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Williams’s work. She had smiled and listened and wondered if there was anything more here than chat and great eyes. Then he had put a hand on her knee beneath the table. She smiled at him and reached down to touch his hand. He started to withdraw it, thinking that she was offended, but as he did she closed her fingers around his wrist. Then sliding closer to him on the banquette she parted her legs and drew his hand up past her thighs. All without taking her eyes from his.
    She flushed slightly as she tasted her rum on ice. She had been a wild kid but that was a long time ago. Now she was in her mid-thirties and was about to get on an airplane and head to Shanghai to pick up the corpse of her husband of eight years. A husband whom she had wished dead more often than she could recall. A husband who had “tamed” her. A husband who had in a very real way killed what was most Amanda Pitman in her and replaced it by a creature named Mrs. Richard Fallon.
    She had finished her second rum on the rocks when the salesman on the other side of the bar finally decided it was time to make his move. “Can I buy you a drink?” he said in a midwestern twang.
    Without missing a beat she called over her shoulder to the barman in her very deepest southern accent, “This Yankee carpetbagger thinks I’m a whore for sale. I could use your assistance.”
    With a thousand apologies, the scuffling of white shoes and touching of white belt, the salesman made his way to the exit.
    Once gone, the barman came over to her table with a tall cold rum on ice. “You got style, lady, this one’s on the house.”
    She smiled wanly at him and took the drink, wondering vaguely if she’d ever enjoy the dalliance of hands under tables and up skirts again, the way she had done so many years ago with the literature professor.

    Fong hated being summoned. “Asked to appear,” “Could I have a word,” “We need to meet”—all were fine, but “In my office now” was not his favourite. So it was with more than a little ire that he approached Police Commissioner Hu’s office.
    The commissioner’s secretary wasn’t at her desk when Fong entered. Her computer, a new acquisition, had been left on and its monitor screen was flashing a series of numbers: E-M-29-7976. Fong didn’t even know how to turn on a computer, let alone what these numbers meant. With a rush of silk, the commissioner’s secretary entered from the main office. She appeared angry that Fong was looking at her screen. Fong momentarily wondered what she would do if he looked at her nonexistent tits. With a hrumph, as if she’d been able to read his thoughts, she ushered him toward the commissioner’s office. As she did, she refused to meet his eyes. Fong got the distinct feeling that she didn’t want to be infected by him.
    When Fong entered the office, Commissioner Hu was sitting at one end of a couch, a piece of computer paper in his hands. Upon seeing Fong he quickly folded the paper but in his haste did it inside out, showing the same numbers: E-M-29-7976. A detail that did not escape Fong.
    The commissioner signalled Fong to the far side of the couch. As he sat, Fong couldn’t get over the notion that they must have looked like the famous pictures of Nixon and Mao—one at either end of a couch—or was it Kissinger and Mao? For the longest time he had had trouble distinguishing among westerners. It wasn’t until he headed Special Investigations and had many more opportunities to deal with them that his eye became attuned to the nuances of Western physiognomy.
    The commissioner seemed to have just removed a look of dismay and replaced it by his ever smiling, politically connected “good” face. “How are you today, Detective Zhong?”
    Swell, he thought. I’ve been up since five A.M., seen a body in pieces, had a screaming match with a newspaper editor, held half of a heart in my hand and watched a set of dentures munch on it—all before lunch. But he said,