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    Osama
    Osama
    Osama
    Ebook299 pages4 hours

    Osama

    By Lavie Tidhar

    4/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Lavie Tidhar was in Dar-es-Salaam during the American embassy bombings in 1998, and stayed in the same hotel as the Al Qaeda operatives in Nairobi. Since then he and his now-wife have narrowly avoided both the 2005 King’s Cross and 2004 Sinai attacks—experiences that led first to his memorable short story “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” and later to the creation of Osama.

    In a world without global terrorism Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante…

    WINNER OF THE 2012 WORLD FANTASY AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL.

    "An awesome book, dark, twisty alt-universe terrorist noir" - Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City

    "Bears comparison with the best of Philip K Dick’s paranoid, alternate-history fantasies. It’s beautifully written and undeniably powerful." - The Financial Times

    "Not a writer to mess around with half measures…brings to mind Philip K Dick’s seminal science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle." - The Guardian

    "A strange, melancholy and moving refl ection, torquing politics with the fantastic, and vice virtuosically versa." - bestselling author China Miéville

    "The author is young, ambitious, skilled and original. Osama is an ingenious inversion of modern history...excellent, evocative and atmospheric." - bestselling author Christopher Priest

    "Intensely moving." - Interzone
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
    Release dateOct 9, 2012
    ISBN9781936535774
    Osama
    Author

    Lavie Tidhar

    Lavie Tidhar's work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama and the forthcoming Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and World Fantasy Award winner Osama (2011) and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom prize winner Central Station (2016). He has also written comics (Adler, 2020) and children's books such as Candy (2018) and the forthcoming A Child's Book of the Future (2024). He is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London.

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    Reviews for Osama

    4/5

    77 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      You are going to feel lost at some points in this book - but that is entirely intentional. Easy to read, but hard to understand until perhaps the very end of the novel. I've been thinking of the meanings of the story for a long time now and surely that is a sign of a good book? At any rate this book definitley succeeds in giving us something that is an entirely new piece od sci fi, which can only be worth a punt!
    • 5/5
      A private investigator straight out of Central Casting Noir is given the job of tracking down the author of a series of pulp thrillers. But the world this gumshoe inhabits is not ours, and the thrillers are part of a series entitled 'Osama bin Ladin: Vigilante'...The world-building is intriguing. It's hard to tell if the world of Joe, the PI, is a "real" world or some construct of the human imagination. It is certainly a timeless setting, any time from the 1940s to the 1990s. Yet at times, "our" reality breaks through into the novel. There are opium dens, and London private members' clubs, and a disused Tube station, and villains, and a Sydney Greenstreet character, and Bogart, and a fan convention, and people who become transparent and disappear. Is this an afterlife,? Which is the fantasy world? Who is the author of the bin Ladin novels, and whose story is he really telling? Is our world fantastic, or just unbelievable?Tidhar's perspective is interesting. An expatriate Israeli with a cosmopolitan background, his sympathies are not where you might think they'd be.The style is economical, the chapters short, but I had the urge to continue reading. This is a book I shall want to come back to.The UK hardback from PS Publishing is an exquisite production, too.
    • 4/5
      I've been avoiding reading Osama for a while, as I didn't really feel tempted by the summary, but I ended up picking it up in the library -- because that can never hurt! -- and really enjoying it, as it happens. Rather more than the books that Lavie Tidhar wrote for Angry Robot, actually, even though superficially they might seem more up my street.

      I think a fair amount of the trouble people have reading this is that they're expecting the wrong thing. A classically noirish detective story, a thriller, something solidly science fictional that deals with multiverses... but it's none of those things, or not only those things. It borrows some of the trappings of each: the protagonist is a detective in a classic noir style; there are excerpts that're meant to be from a thriller; there are at least two parallel universes, it seems...

      Going into this as I did, without too many expectations, let me enjoy it a lot. Each chapter is short, so it ended up flying by, and while others complained about the metaphors and imagery, I actually enjoyed it a lot. Borrowing from a genre that gave us "shop-worn Galahad"s and the like, I don't think the writing style was out of place at all.

      It's much more quiet, meditative, than most noir-ish things, though. Although the character is in many ways insubstantial, that's kind of the point. If you're looking for a thriller, this ain't it: though there's plenty of violence and mystery and so on, really it's more about an internal journey.
    • 4/5
      I did like Lavie Tidhar's "Osama" a lot, though in terms of ideas it is the final quarter of the novel which brings out the novel's driving conceit after a more average private detective for hire on a case novel which comes prior, though with some really good bits of screentime guest stars sneaking in, and clinical descriptions of our world's terrorist attacks, with ruminations on what is on the other side of the war that Osama is waging in the "Vigilante" novels. (It pains me not to just love love love the novel, as lots of excellent folks do, and it's maybe the raised expectations that unfairly make me bring it down just a notch? I do love Tidhar's fiction and have been lucky enough to publish one of his stories. Anyway... still very much worth reading and very recommended.)
    • 4/5
      I am having the hardest time processing this book.

      Basic plot?
      Joe is a detective. He's living and working in Laos when a mysterious woman comes to him and asks him to find an author. Someone who is writing about a fictional vigilante named Osama bin Laden. Chances are, if you've gotten to my review, you already know that.

      This world is an alternate reality (maybe). It's a very classic detective noir novel (maybe), with your typical cardboard cut out detective stereotype (maybe), and standard cardboard bad guys (maybe), and a standard mystery to be solved. Maybe.

      It's about life and choices and difficulties and realities. Maybe. It's definitely written in a way that can be hard to grasp, hard to get into. This is not a character driven novel. This is a world driven novel. This is a reality driven novel.

      I will say that this is a book that needs to be read in one or two sittings. This book needs quiet, it needs contemplation, it needs focus, it needs thought. I was trying to read it in my usual 20 minute gulps on the bus, but things would get so convoluted I'd have to backtrack several pages to re-read and figure my way back into the story. So I quit, read something fluffy on the bus and waited for the one day when I could just focus, breathe, and read.

      I think Lavie Tidhar is a very interesting, and maybe, amazing author. He plays with the language and sentence structure in a way that I notice, and it upsets my processing, the way the world in the novel changes and upsets my processing. He ties the writing in with the story, and I have not seen that done successfully (for me) very often. Bravo.

      He gets an A-plus-plus for making an amazingly atmospheric novel, something I expect from a World Fantasy Award.

      I think he could have been a little less heavy handed. I felt that the novel was very deliberate, but I also feel like it was a bit too heavy handed. Some things didn't need to be subtle, but I could have lived without a few anvils.

      But I'm still not sure what the hell to think of this one. It's uncomfortable, and I'm pretty sure it was written to be that way. This book is not clean, it's not tidy, it's not wrapped in a beautiful little package that will let you not think/stop thinking and walk away.

      And some of it is painful, and some of it is cute, and I believe absolutely all of it was very deliberate. And very well done. But I don't know what star rating I should give this book, because while I believe it to be a "good" book, and I believe the writing to be awesome. I'm not sure I "liked" it at all.

    • 4/5
      This book pulls you in. Joe, a hard-boiled detective who lives on whisky, black coffee and nicotine, gets a visit from a mysterious young woman who asks him to find one Mike Longshot, an author of pulp fiction novels involving a character called Osama Bin Laden. She gives him a special black credit card as an upfront fee. The only known address for this author is a post-office box in Paris. On his way out of the office later Joe is shot at. Joe's search for this mysterious author drives things as the action moves from Paris to London, and Joe is pursued and shot at again. Joe uses every trick in the detective's canon to evade those blocking his way, for example penetrating an opium den and later a private members club in Soho, where Longshot might be a member. Having worked in this part of London around the time the novel is set I found the reconstruction excellent. Joe seems to be in an alternate Osama-free reality, and after one particularly violent incident, he sees a vision of the real London, where digital surveillance technologies bemuse him. One flaw in the novel are the short chapters from our reality which starkly report acts of real terrorism and do not read like excerpts from pulp fiction. An attempted scene set at a Mike Longshot 'fan convention' later in the novel grates because of this. More seriously, there is an ending problem. This is chiefly due to the power that detective fiction generates towards closure. This novel has various 'closures' none of which really convince although one did strike me as having a superior rationale. As it stands, the novel halts instead of closing, which is a shame
    • 4/5
      Osama is a strange and haunting science fiction/detective story about a world in which 9/11- and a lot of other things too- have become fiction fodder rather than real-life tragedy. It's the kind of book you need to take in all at once, like a dream. A detective named Joe living in Laos is hired to find a pulp writer who may be living in Paris, but his journey takes him around the world. Lavie Tidhar evokes his settings beautifully, especially London, which has a surreal feel to it. I was totally drawn into this unusual novel.
    • 5/5
      Tidhar, an Israeli writer, has written a beautiful and haunting book--but to try to describe it without revealing too much of its mysterious heart is quite a task. So let me start by saying it is extremely well-written and brilliantly evokes each of the places it takes place: Vientiane, Laos; Paris; London, New York; and finally, Kabul. Ostensibly, it is the story of a detective (in the Raymond Chandler mode) hired by a mysterious woman to track down a writer named Mike Longshott, who has written a series of books about Osama Bin Laden, Vigilante. It soon becomes clear, however, that in the detective's world, Osama Bin Laden, the events of 9/11, and a few significant chunks of history don't exist. But to pigeonhole this book as just an alternate history or science fiction would be missing the point. Osama isn't as neat and tidy as such fictions tend to be. Tidhar blends the real and the unreal together in such a way that truth and fiction blur into a marvelous new synthesis that tells us something about both. It succeeds, where other attempts such as China Mieville's THE CITY AND THE CITY largely fail, because of the depth of feeling at the book's center and because the detective is so well-drawn and interesting, even when stumbling blindly in search of his next clue. OSAMA achieves the near-impossible--serious escapist fiction, or maybe vice-versa? Just read it.
    • 4/5
      Very smart Sci-Fi with a hard political edge.Osama as a heroin induced fiction surely a cipher for an Osama made in Afghanistan. 4.5 *

    Book preview

    Osama - Lavie Tidhar

    Longshott

    PROLOGUE

    —a fake Yemeni passport—

    The Hilltop Hotel stands on Ngiriama Road in downtown Nairobi. On the busy street outside are shoe-shiners; scratch-card stands; taxi-drivers; dusty shops selling stationary, rice, spices from Zanzibar, tinned foods and fresh tomatoes; down the road a little is an Indian restaurant. Electric fans move dust around inside the low-ceilinged buildings. The Hilltop itself is a run-down establishment catering mainly to backpackers.

    The men in room 107a were not backpackers. They had checked into the hotel using fake passports, and were in the final stages of preparing to commit an act of mass murder. They did not, perhaps, see themselves as murderers, though under both the American and Kenyan penal code that is what they would be considered. The men believed they were acting on God’s behalf, and perhaps they were right. God was on their side. Soon they would be successful.

    ***

    Mohammed Odeh arrived in Nairobi on the fourth of August. It was a Tuesday. He had come off a night bus from Mombassa at 7:30am, and checked into the Hilltop Hotel under a fake Yemeni passport, into room 102b. He went to sleep, getting up just before noon. He met with the others. He was dressed as a Muslim cleric, complete with a long beard. Later, he changed his clothes, putting on trousers and a shirt. He also shaved his beard.

    He left on Wednesday evening. He spent his last few hours in Nairobi shopping. He had his shoes shined on Moi Avenue, near the American embassy. At 10:00pm he got on a flight to Pakistan.

    ***

    August seventh was a Friday. The US ambassador was meeting with Kenyan Trade Minister Joseph Kamotho at the Ufundi Cooperative Bank near the embassy. The United States Embassy was a concrete building comprising seven floors, five above-ground, two below. Standing at Post One was Marine Corporal Samuel Gonite. The detachment commander, Gunnery Sergeant Cross, was making his rounds.

    Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali was dressed that morning in black shoes, a white short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans and jacket. He carried a 9mm Beretta. He also carried four stun grenades. At 9:20am he made a phone call. The truck, a Toyota Dyna, had already been loaded with boxes full of eight hundred kilograms of TNT, cylinder tanks, batteries, detonators, fertilizer, and sand bags. Al-Ohwhali entered the truck on the passenger seat. Driving was a Saudi man known as Azzam. Leading the way in a white Datsun pickup truck was a third man. He was known as Harun.

    They arrived at the embassy compound just before 10:30am. Azzam drove the truck to the rear parking lot. A mail van was leaving, and he waited for it to pass before driving up to the drop-bar. Al-Owhali stepped out of the truck. He walked towards the lone guard when he realised he had left his jacket – and his Beretta – in the truck. He still had the stun grenades. He shouted at the guard, demanding that he raise the bar. The guard refused. Al-Owhali pulled the pin out of one grenade and threw it at the guard. There was an explosion. The guard ran away, shouting. Azzam drew the Beretta from Al-Owhali’s jacket and began firing at the embassy windows. Al-Owhali began to run. A moment later, Azzam pressed the detonator button.

    ***

    The explosion tore a crater in the ground. It blasted windows and tumbled concrete, and made men and women fly through the air as they died. Nearby Haile Selassie Avenue was strewn with debris. The windows of the Cooperative Bank House facing the avenue were blown by the blast. The American ambassador was knocked unconscious by the blast and cut by flying glass. The small bank building behind the embassy collapsed onto the chancery’s emergency generator, spilling thousands  of gallons of diesel fuel into the basement of the embassy. The diesel fuel ignited.

    Two hundred and twelve people died in the attack. Four thousand were wounded. One woman, a Kenyan tea-lady from the Ufundi House offices, was trapped under the rubble. Her name was Rose Wanjiku. Rescuers, including marines and an Israeli special rescue unit, tried to reach her. She communicated with them constantly. She had been buried for five days. She died several hours before they finally reached her.

    ***

    Mohammed Odeh landed in Karachi on the morning of August seven, a short time after the attack. As he went through immigration the first news of the bombing could be heard on the radio. He smiled. He passed through the airport and stepped out into the sunshine. Once outside, he located a phone box, and dialled a number.

    ‘Emir?’ he said into the silence of the mouthpiece. He took a deep breath. ‘With the grace of God, we are successful.’

    PART ONE

    THE SECRET WAR

    puddles of light

    ——

    In the summer the sunlight falls down on Vientiane and turns walls and people translucent. Puddles of sunlight collect in street corners, and scooters pass through them and splash light onto shop fronts and down to the canals that run through the city toward the Mekong. The sunlight stains shirts with dark patches of sweat, and sends dogs to seek shelter in the shade of parked cars. Peddlers move sluggishly along the road with their wares of bamboo baskets, fruit and red-pork baguettes. The whole city seems to pause, its skin shining, and wait for the rains to come and bring with them some coolness.

     Joe put down the book on the low bamboo table and sighed. The small china cup before him contained strong Laotian mountain coffee, sweet with the two sugars he liked to use, which was overdoing it, he knew, but that was the way he liked it. Beside him was an ashtray containing two cigarette stubs. Also on the table was a soft packet of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter, a plain one, which sat on top of the cigarettes. He sat, as he did every morning, in the small coffee shop facing the car park of the Talat Sao market in downtown Vientiane. Through the glass windows he could watch the girls walk past.

    The book was a worn paperback with a garish, colourful cover. It showed a multi-story building in the final stages of collapse, a dusty African street, and people running away from a blast. The book was called  Assignment: Africa and, in an only slightly smaller subtitle, announced it as the third title in the series Osama Bin-Laden: Vigilante. The unlikely name of the author was Mike Longshott.

    Joe reached for the packet on the table and extracted a cigarette, his third. He lit up with the Zippo and stared out of the window. Soft jazz played in the air. Every morning Joe came here, walking the half-hour distance from his apartment on Sokpaluang Road, past the bus station and the adjacent fruit and vegetable market, past tuk-tuk drivers, dogs and squawking chickens and the large sign that extolled the virtue of Keeping Our Country Clean – All Good Citizen Must Pick Up Litter, across the traffic lights and into the Talat Sao, the Morning Market, and into the small air-conditioned coffee shop that served more as his office than his office ever did.

    He sat there for a long time and was not disturbed. Staring out through the glass windows he could see friends meet and walk away, laughing. A mother walked past with her two children, holding their hands. Three men shared a cigarette outside, gesturing with their hands as they talked, then wandered off. A girl appeared on the steps and seemed to wait for something to happen. Five minutes later a boy appeared through the doors and her smile lit up her face, and they walked away, though without acknowledging each other. A village woman came in through the car park carrying baskets. A businessman in a suit walked down the stairs accompanied by an entourage, all hurrying towards a black car and its sheltered air-conditioning. A long time ago Joe had learned that it was sometimes easiest to feel alone amongst people. He no longer let it disturb him, but as he sat there, isolated from the outside by the transparent glass windows, he felt for a moment disconnected from time, all contact between him and the rest of humanity removed, cauterized, his connection to the people outside no more than an amputee’s ghost-limb, still aching though it was no longer there. He took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled, and some of the ash fell down on the book, and left a grey mark where Joe brushed it off.

    Joe took a last sip from his coffee. There was nothing left at the bottom but foam. The piped music had changed, jazz giving way to a soulful tune he recognised but didn’t know from where. He put out the cigarette. A small girl went past outside holding a teddy-bear. A teenaged student in pressed black trousers and a pressed white shirt went past carrying books. Two teenage girls went past eating ice-creams, and when the boy in the white shirt saw them he smiled, and the girls smiled back, and they went off together. The wordless song playing in the air niggled at Joe, that persistent sense of knowing without quite putting a name to things, which always annoyed him. He watched the skies above the buildings and saw that they were changing.

    It was a minute darkening, a momentary dimming of the light, and as he watched he saw a piece of paper on the ground outside move of its own accord, leap into the air and take off, like a dirty-white butterfly, and he knew the rains were coming.

    He paid, and stepped through the doors outside, and he could smell the change in the air. The old lady selling English primers in the shop opposite looked up too, and he could see on her face the same longing that he recognised, for just a moment, in himself. Then he strode down the car park, his boots crunching gravel as he walked, and he whistled a tune. It was only when he was almost outside his office that he realised it was an old Dooley Wilson song, from another smoky café, in another time and place.

    a scattering cloud of geckos

    ——

    As he walked along the wide, shady avenues of downtown Vientiane, Joe was struck again by the Japanese influence on the cityscape. Amongst the low-lying, traditional buildings along Lan Xang avenue, for instance, there emerged the half-completed shell of the new Kobayashi Bank building, a towering, glass and chrome egg visible from far in the distance, an alien entity in this sedate, regal environment. Against the wall of a shop whose outdoors stalls were heaped with pineapples and watermelons and lychees, above the head of the brown-skinned proprietor (a Hmong, Joe judged) who was sitting in the shade rolling a cigarette, there was a faded poster showing the Lao king and the Japanese emperor bowing to each other respectfully, below the words Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. You could see Japan in the cars, and in the blare of music that came through tinny speakers here and there, and in the notices for language schools that promised Number OneNippon, English Tuition, For Your and Your Children’s Future.

    He crossed Lan Xang and soon came within sight of That Dam, the black stupa rising against the sky like a reminder of long-gone wars. Once it had been coated in gold, and shone in the light, but the gold had been stripped, by Thai or Burmese invaders, no one was quite sure anymore, and never replaced. Grass grew through the cracks in the stone of the steps. It was a peaceful place; he had always liked it.

    He reached the dilapidated building on the corner. There was a spirit house outside, with miniature figurines standing in its courtyard, and offerings of rice whisky and food, and a burning incense stick. He paused by it for a moment, looking at it vaguely, then stepped into the hallway, which was cool and dusty and dark. He climbed up the steps, noticing the single light-bulb had burnt again. The building was quiet. There was a noodle soup place open to the street on the ground floor, but hardly anyone ever ate there. There was also a second-hand bookshop, but it wouldn’t be open for a while; not until Alfred, its proprietor, could shake off the previous night’s effects and convince himself to open up for business, which was unlikely to happen before noon.

    Joe opened the door to his office and stepped through, surveying the room as he did every time he entered. The windows, a little grimy, showed rooftops and wide open skies above the Mekong. His desk was plain wood, unvarnished, with a much-folded square piece of paper balancing one of its legs. On the table scattered papers, a paperweight in the shape of an elephant, a dull-coloured metal letter opener, a desk-lamp, and an ashtray made of a polished coconut shell. Ash and two cigarette stubs from the day before were still sitting in the ashtray, and he made a mental note to have a word with the cleaning-lady, though it never seemed to make a difference. There was no phone on the desk. In the top drawer was a Thai knockoff of a Smith & Wesson .38, illegal, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label, half-empty or half-full, depending.

    Also in the room were: a wastepaper basket, woven from bamboo, and like the ashtray unemptied; a metal filing cabinet, empty but for a pair of scuffed black shoes two sizes too small for Joe, which were the only effects left behind by the office’s previous occupant; a solitary bookshelf; on the wall, a small painting showing a burning field, the flowers crimson, the smoke coiling across the canvas in jagged lines of white and grey, the figure of a man blurred in the distance, his face hidden behind the smoke; three chairs, one behind the desk, two before it; in one corner, a potted plant that had long since passed away.

    It felt like home. As he stepped fully through, half-closing the door behind him, he startled a small gecko on the wall. As the gecko shot up other geckos appeared, and for a moment it seemed to Joe like an explosion, the geckos racing away from its source – which was him. He smiled, and went to his desk, and sat down, putting the paperback on his desk. He shared his office with no one but the geckos. Every time he came in it seemed to him that there were more of them. They would hide unseen in corners, and he would startle them each time with the opening of a drawer, with the legs of a chair dragging across the floor, and they would scuttle away. Once, he came across a solitary gecko squatting by the wastepaper basket. Its left front leg had been hurt, and it was motionless for so long that Joe had thought it dead. He wondered what happened to it – did it get in a fight with another of its kind? He never found out. Later, when he looked again, the gecko had moved: the last Joe saw of it the gecko was crawling slowly through the gap under the door, until finally the tip of its tail disappeared and the wounded gecko was through, passing beyond the safety of the office into the corridor beyond.

    Joe went around the desk and sat down. He thought of lighting a cigarette and decided against it. He turned the chair to the window and stared outside. The skies were clouding over, and he could smell the oncoming rain.

    contour of a woman through the rain

    ——

    The rain fell down all at once. In the distance thunder broke into shards of sound and exploded in the vast open skies above the Mekong, and lightning flashed blue against grey. Joe stared out of the window, watching a barefoot child run through the puddles, a large green leaf, as large as a serving-tray, held above his head against the rain. The air was humid and smelled of vegetation and earth, and Joe knew that later, in the night, the snails would come out and glide across the road like sedate locomotives, leaving their rails behind them as they passed, and that the frogs would be luxuriating in the pools that were, to them, grand palaces of water. A burst of song came and went on the wind, bookended by static. A solitary bird flew high overhead, swooped and disappeared out of sight, little more than a black dot on the horizon.

    It was when the rain had began to ease, and sunlight streamed down through the fresh incisions in the cloud cover, that he first saw her. She was crossing the road, head bent, intent on the path she was following. There was no traffic. Light rain fell and sunlight came through behind her, but he couldn’t see her face. For a moment it seemed to him the whole world was still, a frozen backdrop, the moving girl the only living thing inhabiting it. Then the clouds closed overhead and the girl was gone, and Joe sighed, and turned away from the window and reached for his cigarettes.

    ‘Hello,’ a soft voice said, close by, and Joe started, dropping the Zippo lighter he was in the process of picking up a half-inch above the table. He looked up. She looked back at him. The window was behind her, and behind the glass the sunlight was passing through the rain, and for a moment the raindrops seemed like thousands of miniature prisms hovering in the air. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he said. He glanced at the half-open door. The girl smiled. ‘You looked thoughtful,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’ She had long brown hair and was quite petite, with eyes that were slightly almond-shaped, and though she was clearly European, she looked more like an Asian girl in her build. She looked like a girl who would always have a problem buying the right-size clothes in Europe, and no problem at all here. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes when she smiled, and he wondered if they were from laughing or crying, though he didn’t know why. He said, ‘Can I help you?’

    ‘You are a detective?’ She didn’t sit down and he didn’t offer her a seat. She seemed comfortable standing there, while rain and sun clashed behind her. He wondered what her accent was. He said, ‘I –’ and shrugged, his hands encompassing the bare office, the silence of the rain. Then he said, ‘What is it you want?’

    She came closer then, standing against the edge of the desk, looking at him. She seemed to study him, as if there were more behind his question than he understood. Her hand fell down to the surface of the desk, resting on the paperback that lay there, and she turned. Her fingers felt the book’s spine and cover, and she picked it up, taking a step back from the desk, her back still to the window. She opened the book and leafed through the yellowing pages.

    ‘The Hilltop Hotel stands on Ngiriama Road in downtown Nairobi,’ she said, reading. He realised she had no problem pronouncing the road name correctly. ‘On the busy street outside are shoe-shiners and scratch-card stands and taxi-drivers —‘

    ‘No, that’s wrong,’ Joe said.

    ‘No?’ She looked taken aback, for some reason.

    ‘I think there is a pause there, not an and,’ he said. It reminded him of something, as if he had once known someone to do this, to substitute words for punctuation when reading a book out loud. Someone who liked to read out books; it made him uncomfortable. ‘It’s just a pulp novel,’ he said, feeling defensive. ‘It helps pass the time.’ He didn’t know why he was apologising, or trying to justify himself to her. The girl closed the book and laid it back down on the desk, doing it carefully, as if handling a valuable object. ‘Do you think so?’ she said. He didn’t know what to answer her. He remained silent. She remained standing. They looked at each other and he wondered what she saw. Her fingers were quite long and thin. Her ears were a little pointy. At last, she said, ‘I want you to find him,’ and her fingers caressed the book; he couldn’t put a name to the look she had in her eyes then; he thought she looked lost, and sad, and a little vulnerable.

    ‘Find who?’

    ‘Mike Longshott,’ she said, and Joe’s surprise became a laugh that exploded out of him without warning.

    ‘The guy who writes this stuff?’

    ‘Yes,’ she said, patiently. Behind her the rain was petering off. Her voice seemed to be growing quieter, as if she were standing farther away than she was. Joe went to pick up the book and his fingers touched hers. He looked up, suddenly

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