Yongli returned to the table with two bottles of champagne in an ice bucket, and four glasses. Lotus gasped in delight, forgetting to speak English. “Champagne! What’s this for, lover?”

“A small celebration.”

“What are we celebrating?”

“Oh, the fact that it’s three in the morning and Big Li’s not tucked up in his bed yet. The fact that he’s out on the town with a woman . . .”

“Aw, shut up,” Li said.

“She’s a doctor,” Lotus protested.

Yongli leaned over confidentially. “That’s what she tells all the boys. Actually she cuts up dead people for a living.”

Lotus looked at Margaret, shocked. Margaret said, “What’s going on? Will somebody speak English?”

“Ma Yongli’s just playing the fool,” Li said.

“No I’m not.” He squeezed the cork out of one of the bottles and started filling the glasses, champagne foaming over brims and spilling on the table. “I’m just proposing a toast.” He pulled his chair in beside Lotus and raised his dripping glass. “To the two most beautiful women in the Xanadu. Probably in Beijing. Maybe even the whole of China.”

Margaret looked around. “What table’s the other one at?”

Lotus laughed and put a hand on her arm and said, as if to an idiot, “He mean me and you.”

Margaret supposed it was unfair to make judgments on someone’s intelligence based on the few words of your language that they knew. She took in Lotus’s almost childish delight at having to set her straight. It was quite possible, she supposed, that Lotus was wondering how someone so stupid could possibly be a doctor. “Oh,” she said, and smiled, raising her glass. “Well, I’ll drink to that.”

And when they had finished the first bottle, Yongli opened the second, and Margaret began to lose track of their conversation. The champagne on top of the vodkas, on top of her lack of sleep, had resulted in the club starting to make slow revolutions around her. They all seemed to be laughing a lot, even Li, who in her experience was not given to laughing easily. She had no real idea of what she was saying. Answering, it seemed, endless silly questions about America, about money, about . . . she wasn’t sure what. Every time she lifted her glass it seemed to have miraculously refilled itself. Was there a third bottle on the table?