sneakers. Rafferty continues, “They probably sat too long, maybe under heat lamps. Maybe you guys should both go to bed for a while, see how you feel in a few hours.”
“All right,” Miaow says, opening the front door.
“Don’t make a lot of noise, okay?” Rose says. She sounds sleepy and irritable, and it’s not an act. “I want to sleep.”
“I’ll work on my notes for the book. That’ll be quiet.” He drinks again and heads for the front door, which Miaow is holding wide. “You two go to bed. Get some rest. You won’t even know I’m here. I promise.”
Rose precedes him through the door, cup in hand, and Miaow closes it quietly behind him as he punches the button for the elevator. Two minutes later, down on the fourth floor, Rafferty inserts a new cassette and pushes “record” again.
Da wakes on a village farmer’s schedule, maybe six in the morning, and finds herself on her back, looking up at a rough wooden ceiling. After a moment shaped like a vague question, she rolls over to see where she is.
The room is dim, with interruptions of brilliance. Sunlight shoulders its way through the cracks between the planks that make up the walls. When she withdraws her focus from the vertical strips of glare, the gloom resolves itself into backs, seven or eight of them, between her and the nearest wall. Peep is asleep beside her, nestled up against a child Da has never seen before.
She smells children, none too clean, but not filthy either. Just the slightly salty pungency of child’s sweat. She could be back in the village.
Suppressing a grunt of effort, she sits up and looks around. The room is full of sleeping children, literally wall to wall. The floor beneath Da’s hand is packed earth. It takes her a few seconds to assemble the pieces in her memory. The sad song, the light in Kep’s hand, the silvery fire of the knife, the blur of motion behind him, the sound of the stone hitting his head. The stone that turned out to be in the toe of a sock. And the boy standing in the doorway when Kep went down.
She had quickly picked up the flashlight and snapped it off. She was certain that the sound of the motorcycle and Kep’s singing had awakened the others in the building, and the light seemed dangerous. The boy had nodded acknowledgment and then made a cradling motion with his arms: the baby. By the time Da had Peep hugged to her chest and the blanket folded over one shoulder, the boy had pulled the ring of keys from Kep’s pocket. He rolled the man farther into the room so the door could swing shut without hitting him. Then he motioned Da into the hallway, closed the door, and locked it. She had followed him outside into the night. Without even looking back at her, he climbed onto a motorcycle that had to be Kep’s and started it with one of the keys on the ring. He waited until she climbed on. As he pulled the bike away from the building with her hanging on behind, she looked back to see the pale shapes of faces at the windows.
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
