Most farang pass through the gravitational Gordian knot of Bangkok unscathed, like long-haul comets for whom our solar system is just something else to shoulder their way past. Farang have no formal status here. They come and go. They dimple the surface of the city’s space-time like water-striding insects, staying a few months at a stretch and then flitting elsewhere. They don’t have enough mass to draw the gaze of the individuals around whom the orbits wheel.

But Rafferty is being gazed at. And he knows all the way to the pit of his stomach that it’s the worst thing that can happen to him. If they decide it is in their best interest, they can blow through him and his cobbled-together family like a cannonball through a handkerchief.

If he goes in one direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. If he goes in the other direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. And “in danger” is a euphemism.

He is leaning against a building. His skin is slick and cold with evaporating sweat. Panic is barking useless orders at him: Get the family to the airport. (Rose and Miaow don’t have passports.) Hurry them out of Bangkok. (We’re being watched.) Disappear into the city. (Not possible.) Kill everybody. (Who?)

He pushes himself free of the building on legs that feel as numb as prosthetics and makes his way down the soi to the boulevard.

Where he stops, looking left, then right. Which way to go?

Both directions are wrong, but one must be less wrong than the other.

What he needs to do is buy time. He needs to do things that both sides will see as compliance while he figures out which chunk of Bangkok masonry he can pry loose to make a hiding place for his family. Once they’re out of the line of fire, he can think about next steps. About removing himself from the equation. Finding some way to step aside at the last possible moment and let the opposing forces annihilate each other.

Just as he figures out where he needs to go next, his cell phone rings, and it’s someone summoning him to the one place in Bangkok he wants to be.

14

You wait,” the guard says, shutting the little glass door in the booth. The glass is at least an inch thick, certainly bulletproof.

The booth occupies the base of a semicircular clay-brick turret beside an enormous pair of weathered bronze gates that stretch twenty feet toward the paper-white sky. Mesopotamian lions rear up on them, claws extended and teeth bared. The Mesopotamian theme continues on the clay-brick walls, covered with bas-relief figures of standing kings, slender and stiff-kneed and tightly robed. Sprouting here and there among the kings are outcrops, planted with vegetation that spills over the edges. Green streamers dangle downward.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Rafferty realizes. Not even remotely what he’d expected.

The wall is perhaps a fifth of a mile long. It occupies the entire block. Rafferty tries to remember what used to be here, but nothing comes to mind. Bangkok is like that, he thinks: One day you look up and there’s a building, and the field, the house, the slum-whatever it was before, it is gone forever.

The sun’s glare makes him uncomfortably aware that it is almost noon. He is glancing at his watch when the guard opens the little window again and says, “Through here.” A narrow door, barely wide enough for one person to pass through, opens in the left gate. On the other side of the door stands a short, slender, dark-complected man in a pale yellow shirt and triple-pleated, salmon-colored golf slacks.

“Please,” he says in English, “come in, come in.”

The door in the gate clangs closed, and the slender man in the bright clothes climbs into a little white electric golf cart that has been remodeled to look like a very large and steroidal swan. One wing is improbably upraised to shade the passengers. All that Rafferty can see as the cart whirs into motion is greenery, thickly tangled and thorny, a second wall. At the wheel of the cart, the slender man says, without turning to Rafferty, “I am Dr. Ravi.”

“I recognized your voice from the phone,” Rafferty says. Dr. Ravi’s receding hair makes his noteworthy nose seem even larger. His entire face points forward, like a 1950s hood ornament.

“I’m often told I have a distinctive voice,” Dr. Ravi says. “I think it’s the influence of Cambridge.”

Arthit also went to school in England, but his linguistic suitcase isn’t packed with such plummy vowels and half-chewed consonants.

“Sounds like you were there for years.”

He gets a quick glance, but the wall of foliage is upon them. Dr. Ravi slows the cart, slides a hand into his pocket, and brings out a slim remote, which he points at the green barrier. A portion of it detaches itself and begins to swing inward.

Rafferty says, “ Lot of protection.”

“Human nature,” Dr. Ravi announces gravely, “is to want.”

“I’ve noticed.”

The paved track they’re following describes a slow turn through the tangle of scrub, and the view widens suddenly. Rafferty stifles the urge to gasp.

They are entering the Garden of Eden.

The cart passes through a flaming gate, from the top of which a gigantic hand points a single finger outward. The flames are made of gold, beaten thin and curled into phantasmagorical shapes. Large red stones glow at the base of the flames, simulating coals. On the far side of the gate are green, gentle hills, pools complete with swans, ferns, and willows, and, in the center of the garden, an artificial apple tree hung with glistening red and green fruit. A gleaming silver snake curls around the trunk of the tree. It has a red apple in its jaws.

Rafferty says, “Um.”

“The first paradise,” Dr. Ravi says.

From several hundred possible questions, Rafferty randomly chooses one. “How did he get the apples to glow like that?”

“That’s what everyone asks,” says Dr. Ravi smugly. “The red ones are covered in tiny rubies, thirteen or fourteen hundred on each. The green ones are made with emeralds.”

“It’s like a fundamentalist theme park,” Rafferty says maliciously. “Faith World.”

Dr. Ravi says, “Hardly,” in a voice like a pair of tin snips.

A brace of peacocks wander by, the males wasting their time trying to dazzle each other. Men, Rafferty thinks. White ponies dawdle and trot here and there. A couple of them have spiral horns protruding from their foreheads.

“I didn’t know there were unicorns in the Garden of Eden.”

“Obviously there weren’t,” Dr. Ravi says. He’s still offended. “Or they’d exist today, wouldn’t they? One assumes that God works in first drafts and doesn’t revise, or there wouldn’t have been such a flap about evolution. But this is Khun Pan’s Eden, and he wanted unicorns.”

Rafferty watches the apple tree recede. The bed of deep green moss that surrounds it looks like it was created to be reclined upon. “Is Eve home?”

Pursed lips and a pause. “On occasion.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“I rather doubt that you will.”

The narrow road they are navigating is so smooth and the cart so silent that Rafferty has the illusion of being towed over ice. “Why Mesopotamia? Why Eden? Why not something Thai?”

The pursed lips again. “If you had done any research this morning, you would know that Khun Pan enjoys annoying certain people. Spending this kind of money to re-create the Judeo-Christian paradise in a Buddhist society…well, it…it-”

“It pisses people off.”

“And occasionally he opens the grounds for a charity event. Tonight, for example. It’ll draw movie stars, television crews, newspapers, and pour more salt into the wounds of the wellborn. All of this did not come cheap,” Dr. Ravi says. He allows the corners of his mouth to lift, revealing unexpected dimples. “If it doesn’t upset people repeatedly, it’s not cost-effective.”