And that something has to be connected with Pan. This all began with Pan.

He catches a whiff of his own sweat and glances down at his shirt.

Right, clothes. The booths that crowd the sidewalks of Pratunam are beginning to shut-there’s a dark spot here and there where the spotlights have already been doused-but the sellers who are active are eager to accommodate a policeman. Within twenty minutes he has bags containing three anonymous plaid shirts, a couple of generic T-shirts, and two pairs of preshrunk, precreased, totally indestructible and wholly synthetic pants that will probably be the last man-made objects on earth. His shoes are a dead giveaway, cop from soles to laces, but they fit well, and if anyone gets close enough to look at them, he’s finished anyway. He makes a final stop at a booth that sells toiletry articles and buys a razor, some shaving foam, a comb, and a toothbrush. The woman studies him as she puts them into the bag, wondering why a cop needs to buy the stuff for a night out and concluding that he’s got some action lined up somewhere. She practically winks at him as she hands him his purchases.

She’ll remember him, too.

So far, he thinks, tucking the bag under his arm with the others, I might as well be fluorescent, leaving glowing footprints everywhere I go. How the hell did crooks manage?

Still, with the change of clothes in a bag and the night stretching out around him in all directions, he can feel a sort of click inside, a hardening of purpose and sharpening of focus he has come to regard as his cop mode. When he feels like this, he occasionally visualizes himself as a human flashlight, pointed forward, sharp-eyed, able to ignore the irrelevant and cut through the fog of confusion. This is when he does his best work.

But the lift in his spirits doesn’t last long. He’s looking for someplace he can change clothes when he sees the blinking lights. Regular, steady, red flashes, coming from the intersection half a block in front of him. He turns around to put some distance between himself and the police van, then halts. There are red lights in the street behind him, too, at the other end of the block. And he stands there, clutching the bags as the illusion of competence recedes, asking himself why on earth he took the time to go shopping on the same street where he used an ATM.

“THEY TOOK THE kid away from her,” Da says. “Like it was a lamp or something, not a…a child. And next time I saw her, she had a new one. They gave her a baby. The same way they gave Peep to me.”

“Wichat did,” Rafferty says, just trying to keep track.

Da says, “I guess so.”

“He’s been sending beggars out with babies for at least a year,” Boo says. “Everybody on the street knows it. But nobody says anything. He’s not a friendly guy.”

“Where does he get them? Any idea what he’s doing?”

Boo says, “What I think he’s doing is selling them. I think he’s buying them someplace, maybe from people who steal them, and then keeping them until he can find a buyer. And giving them to beggars, so that…well, that way he doesn’t have to draw attention by storing a whole bunch of babies somewhere.”

“And beggars with babies make more money,” Da says. “At least that’s what he told me.”

“You say babies,” Rafferty says. “How old is a baby?”

“A year,” Superman says with a shrug. “Maybe a year, eighteen months. Like Peep.”

“So they can’t talk,” Rafferty says.

Da says, “No. I didn’t see any that were old enough to talk, except some who were injured and the boy they took away, and he was simple or something. He never said a word.”

“Why does that matter?” Superman says. He squints, working it out. “Because…what? Because babies can’t tell the people who buy them that they were stolen?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says. “And maybe because if they could talk, they wouldn’t speak Thai.”

Da looks down at Peep as though he could answer her question. “Not speak Thai?”

“Three or four years ago,” Rafferty says, “there was a big baby racket in Cambodia. People went there from America and Europe, thousands of them, to adopt children who were supposed to be orphans. But they weren’t orphans. They’d been bought from poor families for fifty or a hundred dollars. Sometimes they were just stolen. The new parents paid anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand dollars for a baby. The money was supposed to pay some sort of official fees.”

Boo says, “Thirty to fifty thousand per kid?”

“Per kid.”

“There were four or five babies at the place I was staying,” Da says. The numbers are unimaginable. “And I think they may have more places.”

“They have three more,” Boo says. “My guess is that they’ve got fifteen or twenty babies at any time.”

Rafferty says, “A while back I heard something about babies being brought here, carried across the border by women who pretended to be their mothers. Makes sense, I suppose, just thugs shaking hands across the border. The racket was too profitable to let it go. But I’m not sure what you want me to do. Do you want to find a way to get-What’s the baby’s name?”

“Peep,” Da says.

“Do you want to get Peep back to his mother or something?”

“Oh,” Da says, looking like someone who has just been surprised by a loud noise. “I don’t…I mean, I don’t-”

Rafferty’s phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket and checks the display, which says KOSIT.

THERE IS NOWHERE to go. Another van has pulled up at each end of the block, straight across all the lanes to cut off the traffic, and Arthit sees six or eight uniformed policemen climb out of each. They obviously intend to work toward one another in the hope that Arthit is somewhere between them. He sees them split up, some moving slowly, trolling the sidewalk, while others stop and talk to the vendors.

The uniforms have fanned out onto both sides of the street, which is now empty of traffic and too wide and well lit to cross comfortably. Arthit knows he’d never make it to the other side. He’s closer to the vans in front of him, so he turns around and moves with the crowd, which is gradually slowing to a stop. The cops at either end are funneling people down to single file, peering at faces.

He stops walking. Faces? How would they know what he looks like? It’s surprising enough that Thanom could scramble a force so quickly; there’s no way he’s had the time to print out and distribute a stack of Arthit’s file photos. He moves a bit farther along until he’s in front of a booth that’s gone dark, and he steps back into the gloom and squints at the group of cops that’s working its way toward him from his left.

He knows some of them. He sees three men and one woman he has worked with, nobody he could call a friend but people who can identify him on sight. Even a change of clothing isn’t going to allow him to slip away.

The nearest pair of cops reaches the booth where he bought his shirts. The vendor keeps his face down, not wanting to challenge the cops in any way, but then he looks up and nods an answer. He talks for a moment, waving his hand along the sidewalk in Arthit’s direction. Then he comes out from behind his counter and indicates the booth where Arthit bought the razor.

The dark spot where Arthit is standing suddenly feels quite a bit brighter than it did a moment ago. Without looking left or right, he crosses the uneven sidewalk to its far edge and begins to move slowly along, his left shoulder almost brushing the walls of the buildings that face the booths. Unlike some areas of Pratunam, where booths hem the sidewalks on both sides, here they’re only on the traffic side. Opposite them are older, somewhat run-down buildings, mostly four- and five-story structures with shops at street level and apartments or offices above them. The street windows are mostly dark now, the shops locked, but he’s hoping that one of the doors leading upstairs will be open.