This set off a long, hushed caucus among the Chinese parties. At last Cindy very antsily explained that due to a legal dispute between the team's owner and the World Trade, the hotel issue was a matter of some delicacy.

Marbury offered another proposal: Perhaps the team could arrange long-term quarters. "A three-bedroom apartment," said Marbury. "With TVs and a chef, and a maid to come every day. I could do that as well. I'm gonna be here for three years. It'd probably be cheaper to rent a place anyway."

But Mr. Song pursed his mouth and nodded sourly, giving the impression that he was not in the habit of indulging fussy requests from players. Marbury's Chinese teammates, by way of comparison, didn't get to stay in a hotel at all. They lived by the team's rusting gym on the outskirts of town, in a dormitory of pink concrete with a big pile of coal in the yard.

Mr. Song agreed to take up the hotel upgrade—a $14-a-night proposition—with his boss, then he turned the conversation to basketball. The Brave Dragons, he said, were promising this year, having recently acquired a second American player, Jamal Sampson, late of the Denver Nuggets. The most important thing, Mr. Song said through Cindy, was that the fourteenth-ranked team finish in the top eight.

Marbury gave him a straight look and held up his index finger. "Number one," he said.

And Cindy went, "Yeeeeeeeeahh," part weird cheer, part dubious meow. "So you will, you will lead our team to the top eight? You promise that?"

"Don't worry," Marbury said.

"Okay! We believe you! Ha! Ha!" said Cindy, in a tone of forced enthusiasm. "So, ah, now Mr. Song want to know, before you come to China, you maintain the trainings?"

She cast a nervous eye over Marbury's middle, which was a tad softer and rounder than it had looked beneath the lights at Madison Square Garden. Marbury nodded.

"Every day?"

"Listen," said Marbury. "All you need to know: When December 10 comes, when they throw the basketball up, I'll be ready."

"Auch!" said Mr. Song, though whether he meant, "Auch—what a relief" or "Auch—this person is completely full of baloney" was not immediately clear.

"We believe in you!" cried Cindy.

"No problem," said Marbury. "All love."

···

Waking up in Taiyuan, a city of 3.5 million located 250 miles southwest of Beijing, was breathtaking in the literal sense. The city lay under an ochre fog of startling opacity. Even behind the fid panes of my hotel windows, the air had a dizzying reek you could faithfully reproduce by sealing your head in a sack of Match Light charcoal. A walk around the neighborhood turned up symptoms of an industrial economy in transition: lots of people driving Mercedeses and Lexuses, yet still more people carrying multiple offspring and lumber on mopeds that seemed to be made mostly of tape. Sephora stores and Cadillac dealerships verged on aged tracts of cratelike concrete buildings Pompeian with particulate grime. Not a single window you couldn't have graffitied with a fingertip.

Inspecting the local firmament, I could see no birds in flight. "If you see one, let me know," said Marbury when I told him this. In fact, during my week in Taiyuan, I would not see a bird, or a rat, or an ant, or a cockroach, or any living creatures at all, except for human beings and a substantial population of upsettingly adorable and horny stray lapdogs.

Still, in the city's defense, "shithole," with its connotations of biotic robustness, was an unfair epithet. It was more like an engine, which was how Marbury regarded his adoptive home. Riding through Taiyuan, he pointed out the gleaming condominium towers going up along the custard-colored Fen River, and the storefronts where he imagined Starbury outlets opening their doors a few months from now. "This is one of the richest cities in China, and I'm here to be a part of it," he told me several times. The Starbury Corporation's future projects here might range from skyscraper construction to lumber and cotton, to "anything that's got anything to do with something being made." Even in the coal soot itself, Marbury saw future riches. "You just gave me an idea," he replied when I marveled at Taiyuan's grime. "Mobile car washes. Give these people a taste for being clean. I'm gonna get the schematics on that immediately."