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seem to require physical effort. “The pain’s worse and worse. It keeps her up. I can hear her breathing. So the doctor, the new one, he gives her sleeping pills. Strong ones. She’s been getting them for more than three months.”
    Noi has been Arthit’s wife for seventeen years. Her nervous system is being ravaged by multiple sclerosis. In the last few months, her decline has been brutally swift. She is a burning match. Arthit has been reduced to the role of helpless bystander.
    “Do they work?”
    “I wouldn’t know,” Arthit says.
    “Why not?”
    Arthit opens the glove compartment and snaps it shut again. “Every night she goes into the bathroom and she brushes her teeth, and then I listen as she fills a glass with water and shakes a pill out of the bottle, and then she comes to bed. Just like the doctor told her to. And I lie there and listen to her breathe, hear the catch in her breath, and I knowshe’s awake.” He opens the little compartment door again and leaves it hanging, the dim splash of light from inside it bringing his thighs and belly out of the darkness. “And this morning I went into the kitchen to make her some pancakes, as a surprise. She loves pancakes.”
    Rafferty feels a tremor of dread but says, “Okay.”
    “And in the tin of flour, a couple of inches down, I found one of those plastic bags that’s got the little zipper along the top, and it was full of pills. There were eighty-one of them, Poke.”
    Rafferty says, “Oh?” Then he says, “ Ohhhh .”
    Arthit puts both hands on his friend’s arm. “Eighty-one of them,” he says. “Hidden from me.”

7
The Silk Room
    T he phone in the Silk Room rings at 11:17 P.M.
    The man in the big bed is awake immediately. Late-night phone calls are so common that his wife sleeps in the Teak Room, more than thirty meters down the hallway. It is a very big house.
    “Yes.” He switches on the bedside lamp, and the pale silk walls of the room appear. He listens for a moment, until something he hears brings him up to a full sitting position. His forehead wrinkles and then smooths immediately, automatically erasing the display of concern even though there’s no one to see it. “Seriously? A farang? ”
    He peels back the blankets and gets up, a lithe, slender, balding man in his early fifties, whose face retains the fine bone structure that had made so many well-bred hearts flutter when he was younger, the bone structure that landed him the problem daughter of one of Thailand’s oldest families, now sleeping down the hall. He wears silk pajamas. “Was he drunk? He must have been drunk.”
    A desk, the work of some English craftsman who’s been dead for three centuries, gleams between the heavily curtained front windows. On one corner is a silver tray holding a decanter of water and a heavy,deeply cut crystal glass. The man cradles the phone between ear and shoulder and uses both hands to pour, being careful not to splash any water onto the wood. He picks up the water and sips. “No,” he says, “not at all. You were right to call.” He puts the glass back on the tray and picks up a pen. “Spell it?” He listens and then writes, Rafferty . The man on the other end asks him a question.
    “Let me think about that for a second.” His underlings call him “Four-Step” behind his back, because of his insistence on thinking things through four and sometimes even five steps in advance. He closes his eyes briefly, his finger making tiny circles on the wooden surface of the desk.
    His eyes open. “Good idea,” he says. “Two in English and two in Thai. All morning papers, and one of them should be the Sun . You’ll need to make the calls right now and use my name to make the morning editions. And I need information about Rafferty. By the time the papers come out.” He listens again for a moment, and impatience twists his face. “ Everything ,” he says. “I need everything.”

8
Six Separate Hells
    T he children who joined the boy