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Corporation. Sands hadn’t yet met anybody from Del Monte and by now no longer expected to. Only two other men appeared to be staying here, one an English specialist on mosquitoes and the other a German whom Sands suspected of being a more sinister kind of specialist, perhaps a sniper.
    Bacon and eggs for breakfast. Tiny eggs. The bacon was always tasty. Rice, no potatoes. A soft bread roll, no toast. Filipinos moved around the place in white uniforms, with mops and cloths, keeping the grime and mildew at bay. A young man wearing only black boxer shorts skated past the archway to the main room on the downturned halves of a coconut husk, polishing the wooden floor.
    Sands read the front page of the Manila Times . A gangster named Boy Golden had been slain in the living room of his apartment. Sands studied the photo of Boy Golden’s corpse, in a bathrobe, limbs flung crazily and the tongue lolling from between the jaws.
    The barber appeared, an old man toting a wooden box, and Skip said, “Let’s go out back.” They stepped through French doors onto the patio.
    The day was clear and looked harmless. Still he feared the sky. Rain six weeks straight, from the moment of his arrival in Manila in mid-June, and then one day it just shuts off. This was his first trip beyond the borders of America. He’d never resided outside of Kansas until he’d taken himself and a red-orange suitcase on the bus to Bloomington, Indiana, for the university; but several times as a child and once again in his teens he’d visited Boston to stay with his father’s side of the family, boarding almost a whole summer the last time among a gauntlet of relations, an Irish horde of big cops and veteran soldiers like mastiff guard dogs, and their worried poodle wives. They’d overwhelmed him with their unselfconscious vulgarity and loud gregariousness, embraced him, loved him, uncovered themselves as the family he’d never found among his mother’s midwestern group, who treated one another like acquaintances. He had scant memory of his father, a casualty of Pearl Harbor. His Boston Irish uncles had shown Skip who to become, had marked out the shape he’d fill someday as a grown man. He didn’t think he was filling it. It only set off how small he was.
    Now from these Filipinos he felt the same warmth and welcome, from these charming miniature Irishmen. He’d just begun his eighth week in the Philippines. He liked the people, he hated the climate. It was the start of his fifth year serving the United States as a member of its Central Intelligence Agency. He considered both the Agency and his country to be glorious.
    “I just want you to cut the sides,” he told the old man. Under the influence of the late President Kennedy he’d begun to let his crew cut grow out, and also just recently—under the influence, maybe, of the region’s Spanish vestiges—he’d started a mustache.
    As the old man clipped at his head Sands consulted a second oracle, the Manila Enquirer : the biggest front-page article announced itself as the first of a series devoted to reports by Filipino pilgrims of startling miracles, including asthma cures, a wooden cross that turned to gold, a stone cross that moved, a plaster icon who wept, another icon who bled.
    The barber held an eight-by-five-inch mirror before his face. It was good he didn’t have to show this head around the capital. The mustache existed only as a hope and the hair had reached a middle state, too long to go unnoticed, too short to be controlled. How many years had he kept his crew cut?—eight, nine—since the morning of his interview with the Agency recruiters who’d come to the campus in Bloomington. Both men had worn business suits and crew cuts, as he’d observed the previous afternoon, spying on their arrival at the faculty guest residence—the arrival of the crew-cut recruiters from Central Intelligence. He’d liked the word Central.
    He felt, here, a day’s drive from Manila on terrible