Moving through the fug towards Petrovitch was a thin figure wearing a stained white apron. “Hey! Bad man!”

“Hey, Wong. Your sign outside still isn’t working.”

Wong folded his scrawny arms. “You fix it for me?”

“Kind of busy at the moment. Maybe when I get back.”

Wong nodded slowly. “Pay me back for all those free cups of coffee, yes?”

“Free? From you? How is the coffee, anyway?”

Then they were hugging, slapping each other’s backs and cackling like loons. “Coffee hot and strong today!” they chorused.

“Where that wife of yours?” asked Wong after they’d separated.

“Taking care of business. She sends her apologies.”

“Okay. Next time, bring her, not this thing. She much prettier.” Wong peered at Newcomen. “Case out back. No room in here. No room!.”

“He treats it like it’s got the yebani crown jewels inside. Let him stick it in a corner somewhere.”

“Who this? Makes place look untidy.”

Petrovitch peered through the chemical fog. Tidiness had never been a hallmark of Wong’s establishments. Or cleanliness, for that matter.

“This is Agent Joseph Newcomen, FBI. He’s going to help me find Lucy. Isn’t that right, Newcomen?”

“Yessir… yes,” he corrected himself.

“American, huh?’ Wong stalked around him like he was viewing a grotesque artwork. “This one end up dead too?”

“Yeah, maybe. I seem to have a bit of a record for that.”

“What? What do you mean?” Newcomen looked startled.

“First American?” Wong snorted. “Bang. Bullet in head.”

“And the next?”

“Bang. Bullet in head.”

“Pretty much tells you everything you need to know, Newcomen.” Petrovitch scratched at his nose. “You got a table for us, or are we going to have to eat standing up?”

“This one, here?” Wong pointed to a table in the middle of the floor.

“Yeah, how about that one over there, behind the pillar, where no one will be able to overhear everything we say to each other?”

Wong’s eyes narrowed. “You organising crime again?”

“No, not with Joe Friday here, anyway. I just want to sit somewhere we’re not going be disturbed. We can do drunken revelry later.”

“Okay.” Wong persuaded the two Rastafari out of their seats and carried their half-eaten egg fu yongs to the table he’d tried to foist on Petrovitch. They grumbled about Babylon, but then saw who it was they were making space for. The men both slid their palms across Petrovitch’s white hand and seemed content.

The table was cleaned with a damp rag smelling strongly of bleach. Petrovitch shrugged off his coat and threw it across the back of his chair before falling into the seat.

Newcomen hovered nervously, looking around him in wonder and fear. His shoulders finally slumped, as if he’d accepted his fate, and he dragged his suitcase into the space next to the red-hot radiator.

“You don’t honestly think I’m going to eat anything here, do you?” he sat down opposite Petrovitch and leaned across to hiss at him. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“I’m trying,” said Petrovitch, “to talk to you. Find out what you’re like. Find out whether I can trust you to do your job or not. I know all the facts about your life: what I don’t know is you: how you react, your own particular strengths and weaknesses. The files I’ve read don’t tell me that sort of stuff. Now, do you want coffee?”

“We could talk at my hotel. Have dinner in the restaurant. With food that isn’t going to poison me.”

“Hmm.” Petrovitch flipped open an imaginary notebook and started to write. “Freaks out when removed from comfort zone.”

“I do not do that.”

“Unable to cope with novelty.”

“Shut up.”

“Scared of absolutely everything.” Petrovitch flipped the note-book shut and tossed it away over his shoulder. “That’s about right, isn’t it?”

“Don’t make fun of me, Petrovitch.”

“Or what, vat-boy?”

“That’s not an insult.”

“Is where I come from. Hell, at least my upgrades took.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Okay. This isn’t going well. Some of that is my fault.” Petrovitch placed his palms on the table. “Let me ask you a question: do you actually care that my daughter’s missing?”

Newcomen worked his jaw. “It’s my job to help find her.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Petrovitch stared across at the American. “Let’s try another. When they tweaked your genes, did they throw out the code for your soul?”

“Are you trying to get a reaction from me? Provoke me? Get me into a fight that’ll land me in front of the Assistant Director’s desk on a disciplinary matter? You won’t be able to do that. You want to know what was in your file? You don’t need to warn me about your behaviour. I know about it already.”

“Okay, okay.” Petrovitch held his hands up. “I know what you care about now. Your position within the Bureau. That’s what’s important to you, I understand that now. Let’s get a coffee each and calm down.”

Right on cue, two mugs appeared. It was almost as if Wong was waiting for a gap in the conversation.

“He takes it white,” said Petrovitch, dragging his own drink towards him.

Wong sniffed, and came back a moment later with a jug half-filled with something resembling milk. “Ready for food?”

“Yeah.”

“We haven’t even seen a menu yet,” objected Newcomen.

Petrovitch pointedly ignored the interruption. “What I said earlier will be fine.” After Wong had left, he said: “You know when you go round someone’s house for dinner? You don’t ask for a menu then, do you? No. So don’t be an idiot.”

“This is a public diner….”

“You don’t know anything about Wong, and you don’t get to say what this is or isn’t. Especially when your government killed most of his old customers with a cruise missile.”

Newcomen chewed cud for a while, and ignored his coffee. Petrovitch didn’t, and welcomed it like an old friend. Hot and strong, just how he liked it.

“Look,” said Newcomen suddenly, putting his forearms on the table and crowding close. “Can we agree on a truce?”

“And why would I want something like that?” Petrovitch centred his mug down in the brown ring of liquid already on the wooden surface. “But go on, I’m listening.”

“We’ve been thrown together by circumstances beyond our control. I don’t have a choice about being sent, and you don’t get to choose who escorts you around.”

“Someone chose. Don’t you want to know who? And why?”

“I know why they sent me. It’s because they thought I was the right man for this job.”

“That begs so many questions.” Petrovitch held up two fingers. “Mainly, what’s the job and why are you right? You see, I was expecting some high-level State Department official, not some junior G-man. What did Buchannan tell you the job was?”

“Stick with you. Show you around. Keep you up to date with the investigation. Wait until you were satisfied we’d done everything we could, and then,” Newcomen sat back, “get you out of the country.”

Petrovitch’s eyes narrowed. “You have remembered my daughter’s missing, haven’t you?”

“Petrovitch. Dr Petrovitch, you have to realise that the chances of find—” His words finished in a choking sound, because Petrovitch had lunged across the table and had him by the throat.

“Finish that sentence and I’ll break your neck.” He squeezed a little more. “Vrubatsa?”

Newcomen’s fingers managed to prise Petrovitch’s hand away, but only because he’d let him. The American rubbed at his throat and glared across the table. “I thought we were discussing a truce.”

“We will find her. This is not an article of faith, this is a statement of fact. The moment you stop looking for her is the moment I kill you.” Petrovitch looked around the pillar to see if Wong was coming with their food. “That’s not just hyperbole, Newcomen: I do mean it.”

“Then you’ll be arrested and charged with first-degree murder. You’ll be executed for sure.”