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By the time Smith made it out to the street, his bulky black hold-all tucked under his arm, the girl-passenger's details safely scribbled-down on the back of an Orion Air baggage label in his inside pocket, dusk had settled on the tropical landscape and the warm breeze that ruffled his hair, carrying with it the scent of chicken-wings and skewers of pork roasting on street-side barbecues, brought him at least a faint flicker of the exhilaration he normally felt on arriving at some exotic new destination.
So far, nothing too terrible had happened. He was under suspicion, but he knew that he was innocent, and now he had managed to contrive for himself the chance to prove it. He strolled idly across the car-park in the direction of the main road, ignoring the shouts of "You want taxi, Sir?", "You want Rolex watch, Sir?", "You want nice girl, Sir?", "You want chicken-wing on stick, Sir?" and all the rest of it until he got to the road. There was a bus-stop in front of a line of food-stalls, and after that a line of parked motor rickshaws, plying for hire. "You want taxi, Sir?" they cried out as he passed, "Where you want to go, Sir?", "Very cheap taxi, Sir!", "You get in here, Sir!" and many more things in similar vein. Smith ignored their cheerful shouts and selected an older, rather thoughtful-looking driver who sat on the saddle of his little machine without speaking and waited for Smith to walk right up to him.
"Do you speak English?" Smith asked quietly, not even bothering to shout over the tumult of voices inviting him to board other vehicles.
"English, German, French, Japanese.... no problem," the old man assured him solemnly.
"Okay. Let's get away from here - somewhere quiet where we can talk."
The driver didn't hurry. He kick-started the little two-stroke engine and set off sedately if noisily down the main thoroughfare, turning left at the first side-road. A little up the track, by a tumble-down bamboo shack that seemed to be a gate-house to a farm of some kind, he stopped.
"My name is Fan. Like turns around on the ceiling. My mother lives here," he said, gesturing in the direction of the building, "we have good clean rooms if you need somewhere for the night."
Smith liked him. He wasn't pushy or insistent and he seemed to understand Smith's needs. Why not, he thought? Smith looked at the old man's wiry burnt-brown features and wondered how old his mother must be. "Thank you," he said, "that would be fine. But first, I want to ask you about an address." He put his hand in his pocket and pulled-out the baggage-ticket with the name and address on the back. "Do you read English?"
"Some," the driver nodded, and held it under the yellowy beam of a map-reading-light that he plugged-in to a socket on the dashboard.
"Is it far away?" Smith asked when he fancied that the man had had enough time to assimilate the details.
"Not too far. This is a very rich family, Sir. These people are... what is the word... government."
"Politicians?"
"Yes. Politicians. Powerful people."
"I see. Are they.... good people?"
The old man looked him straight in the eye but did not ask for any clarification. "I think that they are good people, Sir," he said quietly.
"I met their daughter today. Suavarose. Do you know her?"
"I know that they have two children, both girls. I have not met them, Sir."
Without knowing why, Smith was pleased that the taxi driver approved of the family. For some reason that he could not explain, he trusted this man. He wondered if he should take him into his confidence entirely and explain everything that had happened that day.
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