“You’ve heard her singing,” Li said. “And anyway, she’s not some street-corner hooker. It’s all private deals behind closed bedroom doors in high-class joint-venture hotels. She probably makes a lot of money.” He shrugged. “A girl like that, she’s just making use of the one asset she has—while she still has it.” He looked at her on the stage, eyes closed, living out some sad fantasy, giving her heart and soul to the cheap lyrics of a popular Taiwanese ballad. What arrangement, he wondered, had she arrived at with the manager that allowed her to sing here, escaping for a time from the sordid world of clawing, pawing, sexually frustrated foreign businessmen? He almost felt sorry for her. He had believed her when she told him she loved Ma Yongli. He treats me like no one’s ever treated me before. Like a princess. What he hated was the effect she had on him, turning him from a confident, cocky young man with a wicked, if juvenile, sense of humour into a sycophantic and simpering acolyte, all confidence lost in a welter of self-doubt. There was something going on in Yongli’s head that told him she was too good for him. He couldn’t believe his luck, or that it would last. It was pathetic, and Li hated to see it, and blamed Lotus when perhaps the fault was Yongli’s.

“Well, well, well. I see you took my advice and got yourself a woman after all.” Li turned to find himself looking up into Yongli’s big, round, smiling face. But the smile vanished almost immediately. “In the name of God, what happened to you? Don’t tell me she’s beating you up already?”

Li grinned. “I got on the losing end of an argument with a villain.”

Yongli shook his head in amazement. “Must have been a big bastard to put one over on you.”

“Caught me off guard,” Li said ruefully.

Margaret watched the exchange with interest. She could make an educated guess about the topic of conversation. For a moment she had been nonplussed to find that there was something familiar about the face of the big, bluff man who had arrived at their table. And then she had placed him. He had been with Li that first night at the duck restaurant. The affection between the two men was obvious. He turned and grinned at Margaret, and she grinned back, attracted by the infectious quality of his smile and the laughter in his eyes. “So are you not going to introduce me?” he said to Li in a heavily American-accented English.

“Ma Yongli, this is Dr. Margaret Campbell.”

Yongli took her hand and kissed the back of it lightly with full lips. “Enchanté, madame,” he said. “I learned that in Switzerland. It’s French.”

“I know,” Margaret said. “Et moi, je suis enchantée aussi à faire vôtre connaissance, monsieur.”