ABSTRACT
M Money Slid from hand to waiting hand. Only small amounts of money. Notes or a few coins. It slowly made its way inside the passports, or more openly, straight from one hand into another. There was no money in my passport as I handed it to an enormous woman wearing a New York Police Department-style uniform, who sat, Buddhalike, inside a small cubicle five feet above floor level at one end of the airport terminal. My passport joined a small pile on the desk, and she took the next handsomely-loaded document from the person behind me and stamped it. Eventually I was the only person in front of her. I held out my hand. She looked me in the eye, then slowly began flicking through the pages of my passport.
