'What will you tell them, then?' I asked the girl.

'It is difficult. You were on a military road. But I think perhaps that if you made profuse apologies, they might listen. Especially if you behave contritely.'

One of the officers pushed a flap open at the end of the counter and beckoned a man through and took him to one of the doors at the back, with two other officers closing in. Everyone stopped talking while this happened, then the noise started up again.

'Then of course I apologize,' began using my hands, 'I apologize profusely,' shooting the officer looks of penitence, 'and I shall certainly make sure I read the signs in the future.'

He didn't turn to look at the girl as she translated, but went on looking at me. He'd been seventeen, once, seventeen, eighteen, top of his class and fond of sports, taken his mum and dad out sometimes, given them a treat, told them he wanted to go into something he could be proud of, something that'd make them proud of him, say the police force, and this afternoon he was standing here with the gun and the truncheon on his belt and hoping for the chance of pushing the flap open at the end there and throwing me into a cell and beating me up if I wouldn't answer questions.

This wasn't Beijing, this was the Holy City, but last year there'd been troops brought in by the thousand to quell the uprising, and more monasteries burned and more corpses dumped into military trucks and taken away for mass burial in the gaping earth with the bulldozers standing by.

'He says it is not enough.'

I hadn't thought it would be.

'Then I'd be happy to pay a fine.'

I meant it to sound naive, to let them know I didn't really understand the gravity of the charge. The least I was going to get away with was a night in the cells, and that was no big deal in itself, but it meant that I would become more familiar to them over the hours, more recognizable. That could be fatal, later, for me or for Xingyu Baibing or both.

The girl turned back to me and went on speaking in Chinese and corrected herself. 'Yes, you must pay a fine of fifty yen and write a confession.'

'That's very generous.'

'You have money to pay?'

I got my wallet and put down a Y 100 note and she pushed it across the worn, paint-chipped counter. The young officer looked at it as if it were a piece of yak dung but in a moment pushed my passport and the other stuff over to me and I put them away.

'You will receive fifty yen change,' the girl said. 'Now we will go over there.'

Rickety desk, one of the dozen in here, with a cheap ballpoint tied to a nail with a bit of dirty string, some kind of stool to sit on, though I didn't trust it.

'Write, please.' She pointed to the block of schoolroom paper and took her hand away quickly when she noticed it was trembling. 'In transgressing the laws of this city, I have shamed my ancestors.' The ballpoint ripped a gash in the gray thin paper and she tore off the sheet and I started again. 'Certain roads here are strictly out of bounds, and they are adequately provided with signs to this effect, in Chinese, English, and French. In failing to take notice of the signs I am guilty of a grave lack of attention.'

The door banged open and someone came in with a chicken underneath each arm and one of them let out a piercing squawk and flew into the air and sent a streak of white droppings across the counter and one of the PSB men shouted and someone else caught the poor bloody bird by one wing and bashed it against the wall.

'My ancestors are disturbed in their honourable sleep by my fall from grace on this sorry occasion, and my esteem in their eyes has grievously diminished.'

The pen dried up and she got me another one from the next desk, pulling the looped string carefully off the nail in a show of deep respect for PSB property in case she was being watched.

'Finally, I wish — '

'Are you cold?'

Her eyes widened as she looked up at me. 'It is not cold in here.'

Then it was fear, making her hands shake. It was also in her eyes, fear of committing even the tiniest breach of protocol, damaging their bit of string, interrupting the written confessional by normal conversation. She looked down at the pad.

'Write, please, and do not interrupt. Finally, I wish to apologize sincerely for the trouble I have caused the officers of the Public Service Bureau, and vow that such a transgression will not occur again.'

They were pushing the man with the chickens out of the door and a gust of freezing air blew in again. A wind had got up soon after we'd landed in Gonggar today.

'Do you wish to add anything?' the girl asked me.

My late Aunt Ermyntrude would also be shocked clean out of her celestial corsets by my lamentable fall from grace, but we'd better not put that, we had better, my good friend, not put anything like that, I am simply feeling a touch lighthearted, you'll understand, because they're going to settle for fifty yen and this bit of bullshit and I could well have got their goat in some trivial way and finished up in the basement chained to the wall. Far better to take all possible notice of my little Eskimo here and walk on eggshells.

'I'd like to thank them for their leniency,' I told her.

'No. They might decide to double the fine, one must understand. Please sign what you have written.'

She tore it carefully off the pad and took it over to the counter, and we had to wait until they'd dealt with a youth in a smart leather jacket and sunglasses, chewing gum as if he were starving while he showed his papers and they told him to take off his sunglasses and he didn't want to and they snatched them off for him and flung them across the floor. Then the girl went forward and read my confession in Chinese while the PSB man watched me the whole time and I looked penitent and hoped to God we'd got it right, because I'd got quite enough worries already with Xingyu Baibing sitting up there in his cell on the top floor of the monastery, sitting there like a time bomb because there'd been nothing else I could have done, there'd been nothing.

The PSB man put out his hand and the girl gave him the sheet of paper and he scanned it for long enough to make it look as if he could read a bit of English and then tore it in half and jerked his head toward the door.

'We can go,' she told me.

'Do you know this place well?'

'This restaurant?'

'Lhasa.'

'Yes. I have been here often. I am an air stewardess with CAAC.' She looked down quickly, perhaps because in the torn, patched coat that was too big for her she knew she looked more like a vagrant.

'When are you flying out?' I didn't imagine she was flying anywhere but I wanted to keep her talking. The minute we'd left the PSB office she'd told me she'd show me a cheap place to eat and when we'd got here she'd asked if we could sit together and I realized she was starving and hadn't any money.

'I won't be flying out for a time,' she said. They'd brought up some bowls of noodles and meat dumplings, and she was using her chopsticks busily.

'You've got friends in Lhasa?'

'Yes.' She looked up at me, then down again. 'I cannot impose upon friends.'

I began listening between the lines, because that was the way she communicated. I'd seen she was starving and I knew that when we left here I'd be paying the bill and when she told me she'd got friends here I'd wondered why they weren't looking after her and she'd told me: she couldn't impose. But she'd helped me with the confession thing and I was in her debt and here we were in this place with smoke creeping out of the seams in the pipe above the stove in the corner and condensation trickling down the windows and the dogs under the table snarling and scuffling in competition for any scraps that might fall.