17

‘Mushkul’ sounded OK until Baaz explained, as we kept up a steady jog south-west through the tunnels, that it was Punjabi for ‘about as extreme as it gets’.

While I tried and failed to imagine what he might think was worse than nearly being drowned, he also explained that more of the tunnels south of the Place d’Italie had been walled off since my teenage excursions, so we couldn’t simply loop around it. We had two options: take a long detour south, or cut straight under the great traffic junction – and risk another confrontation. The men who’d found him, he thought, had most likely entered via the Place d’Italie Métro station.

Surviving another shootout underground would be not so much a matter of skill and training as chance. As soon as we went up against someone with night vision, we couldn’t hide. If we were caught in a long stretch of tunnel, we’d be mown down before we could turn around. I didn’t even want to think about the damage another grenade strike might do.

We headed south.

As the possibility of using my father’s waypoints receded into fantasy, the reality of my reliance on Baaz grew sharper. He twisted around fragile columns, slithered under low passes, directed me left and right – pointing out where flooded tunnels breached at ankle height and where to jump the metal-spiked shafts that yawned wide in the passage floor. He was fit and fast, but, like most people who don’t train for it, had little upper body strength and struggled to pull himself up where there was no foothold to boost him. He was alert, though – stopping constantly, listening, picking out the distant murmur of voices. At one junction he just stood still and sniffed the air. I asked what he was doing.