The other members of Khader's mafia council were just as suddenly and conveniently absent. Farid was in Dubai. General Sobhan Mahmoud was in Kashmir. No-one answered my knock at Keki Dorabjee's house, and every window was darkened with a drawn shade. Rajubhai, who'd never been known to miss a day at his counting house in the Fort, was visiting a sick relative in Delhi. Even the second-level bosses and lieutenants were out of town or simply unavailable.

Those who remained, the gold agents and currency couriers and passport contacts all over the city, were polite and friendly.

Work for them seemed to continue at the same pace and with the same routines. My own work was just as secure. I was anticipated at every depot, exchange centre, jewellery store, and other point of contact with Khader's empire. Instructions had been left for me with gold dealers, currency men, and the touts who bought and stole passports. I wasn't sure if it was a compliment to me-that I could be relied upon to function in the absence of the council-or that they saw me as so inconsequential in their scheme of things that I didn't merit an explanation.

Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city.

I'd lost Prabaker and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You Are Here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I was that point in space and time where Abdullah's wild violence intersected with Prabaker's happy gentleness.

Adrift, then, and somehow un-defined by their deaths, I realised with unease and surprise how much I'd also come to depend upon Khader and his council of bosses. My interactions with most of them had been cursory, it seemed to me, and yet I missed the reassurance of their presence in the city almost as much as I missed the company of my dead friends.

And I was angry. It took me a while to understand that anger, and to realise that Khaderbhai was its instigator and its target. I blamed him for Abdullah's death: for not protecting him and for not saving him. I couldn't bring myself to believe that Abdullah, the friend I'd loved, was the brutal madman Sapna. But I was ready to believe that Abdel Khader Khan had some connection to Sapna and to the killings. Moreover, I felt betrayed by his desertion of the city. It was as if he'd abandoned me to face... everything... alone. It was a ridiculous notion, of course, and quite self-aggrandising. The truth was that hundreds of Khader's men were still working in Bombay, and I dealt with many of them every day. But still I felt it-betrayed and forsaken. A coldness, formed from doubt and angry fear, began to spread inward toward the core of my feeling for the Khan. I still loved him, and I was still bonded to him as a son to his father, but he was no longer my revered and flawless hero.

A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them. Khader was one of my twelve, but his disguise was always the best. In those abandoned, angry days, as my grieving heart limped into numbing despair, I began to think of him as my enemy; my beloved enemy.

And deal by deal, crime by crime, day by day my will and purpose and hope staggered toward the pit. Lisa Carter pursued and won her contract with Chandra Mehta and Cliff De Souza. For her sake I sat in at the meeting that clinched the deal, and I signed on as her partner. The producers saw my involvement as important. I was their safe conduit to the black money of the Khader Khan mafia-an untapped and virtually inexhaustible resource. They didn't mention that connection, not then, but it was a key factor in their decision to sign on with Lisa. The contract specified that Lisa and I would supply foreign junior artists, as bit players were known, for three major studios. The terms of payment and commissions were set for two years.

After the meeting, Lisa walked me to my bike parked at the sea wall on Marine Drive. We sat together at the precise spot where Abdullah had put his hand on my shoulder, years before, when my mind was filled with the drowning sea. We were lonely, Lisa and I, and at first we talked to one another as lonely people do-in fragments of complaint, and corners clipped from conversations that we'd already had with ourselves, alone.

"He knew it would happen," she said after a long, silent pause.

"That's why he gave me that money in the case. We talked about it. He talked about it. He talked about being killed. You know about the war in Iran? The war with Iraq? He almost got killed there a few times. It got into his head, I'm sure of it. I think he wanted to die, for running away from the war and leaving his friends and family behind. And when it came down to it, if it ever did come down to it, he wanted to go out like that."

"Maybe," I answered her, looking at the sublime, indifferent sea.

"Karla once said we all attempt suicide several times in our lives, and sooner or later we all succeed."

Lisa laughed, because I'd surprised her with the quote, but the laugh ended in a long sigh. She tilted her head to let the wind play with her hair.

"The thing with Ulla," she said quietly, "It's been killing me, Lin. I can't get Modena out of my mind. I'm reading all the papers, every day, looking for something about him-about maybe they found him or something. It's weird... the thing with Maurizio, you know, I was sick with it for weeks after. I used to cry all the time, just walking on the street or reading a book or trying to sleep, and I couldn't eat a meal without feeling sick to my stomach. I couldn't stop thinking about his dead body... and the knife... what it must've felt like, when Ulla pushed the knife into him... But now, all that's kind of faded. It's still there, you know, in the bottom of my gut, but it doesn't freak me out any more. And even Abdullah-I don't know if I'm in shock or denial or whatever, but I don't... let myself think about him. It's like... like I accept it, or something. But Modena-that keeps getting worse. I can't stop thinking about him."

"I see him, too," I muttered. "I see his face, and I wasn't even there in that hotel room. It's not good."

"I should've hit her."

"Ulla?"

"Yes, Ulla!"

"Why?"

"That... callous... bitch! She left him there, tied up in that room. She brought you trouble, and me trouble and... Maurizio ... But when she told us about Modena, I just put my arm around her, and took her to the shower, and looked after her like she'd just told me she hadn't fed her pet goldfish. I should've slapped her or socked her one on the jaw or kicked her ass or something.

Now she's gone, and I'm still freaking out about Modena."

"Some people do that," I said, smiling at the anger in her because I felt it myself. "Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after. They're the canaries, kind of, in the coalmines of our hearts. If we stop feeling sorry for them, when they let us down, we're in deep trouble. And anyway, I didn't get involved to help her. I did it to help you."

"Oh, I know, I know," she sighed. "It's not Ulla's fault. Not really. The Palace messed her up. It messed with her head completely. Everyone who worked for Madame Zhou got messed up in some way. You should've seen Ulla, back then, when she started work there. She was gorgeous, I gotta tell ya. And kind of... innocent... in a way that the rest of us weren't, if you know what I mean. I went there already crazy when I first started work there. But it fucked me up, too. We all... we had to... we did some weird shit there..."