“And he’s selling soft drinks now and has probably been working since he was eight. He should be in school, but he’s not. And you buy a drink from him and don’t even see him.” Chet put the plastic bag down. “Ting, if you are not the solution, then you are part of the problem. I am tired of being part of the problem.”

I said, “You wanted martial law.”

Chet composed himself. “I wanted the contract for the LRT and expansion of the highway system in the provinces. I wanted to cut through the red tape.”

“Gumboc is a murderer. He’s killed over ten thousand people and—”

“Ting, I know that,” Chet said. He had dropped his voice to a soothing level and was talking to me as if I were a child. “Gumboc would have won the next election anyway, maybe not in a landslide, but handily. So what harm has been done? He’s old and sick. Another couple of years, he’s dead, his party flames out because the infighting has already started. Again, we swing the other way. Next president’s probably your guy, Lijé, or someone like him. Someone who deals in the old ways, where nothing gets built and the wealth of the country is spread among the cronies.”

“You’re a crony,” I said. I didn’t mean it as an insult but merely to point out an irrefutable truth.

Chet gave a sad laugh and said, “But I will get my highways to the provinces, I will get the LRT, I will improve the traffic.”

I thought of the long lines snaking down the steps of the LRT terminals, of the hours we all spent stalled in the traffic, of the overflowing sewers that flooded the houses of the poor every time it rained. The LRT was, to Chet, a modern-day aqueduct, a source of employment for the many workers who would no longer have to go overseas and leave their families, who could now live cheaply outside the squalor of Manila’s poor neighborhoods. If the whole thing wasn’t so corrupt, it would have been admirable.

“But why did you involve Laird?”

“Involve Laird? This was his idea. He sold it to Rocco. The guy’s crazy, but he’s smart. Laird knew what the video would have to look like. That was easy. And then he just needed to find a head.”

I wondered how they had made it look like Laird or if the head had been decomposed, which would have been convenient. Or if they had simply found someone to sign some document saying that this head had been identified when it hadn’t.

I asked, “So whose head?”