We returned to the China World a little before three o’clock and went to the press center. The Unetat staff quieted down as they saw us approach. Even Lisette looked away. We were clearly on someone’s shit list. A message was posted on the board for Arthur. As he read it I could see the tension on his face.

“This should be fun,” he said. “Bézy wants to see me, right now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go see him. I don’t really have a choice, do I? Unless I want to run away, which I don’t. Nope, young Truell, you and I get to play this one out.”

I was already feeling guilty. I had drawn Arthur into something he still didn’t fully understand. “Let’s meet later,” I said. “Five o’clock, back at my hotel. We can take a walk, figure out what’s up.”

He took me by the elbow. “Watch out, Eric,” he said. He was worrying more about me at that moment than about himself. “You have just kicked over a rather large hornet’s nest, and unless you’re careful, you’re going to get stung.”

Lisette escorted me upstairs to Peyron’s suite. She had a look of disappointment on her face. I was a bad boy; I had not performed as she had hoped.

Peyron was waiting for me in his sitting room. He was dressed in a smoking jacket made of embroidered Chinese silk and was smoking a Gitane through a long black cigarette holder. His face was dominated by thick black eyebrows; they were heavy and Mediterranean, almost menacing; the eyes and mouth were lighter, sweeter, finer. It was a face that combined, in these different elements, the contradictions of his country—the face of a virtuous bandit. He looked at me quizzically as I introduced myself; his eyes, under the weight of those eyebrows, seemed to be asking: Can this lanky young man actually be the person who is causing us so much trouble? He dismissed Lisette, but a security man remained in the room, sitting in a chair by the door.

I took out my tape recorder, but he immediately waved me off. “You’ll have a much better interview if we do this off the record,” he said. His English was flawless, almost without accent. Fine, I answered. I wasn’t sure how to begin. It had been a while since I had been a reporter. I felt rusty.

“Back in America, most people seem to expect that Unetat will win the China contract,” I said. “Are they right?”

Peyron smiled and shook his head. In his world, reporters were fools, and I had just added further evidence. Instead of answering my question, he asked one of his own. “Why did you come to Beijing, Mr. Truell?”