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description of sixty years earlier: ‘You must come over the mountains from Durazzo and see at the foot of the mountains—with old Dajti stretched like some prehistoric monster against the sky above it—the long stretch of trees that’s Tirana and the white minarets rising.’
    By the time a German journalist, Harry Hamm, arrived in Albania, thirty years after Rose Wilder Lane, of the country’s 530 mosques only a dozen remained. Some had been turned into theatres, others into gymnasiums. The Orthodox church on the hill at the southern edge of Tirana, he noted, had been turned into a restaurant and the altar into a counter on which a chromium-plated coffee machine displayed a ‘latest social achievement’ plaque.
    From the railway station we walk through the city to the Dajti Hotel, its namesake looming over the city as Rose Wilder Lane described, but its summit covered in grey mist. Every visitor mentions Dajti but now I can see why. Tirana feels like rubble at the bottom of a cliff.
    By the time we reach Skanderbeg Square the mist has turned to rain.
    â€˜Such a pity,’ says Mister Jin, and he reminds me: in summer a cradle of smiles dangles over Tirana.
    â€˜Where are the birds?’ I ask.
    â€˜Birds?’
    It has just occurred to me. It has to do with the absence of traffic, the total absence of noise, I am sure, otherwise I would not have thought of birds.
    â€˜The birds are surely in the trees,’ he says.
    We come onto Skanderbeg Square, which is vast and rain-soaked. We stop to look at the pedestal where the statue of Enver Hoxha had stood, and which is now occupied by small children. One boy strikes a pose and pops a muscle. A soldier posted there heaves his rifle and looks off in another direction.
    From the square we follow the edge of a park. Mister Jin says we are nearly there.
    â€˜Okay. Okay,’ call some small boys crouched by the fires of a chestnut vendor.
    A young man selling newspapers calls out pleasantly, ‘Bush!’ He raises the Democrat salute. Two fingers.
    I feel as if I’m the only foreigner in Tirana. A special emissary of some kind.
    In fact the Dajti, as I discover, is full of UN people and logistics experts from Western relief agencies. The other guests are visiting ‘businessmen’. Romanian, Italian, Hungarian—they are all here. The foyer of the Dajti is a kind of piazza. The noise missing in the square is in the hotel. In the days ahead the visiting ‘businessmen’ fail to shed their heavy coats or venture beyond the smoke-filled lobby. At night they resettle in the lounge and sit at the low coffee tables under a thickening cloud of smoke. They raise their glasses, propose toasts and talk of ‘opportunities’, while a woman in a leopardskin coat goes from one man’s knee to another’s.
    In the foyer of the Dajti, I begin to thank Mister Jin, until he stops me.
    â€˜But you are a guest in my country. It has only been a short time together, but I feel secure to think of us as friends.’
    He places both his hands on my shoulders. His unshaven cheeks brush with mine.
    At the door, he calls back: ‘Dossier H! Don’t forget.’

6
    I HAD TO wait another four days before meeting Gert Munz. He’d been on a home visit to Wiesbaden. His wife refuses to live in Tirana—and Tirana, of course, offers nothing for his teenage children. Munz was a career diplomat and Tirana was his posting.
    â€˜What am I to do? I am held hostage.’ He smiled agreeably.
    I liked and trusted his wrinkly eyes. A wild idea brought out a twinkle and then he might begin, ‘You know, I have an idea…’ But there were unguarded moments too, such as when I came upon him waiting for me down in the hotel foyer and lost in thought, that I imagined him preoccupied with crossing out the days, weeks and months he had left in Tirana.
    While he wished me well he was less than confident of my finding