THE TALL, WILLOWY blonde grabs my arm and steers me across the road. Her spiked heels click on the concrete in counterpoint to the swish of her leather-clad legs. Behind us, the Hotel Lisboa looms out of the chill night, looking like something from Steven Spielberg's most fevered UFO dreams.
And indeed, my companion might well be an alien judging by the looks she's getting. She stands about 1.85 metres on her stilettos and her mane is almost platinum. The heads of a passing throng of Chinese men are about level with her torpedo breasts and their mouths pop and gape like goldfish. She guides me into a dark nook beneath a flyover and says in her thick Russian accent: 'We can talk here.'
The smell of stale urine is overpowering. Sweaty-palmed, I fish $500 from my pocket. She grabs it with a deft and practised flick. 'My name is Nadezhda,' she says, 'and I come from Vladivostok.'
Minutes earlier, we had concluded a furtive and hurried negotiation on the pavement. 'You want to give me money just to talk?' she had asked, bemused. Our close encounter won't be her biggest earner tonight, but it might be the most money she's ever made standing up.
Nadezhda is a prostitute. She's been prowling outside the Lisboa for almost a month. She is one of the foot soldiers in what some locals have dubbed Macau's 'whore wars' - a tense stand-off between Russian and mainland prostitutes and their triad handlers. Mainlanders patrol inside the hotel. Russians work the footpath outside. And never the twain shall meet. At least, that's the theory.
In fact, inclement weather or poor patronage occasionally prompts some plucky Russians to cross the demilitarised zone marked by the hotel doors and try their luck inside. And then the fur flies.