AN EVENING IN SHANGHAI

Hmm, sounded suspicious. For starters, what 25-year-olds drive around Shanghai in limos, except for thugs? Napoleon, in his leather jacket, leather hat and Mao collar, did look like someone trying to play the role of a mob kingpin -- albeit a short, skinny kingpin.

I could easily take him in a fistfight. Question: Did I want to?

Sure I wanted adventure, but this isn't what I had in mind. I'd imagined an enchanting weekend of strolling through street markets and eating spicy dumplings. Club-hopping with tough guys six inches shorter than me? Not on the itinerary.

Napoleon was persistent, and you had to admire his confidence. "Do you have a boyfriend?" he kept asking Marcy. He barely came up to her bosom.

He rattled off the places he'd take us: bars full of Shanghai's beautiful people -- filmmakers and novelists from Beijing, Hong Kong, "even Paris," he said. Jimmy said nothing at all. He just stood there and stared at the two of us, a pair of white-skinned, round-eyed trophy dates from Mars.

Still, Marcy was ready to get in the car. She glanced meaningfully at me and raised just one of her eyebrows. The message was clear: Only an idiot would hesitate for even another second.

I surveyed the limo -- long, foreboding and black, except for its highly incongruous white ruffled curtains on the windows -- and thought back for a minute about how I'd arrived at this predicament.

We’d flown in to Shanghai the night before and immediately checked into the Peace Hotel, a crumbling 1920s gem on the riverfront and an icon of the days when Shanghai was truly the Paris of the East. Now, of course, the Peace Hotel is full of tourists. But the decadence-in-decline feel lingers. It's as if F. Scott Fitzgerald could walk around the very next corner. Or perhaps a double agent from the Cold War.

The flip side of the hotel's fading glory, however, is the faulty plumbing. Don't ask how I know this, but the first thing a traveler should always do when arriving in a foreign land is give the toilet a quick test-flush. When traveling abroad, a toilet represents a touchstone of normalcy -- not that you actually want to touch it. You simply want to confirm that it will be ready to hold up its end of the bargain later on, when the stakes are higher.

Anyway, our first toilet in Shanghai wasn't inspiring confidence. A pair of shy young bellhops, decked out in shabby red hats and ill-fitting gold-buttoned coats, smiled and snickered as the two towering Western women flushed the toilets in room after room after room.

Small wonder that, afterward, we were perfectly happy to vegetate and spend the rest of the evening listening to Maria sing about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

So much for the first night.

Which brings us to night number two -- and the promise of real adventure. We spent the afternoon hiking all the way across town, maps in hand, toward a tiny jazz bar a friend in Hong Kong had steered us to. On the way, we were stared at so hard, I think some people's eyeballs must have actually fallen out of their faces and rolled down the sidewalks.

People sized me up with curiosity, but when they spotted Marcy, heads really whipsawed. Marcy is six-feet-two, with long blond hair and blue eyes -- pretty much the polar opposite of almost everyone within thousands of miles.

We stopped along the way to eat some noodles at a street stall -- Marcy's idea, not mine. As soon as we sat down at our sidewalk table, I found a bug in my meal. Goodbye, noodles. But Marcy, undaunted, polished hers off. A small but telling sign of the differences in our personalities, I thought.

When we finally arrived at the club, a trio of Rastafarians was playing Louis Armstrong tunes. I was hungry after the noodle fiasco, so we sat down and ordered drinks and dumplings. Our drinks arrived quickly -- and so did Jimmy and Napoleon.

Like everyone else, they couldn't tear their eyes from Marcy. We struck up a conversation, and gradually, a crowd settled in at our table. I began to wish we were back watching Julie Andrews again. Eating dumplings with chopsticks is tough enough, even without an audience.

But as the evening grew long, the group expanded and became increasingly mesmerizing. Beautiful, bored women in spaghetti straps. Beautiful men with flawlessly tousled hair. Dubious characters and their posses.

Around midnight, the bar closed. Finally, back to the Peace Hotel, I thought to myself.

But no. Instead, there we were, standing beside a weird limo with lacy curtains, with a 25-year-old Chinese kid in a leather hat rolling his eyes at my indecision.

A moment of awkward silence passed. The midnight air was so foggy and thick with the pollution of a million Chinese factories, you could barely see across the street.

I made my call. Taking a deep breath, I was just about to tell Marcy, "No way am I getting into this hearse," when Napoleon decided it was time to fire off his favorite question again.

"Marcy, do you have a boyfriend?" he asked, trying to stand up extra tall.

"Napoleon, we've discussed this," Marcy said. Then she looked at me. "Now let's go!"

And with that, I figured, why not? And piled into the backseat.