I can feel my face doing funny things. It’s as though my eyebrows are trying to convince him out of it by sheer force of contortion. My neck muscle is seizing up. “But the FBI interviewed you last time, when they advised him to go to a motel for two weeks. You’ll be the first person they suspect.”

Now the Mona Lisa smile deepens a bit, so the toothpick can reach some deeper recess. “Let’s just say I have made arrangements,” he says. “To be dispatched upon my death.”

“You’re kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding me.”

“No, that’s the beauty part, because as soon as I’m dead, presto, the plan goes into effect. They can’t come back at me. Pretty sweet, huh? So in a way I hope Burton does find out where I’m going to have my surgery and does manage to squash it, because it’ll be his ass.”

I’m squinting through the smoke from tables everywhere, blinking much more than I want to. “So I’m assuming this is still a wake-up call rather than a fatwa fatwa, as you said. And Burton will survive it, right?”

“Yes. Whether he’ll want to, that’s a different question. Put it this way: It’ll be a learning experience for him. Like he prescribed for me. A growth experience. He thinks he rules the world. He’ll find out that he’s not even an ant in the real world.”

I’ve never heard such contempt packed into a single word as what he does with “ant.” He extracts his toothpick and points it at me.

“And you know the part I love best, Dan? That he thinks he’s safe. Oh, I relish that. This is my masterwork. I want to be remembered for this.”

“But, Larry, you don’t think something more moderate might be in order? Like challenge Burton in a court of law?”

“I’m not interested in paperwork. This is poetic justice. He screwed me up the ass, I’m returning the favor. And in front of his wife. That’s the part Killer especially liked. When Killer heard about my mutha on her deathbed, he said he couldn’t wait to take care of it personally. He was very attached to his mutha, too, apparently. Well, I already alluded to that. She called him ‘Button-Nose.’”

Larry’s eyes are dancing. Even the thought of the deed makes his eyes sparkle with happy menace. I haven’t seen him this animated since he was ten, doing his favorite trick of speaking Clint Eastwood lines into the fan: “I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.”

I look around the crimson restaurant, aghast. My eyes search out a TV for distraction. On the screen above the waiters’ station, they’re running a show about pandas. What is it with this country and pandas? Everywhere you look, pandas chewing on celery stalks, pandas batting one another playfully in the balls, pandas in positions that in any other species would be called obscene. They even have an expression for someone with droopy eyes: “panda eyes.” Enough with the pandas already. I make one last effort at denying Larry’s news.

“You’re gaming me, right? You’re hoping I get back to Burton with this so he freaks out all over again, even though in reality there’s nothing to it.”

“Oh, I like that version,” Larry says. “That adds a nice little bit of surrealism that even I couldn’t have dreamed up.”

“But that’s the truth, right? You never really issued the first fatwa against him. You were just blowing smoke to shake him up. You’d never do something like that to your own cousin, or anyone else for that matter. You just said it so he’d get anxious, and that would be punishment enough right there.”

“Good. Keep your head in the sand. That’s the version we’ll go with.”

“Because you’ve got the golden heart, even for people who cross you. I mean, you’re someone I’ve known my whole life, you’re not…evil…are you?”

“No, I like the first scenario. We’ll leave it at that. Why spoil a nice Friday-night duck feast. Good Shabbos, by the way. We ought to make this Peking duck a Friday-night tradition.”

The denial is over. I’m at one of the next stages of grief-depression-and am surprised at how weak and supplicating my voice comes out. “I really thought the feud was dead.”

“Not dead. Dormant. But I do have some good news.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve refined it somewhat. I now want the act recorded on film so it can be posted on YouTube.”

“Larry, I’ve got to tell you this is making me physically ill.”

“Don’t worry. It’s less than a grand. Killer gave me a discount-”

“I don’t mean how much you’ve had to shell out, Larry! I mean the idea of you doing bodily injury to a relative. To anyone!”

When have I ever seen eyes so merry with deadliness? And then it comes to me. At his father’s funeral. There was a man no one recognized at graveside. He stood right beside the casket, waiting patiently for it to be lowered. And when it was set into the ground, he was the first person to pick up the shovel and perform the traditional rite of casting dirt upon the grave. Only he did it with too much gusto. It’s meant to be symbolic, a reluctant drizzle of soil, but this grunting stranger heaved five, ten, twenty-five shovelfuls: He didn’t stop till his shirt was soaked through. It was only after the ceremony that it occurred to me he must have been someone with whom Sam had had a blood feud. Decades earlier, perhaps, the man must have vowed, “I’ll toss dirt on your grave!”

Who knows, maybe it was what kept the guy alive all those years. Maybe Sam, too.

Primitive business, this vengeance thing. People took their restitution seriously back in the shtetl.

Larry’s watching me, an enigmatic smile playing on his lips. He looks more like Mona Lisa than the original Mona Lisa does, so that I understand something about Leonardo’s model that I didn’t understand before. She’s more than enigmatic. She’s a schemer. Behind that famously mysterious smile, she’s plotting to violate her cousin. And make another cousin an unwitting accessory.

“So come to think of it, Dan, you’re doing a twofer too, just like me,” he says.

“How’s that?”

“You thought you were coming to China just to save one cousin. But if you save me, you save Burton, too, at least for the time being. Two for the price of one…”

Even a hare will bite when it is cornered.

Sept. 19. Dear Florida Power & Light:

It has come to my attention that despite my entreaties you still have not turned my power back on in my condo, due to you thought I had not paid my bill. The check is in the mail. Please reinstate the above stated relief henceforth. Sincerely, Larry Feldman.

Five days have passed. I’m at a new stage of grief-stupefaction-after Larry’s announcement, trying to fathom how I managed to land myself in an episode of The Sopranos in Asia. (This week’s episode: Is Dan saving the life of a monster?) Larry’s dominion over me is total: I’ve been horrified into a state of submission. Between the bombshell that he hasn’t rescinded his fatwa and the realization that I’m now for all intents and purposes an accessory, my mental state is disabled; I’m good for nothing more than being Larry’s manservant. He dictates, I type:

Sept. 19. Dear Mary:

Here I am in the hospital with nothing to do but wait. Feel like a prisoner, but even more painful is not being able to communicate with you. Is there any chance of your coming back to me fairly soon? Of course I will pay all your expenses and then some. Please let me know how much money you need and I will have Dan dispatch it. All my love, Larry.

One thing’s clear: Larry’s in his element, reigning supreme. Divulging his fatwa seems to have freed his creative energies, which are further fueled by infusions of imitation Do-Si-Do peanut butter sandwich cookies I managed to find in a local grocery store. His blood pressure is down to 190 over 120 and his mood bullish, his body weak but his drive ascendant. In his box-turtle shades and Businessman’s Running Shoes, conducting business through me from atop his thin-as-silk hospital sheets, he’s the ayatollah of the ninth floor. Since he ordered the A/C to be shut down, I’m wilting in the heat of central China ’s late-September furnace, so disenfranchised I’m not even allowed to correct his grammar.