UNTIL QUITE RECENTLY , as Csongor had considered his position in the world, he had never thought of himself as the sort of person who would end up in any situation even remotely like this one. Which might seem odd given that he had been employed, to a greater or lesser extent, by criminals since the age of fourteen. But as he had been at such pains to explain to Zula, most of what criminals did was in fact quite boring and they tended to go to great lengths to avoid such outcomes.