"How's the kid?"

"The kid?"

"That little kid you had with you that night, you remember, at Karla's place."

"He's fine. I saw him last week, at his uncle's. He's not so little any more. He's growing fast. He's at a private school. He doesn't like it much, but he'll do okay."

"Do you miss him?"

The signal changed and I kicked the bike into gear, twisting the throttle to send us into the intersection on the staccato throbbing of the engine's growl. I didn't answer her. Of course I missed him. He was a good kid. I missed my daughter. I missed my mother and all of my family. I missed my friends: I missed them all and I was sure, in those desperate years, that I would never see them again. Missing the people I loved was a kind of grieving for me, and it was worse, much worse, for the fact that-so far as I knew - they weren't dead. My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones. And when I was alone in my apartment, night after night, that grieving and missing choked me. There was money in bundles on the dressing table, and there were passports freshly forged that could send me... anywhere. But there was nowhere to go: nowhere that wasn't emptied of meaning and identity and love by the vacuum of those who were missing and lost forever.

I was the fugitive. I was the vanished one. I was the one who was missing; missing in action. But inside the slipstream of my flight, they were the missing ones. Inside my exile, it was the whole world I once knew that was missing. The fugitive kind run, trying against their hearts to annihilate the past, and with it every tell-tale trace of what they were, where they came from, and those who once loved them. And they run into that extinction of themselves, to survive, but they always fail. We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

And from the pink and purple palette of the perished evening, a blue-black night rose up around us as we rode. We plunged with the sea-wind into tunnels of light. The robe of sunset slipped from the shoulders of the city. Lisa's hands moved on my hard skin like the sea; like the surging, swarming caress of the sea.

And for a moment, as we rode together, we were one: one desire, one promise dissolving into compromise, one mouth tasting the trickle of danger and delight. And something-it might've been love, or fear-goaded me to the choice, putting whispers in the warming wind: This is as young, and as free, as you'll ever be.

"I better go."

"Don't you want a coffee or something?" she asked, her hand on the key in the door to her apartment.

"I better go."

"Kavita's really into this story you gave her, about the girls from the slum. The girls who came back from the dead. It's all she talks about. The Blue Sisters, she calls them. I don't know why she calls them that, but it's a pretty cool name."

She was making conversation, holding me there. I looked into the sky that was her eyes.

"I better go."

Two hours later, fully awake, and still feeling the press of her lips in the good-night kiss, I wasn't surprised when the phone rang.

"Can you come over right away?" she said when I answered the call.

I was silent, struggling to find a way to say no that sounded like yes.

"I've been trying to find Abdullah, but he doesn't answer," she went on, and then I heard the flattened, frightened, shell shocked drone in her voice.

"What is it? What's happened?"

"We had some trouble... there was some trouble..."

"Was it Maurizio? Are you okay?"

"He's dead," she mumbled. "I killed him."

"Is anyone there?"

"Anyone?" she repeated vaguely.

"Is anyone else there, in the apartment?"

"No. I mean, yes-Ulla's here, and him, on the floor. That's..."

"Listen!" I commanded, "Lock the door. Don't let anyone in."

"The door's busted," she murmured, her voice weakening. "He smashed the lock off the wall when he busted in here."

"Okay. Push something up against the door-a chair or something.

Keep it closed until I get there."

"Ulla's a mess. She... she's pretty upset."

"It'll be okay. Just block the door. Don't phone anyone else.

Don't speak to anyone, and don't let anyone in. Make two cups of coffee, with lots of milk and sugar-four spoons of sugar-and sit down with Ulla to drink them. Give her a stiff drink, as well, if she needs it. I'm on my way. I'll be there in ten minutes. Hang in there, and stay cool."

Riding the night, cutting into crowded streets, winding the bike into the web of lights, I felt nothing: no fear, no dread, no shiver of excitement. Red-lining a motorcycle means opening the throttle so hard, with every change of gears, that the needle on the rev-counter is twisted all the way round to the red zone of maximum revolutions. And that's what we were doing, all of us, in our different ways, Karla and Didier and Abdullah and I: we were red-lining our lives. And Lisa. And Maurizio. Twisting the needle to the red zone.

A Dutch mercenary in Kinshasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all.

I wished he hadn't said it to me because I knew exactly what he meant. And I rode that night, I soared that night, and the stillness in my heart was almost like being at peace.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In my first knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live, who kills just to survive, will usually come out of it on top. If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike common fistfights, are lost and won in the reasons that remain when the blood begins to run. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.

My first knife fight was in prison. Like most prison fights, it started trivially and ended savagely. My adversary was a fit, strong veteran of many fights. He was a stand-over man, which meant that he mugged weaker men for money and tobacco. He inspired fear in most of the men and, not burdened with judiciousness, he confused that fear with respect. I didn't respect him. I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men.

And I was tough enough. I'd grown up in a rough, working-class neighbourhood, and I'd been fighting all my life. No-one in the prison system knew that then because I wasn't a career criminal, and I had no history. I began my prison experience as a first offender. What's more, I was an intellectual, and I sounded and acted like one. Some men respected that and some ridiculed it, but none of them feared it. Nevertheless, the long prison sentence that I was serving-twenty years at hard labour for armed robberies-gave most of them pause. I was a dark horse. No one knew how I would respond to a real test, and more than a few were curious about it.

The test, when it did come, was flashing steel, and broken teeth, and eyes rolling wide and wild as a frenzied dog. He attacked me in the prison laundry, the one place not observed directly by guards patrolling catwalks between the gun towers. It was the kind of unprovoked surprise attack that's known in prison slang as a sneak-go. He was armed with a steel table knife, sharpened with endlessly malignant patience on the stone floor of his cell.