“You’re getting your Princess!” I tell him. “Your Princess, a kidney!”

He doesn’t seem to grasp my meaning and grasps my finger instead, not letting go.

“You’re getting your surgery within two weeks,” I say, lifting my glass. “Toast to Chairman Larry!”

“To a soon surgery!” Jade echoes. She takes her first sip of schnapps, which, by evidence of her face, is a revelation.

“Let the record show that I continue to have a very bad premonition about it, however,” Larry reminds me.

“Nothing can wreck my mood right now,” I tell Larry. “Not even having my pointer finger mauled by you.”

He seems embarrassed that he’s still grasping my finger, lets it go, and takes his first cautious sip of his drink, coughing at its strength. “Do you think Dr. X took it all in?” he asks. “Those references to Paul Volcker may have been a little much.”

“What references to Paul Volcker?”

“I feel confident he got my gist, though,” he says. “And just so you know, that was a conscious decision on my part not to tell him about all the nineteen-year-old girls from Appalachia who board those cruise ships five to a room in the hope of bagging someone good. I calculated it would be overkill. Because forget coeds-a girl from the mountains will commit acts at sea she wouldn’t dream of doing ashore. Are you kidding? With an American professor in a balcony penthouse? I make out like a bandit.”

“So everything’s great,” I say. “Why the long face? You having second thoughts about your donor?”

“I’m delighted with my donor,” he says. “What’s not to like? He’s thirty-one.”

Count on Larry to cut to the chase. He’s right-the donor’s youth is a plus. I guess it’s too much to expect moral hair-splitting from Larry; I should just be relieved he didn’t try to make a deal for the other kidneys-the six kidneys of the donor’s murder victims-for him to scalp outside Dolphin Stadium.

Rather than lightening his mood, however, the schnapps seems to be readying him for his next set of problems.

“I couldn’t help noticing there was no mention of price,” he says. “Did he say how much discount he was willing to give us?”

“I didn’t hear the word ‘discount’ at all,” I say.

“I continue to have the feeling I’m being set up for a stupendous fall.” He fixes his cinder-block gaze on his drink, takes another sip. Meanwhile Jade’s exploring the miracle of her American cocktail, like a hummingbird at a feeder of sugar water. “Unless my ears deceived me,” Larry says, “I’m pretty certain he said he would try to keep expenses down.”

“I didn’t hear that either, but let’s hope so.”

“Well, let’s do more than hope,” Larry says, leveling a placid gaze on me, “because it’s only fair to tell you that I won’t go through with this if the price is too high.”

I assume he’s kidding. “That raises an interesting question, though,” I say. “What price do you put on saving your own life? Is fifty grand appropriate for an extra few decades? Is sixty? Seventy?”

“If it doesn’t come in under fifty, I’m jumping ship,” Larry declares.

I give it a beat. “Sure you will,” I say, laughing. I examine his face for any sign of levity and start to get a sour feeling.

“I’m serious, Dan. I’m very concerned about cost. I can always start over again and negotiate a better deal in some other country.”

I have to be mishearing him. I look helplessly at Jade. “Take it easy on that drink,” I advise her, because she goes back for additional sips every few seconds, less like a hummingbird now than one of those plastic bird toys that clips to the rim of a glass and ducks its beak up and down, up and down.

Back to looking at Larry. I’m hoping the intervening seconds will have erased his dangerous thought process.

“You’re not telling me,” I say slowly, rationing out my words, “that after coming all this way, after all the people who’ve put themselves on the line for us, that you’ll leave everyone hanging if the price comes in too high.”

“You’re the one who’s always telling me to watch my pennies,” he says. “And I agree: A penny over fifty and I’m on the next plane outta here.”

After a while I exhale. “You know what?” I say. “I’m going to pretend you’re not here, that you’re back in the hospital suite, not really saying what you’re saying.”

It works, temporarily. It’s like holding my breath and ducking under the water to swim away from a sea monster. I turn my attention to Jade, who’s counting the beads of condensation on the outside of her glass. A harelipped boy wanders by hawking pink balloons. I startle to see three Westerners across the room, just as the natives always startle when they see me. They’re our mirror image: two women and a man, and they’re all laughing together, the best of friends. The man and I raise glasses to each other. This whole scene could be jolly if there weren’t a death-radiating killjoy breathing moistly at my elbow.

We order some standard American dishes. Jade is inspecting the rice inside the salt shaker, holding it upside down without realizing it’s emptying onto her place mat. Wearing an expression that makes me suspect that the strawberry schnapps has loosened her tongue, she raises her hand with an important announcement.

“Yes, you with the bubbles in your teeth.”

“I don’t care for McDonna,” she says.

“Really!” I say, scandalized to my core. “Well! And what is it exactly you don’t like about Madonna?”

“She too sexy in a bad way.”

“Okay, I’ll accept that as the statement of a tipsy, tipsy woman. Any Americans you do happen to favor?”

She picks up her swizzle stick with two hands and begins to turn it like a tiny corncob, nibbling its maraschino cherry all around. “I like Benjamin Franklin very much. He is like chairman of American history.”

“Okay, one vote for Ben Franklin,” I say, opening my large illustrated menu for the first time, even though we’ve already ordered. “You know what I’ve been meaning to ask you, though? Where’s the ‘chicken without sexual life’? I used to love that twenty-five years ago.”

“They rename. Now call ‘spring chicken.’”

“Tell me it ain’t so! What about ‘bean curd made by pockmarked woman’?”

“Now call ‘stir-fried tofu in hot sauce.’”

“Is nothing sacred? Why would they mess with a proven crowd-pleaser?”

Jade skillfully gnaws around the cherry until there’s only a spot of red left. “It so Olympic tourist don’t get wrong idea. All menus scrubbed clean of so-so names.”

Larry watches over us judgmentally, severe as a Spanish duenna, cracking his knuckles. I know the warning signs for when to desist, and the echo of distant ballistics is one of them. But I don’t care if his disgruntlement is ethical, intestinal, or whatever. Let him stew. Serves him right.

“So,” I ask Jade, running my finger down the menu. “You like the cow stomach?”

“It is very milled,” she says, meaning “mild.” I’m not clear whether this is a good thing or bad, in her book.

“What about pig’s heart fried with pickled peppers or pig’s intestines sautéed with black bean sauce?”

“I like,” she says.

All this organ talk is driving Larry deeper into his funk, which is fine by me. “How’s about kidney?”

“Um, good roasted!” she says enthusiastically.

“Which one’s best: the black kidney in this picture or the redder one?”

“I like everything in the menu,” she says. “The bitter pig’s nails. The spicy chicken’s ear. The stewed soft turtle feet.”

“And what’s this beautiful item on the back page?”

“I do not know how to speak this,” Jade says after a short struggle. “Maybe it is like floor of dog? No, not dog. My error. Collie, floor of collie-”

“Collie-floor?”

“Cauliflower!” she exults. She takes another hit of her strawberry schnapps, then guffaws with a new thought. “So now we know what you think is beautiful: cauliflower!”

I decide to see if I can get Jade to open up in a new way. “Well, there are all kinds of beautiful. For instance, cauliflower’s not beautiful,” I say, “in quite the way you are.”