Didn't want to know. All he wanted to do was get me to the freight yard and drop me off and go home and try and sleep. They're not all like this, the contacts; most of them are seasoned and they've learned to get used to things blowing up, but one or two hang on to a shred of sensitivity and this man was one of them, I could feel the vibrations.

'How long have you been out here?' I asked him.

'In Bucharest?'

'Yes.'

'Year, bit more.'

'Picking up the language?'

With a nervous laugh, 'Trying. It's a bitch.'

There was some black ice and we spun full circle across a waste of tarmac, perhaps a car park, and soon after that we picked up the coloured lights of signals on the skyline and Baker touched the wheel and hit gravel and sped up and we started bumping across some half-buried railway sleepers, and I told him to slow down and cut his lights and the engine and take me as far as the line of trucks below the big black water tank that stood silhouetted against the sky.

I got out and told him to go home, then I stood there for ten minutes in the shadow of the end truck and waited for my eyes to adjust from the glare of the headlights to the half-darkness here. I didn't know if the local supports had got the area protected, or whether they too lacked experience. Bucharest isn't a major field and you can't expect first class people wherever you go.

There was a film of cloud across the city, lit by the glow of the streets, but only a few lights in the freight yard, high up on swan-neck poles. Smell of coal, steel, soot, sacking, some kind of produce, potatoes or grain. Very little sound, but I was picking up low voices over towards the main passenger station. The air was still, cold against the face. The outline of the trucks was sharper now and I began moving, keeping my feet on hard surfaces, tarmac, sleepers, rails, going slowly, feeling my way in.