I finished at the Silahis in five minutes; the travel agent was almost that fast in snapping up seats on a flight the next morning.

     The agency was in the ground floor of an office building on the boulevard. I came out knowing that I had our future in my shirt pocket. Knowing that in a day I was gone and might never be back.

     The building had a doorman. I stood with him in the heavy heat, looking out at the bay and the beggars along the breakwater. The pension on Mabini Street was two blocks away.

     I said to the doormen, “Do you know a place called Tondo?”

     “Yes sir, Tondo Manila. Near by the North Harbor.” So we had gone through it when we left the docks. A cramped, shabby district.

     “Right across the river.”

     “Yes sir, other side of the Pasig River.”

     Twenty pesos, a few minutes.

     “Taxi, sir?” Looking for the tip. I said yes, and he whistled one into the curb.

     Earlier we had only skirted the edges of Tondo. The 400 block of Jison was in its squalid bowels, an amorphous clutter of shops and shacks. Burning garbage fumed in a heap at the intersection; kids poked sticks at a dog's rigid corpse. Four nineteen was a beauty salon. A sunless alleyway, barely wider than my shoulders, led to the back. I heard Sinatra, faintly. Chicago, Chicago.

     A closed door, four steps down. On the door, scratched into the paint: KNOCK TO ENTRANCE.

     I went down and knocked. Somebody opened it, and Sinatra got louder as I stepped in. A mattress lay in the middle of a basement room. A man and a woman were humping on the mattress, to an audience of about a dozen men who gawked from chairs against the walls.