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just three streets from the station. I watched the traffic, looking for people sitting in parked cars or standing around, the same person coming and going, anything that indicated Lemi was being watched. I wasn’t that thorough, relying on the fact that Lemi would only be of interest to the police rather than the intelligence services, and any surveillance they carried out would be obvious. A lot of my time was spent watching and waiting.
    During my training the Soviets had told me that waiting for contact with agents was a third of the job, avoiding surveillance a third, and reassuring agents that they were doing the right thing another third. But Lemi the Turk was no agent of mine. He was just one of the people, a technician, that I used for specific jobs. He was a genius at adapting everyday luggage and objects so that things could be smuggled or hidden in them. He’d once shown me a whole chess set that he’d hollowed out in his attic workshop, ready to be filled before the bottoms were faultlessly glued on. When I’d asked what was worth smuggling in such small quantities Lemi told me that he was adapting twenty such chess sets for a bulk shipment of cocaine. Although I found such things interesting, I lacked confidence in the Turk’s discretion, a requirement in such an occupation. Intelligence agencies would have a whole department to do just what Lemi did, but I had no access to such facilities, except through Abu Leila and the Stasi and KGB, and although Abu Leila had been happy to use them for training, he trusted them not one bit with anything operational.
    “We are useful to them and they support our struggle to an extent, but we are not fighting for the same thing,” he’d once told me. Abu Leila was particularly wary of the East Germans. “The Stasi are obsessed with spying on their own people and the West Germans,” he said. “And for some reason they are also obsessed with the English,” he’d added on reflection. “All they want to do is recruit British academics. Just be glad that they don’t know you are in England.”
    Ten minutes before Lemi was expecting me, I knocked on his door and was let into the house by the small dark boy who’d answered the phone. Lemi’s security was nonexistent; he thought it was enough of a cover to be a family man and sculptor. He greeted me from the top of the stairs, a broad smile under his thick moustache. He looked like he ate well. He owned a whole house in a neighborhood where most people lived in houses sectioned into smaller units, much like where I lived.
    “I won’t offer you any coffee, my friend, I know you are always in a hurry.” He pretended to look hurt and I followed the big man upstairs. I could hear children on the lower floor and smell Middle Eastern cooking. A woman was shouting at the children in Turkish. I always felt at home in Lemi’s house. The atmosphere and the smells were so familiar, even if the language was not. The Turk had a workshop (he called it a studio) in the attic, where he did his modifications. You could only get up there using a pull-down ladder, which didn’t look like it would take Lemi’s weight. I had been referred to the Turk by a Parisian woman who sometimes forged documents for me. She was another artist, not just in what she did, but because she painted larger-than-life canvases of male nudes lying on crumpled sheets. I had once seen her work on sale in a gallery in London. With her the forgery was to support her artwork, whereas with Lemi the carving was just a front for his real passion. She was in her fifties, twice as old as any of her models; they were all young and looked into the viewer’s eyes with a sensuality that made me uncomfortable. What struck me was that they all looked equally vulnerable.
    “On the outside you look like a man,” she told me when I’d first gone to pick up a fake driving license from her studio. “But you have something of a boy about you on the inside.” She’d