“Uh?” I say.

“C’mon, it’s obviously blown from the look on your face, Daniel,” he says. “I hope you never try to make a living as a poker player.”

“Uh…”

“Anyway, hold on to your hat, because she may have even helped your quest for a kidney, greased the wheels behind the scenes, getting the paperwork approved by the higher-ups. She was watching over you, like a fairy-godmother.”

Or a fairy goddaughter…

Damn dim bulb is all I can think. I was in the dark all that time.

“But how’d you know…? I mean-”

“Oh, let’s just say a few of us took an interest in your project,” he says, smiling at me in that complicated way of his.

“An official interest?”

“I’m not prepared to say,” he says, affecting a look of modesty as he bites off the top of a sugar packet and picks the paper from his tongue. “In any event, it’s partly speculation on our part, with very little hard-and-fast proof. Maybe she’s just an innocent little waitress and we’re hyperventilating for nothing. If you think back on the cast of characters you’ve involved yourself with, however, I think you’ll agree that it has all the earmarks of being the classic scenario, on both sides.”

Cherry? I think. Ow my God, Cherry was on our team? Good hands indeed. And why was Queen Latifah so Johnny-on-the-spot? Did she have a dog in this fight, too?

I find myself clinging to the one thing I need to know for certain. “But the kidney’s good, right?”

Alfred laughs again, a tinkling like broken teacups. “You tell me. So long as Larry keeps taking his antirejection drugs, I’m told that everything should keep going well.”

“It’s not bugged or anything?”

“What, so the Chinese can keep tabs on his latest inventions?”

He laughs at me, not unkindly.

“And you’re sure it was a murderer, right, the donor?” I ask. “It wasn’t one of those religious guys the state’s outlawed?”

Here Alfred makes motions that say our little snack is coming to an end. “Let’s not even go there, shall we? Because in truth we’ve no way of knowing for sure. I doubt very much whether even Dr. X has a way of knowing for sure. I mean, China in its wisdom killed ten thousand prisoners the last year they reported, with very little lag time between verdict and execution, and the number is now officially a state secret, zealously guarded.”

He glances at my face.

“But listen, we don’t know anything for sure! We don’t even know about Jade for sure. The point is, you did what you had to do. Don’t second-guess yourself. Did you kill an innocent man? Possibly. Did you jump the queue, along with everyone else? Of course you did. Is it ruthless business? Without a doubt.”

I clear my throat. “I killed an innocent man?”

“Look, I can’t give you a free hall pass, Daniel: There are a lot of unknowns here. But you did what you came here to do: You saved your cousin’s life.”

“He’s not even my first cousin,” I say.

“So you’re not precisely your cousin’s keeper,” he says without missing a beat. “You’re something else, maybe less alliterative.”

I take a breath. It feels like the first one I’ve taken since entering the cafeteria. Alfred puts his hand on top of mine and pats it supportively.

“You know what, though? Can I give you one word of warning, from my limited experience seeing cases not unlike yours? Don’t expect to be applauded when you get home. A lot of people will be put out that you managed to pull this off. Certain family members may be angry that you lifted a finger to help when they didn’t. Certain segments of the medical community, don’t expect them to be overjoyed, either, at taking matters into your own hands. Others will say you played fast and loose, that you’re an American vampire, all those profundities that miss the point entirely. You know the expression ‘No good deed goes unpunished’? There’s an even more apt expression from this part of the world: ‘The captive buffalo resents the free buffalo.’ So don’t expect a ticker-tape parade.”

“I know,” I admit. “Even Larry kind of resents me.”

“We have a joke in Baltimore: ‘Why are you mad at me? What’d I do to help?’”

I try to smile, but it isn’t coming.

“As for those others who disagree with your methodology, they’re simply not playing on the same field as you,” he says. “They want a rational, step-by-step approach; you whisked yourself here and said, ‘Universe, use me.’ They want to play chess, and you’re already playing Go.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know about any of this,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m a little misoriented right now.”

“Here’s the bottom line,” he says, giving my hand a final pat and getting ready to stand. “All these carpings about whether we have the right to take an organ, even from a murderer, they’re just sentimental luxuries we can’t afford. I don’t necessarily want to get into this, because frankly it’s none of anyone’s business, but I lost a niece to a murderer back in the States, a long time ago, and I would have reached inside his rib cage and pulled out his heart with my bare hands if that would have brought her back to us.”

The speech has made him a little breathless. He gathers himself. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just mean to say that my ordeal has clarified a few things, taught me that if we have a chance to use good organs, even from bad people, it’s a sin not to. The rest of it, it’s not worth debating.

“All set?” he concludes, picking up his tray. “The second-to-last thing I want to say, and then I’ll let you go, is don’t feel compromised by this whole experience. Don’t feel dirtied. This is the real world…”

“And the last thing?” I manage to croak out.

“Don’t forget to bus the table.”

A dream comes back to me. I can fly. I’ve had it recurrently since childhood, less and less frequently as I’ve grown older, but I realize now I might have been having it several times in the last week. My arms are winglike. I possess just the right amount of power to rise to a state of being airborne, lumberingly at first, but then higher, aloft, dipping up and up to soar around the spaces I ordinarily look up to. In the dream this past week, I’ve been offering to carry Larry with me, and Mary, too, but they don’t want to go, so I’m flying by myself, suddenly zooming upward into the nighttime stars…

At first, leaving Alfred in the late-afternoon light, I don’t want the dream to end. I want to go directly to the airport and get on a plane and fly home without seeing Jade, all my dreams intact. But gradually I realize I have to see her. I can’t go home without seeing her one last time.

On the phone Jade tells me her father’s taken ill, just a “middle squeeze” and nothing serious. She’s very sorry, but she has to take a train to her faraway home after our dinner together, she can’t accompany me to the airport.

Fine. Just dinner will be fine.

So do I feel dirtied, in the cab on my way over to see her? Not so much dirtied as deepened. Not so much compromised as complexified. I’ve had layers added to my soul…or at least age spots added to my hands. I feel many things: overjoyed about coming home and seeing my wife and kids, apprehensive about coming home and facing my critics. All that, yes, but mostly how I feel this steaming autumn twilight afternoon on my way to see Jade is…conflicted. With my new knowledge of her beneficent duplicity, I’m not sure how I feel about those oblong nostrils, those bubbles in her teeth. But I’ll never find out by sitting on my hands.

We’re to meet at the best duck restaurant in Beijing. I’m almost too tired to keep my eyes open in the cab-been up since dawn, with a long flight ahead of me before I get home. Part of my fatigue is from the bombshells Alfred just dropped on me, and part of it’s nervousness, as though this is a first date and a last date rolled into one-first because I’ll be seeing Jade with my eyes open as never before, last because we’ll never see each other again. Will we really, really not? I hate breakups more than anything in the world.