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the back and roared off. And that was something else that bothered me. There’s a clinic just three blocks down the street, near the Dong Dan market. It’s a very modern facility by Chinese standards; it was included on our tour. I saw the cardiac unit myself—not great, but adequate for a heart attack. Yet the medics drove right past it, never even slowed down.”
    “Maybe it was closed for the evening.”
    “I don’t think so, Mr. Stratton.”
    “Strange, isn’t it?” Stratton mused. “Do you know who David had dinner with?”
    “It was a small banquet in a corner of the dining room; all the people were Chinese.”
    Together they walked down the stairs. The whole hotel smelled of turpentine and cheap new paint. On the second floor, Weinstock paused on the stairwell, as if making up his mind. “Mr. Stratton,” he said. “I’ve got something in my room that you should see.”
    Gerda Weinstock was caking her cheeks with makeup when the two men walked in; she let out a tiny shriek and fled into the bathroom.
    “She hates for anybody to see her until she gets her face on,” Weinstock whispered. With bony knees rubbing on the wooden floor, he hunted under the bed. When Weinstock got to his feet, he was holding a black medical bag.
    “Once a doctor, always a doctor,” Stratton said.
    Weinstock shook his head soberly. “No, this isn’t mine. This is what the medics left behind in Dr. Wang’s room. This is what I wanted to show you. I found it on the floor, near the bed. I opened it because I was curious. Professional curiosity.”
    Inside, lying in a shining heap, were dozens of identical gadgets: a small tool, perhaps three inches long, with a small arm that swung out on a tiny hinge and flipped over to form a lever for the thumb. Pressing the lever made the sharp U-shaped jaws of the tool open and close silently.
    “Do you know what these are?” Weinstock asked incredulously.
    “Fingernail clippers,” Stratton muttered.
    “Fifty-four sets,” the American doctor reported. “Made in China.”
    “I’ll be damned,” Stratton said.
    “Some medics,” said Saul Weinstock. “Some goddamned medics, huh?”
    Stratton asked to keep the medical bag.
    “Sure, just don’t tell them where you got it. Please,” Weinstock implored. “My wife and I don’t want to get kicked out of China before we get to see Tibet.”
    “You’re damn right!” came a voice from the bathroom.
     
    Steve Powell lifted the doctor’s bag from his tidy government-issue desk and shook it. The nail clippers clattered metallically inside. “You’ve got to admit it sounds authentic,” he said to Stratton. Then, with a dry laugh: “Welcome to China, my friend.”
    Stratton ignored the consul’s invitation to sit down. “I don’t think this is funny,” he said.
    “Understand something, Mr. Stratton. These ‘medics’ who attended to your friend at the hotel—of course they weren’t real medics. Forget the bullshit you’ve heard about the phenomenal modernization of Chinese medicine. It’s still backward as hell. And try to find a fucking veterinarian in this town! The embassy wives have to send their precious French poodles to Hong Kong for a lousy distemper shot.
    “These guys who took Wang to the hospital were, at the very most, first-year students. They could have been janitors just as easily. The doctor bag is a prop, as you no doubt figured out. They were lackeys. Their only job was to get the patient to a hospital.”
    Stratton asked about the clinic three blocks from the hotel. “It’s supposed to be very good,” he said.
    “Maybe it is,” Powell said, “but David Wang was the VIP brother of a deputy minister. The Chinese knew who he was, where he was and what he was doing. When he got sick, they took him to Capital Hospital, one of the most advanced hospitals in Peking, whatever ‘advanced’ means here.”
    Stratton sat down. “Yesterday you weren’t so sure.”
    “Since then I’ve received a full