“Take a look at your father’s unimportant little war, then,” he had said, his face tight with anger. “You won’t find it in a hotel bar any more than he will. It’s just down this street.”

There had been another car bomb. Lamartine had his cameras out at once. She stood amid the wreckage, tilting walls, rubble, screams, and lamentation: a child’s feet protruded from the masonry right in front of her. It was the first time she had ever seen, and smelled, death and grief.

She froze, then tried to help. There was a man, and they were trying to lift him onto an improvised stretcher, a length of corrugated metal. An Arab woman spat at her, and she stumbled back. She had blood on her hands and blood on her face. Then, out of the confusion of people and noise and movement, Lamartine had come back. She could see shock, contrition, anxiety on his extraordinary face. She felt his arms lock around her, and then he was drawing her away, around a corner, down a street. They stopped in a hot, narrow street near the harbor. He had a room there over a bar. He drew her into the shade of a doorway, began to speak in an agitated way, then stopped.

She had looked at his face, his fierce, intelligent face, his gray eyes. She watched his gaze become steady, then intent. She knew then, as he knew, what had to happen next. Less than fifteen minutes after leaving the scene of the bomb, she was in his room, in his arms, making love for the first time, with a man she had only just met, scarcely spoken to, but felt she had known all her life.

Could she tell Fricke this, or some of this? Would it make any difference if she did? Could she say, trust me, Fricke, I know how it feels to be wildly in love for the first time in your life. I know how it feels to toss caution aside and gamble everything on one glorious risk. It can work out, Fricke—it did, eventually, years later, in my case. I still love the man concerned; we met again. I am with him now—those fifteen-year-old instincts of mine may have been unwise, but in my case they were correct.

She leaned forward, some of those sentences on her lips; then she drew back. No. In the first place, Fricke would not believe her; in the second, it would be irresponsible. Such instincts had been deadly in Anneke’s case.

The silence had continued for some five minutes now. Fricke was frowning into space, fiddling with her cigarette. Her thoughts, Gini realized, had been following a completely different track. She now turned back, pushed aside her lank hair, and gave Gini a cautious look.

“What you told my mother this afternoon—” She hesitated. “That was true? It was definitely Star who got Anneke onto drugs?”

“Yes, it was. I interviewed someone in England, a man who sees Star pretty often. He met your sister twice with Star. She was on heroin by then, and Star was supplying it. He used to help her give herself a fix.”