Immigration and Naturalization Services have their offices downtown in the Federal Building on Los Angeles Street. I found this out the next day by calling information. Bounded on one side by Chinatown and on the other by Little Tokyo, it’s a cold steel structure, an unwelcoming fortress of indeterminate age. No sense of history, no grandeur. No uplifted torch. It’s all bulletproof glass and warnings not to trespass on federal property.

I parked my old blue Datsun in the underground parking structure across the street and walked through the plaza of the Children’s Art Museum. It was hot. Even the kids were listless. Although I had just showered at the gym, I was already feeling sticky and uncomfortable. The tinny computerized music of Triforium, a giant electronic tower that sprays the city with unwanted harmonies and flashes of colored lights, polluted the already overburdened air. In front of the Federal Building a group of nuns moved back and forth across the sidewalk in their weekly silent vigil against the war in Central America. A mutated Frank Sinatra tune groaned behind them.

INS is on the first floor. The line was stretched out nearly to the front door when I joined it, even though it was barely nine in the morning. Hundreds of people from every country in the world wove their way through an anxious maze of ropes toward a distant row of officials behind desks. Arabic, Spanish, all the Asian languages and their subdialects bounded off the gray marble walls. There were old women haggling among themselves, couples quietly holding hands and whispering, children pulling away from their parents and being pulled back. There were many uneasy-looking Filipinos rummaging through their purses, bored Arabs smoking elegantly and with disdain. There were even about thirty women who looked like Carmen Luzano.

Or at least what I had come to imagine she looked like.

Short. Dark. Faint moustache above the upper lip. It was hard to tell. Particularly without a photograph. I had called Monica Fullbright twice the night before, but there was never any answer, not even the ubiquitous phone machine. I supposed she had taken her kids out to dinner when she got home. She probably had a microwave but was too lazy to cook. Someday soon I want to have a microwave. A VCR. A car without terrifying noises under the hood. I was staring vacantly into space, thinking about how grateful Carmen Luzano would be when I restored her to her full-service kitchen, when I heard someone call my name.

“Whitney. What it is.”

It was Leo Hernandez. He was a year ahead of me in law school. A real skirt-chaser but a nice guy. Totally undeterred by the fact that he’s married to a beautiful woman who supported him through law school by waiting tables.

We shook hands and exchanged hasty pecks on the cheek, mine a bit hastier than his.