“Come visit me in America,” I say when he drops me off at the station. “We’ll play badminton in my backyard.”

“Or come to Pakistan,” he says, “for an excellent holiday.”

Well, that’s maybe not the first place I’d go for an excellent holiday just now, but who knows? We shake hands good-bye. After I walk into the station, it occurs to me that he still had his mittens on when we shook. With that single gesture, that lack of skin contact, I receive the information that we are not deeply befriended. Larry got the kidney before Abu’s dad did, and besides, there are political differences. If America were to find itself in a war with Pakistan, Abu would hesitate only long enough to say a prayer before slitting my throat. Sunny-side-up dude I may still be, after all that’s happened here these past two months, but a dumb one I am not.

Or am I ever.

CHAPTER 20. The Art of War

It is only when the cold season comes that we know the cypress to be evergreen.

Home sweet home. It’s good to be back among so many Western faces, so much English lettering. Except I’m not in America but Beijing, which only feels like home after I’ve spent seven weeks in Shi. Suddenly I’m filled with nostalgia for scruffy old Massage Central with its repainted cabs and screeching bikes. I have a few hours to kill before I have dinner with Jade and then proceed to the airport, so I decide to pay my respects to the rooftop of my old luxury hotel. Great view from up there, of my life if not of the city. Then I decide to pay a visit to Alfred, the bow-tied dean from the Shabbos service who asked me to keep in touch. We greet each other like old friends in the rotunda of the foreign-language institute, but when I start to debrief him, he shushes me with a finger to his lips and without another word walks me to the institute’s cafeteria for a snack. Only there, amid the bustle of scattered diners, does he speak again, telling me that the temple has been praying for Larry every Friday night since I left Beijing-a Misheberah, prayer for those in need of healing.

“Really?” I say, pushing my plastic tray along the rack. “I’m touched. I wasn’t aware that was going on.”

“If I may be so bold, Daniel,” he says, using an ice-cream scoop to dig out a healthy dollop of potato salad. “I daresay there are many things of which you are not aware.”

I want to know what he means.

“It’s okay now, it worked out safely,” he tells me. “We did have a few scary days there, however.”

Now I really want to know what he means.

“Daniel,” he says, “you’re a reasonably attractive man.”

“Okay,” I say, taken aback.

“But then again, I’m a man of sixty-four,” he continues. “That is to say, I’m not a woman of twenty-four. Do you honestly think you’re so irresistible that young Chinese women trip over themselves for the pleasure of squiring you around?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I say, but even as I’m saying the words, I’m feeling a trickle of the old charley horse or something related, some echo of something I’ve purposefully kept muted in my musculature the past two months.

“Perhaps you understand more than you think you do,” he says, selecting a bowl of crimson Jell-O.

“What do you mean?”

A pause as he pays the cashier. “You’ve been very lucky these past two months,” he says.

“I’ve been excruciatingly lucky. I’m very grateful. So?” I follow his backside through the semicrowded cafeteria. “You’re saying I’m luckier than I know?”

The whole way across the room, the echo inside me is turning into heat, which is turning into an itch. In my chest, which I can’t scratch because I’m carrying a tray. I’m suddenly very uncomfortable.

“What are we talking about?” I repeat as we find a table.

He’s opaque as he pulls out a chair and sits down, then fiddles in the briefcase at his feet. “Daniel, do you not read the papers? Are you not aware that there are reports almost every day about the amount of surveillance that goes on in this country?”

My knees itch madly. I feel like a monkey, wanting to scratch everywhere.

“Look, right here,” Alfred says, producing a couple of newspapers. “Just this morning a report that over half the foreign journalists based in China have been spied on or detained. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always been bad, but since the world began focusing its spotlight on Beijing with the Olympics, it’s become, let us say, pervasive.”

“Okay-okay, I get it,” I say, even though I’m uncertain what I get. I’m too busy clawing at the itch surfacing in the unlikeliest places: my eyebrows, my armpits.

“And you’re an American writer poking around on your own; of course they’d want to know what you’re up to. Not to say that you’re not perfectly attractive on your own merits, but I mean, c’mon, Daniel: twenty-four?”

“I’m trying my best to misunderstand you,” I say, tongue-tied. Now it’s the small of my back that’s itching.

“Don’t take it so hard,” he says, gauging my reaction closely. “It’s in the culture-a tradition of deep strategic thinking that’s as old as the country itself. In their ancient book The Art of War, written in the sixth century B.C., they talk about the importance of placing spies in the opposite camp to learn what they were up to. China is a nation that takes its espionage very seriously.”

I know all this yet am a ridiculous mass of symptoms: itchy, coughy, confused, upset.

“You’re feeling like an idiot,” he says, reading my thoughts. “But look, when I first came to the institute, I was astonished to learn there were more than two hundred teachers who volunteered to read the e-mail of their fellow faculty. They considered it a privilege to spy on one another for their beloved mother country. Even today I estimate that a third of my staff is state security.”

I’m a monkey idiot, busy tracking my itches. That word “spy,” I abhor its sound…

“So let me ask you, did it really never occur to you when your waitress said she would be your guide for free…?”

No, I think, and just as clearly, yes. Of course. In a way I knew it all along but didn’t want to admit it. Jade befriended me just a few morn ings after I turned away Yuh-vonne. The powers that be must have refined their research, and on a second try selected someone they knew would be more my style. That’s why her supervisor let her idle with me that first morning at breakfast, bowing out of the way. It all makes sense. How passionate she was about Tibet and Taiwan when she was tipsy. Her father in the government-of course! Studying foreign relations-indeed she was! She never asked me one question about my career-no doubt because she knew all about it. My mind races to catch up with itself. Ow my God. So she was a member of the cult of Mao rather than the cult of Larry? She was someone else’s spy before I recruited her to be mine? Worst of all, does this mean Jade didn’t care for me or Larry? That she was only-

“Now, that doesn’t mean she’s a bad person,” Alfred says, reaching for the sugar bowl. “In fact, those teachers who volunteered to spy? They were lovely individuals, some of them. Some were the loveliest of all! It was a form of patriotism on their part, Daniel. Think of your friend Jade as a kind of idealist, if that helps…”

My mind is blown. And that’s a phrase I haven’t even thought of in decades. It feels like a portion of my head has been exposed to the elements. The back of my skull pulsates.

“Oh, you dreamers.” Alfred laughs lightly at the expression I’m wearing. “That’s why we love you: Your vanity makes you such pushovers! But don’t worry, she must have genuinely cared for you, for her not to blow the whistle and do all sorts of serious damage, such as having the hospital padlocked and Dr. X stripped of his license. She must have grown very fond of you both and judged that what you were up to wasn’t going to hurt the state in any way. In fact, at the risk of blowing your mind a second time-”