‘Do you mind if I sit?’ asked Dubash, pulling a chair from another table. His offsider—a burly, round-faced plod with dead eyes—remained standing, unintroduced.

‘You must be Clement Vinier, yes?’ asked Dubash.

‘That’s me,’ said de Payns, reaching for his coffee to prove his hands weren’t shaking.

‘And this is your … crew? Is that the word?’ asked the ISI man.

‘Yes,’ said de Payns, adding with a laugh, ‘though they’re often referred to by less complimentary terms.’

‘Because you are filmmakers, yes?’

‘You can call them that, yes,’ said de Payns.

‘What are the names of these films?’ asked Dubash, crossing his legs.

‘This current one that we’re scouting locations for is Lake Forgiveness,’ said de Payns. ‘We’ve made probably five films between us, including the short feature Change, which had a run in Cannes …’

‘Change?’ said Dubash. ‘What’s it about?’

De Payns remembered the hurried shoot he did with a new recruit who had a film background, along with a couple of trainee actors. ‘It’s about a teenage girl realising that if she can change herself, she can change the world. But changing herself is not that easy.’

Dubash made a face and looked straight at Templar. ‘He’s a good filmmaker, this Clement Vinier?’

‘He’s very good,’ said Templar. ‘Very funny but also sensitive.’

‘He uses very good writers,’ said Thierry.

De Payns introduced the group, but Dubash kept his eyes firmly on the chef de mission.

‘Islamabad is a good place to make a movie, I think,’ said the ISI man. ‘So, where have you scouted?’

‘North, south, east and west,’ said de Payns. He had his film notebook in front of him and offered it to Dubash, who took it and flipped through the pages, pausing at a page and squinting at the bad handwriting. ‘Okay, so the Raja Bazar Road, the great food and shopping, yes?’

De Payns nodded. ‘We had a couple of great pizzas down there.’

‘Excuse me for my poor reading of the French. But I believe this says that the girls—the women?—in Raja Bazar are very sexy. No hijabs. Great place for Ravi to lose his innocence?’

De Payns shrugged but Dubash wasn’t smiling. ‘Explain to me this innocence?’

‘Well,’ said de Payns, treading carefully, ‘Ravi is young and has had a sheltered upbringing—he has never seen girls like this before.’

Dubash looked confused. ‘These are Pakistani girls? You mean like teenagers?’

De Payns tried to smile. ‘It’s part of the coming of age, when a fourteen-year-old boy discovers himself …’

‘Fourteen? That’s not marrying age in Pakistan. We’re not in Afghanistan.’

‘No, no,’ said de Payns, trying to rescue the conversation. ‘Not coming of age so he gets married.’

Dubash and his sidekick stared at de Payns, waiting.

De Payns tried to play it out. ‘You know, teenagers, love, sex, experimenting …’

Dubash looked genuinely embarrassed. ‘You have the camera?’