But Rafferty is being gazed at. And he knows all the way to the pit of his stomach that it’s the worst thing that can happen to him. If they decide it is in their best interest, they can blow through him and his cobbled-together family like a cannonball through a handkerchief.
If he goes in one direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. If he goes in the other direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. And “in danger” is a euphemism.
He is leaning against a building. His skin is slick and cold with evaporating sweat. Panic is barking useless orders at him: Get the family to the airport. (Rose and Miaow don’t have passports.)
He pushes himself free of the building on legs that feel as numb as prosthetics and makes his way down the soi to the boulevard.
Where he stops, looking left, then right. Which way to go?
Both directions are wrong, but one must be less wrong than the other.
What he needs to do is buy time. He needs to do things that both sides will see as compliance while he figures out which chunk of Bangkok masonry he can pry loose to make a hiding place for his family. Once they’re out of the line of fire, he can think about next steps. About removing himself from the equation. Finding some way to step aside at the last possible moment and let the opposing forces annihilate each other.
Just as he figures out where he needs to go next, his cell phone rings, and it’s someone summoning him to the one place in Bangkok he wants to be.
You wait,” the guard says, shutting the little glass door in the booth. The glass is at least an inch thick, certainly bulletproof.
The booth occupies the base of a semicircular clay-brick turret beside an enormous pair of weathered bronze gates that stretch twenty feet toward the paper-white sky. Mesopotamian lions rear up on them, claws extended and teeth bared. The Mesopotamian theme continues on the clay-brick walls, covered with bas-relief figures of standing kings, slender and stiff-kneed and tightly robed. Sprouting here and there among the kings are outcrops, planted with vegetation that spills over the edges. Green streamers dangle downward.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Rafferty realizes. Not even remotely what he’d expected.
The wall is perhaps a fifth of a mile long. It occupies the entire block. Rafferty tries to remember what used to be here, but nothing comes to mind. Bangkok is like that, he thinks: One day you look up and there’s a building, and the field, the house, the slum-whatever it was before, it is gone forever.
The sun’s glare makes him uncomfortably aware that it is almost noon. He is glancing at his watch when the guard opens the little window again and says, “Through here.” A narrow door, barely wide enough for one person to pass through, opens in the left gate. On the other side of the door stands a short, slender, dark-complected man in a pale yellow shirt and triple-pleated, salmon-colored golf slacks.
“Please,” he says in English, “come in, come in.”
The door in the gate clangs closed, and the slender man in the bright clothes climbs into a little white electric golf cart that has been remodeled to look like a very large and steroidal swan. One wing is improbably upraised to shade the passengers. All that Rafferty can see as the cart whirs into motion is greenery, thickly tangled and thorny, a second wall. At the wheel of the cart, the slender man says, without turning to Rafferty, “I am Dr. Ravi.”
“I recognized your voice from the phone,” Rafferty says. Dr. Ravi’s receding hair makes his noteworthy nose seem even larger. His entire face points forward, like a 1950s hood ornament.
“I’m often told I have a distinctive voice,” Dr. Ravi says. “I think it’s the influence of Cambridge.”
Arthit also went to school in England, but his linguistic suitcase isn’t packed with such plummy vowels and half-chewed consonants.
“Sounds like you were there for years.”
He gets a quick glance, but the wall of foliage is upon them. Dr. Ravi slows the cart, slides a hand into his pocket, and brings out a slim remote, which he points at the green barrier. A portion of it detaches itself and begins to swing inward.
Rafferty says, “ Lot of protection.”
“Human nature,” Dr. Ravi announces gravely, “is to want.”
“I’ve noticed.”
The paved track they’re following describes a slow turn through the tangle of scrub, and the view widens suddenly. Rafferty stifles the urge to gasp.
They are entering the Garden of Eden.
