But I couldn't ask them. Not now.

'Discreetly,' he said, Billy said, not looking at me. 'I can't take anyone in my van, see.'

'Look, I'm going to be frank with you, Billy. I can't use a cab because they're out in front of the hotel and he's waiting there for me.'

'Who is?'

'Her old man.'

Big grin now, bright with the light of understanding.

'You Australian, are you?'

'Limey.'

'My dad was over there once, in the war. Kenley. See, I can't ride anybody in my van. Rules.' Taking for the first time a glance at me, conspiratorially, emboldened by my not being, after all, abnormal, 'little bit of love in the afternoon, was it?'

I started with twenty but he didn't give it more than a flick of his eye, taking two more crates in and coming back whistling, a man with a sense of covert communication. I gave him fifty and he looked at it long enough to make it seem he was giving it his careful consideration, and then folded it and put it into his worn plastic wallet.

'Mind you don't slip, okay? It's a metal floor.' Gave me a push and slammed the two doors and dropped the bar and went round to the cab and got in and started up.

Darkness and the ammoniac reek of fish, the empty crates shifting as the van took the turns, a faint whistling from the cab, and deep within me the feeling of having missed the road, of going in the wrong direction, the nagging urge to turn back.

'Cab rank across there, mate,' stressing the 'mate', proud of the bit of Cockney slang he'd picked up from his dad. We were four blocks from the hotel, on NW 6th Street. 'Wanna take a bit of advice? Go for the single chicks, they're cheaper in the long run.'

This was at 8:14.

'The 1100 block at Riverside Way.'

'You don't know the address?'

'That's close enough.'

Cracked black vinyl and the scent of stale cigarette-stubs, a blue silk garter thick with dust hanging from the driving mirror, Albert Miguel Yglesias on the identification plaque, the photograph nothing like his face.

'You wanna good place to eat?'

'No.'

'I know a good place to eat. Fillipo Grill, fantastic, oysters this big!'

Said really.

In twenty minutes we turned east into the 1100 block and I got out.

'Open till midnight, great bar too, fantastic!'

8:41. The street was quiet, the restaurants full.

I began walking.

They would expect me there, at 1330 West Riverside Way, sometime before midnight, not later. But they might also expect me to hesitate, as I grew close, even to change my mind. They might, then, have people out here in the streets, in the rendezvous zone, to trap me, cut me off, if in point of fact I decided to turn and go back the way I had come. So I took in the environment as I walked. In the cab I would have had no chance of going back, if Albert Miguel Yglesias had dropped me anywhere in the 1300 block. Approaching on foot, I would have a chance.

Step after step, observe.

A late signal going in, perhaps: Attempted to phone the executive between 20:05 and 20:40 hours but received no answer.

The evening air sticky on the face: the noon temperature had been ninety-three degrees and the hygrometer touching seventy-five. Under my clothes I was shivering again – it came in spasms, triggered by each new onset of nerves. Do you know what I felt like on this warm Miami evening? I felt like a man on his way to be hanged.

Attempted to have a visit made to the executive at 20:45. There was no answer to the knock. Forced entry revealed the room empty, no sign of disturbance, no message left.

People window shopping. The sidewalks were wide here and observation was easy because of so many reflecting glass surfaces and the lack of shadow. He was a white Caucasian, thirty, medium build, a slow walk with a certain degree of strut.

So what decided you, Ferris would ask me, to leave the hotel without notifying the support?

But I wouldn't be seeing Ferris again.

The sky bore down across the tops of the tall buildings, its weight buckling them, bearing down through the thick and steamy air to press on my head, to crush me, while the street's perspective widened, bellying out like a scene through a fish-eye lens, but then I suppose it had been a long day and the bullets had come very close and there's always, you know, a shift in the state of consciousness when you're still walking about, still doing ordinary things, when by a small margin you have just missed being carried to the ice cold slab and filled with formaldehyde. I was feeling the reaction, that was all.

Not feeling reaction.

The voice of panic, vigorously to be ignored.

He was very close now and I moved to the left along the sidewalk and picked him up again in the window standing at an angle in a shop entrance way.

I hadn't seen him before, on the quay or anywhere in the street.

On my way, yes, to be hanged, in other words following a course that would take me to an imminent death, a course from which there was no possible deviation. A feeling of inexorability, of karma being fulfilled. It didn't take away fear, terror, but it took away responsibility.

These were my instructions, to make the rendezvous.

Your instructions come only from the Bureau.

But things have changed.

I swung round very fast and he almost walked into me, had to jump sideways, his eyes round, surprised.

'Are you okay?'

The way, I suppose, the way, I am certain, actually, I was looking at him.

'No.' That is what I said to him, and I heard it. I was not okay, and things had gone terribly wrong.

'You need some help?'

But he was already eager to go, not wanting contact, involvement, with this cokehead, this junkie. He was, you understand, no more like an opposition agent of any kind than Mickey Mouse, and it had just happened that we'd been moving at about the same speed along the street. It happens all the time.

'No.'

No help.

But he'd already gone, and I stood there with my head bared to the overwhelming weight of the sky and knew that I couldn't in fact shrug off all responsibility, because that would indeed lead to the mortuary and the formaldehyde, but oh my God you can have no idea how far it was to the telephone at the end of the block, how many desperate encounters were played out as the insubstantial figures leapt from nowhere and from everywhere, how many times they came for me, squealing for my blood as they dragged me to the hangman, the stink of fish sickening to the stomach, his madman's inane grin, go for the single chicks, they're cheaper, lurching on my nerveless legs to the end, all the way to the end of the block with oysters this big as the sky crashed at last across the roaring chasm of the street and I reached the phone-box, smashing away the flimsy aluminium panel with my shoulder to break the momentum, digging for a quarter and forcing it into the slot, a pale girl with pimples staring for a little time before she hurried past, so that I buried myself against the phone-booth, into it, in it, my back to the street and the people, hunched like a pariah dog, like a leper 'Yes?'

Ferris.

1330 West Riverside Way. At any time before midnight. Not later than that.

'Yes?'

Those are your instructions.

Of course. Put the phone down, make the rendezvous. Of course. Without question.

'Who is that? I am listening.'

I tell you I had to use physical force to keep the phone pressed to my head while the other force did everything it could to pull it away and slam it across the hooks. I remember that very clearly.

'I need – ' the breath blocking in my throat.

'Yes? You need?'

Force countering force while I waited in limbo for the outcome, the sweat drenching my body as the street reeled, roared, swept over me.