Snakehead

door.
    “We’ll take the service elevator,” Ash said. “And we’ll find the back way out. If anyone sees us looking like this in the Peninsula Hotel, we’re going to get arrested.”

    The driver who had met Alex at the airport was waiting for them outside the hotel, and he took them over the river and then upstream toward Chinatown. Alex felt the air-conditioning blowing cold against his skin and knew that it was a luxury he wasn’t going to enjoy again for a while. The car dropped them off at a corner, and at once the heat, the grime, and the noise of the city hit him. He was sweating before the door was even closed. Ash dragged a small battered case out of the trunk and that was it. Suddenly they were on their own.
    Bangkok’s Chinatown was like nowhere Alex had ever been before. When he looked up, it seemed to have no sky—all the light had been blocked out by billboards, banners, electric cables, and neon signs. Tom Yum Kung Restaurant. Thai Massage. Seng Hong Dental Clinic (Great Smile Start Here). The sidewalks were equally cluttered, every inch of them taken up by stalls spilling food and cheap clothes and electronics into the street. There were people everywhere, hundreds of them, weaving their way between the traffic, which seemed frozen in an endless, diesel-infested jam.
    “This way,” Ash muttered, keeping his voice low. From now on, whenever he spoke in English, he would make sure he wasn’t overheard.
    They pushed their way into the chaos, and in the next few minutes Alex passed vegetables that he had never seen before and meats he hoped he would never see again: hearts and lungs bubbling in green soup and brown intestines spilling out of their cauldrons as if trying to escape. Every scent on the planet seemed to be mixed together. Meat and fish and garbage and sweat—every step brought another smell.
    They walked for about ten minutes until at last they came to an opening between a restaurant—with a few plastic tables and a single glass counter displaying plastic replicas of the food it served—and a paint factory. Here at last was an escape from the main road. A soiled, narrow alleyway led down between the backs of two blocks of apartments—the apartments piled up on one another as if thrown there at random. There was a miniature altar at the entrance, the incense adding another smell to Alex’s collection. Farther down, a couple of cars had been parked next to a dozen crates of empty Pepsi bottles, a pile of old gas canisters, a row of tables and chairs. A Chinese woman was sitting cross-legged in the gutter, fixing ribbons to baskets of exotic fruit. Alex remembered the complimentary fruit basket that had been waiting for him in his hotel. Maybe this was where it had come from.
    “This is it,” Ash said.
    It was the address that Karim Hassan and his son had been given by the snakehead. This was where they were expected to stay.
    All the apartments opened directly onto the alley, so that Alex could see straight in. There were no doors or curtains. In one front room, a Chinese man sat smoking at a table, dressed in shorts and glasses, his huge stomach bulging over his knees. In another, a whole family was eating lunch, crouching on the floor with chopsticks. They came to a room that looked derelict—but it was occupied. An old woman was standing beside a stove. Ash signaled to Alex to wait, then went over and spoke to her, relying on sign language as much as words and waving a sheet of paper under her face.
    She understood and pointed to a staircase at the back. Ash grunted something in Dari and, pretending to understand, Alex hurried forward.
    The stairs were made of cement, with pools of murky water on at least half of them. Alex followed Ash to the third floor and a single door with no handle. Ash pushed it open. On the other side there was a bare room with a metal bed, a spare mattress on the floor, a sink, a toilet, and a grimy window. There was no carpet and no light. As Alex walked in, the biggest cockroach he had ever seen climbed over the side of the bed and scuttled across the wall.
    “This is it?” Alex muttered.
    “This is it,” Ash said.
    Outside, in the alleyway, the man who had followed them all the way from the hotel made a note of the building. Then he took out a cell phone and dialed a number. At the same time, he walked quietly away, and by the time he had been connected, he had disappeared into the crowd.

8
    FIRST CONTACT
    “S UPPOSE THEY DON’T