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they wound north through Haidian District, Shen An-ling taking the long way, sticking to dark streets and doubling back on himself occasionally, Dongfan Beisan abruptly broke the silence with “She’s an American.”
    “You better not be talking about his wife,” Shen An-ling said.
    “No, no. Mary Caul. She works at the American consulate in Guangzhou.”
    Zhu lowered his sun visor to peer into a small mirror at the boy. “Go on.”
    “I met her at the New Get Lucky.”
    “The what?”
    “Chaoyang District,” Shen An-ling said. “They serve German beer.”
    “How long ago was this?” Zhu asked.
    “When I met her? Five, six months ago. She’s from New York City. Pretty. She liked me.”
    “Did you have sex with her?” asked Zhu.
    He was surprised to see embarrassment break through the boy’s mask. “When she was in town,” he said, almost a whisper.
    “At your place?”
    Dongfan Beisan shook his head. “Never. Her hotel.”
    “Which one?”
    “Crowne Plaza.”
    Shen An-ling whistled. “Must’ve thought you’d hit the jackpot.”
    The boy frowned but said nothing.
    “And she asked you to check on my wife?”
    “Last week. Thursday. Mary said that Sung Hui was an old friend of hers. She said she was worried about her, because she had . . .” He trailed off.
    “Don’t stop now,” said Zhu.
    “She said that Sung Hui had married a brutal man who kept her imprisoned. She had no way to contact her, unless she could meet her by accident. So she wanted to know what her daily schedule was.”
    “Bái chī,” said Shen An-ling.
    “He’s not retarded,” Zhu corrected. “He’s just in love. The two are very similar.”
    Dongfan Beisan said nothing.
    Zhu said, “How did you know to talk to a relative of my wife’s seamstress?”
    “Mary told me.”
    “She didn’t know how to run casually into my wife, but she knew the name and family of my wife’s seamstress?”
    “I . . . I didn’t think of that,” he said. The kid really was an idiot.
    Despite Shen An-ling’s protests, they returned to the Blim-Blam and let Dongfan Beisan, stunned and wobbly, leave. Then they went to the office and learned from the files that Mary Caul was indeed attached to the American consulate in Guangzhou as part of the Foreign Commercial Service—or she had been, until last Friday, when she returned to the United States for good. She had left, Shen An-ling pointed out unnecessarily, the day after asking Dongfan Beisan to collect information on Sung Hui. Also unnecessarily, he reminded Zhu that Leticia Jones’s visit overlapped with Mary Caul’s final days in China.
    By then it was after midnight, so Zhu called home to learn from the maid that Sung Hui was asleep, then had Shen An-ling drive him to the Crowne Plaza. He spent the next three hours with the head of security, a round-faced Uighur who kept sending for pots of Long Jing tea as they sorted through audio recordings from rooms and video files from the public areas. Zhu had approximate days, and he knew one name for sure—Mary Caul—and had her file photo. The other—Rosa Mumu, a.k.a. Leticia Jones—had stayed at the Hua Thai, but he had her photo to guide his hunch. On a video file marked Tuesday, May 6, when the time code indicated 3:12 in the morning, they found it. Leticia Jones and Mary Caul sitting close together on a leather sofa in the lobby, talking animatedly, almost intimately.
    “You have sound?”
    “Apologies, comrade,” said the Uighur.
    Despite the extra care he took in making such decisions, Zhu made a mistake when, the next morning, Sung Hui asked what the rock and roller had been up to. After staring at the gray sky through the kitchen window for about four seconds, he decided on honesty and told her that the source of his questions was an American intelligence agent. Sung Hui moved slowly to the table and sank into a chair. She said, “They want to kill me.”
    “Why would they want to kill you?” he asked, reaching for her