“You’ve met the president, of course,” Ashford commented. He picked up a pipe from the coffee table but did not put it in his mouth. “Sorry I missed your White House going-away party. I wasn’t in the neighborhood.”

“Luckily, you’re in this neighborhood where I need your help.” She smiled sweetly. “I’d like to discuss the baby—”

Ashford emitted a guttural croak she couldn’t interpret. “I’d like to put things in context.” He leaned forward, but his girth forced him to straighten up again. He used the unlit pipe to punctuate each word as he spoke. “We are in a country where twenty-two percent of the human race is packed into seven percent of the planet’s arable land. Got it? For all its historical mistakes, misguided idealism and subsequent chaos and human suffering, the communist regime has built a prospering, self-governing and self-sufficient China. It has been feeding its people, which is no minor feat—”

She fidgeted in her seat. “I’m sorry to interrupt; I don’t want a history lesson. I want to adopt this baby.”

“Hear me out.” He removed a tobacco pouch from his inside breast pocket, opened it, pinched some tobacco, and placed it in the pipe. The biting, fresh aroma was not unpleasant. “They also built an industrial base where none had existed and an infrastructure of transport, communications and housing—all of which has lifted the nation out of the grinding poverty and literal starvation of the pre-Revolutionary years.”

“You can go back to the Ming Dynasty. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with my baby.”

“It sure has. You are a goodwill ambassador from the United States to the People’s Republic of China, and a guest of its government. The first order of the day is for you to respect this nation for its accomplishments.”

She sensed danger rushing toward her like a train through a dark tunnel. “Please. Get to the point.”

He retrieved a metal gadget out of another pocket and tamped the pipe bowl. Then he took a ten-inch-long match from a red jeweled box on the table and sent her a questioning look. She shook her head and pointed toward her throat. With a benevolent expression he put down the match, but grabbed the unlit pipe between his ample lips.