'What's your name?'

'Su-May Wang,' she said, putting it the Western way round. 'What is yours?'

'Victor Locke. I'm just here for a few days. Are you on holdover, or what?'

I didn't like asking direct questions, but there wasn't much time: I had to find the Barkhor Hotel and report to Pepperidge and then get back to the monastery before ten o'clock because of the curfew, and I needed to know exactly how useful this girl could be, exactly how well she knew the town, because I'd found that the local laws and restrictions were like booby traps and I couldn't afford to be run into another PSB office: they'd throw me into the cells for a week next time just to make me pay attention.

'No,' Su-May said, 'I'm not on holdover.' She stopped eating and for the first time looked at me steadily in the eyes, and her question was clear enough: could she trust me? Then she bent her head again over the bowl of food. 'Things are bad,' she said, 'in China. You are a tourist?'

'Yes.'

'What do you think of things in China?'

'I think they're tragic.'

'The bloodshed that time in Tiananmen?'

'And the crackdown that's been going on ever since.'

She finished her bowl. 'Would you like some more tukpa?'

'Very much." I got the man over and she ordered in slow, careful Tibetan, then turned back to me. The British are on our side?'

'On the side of the people. You don't imagine we'd support the primitive thugs you've got in your government, I hope.'

Trade went on,' she said evenly, 'between the British and those primitive thugs. Nothing has changed.'

'I realize that. It was disgusting. We're like any other people — we don't always agree with what our government does. What's he asking for?' There was a young boy waving his hand in front of my face.

'A pen. Don't give him one.' She said a sharp word or two in Tibetan and he moved on. 'My father is missing,' she said in a moment.

A man in an ancient fur hat was watching me from the next table, but I didn't think there was any problem: round-eyes get watched quite a bit in the backwaters of the Orient. There wasn't any question of checking the environment in this place: it was like a flypaper, with as many people in here for warmth as for the food. I'd done a lot of routine checking on the flight into Gonggar and on the CAAC bus into Lhasa and we'd been absolutely clean, Xingyu and I, and no one would have got on to me here in the city, no one clandestine. But I began looking around me now for anyone who looked as if he could understand English, because she'd started saying things that were potentially dangerous.

'Missing from home?'

'Yes. And from his university. That is why I am worried, as you have noticed. That is why I am here.'

'You're missing too.'

'Yes.' She was looking me in the eyes again, losing her unwillingness to trust me. 'He disappeared a week ago, when the wave of arrests began. He left a note for me, saying I must not worry. They are hunting for him now. He is quite an important man, an important dissident.' A shrug. 'Of course — there are many. There are thousands.'

We stopped talking when the man brought the food she'd ordered, and waited until he'd gone. I asked her why she'd come to Tibet.

'It was the next flight on my schedule. They use relatives, you see, as hostages. It is a well-established practice. They want my father in prison, or perhaps executed, and they would have me arrested on some pretext — anything will suffice, one must understand, suspicion is enough — and then they would have reported it in the media, to bring my father out of hiding to take my place.'

I must go to Beijing. Xingyu, staring at me in the bleak light of the airport at Chengdu. You cannot stop me.

'You simply got off the plane here,' I said, 'and didn't go back?'

'Yes. Others have done this. Many of us have brothers, sisters who are students, or parents who teach. Some of my friends have gone to Hong Kong, and stayed there. But if they are picked up and sent back, they will be accused of fleeing the country, of evading their responsibilities as citizens. I am perhaps safer here. I have not fled my country.'

Then what she was saying, what she was feeling bore down on her suddenly, and her eyes took the weight of it, the life going out of them. It's difficult to tell the age of an Oriental: she had looked, until this moment, no more than twenty, with her clear luminous eyes and her flawless skin, though she was probably more than that; now she had grown suddenly old, though her skin hadn't changed; the only expression was in her eyes, and they looked out on a frightening world with the despair of middle age, when for so many things, for so many people, it has become too late.

My father is missing. They would have arrested me. I have not fled my country. Not the burden of the years but of being a young woman in China in this year of such little grace.

'Your mother?'

She looked down and began eating, but from habit. 'They do not agree. My mother is against his activities, his protests.'

If they arrested her mother, then, he'd be unlikely to come out of hiding. 'Where are you from, Su-May?'

'Beijing. That is where the worst happens, the worst of it all. For me, I am worried now because my father will find out I am missing too, and he may believe I have been arrested. They might even lie, and report it in the media that I have been arrested. But from here, from Lhasa, it is difficult for me to get a message to him, saying I am safe. There are people I could write to, but it is dangerous to send letters. Many are opened. Telephones are monitored. They catch many that way."

She looked up as a beggar came and crouched by the table, an empty tin bowl cupped in his hands, his eyes hollowed and demanding, not imploring, as he attacked our indifference. 'Give him nothing,' she told me, 'or we shall have dozens here.' She waved him away. 'They have come from remote places to the Holy City, and have no money left.' She shrugged. 'I am the same. But they have come here to pray. I have come here — ' On a rueful breath, 'Maybe it is the same thing.'

Dark was coming slowly against the windows, and more people were arriving, packing against the bar counter shoulder to shoulder. Two PSB officers came in, their guns silhouetted on their hips, their eyes hidden by the shadow of their caps, and I caught a look on the face of Su-May as she saw them, not fright, something like disgust, as if she'd seen something obscene. They moved between the tables, and the people pressed back to give them room — again, it seemed to me, not from fear or in deference, but as if wanting to distance themselves from lepers. Beijing, she'd said, was where the worst had happened, but the people of Lhasa would disagree, seeing as they had the sky black with the smoke of burning monasteries, hearing as they had the crackle of bullets and the cries of grief.

I waited until the two officers had left. 'If you like, Su-May, I can get a message to your father in Beijing, telling him you're safe.'

She almost dismissed it. 'You are a tourist.'

'I can do it,' I said, 'if you like.'

She brought her hands to her face suddenly, knocking her bowl and spilling some food. 'How?'

'With great discretion.'

'But how?' She held her face, staring at me from over her spread fingers.

'By word of mouth.'

In a moment- 'You are not a tourist, then.' A tone of suspicion. Tourists were harmless, a gaggle of gawpers pointing at things strange to them, finding most of them funny. I was not one of them, if I could get a message to her father. I must be something else, not what I seemed, and therefore suspect.

'Yes,' I said, 'I'm a tourist, but I've got friends in Beijing. Close friends. Think about it, and let me know if you want me to help.'