A dark grey BMW stood idling just outside the door of the terminal building. The trunk lid swung up and a waif-like girl in uniform leapt out of the car to load Margaret’s luggage. The two large cases were almost as big as she was, and she struggled to heave them off the trolley. Margaret moved to help her, but was quickly steered into the back seat by Lily. “Driver get bags. You keep door shut for air-conditioning.” And to reinforce the point, she slammed the door firmly closed. Margaret breathed in the almost-chill air and sank back into the seat. Waves of fatigue washed over her. All she wanted now was her bed.

Lily slid into the front passenger seat. “Okay, so now we go to headquarters Beijing Municipal Police to pick up Mistah Wade. He send apology for not being here to meet you, but he have business there. Then we go straight to People’s University of Public Security and you meet Professah Jiang. Okay? And tonight we have banquet.” Margaret almost groaned. The prospect of bed receded into some distant, misty future. That much-quoted line from Frost’s poem came back to her . . . “and miles to go before I sleep.” Then she frowned, replaying Lily’s words. Did she say banquet?

The BMW sped along the airport expressway, bypassing the toll gates and quickly reaching the outskirts of the city. Margaret watched with amazement through the darkened side windows as the city rose up around her. Towering office blocks, new hotels, trade centres, upscale apartments. Everywhere the traditional single-storey tile-roofed siheyuan courtyards in the narrow hutongs were being demolished to make way for the transition from “developing” country to “first world” status. Whatever Margaret had expected—and she was not certain what her expectations had been—it had not been this. The only thing “Chinese” that she could see in any of it were the ornamental curled eaves grafted on to the tops of skyscrapers. Long gone the huge character posters urging comrades to greater effort on behalf of the motherland. In their place gigantic adverts for Sharp, Fuji, Volvo. Capitalism was the spur now. They passed a McDonald’s burger joint, a blur of red and yellow. Her preconceptions of streets thick with cyclists all uniformly dressed in Mao pyjamas were blown away in the clouds of carbon monoxide issuing from the buses, trucks, taxis and private cars that choked the six lanes of the Third Ring Road as it swept round the eastern fringes of the city. Just like Chicago, she thought. Very “first world.” Except for the bicycle lanes.