But I didn't pity him. You got what you deserve, I thought, as we rolled his body in the plastic sheet. I felt despicable and mean souled for thinking it, but the words wormed their way through my brain like a murderous whisper working its way through an angry mob. You got what you deserve.

Hassaan had brought a laundry-style trolley basket with him. We wheeled it into the room from the corridor. Maurizio's body was beginning to stiffen up, and we were forced to crunch the legs to fit it into the basket. We wheeled and carried it down two flights of stairs unobserved, and out into the quiet street, where Hassaan's delivery van was parked. His men used the van every day to deliver fish, bread, fruit, vegetables, and kerosene to his shops in the African ghetto. We lifted the wheeled basket into the back of the van, and covered the plastic-wrapped body with loaves of bread, baskets of vegetables, and trays of fish.

"Thanks, Hassaan," I said, shaking his hand and passing him the ten thousand dollars. He stuffed the money into the front of his jacket.

"No," he rumbled in the basso voice that commanded unquestioning respect in his ghetto. "I am very happy to do this work. Now, Lin, we are even. All even."

He nodded to Abdullah and left us, walking half a block to his parked car. Raheem leaned out of the van to flash a wide smile at me before turning over the engine with a flick of his wrist. He drove away without looking back. Hassaan's car followed it a few hundred metres behind. We never heard so much as a murmur about Maurizio again. It was rumoured that Hassaan Obikwa kept a pit in the centre of his slum. Some said the pit was full of rats. Some claimed that it was filled with scuttling crabs. Others swore that he kept huge pigs in the pit. Whatever the hungry creatures were, all the whisperers agreed that they were fed from time to time with a dead man, one piece of the corpse at a time.

"Money you did spend well," Abdullah muttered, with a blank expression, as we watched the van drive away.

We returned to the apartment, and repaired the door locks so the door could be sealed shut when we all left. Abdullah phoned another contact and arranged for two reliable men to visit the apartment on the following day. Their instructions were to bring a saw, cut the couch into pieces, and remove it in rubbish sacks. They were to clean the carpet and leave the apartment in an orderly state, removing every trace of its recent occupants.

He put the phone down, and it rang at once. His contact in Dadar had news. Modena had been discovered by staff in the hotel room, and rushed to hospital. The contact had visited the hospital, and learned that the weak and wounded man had checked himself out of the ward. He was last seen speeding away in a taxi. The doctor who'd attended him doubted that he would survive the night.

"It's weird," I said when Abdullah had related the news. "I knew Modena, you know... I sort of knew him well. I saw him at Leopold's... I don't know... a hundred times. But I can't remember his voice. I can't remember what he sounded like. I can't hear his voice in my head, if you know what I mean."

"I liked him," Abdullah said.

"I'm surprised to hear you say that."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure," I replied. "He was so... so meek."

"He would have made a good soldier."

I raised my eyebrows in greater surprise. Modena wasn't just meek, it seemed to me then, he was a weak man. I couldn't imagine what Abdullah meant. I didn't know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

And when all the loose ends were cut or tied, when Ulla left the city for Germany, and Lisa moved to a new apartment, and the last questions about Modena and Maurizio and Ulla faltered, faded, and ceased, it was the mysteriously vanished Spaniard who claimed my thoughts most often. I made two double-shuffle flights to Delhi and back in the next two weeks. I followed that by flying a seventy-two hour turnaround to Kinshasa with ten new passports for Abdul Ghani's network. I tried to keep busy, tried to focus on the work, but the screen in my mind was filled too often with an image of him, Modena, tied to the bed and staring at Ulla, watching her leave him there, watching her walk away with the money. And gagged. No way to scream. And what he must've thought when she entered the room... I'm saved... And what he must've thought when he saw the terror in her face. And was there something else in her eyes: was it revulsion, or was it more terrible than that? Did she look relieved, perhaps? Did she seem glad to be rid of him? And what did he feel when she turned and walked away and left him there, and closed the door behind her?

When I was in prison I fell in love with a woman who was an actress in a popular television program. She came into the prison to teach classes in acting and theatre for our prison drama group. We clicked, as they say. She was a brilliant actress. I was a writer. She was the physical voice and gesture. I saw my words breathe and move in her. We communicated in the shorthand shared by artists everywhere in the world: rhythm, and elation.

After a time, she told me that she was in love with me. I believed her, and I still believe that it was true. For months we fed the affair with morsels of time stolen from the acting classes, and long letters that I smuggled to her through the illegal jail mail system known as the stiff-letter run.

Then trouble found me and I was thrown, literally, into the punishment unit. I don't know how the screws found out about our romance, but soon after I arrived in the punishment block they began to interrogate me about it. They were furious. They saw her affair with a prisoner, carried on for months under their noses, as a humiliating affront to their authority and, perhaps, to their manhood. They beat me with boots, fists, and batons, trying to force me to admit that she and I had been lovers. They wanted to use my confession as the basis for laying a charge against her. During one beating they held up a photograph of her. It was a smiling publicity still that they'd found in the prison drama group. They told me that all I had to do to stop the beatings was nod my head at it. Just nod your head, they said, holding the picture before my bloody face. Just nod your head, that's all you have to do, and it'll all be over.

I never admitted anything. I held her love in the vault of my heart while they tried to reach it through my skin and my bones.

Then one day, as I sat in my cell after a beating, trying to stop the blood flowing into my mouth from a chipped bone in my cheek and my broken nose, the trapdoor opened in the door of my cell. A letter fluttered in and landed on the floor. The trapdoor shut. I crawled over to the letter, and crawled back to the bed to read it. The letter was from her. It was a Dear John letter. She'd met a man, she said. He was a musician. Her friends had all urged her to break up with me because I was serving a twenty-year sentence in prison, and there was no future in it for either of us. She loved the new man, and she planned to marry him when his concert tour with the symphony orchestra was complete. She hoped I understood. She was sorry, but the letter was goodbye, goodbye forever, and she would never see me again.

Blood dripped onto the page from my broken face. The screws had read the letter, of course, before giving it to me. They laughed outside my door. They laughed. I listened to them as they tried to make a victory of that laughter, and I wondered if her new man, her musician, would stand up under torture for her. Maybe he would. You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.

And somehow, in the weeks after Maurizio's death, Modena's face, or my mind's picture of his gagged and bloody and staring face, became confused with my own memories of that love I'd lost in prison. I wasn't sure why: there didn't seem to be any special reason why Modena's fate would twist itself into the strands of my own. But it did, and I felt a darkness growing within me that was too numb for sorrow and too cold for rage.