THAIS have a saying about a frog living inside a coconut shell. The frog believes that the world inside the shell is the whole universe. In the private investigation business, Vincent Calvino had clients who were like the frog. What they saw from inside their shell blinded them, made them unable to solve a problem. So they hired Calvino. He knew the drill. Shells offered comfort and security. Leaving a shell could be a dangerous business. Calvino’s froglike clients paid him to venture into a larger existence and to find out and report on the wiring of relationships and places and events, how they were linked and fit together in networks.

Drop two alpha spiders into a coconut shell and watch as things become infinitely more interesting. It’s still a shell, but the dynamics change from security and comfort to fear and suspicion. No matter that the shell looks the same; it isn’t the same place. The landscape is colored with a different set of the emotions. Silky webs mark turf, and spiders patrol their turf. He’d done investigations for spiders, dragging prey back to their shell. Spiders paid well. As far as Calvino would make out, there was no Thai saying about a couple of large, hairy spiders spitting poison at each other in a coconut shell, but when he mentioned it to the Thais, they laughed and said that he knew too much about the country. When a Thai said that, it wasn’t a good thing for a farang. It wasn’t a compliment; it was a warning.

When a potential client walked into his office, Calvino studied the face and body language for some sign: was this person a frog or a spider? Sometimes he knew the answer after the first blink. Other times, he wasn’t so sure. Danielson was a case in point. Calvino collected evidence of a drug piracy operation for this client, an American lawyer who was a partner in a Bangkok law firm. Someone had banged on the side of Danielson’s coconut shell and two fearful eyes had popped up at the edge and peered out. Life outside the shell was unstable, dangerous, and darkened by powerful forces. Andrew Danielson was a frog, another borderline ordinary, boring, and predictable frog working in a spider’s nest. That’s what had confused Calvino. The fee Danielson agreed to pay had been excellent. And there was another reason: the job would help Calvino with an application he had been working on. His mother had sent him an advertisement for a World Health Organization job. The WHO had advertised for a senior investigator. He had never heard of the UN hiring a private investigator, but it made sense. Someone had to investigate where the next pandemic was brewing, who was manufacturing fake drugs—stuff filled with chalk and powdered milk, stuff that harmed people—or who was sleeping at regional headquarters. His mother said Calvino was perfect for the job. He would have a steady income, a steady job, and he would work in New York, closer to her and the family.

His mother had written the letter from inside her retirement home. It was a strong letter, which had cursed the memory of Galileo Chini, the Italian painter, long dead, who had left an everlasting impression on Calvino when he was fourteen years old. He checked out the WHO. It was a legitimate position on offer. With a major bust of an illegal drug piracy operation, how could the WHO not hire him? Vincent Calvino, it seemed, also lived deep in the shell of Bangkok. Calvino hadn’t been alone; many foreigners were looking to leave.

On his wall was a framed reproduction of Galileo Chini’s The Last Day of the Chinese Year in Bangkok, 1912. The original oil painting, which was huge, hung in the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy. Colonel Pratt had given him the reproduction as a birthday gift the previous year. Many years before, in New York City, they had met at a lecture on Galileo Chini and his Siam paintings. Calvino looked up from his mother’s letter at the painting. The people, the street, and the dragon glowed in a burnished red hue, shimmering as if caught in the afterglow of flares, tropical hot red as if on fire. The dragon danced, and Chinese in pigtails stood in front of the huge dragon head, as if accepting their fate, waiting to be swallowed. The mind echoed with the sound of gongs and drums and, with each move of the dragon, the tinkling of hundreds of bells.