"You mean you don't wanna lay me, honey?" The rain thundered on the roof.

"No. I just want to stay here for a day or two."

She gazed at me from beneath her heavy black eyelashes. "But not like a love nest?"

I'd found her in a doorway, sheltering from the torrential rain the monsoon had brought to the city half an hour ago. She was all I had, but I'd better not tell her that, because those bloody penny-pinching secretary birds perched at their desks in the Accounts Department in London would go into instant moult when they saw my expense sheet.

"Not like a love nest," I told her.

There was a kind of eldritch laughter somewhere in the remnants of my soul and trying to get out, because this was an ultra-priority mission with a crack London director in control and a first-class director in the field with instructions to give me all necessary facilities from signals-through-Embassy to shields and support, and here I was in a Seoul back street soaked to the skin and trying to get a fifty-year-old whore with green eyelids to take me in from the rain.

"Are you stoned, honey?"

We were standing in the passage between the front door and the stairs and the door was still open and I could hear the sirens in the distance as more patrol cars zeroed in on the Chonju Hotel a few streets away, where a man was lying with his back broken under the weight of a brass gong. They wouldn't be looking for me yet: Clive Ingram, travel agent, was still ostensibly staying at the hotel and his overnight bag was still in his locked room; he might easily be dining out or seeing a film or holed up at the Pacific Club with friends, and wouldn't be reported absent until the morning. No one had seen me leave; the lobby had been full of people with white faces looking down at the body under the gong, and I'd gone out through a fourth-floor window and across the rooftops.

"No," I told the woman, "I'm not stoned." I got out my wallet and peeled off some notes. "What about a hundred thousand a day, minimum three days?"

She looked at me hard. "Don't fool around, do you?" She took the notes and led me upstairs. "You running drugs, are you?"

"There are two conditions," I said, watching the calves of her stout veined legs as we climbed the stairs. "One is that as far as anyone else is concerned I'm not here. And while I'm here you don't see any clients."

"That's no sweat. But what did you do out there, buster? You in some kinda trouble?"

"Not if you don't talk."

She was panting as we reached the big low room at the top of the stairs. Stained cotton rugs, two sagging divans, a cheap bead curtain over a door in the corner, a big Japanese lantern and a dead palm in a chipped reproduction Ming container. The wall was papered with old posters: Sadie Nackenberg's In Town… Sadie Be Good… If You Knew Sadie Like I Know Sadie… New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans. And hundreds of photographs.

"Showbiz," she said with an echo of desperate pride, "that was me. Those were the good days, like Streisand says. Where are you from?"

"London. My name's Clive Ingram."

"Hi. I'm Sadie. Born in Memphis, US of A. Been in a fight?"

"There was an accident." There were still scratches on my face from Li-fei's nails, and I'd fallen nine or ten feet onto a pile of stacked crates at the back of the Chonju Hotel when the creeper had given way.

"You on the run, mister?"

"My wife doesn't understand me."

"Uh-huh. She throw you out the window?"

"Something like that."

"Goddamn women's lib, it takes the joy out of everything." But she was watching me critically, wondering how far a hundred thousand won would go if one day she had to bribe the police. "Listen, I don't want no trouble here. This is a respectable place. I mean I don't want your wife here. Or whoever. I have a businesslike understanding with the cops, you know what I mean?"

Water was dripping from my clothes as I stood checking the usual things: exits, windows, telephone, visual security from the street and other buildings; tonight it wasn't easy: all I could see from the windows was the rain through the flimsy curtain.

"If you don't talk to anyone," I told her, "you won't have any trouble." But I'd have to be careful when I went into the street; by the morning the Homicide Bureau would be pushing the street patrols for results. "Is there a shower?"

"You bet. You don't have any dry clothes?"

"I want to go straight to bed. They'll dry overnight."

"I got some hangers. Bathroom's through that curtain and turn left. Careful with the faucet, it needs fixing, you can get yourself drenched." She looked at my clothes and gave a husky laugh. "What am I saying?"

The telephone rang twice while I was in the bathroom and I listened to the soft rasp of her voice through the thin white plaster wall, that's okay, honey, I didn't expect you a night like this, I'll miss you too, and so forth. I dried myself on a towel marked Seoul-Hyatt and wrapped myself in the blanket she'd given me. The phone rang again and I listened again, in case. I wasn't safe here, but I wouldn't be any safer anywhere else. Spur might have put me up, but I wouldn't have been able to sleep with that bloody thing crawling all over the floor; as soon as they found my room still empty at the Chonju in the morning the police would be checking every hotel in the city; the Embassy would give me a bed, but you don't go to ground in your Embassy when you're blown: London is terribly fussy about abuse of diplomatic hospitality overseas and in any case the opposition would expect me to go there for refuge and I'd never get out again without walking into a trap.

"You can see the kinda clients I got," Sadie told me the third time the telephone rang. "They call me up when they can't make it. Most of them are in the US forces out here, some of them lieutenants and upwards, fresh outa West Point but underneath the war-paint just boys from back home, and you know something? They miss their mothers; half the guys that come here don't even ask me for sex, they just wanna talk to someone who can speak the Queen's goddamn English. Gee, honey, you look real cute in that poncho."

The rain was still drumming on the roof and sending cascades into the street below. Five minutes away from here the girl with the cinnamon eyes would be listening to it, the girl with the Astra Cub.22. What had the Asian said to her when he'd stopped her outside her apartment?

He hadn't followed me back to the hotel: I'd checked to make sure I was alone. He'd taken a different route through the maze of alleys and reached there before me, not knowing at that time that I wasn't still in my room.

Did you kill him? he'd asked her outside her apartment.

No. He's not the man, she'd said.

It was possible. Anything was possible, but I had to look for a likelihood, a logical scenario. It could have been someone else who stalked me in the corridors of the Chonju but I didn't think so: it would have been too much of a coincidence. The man who had turned slowly in the air as he went down the marble stairwell had been Asian and he'd worn dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt; Soong Li-fei wasn't just an official interpreter for the airline: she'd had a brother who was in Pekin at the time of the funeral bomb — "It was something to do with that dreadful thing in Pekin" — and they'd killed him because he'd "done something wrong". She had a friend who had lent her a gun, and someone had told her that the man who'd killed her brother would be checking into the Chonju Hotel tonight, Room 29. She'd got Tung connections, strong ones, close ones, whether she knew it or not; and they'd tried to use her as a killing instrument and when she'd failed to kill me the young Asian had gone there to do it himself.