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Children might’ve turned her stomach, but it seemed to be immune to the searing effects of the sour mash whisky. She tipped the bottle back and drank off a good quarter of it in long, slow swallows. That’s the one, I thought. If she wasn’t drunk before, she is now. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled, but the expression was lopsided, and the focus was spilling from the bowls of her china blue eyes. Falling and fading as she was, the mask of her many abrasive attitudes began to slip, and she suddenly looked very young and vulnerable. The set of her jaw-angry, fearing, and dislikeable-relaxed into an expression that was surprisingly gentle and compassionate. Her cheeks were round and pink. The tip of her nose was turned-up slightly, and formed in soft contours. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman with the face of a girl, unmarked by the hollows of compromise or the deeply drawn lines of hard decisions. From the few things that Karla had told me about her, and what I’d seen at Madame Zhou’s, her life had in fact been harder than most, but none of that showed in her face.

She offered me the bottle and I accepted it, taking a sip. I held on to it for a few moments, and when she wasn’t looking I placed it on the floor beside the bed, discreetly out of her reach. She lit a cigarette and messed at her hair, spilling the loosely tied bun until the long curls fell over one shoulder. With her hand poised there, on top of her head, the wide sleeve of her silk jacket slipped past her elbow, and exposed the pale stubble of a shaved armpit.

There was no sign of other drugs in the room, but her pupils were contracted to pinpoints, suggesting that she’d taken heroin or some other opiate. Whatever the combination, it was sending her swiftly over the edge. She was slumped uncomfortably against the bedstead, and she was breathing noisily through her mouth. A little trickle of whisky and saliva dribbled from the corner of her slack lower lip.

Still, she was beautiful. The thought struck me that she would always look beautiful, even when she was being ugly. Hers was a big, lovely, empty face: the face of a pom-pom girl at a football match, the face advertisers use to help them sell preposterous and irrelevant things.

‘So go on, tell me. What’s he like, that little kid?’

‘Well, I think he’s some kind of religious fanatic,’ I confided, smiling, as I looked over my shoulder at the sleeping boy. ‘He made me stop three times today, and this evening, so he could say his prayers. I don’t know if it’s doing his soul any good, but his stomach seems to be working fine. He can eat like they’re giving prizes for it. He kept me in the restaurant for more than two hours tonight, eating everything from noodles and grilled fish to ice cream and jelly. That’s why we’re late. I would’ve been home ages ago, but I couldn’t get him out of the restaurant. It’s going to cost me an arm and a leg to keep him for the next couple of days. He eats more than I do.’

‘Do you know how Hannibal died?’ she asked.

‘Come again?’

‘Hannibal, that guy with the elephants. Don’t you know your history? He crossed the Alps, with his elephants, to attack the Romans.’

‘Yeah, I know who you’re talking about,’ I said testily, irritated by the conversational non sequitur.

‘Well, how did he die?’ she demanded. Her expressions were becoming exaggerated, the gross burlesque of the drunk.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ha!’ she scoffed. ‘You don’t know everything.’

‘No. I don’t know everything.’

There was a lengthening silence. She stared at me blankly. It seemed that I could see the thoughts drifting downwards, through the blue of her eyes, like white flakes in the bubble of a snow-dome.

‘So, are you going to tell me?’ I probed after a while. ‘How did he die?’

‘Who die?’ she asked, mystified.

‘Hannibal. You were going to tell me how he died.’

‘Oh, him. Well, he kinda led this army of thirty thousand guys over the Alps into Italy, and fought the Romans for like, sixteen years. Six-teen goddamn years! And he never got beaten, even one time. Then, after a lot of other shit, he went back to his own country, where he became a big honcho, what with being a big hero and all. But the Romans, those guys never forgot that he embarrassed the fuck outta them, so they used politics, and they got his own people to turn on him, and kick him out. Are you getting any of this?’

‘Sure.’

‘I mean really, am I wastin’ my goddamn time here with this? I don’t have to do this, you know. I can spend my time with a lot better people than you. I can be with anyone I like. Anyone!’

The forgotten cigarette was burning down to her fingers. I placed the ashtray under it and prised it loose, letting it fall from her hand into the bowl. She didn’t seem to notice.

‘Okay, so the Romans forced Hannibal’s own people to kick him out,’ I pressed, actually curious about the fate of the Carthaginian warrior.

‘They exiled him,’ she corrected grumpily.

‘Exiled him. Then what happened? How did he die?’