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every day of his life and what he had suffered in the past. Indeed, it must have been worse for the European, because he had not only lost face in the eyes of his own kind but also in the sight of the Chinese. He was a pathetic figure and Heng knew only too well that, but for the whim of fate, the man on the bed might have been him. But he also knew that he could not afford to carry a free guest in the hotel. The owners would not stand for it. If Sandingham did not keep more or less up to date with his room rent Heng had instructions to evict him; after all, he knew from other managers in the trade that Sandingham had already been thrown out of at least three other hotels in Kowloon during the last twelve months.
    ‘Three hundred and eighty-two dollars, sixty-seven cents,’ said the manager. He held out the paper which bore the calculations. They were laid out neatly in a thin hand. The figure seven was crossed through in the continental manner.
    Sandingham’s face remained impassive.
    ‘I’ll have the money for you this evening,’ he said.
    ‘I would be most grateful if you would let me have it before you retire,’ replied Heng. ‘The owner of the hotel will be arriving in the morning and it is his custom to check through the books for the previous month.’
    Sandingham allowed his head to drop slightly. He suddenly felt both tired and frightened.
    ‘I’m sorry, Mr Sandingham, but I must obey the orders of my employers.’
    ‘I do believe you are, Mr Heng,’ replied Sandingham and he meant it. As the manager left the room, closing the door gently behind him, it occurred to Sandingham that, despite the gulf of difference between them, they understood one another very well.
    One advantage of having spoken with Heng was that Sandingham could now leave the hotel by the front entrance instead of escaping by the back. And leave he had to, for he was obliged to find what was for him a fairly large sum of money by evening, and there was only one way to do that.
    The sun had moved away from the front of the hotel by the time Sandingham walked through the lobby. The bar was closed and the glassware was dull, lacking the sparkle it had held earlier, or would again contain once evening arrived. Mid-afternoon in the hotel was always a slack time.
    A small glass porch was beside the main entrance steps at the head of a set of stairs that led down to the garage. He stood by it, absorbing the heat of the day, and smelling the odour of warm gearbox and sump oil flow from the stairwell. It was a scent he knew from the past, reminding him of something he could not place.
    As he turned right to descend the curving hotel drive, a movement on the front lawn caught his eye. Lying on the grass behind the low hedge was the young boy who had seen him attempt to cut down the papaya. The boy did not notice Sandingham: he was engrossed in playing with toy soldiers in the shadow of the tightly packed evergreen leaves. He had carved a network of tiny trenches in the dirt and, at the end of the hedge, in strategic positions, several khaki soldiers, one bravely emblazoned in the red tunic of a Grenadier, manned a machine-gun post in a salient. Behind them, tucked into the cover of the hedge roots, were a number of military vehicles – a small scout car, a five-ton Bedford truck, a jeep and a much-dented tank.
    Sandingham watched the boy for at least a minute. His legs where they protruded from his navy-blue shorts were tanned and, as he lay on the grass, the shorts had worked their way up tighter around his groin, so that the tidemark of whiter skin showed higher up his thighs. The material had also wedged into the crack between his buttocks, accentuating their round firmness. His head was under the hedge, but even in the shade the sun caught his blond hair and gave it a golden sheen. It was the colour hair that Chinese, passing in the street, would touch for luck. Blond hair was lucky and Sandingham wished he, too, could stroke the boy’s