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‘You walked all night?’

I sighed. ‘I walked. I sat. I thought. You know, a human life…’

Ricky, as I’d painted him, was a man not wholly at ease with the business of talking, so this answer took some time to get out. We let a human life hang in the air for a while.

‘A lot of people die, Rick,’ said Latifa. ‘There is death everywhere. Murder everywhere.’ The sheet relaxed a little more, and I saw her hand move gently to the side of the bed, next to mine.

Why was it that I kept on hearing this argument wherever I went? Everybody’s doing it, so you’d be a square not to join in and help the whole business along. I suddenly wanted to slap her, and tell her who I was, and what I really thought; that killing Dirk, killing anybody, was not going to change anything apart from Francisco’s fucking ego, which was already large enough to house the world’s poor twice over, with a few million bourgeoisie in the spare-room.

Fortunately, I am the consummate professional, so I just nodded and hung my head, and sighed some more, and watched her hand creep nearer and nearer to mine.

‘It’s good that you feel bad,’ she said, after some thought. Not much thought, obviously, but some. ‘If you felt nothing, it would mean there was no love, no passion. And we are nothing without passion.’

We’re not a great deal with it, I thought, and started to pull off my shirt.

Things were changing, you see. In my head.

It was the photographs that had finally done it - had made me realise that I had been bouncing around inside other people’s arguments for so long that I’d reached the point of not caring. I didn’t care about Murdah and his helicopters; I didn’t care about Sarah Woolf and Barnes; I didn’t care about O’Neal and Solomon, or Francisco and The Sword Of fucking Justice. I didn’t care who won the argument, or who won the war.

I particularly didn’t care about myself.

Latifa’sfingers brushed against the back of my hand. When it comes to sex, it seems to me, men really are caught between a rock and a soft, limp, apologetic place.

The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. One is a runabout, suitable for shopping, quick journeys about town, and extremely easy parking; the other is an estate, designed for long distances, with heavy loads - altogether larger, more complex, and more difficult to maintain. You wouldn’t buy a Fiat Panda to move antiques fromBristol toNorwich, and you wouldn’t buy a Volvo for any other reason. It’s not that one is better than the other. They’re just different, that’s all.

This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I’m going to acknowledge it, because I’ve always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said.

He didn’t, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you’re not going to like it.

If a man gives himself up to the sexual moment, then, well, that’s all it is. A moment. A spasm. An event without duration. If, on the other hand, he holds back, by trying to remember as many names as he can from the Dulux colour chart, or whatever happens to be his chosen method of deferment, then he’s accused of being coldly technical. Either way, if you’re a heterosexual man, emerging from a modern sexual encounter with any kind of credit is a fiendishly difficult thing to do.

Yes, of course, credit is not the point of the exercise. But then again, it’s easy to say that when you’ve got some. Credit,

I mean. And men just don’t get any these days. In the sexual arena, men are judged by female standards. You may hiss and tut and draw in your breath as sharply as you like, but it’s true. (Yes, obviously, men judge women in other spheres - patronise them, tyrannise them, exclude them, oppress them, make them utterly miserable - but in matters of a writhing nature, the mark on the bench was put down by women. It is for the Fiat Panda to try and be like the Volvo, not the other way round.) You just don’t hear men criticising women for taking fifteen minutes to reach a climax; and if you do, it’s not with any implied accusation of weakness, or arrogance, or self-centredness. Men, generally, just hang their heads and say yes, that’s the way her body is, that’s what she needed from me, and I couldn’t deliver it. I’m crap and I’ll leave at once, as soon as I can find my other sock.

Which, to be honest, is unfair, bordering on the ridiculous. In the same way that it would be ridiculous to call a Fiat Panda a crap car, just because you can’t fit a wardrobe in the back. It might be crap for all sorts of other reasons - it breaks down, or it uses a lot of oil, or it’s lime-green with the word ‘turbo’ written pathetically across the back window - but it’s not crap because of the one characteristic that it was specifically designed to have: smallness. Neither is a Volvo a crap car, simply because it won’t squeeze past the barrier in the Safeways car-park and allow you to get out without paying.

Burn me on a mound of faggots if you like, but the two machines are just plain different, and that’s that. Designed to do different things, at different speeds, on different types of roads. They’re different. Not the same. Unalike.

There, I’ve said it. And I don’t feel any better.

Latifaand I made love twice before breakfast, and once afterwards, and by mid-morning I’d managed to remember Burnt Umber, which made thirty-one, something of a personal record.

‘Cisco,’ I said, ‘tell me something.’

‘Sure, Rick. Go ahead.’

He glanced across at me, then reached down to the dashboard and popped the cigarette lighter.

I thought, for a long, slow, Minnesotan moment. ‘Where does the money come from?’

We travelled about two kilometres before he answered. We were in Francisco’s Alfa Romeo, just the two of us, gradually reeling in the Autoroute de Soleil from Marseille toParis, and if he let ‘Born In The USA’ go round just once more on the tape-deck, I was probably going to have a nosebleed. Three days had passed since the shooting of Dirk Van Der Hoewe, and The Sword Of justice was feeling pretty invincible by now, because the newspapers had started to discuss other matters and the police were scratching their computerised, intelligence-gathering heads at the lack of any firm leads. ‘Where does the money come from,’ Francisco repeated eventually, drumming the steering-wheel with his fingers. ‘Yeah,’ I said.

The motorway hummed by. Wide, straight, French. ‘Why do you want to know?’

I shrugged.

‘Just… you know… just thinking.’

He laughed like a crazy rock ‘n’ roll thing.