"That's my point. You love clothes so much that you can't bear to wear anything but the few things that feel just right."

I fidgeted with the prickly collar of the shirt.

"Well, Karla, these clothes are a long way from just right. How come you've got so many men's clothes at your place, anyway?

You've got more men's clothes than I have."

"The last two guys who lived with me left in kind of a hurry."

"So much of a hurry that they left their clothes behind?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"One of them... got very busy," she said quietly.

"Busy doing what?"

"He was breaking a mess of laws, so he probably wouldn't want me to talk about it."

"Did you kick him out?"

"No."

She said it flatly, but with such a clear sense of regret that I let it go.

"And... the other guy?"

"You don't want to know."

I did want to know, but she turned her face away to stare out the window, and there was a finality in the gesture that warned and prohibited. I'd heard that Karla had once lived with someone named Ahmed, an Afghan. People didn't talk about it much, and I'd assumed that they'd broken up years before. In the year that I knew her, she'd lived alone in the apartment, and I hadn't realised until that moment how deeply that image of her had insinuated itself into my sense of who she was and how she lived.

Despite her protest that she didn't like to be alone, I'd thought of her as one of those people who never lived with others: someone who let people visit or even stay overnight, but never more than that.

I looked at the back of her head, at the small part of her profile, at the barely perceptible bump of her breasts beneath the green shawl, and the long, thin fingers making prayer in her lap, and I couldn't imagine her living with someone. Breakfast and bare backs, bathroom noises and bad moods, domestic and demi married: it was impossible to see her in that. Perversely, I found it easier to imagine Ahmed, the Afghan roommate I'd never met, than it was to imagine her as anything but alone and... complete.

We sat in silence for five minutes, a silence calibrated by the slow metronome of the taxi's meter. An orange banner hanging from the dashboard of the car proclaimed that the driver, like many others in Bombay, was from Uttar Pradesh, a large and populous state in India's north-east. Our slow progress through the traffic jam gave him many chances to study us in the rear-vision mirror. He was intrigued. Karla had spoken to him in fluent Hindi, giving him precise, street-by-street directions to the Palace. We were foreigners who behaved like locals. He decided to test us.

"Sister-fucking traffic!" he muttered in street Hindi, as if to himself, but his eyes never left the mirror. "The whole fucking city is constipated today."

"A twenty-rupee tip might make a good laxative," Karla fired back, in Hindi. "What are you doing, renting this taxi by the hour? Get a move on, brother!"

"Yes, miss!" the driver replied in English, through delighted laughter. He applied himself with more energy to bullying his way through the traffic.

"So what did happen to him?" I asked her.

"To who?"

"To the other guy you lived with-the one who didn't break a mess of laws."

"He died, if you must know," she said, her teeth clenched.

"So... how did he die?"

"They say he poisoned himself."

"They say?"

"Yeah," she sighed, looking away to let her eyes drift in the shuffle of people on the street.

We drove in silence for a few moments, and then I had to speak.

"Which... which one of them owned this outfit I'm wearing? The law-breaking one, or the dead one?"

"The dead one."

"O... kay."

"I bought it for him to get buried in."

"Shit!"

"Shit... what?" she demanded, turning to face me again, and frowning hard.

"Shit... nothing... but remind me to get the name of your dry cleaner."

"We didn't need it. They buried him in... in a different outfit of clothes. I bought the suit, but in the end we didn't use it."

"I see..."

"I told you that you didn't want to know."

"No, no, it's okay," I mumbled, and in fact I felt a cruel, secret relief that the former lover was dead, gone, no competition to me. I was too young, then, to know that dead lovers are the toughest rivals.

"Still, Karla, I don't mean to be picky, but you've got to admit it's just a tad creepy-we're off on a dangerous mission, and I'm sitting here in a dead guy's burial suit."

"You're just being superstitious."

"No I'm not."

"Yes you are."

"I'm not superstitious."

"Yes you are."

"No I'm not."

"Of course you are!" she said, giving me her first real smile since we'd started in the taxi. "Everyone in the whole world is superstitious."

"I don't want to fight about it. It might be bad luck."

"Don't worry," she laughed. "We'll be okay. Look, here are your business cards. Madame Zhou likes to collect them. She'll ask you for one. And she'll keep it, in case she needs a favour from you.

But if it ever comes to that, she'll find that you're long gone from the embassy."

The cards were made of pearl-white, textured, linen paper, and the words were embossed in liquid black italic. They declared that Gilbert Parker was a consular under-secretary at the embassy of the United States of America.

"Gilbert?" I grunted.

"So what?"

"So, this taxi crashes, and they gouge my body out of the wreckage, wearing these clothes, and they identify me as Gilbert.

I'm not feeling any better about this, Karla, I have to say."

"Well, you'll have to settle for Gilbert at the moment. There really is a Gilbert Parker at the embassy. His tour of duty in Bombay finishes today. That's why we picked him-he goes back to the States tonight. So everything will check out okay. I don't think she'll be checking up on you too much, anyway. Maybe a phone call, but she might not even do that. If she wants to get in touch with you, she'll do it through me. She had some trouble with the British embassy last year. It cost her plenty. And a German diplomat got into a real mess at the Palace a few months ago. She had to call in a lot of dues to cover that up. The embassies are the only people who can really hurt her, so she won't be pushing it. Just be polite and firm when you speak to her. And speak some Hindi. She'll expect it. And it'll smooth over any trouble with your accent.

That's one of the reasons why I asked you to help me with this, you know? You've picked up a lot of Hindi, for someone who's only been here a year."

"Fourteen months," I corrected her, feeling slighted by her shorter estimate. "Two months when I first got to Bombay, six months in Prabaker's village, and now nearly six months in the slum. Fourteen months."

"Yes... okay... fourteen months."

"I thought no-one got to meet this Madame Zhou," I said, hoping to shift the puzzled, uncomfortable frown from her features. "You said she kept herself hidden away, and never talked to anyone."

"That's true, but it's a little more complicated than that,"

Karla replied, softly. A meditation of memories clouded her eyes for a moment, but then she concentrated again with obvious effort. "She lives on the top floor, and has everything she needs up there. She never goes out. She has two servants who bring food and clothes and stuff up to her. She can move around the building without being seen because there's a lot of hidden passageways and staircases. She can look in on most of the rooms through two way mirrors or metal air vents. She likes to watch. Sometimes she talks to people through a screen. You can't see her, but she can see you."

"So how does anyone know what she looks like?"

"Her photographer."

"Her what?"

"She has photographs taken of herself. A new one, every month or so. She gives them out to favoured clients."