And he stepped aside with a swirl of cloak, pulling out a chair for her. 
They were in the corner of the banquet hall. Sitting on the opposite side of 
the table, his back to a large marble-silled window, the illuminated Bund and 
the mediatronic cacophony of Pudong spilling bloody light across the glossy 
shoulder-pads of his suit, was a young African man
in dreadlocks, wearing dark glasses with minuscule circular lenses held in some 
kind of ostentatiously complex metallic space grid. Sitting next to him, but 
hardly noticed by Miranda, was a Nipponese businessman wearing a dark formal 
kimono and smoking what smelled like an old-fashioned, fully carcinogenic 
cigar.