There were people who resented his rudeness and rebukes, but they tolerated them because he was frequently useful and occasionally indispensable. He knew where everything-from a pistol, to a precious gem, to a kilo of the finest Thai-white heroin-might be bought or sold in the city. And, as he sometimes boasted, there was very little he wouldn't do for the right amount of money, provided there was no significant risk to his comfort and personal safety.

"We were talking of the different ideas people have about the best thing in the world," Karla said, "But I don't have to ask what you think."

"You would say that _I think money is the best thing in the world," he suggested lazily, "and we'd both be right. Every sane and rational person one day realises that money is almost everything. The great principles and the noble virtues are all very well, in the long run of history, but from one day to the next, it's money that keeps us going-and the lack of it that drives us under the great wheel. And what about you, Lin? What did you say?"

"He didn't say anything yet, and now that you're here, he won't get a chance."

"Now be fair, Karla. Tell us, Lin. I would like to know."

"Well, if you press me, I'd have to say freedom."

"The freedom to do what?" he asked, putting a little laugh in the last word.

"I don't know. Maybe just the freedom to say no. If you've got that much freedom, you really don't need any more."

The beer and coffee arrived. The waiter slammed the drinks onto the table with reckless discourtesy. The service in the shops, hotels, and restaurants of Bombay, in those days, moved from a politeness that was charming or fawning to a rudeness that was either abrupt or hostile. The churlishness of Leopold's waiters was legendary. It's my favourite place in the whole world, Karla once said, to be treated like _dirt.

"A toast!" Didier declared, raising his glass to touch mine. "To the freedom... to drink! _Salut!"

He drank half the long glass, let out a loud, wide-mouthed sigh of pleasure, and then drank the rest. He was pouring himself a second glass when two others, a man and a woman, joined our group, sitting between Karla and me. The dark, brooding, undernourished young man was Modena, a dour and taciturn Spaniard who did black-market business with French, Italian, and African tourists. His companion, a slim and pretty German prostitute named Ulla, had for some time allowed him to call himself her lover.

"Ah, Modena, you are just in time to buy the next round," Didier shouted, reaching past Karla to slap him on the shoulder. "I will have a whisky and soda, if you please."

The shorter man flinched under the blow and scowled unhappily, but he called the waiter to his side, and ordered drinks. Ulla was speaking with Karla in a mixture of German and English that, by accident or intent, obscured the most interesting parts of her conversation.

"How could I know it, _na? How was it possible for me to know that he was a Spinner? Total verruckt, I tell you. At the start, he looked totally straight to me. Or, maybe, do you think that was a sign? Maybe he was a little bit too straight looking. _Na _ja, ten minutes in the room and er wollte auf der Klamotten kommen. On my best dress! I had to fight with him to save my clothes, der Sprintficker! Spritzen wollte er, all over my clothes! Gibt's ja nicht. And later, when I went to the bathroom for a little sniff of cokes, I came back to see dass er seinen Schwanz ganz tief in einer meiner Schuhe hat! Can you believe it!

In my shoe! _Nicht _zu _fassen."

"Let's face it," Karla said gently, "The crazy ones always know how to find you, Ulla."

"Ja, leider. What can I say? Crazy people love me."

"Don't listen to her, Ulla my love," Didier consoled her.

"Craziness is the basis of many a fine relationship. In fact, craziness is the basis of every fine relationship!"

"Didier," Ulla sighed, mouthing his name with a smile of exquisite sweetness, "have I told you to get fucked yet?"

"No!" he laughed, "But I forgive you for the lapse. Between us, my darling, such things are always implied, and understood."

The whisky arrived, in four small flasks, and the waiter prised the tops off two soda bottles with a brass bottle opener that hung from a chain at his belt. He let the tops bounce on the table and fall to the floor, then swished a grimy rag over the wet surface of the table, forcing us to duck and weave as the moisture spilled in all directions.

Two men approached our table from different parts of the restaurant, one to speak to Didier and the other with Modena.

Ulla used the moment to lean close to me. Under the table she pressed something into my hand-it felt like a small roll of bank notes-and her eyes pleaded with me not to draw attention to it.

As she talked to me, I slipped the notes into my pocket without looking at them.

"So have you decided how long you're going to stay?" she asked.

"I don't really know. I'm in no hurry."

"Don't you have someone waiting for you somewhere, or someone you should go to?" she asked, smiling with adroit but passionless coquetry. Seduction was a habit with her. She turned that same smile on her customers, her friends, the waiters, even on Didier, whom she openly disliked-on everyone, in fact, including her lover, Modena. In the months and years that followed, I heard a lot of people criticise Ulla, some of them cruelly, for her flirtations. I didn't agree with them. It seemed to me, as I got to know her well, that she flirted with the world because flirting was the only real kindness she ever knew or shared: it was her way of being nice, and of making sure that people-men- were nice to her. She believed that there wasn't enough niceness in the world, and she said so, in exactly those words, more than once. It wasn't deep feeling, and it wasn't deep thinking, but it was right, as far as it went, and there was no real harm in it.

And what the hell, she was a beautiful girl, and it was a very good smile.

"No," I lied. "There's no-one waiting, and no-one I should go to."

"And don't you have any, wie soll ich das sagen, any program? Any plan?"

"Not really. I'm working on a book."

During the time since the escape, I'd learned that telling people a small part of the truth-that I was a writer-provided me with a useful and flexible cover story. It was vague enough to explain extended stays or sudden departures, and the word research was comprehensive enough to account for inquiries about certain subjects, such as transport and travel and the availability of false documents, that I was sometimes forced to make. Moreover, the cover story guaranteed me a measure of privacy: the simple threat to tell people, at length, of my work in progress usually discouraged all but the most persistently curious.

And I was a writer. In Australia I'd written since my early twenties. I'd just begun to establish myself through my first published work when my marriage collapsed, I lost the custody of my daughter, and I lost my life in drugs, crime, imprisonment, and escape. But even as a fugitive, writing was still a daily custom and part of my instinctual routine. Even there, in Leopold's, my pockets were full of notes, scribbled onto napkins, receipts, and scraps of paper. I never stopped writing. It was what I did, no matter where I was or how my circumstances changed. One of the reasons I remember those early Bombay months so well is that, whenever I was alone, I wrote about those new friends and the conversations we shared. And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.

"Well, Scheisse, I don't see what's to write about in Bombay.

It's no good place, ja. My friend Lisa says this is the place they were thinking about, when they invented the word pits. And I think it is a good place for calling a pits. Better you should go somewhere else to write about, like Rajasthan maybe. I did hear that it's not a pits there, in Rajasthan."