"Fair enough."

The sun had climbed above the roof of the huge Palace Museum and the direct heat was stifling; the breeze from the rice-fields was blocked here by the buildings. The Secretary of State was talking quietly to Claudier and Veidt, the French and German delegates: I recognised a dozen people here from their press photographs.

"Three kings," Stanfield was speaking from the side of his mouth, "twenty-nine presidents and heads of state, twenty-one prime ministers and sundry odds and sods. Quite a turn-out for someone who was only in office ten months."

I noticed Walter Mills, the US Vice-President, surrounded by the ten members of his delegation, with the same number of security men positioned along the edge of the dais.

The crowds along the east side of the square were murmuring now, the sound of their voices trapped by the buildings; I looked twice in that direction and saw the cortege coming, with the draped funeral carriage drawn by a white-painted jeep.

"Eye on the bod," Stanfield murmured, and I turned my head back to watch Bygreave. There were quite a few Europeans on the far side of him but I couldn't see anything of Ferris.

At ten-fifteen the cortege reached this end of the square and Stanfield-drew me along the dais as the first of the official mourners took their wreaths from the attendants and began laying them against the coffin, the Premier's widow and two sons being the first to step down from the dais. The military band had stopped playing now and the square was quiet. Beyond the English delegates I could see hundreds of school children going onto their knees along the roped pavement, one of them dropping her white bouquet of flowers and crawling between two police guards to fetch it; from somewhere nearer I could hear women sobbing, and wondered why. This wasn't Mao, the Father of the Revolution, but a man without charisma and less than a year in office; perhaps they always cried at funerals because the flowers were so beautiful, or because unlike the men their hearts could be moved beyond politics to the thought that whoever this was, here was a man dead.