It was nearly six o’clock. He had to hurry.

His neighbors watched him departing with querulous, disapproving faces. He ignored them as he guided the cyclo through them and jumped onto his seat, pedaling away. Little Thuc howled behind him, running onto the concrete and watching him leave. He pushed hard on the pedals, driving too fast along the narrow alleyways, ringing the small bell on the cyclo handle when he negotiated the tighter turns. Children and small dogs raced out of his way. Old men called to him to be careful as they sat at their small plastic-table thrones with their cigarettes and beer and tea. Young men laughed and pointed, viewing his recklessness as wild abandon rather than a suffocating grief.

On the main roads the traffic serenaded him with its very chaos. Its noxious fumes were like a drug that calmed him. Yes, this was normalcy, more than a decade of it now, he in the middle of this frantic churning, this massive, elemental striving, pushing the pedals, feeling his chest heave and his body sweat, the sun baking down on him and the fumes burning his eyes. Pushing toward something, pedaling away from something, waiting for Buddha to stop laughing long enough to allow him a real destination.

But now there was a destination. He wondered at his own audacity as he made the turns and headed toward it. On the surface of it, he had no leverage, none. He had nothing at all to bargain away, and he had nothing more to offer than what they knew they already had. He could not refuse to carry out Manh’s orders if and when the time came. The implicit threat of harm to his family was already the guarantor of that. They could cause the trigger to be pulled at their target, and pulled well. But there was one intangible that they never could demand, and which he had never believed he would offer.

His loyalty.

In the dark, cool lobby of the Interior Ministry building, the small-faced guard was sitting with a grand self-importance behind his wide old French-made desk, smoking a cigarette, guarding his precious few hundred square feet of tomblike emptiness as if it were heaven’s very door. As Dzung entered the lobby, the guard waved commandingly, summoning him to the desk, ever scowling, ever stupid, thinking nothing had changed. But everything had changed. Dzung burst past him, ignoring the usual mandatory, humiliating courtesies, and started up the now-familiar flight of moldy old stairs. The guard rose from his chair in protest, but Dzung froze his motion with a threatening finger and violent eyes.

“Stay where you are, frog. He’s waiting for me. Room 212. I don’t have any time for you today.”