He got up, tucking the black credit card into his pocket, and went downstairs. There was a connecting door into the bookshop and he used it. As he stepped inside he could smell the lingering scent of opium in the air. Sometimes when he came through it smelled sweet; sometimes it smelled like burned foliage; and if Alfred was forced to comment on the persistent smell that clung to his aging body so devoutly, he would have quoted the painter Picasso, who he claimed to have once known, and call it the least stupid smell in the world. Whatever it smelled like, what words were described to use it, it was always there, in Alfred’s clothes and his black beard flecked with white, and in the books themselves that, when opened, would exude a faint trace of the scent from their pages. ‘You no-good, son of a bitch,’ Alfred said. ‘Oh, hi, Joe.’ Joe smiled and waved with the hand holding the cigarette. Alfred turned back to May. ‘Get out of my sight, May. I never want to see you again. Go!’

‘Hi Joe,’ May said, and Joe smiled and waved again. There was a chair wedged in between two tall book cabinets and he sat down. ‘You smoke too much, old man. Every night you need more. Soon you will do nothing but smoke.’

May was strikingly pretty. She had long black hair and delicate features, and though she never, as far as Joe knew, had the operation below, she had small, firm breasts proudly displayed by her tight, red top, courtesy of her regular dose of estrogens. She was kathoey, and had been Alfred’s girlfriend for a long time.

‘Nonsense,’ Alfred said. ‘I have a perfectly healthy opium habit. Had it for years. Marvellous plant.’

‘Makes you slow.’

‘Makes me strong!’ Alfred shouted. ‘Strong like an ox!’ he made an unmistakable, lewd gesture with his fist, and he and May collapsed in laughter. ‘I would give you many babies if you weren’t half man,’ Alfred said sadly when they had calmed down.

‘I might be half man but I am all woman,’ May said. Joe knew she could match Alfred’s smoking with her own.

Alfred nodded and sighed. ‘That is true,’ he said.

‘I love you,’ May said.

‘I love you too, sweetheart. Now go and leave this old man to run his business.’

May blew him a kiss, waved to Joe, and disappeared into the sunlight outside. Alfred sighed again and turned to Joe. ‘Silly girl,’ he said. ‘And if I didn’t smoke? I might not even see you.’

Joe wasn’t sure how to take that, and let it pass. You had to let things pass, with Alfred. ‘You want some coffee?’ Alfred said.

‘Sure.’

Alfred got up and went to the small electric plate, single ring, which sat on a low table beside the open door. He spooned coffee into a long-handled pot already filled with water and turned on the dial. The electric ring began to glow.

He was a tall man, Alfred, though a little stooped now; he wore jeans and a chequered shirt and a belt with a large metal buckle. His feet were bare. He moved softly, making almost no sound: he claimed to have been with the Foreign Legion, fighting on the French side in the Vietnam War, and sometimes that he’d been an adviser to the Khmer king before a misunderstanding – whose nature he never expounded on – made him depart the country in some haste. Alfred was a man full of stories; now he filled his life with those of others, the small shop filled with worn and battle-weary books that had seen more of the world in their time, he liked to say, than he had and, like himself, had finally come to rest, for a while at least. He was a reluctant seller of books, which was, Joe thought, not a bad thing seeing that he rarely had any customers.

‘Did you see a girl walk out of the building as you came in?’ Joe said. Alfred turned towards him, his eyes bright, and chuckled. ‘That’d be the day,’ he said.

‘Did you?’

Alfred shrugged. ‘I’ve not seen anyone. Why, you working a case?’ he chuckled. ‘Is she a suspect? You should have tailed her. You could do with finding yourself a piece of tail, Joe.’

Joe let that, too, pass. The water was coming to a boil, and Alfred stirred in sugar and then poured the black, muddy drink into two small glass cups. ‘Salut,’ he said. He drank the hot coffee noisily.

‘You know those books you gave me a while back?’ Joe said. Alfred had recommended them, almost pushing them into Joe’s hands. ‘This Osama Bin Laden series?’

Alfred sat down behind his desk and put the coffee cup directly on the table, where it would leave a ring to join the countless others that had turned the surface into an otherworldly map, like the surface of the moon. ‘You got a cigarette?’ he asked Joe.

‘Sure.’

‘Ta.’

He accepted the proffered cigarette and Joe sat back between the bookcases. ‘What about them?’ Alfred said.

‘You know who wrote them?’

‘Got a light?’

‘Sure.’ He got up again, flicked the Zippo, and offered the flame to Alfred, who inhaled deeply and blew out a ring of smoke. Joe sat back.

‘Longshott,’ Alfred said. ‘Mike Longshott.’ He giggled. ‘I assume it’s a pseudonym.’

So did Joe, but – ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Come here,’ Alfred said. He rose and circumnavigated the desk, heading for a bookcase two down from Joe. ‘Let’s see, Medusa Press…the only titles I seem to sell. To be honest, the only books I don’t mind selling. Very popular, in certain sections of society.’ His fingers ran along the shelf, plucking out books. ‘There you go.’ He thrust them into Joe’s hands and went back to the desk, leaving behind gaps on the shelf like the white keys of a piano. Joe looked at the books.

They were identical in size and look to the Vigilante books he already had. The first one was called I was Commandant Heinrich’s Bitch. Joe stared at the cover. It depicted a blond man in uniform holding a horse-whip in one hand. Behind him were guard towers, a barbed-wire fence. At his feet was a large-breasted girl in badly-torn clothes that revealed a lot of her flesh. She was holding on to the man’s leg, looking up at him with an undecipherable look in her eyes.

‘Smut,’ Alfred said. ‘Filth. Utter junk, of course. Wonderful stuff.’

Joe put it down carefully and looked at the next one. Confessions of a Drug-Crazed Nymphomaniac. The cover showed a bare-chested blonde woman reclining on a sofa while the sinister shadow of a man towered above her, administering an opium pipe to her slack mouth.

The third book was simply called Slut.

The author of the first two books was called Sebastian Bruce. The author of the third title went by the moniker of Countess Szu Szu.

‘Medusa Press,’ Alfred said through the smoke of his cigarette, ‘are, on the whole, purveyors of unadulterated pornography. Uncut, I should say. Dirty books, in common parlance. Sell quite well, too, when I can get them past customs. Which is most of the time, to tell you the truth.’

Pornography? And yet it seemed to fit. Sex and violence, he thought. Hand in hand through the smoke. The image startled him, seeming to awaken something inside. The smoke smelled sweet and the silence was complete – he shook his head, searched for his cigarette, realised he had left it in the dirty-glass ashtray on the second shelf and that it had burned away. He shook the pack out of his pocket, liberated a cigarette and lit it. ‘Know anything else?’ he said.

Alfred looked at him and the old eyes were suddenly hooded. ‘No,’ he said. ‘If it’s Mike Longshott you’re looking for – if it’s Osama Bin Laden you’re after, for that matter – then I suspect you would not find the answer here. But Joe –’

‘Yes?’

The old man stood up. There was ash in his beard. He scratched a vein in the craggy, limestone visage of his face and lumbered towards Joe. Suddenly the space in the bookshop felt that much closer. ‘Are you sure you want to find out?’

a man reading a newspaper,