“He’s a distant relative or will be when he marries a distant cousin. He’ll be my distant in-law.” Now I could see, as he was angled in our direction, that it was clearly Laird, radiating the same unearned conviction. His eyes came to rest on the car, and he might have been looking at me as Chet pulled away from the curb, but he could not have seen through the car’s tinted windows. Rocco Basilang had been awarded major contracts by Gumboc and was one of Manila’s most powerful citizens, but why would Laird be talking to him? “I think he’s writing a story about Gumboc.”

“Pro or anti?”

“I really couldn’t say.” I was confused about more than this. “Why would Rocco talk to Laird? I mean Rocco is Rocco and Laird, well, he’s nobody. And it’s not as if Laird knows anything about building, although he does seem to have a passion for infrastructure.”

Chet laughed. “Listen to you! A nobody. Two months here and all your egalitarian American bullshit flies out the window.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Although I had a bad feeling that it was what I meant.

“Until we are a somebody, Ting, we are all a nobody. Even in Manila.”

The new apartment was in a building of polished marble vestibules and brass-trimmed elevators. It could have existed anywhere—New York, Shanghai, Brussels—but it was here, in Manila, and the people checking the mailboxes and heading to the basement gym (even at this late hour) in shorts with towels draped across their shoulders were all Filipinos, except for a bulky, sweating man, who was texting madly just inside the front door.

Chet’s apartment was on the twentieth floor, down a brightly lit, silent corridor. It felt like the quietest place in the city and standing there with Chet, I realized that we were actually alone for the first time in two or possibly three decades. Chet’s key was attached by a paper clip to a card that had a number written on it. He stepped inside the door and ushered me in with an even pressure on my shoulder. There was a moment of darkness before he began, with no small amount of drama, to punch on the lights. We had entered a living room of a dimension almost unknown to me, a mythical square footage of city apartment space. A wall of windows gave out to the sprawl of Manila, a dazzling sea of electric luminescence and life that stretched on and on, uninterrupted, expanding into sea of blackness.

“I bought it for the view,” he said. “It’s the tallest residential building right now and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.”

I walked over to the window and placed my hands on it, dizzied by the dive to the street below. “How do you know that?”