That would have been done years back, obviously enough, but no one had bothered to remove the useless screen. There were also books lined up on the over mantle, all of them flaking and crumbling with age and no one had bothered to remove those either. Time’s debris-there was a lot of it about.

‘You got the job of trying me?’

The Colonel nodded. No apologies, no excuses. Axl was grateful for that.

‘Today?

Colonel Emilio spread his hands. From his short brushed-back hair to his green eyes, he might have been Austrian somewhere back in the gene pool, but he had the hand gestures of someone born in Mexico.

‘The Cardinal decided this?’

Of course he did. Stupid question.

Outside in the central courtyard police recruits paraded in full uniform. They carried Browning pulse/Rs with flip-out bayonets, sawtoothed ceramic blades neatly folded back under each barrel. Grey polymer helmets protected their heads while smoke-grey visors hid their faces.

It was the battle armour of an army devoted to crowd control not the solving of crime. Everyone from the meanest peon to the Cardinal, from the visiting delegation from WorldBank to the crowd being controlled knew that.

Fear was the key, thought Axl, but then when wasn’t it? My fear, your fear, the Cardinal’s fear...

Particularly the Cardinal’s fear.

When Axl spoke again, his words were calm and reasoned. Without knowing it, he fell into the speech patterns of his old captain. Understated, ironic. The things Axl usually tried to be and mostly failed.

‘When you try me, do you get to take my saving the old bastard into account?’

Colonel Emilio shivered. Criticising the Cardinal lost people more than just promotion… Starting with their heads, if they got lucky. Everything else, and then their heads if they didn’t.

What Colonel Emilio should have done was slap the prisoner into submission, just in case the two cops at the screen had overheard. But it was too late for that and besides Axl could tell the Colonel was interested.

‘I saved his life,’ said Axl, ‘but you already know that

Colonel Emilio didn’t know, he didn’t know at all. And the Colonel suspected he was learning something it was better not to have been told.

‘The republicans almost shot the old bastard,’ said Axl flatly. ‘But I was there, so it didn’t happen. Maybe I was wrong…

‘Maybe I should have…’

‘Out,’ Colonel Emilio barked and the two cops looked round in surprise. Neither one had been listening but that wasn’t the point. A door slammed and then Axl’s comment hung in the air like a taunt, along with a thin strand of spider’s web and dust motes that danced like slow-turning flakes in a bottle of chilled goldwasser. The expensive kind sold in Austrian cafés ringing the Plaza de Armas.

Prisoners in La Medicina didn’t question the rights of the Cardinal, not coldly anyway. They cursed and spat defiance or pleaded for their lives or a quick death, or both. Axl wasn’t going to plead. He hadn’t pleaded for the impossible, not for a long time. And he didn’t curse, he left that to his gun. All the same…

‘You go back and tell him I saved his life once. Ask the old bastard if he wants it saved again.’

Power and paranoia, vanity and fear; flip sides born out of the cowardice most people called survival. Me too, thought Axl, surprising himself. The Colonel might not quite believe him. He might decide that Axl’s words were as empty as Axl’s future but all the same…

Axl would get his meeting with the Cardinal, he was sure of it. Whether he’d get out of the meeting alive was something else again. But just being able to stare the old bastard in the face once more would even the odds.

Each breath pulled at his throat and the sour air Pietro sucked into his lungs burnt like smoke from a rubbish tip. The boy thought he wanted water but what he actually needed was enough rest for his tired muscles to purge themselves of lactic acid and his heart to steady.

Pietro wasn’t sure how old the tunnels were or where they led. All he knew was that most were lined with damp grey stone and that they stank. Shit he could have handled, what with sleeping each night on the floor of the servicios at La Piscina, but this was the sour smell of dust and dead history.

Sometimes the tunnels were silent except for the rumble of traffic overhead and sometimes Pietro could hear the distant swearing of his pursuers. Now there was noise both behind and ahead. Pietro was sure he’d been running for days and wouldn’t have believed it was only three hours, had there been anyone there to tell him, which there wasn’t.

Hurtling down the sewer towards the noise ahead, Pietro realised it was the sound of drums and froze. What if the people ahead were worse than those behind? He’d heard the stories about Vou, about old men ridden by gods, cups of blood, smoke, animal sacrifices, drugged girls in torn shifts… whatever, he had no choice.

Pietro wasn’t sure what he was expecting. Breasts, probably. Naked women—or at least naked from the waist up—dancing to the drums or falling to the ground like drunks. Or maybe a single frenzied woman foaming at the mouth and writhing in the dirt of a cellar floor, while a tall black man slit the throat of a black chicken and drank its blood from a silver chalice.

What Pietro got was an almost empty brick-lined vault. The drums echoing from an old Sanyo stack. No woman writhing in the dirt. Only an old man with dreadlocks who looked up from the upturned crate that made do as a makeshift altar and frowned at the boy who skidded out of the darkness and stopped, huge gun held tightly in one hand.

‘You looking for Sábado?’ The man’s voice was incongruously deep given his spindly, driftwood thin body. He had a cigar in one hand and was wearing a bowler hat.

Pietro just shook his head. Behind the man was a half-open door and steps ... If Pietro could reach those he could lose himself in the crowd. Maybe jump a tram to the Zona Rosa and the big ‘crete and glass hotels. Find a tourist, either sex. It wouldn’t be pleasant but it would give him a bed for the next few nights. And if he got really lucky they might buy him a ride out of the city, maybe even across the border.

Time to move. Now, before Spanish Phillipe and the others came crashing out of the tunnels.

‘You stay right there, Mon.’

‘Like fuck,’ Pietro said and began to edge towards the steps.

‘No,’ said the man. ‘Like a good boy.’

Old… thin… ill. Pietro decided the dreadlocked Vou priest was no real threat but he raised the Colt anyway, then stopped as dark eyes locked onto his, faint tendrils of thought brushing at the edge of his mind, no heavier than cigarette smoke curling up into an open sky.

On the upturned crate—in front of half a dozen framed postcards, and either side of a copper bowl containing burning embers—stood two candles, little more than wax poured into paper cups and left to set. The kind that street stalls sold by their thousands every day. Crudely printed on the wrappers was a woodblock of a woman gazing heavenward. The old man passed his hands over the cheap candles and they went out, flames guttering into nothing. Then the man passed his hands back the other way and the wicks relit.

‘Choose,’ said the Voudun priest.

Choose what? Pietro shook his head violently and tried to raise the hiPower.

‘Wrong choice,’ said the Colt and it was talking to Pietro. Just above where the handle finished and the matt-grey ceramic of the chassis began, a tiny diode flicked from red to steadily-flashing yellow. The gun was on standby.

Pietro slapped his hand against the Colt, trying to get the diode to change. And when it wouldn’t he reversed the gun and tried to raise it like a club.