They were in the back seat of first class. The movie was running. Hissao removed the seat divider. She held his face a moment. Hissao smiled, thinking of the lines of her life held firmly against him, the beginning of her heart line touching the beginning of his smile.

Naturally she misunderstood the smile.

"It's all right," she whispered, "I'm just trying to imagine who you are."

His intentions were not bad. It may be tempting to find in those rosy Tuscan apples the worm of self-absorption, to see in his Bacchus lips the centre of his moral universe. He has, after all, declared himself amoral. He likes to think of himself as a pirate, a brigand, a citizen of risk. But let me tell you, he has the morals of a schoolteacher. Forget the Bacchus lips. He is as careful as a clerk. Even when he removed the seat divider he was beginning to stand, to place the parrot safely amongst his folded coat.

His mistake was to expect caution on the part of his companion. After all, they were not alone. The stewards were sitting upstairs and could return at any moment. The other four first-class passengers were absorbed withThe Railway Children but that could prove to be indigestible at any moment.

But his companion, Rosa Carlobene, was not known for timidity and tonight, above the Arafura Sea, she was seeking the warm juices of life, defying the tapeworms of habit and order, luxuriating in the complexity of her sexual feelings, flying high on the side of the angels against death and despair.

Thus it was poor Rosa who, in one strong sinuous thrust, ground her pelvis into the head of the golden-shouldered parrot.

Hissao felt the skull squash and wetness spread. He leapt to his feet. He did not care for caution, discretion, customs spies, or Rosa Carlobene. He unzipped his fly, hoping against hope.

And Rosa, who had misunderstood the bump that was the parrot, now misunderstood the blood on Hissao's trembling hands.

"What is it?"

She clutched at his sleeve. He sat down again, but he was fiddling around his fly. "It's nothing," he said.

"Did I hurt you?"

"It's nothing, nothing, I promise. Don't worry." But the words did not match his tone which was cold and angry.

"I have hurt you?"

Hissao did not weep easily, but he wept there, in that aeroplane with the last of the golden-shouldered parrots dead inside his trousers.

Carla felt as if she was having a bad reaction to a drug. She patted at his lap with a handkerchief and was horrified to find it streaked with death.

"It's no good," he said. "It's dead." And he pushed her hand away.

Remembering the incident in later years each of them would physically groan out loud and shut their eyes (each one in their different country, in a different life, carrying the sharp blade of feeling that was unblunted by time or touching), yet the degree of their suffering was different and Rosa's pain, in comparison, was no more important than a stubbed toe or a faux pas. Much more was involved for Hissao – it had been his ambition to be recognized as the man who had saved the golden-shouldered parrot.

It was because of this incident, with his guilt, with his contempt for himself, that his hate unleashed itself, a steel spring unsprung, a Japanese paper flower opening up to show its livid heart in a glass of water.

He had loved his country more than he had pretended, and had tried to make something fine out of something rotten. He felt the feelings he had once described to Leah Goldstein as greatness but it was not greatness – it was the same feeling Charles described when he said he would strangle his wife.

64

A bird was a bird to Rosa Carlobene and although she knew her new lover was unhappy about its death she had little inkling of what it really meant to him. He was a smuggler. He had lost money. But he had come through customs without difficulty and, doubtless, he would smuggle again.

She woke in the night to see him climbing on to a chair in the bathroom. At first, half enmeshed by sleep, she thought he was doing himself harm, and then she saw, in the sickly green light of the UPIM sign that illuminated the room, that he was doing chin-ups. She smiled and went back to sleep.

Hissao did his exercises to make the tension go away. He did chin-ups until he could do no more. This of course, did not take place at the Rome Hilton where he was booked. There is nothing to grip on above the doors in the Rome Hilton. They stayed, instead, in a small pensione on the fifth floor of a building in the Piazza Nationale. It was a clean enough place, but noisy. Beefy-armed female singers performed for the aperitif sippers in the square below.

The exercises soothed him for a moment, and then the tension came back. He showered, but the hot water could not unclench the knotted muscles of his strong neck. Then he dressed and went down to the piazza which was now almost empty. Some men hung around the edge of the fountain and, at the last bar, they were stacking away the plastic chairs for the night.

Hissao walked down the streets towards the railway station where young toughs lit matches which illuminated their shirts: brilliant aquamarine, lolly pink, explosions of colour caught in a machismo flare of phosphor.

Hissao walked past, neither frightened by the toughs nor aroused, as he might normally have been, by the erotic possibilities of a new city.

All his skin was tight at the palms and there was nothing he could do to ease it.

Somewhere in a small gritty-pathed park, beside a shuttered kiosk, under warm swaying trees, he said, in English: "I'm going to fix you bastards right up."

And when he said that he felt something click, like a vertebra shifting or a glass skylight cracking under strain. He felt a thing "go" and it made itself known as sharply as a rifle shot and it was there (smelling the sweet scent of some flowering tree whose name he did not know, hearing a nearby Fiat flatten its battery as it tried to start, become weaker and soon give no sound other than the almost mute click of the starter motor and the soft monosyllabic curse of the driver) it was then, while these other things circled his dull tight centre, like flies around something dead, that he felt the hate he had kept himself from knowing. The pain in his skin and in his joints did not go away but intensified, took up another notch, and he was possessed of an acute sensitivity to everything, even the pressure of his silk shirt where it brushed, lightly, against his hairless chest, and he was not sure that what he felt was pain or pleasure, whether he was happy or unhappy to see, at last, the family he had worked so dangerously to support for what they were – an ugly menagerie as evil as anything you might ever see, fleetingly, before your eyes in a bottle.

Then he had the idea.

He had had it before, this idea, and then forgotten it. It was one of those ideas that we find and forget, dig and bury, over and over again, and each time we forget that we have had the idea before. We unearth and bury them like sleepwalkers, frightened of the consequences and only the mud under our nails in the morning reminds us that we have let ourselves fool around with something dangerous.

"I'm going to fix you bastards right up."

He walked back to the pensione in a different style entirely, skipping impatiently at the corners. He was polite to the sleepy concierge. He went into his room and sat by the window for a long time. Rosa Carlobene tossed in her sleep. Hissao opened the window, and heard, from five storeys below, the lonely click of a whore's heels in the empty colonnade. His emotions were those of an assassin. He was small, as small as a grain of sand and also, at exactly the same time, very very large. He was pink and visceral, grey and metallic. He was nothing. He was everything.