I sat in silence for the first ten minutes. Top Gun was sitting silently too, in the way demanded of so many drivers. They must have been a contemplative set, used to silence, used to disregarding the passage of time as they had no control over how they spent it. Finally, I turned to face him. “Are you working?” I asked.

“Oo po,” he responded. Yes.

I looked around to see if there was anything that would demand Top Gun’s attention, but there was no one close by except for the valet staff, who didn’t really valet but merely monitored the parking. “Do you like your job, working for Chet?”

“I do,” he said. “I like Boss.”

“Aren’t you worried that it’s dangerous?”

He composed his face and delivered a deliberate nod. “Yes. But working construction in Saudi is also dangerous. I could be in security at a bank, also dangerous, and it wouldn’t pay as well. And—” Top Gun was censoring himself.

“And what?”

“And I agree with Boss.”

“Agree with him? About what?”

Top Gun looked around the corners of the car and his eyes came to rest, somberly, on me. “About what is happening in Manila.”

“You mean his politics?”

Top Gun considered this but he didn’t know what I meant by politics, and when I considered, under the weight of his confident, direct gaze, I wasn’t sure what politics meant either. He said, “He is a good man. Boss buys insurance for me and my family. No one else does that.”

“Do you mean health insurance? Or life insurance?”

“He buys both. He is a good employer.”

Top Gun clearly felt that he was putting me in my place, and maybe he was. I wondered who he had voted for the in the last election and was about to ask him when Chet reappeared at the front of the restaurant. He was chatting with a man in his sixties, balding and on the stout side, who was smiling with unbridled confidence. They were nodding in agreement over something. I then saw a third man, tall, standing with them. As Chet made his way to the car, this third man turned and I thought I recognized him. The light was dim and he was at an angle, but it could have been Laird.

Chet got into the car, his face apologetic, as if he wished he were more considerate, but he wasn’t. “Sorry,” he said. “Some things you have to do in person.”

“What things?” I asked.

“Business things. At least with Rocco Basilang. He likes to look you in the eye.” Chet waggled his eyebrows dramatically.

“Who is that other man?”

“That guy? Some American interested in what Rocco’s doing with the highways and the Light Rail Transit. He seemed harmless.”

“So it was Laird,” I said.

“Laird?”