A half block away, a muscled but toothless vendor named Truong had set up two vertical stalls filled with maps and books and T-shirts and was awaiting the tourists who might pass him on an afternoon stroll. On Dzung’s other side, amid the garbage and the muck from that morning’s rain, a sad and shriveled old woman who still refused to tell him her name was peddling rice cakes and just-warmed noodles to a stream of hungry street people. A cat continually licked the old woman’s feet. Two puppies she was fattening for sale devoured leftovers that she dumped in puddles just off the curb.

Gloom covered Dzung’s face. He had been waiting for Condley all day, and his thoughts were overwhelming him. He studied his own bare feet, impervious to the usual array of hustlers and cretins as they came and went. Hai, the one-armed, one-eyed beggar, walked up, pulling briefly at Dzung’s sleeve, hoping for a few hundred dong for lunch. Hai had stepped on a mine as a communist soldier in Cambodia in 1985 but begged from western tourists by telling them he had been blown up in “America’s” war. Dzung ignored Hai, who quickly moved down the street toward other targets.

Others flitted past Dzung, carrying out their daily routines. Old Ba Thuc, shriveled and hunchbacked, nodded as she shuffled silently by, sweeping last night’s trash from the damp and treacly gutter with a waist-high, loose-bristled broom. Two tough street urchins pulled a flatbed wagon along the broken sidewalk, heading for the fertile begging grounds at the intersection of Le Loi and Nguyen Hue Streets. Their rented passenger was a hapless quadriplegic lying facedown on the wagon’s boards, his bone-thin arms and legs twisted behind him like pretzels. Delicate, moon-eyed little Ahn, sent onto the street every afternoon by her mother with a ream of no-win lottery tickets and a book of worthless stamps, tried to tease him out of his misery. Then, when he did not respond, the angel-faced child cursed him fluently for half a block as she retreated.

But Dzung did not care. He was sad, afraid, portentous, living under a pall. The cars and motorbikes drove by, their noxious fumes wafting over him. To Dzung, the gasoline odors smelled like money, opportunity, even freedom. Condley was at Thu Duc in a car. He knew that the American rode on his cyclo purely out of loyalty, that if it had not been for their friendship Condley would be driving himself in a car or on a motorbike while in Sai Gon. True, Dzung was just as loyal, looking after Condley and always listening among the gossipmongers on the street for news that might affect his friend’s fortunes. But for some reason, he felt a change coming. Condley would not ride like this forever. And without Condley’s generous salary of ten dollars a day, his life might become impossible.