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Sprinkled in: the Chinese bar girls with their fake Prada handbags and Hermès scarves. So old Shanghai. “Whenever I come in here I feel like I’m stepping back to 1935,” he murmured to Camille. “It’s so sordid and elegant at the same time.”
    She smiled at him, and he couldn’t tell if she was agreeing or if she thought he was silly. He shouldn’t have waxed quite so poetic. Maybe he’d overplayed it. “Let’s find my friends,” he said, and they pushed further into the crowd.
    The Bar Rouge was a slightly dangerous place for him to be seen with Camille. A lot of Nadia’s friends came here: models from Eastern Europe trying to work their way up to New York or Paris. If a friend of Nadia’s spotted them he would have a hard time explaining Camille away as his tutor. Although, to be honest, he was tiring of Nadia. Beneath her beauty she was a girl from a small town in the Czech Republic with a high school education, and her three years of modeling hadn’t left her particularly wise in any field other than names on clothing. In her best photos she was exquisitely, impossibly beautiful, and it was that image he was trying to possess, the impossible one. In real life, without makeup and stylists, she was a pretty girl of twenty-three with a taste for brand names and the good sense to stay quiet and let her beauty speak for her.
    He spotted Kell across the roof and started toward him. Kell was shorter than most of the people around him, but his wide body radiated a muscular density. With his thick auburn hair and combative South Philly accent, Harrington saw him as the kind of Celtic horse trader that two thousand years ago would have sold the Romans horses during the day and stolen them back at night. He was talking with a dark-haired man Peter didn’t know and a couple of Chinese girls that Kell had probably picked up. Kell had a taste for the bar girls that wallpapered the Bar Rouge and the M1nt Shanghai and the Yongfoo Elite Club. They were always here, though they could have been excluded easily enough. They had varying degrees of institute English, except for a few university girls who spoke well and could just about put over the idea that they had real careers. They weren’t all prostitutes, exactly. Some were simply girls trying to cobble together a relationship with a rich foreigner from which would spring money, gifts, meals in expensive restaurants, and, the jackpot, a marriage proposal and a permanent round-trip ticket to the rest of the world. Kell always said that if you called them prostitutes, he could make a very good case for calling a lot of the women he’d known back in New York prostitutes also. “The bottom line,” Kell said, “is that we all make the best deal we can with what we’ve got. Money makes me more interesting. A pretty face and hot body make a woman alluring and mysterious. If you put Nadia in an ugly body, would you give her a second thought? Don’t answer, because I don’t want to hear you lie to me.” That was one thing about Kell: you didn’t like what he said, but it was hard to prove him wrong.
    Now Kell was motioning to him, and to Harrington’s surprise the unknown man waved to him as if they knew each other. Harrington was still drawing a blank on him, smiling daftly as he got closer, and then finally, just as they shook hands, the face snapped into place with a surprise that made him rear back a few inches.
    â€œPaul Gutterman! Is that really Paul Gutterman?”
    The newcomer beamed at him. “Peter Harrington! The rock star! Kell told me he had a surprise for me, but I didn’t expect him to pull you out of his hat!”
    â€œKell’s got a big hat. What the hell are you doing in Shanghai?”
    His eyes flickered slightly to the side. “Just seeing the sights, Peter! Everybody talks about Shanghai, and I had to see for myself.” He noticed Camille