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gem.”
    Alexei closed his computer and slipped it down into his pack. He slid his handset back into the outside pocket, then found a place for the pouch of remaining profile tests. Lao Ban chuckled and shook his head as he watched the big Russian use a sling to secure the tiny infant to his chest.
    “You want nurse, too? I sell you one of these cheap. Very good price. She take care of baby and take care of you. I guarantee you like.”
    “I don’t need a nurse,” Alexei said.
    He put his coat on over the sling, but left it open. The baby’s head was propped up and positioned so she could see the world out ahead of her. Alexei lifted his pack, and carefully hung the straps from his shoulders.
    “If this works out,” Alexei said, “I’ll be back for more.”
    “Yes, you come back,” Lao Ban said. “If you not come back, maybe I come find you.”
    Alexei was already on his way to the stairs, but he stopped. “What did you say?”
    “I say, you make me a lot of money. Maybe I come find you when I want more.”
    Alexei turned slowly and faced Lao Ban. He looked directly into the Chinese man’s eyes. “Here’s another Chinese proverb,” he said. “Fortune does not come twice. Misfortune does not come alone.”
    Alexei waited for Lao Ban’s wild smile to falter before he turned again to descend.
    It was cold outside, and he zipped his coat up to the baby’s chin and blew into his hands. He crossed the street to the opposite corner, checkedhis watch, and looked up and down the street. Almost everyone was inside, but he could see at least half a dozen deer in the streets and on the sidewalks. While the indigenous big cats of the region were hunted for their pelts and incinerated as their territories were slashed and burned for farmland, the East Asian spotted deer—not unlike the rat and the cockroach and the pigeon before it—had embraced urbanization. The bucks knew their velvet-covered antlers prevented them from getting their heads down into the trash bins, and had therefore learned to push the barrels over with enough force to scatter the refuse along the sidewalk. The doe, on the other hand, preferred to elicit handouts. As a slender female brazenly approached, Alexei squatted, lifted the thick material of his pant leg, and drew a long, stone-handled serrated blade from a sheath sewn into his boot. As he stood back up, the deer bowed her head toward his coat pocket, her neck bent and her skin tight over her thick veins. There was a distended tick embedded in the animal’s ear and Alexei could see lice swarming over its scabbed skin and through its short copper hair. The baby watched with wide dark eyes.
    The deer’s attention was drawn to Alexei’s left hand as he reached down into his coat. When he pulled it back out, he was holding a small, hard, yellow apple. He cautiously sliced it through the middle, returned his knife to his boot, and allowed the animal to take her share off his open and extended palm.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Fifteen young girls are sitting cross-legged on blankets and cushions forming a semicircle in the common room of the penthouse apartment. Ki is the focus. She is sitting directly on the cream and rose Italian marble floor, leaning back against the raised hearth of the ceramic and plasma fireplace. She is wearing tight pink pajama bottoms and a short floral baby-doll top. The girls are all pitched forward, delighted and mesmerized by what Ki has been showing them.
    Months ago, while organizing the house library, Ki found a book on coin tricks and convinced a few of the house moms to bring her some money with which to practice. During the first act of her show, she used variations of the “French drop” and the “pinch vanish” to take coins from her right hand with her left where she shook, crushed, or blew on them before revealing—finger by finger—that they were gone. She then pulled the coins out of the air with her right hand, or produced them with a flourish from beneath