"I understand, Linda, but think… think! Instant wardrobe, instant identity, a ticket to the States-it adds up. Picture the deputy minister in David's eyeglasses-could you tell them apart? Would immigration ever question the passport photo? No. It's one goddamn perfect plan." Stratton's voice cracked.

Yes, perfect, thought Linda Greer, except for one thing. She spoke soothingly.

"It's a good theory, Tom."

Stratton was in a fury. She was patronizing him.

The station chief said, "I think it's a crazy goddamn theory and it's time to cut the shit. Whatever Wang Bin was up to, it doesn't matter anymore."

"Listen to me," Stratton insisted. "David Wang is alive! His brother intends to murder him any day, any second."

"No, Tom," Linda said, shooting a glance at the station chief. "Maybe the deputy minister was planning something big… but it doesn't really matter anymore-"

"You keep saying that… "

"-because Wang Bin is dead."

From Hong Kong came only static. Linda Greer glanced anxiously at her boss. She leaned closer to the phone speaker. "Tom? Did you hear what I said?"

Stratton battled waves of nausea. His head sagged to the rosewood table; sweat beaded on the back of his neck. He raged silently, the private agony of a terrible failure. Now he knew; it was too late.

"Tom?"

"How?" came a hoarse voice from Hong Kong.

"Drowned," the station chief reported. "An old fisherman snagged the body in the Ming reservoir. The Public Security Bureau found a capsized rowboat near the shore. We got wind of it yesterday afternoon. Today the government newspapers say it was an accident. We hear differently."

"Oh." Head bowed, Stratton mumbled through clenched hands.

"We hear it was a suicide."

Stratton laughed sadly. "What?"

"Suicide," the station chief repeated, with emphasis. "Wang Bin was due to appear before the Disciplinary Commission earlier this week. Obviously his number was up, and he knew it. So he cashed all his chips. No fancy stuff-phony passports, secret Swiss accounts, all that Hollywood bullshit-just good old-fashioned Chinese honor. In this country, anything beats total disgrace, and that's what Wang Bin was facing. So he chose to die an honorable man. That way, at least, all the brass show up at your funeral."

"Will there be a state service?" Stratton wondered.

"Yeah, and you're not invited. Party types only, mid-level flag wavers, we're told. Courtesy, but no fanfare. And, Stratton, no flowers."

"Have you seen the body?" Stratton demanded.

"The coffin is closed. For God's sake, he'd been in the water a couple of days.

Do I have to spell it out to you, Stratton? The man looked like a bloated carp."

"Please, that's enough," Linda Greer implored. "Tom, are you all right? I know you've been through hell-maybe I ought to fly down."

"No, thanks, I'm fine. If the nice folks here will just get me a new passport, I'll be on my way."

The beet-faced man at the oblong table nodded helpfully; it would be a relief to book this yo-yo on the next Pan Am. "Phoenix" indeed.

Sitting in Peking with the station chief, talking into a squawk box to an unseen face across the continent, Linda Greer could say none of the things she wanted to say, and none of the things that mattered now. Stratton was safe, somehow returned from the files of the dead, and for that she could be happy. But there was something else, something troubling about his theory…

"It's over now, Tom," she said softly. "Whatever happened between your friend and his brother is finished. I'm sorry about everything."

It was only after Stratton hung up that Linda Greer realized what the loose end was: the soldiers. Stratton had never explained about the clay soldiers. He'd never told her how Deputy Minister Wang Bin had done it.

As night shrouded Victoria Peak, a galaxy of bare-bulb lights sprinkled the hillsides of Hong Kong. Jim McCarthy sat in the Foreign Correspondents' Club, sipping gin, imagining a shanty-porch view of the ravenous blast furnace of a city. The poor looking up on the rich; the rich too busy to look down. Once McCarthy had written a feature story about three Hong Kong families who shared a tiny attic in the heart of the city-ten adults, six children, no running water, not even a ceiling fan to stir the air. After he filed the piece, an editor called to ask how many Hong Kong Chinese actually lived like that. Hundreds of thousands, McCarthy had told him; it was right there in the story. The editor told him they were looking for something a little more offbeat, a little sexier.

And so the next day the newspaper sent McCarthy off to do a feature on the manufacture of counterfeit Rubik's cubes. That story made the front page.

McCarthy ordered up another gin-and-tonic. Cursing the idiots-that's what R-and-R is for. Get it out of your system, Jimbo.

The club was bustling and noisy with journalists hell-bent on a night of sloppy decadence-British, Australians, New Zealanders, a Frenchman, even two American network guys. Behind the huge padded bar, stone-faced Cantonese bartenders poured quickly and expertly. As the night wore on, McCarthy knew, the ratio of water to booze would escalate in proportion to the patron's inability to tell the difference. McCarthy, who could hold his liquor and appear to when he couldn't, kept a close eye on the Tanqueray bottle behind the counter. The instant the bartender made a secret move for an off brand, McCarthy would lunge for his throat.

At the big table in the center of the club, one of the American network guys was screaming at the French magazine freelancer. Vietnam again, McCarthy thought.

Every time he was in the place there was a fight about Nam. Almost everybody in the club had covered the war, some of them with a fanaticism otherwise reserved for the World Series or slot machines. Everybody had a story, everybody had a theory, everybody had a pain. The walls of the club had become a Nam shrine: headlines, photographs, tributes to fallen colleagues like Larry Burroughs and Sean Flynn. When Nam had been hot, Hong Kong had been the jump-off point for journalists. The club had been electric then, swirling with stories of war; the war had been the story, and even besotted Fleet Street could focus on it. Now the story was China, McCarthy reflected, huge, ungainly, enigmatic, unsexy China. There was only so much you could write, so many telescopic shots of the Great Wall, before the guys on the desk started hollering for more Rubik's cubes.

McCarthy guided himself to the men's room. Standing at a urinal, he observed that in the eight months since his last visit, there had been only one addition to the wall graffiti: a strikingly accurate likeness of Lady Diana, reclining languorously. The Aussies, McCarthy decided, it had to be. As he was admiring the steady hand of the artist, the door swung open and McCarthy was joined by another man.

"Remember me?"

McCarthy studied the face in the mirror. "Stratton, baby! Gimme a second here and I'll be right with you."

"Take your time," Stratton said.

"Hey," McCarthy said, zipping up, "you don't suppose the princess is really double-jointed?"

"Not like that, Jim."

To make room for Stratton at the bar, McCarthy gently shooed a buxom prostitute who had costumed herself like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Stratton immediately claimed the barstool and ordered a Budweiser.

"Heresy!" McCarthy exclaimed. "Every time I see you you're ordering the wrong beer. What brings you to this seedy place?"

"You do," Stratton said. "I need your help."

After leaving the consulate, he had walked for hours through Hong Kong, dazzled and disoriented, distracted from the city's raucous vitality by his own despair.

Stratton mourned for David, and for Kangmei. Once, in an alley market where old crones cooled their feet in vats of live shrimp, he had spotted her, swaying through the crush of people, an ebony trail of silken hair. He had run, hurdling racks and sidestepping vendors, until he had caught her, taken her by the elbows, turned her and seen a stranger's face. The young woman had smiled shyly and backed away, but Stratton had been too sad to apologize.