It was very quiet except for the sawing of my breath. I didn't hear anything but sensed a movement to my right, and looked up at the man sitting on the stairs holding the gun.

Chapter Eight: 555

'Put that bloody thing away,' I told him.

I meant it. I wasn't joking.

He'd had me worried for a second, till I'd recognized him. I'd thought it was more trouble and I wasn't ready for it.

He was Ferris.

'Tried to tread on you,' he said, 'did they?'

He gave a wintry little smile, putting the gun away.

Ferris had directed me in Hanover, last time. He was sitting on the steep flight of stairs, thin and sandy and owlish, an eccentric don, his hair all over the place, what was left of it.

'Why didn't you do it?' I asked him, still annoyed at the start he'd given me.

'You wouldn't keep still.'

I suppose he didn't want to make a noise, either, not that sort of noise. And he might have got Chiang in the leg or somewhere. He would only have done it if he'd seen I couldn't do it myself: that was Ferris, he always made you bloody well work for your living.

My breath went on sawing. I'd used an awful lot of muscle in the last few seconds and I needed the oxygen back and my lungs were going like bellows. When I could I said:

'Chiang. What kind of venom is it?'

He didn't answer. He was standing quietly looking down at the boy on the floor, his expression benign. It could have been Chiang who'd done something at the last minute, thinking I couldn't manage: he was a belt, the briefing said. Maybe I'd ask Ferris. Or maybe I didn't want to know.

'Chiang.' My nerves were still sensitive.

His head snapped up.

'What kind of venom have these things got?'

'Venom?'

'Poison — come on, I want to know if it's — '

'No poison.' He shook his head. 'Snake not venomous, no. Law not allow, in shops.' He took a step towards me and dragged my sleeve back, his fingers very strong. There were fang marks all over the place and I tried not to think about it. 'No trouble,' he said. 'It happen sometimes with me too, is like little nails.' He called suddenly in the direction of the stairs. 'Chih-chi!' As he moved impatiently towards the stairs I caught the smell of the incense that clung to his gown. I straightened my back slowly, letting the nerves explore the bones and ligaments. There didn't seem to be anything wrong, just the hand burning, and the punctures in the arm.

Chiang moved past me again, taking the boy's wrists and dragging him through the broken glass, leaving him behind the counter. One of them slid across the floor in a series of smooth curves, black and yellow, and I said:

'Ferris. Where are we going to talk?'

'Up here.'

I walked to the stairs, watching for another one and ready to kick out. A girl was coming down in a cheongsam, not looking at me, looking at Chiang. He spoke to her in Cantonese, with no particular urgency in his tone. They had to see to the Saiyan, his hand was bleeding, then they had to clear up all this mess and find the reptiles, they would keep the door locked, so forth, and she kept saying yes, yes, quickly and repetitively like the chatter of a bird, expressing her fright at the mess, looking down at my hand, then fleetingly up at my face. She went back up the stairs.

'Chiang,' Ferris said. 'What about him?'

'Ah!' He threw his head back quickly. 'I will make all in order.' He came shuffling quickly to the stairs, scattering bits of glass and flicking the dead snake aside with his pointed shoe, folding his strong stubby hands and speaking softly and emphatically to Ferris. 'Will cost money, to take him long way and bury with fung shui. There will be many others to pay, tea-money and for not speaking of this. Will cost two thousand dollars,' watching our faces to catch our reaction.

'You will be paid,' Ferris said thinly, 'what London decides you are to be paid.' I remembered he hated mercenaries, even though we had to depend on them for so many things. It was nothing to do with morality: he knew they were dangerous. 'And there will be no fung shui, because he was our enemy, not yours. And there will not be «many» others to help. You will use one other, and you make damned sure he's deaf, blind and dumb. You should be ashamed of yourself: in London Mr Chiang is not said to be a greedy person. I would not like to report otherwise.'

Chiang gave a breathy little laugh to cover his loss of face, and said nothing more. Ferris didn't look at me, but turned and went up the stairs. The girl, Chih-chi, was at the top, beckoning me to follow her. She sat me on a wicker linen-basket in a bathroom on the first floor, with my wrist across the edge of the cracked handbasin, and used running water and a pair of eyebrow tweezers while I looked at the two rust stains running down beneath the taps, and the toothbrush and Lifebuoy soap and the bottle of black hair dye, one of Mr Chiang's little secrets. She didn't speak English, or was too shy, so we spoke in Cantonese: she was the third daughter and working in a doll factory before going to the university next spring, if she could pass the examinations; but she found English difficult, 'like Chinese puzzle', with a sudden warbling laugh at her own joke, her eyes darting to mine again, wondering who I was and who had smashed the jars and released the snakes down there and what had happened to my hand. The things she told me were only the record I'd asked her to put on.

She used the tweezers delicately, her hand pecking at mine like a bird, flicking the pieces of glass into the basin while I sat there feeling the reaction and feeling it more strongly because I didn't want there to be any; I had to start thinking again. But all I could think was how bloody chancey this trade was getting, it could have been me down there lying in all that hideous mess, with Ferris getting on the radio, Wing broken, or whatever phrase he'd use for immediate and urgent speech-code transmission to Norfolk and by direct private phone to Egerton's bedside at one in the morning. Deceased during mission on the right-hand page in the book before it was closed, and nothing to show for it, nothing like Thornton had shown, just a vulgar brawl with a hit-man, almost an accident.

Hadn't you better think?

Well, I'm bloody well trying to.

She had to grip my wrist to keep my hand still: I was shaking all over, muscular reaction, nervous reaction, could do without it, had to get back on form because they'd dropped in a director for the field and he was waiting to local-brief me. She got some bandage and a dressing and I tried to blank off my mind, clear it of all references and associations and start all over again. It worked, up to a point, and the question came in pretty sharply: Hadn't you better think about what he was doing here?

Well, he didn't tag me from the car because I checked, all the way. And he didn't tag me from the Golden Sands. So he 'Did that hurt?'

'No.'

Must take great care, so forth. She tied the knot.

'How did he get here?' Ferris asked me when I went up to the radio room. He assumed I knew, and it made me touchy, because I should know, and didn't. He was fiddling with the set, his long body angled and propped on one of the sacks that Chiang kept here.

'How the hell should I know?'

He turned his narrow sandy head to look at me for two seconds with his yellowish eyes. They were rather bright, with shifting lights in them, but just about as expressive as a cat's-eye on the road. He wore plain glass in his spectacles: we all knew that. It was some kind of image he was trying to identify with, and it was very successful because you only had to imagine Ferris without his glasses to realize you'd never recognize him. He looked away, with the faintest smile, and went on fiddling with the set. He knew I didn't mean how the hell should I know, I meant shut up I'm trying to think.