'But you must have seen it,' he said. The army. 'I came down in moonlight, Colonel. All I could see was jungle.' His face was changing again as he brought his head back by infinite degrees, and I noted this. The move- ment could be significant: his way of "sighting", of seeming to hide behind himself, might indicate the times when his brain went out of phase. He was facing me now and asking normal questions again. 'Why did you come here by air?' 'I was told you like your privacy.' 'Yet you still came.' 'Yes. I —' 'Why?' 'I think we can help each other.' His head began turning again, and the hairs on my neck rose in reaction. He said nothing, and I waited. This time the phase didn't last long, and his head moved back. 'To do what?' 'To destroy Shoda.' You must have seen a cat facing a dog - the eyes narrowing and the ears flattening and a hiss coming from the open jaws. It was like that. It's not enough to say that he recoiled. He tensed, drew back, threw up his guard, all those things, without making much movement or much sound, and somehow it looked worse for that: it was an expression of total hate, total menace, barely contained, about to detonate. If Shoda had been here now she would have been ripped into pieces. This man didn't need those dogs. It took time for him to recover, and the aftermath was a grimace of pain, not of physical pain now, but the pain he had felt when that monstrous blow was struck, cleaving his face, and the pain he'd been feeling ever since, day after day, remembering what he looked like and what people -especially women - would think if they ever looked on him again. He was still young, say forty, and that must be his photograph I'd seen on the wall near Funakoshi's, the picture of a handsome Asian, high cheekboned in the Yul Brynner mould, large-eyed, sensual. Colonel Cho would have loved many women; now he was a creature, a Caliban, self-imprisoned in a hermit's cave. A whisper came. ''Shoda ...' Something was moving in the background behind him, and I noted it, even though it wasn't defined. Cho was watching me intently, as if I'd offered some kind of revelation. His expression was perfectly sane now, and it occurred to me that in simply mentioning Shoda's name I'd recalled memories he'd been keeping forced down under his need to forget; but I couldn't tell what this would do to him, bring him increased sani- ty through release, or drive him deeper into madness. I had the feeling of stepping through a minefield in the dark. Snake. That was the movement behind him, high among the creeper that itself was winding its way through the beams and girders of the fourth wall. The bloody thing was hanging from the leaves by the tail, its head down and moving from side to side, heat-sensing the earthen floor. Still in a whisper, 'You said, destroy? 'Yes. The whole of her organisation.' He was chief of intelligence in an insurgent group, Chen had told me, affiliated with Shoda's organisa- tion. He was clever, but he wanted to handle things his way, and she didn't like that. She had him arrested and slated for execution, but he got away with it somehow, with a head wound you'd never believe. 'Come.' He led me across to a corner, and that was when the snake dropped and the rat squealed and my skin crawled, though he took not the slightest notice. He shared the life of the jungle here and was used to it; but it came to my mind that if he were ever struck down with a fever or couldn't move around he'd the with the jungle too, or the dogs would scent easy meat and pick him clean. 'Tell me," he said, 'why you wish to de- stroy Shoda.'

I was his guest at table, towards noon; we sat on the floor, Japanese-style, on each side of a slab of red- wood with a great crack in it; he'd lashed thin cord across and across to keep it together. 'You know, of course, that there have been many attempts to kill her?' 'Yes.'