“My sentiments exactly.”

“And inadequate in the bargain. Suppose you show me your passport so that I can be confident you are truly yourself.”

I went to the men’s room, retrieved the passport from my money belt. When I got back to Sukhumvit’s table there were two fresh bottles of beer on it, and a bowl of peanuts. I gave him my passport and poured myself some beer while he squinted at it, looking at my photo and at me, reading everything the passport had to say about me. Then, with a quick smile, he folded it and handed it back to me.

“You are enjoying Bangkok, Tanner?”

“I just got here.”

“You speak the language well.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m pretty good with languages.”

“How’s your Burmese?”

“Not as good as my Thai. ”

“You’ve been to Burma?”

“No.”

“Fascinating country. Cut off from the world all these years. You’ll find Rangoon very different from Bangkok.”

“I can imagine.”

“Of course, it’s Yangon now. And the whole country is Myanmar. But no one outside the government calls it that.”

“So I understand.”

He helped himself to a handful of peanuts, chewed thoughtfully, drank beer. He said, “You’ve been to Bangkok before.”

“Not recently.”

“No, not since that passport was issued. Do you find it changed much?”

“A lot of new construction, from the looks of things.”

“Yes.”

“And it seems to me the traffic is worse.”

“It is worse each year than the year before.”

“And there was a war going on the last time I was here,” I said, “and that’s over with.”

“Not a war in Thailand.”

“No, of course not.”

“In Vietnam, you must mean.”

“Yes.”

He frowned. “But how can that be? It says on your passport that you were born in 1958. Americans were not drafted until the age of eighteen, is that not so? And the last American troops left Vietnam well before your eighteenth birthday.”