Tom Stratton threaded through a knot of noisy Americans. He skirted a gaggle of Japanese clustered around a guide waving a flag. He neatly sidestepped a functionary listlessly pursuing a fifty-pound steel vacuum cleaner. Reaching the stand where an empty-eyed girl protected trays of almost fresh fruit, Stratton bought two apples. She weighed them on a digital scale and made change of his one yuan note with an abacus.

"Ba lou," Stratton told the elevator operator in phrase-book Mandarin. He was eventually deposited on the eighth floor.

The room was a monstrous little brother to the lobby, but already, after a week, it seemed like home. Stratton kicked off his shoes and padded into the bathroom.

The hot water tap snuffled and growled, barked and hissed. On past experience, the chances that the water would be hot when it finally appeared were exactly one in two.

Stratton ate the apples and fingered leaves of tea into a thin-walled mug.

Tenderly, he added water from a thermos on the night table, then threw back the red velvet drapes to let in the last rays of sunshine and sprawled on the bed.

It was one hell of a place, Peking. Stratton had not decided whether to love it or hate it. The city sprawled in all directions, a flat, dusty, one-story town punctuated by brick chimneys thrusting toward the smog like phallic exclamation marks. Graceless monuments of revolutionary architecture dwelt alongside exquisite, gold-roofed survivors of the city's imperial past. Stratton scissored off the bed to watch the evening rush hour flow past a hundred feet below. He had just calculated the bicycle flow at nearly five hundred per minute when the room door flew open.