Noi, he thinks, with a jolt of despair. He can’t even ask about Noi without feeling like he’s imposing. And he still hasn’t told Rose that Arthit’s afraid Noi is planning to kill herself. It’s almost enough to make Rafferty’s own troubles seem trivial.

Except for Rose and Miaow.

He considers calling Kosit, but the people Arthit fears could obviously erase Kosit from the equation even more easily than they could Arthit, since Kosit is a much more obscure cop than Arthit. The second obvious source of information, newspapers, is also closed to him. He figures it’s not just the Sun where the computers are programmed to let out a squawk every time someone enters Pan’s name. It’s easy to see himself sitting in the empty morgue of some paper, suddenly being joined by Captain Teeth and a couple of lifters who specialize in joint dislocation and eardrum ruptures.

He could say it’s research, of course. He resolves to hold that option for later.

So.

So, he guesses, that makes it time to eat.

He turns idly in the direction that most of the foot traffic is moving in, looking for someplace where he can get a salad or something light. In this heat he’d rather eat a bowling ball than a chunk of meat. He figures he’ll grab a table big enough to write on, clear a space, and go back to work on his list. Maybe start playing with scenarios. He’s long known that he thinks more clearly when he writes, that the act of waiting for his hand to finish forming the words slows his thought processes in a way that opens them up, allows him to see three or four possible alternative paths rather than just the most obvious one.

One problem is that there’s been no time to reflect. This is Thursday, just minutes into P.M. The card game had been Tuesday night, the phone calls and the abduction in front of Miaow’s school had happened on Wednesday morning. Looking back, Wednesday seems a week long: the threats, the abduction, the office suite, leveling with Pan-which he still thinks might have been a mistake, especially in light of what Porthip had to say about him-the meeting with Weecherat and then with Arthit, the encounter at the party with Captain Teeth, the event in Pan’s sparkling garden.

Ton. The snake in the cabinet. Miaow’s terror. The microphones in the apartment.

And today: Learning about Weecherat’s murder. Arthit’s remoteness. The fourth-floor apartment, and then Porthip, the dying man, smelling of mold and bitterness behind his desk.

And almost willfully uncommunicative. Why had he been on the list?

The thought stops Rafferty midstep, and someone passes him, brushing him lightly, as though he or she had sidestepped at the last moment in order to avoid bumping into his back. Rafferty glances up as the person passes, but the question about Porthip claims his attention and leads to another question: What if they’re all like that? And then to a third: Does anyone actually want this book written?

And, if not, what the hell is going on?

But before he can begin to consider that, his consciousness is flooded by a detailed, high-definition visual memory of the person who had brushed past him. The shape of the shoulders, the way he carried himself, the color of his clothes.

The hair.

Rafferty breaks into a run, dodging between people, pushing his way through the crowd and the heat, not seeing anything ahead of him, no one that could be who he thinks it was. An alleyway opens to his right, and he stops.

Alleyways.

If it’s who he thinks it was, if he went into an alley, if he doesn’t want to be found, well…

He won’t be found.

Still, it could have been someone else. It probably was. In Bangkok there must be a thousand people who look like that.

And it doesn’t do Rafferty any good to wonder about it. He needs to get to a table, he needs to start writing. He needs to stop reacting and begin to plan. He needs to solve the problem of Rose and Miaow.

TODAY IT’S FLIES.

They land on Da’s wrists and hands and ears. They swarm Peep’s face and crawl toward the moisture in the corners of his eyes. He swings his fat little fists back and forth, but seconds after the flies take off, they land again. She hears their buzz even over the noise of the crowd, and that thought straightens her spine.

She’s grown accustomed to the sound of the crowd.

Was it yesterday that it was so deafening?

Was it yesterday that she met that woman across the street, with her skeletal, shining-eyed child? Remembering that the woman and the boy hadn’t been in the van that morning, Da scans the sidewalk across the street and sees her. But the boy’s not with her.

There’s no question that it’s the same woman who’s sitting there: same color blanket, same long, loose hair, same faded denim blouse. But she’s not upright, not up on her knees with her bowl out. She sits hunched over, like someone who’s been kicked in the stomach. And in place of the skeletal child, she holds a bundle, tightly wrapped in a blanket.

A passing schoolchild tosses a sidelong glance at Peep. Da has almost stopped noticing how people avoid her eyes; they look at the baby, they look at the bowl, but they don’t look at her. She is becoming used to this.

Da shakes her head, and Peep stares up at her. She will not become used to this.

A schoolchild, she thinks. Kep may be eating. This is the time he disappears to eat; the woman said so.

After three or four minutes of searching the sidewalk for the awful blue shirt, she gets up. The traffic hurtles by, all gleam and glass and chrome and steel. She has not actually crossed a Bangkok street yet, except when many others were crossing, too, but now she is alone. A big something goes by, and there is enough open air behind it that she grasps Peep so hard he squeals, and then she steps out onto the pavement. Two motorcycles beep at her and split up, one going behind her and the other in front of her, and when the one that went in front of her is gone, there is room enough between cars for her to run into the second lane. She stops as a truck barrels past and a boy sitting on top of it shouts something down, and then she’s in the middle of the street, dripping sweat, watching the traffic come from the other direction. But this time she gets a break, because a bus makes a turn at the corner, stopping all the cars, and she has enough time to crawl across on her hands and knees if she wanted to.

The woman does not look up, not even when Da says, “Hello.”

This close, she can see that the bundle in the woman’s lap is a baby, not much older than Peep. The woman holds it carelessly, as though it were a newspaper or something else that can’t be damaged by letting it roll onto the pavement. The child’s eyes are wide and startled, like the eyes of someone who has just learned that people sometimes hurt each other on purpose.

“Are you all right?” Da asks. She sits back on her heels, village style.

The woman says, “Go away.”

“Kep’s probably eating.”

“Who cares? Go away.” She has not turned her head, not given Da so much as a glance.

“Where’s…um, where’s…” She doesn’t know the name of the missing child.

“Gone. I don’t want to talk about it.” She reaches up and scrubs the palm of her hand fiercely across her cheeks. “Little idiot. He never even learned to button his shirt right.”

“Gone where?” People are pushing past them now as the afternoon rush intensifies, but neither of them pays any attention. Their bowls are on the pavement, forgotten.

“I had to button it every morning. Can you believe that? Seven years old and he couldn’t-” She stops talking abruptly.

“He’s seven? He looks so much younger.”

“They let him starve,” the woman says. “When he was three, his mother knew he was wrong. He didn’t look at things. He didn’t learn. So she fed her other kids, and after a while she pushed him out of the house. He didn’t get enough to eat, so he stayed small.”