With Didier close behind me, I made my way along the secret corridor and back to the blackened stairs.

"I owe you one, Didier," I admitted, grinning into the dark.

"Certainly you do," he replied, and then the stairs crumbled beneath us and we fell, tumbling in and through the burned and broken wood until we hit the hard floor below.

Spluttering and coughing in the cloud of charcoal dust and floating fibres, I wriggled against my fallen friend to sit upright. My neck was stiff and sore, and I'd landed on my wrist and shoulder, spraining them both, but I seemed to be intact and otherwise unbroken. Didier had landed on me, and I heard him moaning grumpily.

"Are you okay, man? Jesus, what a fall! Are you all right?"

"That's it," Didier snarled. "I'm going back up there to _shoot that woman!"

We laughed as we hobbled out of the ruined Palace together, and the laughter stayed with us in the hours that followed while we bathed our wounds and dressed them. Didier gave me a clean shirt and trousers to wear. His wardrobe was surprisingly stylish and colourful for a man who dressed in such a drab uniform at Leopold's. He explained that most of those bright new clothes had been left with him by lovers who'd never returned for them, and I thought of Karla, giving me clothes that had once belonged to her lovers. And the laughter bubbled up anew as we ate a meal together at Leopold's while Didier talked of his most recent romantic disasters. We were laughing still when Vikram Patel ran up the steps with his arms wide in an excited greeting.

"Lin!"

"Vikram!"

I stood just in time to receive his flying hug. Holding my shoulders with his arms straight, he looked me over, frowning at the cuts on my head and face.

"Fuck, man, what happened to you?" he asked. His clothes were still black, and still inspired by the cowboy dream, but they were much more subdued and subtle. That was Lettie's influence, I guessed. Although the new, inexcessive look suited him, I was relieved and comforted to see that his beloved hat still hung on his back from the cord at his throat.

"You should see the other guys," I answered, flicking a glance at Didier.

"So why didn't you tell me you're back, man?"

"I only got back today, and I've been kind of busy. How's Lettie?"

"She's great, yaar," he responded cheerily, taking a seat. "She's going into this business thing, this multi-fuckin-media thing, with Karla and her new boyfriend. It's going to be damn good."

I turned my head to look at Didier, who shrugged non-committally and then glared at Vikram with his teeth bared in fury.

"Shit, man!" Vikram apologised, clearly stricken. "I thought you knew. I thought Didier would've told you, yaar."

"Karla is back in Bombay," Didier explained, silencing Vikram with another stern frown. "She has a new man-a boyfriend, she calls him. His name is Ranjit, but he likes everyone to call him Jeet."

"He's not a bad guy," Vikram added, smiling hopefully. "I think you'll like him, Lin."

"Oh, really, Vikram!" Didier hissed, wincing for me.

"It's okay," I said, smiling at each of them in turn.

I caught the eye of our waiter and nodded to him, gesturing for a new round of drinks. We were silent until they arrived and the drinks were poured, and then, with the glasses in the air, I proposed a toast.

"To Karla!" I proposed. "May she have ten daughters, and may they all marry well!"

"To Karla!" the others echoed, clashing glasses and throwing back the drinks. We were sharing our third toast-to someone's pet dog, I think- when Mahmoud Melbaaf walked into the happy, noisy, chattering restaurant and looked at me with eyes that were still up there, on the frozen mountains of the war.

"What happened to you?" he asked quickly, looking at the cuts on my face and head when I rose to greet him.

"Nothing," I smiled.

"Who did this?" he asked more urgently.

"I had a run-in with Madame Zhou's guys," I answered, and he relaxed a little. "Why? What's up?"

"Nazeer told me you would be here," he whispered through a tight, anguished little frown. "I am happy to find you. Nazeer says to you, don't go anywhere. Don't do anything, for some days. There is a war now-a war of the gangs. They fight for Khader's power.

It is not safe. Stay away from the dundah places."

The word dundah, or business, was the slang term we used for all of Khader's black-market operations in Bombay. They'd become targets, somehow.

"What happened? What's it all about?"

"The traitor, Ghani, is dead," he replied. His voice was calm, but his eyes were hard and determined. "The men with him, his men in Khader's gang, will also die."

"Ghani?"

"Yes. Do you have money, Lin?"

"Sure," I muttered, thinking about Abdul Ghani. He was from Pakistan. That had to be it. The connections to the secret police, the Pakistan ISI, must've been his. Of course it was him.

Of course he was the traitor. Of course he was the one who'd tried to have us arrested and killed in Karachi. That's who Khaled had been talking about on the night before the battle: not Abdullah, but Ghani. Abdul Ghani...

"Do you have a place? A safe place?"

"What? Yes."

"Good," he said, shaking my hand warmly. "Then I will see you here, in three days' time, in the day, at one o'clock, Inshallah."

"Inshallah," I responded, and he walked out. His handsome head was high, in his brave, righteous step, and his back was straight.

I sat down again, avoiding the eyes of my friends until I could disguise the dread that I knew they would read in them.

"What is it?" Didier asked.

"Nothing," I lied, shaking my head and faking a smile. I reached for my glass and lifted it to clink against theirs. "Where were we?"

"We were just going to toast Ranjit's dog," Vikram recalled, grinning widely, "but I'd like to include his horse in that toast, if it's not too late."

"You do not know if he has a horse!" Didier objected.

"We don't know if he's got a dog, either," Vikram pointed out, "but that's not stopping us. To Ranjit's dog!"

"Ranjit's dog!" we all replied.

"And his horse!" Vikram added. "And his neighbour's horse!"

"Ranjit's horse!"

"And... horses... in general!"

"And to lovers, everywhere!" Didier proposed.

"And to lovers... everywhere..." I answered.

But somehow, in some way, for some reason, the love had died in me, and I suddenly realised it, and was suddenly sure. It wasn't completely over, my feeling for Karla. It never is completely over. But there was nothing of the jealousy I once would've felt for the stranger Ranjit. There was no rage against him, and no feeling of hurt inspired by her. I felt numbed and empty sitting there, as if the war, and the loss of Khaderbhai and Khaled, and the face-off with Madame Zhou and her twins had poured anaesthetic into my heart.

And there was, instead of pain, a sense of wonder-I could think of no other way to describe what I was feeling-at Abdul Ghani's treachery. And behind that almost spiritual awe there was a dull, throbbing, fatalistic dread. For even then the bloody future his betrayal had forced on us was unfolding and spilling into our lives, like the sudden blossom of a drought-forced rose in a red, falling rush to dry, unyielding earth.