If he had his way, the man who’s been assigned to Rose thinks, they’d all be rounded up and put in jail. Little animals. They invade neighborhood after neighborhood, looking for pockets to pick, things to steal. Give real crooks a bad name. Lock them all in a cage, drop the key in the river, and drop the cage on top of it. Or do like they did in that Japanese movie, whatever it was called-Battle Royale, that was it-and strand them on an island and force them to kill one another until only one’s left. And then write a new ending and kill the one who’s left.

At the corner the kids turn around and drift back aimlessly, and suddenly one of the kids at the rear of the pack lets out a scream of warning, and about ten new kids round the corner at a run. The gang the man has been watching breaks into a full-out sprint with the others in pursuit. The ones in front look terrified. Two of the bigger boys in the group that’s chasing them are waving something that look like ax handles. They chase the smaller group like a pack of wild dogs.

The man settles back in his doorway to enjoy the show. The kids in front make a rapid turn to their right, as tightly knit as a flock of swallows, and disappear down the ramp into the garage beneath the apartment house. The other group, the larger group, follows.

A man in the garage bellows in Thai, “Out! Get out!” and a second later the kids erupt onto the street again, the groups mixed now into a single cloud of children, and there’s another deep shout, and a tall, fat guard in uniform runs out of the garage behind them, brandishing a billy club. The kids pick up the pace, and five or six seconds later they’ve all vanished around the corner, the guard in pursuit.

The man who’s been assigned to Rose realizes he’s stepped out into the sunlight to watch the spectacle, and he retreats back into the shade. For a few seconds, it occurs to him, he was so interested he hadn’t given a thought to how hot it is.

IN THE GARAGE, Rafferty puts his unbandaged hand up to the spot on his cheek where Miaow kissed him just before she joined the swarm of kids and charged up to the street, her ragged clothes fluttering as she ran. The sight produced a surprising pang. When he first met her, she’d been running with kids just like these.

He goes to the elevator and pushes the button for the fourth floor. Time for Part Two.

Sunlight as thin and unsatisfying as gruel, not even intense enough to throw shadows. The phone at Rafferty’s ear is slick with sweat, an aftereffect of Rose and Miaow’s escape.

“He’s not in,” says Porthip’s secretary.

“When will he be in?” The floor he spent so much time cleaning has gotten gritty again, and he drags his feet over it, enjoying the sound.

“I have no idea.”

Just for the hell of it, he kicks the stool that’s pinched his butt so many times and watches it topple over onto its side. He doesn’t think he’ll ever have to see it again, and he won’t miss it. “Is that usual?” he asks. “That you’d have no idea when he’ll be in?”

“No,” she says. “When he gets in touch with me, would you like me to tell him what this concerns?”

“He’ll know what it concerns,” Rafferty says. “Can’t you get in touch with him?”

The woman does not reply for a moment, and then she says, “No.”

“Really. Is that usual?”

“Oh, well,” she says. “It’ll be in the paper tomorrow anyway. He’s in the hospital.”

“Which one?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Sure you can.” He looks at his watch. About forty minutes more on the tape that’s running upstairs. He’ll have to go up, do his stuff in the apartment, and put in the next cassette. “Anyway, there’s only one hospital he’d go to.”

“Really,” she says neutrally.

“Sure. Bumrungrad.”

There’s a short pause, and she says, “Well, that’ll be in the paper, too. But before you get smug, Bumrungrad’s a very big hospital.”

“Right,” Rafferty says. “I’ll never manage to find him.”

He hangs up and calls Kosit.

“OUT OF THE question,” Dr. Ravi says. He’d answered the phone at Pan’s office. “You can’t just stop by and see him any time.”

“It’s not any time,” Rafferty says. “It’s half an hour from now.”

“This is a very bad day. Extremely busy.”

Rafferty has no trouble visualizing the little man, probably wearing another ambitiously pleated pair of slacks, seated behind the desk in the small office outside Pan’s big one. “Sorry it’s a bad day, but I’m coming anyway.”

“He won’t see you.”

“He’ll see me. Just say one word to him. Say ‘Snakeskin.’”

The pause is so long that Rafferty thinks Dr. Ravi has hung up. When he does speak, all he says is, “Half an hour?”

“Yes. But two other people are going to get there first, two kids. Let them in and have them wait. It’s important that they’re not out on the street when I arrive.”

“Any other orders?” Dr. Ravi says.

“That’ll do for now,” Rafferty says.

He folds the phone and sits on the stool, which he has put upright again. The day in front of him is a maze, an urban labyrinth with several ways in and probably only one safe way out. Within an hour Rose should call to tell him they’re with Boo’s kids down at the river. They’ll be fine down there, at least until dark, when he’ll move them. Assuming that he’s alive to do it.

The taped hand goes into spasms, sending a long, dark line of pain up his arm. When he stands up, the stool pinches him, and this time his kick sends it all the way to the opposite wall, where it breaks into pieces.

There are at least three places he needs to go. At some point he’ll have to dump the final tails, so no one from either side is riding his slipstream. He’s pretty sure he knows how to do it, but he’s been wrong a lot recently, so he turns his mind to it, and while he worries about that, he also worries about time. This is Saturday, and his bank will close early. He focuses on the schedule, trying to factor in imponderables, such as bad traffic or a sudden bullet in the back of the head.

Instead he finds himself worrying about Arthit. His best friend, alone for the first time in his adult life, is floating somewhere on the tide of the city, adrift over depths of abandonment and grief. Running from his loss, running from whatever it is that Rafferty has let out of the bottle. And as hard as it is for Rafferty to imagine Arthit needing help, he probably does. He probably needs several kinds of help.

HE CAN GIVE himself ten minutes, no more. The seconds tick off in his mind as he moves through the apartment silently while he and his wife and child chat with each other over the speakers.

From the headboard of the bed, he takes the Glock and the spare magazine. His closet yields up a pair of running shoes and his softest, most beat-up jeans, since he may have to wear them for some time. He chooses a big linen shirt that’s loose enough to conceal the gun. After he changes, he slips his cell phone into his pocket, where it will stay until he replaces it later in the day. He goes to the sliding glass door to close it but stands for a moment looking past the balcony and out over the city. Its sheer size is a comfort. It unfolds around him in all directions, block by block like giant tiles, fading eventually into the perpetual smog and water vapor that obscure the place’s real size, but he knows that it goes on and on. People have hidden in it for years, just another stone on the beach. He turns and goes over to the little tape recorder, rests his finger on the “stop” button, and waits for a natural pause.

“Hang on a minute,” he says out loud. He pushes “stop.” “I’m going out for a couple of hours, but I’ll get back in plenty of time for dinner. Anybody want anything?” There is no reply, since he’s pulling out the cassette in the recorder and slipping another in. He rewinds the new tape all the way to the beginning of the leader, which will give him twenty seconds or so of silence before Miaow and Rose start talking. He says, “Okay, then, bye,” pushes “play,” and goes out the door, putting some muscle into closing it so it can be heard. He’s still standing out there, waiting for the elevator, when he hears Rose’s voice through the door.