“I know.”

“Pack the lot of ’em into a Land Rover and just keep driving east. It’s a grand time for them. You get girls who’ve never been out of London in their lives, or spent thirty years in a cottage in Cornwall, and here they’re getting the grand tour. Turkey, Iraq, Persia. I don’t rush ’em, I let ’em have their bit of sightseeing. And you just keep heading east until you get to Kabul. That’s in-”

“ Afghanistan.”

“Right you are, Afghanistan. Never heard of the bloody country before me china put me onto this fiddle, let alone Ka-bloody-bul. Just drive straight on into it. There’s some desperate roads on the way, and this last time I was carrying extra water the whole trip, what with the radiator boiling over, but that’s the only problem there is. Crossing the borders is safe as houses, what with me own passport in order and all of the birds’ too. You have to make sure of that ahead of time, that the birds have their passports right, and the visas and all. Customs is no problem. There’s no smuggling, see, just the lot of birds.”

“And then what?”

“And then there you are in Kabul.”

I looked at him. I had the feeling I was missing a fairly obvious point. He wasn’t lying now. Somehow my act of dedigitation had elevated me to the level of a man he could respect, and he seemed to be telling me the details of his fiddle with a pride akin to Courtney Bede’s delight in showing off his stacks of old newspapers.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Do you have sex with the girls?”

“With the birds?” He frowned, thinking. “I suppose a chap could if he wanted. You’ll get some who are proper dying for it, but I never fool with any birds that way.”

“Then what in hell do you do with them?”

“Oh, come on now,” he said. “You’re not half thick, are you? Now you can work it out. Here you are in bloody Kabul with six or seven girls, and what do you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why, you sell ’em, don’t you see? What the hell else would you do with them?”

I said, “You sell them.”

“And to think you couldn’t guess it! White slaves is what they call it. And a thousand nicker each is what they pay. That’s six or seven thousand a trip, and add a bit of profit on selling the Land Rover and take away the cost of flying ’ em to Turkey and you’re still five or six thousand quid ahead of the game. Just play it out four times a year, say, and-”

“Wait a minute. You sell them. Who buys them?”

“Chap named Amanullah. A great hulking wog with white hair to his shoulders. Never an argument on price, not once.”

“What happens to the girls?”

“They make brasses of them. Tarts. They’ve a shortage of them over there, do you know?” He gave a short laugh. “Fancy bringing a boatload of tarts to Soho and trying to sell ’em. Be coals to Newcastle all over again.”

“They work in Kabul, then?”

He shrugged. “Got me there. I’d say they don’t, now that I think on it. I’d say they ship ’em out where birds are scarce. For them that work in the mines and such. You know what? I never gave it much thought. Once I sell ’em they’re nothing to me, and it’s hop a plane and Hello, Picadilly! with a purse full of the ready.”

I sat beside him, my mind quite numb, while he added details. I nodded at the right places, put in the right questions, and tried to convince myself that all of this was really happening. I glanced from time to time at his index finger on the floor. It looked like one of those plastic things they sell in novelty shops along with rubber dog shit and dribble glasses. It wasn’t real, and neither was anything else.

He’d never had trouble with the girls until this last trip, he told me. Then two of them got wind of something, Phaedra and a farm girl from the Midlands, and in Baghdad he caught them trying to escape to the British Embassy. “Had to drug them and keep them in a fog the rest of the way. Told the others they were sick with a fever. Cost me a few quid that way, bribing the hacks at the borders. But the rest never did catch on.”

I pumped him for more details about Amanullah and how he could be located. Finally it got through to him that I actually wanted to go to Afghanistan and get Phaedra back. I think this shocked him more than the loss of the finger. All along he had thought that I wanted to muscle in on his racket.

“You must be crackers,” he said. “You’d never find her, and they’d never let you have her. She’s been sold, don’t you see? Oh, you might buy her back, but after a few months of that life, why, what would she be good for? They don’t last long there, you see. That’s why they’ve got a steady need for fresh birds-”

I thought of Phaedra, my little Phaedra, Mama Horowitz’s Deborah. Sweet, virginal Phaedra, who lived with me for a month and emerged intact. It’s not logical just to save yourself, I had told her once. You have to be saving yourself for something.

And what had my Phaedra saved herself for? A whorehouse in Afghanistan?

I stood up. Hyphen – I still didn’t know his name, or much care – was saying something. I had stopped listening. I found the square of adhesive tape and slapped it in place across his horrible mouth.

Julia was in the bedroom. She was pressed up against the far wall, her arms across her chest, hugging herself and silently shaking. She looked like certain pictures of Anne Frank.

“Did you hear any of that?”

She nodded.

“I want you to go into the hallway now. I want to be certain that there’s no one around when I walk out of here. Go out and close the door. I’ll be ready in a moment or two, and I’ll knock on the door. If it’s all clear, return the knock and I’ll come out.”

She nodded again, rigidly, then grabbed up her purse and walked straight to the front room and out the door without looking at him. I went over to him and picked up the cleaver, but it was no good. I took it to the kitchen and exchanged it for a more pointed knife.

He didn’t like the looks of it at all.

I spent a few unintentionally brutal seconds standing there trying to think of something to say, but there was no way to say it and no reason to try. So I put the knife in his heart, and took it out, and put it back a second time and left it there.

Chapter 4

Afghanistan consists of a quarter of a million square miles of mountainous terrain bordered on the west by Iran, on the south and east by Pakistan, and on the north by the Turkmen, Uzbek and Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republics. The population is slightly in excess of fifteen million, a thirtieth of whom live in greater Kabul. The monetary unit is the afghani. Major languages are Afghan and Persian. The chief religion is Islam. Camels and sheep constitute the most important livestock. There is some gold mined in the extreme northeast in the Hindu Kush, in which area is located the highest peak in the nation, which rises 24,556 feet above sea level. Substantial amounts of coal and iron are also to be found here and there. Major rivers include-

If you care, you might check out Hammond ’s Medallion Atlas, which was my own source for all of the above information. Nigel had a copy, and I divided my time that night between it and the coal fire, which was not throwing as much heat as I thought it should.

By midnight, both Nigel and Julia had gone off to bed. Our conversation until then was forced and uncomfortable. No one much wanted to discuss what had gone on at the Old Compton Street flat, and it was difficult to put one’s mind to anything else, but we did make a pretense of talking over the barbarous notion of white slavery and the possible course of action I might take.

The former topic was limited to lines like, “Imagine that sort of thing in the twentieth century,” and so on. I didn’t find it all that hard to imagine, but then I’m not all that thrilled with the twentieth century, which may explain my feelings. The latter subject, just what to do about it, kept running into conversational dead ends. As far as I could see, there was only one thing to do. I had to go to Afghanistan, find Phaedra, and lead her Mosaically out of the house of bondage. I didn’t imagine this would be a simple matter, but neither did I see how discussing it could render it a whit less difficult.

So they went to bed, and I read the atlas and poked at the fire and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

I’d have saved a lot of time if it hadn’t been for the silly atlas. But the more I concentrated on the precise geographical location of Afghanistan, the more elaborate plans I devised for working my way into the country. The best route, I finally decided, would constitute a close approximation of the course the girls themselves had followed. I’d have to omit Turkey, of course, where I am as non grata as a persona can possibly be. But other than that it wouldn’t be too difficult to get into Iraq, then move on to Iran, then make the final crossing into Afghanistan.

Would Iraq be a problem? I wondered about this. The Kurds have been in armed rebellion against the Iraqi government for over twenty years, fighting incessantly and heroically for autonomy, and theirs is not the sort of struggle from which I am inclined to remain aloof. This might well limit my chances of obtaining an Iraqi visa. Still, that couldn’t be too hard a border to cross, could it?

I studied maps.

This sort of thing went on for hours. I brewed fresh tea, added more coal to the fire (without adding more heat to the room), and wasted more time. I prepared for a variety of unlikely contingencies, none of which I’ll bore you with now. My mind went on and on, never hitting upon the basic geometrical postulate that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Blame it on my past. When one is sufficiently experienced in the devious, one rejects the straightforward approach as a matter of course. It took me hours and hours before I realized that the easiest way to go to Afghanistan was to go to Afghanistan.

Quite so.

No one in Afghanistan had anything to fear from me. It was one country where I was as welcome as any other stranger. Nor was there anything at all clandestine or subversive in my purpose for going there. I wanted to repurchase a slave and take her home, and I intended to do this quietly and discreetly, thus constituting not the slightest threat to the peace and stability of the Afghan nation.

So why not fly to Kabul?

I closed the atlas and returned it to its place on the shelf. There was probably an Afghan embassy or consulate somewhere in London. I could go to it in the morning and find out what I would need in the way of visas and inoculations. Any of the travel bureaus I had previously haunted could find a way to book me straight through to Kabul. A direct flight seemed too much to hope for, but no doubt there was a way to make connections through Teheran or Karachi or something. I wouldn’t have any trouble flying out of England, either; my passport, with the entrance visa stamped at Dublin, was in good order. The British might have made it hard for me to enter their country, but my leaving it could only please them, if in fact, they took any particular note of it at all.

It was a few minutes past four when Julia screamed.

This wasn’t the first time that sounds had come from behind her door. Periodically I had heard moans and groans, and while these did nothing for my concentration, they came as no great surprise to me. She was a fine girl, strong and resolute and bright, an echo of those superb English girls who distinguished themselves during the blitz in movies of the Second World War. But it had been a hell of an evening, and the episodes of amateur surgery and murder were the sort that might disturb anyone’s sleep.