Vulture Peak sj-5

by John Burdett

  What was shocking to me at this moment was the new sofa. It was beige leather and looked Italian and quite incongruous. Vikorn prided himself on his bare wooden boards and couple of hard chairs for hard cops to sit on while he dished out orders. I think he must have told Manny to go buy the most expensive sofa she could find, and now here it was supporting two American bottoms, one female, the other male. There was a third stranger, an older American man who had been given a chair that, though old and retrieved from some storeroom somewhere, nevertheless had arms and therefore could be said to be the equal in protocol of Vikorn’s own chair, which also had arms. The two armless chairs had been relegated to a position in the corner, but now Manny brought me one to sit on.

  The two men and the woman owned in common a specifically North American seriousness, which seemed to freeze nerve endings in the area of the cheeks and mouth. I knew instinctively not to appear too human around those people.

  “Sonchai, how nice to see you.” Vikorn beamed.

  I threw him an incredulous look, which I had to modify immediately. “Great to see you too, Colonel,” I said. We had spoken in Thai, but Manny was under instructions to translate everything into English. “The Colonel said, ‘How nice to see you,’ and Detective Jitpleecheep said it was nice to see the Colonel too,” Manny explained. The three guests allowed their lips to part in nanosecond smiles that bloomed and self-erased while Vikorn told me everybody’s names. The woman was called Linda, the older man was Jack, and the younger man sitting on the sofa with Linda (I decided he was older than he seemed: one of those John Kennedy-type faces that look thirty when the owner is at least forty) was called Ben. Vikorn told me he had outlined the bare bones of my trip to Dubai and the basic strategy of making contact with the global organ-trafficking community.

  “The Colonel just explained to the detective that he had already outlined to you the bare bones of the detective’s forthcoming trip to Dubai and the basic strategy of making contact with the global organ-trafficking community,” Manny said.

  Now we were waiting for the Americans. The woman and the man on the sofa waited for the older man in the chair to speak. I thought, from the way he was twisted in the chair with his long shanks drawn up like Abraham Lincoln, that Jack must be very tall. He remained immobile, then turned to the woman with his brows raised and said, “Linda?”

  Linda nodded thoughtfully, prepared to speak, coughed, remained silent. Nevertheless Jack treated this as a useful contribution and passed on. “Ben?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, “I can see the point. The detective here discovers that Thailand is being used by unscrupulous organ traders as a center from which to conduct their evil trafficking. The Colonel busts them-it’s like the gold ring. The Colonel not only puts himself on the international law enforcement map, he makes Thailand into the squeaky-clean, non-organ-trafficking, righteous Buddhist center of humane governance of the world. Sure, I can see the upside.”

  The older man said, “Linda?”

  “I don’t know, Jack,” Linda said.

  “Don’t know what, Linda?” Jack said from his arm chair.

  “I don’t know if it would be a plus or a minus for us.”

  “Surely a plus?” Ben said.

  “Take us through that,” Jack said.

  “Bust someone big in this trade, and you get the attention of the world,” Ben said.

  “Sure,” Linda said, “I got that the first time. But the downside?”

  “Take us through the downside, Linda,” Jack said.

  Linda frowned, then sucked in her left cheek while leaving the right one inflated. “You know,” Linda said.

  “What?” Jack said.

  “It’s like, you start to give specific examples of what could go wrong, you end up arguing about the examples?”

  “A forest-for-trees thing?” Jack said.

  “Exactly that.”

  “So give us the forest, forget the trees,” Jack said.

  “Okay,” Linda said. “So, it’s the whole unknown of this industry. There are no responsible papers on public reaction to organ trafficking, but anecdotal reports indicate we’re in serious voodoo territory. I don’t mean the science is voodoo, I mean the ordinary uninstructed human reaction. We have to forget the professional oversight for a moment and look at it from a personal point of view. Think about your own favorite organ, Ben,” Linda said.

  “Bet we know what his favorite organ is,” Jack said.

  “Okay,” Ben said, struggling with a blush. “So, we’re talking about my liver.”

  Linda and Jack smiled wryly at the joke. “No,” Jack said, “let’s make it your-wait, which is your favorite testicle?”

  “My favorite testicle?” Ben said.

  “Yeah, the one you’re most fond of,” Jack said, winking at Linda, who smirked.

  “I don’t have a favorite testicle,” Ben said.

  “Sure you do, Ben,” Jack said.

  “Yes, Ben, sure you do,” Linda said.

  “It’s the one you most like the lady to jiggle and bounce around a bit when you get laid,” Jack explained, and looked at Linda.

  “Don’t look at me, Jack,” Linda said, “I don’t have one.”

  Jack looked at Ben and said, “Well?”

  “The left,” Ben confessed with a pout.

  “So, think about all the possessive, tender, and above all proprietorial feelings you have about your left testicle,” Linda said. “Then think about someone taking it away from you and giving it to another man.”

  “Or woman,” Jack said.

  “Or woman,” Linda said. “Now, hold that moment-the point where it’s lost and gone forever, that oh-so-very-important part of you-”

  “Wait,” Jack said. “I think we’d better make it his cock, now I see where you’re going.”

  “We’re already committed to the testicle,” Linda said.

  “Oh, okay. So, your left testicle,” Jack said, looking at Ben and jerking his chin. “Close your eyes. Right.” Jack looked at Linda.

  “Go deep into that very specific personal proprietorial male agony, that nightmare of nightmares, far worse than dying, right?”

  “Right,” Ben said, keeping his eyes closed.

  “Now project that over the population of the third world-like, say, four billion people divided by two gives two billion males with those kind of feelings.”

  “What kind of feelings we talking about here?” Jack said.

  “I already got the message,” Ben said, opening his eyes. “Yeah, so what you’re saying is, this could all backfire badly owing to the very powerful and unpredictable feelings this new industry provokes in people. Instead of associating the Colonel with a major law and order breakthrough, we might end up with a labeling problem where he gets associated with a Frankensteinian experiment, even though he’s the good guy trying to fix it, or, even worse, as the guy preventing people from undergoing life-saving operations by busting the racket. The disgust, loathing, and paranoia could spread to all parties. At the same time you get a medical lobby kicking in defending the industry, and you end up with a public relations oil slick. Yeah, I get that.”

  “But we do need to at least pay lip service-” Jack murmured.

  “Oh, I think we can pay lip service, so long as we all agree we might have to finesse it,” Linda murmured back.

  As if by common tribal programming, the three Americans seemed to have come to an agreement indecipherable to the rest of us. Now they were looking at me again. The two men kind of glazed over me with their eyes: I was not a member of their secret society, not an initiate, therefore I hardly existed except in the field of basic courtesy. The woman, though, double-checked my face and saw that I had indeed picked up on certain incongruous phrases: might have to finesse it; need to pay lip service. She gave me a split-second chance to ask the question, but I hadn’t decided which way to jump.

  “Can we move on to the next item?” Linda said.

  Now we were all waiting f
or Jack, who nodded and put his elbows on the arms of his chair and pressed his palms together at the same time as he kissed the tips of his fingers. He let a lot of beats pass before he said, “What we don’t want to have to deal with is a Noriega-type situation.”

  “Right,” Linda said.

  “Those photos of the younger Bush on a certain island not a hundred miles from the west coast of Panama-that little punk in jail after Big Daddy’s invasion and threatening to tell all-how toxic was that, for Chrissake?” Ben said.

  “Bush was a cinch compared to Yeltsin. I never saw so many skeletons in one cupboard,” Ben said.

  “Yeltsin? This is a breeze in comparison,” Linda said. “Try getting instructions out of a terminal alcoholic.”

  “Yeah, Ben bore the brunt of that one,” Jack said with the ghost of a twinkle. Linda coughed. “Except the time he came on to Linda,” Jack added.

  “If he’d been able to get it up, I woulda shot the creep,” Linda said.

  “Well, what do we do?” Jack said.

  Silence. Now Linda coughed again. Jack looked at her. “We’ve got to have more detailed data, so we can analyze the risks,” Linda said.

  “That’s right,” Ben said.

  “So, do we have a conclusion to this meeting?” Jack said.

  “Well, I think we let the detective follow present instructions from the Colonel and keep a close eye.”

  “That’s just the present issue-what about security in general?” Jack said.

  “Like I said, we need all the relevant data-all of it,” Linda said.

  “Like with Yeltsin?” Jack said. He shared a dirty grin with Ben, who was delighted.

  “You boys,” Linda said.

  “How’d you get out of it again?” Jack said.

  “Chrissake, Jack,” Linda said.

  “How’d she do it, Ben?” Jack said.

  “Kicked him in the balls so hard she nearly killed the client.”

  Jack’s eyes took on a new life. “Yeah. The one time they rushed him to the hospital for non-alcohol-related injury.”

  “Okay, okay,” Linda said.

  “So,” Jack said. “We stand pat for the moment and let the detective go to Dubai on business as usual, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily take the thing any further than that. Good. What was the detective’s name again?”

  “Jit-plee-cheep,” Manny said.

  “Right,” Jack said.

  There was a kind of satisfied pause. The three serious Americans seemed to have talked themselves into a mood of indomitable optimism that made Vikorn smile. There was one more item on the agenda, though, something that had perhaps been alluded to so far only in code. I had a premonition of a knotty problem they were about to share with me. Linda mumbled something impossible for me to catch. Jack mumbled back. Ben said, “Better you than me, Linda.” Linda gave him a stern glance but prepared to speak.

  She looked at me. “Ah, I wonder if you could help us with this, Detective. Thing is, we know the Colonel here is a genius-level administrator, but-ah-put it down to American insecurity, but it bothers us the way nothing at all is visible. I mean, no docs, no computer program-there’s nothing for us to look at. How can we know what’s supposed to happen next in any of his multiple operations? To do the job properly, we have to know everything he’s up to to make sure nothing goes wrong. I mean, with Bush we knew exactly how much coke he did and who he screwed when he was wild, and with Yeltsin we actually took control of his vodka supplier for two months prior to the election. What we thought was-”

  “Some kind of project management software, with full security, firewalls, et cetera, that we could have access to, the three of us, or maybe only Jack, whatever, just so we’re not working in the dark,” Ben said.

  “So far the Colonel has been kind of resistant,” Linda said.

  Manny translated everything to Vikorn, who went on smiling like a gnome.

  I spent the rest of the day shopping for clothes to wear in the United Arab Emirates. They say it’s one of the richest countries in the world, and I needed to look like a successful organ trader, so I went to the swank men’s shops at Chitlom. At Armani, Zegna, and Yves St. Laurent I wanted to pay with my shiny new black Amex, but none of the Thai sales assistants had ever seen one and wouldn’t take it, so I had to use a bank machine to get cash. (The machine had heard of black Amex and delivered pronto; if it could have spoken, it would have called me sir.) I have a thing about shoes: I can almost never find ones I like, and when I do, I tend to wear them out in months. It took me hours to settle on a pair of Baker-Benjes and some chamois-soft Bagattos. The shopping spree took all day, and I think there must be quite a lot of woman in me because I enjoyed it; we still think like that over here, by the way, DFR. We still have freedom of speech too.

  By the time I reached home, I had to take Chanya to the One World Hotel, because she’d arranged to meet Dorothy there for supper; then the three of us were to visit my mother’s bar on Soi Cowboy. I wanted to wear my new Zegna pants with my new black Armani shirt with silver studs and my cream linen tropical jacket that comes ready crumpled, but there wasn’t time, so I wore generic jeans and a short-sleeve shirt instead. Chanya was wearing tight denims that squeezed her gut and clearly delineated her vagina. She looked deceptively casual in a man-style shirt that was one size too big; but she left the three top buttons undone and every second man we passed tried to see her breasts; she wasn’t wearing a bra. Normally retired prostitutes don’t play that kind of game, they know too much, but Chanya wasn’t dressing for men, she was stealing a little of each man’s power as he tried to look down her shirt. I was starting to feel sorry for Dorothy.

  Who was already waiting for us in the lobby when we arrived. When she stood up, I thought I understood the problem. When she spoke, I was sure I understood it. Dorothy was about six feet tall and pear-shaped. Her hips were wide and her breasts not large; she liked food too much, so her thighs were fat, and so was her face, which nevertheless was pleasantly regular, with sky-blue eyes and topped with bright blond hair. She spoke London English with an estuary accent and carried with her that unmistakable odor of English depression, which passively asserted that despair was the only reality-but lest you think me cruel, DFR, let me right away explain that, like my partner, I also found myself irked by her for reasons that had little to do with physical appearance. Does the phrase pretentiously depressed ring a bell in regard to a certain kind of Brit? (Clinical chic? I’m not an expert, although I visited Harrods once with Mum; the john was a member of the Hooray Henry tribe whose net worth was not commensurate with his nasal vowels.) It was mostly her posture that was unattractive; indeed, her face possessed all the charm of an English daisy, with, alas, the droop of a sunflower.

  She was dogged though. She doggedly stood to greet us, doggedly smiled at Chanya as if she loved her, doggedly tried not to be afraid of me when Chanya said, “This is my lover. He’s a cop and a pimp, he multitasks. Now he’s working on a big international case about human organ trafficking-the biggest suspect is a two-woman team.”

  Dorothy took this not-so-subtle jibe as a mule takes a whipping: just part of being alive. Now I led us to the buffet area, and one of the waitresses showed us to the table Chanya had reserved. Chanya left Dorothy and me at the table while she went to get hors d’oeuvres for all of us. She wanted me to bond with her supervisor to see what I could discover.

  Now Dorothy and I were staring at each other across the stark white tablecloth. Dorothy looked down. I said, “So, how do you like working with Chanya?”

  “She’s very bright. Maybe she’s too clever for me. I don’t understand her.”

  “How so?”

  “All the progress women have made over the past thirty years. She seems to just want to throw it all away.” Dorothy made her blue eyes plead. “How can she accept that any woman would willingly commodify her body?”

  “Newton discovered gravity,” I explained. “He didn’t invent it.” Dorothy didn’t get i
t, so I had to say: “She decided to study sociology because she has a scientific mind. She’s only interested in the truth. It’s important for her. She was on the game herself, she’s interested in an accurate description, not…” I let my voice trail off. Dorothy was looking more miserable than ever, so I didn’t want to say feminist fantasy. I didn’t want to point out that there were women who knew very little about women. If I could have, I would have gone deeper. I would have explained that Chanya was a country girl who left school at fourteen years old with an exclusively Buddhist worldview, which she found beautiful and comforting. She was on the game for nearly ten years and traveled to America, which made no impact on her views-if anything, it confirmed her Buddhist faith. After our son died, she had nothing much to do, so she studied sociology because I told her it was about people and society. She has an excellent brain and was at the top of her classes. The price she paid was that she had to think like a farang. It seemed to her there was something seriously missing in farang logic: it only dealt with measurable things and had no way of incorporating the Unnameable-or even basic human nuance-in its calculations. She let that pass, at considerable cost to her peace of mind and personality-you might say she sold an organ, metaphorically speaking. What she demanded in return was that farang thinking be faithful to its own terms. Things were fine up to her first and second degrees, but when she started working on her thesis, which required personal creative input and direct fieldwork, she began to discover she had been right all along: farang social science was mostly propaganda for farang dominance. In former times, DFR, you used exactly the same double-talk to justify the opium and slave trades. She went back to Buddhism and challenged the Western world from there. Starting from Emptiness, it is not so difficult to see clearly: one has less of a stake in fantasy. When Dorothy arrived on the scene, the English sociologist became her favorite pincushion.

  Now Chanya was back with hors d’oeuvres for all of us: a little smoked salmon for me, some somtam for her, and a great pile of potato salad with smoked salmon for Dorothy. For a second I thought Chanya had gone too far with her sarcasm, but Dorothy tucked into the potatoes with gratitude. For the first time since we met, her mood rose above room temperature, and she was almost beaming. We ate in silence. When the time came for the second course, we each went to serve ourselves. When Chanya and I were alone, I repeated what Dorothy had said about a woman commodifying her body. “For Buddha’s sake,” Chanya said, “human beings have been commodifying our bodies since the first tattoos. What are mascara and lipstick if not commodifying agents? What about hair dye? Farang are so far gone, they are blind to the obvious.”