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he said. “But the picture of her? Is that gone, too?”
    “No, I took that on my phone. We have that.”
    “Well, that’s something.”
    Hallelujah drew on his cigarette and shook his head again. Mangan pulled back onto the road. The traffic had slowed. They passed corrugated iron shanties lit by naked bulbs, alleyways an oblivion of shadow, women roasting corn over charcoal stoves by the side of the road. Rain spattered the windscreen.
    They climbed to Mangan’s flat, dumped their things, then went downstairs again to the First Choice café. They ordered
tibs
—the spiced, sticky beef—with
injera
, French fries and cold St. George’s beer. Hallelujah was nervous and fidgety; he lit a cigarette.
    “So will you file?” he asked.
    “Tomorrow, maybe,” said Mangan, absently.
    “Okay. Me too.” Hallelujah reported for an Addis weekly, but moonlighted for Mangan, translating, fixing. Mangan watched him, this lean, earnest boy, his dirty shirt, worry like a stain in his eyes.
    “What’s eating you, Hal?”
    “Oh, nothing. They won’t like it, that’s all.”
    “Who won’t? The paper?”
    “No, no. The paper will hold its breath and run it. The government, I mean. And NISS.”
    “If they’re so worried about the coverage, why did they give us access to her?” Mangan said.
    Hallelujah looked at him.
    “How long have you been in Ethiopia now?”
    “A year, a bit less,” said Mangan.
    Hallelujah stubbed out his cigarette.
    “So you know they like to play with us, lure us out. We interview dissidents, publish their views, write about their situations, we become vulnerable. They can use it against us whenever they choose. Shut us down.”
    The
tibs
arrived, and the beer. Mangan took a long, cold pull on the bottle, and ate. The beef was sizzling, the
berbere
—chilli and spice—leaving his throat pulsing with aromatic heat.
    “Do you ever see them? Talk to them? NISS?” he asked.
    “No. They send messages. Through other people. You have to listen.”
    Hallelujah tore the
injera,
moulded it in the stew with his fingers. “A businessman takes you for lunch. Or an old professor calls you up. Very interesting piece in the paper last week, they say.
Lots
of people talking about it. Have you thought about a vacation? Somewhere far away?”
    Mangan smiled.
    “Sounds like China,” he said.
    “African problems, Philip,” said Hallelujah, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “African problems.”
    Hallelujah took a taxi home. His nervousness and his talk of the National Intelligence and Security Service—Ethiopia’s tough, effective intelligence agency, with its vast web of informers modelled on the old East European practice—had put Mangan on edge. Helabored back up the sour concrete stairwell to his flat, four floors above Gotera, his buzzy neighborhood. He stepped onto his balcony, the night air cool. It was late, but the streets around his block were filled with cafés, tinny music, the smell of grilling meat, coffee. He watched the couples strolling along the weed-strewn pavement, the girls done up in tight jeans, heels, the glint of gold from their necks, their slender wrists.
    He went back inside, poured himself a belt of vodka and lay on the sofa in the dark. He thought about Habiba, squatting in the corner of some prison shed, the noise and squalor of it, her fingers probing the lump in her breast hopelessly.
    He thought about going home, and where that would be, and how. About how loneliness was not something he was given to—in his years as a foreign correspondent, he had been alone many times. About how when it did find him, it came on as a physical sensation, a flood in the veins. He sat up and put his head in his hands. Loneliness came, he knew, from silence, from the inability to speak of what had happened.
    Secrecy breeds loneliness.
    And after loneliness comes fear.
    He thought, as he did every night, when the cafés closed and the darkness thickened and the streets went silent