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that eighties craze for accessories that displayed moderate individualism without undermining one’s reputation as a ‘team player’. I yanked his tie, a pattern of rugby balls and beer bottles on a background of green turf, and his head followed to where I kneed him in the face. He filed for assault, and had the witnesses. I had a police record and a caution. For a few days my father was proud of me. It was the sort of meaningless, self-damaging act that made people like us think for a moment that we were winning, that gave us an extra swagger at the pub or in the dole queue. My first act of violence.
Halfway to your first fuck
, was how he put it, betraying, in that conjunction, something of how he saw the world.
    A few months later my father, by then a year out of work, on dole and benefits and coughing blood, collapsed in the newsagent’s and called me from hospital. When I got there a neighbour had brought him a dressing gown and slippers and a bag of 2p coins for the phone. The consultant was waiting to see us. Maybe it was the way he explained the cancer – ‘competing cells’, ‘unchecked growth’, ‘hostile takeover’ – but it sounded like he was talking not about a human body but about the stock market. Maybe he thought it was the only language we understood.

    Leo hoped I would turn out to be as much of a blank in person as I had been at the interview. I must have internalised the shock of arriving here because he claimed to be impressed by my adaptability. He found me unfazed by it all, though the radical unfamiliarity of Bucharest life was neutralised by my sense of entering an existence that had been tailored with me in mind: the flat, full of clothes that fitted me, books and records I would have wanted myself, pictures I would have chosen for my own walls; a job I was suited for despite never having imagined what it entailed and that had been given to me precisely because I had not sought it. Then there was Leo, who could cram twenty years of friendship into five minutes’ conversation. I came away from our first evening together feeling as if he had implanted a rich and textured shared past into my consciousness, that our friendship had preceded our meeting; that it had even preceded
me
.
    Leo had his pragmatic reasons for wanting me to feel at home here. He was Bucharest’s biggest black-marketeer, with a ramifying network of shady staff and shadier clients, dealing in booze, cigarettes, clothes, food, currency and antiques. He needed human cover, a straight man, and I was happy to comply. In exchange, though Leo would never have called it an
exchange
, he gave me friendship that was unconditional.
    Soon Leo was storing contraband in my cupboards. He secreted his supplies in hiding places across town, and my flat, on the cusp of three of Bucharest’s slickest suburbs, was a convenient shipping point. Despite his run-ins with the authorities, Leo was at once above and below the law: his clients were usually more important than his persecutors, and he had yet to find a persecutor who could not be turned into a client.
    He supplied the embassies with Romanian currency in exchange for luxury goods: wine or
foie gras
, designer clothes, brandy, anything that could be traded or sold on. Sometimes he was paid in cameras or hub caps or hair dryers; but there was nothing he could not sell or barter. It was also Leo who supplied Johnnie Walker whisky to government departments, buying it cheap and selling it on at twice the price to the ministry minions who procured their bosses’ luxuries. With a select few, Leo dealt directly: the minister for transport, his source of petrol coupons, the undersecretary for culture, the deputy interior minister – or, as I knew him long before I met him, Manea Constantin. Leo’s contacts stretched across Bucharest. They connected it together in occult ways, subterranean branch lines nobody saw but which mapped out a city of their own.
    Leo’s business partner was