'Chong stays with the truck?'

'Yes.'

'What's his cover, if we're stopped?'

'I'm going to ask for my fucking money back! They can't do this!'

Bottle smashing, then very quiet. I suppose the man on the staff had gone darting out just now to fetch the police.

'Chong's cover,' Pepperidge said, 'is just what it looks like: he's the driver for a transport company.'

'Will he be armed?'

'No.' Pepperidge watched me thoughtfully. 'Do you want him armed?'

'No.'

Then the door opened again and Su-May came in and caught sight of me by chance and edged her way between the tables and passed close to us, whispering, 'You shouldn't be in here — the police are looking for you,' and I saw them in the doorway, fur hats, red stars, bolstered guns.

Skull of a dog.

'How do you know?"

Freezing in here. The window was open.

'I have to report back there,' she said, 'twice every day.'

The Public Service Bureau, where she'd helped me this morning.

Skull of a dog on the wall. Narrow bed in a corner and a few bits of rough wood furniture and one or two oil lamps, the window blind with a bracket loose at one end, hanging at an angle, no telephone need I tell you, cut off, I was cut off from my director in the field, cut off from London and going to ground, I would have to go to ground, lose myself, bury myself, don't think about it, Dr Xingyu Baibing stuck up there on the third floor of a monastery and the man who was meant to get him to the airport stuck in a tenth-rate hotel and freezing to death while the police scoured the town for him, think about anything but that.

'Why?'

Why did she have to report back to the PSB station twice a day? She didn't volunteer very much; I had to keep asking questions.

'I broke the curfew last night.' Her teeth were chattering. She was freezing too, or frightened, or both.

'So you have to report back? Can't we shut the window?'

She went across to it, but it was stuck and I helped her. She'd had trouble with the stove by the look of it, the front was raised and there was ash on the floor, the cheap linoleum had burned patches, why, I suppose, she'd had to leave the window open, smoke, stank in here, it wasn't wood smoke, it was yak dung, having to make an effort, I was having to make an effort to think straight, get things in order, because the mission was like a sinking ship now, rolling in mid-ocean in the dark, the decks awash and wallowing and the stern down, sliding to the cold vast bosom of the deep, must get perspective, yes.

'You are not well,' Su-May said.

'So what happened when you reported back?'

'The officer who dealt with you this morning was still there. He asked me about you.'

She went across to the stove and got some dung out of a torn brown-paper bag.

'What did he ask?'

'If I knew where you were staying. I said no.' She lit some paper and put the stuff on top and began blowing at it.

'Why did they want to know where I was staying?' I suppose it was just her way, didn't talk much.

'They are looking for a man who was seen near a temple. They say someone was found dead there, an agent of the KCCPC.'

I moved nearer the stove. It wasn't giving out any heat yet but there was a flame to watch. 'What did you tell them, about me?'

'I told them we parted,' she said, 'as soon as we left the PSB station. I said I had not seen you since then.' She was squatting by the stove, the box of matches still in her hand, here eyes lifted to watch me with the question in them quite clear: Did you kill him?

'What else did they ask? What else did they say? Give it to me all at once, will you, everything you can think of.'

She looked down, ashamed: I'd criticized her. 'They said that I should look out for you wherever I went, and tell them immediately if I saw you again.' The small flame growing in the stove, its yellow light reflected in the sheen of her thick black hair, the matches still in her long ivory fingers, forgotten, 'I told them I would look out for you, and tell them if I saw you. What else could I say?'

I got down beside her, sat on the gritty linoleum, standing made me tired, you are not well, she'd said, did I look that bad? 'There was nothing else,' I said, 'you could tell them. When you came into the cafe, you didn't expect to see me there?'

'Of course not.' She brought her head up and looked at me. 'If I had known you were in the cafe, I would have gone there sooner, to warn you.'

'Thank you.'

There is hot water here, for the shower.' She put the matches down on the plank of wood fixed to the wall with bent wire supports, a shelf. Other things on the shelf: incense, a torn glove, a half-burned votive candle on a spike in a rusty bowl. 'Not really hot,' a shy smile, put on, acted, because that too was shameful: she was my host and could offer me hospitality but it wasn't as it should be, not really hot. 'But it is not cold, either. Please use the shower, if you wish.'

Do not think it strange, my good friend: in Lhasa in wintertime a shower that is not freezing cold is a luxury beyond all the perfumes of Araby, and I probably smelled, most people here did, lived in their clothes, and I'd soaked these with sweat in the temple when he'd come for me. Her invitation must be counted as grand hospitality.

'I'd like that,' I told her. She got up quickly and I said, 'Su-May, do you think the PSB officers followed you away from the station?'

She looked confused.

'Would you know,' I asked her, 'if anyone was following you?'

'I have never thought of it.'

'Don't worry about it.'

They could have followed her, or they could have passed my description on to the police, for what it was worth. The police had come into the cafe, but that had been because of the drunk.

She'd gone straight to an empty table and sat down facing me, holding her eyes on me, a warning in them.

'I'm going to fucking sue them!' On his feet now, swaying between two friends, a woman trying to quieten him.

Pepperidge watching me: he'd caught her whisper.

I had said: 'I'll be at the small hotel two blocks from here, in Xingfu Donglu; it's called the Sichuan. Get Chong to pick me up there at eighteen hundred hours. Tell him to wait outside.'

'Understood.'

'You the police? I want to talk to you! I've been ripped off by a bloody travel agency!'

I passed close to her table. 'Can I go to your hotel?'

'Of course.'

Through the back way past the toilets and stacked crates and some bicycles and a hen in a cage, slipping on broken eggs and finding the door and the yard and the alley; she came behind me but vanished soon afterward and got there before I did, to the hotel. We weren't tagged, didn't have to lose anyone.

It was the only place I could go, the only rendezvous I could give Pepperidge for Chong, and if I walked any farther than two or three blocks I'd run into a police patrol.

'Towel not very big,' Su-May said, dissembling. CAAC insignia.

I took it into the shower, a cramped corner of the bathroom lined with sheets of plastic, flakes of plaster from the ceiling embedded in the grime on the floor, a streak of rust down the wall under the tap, but the water was warm as she'd promised, and as I stood under the thin sputtering jets I was conscious of the benison not only of the healing water but of the grace of womanhood that had offered me this much comfort at a time when I badly needed it, more in point of fact than comfort, a kind of sanity regained, a renewal of the heart, the means, even, by which I could conceivably do what I had to do, after all. When dark came it would be easier; the dark has so often been my shelter, the ultimate safe house when all other doors are shut.