Then there had been miles of Bangkok unrolling on either side of her and sliding by, bright lights and tall buildings, all of it looking alike to Da. The noise of the bike, the wind filling her eyes with tears. The boy, whiplash-lean in front of her, Peep cradled to her chest. Now and then a last-minute zigzag between cars, making her gasp as the boy laughed. Then the streets had gotten narrower and darker, and they began to slope slightly downhill, and soon there was the river, broad and black and spangled with reflected light.

He had parked the bike and climbed off, then brought his arm way, way back to sling the keys in a long, high arc that ended with a splash in the water twenty or thirty yards distant. The two of them had walked from there, a kilometer or more, along the edge of a road that paralleled the river, both of them looking down the mud-slick bank, seeing the occasional rough wooden structure in the spaces between the buildings that are increasingly fencing in the River of Kings. Above one of the shacks, the boy had turned to her and taken Peep from her arms and tucked him into one elbow with a practiced gesture, then grabbed her hand with his own and led her down the path. A rusted latch, the creak of a wooden door, and then twenty, maybe twenty-five sleeping children. Here and there, half-open eyes shone at them, and she heard the soft sound of breathing.

He had not spoken a word to her the entire time. He led her, stepping over the sleeping forms, to a corner far from the door. He indicated the open space and whispered, “Sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

She had whispered, “They can’t find-”

“No,” he had said. “Nobody knows we’re here.”

She had dropped off almost before she was finished making certain that Peep was comfortable.

THE DOOR TO the shed opens, just a few inches, and the room brightens. He looks in, his eyes going straight to her. When he sees her sitting up, he puts a silencing finger to his lips and motions her to come out. Being careful not to jostle the children on either side of her and Peep, she gathers the baby to her and stands, stiff from a night on the ground, and threads her way between the sprawled children to the door. Here and there, kids roll over and mutter, but they quickly lapse back into sleep. Peep throws out an arm but doesn’t open his eyes.

“They stay up late,” the boy says after he closes the door. “They need to sleep when they can. If you have to go to the bathroom, there’s a hut around the side. I’ll wait for you.”

“Thank you,” she says. She has taken eight or nine steps when she turns back to him. “My name is Da,” she says. “What’s yours?”

The boy says, “I’m Boo.” He looks even slighter in the bright morning light. He can’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and once again she is struck by the concentration of life in the tight-cornered eyes. “When you come back, we’ll get something to eat.”

The hut is the most primitive kind of toilet, just a hole in the earth with four walls built around it and a length of cloth hanging in the open doorframe. There is no roof, but even without one the reek is overwhelming. Da looks down in the hole, as village children learn to do, not eager to squat over a snake or a poisonous spider, and is surprised to see water only a foot or so beneath the edge of the hole. Then she thinks, The river, and takes care of her needs. She unwraps Peep and takes off his soiled diaper, suddenly realizing that she’d left the shopping bag with the clean diapers, with the towel, with the milk and whiskey, at the beggars’ apartment house.

Well, there’s no way she can put the old one back on him. She folds it and drops it into the hole, then cleans him up with paper from the roll beside the hole and totes him back outside with his bottom bare to the breeze. When she comes around the corner, Boo sees Peep and grins. It is the first time she has seen him smile. She feels herself smile back at him, and her heart lifts. Just for a moment, she isn’t worried about anything.

“Cute butt,” Boo says.

“It works, too. I have to get some diapers and a couple of towels and some of those little packets of wet tissues, and-”

“Relax,” he says. “There’s a Foodland a few blocks that way.”

“Open this early?”

“Foodland is like Bangkok,” Boo says. “It never closes.” They are climbing the path, Boo first and Da following. The day opens around them as they get higher, the river flowing below and buildings rising ahead. The mud has a fetid smell, but as they approach the top of the bank, it gives way to the stench of exhaust. Da prefers the smell of the mud. Boo looks back over his shoulder at her. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen. What about you?”

“Fourteen. Or maybe fifteen. There was kind of a disagreement about when I was born.”

“Who disagreed?”

He glances across the road and raises his eyebrows to indicate a lane that runs off it, away from the river. “My sister and my brother.”

They cross the road and enter the lane, lined on both sides with old-style Bangkok buildings, shopfronts at street level with one or two stories rising above them. “Where are they now? Where are your parents?”

Boo says, “Gone,” in a tone that does not encourage further discussion. “Up here about half a block,” he says. “The woman makes good noodles.”

“How do the kids eat?”

He stops and waits until she is beside him, and the two walk on together. “We work with some cops,” he says. “I go to the places where the guys go who are looking for children, and I talk to them, I tell them I have what they want. Then I take them to look at the kids-the ones you saw asleep in there-and they pick out the ones they want. We get a room at a sex hotel and deliver the kids. Two minutes later the cops bang on the door.”

Da can hardly believe it. “And the men go to jail?”

“No. The cops are crooked. They take all the guy’s money and drag him to an ATM to get more, and then they tell him if he doesn’t leave Thailand the next day, they’ll lock him up forever. They pay me, maybe thirty, forty dollars, depending on how much the man had. Sometimes more. They keep most of it.”

“The man doesn’t get arrested?”

“No, but he’s out of Thailand. And the kids can eat.”

They walk as Da considers it. There’s not much traffic yet, and the lane is almost peaceful. “Who thought of it?”

“I did.”

“How did you find the cops?”

He gives her a quick glance. “You mean crooked ones?”

“Yes.”

He laughs. “What’s hard is to find straight ones.”

Small bright plastic chairs, red and blue, are drawn up on the sidewalk, flanking a sloping table covered in a burnt-orange oilcloth. A frilly, smooth-trunked tree provides shade. Over a charcoal fire burning in a black metal drum at the curb, a wok smokes and sputters, and four people are already slurping out of faded plastic bowls. The smell of the food makes Da realize she’s starving, and that Peep must be, too. “I’ve got to get something for Peep,” she says.

“After you eat. One thing you learn on the street is to take care of yourself first. You’re no good to anyone unless you’re strong.” He waves at the woman beside the fire, broad and brown and sturdy, who gives him a bright good-morning smile and starts throwing things into the wok without asking what he wants.

“Your girlfriend?” she shouts, stirring in some chopped garlic and a handful of cilantro.

Da is surprised to see Boo blush.

“Look how shy,” the woman says, laughing. She pours liquid down the sides of the wok, and fragrant steam billows up as the others at the table, three men and a woman, laugh, too. “Such a handsome boy, if he’d only get his hair cut. Honey,” she says to Da, “cut it while he’s asleep if you have to.”

“I just need to comb it,” Boo says. His face is scarlet.

“You couldn’t comb it with a tractor,” the woman says. This time Da laughs with everyone else, and after a moment Boo smiles, too.