She glanced at Lisa, who stood close by, impatient and shielding her eyes, even though the late-afternoon light wasn't bright. She looked at me again, her green eyes puzzled and tired.

"Do we have to talk about this now, in public?"

"No, we don't!" Lisa answered for me.

"I'm not talking to you," I snarled, not looking at her. My eyes were fixed on Karla's face.

"You're not talking to me, either," Karla said firmly. "Not here.

Not now. Let's just go."

"What is this?" I demanded.

"You're over-reacting, Lin."

"I'm over-reacting!" I said, almost shouting, and proving her right. I was angry that she'd told me so little of the truth, and prepared me so poorly for the interview. I was hurt that she didn't trust me enough to give me the whole story. "That's funny, that's really funny."

"Who is this fucking jerk?" Lisa snarled.

"Shut up, Lisa." Karla said, just as Madame Zhou had said it to her, only minutes before. Lisa reacted just as Karla had, with meek, sullen silence.

"I don't want to talk about this now, Lin," Karla said, turning to me with an expression of hard, reluctant disappointment. There are few things people can do with their eyes that hurt more, and I hated to see it. Passers-by stopped near us on the street, staring and eavesdropping openly.

"Look, I know there's a lot more going on here than getting Lisa out of the Palace. What happened up there? How did she... you know, how did she know about us? I'm supposed to be some guy from the embassy, and she starts talking about being in love with you. I don't get it.

And who the hell are Ahmed and Christina? What happened to them?

What was she talking about? One minute you're indestructible, and then the next minute you're breaking down, while Madame Nutcase is babbling away in German or whatever."

"It was Swiss-German, actually," she snapped, a flash of spite in the gleam of her clenched teeth.

"Swiss, Chinese, so what? I just want to know what's going on. I want to help you. I want to know... well, where I stand."

A few more people stopped to join the idlers. One group of three young men stood very close, leaning on one another's shoulders and gawking with aggressive curiosity. The taxi driver who'd brought us there was standing beside his cab, five metres away.

He twirled his handkerchief to fan himself, watching us, smiling.

He was much taller than I'd thought him to be; tall and thin and dressed in a tightly fitting white shirt and trousers. Karla glanced over her shoulder at him. He wiped at his moustache with the red handkerchief, and then tied it as a scarf around his neck. He smiled at her. His strong, white teeth were gleaming.

"Where you're standing is right here, on the street, outside the Palace," Karla said. She was angry and sad and strong-stronger than I was at that moment. I almost hated her for it. "Where I'm sitting is in that cab. Where I'm going is none of your damn business."

She walked away.

"Where the hell did you get that guy?" I heard Lisa say, as they approached the cab.

The taxi driver greeted them, waggling his head happily. When they drove past me, there was music playing, Freeway of Love, and they were laughing. For one explosive moment of writhing fantasy I saw them all together, naked, the taxi driver and Lisa and Karla. It was improbable and ridiculous and I knew it, but the squirm was in my mind, and a white-hot thump of rage went pulsing along the thread of time and fate that connected me to Karla.

Then I remembered that I'd left my boots and clothes at her apartment.

"Hey!" I called after the retreating cab. "My clothes! Karla!"

"Mr. Lin?"

There was a man standing beside me. His face was familiar, but I couldn't place it immediately. "What?"

"Abdel Khader want you, Mr. Lin."

The mention of Khader's name jolted my memory. It was Nazeer, Khaderbhai's driver. The white car was parked nearby.

"How... how did you... what are you doing here?"

"He say you come now. I am driving." He gestured toward the car, and took two little steps to encourage me.

"I don't think so, Nazeer. It's been a long day. You can tell Khaderbhai that-"

"He say you come now," Nazeer said grimly. He wasn't smiling, and I had the feeling that I would have to fight him if I wanted to avoid getting into the car. I was so angry and confused and tired, just then, that I actually considered it for a moment. It might cost less energy, in the long run, to fight with him, I thought, than to go with him. But Nazeer screwed his face into agonised concentration, and spoke with unaccustomed courtesy.

"Khaderbhai told it-_you come, please-like that, Khaderbhai told it-Please come see me, Mr. Lin."

The word please didn't sit well with him. It was clear that, in his view, lord Abdel Khader Khan gave orders that others quickly and gratefully obeyed. But he'd been told to request my company, rather than command it, and the English words he'd just spoken with such visible effort had been carefully memorised. I pictured him driving across the city and repeating the incantation of the foreign words to himself, as uncomfortable and unhappy with them as if they were fragments of prayer from another man's religion.

Alien to him or not, the words had their effect on me, and he looked relieved when I smiled a surrender.

"Okay, Nazeer, okay," I sighed. "We'll go to see Khaderbhai."

He began to open the back door of the car, but I insisted on sitting in the front. As soon as we pulled away from the kerb, he switched on the radio and turned the volume to high, perhaps to prevent conversation. The envelope that Rajan had given me was still in my hands, and I turned it over to examine both sides. It was hand-made paper, pink, and about the size of a magazine cover. There was nothing written on the outside. I tore the corner and opened it to find a black-and-white photograph. It was an interior shot of a room, half-lit, and filled with expensive ornaments from a variety of ages and cultures. In the midst of that self-conscious clutter, a woman sat on a throne-like chair.

She was dressed in an evening gown of extravagant length that spilled to the floor and concealed her feet. One hand rested on an arm of the chair.

The other was poised in a regal wave or an elegant gesture of dismissal. The hair was dark and elaborately coifed, falling in ringlets that framed her round and somewhat plump face. The almond-shaped eyes stared straight into the camera. They wore a faintly neurotic look of startled indignation. The lips of her tiny mouth were pinched in a determined pout that pulled at her weak chin.

A beautiful woman? I didn't think so. And a range of less than lovely impressions stared from that face-haughty, spiteful, frightened, spoiled, self-obsessed. The photograph said she was all of those things, and more. And worse. But there was something else on the photograph, something more repugnant and chilling than the unlovely face. It was the message she'd chosen to stamp in red, block letters, across the bottom. It said: MADAME ZHOU IS