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realized he was going to give way to temptation. It was something for nothing. He’d be mad to refuse.
    She collected him from outside The Welcome Sight in a huge, horrible white convertible. The hotel’s logo, a hologram of the tower, leapt up from the hood like a rhino horn as soon as she cut the engine. Johnny’s whole street—nameless, like all the streets in the old city—came out in the dark to admire.
    “What the fuck is that? It’s disgusting.”
    “I suspect the original germ plasm was 1958 Cadillac. What’s wrong with a few fins, anyway? I thought you were supposed to be an American.”
    He got in. She shut the door. Immediately, once more, she was in his space or he in hers: a profound assault. Johnny looked out of the window, grinning bitterly. It was like being fourteen again. But he was a professional at this by now. He could deal with inappropriate sexual arousal. The car was semi-automatic and Fo was supposedly beaconed: but only a lunatic would use auto on these roads. At least she’d be pinned behind the wheel, he could be thankful for that.
    Macmillan was empty. Bandits and guerrillas lurked in the suburban darkness, by repute, at any rate, but they left the mutated Cadillac alone. It rumbled like a tank over the potholes.
    “What’s it feel like, Johnny?”
    “Huh?”
    “To do it with a machine,” explained Braemar.
    “I don’t know.”
    They reached the Devereux fort with an hour to spare. Once buried in forest, it was now surrounded by ribbon development and only a few hundred meters from the granderoute. There had been a half hearted attempt to set it up as a tourist attraction. Braemar dropped him at the dilapidated gateway and went on to put the car out of sight. Johnny prowled the carpark and helipad, feeling very exposed. He didn’t need his flashlight. An invisible half moon silvered the clouds, the random lights of nearby houses winked in the lower darkness. The fort stood up against the dim sky like a pile of child’s blocks. It had been Portuguese originally, before a consortium of locals plus stateless-European entrepreneurs took it over. Inside the roofless keep you could see genuine relics of those days. The shelves where the goods were stored, stacked up like damp kindling; rusty holes in the stone where chains had been pegged. Those South Africans would probably come here with their guide, point their cams, pose on top of the moldering cannon. There were even free souvenirs to take away, if you cared to scratch the dirt. Some of them weren’t very old. The Devereux had had a bad reputation in the bloody right-wing years.
    Johnny had trained himself to avoid times like this: silence inside, alertness without occupation. He had no purpose here. His only plan was to get home, somehow. To hold Bella in his arms again. The connection between that goal and a game of make-believe did not exist. It was an imaginary thread that vanished when you touched it. He felt utterly desolate.
    Someone walked up behind him. It was Braemar, with a needle of light. She bent and pulled a spray of colorless flowers from a small mound like an unmarked grave.
    “Flower of a heart whose trouble, must have been worse than mine…. What a terrible place.”
    “If it isn’t haunted, it ought to be.”
    “It is haunted. The word means the way we feel here. The fantasy figments we call “ghosts” were invented, in their time, for the sort of clowns who now have to plug into a sensurround horror-feelie to get scared of death and pain.”
    “I love the way you talk.”
    “Thank you. It earns me a modest living.”
    They retired to a heap of broken stonework and sat down. She touched the 360 perched like a large insect beside her face, and read the shell closure light and sound at her wrist. They were in livespace. Johnny shuddered. It was a strange return of the past.
    “Why midnight, for heaven’s sake?”
    “Maybe your friend doesn’t know what darkness means.”
    “Ms.