office along the side and came out with a Filipino whose white uniform shirt had captain's insignia and the emblem of the customs police. The captain took my passport to one of the stations, stamped it without looking, brought it back and gave it to me, and asked if I had baggage. I told him, only what I was carrying—a bag and a briefcase—and he led us briskly out of Immigration, around a row of customs inspectors, into the foyer.

     “Thank you, Manny,” Dalzell said, and the captain waved us off like a mother sending her kids to school.

     “I'm impressed,” I said as we started to the front doors.

     “That's easy. Spread around a little baksheesh, it does wonders. Twenty pesos is the minimum rate for somebody in uniform. A traffic cop gets twenty when he catches you running a stop sign. It goes up from there.”

     “Twenty pesos, he doesn't write you a ticket?”

     “That's right.”

     “That's only a dollar.”

     “A little less. A buck still goes a long way here, if you know what to do with it.”

     We opened the doors and stepped outside, into a wall of heat and people. The air was heavy with a smell of ripe garbage and smog and fried fish. The people were cab drivers and hotel touts, vendors of cigarettes and jasmine garlands; motley hustlers, boys and men hardly larger than boys, scrambling and shouting, elbowing one another to carry my luggage, promising the cheapest fare, the cleanest room, the most beautiful women.

     “Watch your wallet,” Dalzell said, “don't let go of your stuff,” and we had nearly pushed through before I noticed a rectangle of cardboard hoisted above the crowd on a pair of matchstick wrists, MISTER HART U.S.A., it said. I went over to it.

     He stood on the fringes as he held the sign, patient, but with a drooping mouth beneath a pencil-line moustache: a Filipino in his sixties, scrawny, in a straw fedora and an old sharkskin suit that had wet crescents under the arms.