The road to happiness has been a long, winding, twisted, thorny and steep one. I'm writing this at a table in a small crowded tasca called O Sonhador de Alfama, close to the Largo de São Miguel. Looking out the window, I can see a flock of crowing Dutch nuns passing by, shepherded by sombre monks in brown sackcloth, on their way to the Cathedral of Sé. The tantalising smell of fried sardines pervades the old, softly shaded maze of Alfama. Teresa is waiting for me, absorbed in a book, a few steps from here. Life is easy now.

Counterclockwise, five years before. I was on the run, hiding in the guts of a European urban sprawl. I had no money, nobody I could love or trust. I had built myself a reputation as a smart rat who traded underworld hearsay for hard cash, and who otherwise kept his mouth shut. One night, seedy guys I knew started talking about a job that had gone bad. The heisters had got away with several bags full of paper, but not of the money kind. No bonds, no lottery tickets. Something weird. Tickets for the Road to Happiness. One million a piece, written in bold smiling typeface. It looked like kiddie stuff, but who would want to transfer kiddie stuff in an armoured truck with Kevlar-clad men to protect it ? The robbers kept the silly tickets, two bags each. And died, of unnatural causes consisting mainly in the improper use of an ice-pick. All the bags were retrieved by their mysterious owners. All but one, that was still hidden under a bathtub, close to the bar where the seedy characters were talking. Since I was such a story-lover, did I want to see the tickets ?, they said. The bag was very bad juju, nobody wanted to touch it anymore, but it was a five-billion bad juju, waiting for someone to figure it out. I said OK, though I knew that they were trying to set me up, using me as a bait for the ice-pick killer. We met again three hours later. Meanwhile, I had drawn a blank from my fellow rats about anything related to the "Road to Happiness". The bag was not so