“You must be facile with the money. Americans notice very little, but if one is clumsy at the paying, they will notice that.”

No haggling. If that’s what it says, that’s what it costs.

No looking disappointed at a price.

No counting coins or bills out one at a time as if they were being torn from your flesh.

“They have so much money, they don’t care about it at all. Only another Arab or a Jew makes something of pennies. Most Americans don’t bother to pick up pennies or nickels anymore. Money is shit. Pay it no heed. That’s what they expect. That’s what lulls them to nothingness.”

Transportation: elemental, necessary, difficult.

“Cab is best. Pay in cash, no records. Your driver will be a Russian, another Arab, some sort of black fellow or other. He will pay you no attention. He will read you for threat before he picks you up, and seeing none—make certain you look forlorn and defeated, your body sags with melancholy, your cheeks are hollow—he will pick you up, take you, and forget you.”

Public transportation is slow but generally anonymous. Best to understand the payment system up front, however, so as not to struggle awkwardly trying to fit the right number of nickels and quarters into the hopper. This new thing—private cabs contacted by iPhone, Uber, Lyft—is useful, in that it picks you up where you are and it leaves you where you want to be. But as it’s all done via credit card and the Internet, records are kept. If unobserved and working with a card that has been validated, it’s okay, but the card should never be used operationally.

On to peoples. Jared was not kind in his evocation of various ethnic groups. To him, stereotypes were market research, the accumulated wisdom of millions of transactions between tribe members, and he brought a certain bourgeois zest to profiling those he considered inferior, which was pretty much everyone who hadn’t attended prep school. In political correctness, he was well schooled, but he did not care to burden Juba with its precepts. He knew it could get him killed.

Then on to the police, any race.

“Give them no attitude. They are not clever men or they’d be making some more money elsewhere. They are usually big; they like to hurt people and are always looking for an excuse to do so. But their obsession is with their local area, and they rarely see a bigger picture. They pay more attention to paper than to people, so keep your documents up to date and learn your story forwards and backwards.”