from Manila and Bacolod. One was handwritten, three thousand pesos for a car and driver, three days. I couldn't read the straggly signature, but Bembo said the receipt was probably from one of the drivers-for-hire who congregate around the Green Fields. Bembo promised to find him. If he had driven Collins for three days, he knew things we needed to find out.

     We were several hours out of Manila, in our first-class cabin on Princess of Negros. The cabin was a steel cubicle with two iron cots and a small metal table, all bolted to the deck plate and coated with thick gray enamel. It looked like a cell in a county jail.

     Bembo's forefinger moved the pieces of paper around on the table, the way old men's fingers push checkers or dominoes. He turned one of them over, a bar tab from the Green Fields. “Geraldo Martinez” was written there, nothing else. I had missed it.

     He picked up the passport, fixed on the photo for a few moments, then put it down. He went to the printout, ran his eyes up and down it, said “Ah, very nice,” and began to copy it into a small notebook.

     “Do you know the barrio?” I said. Sanchez's birthplace.

     “Barrio Lanao, Hermosa town,” he said. “I don't know that barrio, but Hermosa is in the interior. That is a critical area.” Before I could ask, he said, “A critical area is a region where the military and the NPA are contesting for control. A nervous place.”

     “A war zone,” I said.

     “Yes, but it is an odd kind of war. Most of the encounters are not very large. More on the order of ambushes and skirmishes. Sometimes a skirmish develops into a running battle. But that does not happen every day.”

     He looked to see how I took this.

     “Sanchez must have family there,” he said.

     That reminded me. I got the photograph from my bag. Lito and Vangie, the school.