From my handbag, the statement handbag that I had placed on the desk with the globally recognizable logo pointing right at him, I took out my phone. “You know what my cousin looks like, you’ve seen Peter?” I showed him the selfie I had taken of us at the wedding. “Me and Peter.” He looked down at the picture as though an answer would be found there. “Come up with me. If he isn’t there, no one will know you ever let me in. If he is, then he’s in trouble and you’ll have done the right thing.”

I waited while he put his shoes back on. He looked frightened. It was the fear of getting things wrong, of getting in trouble. I pressed on before he could think of someone he should call. I had the sense he was a newcomer, to the job or the city. I knew how that was, the shallowness of the hand- and footholds. Only I had been able to assimilate, to make myself indistinguishable from those who ran things.

“You have keys, don’t you? Keys to the apartments?” He fetched a bunch from the drawer.

“I can’t be gone for long.”

“We’ll be quick.”

The lift rose up into the night sky. I could see the doorman’s face reflected in the glass. A struggle was going on inside him, and without saying or doing anything, I focused on exerting my will over him.

The lift opened onto a corridor, pale and empty.

“It’s so quiet. Does anyone live here?”

He nodded. At one of the apartments, he took out the key and slipped it into the door. Then he stopped, wide-eyed. “Maybe he isn’t alone.” He paused. “Your cousin has visitors sometimes. Visitors at night.”

So we knocked and called his name through the door. Then, “I am opening the door, Sir. Your cousin and I are coming in.” But the doorman, Adewale, lingered on the threshold. We had seen too many films, the both of us. We knew how it went, the corpse like an unwrapped gift, the blood spray up the wall. Gay men, like women, were most likely to be killed by the people they had sex with. Perhaps that was why we bonded so well over cosmos.