The little girl I approached in her outsized trainers and cutoff jeans looked at me sceptically. I held up a five-dinar note and a sealed envelope.

“You see that place? You see the gate?” She nodded, guarded. They were opportunist couriers, these kids, among everything else.

“Where you from?” she said.

“Paris,” I said. “But that’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone. I have a job for you. Do you think you could persuade those guards to call someone for you?” She nodded. “I’m going to tell you a name, and I want you to go there, and find the person with that name, and only that person, and I want you to hand over this message.”

She was either honest or realised, smart girl, that from where I stood I could see almost her entire route to the door of Bol Ye’an. She delivered it. She threaded in and out of the crowds, tiny and quick—the sooner this lucrative task was done the sooner she could get another. It was easy to see why she and the other homeless children like her had the nickname “job-mice.”

A few minutes after she reached the gates, someone emerged, moving fast, bundled up, head down, walking stiffly and quickly away from the dig. Though he was far away, alone like that and expected, I could tell that it was Aikam Tsueh.

I HAD DONE THIS BEFORE. I could keep him in sight, but in a city I didn’t know it was hard to do so while ensuring that I could not be seen. He made it easier than it should have been, never once looking behind him, taking in all but a couple of places the largest, most crowded and crosshatched roads, which I presumed were the most direct routes.

The most complicated point came when he took a bus. I was close to him, and was able to huddle behind my paper and keep him in sight. I winced when my phone rang, but it was not the first in the bus to do so, and Aikam did not glance at me. It was Dhatt. I diverted the call and switched the ringer off.

Tsueh disembarked, and led me to a desolate total zone of Ul Qoman housing projects, out past Bisham Ko, way out from the centre. No pretty corkscrew towers or iconic gasrooms here. The concrete warrens were not deserted but full of noise and people between the stretches of garbage. It was like the poorest estates of Besźel, though even poorer, with a soundtrack in a different language, and children and hustlers in other clothes. Only when Tsueh entered one of the dripping towerblocks and ascended did I have to exercise real care, padding as soundlessly as I could up the concrete stairs, past graffiti and animal shit. I could hear him racing ahead of me, stopping at last, and knocking softly. I slowed.

“It’s me,” I heard him say. “It’s me, I’m here.”

An answering voice, alarm, though that impression may have been because I expected alarm. I continued to quietly and carefully climb. I wished I had my gun.

“You told  me to,” Tsueh said. “You said . Let me in. What is it?”

The door creaked a little, and the second voice came whispering, but just a little louder. I was one stained pillar away now. I held my breath.

“But you said… ” The door opened more and I heard Aikam step forward, and I turned and went fast across the little landing behind him. He did not have time to register me, or to turn. I shoved him hard, and he barrelled into the ajar door, slamming it open, pushing aside someone beyond him, falling and sprawling on the floor of the hallway beyond. I heard a scream, but I had followed him through the door and slammed it closed behind me. I stood against it, blocking exit, looking along a gloomy corridor between rooms, down at where Tsueh wheezed and struggled to stand, at the screaming young woman backing away, staring at me in terror.

I put my finger to my lips and, surely by coincidence of her breath running out, she ebbed to silence.

“No, Aikam,” I said. “She didn’t say. The message wasn’t from her.”

“Aikam,” she blubbered.

“Stop,” I said. I put my finger to my lips again. “I’m not going to hurt you, I’m not  here to hurt you, but we both know there are others who want to. I want to help you, Yolanda.”

She cried again and I could not tell if it was fear or relief.

Chapter Nineteen

AIKAM GOT TO HIS FEET and tried to attack me. He was muscular and held his hands as if he had studied boxing but if he had he was not a good student. I tripped him and pushed his face down onto the stained carpet, pinioned an arm behind his back. Yolanda shouted his name. He half rose, even with me straddling him, so I pushed his face down again, ensuring that his nose bled. I stayed between both of them and the door.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Are you ready to calm down? I’m not here to hurt her.” Strength to strength, eventually he would overpower me unless I broke his arm. Neither eventuality was desirable. “Yolanda, for God’s sake.” I caught her eye, riding his shuffles. “I have a gun—don’t you think I’d have shot you if I wanted to hurt you?” I switched to English for the lie.

“’Kam,” she said at last, and almost instantly he grew calm. She stared at me, backed into the wall at the corridor’s end, her hands flat against it.

“You hurt my arm,” Aikam said beneath me.

“Sorry to hear it. If I let him up, is he going to behave?” That in English again to her. “I’m here to help you. I know you’re scared. You hear me, Aikam?” Switching between two foreign languages was not hard, so adrenalised. “If I let you up, you going to go look after Yolanda?”

He did nothing to clear away the blood that dripped from his nose. He cradled his arm and, unable to put it comfortably around Yolanda, sort of loomed lovingly over and around her. He put himself between me and her. She looked out at me from behind him with wariness, not terror.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I know you’re scared. I’m not Ul Qoma militsya —I don’t trust them any more than you do. I’m not going to call them. Let me help you.”

IN WHAT YOLANDA RODRIGUEZ called the living room she cowered in an old chair they had probably pulled in from an abandoned flat in the same tower. There were several such pieces, broken in various ways but clean. The windows overlooked the courtyard, from which I could hear Ul Qoman boys playing a rough makeshift version of rugby. They were invisible through the whitewash on the glass.

Books and other things sat in boxes around the room. A cheap laptop, a cheap inkjet printer. No power, though, so far as I could tell. There were no posters on the walls. The door to the room was open. I stood leaning by it, looking at the two pictures on the floor: one of Aikam; the other, in a better frame, of Yolanda and Mahalia smiling behind cocktails.

Yolanda stood, sat again. She would not meet my eye. She did not try to hide her fear, which had not abated though I was no longer its immediate object. She was afraid to show or indulge her growing hope. I had seen her expression before. It is not uncommon for people to crave deliverance.

“Aikam’s been doing a good job,” I said. I was back to English. Though he did not speak it, Aikam did not ask for translation. He stood by Yolanda’s chair and watched me. “You had him trying to find out how to get out of Ul Qoma, below the radar. Any luck?”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Your boy’s been doing just what you told him to. He’s been trying to find out what’s going on. What did he ever care about Mahalia Geary? They never spoke. Now you, though, he cares about. So there’s something odd when, like you told him to, he’s been asking all about her. Gets you thinking. Why would he do that? You, you did care about her, and you do care about yourself.”

She stood again and turned her face to the wall. I waited for her to say something, and when she did not I continued. “I’m flattered you’d get him to ask me. The one police you think just might possibly not be part of what’s happening. The outsider.”