"Comrade! The chairman wants to see you right away."

"Hello, Alice." Stratton stifled a grin behind the tea mug. She had become a China groupie, a parody in blue cotton. The pants Chinese women wear with shapeless abandon strained across Alice's ample rump. The jacket was buttoned to the neck and fashionably wrinkled. The flat-brimmed hat bulged in a frustrated attempt to contain a mass of bottle-blond hair. Clinging precariously to the cap was a sheet metal button, red on white. AAAH, it said.

"You could pass for a native," Stratton mocked. Alice Dempsey was not his favorite woman.

"Bought it all at the Friendship Store. Why didn't you come with us?"

"I felt queasy."

"Baloney!" she snorted. "Every chance you get you slip away from us. What have you got against art historians anyway? I'll bet you don't even wear your badge, do you?" She rolled her eyes up toward her own AAAH. American Association of Art Historians.

"It's a fine group, very nice folks," Stratton said with forced politeness.

Alice Dempsey was ugly as sin and as annoying as a rash, but she did have wit and will enough to be a prized member of an excellent faculty in California.

"Fact is, I'd rather walk around than ride on a bus."

"Well, it's rude to our Chinese friends. The guide, little Miss Sun, is always asking about you: 'Where is Professor Stratton?' At least don't forget about the acrobatic show tonight."

"Sure, Alice."

Stratton's heart had not been with the tour since he had bumped into David Wang outside the Summer Palace, just as if they had been on Adams Street in Pittsville, Ohio, or at one of those ad hoc seminars Wang had loved to lead at St. Edward's, stockinged feet curled to the fire in the old library.

It was Stratton's first time in Asia in more than a decade, and he had still not worked out to his own satisfaction why he had come.