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Lucrecia his purchases, offered her a stretch of the satin to touch. She didn’t admire the fabric. Instead she stared at him again, her lips pressed together by the icy muscles of her face.
    There was a loud knocking downstairs. It was Federico Véa. The Lucky Find was crowded with tourists from England who needed Chen Pan’s assistance. What the British considered precious amused Chen Pan: silver letter openers with strangers’ initials and farm animal figurines. They would pay a premium, it seemed, for anything sporting a pig. He noticed that their teeth were small and mossy, like woodland creatures’.
    After they left, Véa complained that nothing at the Lucky Find had a fixed price. How could he be expected to remember figures that changed from one hour to the next?
    “Those pigs you sold for fifty pesos apiece were ten pesos yesterday,” he huffed.
    “Of course they went up!” Chen Pan bellowed back. “The price is what a customer needs to pay!”
    When he returned to his apartment, Víctor Manuel was asleep. Chen Pan arranged the baby’s clothes and the rag horse for him at the foot of the bed. Lucrecia watched him closely.
    “¿Que quiere con nosotros?”
Her voice could have sharpened knives.
    “
Nada.
I want nothing.” Chen Pan wasn’t sure this was true, but could he simply set them free?
    Lucrecia ate her food in silence, gave him no thanks, stiffly rinsed the dishes. Then she slept, fully dressed, curled around her infant son, her coarse hair spread loose on the pillow. Chen Pan forswore his usual cups of red wine and settled on the velvet divan. For once, he insisted that Lady Ban sleep by herself in the kitchen.
    He thought of going to Madame Yvette’s. It was Thursday night and the voluptuous Delmira from Guïnes would be there. Maybe he should take
her
the river of satin. She’d know how to thank him. Chen Pan thought of Delmira’s rained-on earth scent, her kindling thighs. Best of all, Chen Pan loved the salve of her pink padded lips working every inch of his
pinga
before swallowing him whole.
    A bright half-moon shone through the window. The wind raved, tearing the leaves off the palms, altering the sky. Chen Pan recalled how years ago, a fierce windstorm had coated his family’s wheat fields with dust. The same day, his father had claimed that he’d procured a magical herb that would enable him to remember everything he’d ever read. Before he could test its efficacy, the bandits had come. By nightfall they’d severed Father’s head with a sword, parading it on a pole for the entire village to see.
    When you remembered a wind, Chen Pan thought bitterly, it blew forever.
    Had Chen Pan gone mad? Soon that was the word in Chinatown. Over the next few weeks his fellow merchants visited him, trying to dissuade him from his imprudence. Chen Pan listened to them, treated them to warmed wine at the Bottomless Cup in return for their admonitions. But he didn’t change his mind.
    “Too much heat is simmering in your head!” the grocer Pedro Pla Tan warned him. He advised Chen Pan to get a proper wife from China or, better yet, to visit the new whorehouse on Calle Teniente Rey. Why invite trouble by buying this slave? There was a French girl just arrived at Madame Yvette’s, a fourteen-year-old natural blonde who wore red lace panties slit in two. “Her waist is like a roll of new silk,” Pedro Pla Tan sighed.
    The fish seller, Benito Sook, quoted Confucius, who said that it wasn’t until a man reached sixty that his ears obeyed him. It was clear, Sook insisted, that Chen Pan’s ears were nowhere near obedience.
    Sook and the other merchants agreed that Chen Pan’s sentimentality surely would cause a deformity. After all, look at how Evelio Bai’s head had so swollen from his love of flattery that he could barely hold it upright. Or how that Ramón Gu’s arms had stretched to preternatural lengths from his greediness. And what of the sad example of Felipe Yam, who continued to grow