She turned a perfect quarter turn to look at me. I couldn't see much detail, back-lit as she was in the brilliance.

     “Vangie,” she said.

     I walked across the room. My path took me gradually out of the glare until I was standing beside her.

     “My name is Jack Hart.”

     “You are an American.”

     “Through and through.”

     I tried to grasp all that the snapshot had missed. The clear depth of her skin. The slight, elusive folds of eyes that could have been Chinese or Malay or Polynesian, depending on the way she moved. Her absolute composure.

     “Can I help you?” she said. She seemed to gently rock the words. That lilt, and an almost imperceptible heightening of some vowels, was all she had of an accent.

     I gave her a business card.

     “I'm investigating your cousin's case.”

     “Sir, I have many cousins,” she said, but not at all in a snotty way. She read the card as if she had never heard of the company and had no idea why it would want to talk to her. She didn't seem threatened.

     “I mean Lito Sanchez. Your cousin Preciosa filed a claim for benefits under a fairly substantial life policy that he just recently purchased. We think there's reason to question the claim.”

     “I don't understand.”

     “Lito's alive,” I said, and waited.

     She peered at me as if my head had sprouted clover. I would remember it days later, after I had discovered her gift for parrying and deflection, her bedrock reserve. After maddening hours of trying to meet her eyes for more than a flicker, I would recall that moment in the classroom when she had stared at me so openly, and the memory would amaze me.

     That's how it is with the madonnas of the Philippines.