I tell him almost everything. The letter I received by private courier more than a year ago, the meeting with an agent in Rotterdam, then the dealings with the explorer in Belém. A rough man, I try to explain, used to living in the jungle. Instructions reaching me in the New World by telegraph, terse little missives that I read in the mildewed foyer of a self-styled Grand Hotel. How well I recall them when my captor prompts me, almost word for word! On the telegrams’ instruction, I ordered repairs when they weren’t needed and had the ship brought into dock for twenty-three days. A dreary seaport, the sailors drunk and whoring, the heat of the jungle rotting the clothes off our backs.

When they finally brought it, it came in a crate. The lid nailed shut and reinforced with ropes, like they were transporting a tiger. They loaded the crate at night: a group of natives, twigs through their noses, looking scared. And all the time, there was an invisible hand behind it all, some master strategist who, telegram by unsigned telegram, pushed us around a giant draughtsboard of his own design.

I had no contact with the cargo until we arrived in Europe. We’d emptied a hold for it and there it remained for the whole of the voyage: one crate, chained to the wall, and its guardian, the scar-faced explorer. A Boer he was, speaking with the awful dialect of the settlers there; always chewing on a native leaf. I did not see him more than a handful of times during three weeks at sea. Each time he had grown thinner, sallow, hollow-cheeked. We had difficult seas.

The paperwork proved to be no problem: a bag of money changed hands, and all stamps were issued. The New World is corrupt. So is the old, only more expensively so; one pays extra for the customs officials’ sweets. It was after our arrival in La Rochelle that I finally met the man I had corresponded with all these months. I try to describe him to the policeman. Slight, clean-shaven, well-mannered. Like a bookish manager, I say, at the best hotel in town. Only later it turns out he is the owner, returning your tip without malice.

My captor is amused by this description.

“What language did you speak in?” he asks.

“German.”

“He spoke it like a native?”

“Yes.” I hesitate. “But there was something foreign to it all the same. He gave me blueprints for the secret chamber in my cabin, worked out in detail, to the tenth of an inch. And made me sole custodian of the child.”