Manh had personally loaded the bullets into the pistol, wearing plastic gloves and carefully wiping down each bullet, as well as the casings. Dzung could not understand why the Interior Ministry agent went to all the trouble with the bullets. No registry held his fingerprints. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was simply Manh’s fascination with old movies. Or perhaps Manh thought that such a sophisticated approach would steer investigators away from a Vietnamese suspect once they found the sanitized casings. Or maybe, shrugged Dzung, there was a new form of science that could pick up his body identification from oils left on the bullets and beam the information up into a satellite and then cause the satellite to instantly make him glow so that the police could come and pick him up. Who knew? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t work. He had not touched any of the bullets.

They walked south for a long time, toward the distant, curving Chao Phraya River. After an hour the city slowly began to change. After a few more blocks they entered a neighborhood that seemed to have been built only yesterday, perhaps by using waste materials from old construction sites. The few people on the streets walked listlessly under the scorching sun, viewing Dzung and Manh with little interest. Others sat motionless under outdoor stalls, some numb from opium and others merely enduring the heat.

“It smells worse than District Four,” said Dzung, looking around them at a mass of ramshackle, open-air houses made of plywood and loose tin set along mud pathways.

“That’s because there are no hogs in District Four,” said Manh.

“Yes, another benefit of the revolution,” said Dzung. “That it protects my family from having to eat such meat.”

Manh ignored him, having become deeply intense in this new environment. He pointed in front of them, where four open-air slaughter pens marked the center of another clearing. “They kill them there.”

A dozen huge hogs squealed and cowered in one concrete pen, early arrivals for that night’s slaughter. A muscular, bare-chested young man with tattoos on both his thighs stood in the dirt at the center of the pen, hacking away at the carcass of one hog that had died early from the heat. Concrete gutters ran along the edges of each of the pens. Much of the blood and debris from the daily slaughter would be washed down the gutters to the river, a block below them. Even now the gutters buzzed with flies, stinking horribly with pools of stagnant water from the killings of the night before.