by John Burdett
“Are you going to pay my bar fine?” Shirlee asked in a cute-submissive voice.
“Tonight and every night, love.”
Lek, too, had noticed the romantic moment and smiled at me in a provocative way. I shook my head, laughing, and paid for the drinks. While I was waiting for change, a short, bald, and very nervous farang came in. Lek said, “Oh, my,” because it was obvious from his body language the new customer had never been in a katoey bar before. This was a closet breakout.
The katoeys were salivating. Two of them, one in a silver body glove and another in a leopard-skin tunic with short skirt, went up to him. They stroked his shoulders as if he’d been out in the cold too long; he immediately bought drinks. Lek’s eyes said, Insecure, lonesome foreigner fleeing callous whores and worse wives for the twilight world of transsexuals. In your language, DFR, you say, Out of the frying pan into the fire. We say, Escape the tiger into the mouth of the crocodile. By the time my change arrived, the little bald guy was on his third whiskey-and-Coke and was starting to believe the endless flattery he was getting from the two katoeys.
“Your tits are coming along,” I told Lek as I was leaving. “Better not let them show too much, I’m getting heat from Vikorn about you.”
“I know, I know,” Lek said.
My mind flipped back to the case. I paused for a second. “Zinna must have a go-between. He’s too brutal to work directly with Western surgeons and clients.”
“Sure. I even heard the name once, but I can’t remember it.”
“The Vultures. A two-girl team?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Vikorn told me.”
Outside the plaza was starting to hop. Just as I predicted, the rain couldn’t keep the johns away for long. The girls who were grooming one another before were grooming white men now, and those who’d bought new hairdos from the coiffeur at the corner were showing them off behind the bars. A dozen TV monitors were showing a dozen different shows, most of them soccer, and all the sound systems were blaring. Still the rain from Vietnam was flooding the streets; still the girls paused to wai the Buddha shrine and leave lotus buds.
4
I found a cab fast enough, but we got snarled at the mouth of Soi 4 where it exits onto Sukhumvit. In terms of human sexual activity, this is the busiest corner in the world. Traffic from Nana Plaza, consisting of older farang men accompanying girls they’ve just hired, meets traffic from the other brothels and street pickups, making toward the short-time hotels. Simultaneously newly-mets are arriving from the bars farther up Sukhumvit in the Pleonchit area, looking for somewhere air-conditioned where they can get horizontal for an hour or so.
To me, sitting in back of the cab waiting for the lights to change, the answer to the world economic crisis was obvious: legalize prostitution and tax it. At 15 percent per bang, deficits would shrink overnight. It would be safe to leverage as well. The worse things get, the more people bury their problems in sex. The better things get, the more people celebrate their good fortune with sex. It’s a tax revenue for all seasons, and with ever more sophisticated surveillance coming onstream, it won’t be long before governments will be in a position to tax sex between married couples. Hey, Obama, are you listening?
Out of boredom the cab driver switched on his radio. One of the chat shows reported that five women had complained separately about a stalker on Sukhumvit. It seemed a man with a grotesquely damaged face had been approaching women and scaring the hell out of them. Two complained to the police, but the police told them there was no law against being ugly. Now a bunch of people called to say they agreed with the police: What was Thailand coming to when people showed no tolerance for the afflictions of others? We were supposed to be a Buddhist nation, after all. Then one of the stalked women called in to say, “Have you any idea just how ugly this guy is? We’re talking about extreme mutilation, worse than any horror movie.” The story made me think of Zinna’s lover, whose face was smashed in that car accident; but of course he was in a monastery somewhere in Cambodia, so it couldn’t be him.
By the time we emerged from the jam, it was nine-thirty. A few more holdups kept me in the cab until we finally arrived at my little soi where my little hovel was waiting. I saw from the lights that Chanya was home, working in the corner of the room she calls her office. I called out “Hi,” and she said it back to me, without looking up from her monitor. I tried not to feel lonely, isolated, and rejected. I tried not to think of the nervous little bald guy who’d come into the Lonesome Cowboy a couple of hours before and was probably this minute being initiated into his new world in some upstairs room by those two katoeys who would have his money one way or another. I tried not to think of Burmese mothers selling their kidneys and their eyes to keep their babies alive for a few more years, or of all the other Asian women and men who had tried to help their families by selling body parts after the tsunami. It’s a beautiful, global world, so long as you keep your eyes shut.
The first thing I did when I arrived home was to grab a bunch of incense, light it, and hold it at eye level while I waied the electric Buddha we keep on a high shelf in the northeast corner. He’s quite gaudy with purple and red lights, which are kitsch enough to remind me it’s only a symbol I’m bowing at. On The Path, symbols are functional things, DFR; you really don’t want them to seduce you with their charm or resale value.
So I was practicing a gritted-teeth kind of husbandly tolerance when I went to the other corner of the room, picked up a bottle of red wine, poured her a glass, and set it in front of her keyboard, then poured another for myself. She was not a natural drinker; I’d started to insist on one glass per night, just to bring her down from that high-stress war with her supervisor whose name, inevitably perhaps, was Dorothy. I knew that if she didn’t have wine, she would hit a wall and slob out in front of the TV to watch her DVDs of Ice Road Truckers. You’d think there wouldn’t be much for a slender Thai girl to relate to in a series about great hairy white men driving massive trucks across frozen lakes in Alaska; the attraction of opposites, I guess.
She got the message and looked up apologetically. We clinked glasses. I said, “I have a new case.”
She struggled to emerge from her world into mine. “Really? What?”
“Vikorn’s decided to abolish illegal organ trafficking worldwide. At least while he’s running for governor.”
She searched my face for an explanation. I told her all about Vikorn’s election strategy and the latest ploy in his war with Zinna, and the black Amex card, which made her grin. “But isn’t it dangerous? If there’s so much money in that kind of trafficking, someone’s sure to try to kill you.”
“If I resigned, Vikorn would probably feel he had to bump me off. I know too much, and now that he’s running for governor, the stakes are much higher. Anyway, I’m a cop, how could I refuse a case like this?”
Talk of my death sobered her. Suddenly the war with Dorothy wasn’t so important. Suddenly she remembered she loved me. She shook her head, then started to caress me. I understood because I felt the same way. The likelihood that one will be hanged in the morning can make you horny as a rattlesnake.
We were lying naked together now, in the other corner of the room where the bed was. We’d finished talking about how we could get the most out of Vikorn’s credit card before an enraged organ hunter sent an assassin to kill me-half joking, half not-so now it was my turn to listen. But it was not a new story, it was an old one that kept pressing on Chanya’s mind like a thorn. An earnest look appeared on her face that signaled she was about to go intellectual.
“Dorothy just can’t get it out of her head that all Thai whores are slaves. It’s amazing. The idea that a woman would go on the game voluntarily, accept it like a challenge even, test herself that way to show she’s tough enough, beautiful enough, clever enough with men, sometimes even enjoy it-sometimes really enjoy it-it’s like it would destroy one half of her worldview. I’ve shown her all the evidence, but she goes blind whe
n she sees anything she doesn’t like. A farang like her thinks that a prostitute is some kind of being, an entity in her own right, whereas it doesn’t really occur to the girls that prostitute as a word is any more than a nominal convenience-not even a description; what they are is women, daughters, mothers, farmers, and members of a rural community-all those things that traditionally form the sense of being in the ontological sense.”
She paused for breath, then continued, “I know of at least thirty girls who had breast transplants during their working lives, then had them removed the day they retired. They hung up their tits, you could say, washed their hands of the whole city, and returned to their home villages as if nothing had happened. Therefore they do not lose their identity when they sell their bodies, so that the profession of prostitution is never more than an economically driven distraction. Farang, on the other hand, are unable to see the sale of real biological sex-as opposed to fantasy sex in movies and pornography-as identical in nature to the sale of any other commodity like tomatoes or mangoes. It doesn’t make any sense. If one were to impose any logical value system, one would have to say the farang position is schizophrenic in that it encourages and exploits an obsession with sex but at the same time denies consummation to anyone who wants the convenience of paying for it with cash. Which is a lot more honest in most cases than pretending the flavor of the month is the lover of a lifetime. But for me the question is, why do farang get to live in a science fiction universe while the rest of us have to deal with reality for them? I finally told her she had to spend a night with me sitting in a corner at your mother’s bar. I called your mother, and she said it was okay, so long as Dorothy doesn’t scare off the customers.”
I said, “What does ontological mean?”
She looked at me, laughed, and said, “Sorry. You didn’t want to hear that mouthful when you’ve just come home.”
She let a couple of beats pass, embarrassed maybe to have intimidated me with her big words, then gave a little jump and said, “Look at what an anonymous admirer sent me today.” We went to her PC, and she clicked on an icon so we were looking at her e-mail window. Then she double-clicked on one of the items. Now we were looking at a screen that was blank save for two naked feet. While we watched, the feet slowly grew legs, then knees, then thighs. Chanya threw me a glance, grinned, and turned back to the screen. A further unscrolling revealed a tan penis and testicles, pubic hair, a mass of highly developed stomach muscles, an impressive hairless chest, terrific pecs, biceps, and triceps-a more perfect figure of a man you could not hope to find in your electronic inbox. But the scrolling stopped at the neck. It was a beautiful body without a head. Now a message in crimson Thai script was slowly spelling its way across the screen where the head should have been: I love you.
I said, “Who’s it from?”
She shrugged and used her mouse to point to the sender’s address, which was a collection of numbers. “Anonymous.”
I said, “I didn’t know they’d started targeting women like that. I get about a hundred a week. Women, I mean.”
“Naked without heads?”
“Nope. They all have heads, as far as I can remember. Some have dicks in their mouths. One two weeks ago had an erection in both ears, and she was holding two others in her hands.”
Before we fell asleep, Chanya said, “Do you care about dying?”
“In some ways yes, in other ways no. How about you?”
“I feel the same. It’s a filthy world. I went to temple today-I think I had a breakthrough.”
“How?”
“I finally understood-but it’s unnamable. Afterward I realized I didn’t mind dying. Even if you weren’t there, I could handle it-I never felt that way before.”
“Sounds like the real thing.”
“But when I came home, I got angry with Dorothy, and the Unreal grabbed me all over again.”
“I know the feeling. Try being a cop.”
“Yes, I thought about that. I thought about how the more you get involved in the world, the lonelier it gets. I understood you a bit more, maybe. Is it like you’re in some underground cave system and only connected to the light by a string that could snap any minute?”
“Exactly like that.”
“And for you I’m that string?” By way of answer, I slipped my hand between her thighs, right up to the top: the origin of life. There was nothing erotic about the gesture, it was too childlike for sex. She responded by holding my cock in the same way. “But if you rely on me too much, then you’ve lost your own center-your whole life will depend on the whim of the unknown, namely me.”
“Did you get all this from a book?”
“That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? That you’ve lost me to books?”
I withdrew my hand. I did not say, Not only books. This was not a good moment to mention the rumors.
5
In the morning I woke to feel the world on my shoulders, which is where it normally sits. I know there are other cops all over the planet who feel the same way. The steady accumulation of human dirt-let’s call it evil-makes it a little harder, day by day, to find the light. On the other hand, I also felt a new thrill: this case was a big one, whatever way you looked at it. Maybe it would be the trump to get me out of the hole forever? Remember that Leonard Cohen song: “The card that is so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another”? For a second I allowed my ego to inflate; I saw my name in headlines: foreign media flashing my mug around the world; the Nobel Prize for law enforcement. I also tried to see the good I might be doing-but that detail eluded me.
Chanya was already up, making coffee called three-in-one: the sugar and creamer are included in the little sachet with the coffee. She handed me a mug while I was still in bed. “I’ve been thinking about your new case. Isn’t it kind of-ah-”
“Morally ambiguous.”
“Yes, that’s the phrase. Isn’t it?”
“A crime without a victim, most of the time. Most of the time the illegal organ sale is voluntary. The real crime is letting people get that poor. The real crime is capitalism, of which this trade is an inevitable product. Yes.”
“I hadn’t gone into it that deeply. I was thinking of the beneficiary-I mean, lives are saved, right?”
“And ruined. There are young men all over the third world, from Manila to Rio de Janeiro, who were conned into selling one kidney for a thousand or so dollars, usually to some Caucasian old person who abused their body in their youth and wasn’t going to live more than another five years anyway. Now those young men have lost their youthful good health, they fall sick easily, suffer from diminished energy, and are unable to do heavy manual work, so they get rejected by their tribes. Girlfriends and others know what the saber-shaped scar on their abdomen means. Shame and a sense of deep self-betrayal dogs their lives. Organs are very personal things. You sell one, it’s the same as saying you don’t really exist except as an economic unit. They become very angry young men.”
Chanya listened with wrinkled brow. “I think Dorothy gave me a paper to read on organ trafficking. It was her second specialization after prostitution in Southeast Asia-they sort of go together in her mind. Maybe we should consult her. She claims the trade might have altered the whole rhetoric of gift, especially in India.”
“Then there are the cases where the donor doesn’t agree to donate at all. It’s a feature of modern wars. Civilized man doesn’t take scalps-he strips POWs of organs, like an environmentally aware butcher, not wasting a single valuable item.”
“Really? That happens?”
“The Kosovar army harvested human organs like rice in October.”
Now Chanya was ready to go to her computer, which would trap her spirit for the rest of the day. I asked her to first try to book me a business-class ticket to Dubai. The task interested her, and in a few minutes she’d found out the prices, the flight times, and how to register for air miles. We sat together at the monitor to see how well the black Amex card worked. It worked fine.
Now we printed out my ticket on the rickety little printer that always seemed on the point of dying. We exchanged a glance.
After breakfast I called Vikorn to tell him I had the ticket; now I needed some way of contacting the Vultures. Vikorn had it at his fingertips: “The name the lead vulture is using at the moment is Lilly Yip. Here’s her cell phone number.” He called out a ten-digit number with a Hong Kong prefix, which I wrote down. “When you get to Dubai, call her. She’ll come to your hotel to check you out. She does a lot of work for Zinna, but she also knows me. I might send her a little something she’ll like.”
“Really?”
“You’ll understand when you meet her. She’s a pro.”
“You’ve already given her immunity, if this thing really takes off?”
Vikorn coughed and ignored the question. “What time is your flight?”
“It’s a red-eye tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. Listen. I mentioned you to the election committee. They’re happy for you to do this, but they want to meet you.”
I looked into the mouthpiece of my phone as if it were malfunctioning. I repeated his words slowly. “Your election committee is happy for me to carry out a law and order assignment? Well, I’m certainly relieved about that.”
“If you keep on being sarcastic, I’ll take away your black Amex and replace it with a parking ticket. Get your ass over here at eleven A.M. ”
Chanya caught the expression on my face when I closed the phone. “I have to go see Vikorn and his election team at eleven,” I tell her. “I think they’re going to brief me about my law and order assignment.”
“Wow,” Chanya said. “This is getting seriously Californian.”
As I was knocking on Vikorn’s door I heard American voices that suddenly stopped. Instead of the usual “Yeah” from the boss, Manny opened the door. I remembered that Manny spoke English and often interpreted for Vikorn when he needed to talk to Miami.
