Lin could feel the man's eyes on the back of his skull, analyzing him, wondering what a well-dressed, up and coming Chinese businessman could want with a scruffy, dirty piece of baggage such as that.
Lin wondered too.
* * *
It was the newspaper, he decided later.
Had she asked for soap, or money, or offered herself, Lin would not have given her a second thought. But her odd blue eyes—Lin still couldn't think of blue eyes but as being odd full of greedy speculation, while she asked for the newspaper that he carried folded atop his briefcase. That had disturbed his thoughts.
Later he sat in the restaurant of the hotel, across a grease-smeared table from the Englishwoman and watched her greedily turn the pages of the newspaper, while the steak he'd bought her lay forgotten in its chipped plate, at the side of the table.
"You're not eating," he said.
He himself had scant appetite. Beef in England always smelled spoiled and was a color only slightly lighter than gunmetal grey. The result of being imported over who knew what distances.
But he knew how scant meat of any kind was in England and what a treat the locals considered it.
Strange, he thought. He'd come in with Dragon Clouds Unlimited, a cigarette factory. Unable