s no more a spy than our poor cabbie was a kidnapper? I’m on the other side of the planet, after all, where upside down is right side up. I don’t know my ass from my elbow.

I turn to Larry, about to say, You’re not going to be too warm in that outfit?-but for the second time in as many minutes I keep it to myself. Larry has his own truth, as Cherry has hers, maybe even as the Red Guards have theirs. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it, though.

No question: Larry is failing. Walking down the corridor with me, on the way to dinner, he takes tentative baby steps. Descending eight floors by elevator leaves him breathless. By the time we make it across the cavernous lobby downstairs, he’s perspiring so much from the effort that he takes off his sport coat and asks me to hold it. He grips my shoulder to negotiate the curb by the sidewalk. I’m not prepared to hold his hand, but I do take his upper arm when crossing the street and can’t help noticing that the skin up there is pudgy soft, just like when he was a kid.

“Slow down,” he says. “If I don’t concentrate on standing upright, I’ll fall over.”

I surprise myself by not being impatient. It’s actually interesting to go at his pace; he points out things I wouldn’t have noticed at my usual speed. “Someone could make a fortune installing banisters in this country,” he says, noting the lack of railings everywhere. “We can’t go more than five yards without the walkway changing.” He’s right: The ground surface that passes for sidewalk goes from pebbles to puddles to rutted tar. It’s like my finding it advantageous to not speak the language-his perceptions are sharpened to compensate for his shortcomings. Two handicapped men in China, with only our wits to get us through.

“Eight A.M.,” he says. But my brain’s so busy working overtime that I’ve misheard him. What he actually says is “ATM”-pointing out a cash machine I hadn’t noticed before.

“It’s a good one,” he says, trying it out. “I’m going for broke.”

Unlike most of the ATMs I’ve been trying up till now, this machine’s not on the blink, and Larry is able to make repeated withdrawals. He’s already gotten seventy-five hundred RMB, about a thousand dollars in small bills. “This is better than Atlantic City,” he says buoyantly, playing it like a slot machine until his pockets are bulging.

Approaching the restaurant, the sidewalk path is so narrow and dark-lit only by passing headlights-that we shuffle single file. The mud is slippery from a shower earlier today and feels ancient in its slickness. As for the air quality? “If I were flying in fog this thick, I’d use instruments,” Larry notes.

In the gloom an excitable old man is playing “Danny Boy” on a violin, almost jittering with energy. Beyond him a line of street hawkers affords Larry an opportunity to teach me the art of bargaining.

“NO TOURIST PRICES,” he says to the first hawker he encounters. Larry’s stiffened for the confrontation, wrapped so tight he could be mummified. “WE’RE NOT STUPID WESTERNERS. WE’RE NOT WHATEVER YOU THINK WE ARE.”

“Go easy,” I tell him. “I don’t think they follow-”

“He knows more than he’s letting on,” Larry says.

“Good-friend price,” says the hawker, who wears a flowing Fu Manchu and is smiling with a kind of joy to be in our company.