by John Burdett
“What’s happening?”
“Where have you been?”
“In a traffic jam. I forgot I’d turned off my cell phone. Everything okay? You’ve made contact with Lilly?”
“She’s here now.”
“Good. She’s given you an ILC?”
“Yes.”
“For two hundred thousand dollars payable to my corporation in Geneva?” He gave the name of the corporation.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Let her take them away.”
“Not until you tell me where you got the merchandise.”
“Don’t worry, it’s a cadaver-only trade.”
I wanted to ask how the former owners of the eyes became cadavers, but Lilly Yip was listening while pretending to look at the view. I didn’t put it past her to understand Thai. I closed the phone. “That was my principal. It all seems to be in order.”
She nodded and fished her phone out of her handbag. She spoke in fluent Arabic. Then, without asking, she went to the house phone on the desk in the business end of the suite and again spoke in Arabic. She turned to me with a smile out of Vogue, Shanghai edition. “A security team will pick them up in thirty minutes. If you confirm with reception that they are allowed to remove the container, we can take a stroll through the Gold Souk. I think this is your first visit to Dubai, no? We can have some lattes at Starbucks.”
Her English was finishing-school perfect. I lifted the house phone to call reception.
8
In Dubai’s Gold Souk all that glittered was at least eighteen carat. I strolled side by side with Lilly in my top-of-the-range trafficker’s kit, so we looked like a brace of beautiful Asian billionaires (probably childless by choice but who might adopt a half-dozen third-world orphans for the cameras), at the same time wondering if some of the local eye problems didn’t originate here; I was looking forward to the muted colors of Starbucks. Wherever you put your elbow, there was some garish yellow object demanding attention: window after window, shelf after shelf was crammed with that highly polished kind of gold that, from a distance, is indistinguishable from brass. To our left were ten-chain necklaces laden with heart motifs that surely only a weight-lifter could wear; to our right, browsing Muslims examined the very latest in superfine yellow webs to patch on any remaining area of unadorned flesh. It was one of those terraced malls popular in the East where you can look up at level after level of distilled ostentation designed to burn your retinas into submission.
Now here was the coffee shop: good old corporate identity, I would have recognized that couch anywhere in the world. It was midday and most good Muslims were on their knees in the gilded mosques, so Starbucks was almost empty save for a farang couple with two brats who were moaning about the size of the swimming pool at their luxury hotel. I didn’t know why Lilly had brought me here, but I was sure it was not for a romantic interlude.
Or was I? I’m a humble, self-effacing Buddhist, but I was brought up in the flesh trade. Lust does subtle things to women’s faces, and the light around Lilly had shifted from ultraviolet to something lower down the spectrum. She seemed younger, more impish. This was a shape-changer for sure, with the dough to buy a lot of enigma. In the circumstances I had to wonder which, if any, of my organs she might be interested in. Maybe it was shrewd of her to have chosen Starbucks: you could be anyone you liked in a place like this. Dropping the French-style hauteur, she insisted on carrying our tray, commanded the milk and sugar stand-I told her two packets of Equal and a nuance of nonfat, please-and led me to a sofa where we could sit and watch the gold go by.
“So, how did you get into the business?”
She had sipped at her soy latte, dabbed her lips with a napkin, and dropped the opening question without looking at me; but she followed up with a stabbing glance that seemed to penetrate under the flesh, right to the gristle. I had to walk a middle path here. If I claimed to be a fellow professional, she’d nail me with a whole load of science that I wouldn’t understand. On the other hand, I did just sell her 1,764 human eyes.
“Actually, I’m not really in the business, but I would like to be. I found a principal, talked him into using me as a go-between. I guess I’ll just take it from here. You know, whatever comes through the door?”
She sipped the latte, gave the table her full concentration, and said, “Come off it, Detective,” and sipped some more latte, then looked up at me to see what effect she’d had.
“I, I, I-”
“You’re working for Vikorn, you’ve got to be. There are only two men in Thailand who could have delivered that merchandise so quickly, and the other one always calls me direct. Your Colonel got mad at me five years ago because I won a bet with him, and he’s a seriously bad loser.” She looked me in the eye and laughed. “Asian male pride is quite as ridiculous as Western male pride.”
I said, “Oh. Yes. I suppose that’s true.” Her laugh was gay, hearty, sincere. Or was it? Like a wolf she looked, when we lifted that lid.
“So tell me, has the price of smack gone through the floor, or is the DEA up his backside so he needs to diversify? There are plenty of drug barons who are seeing the light and getting into the organ trade, where there’s practically no law enforcement and no tax. I could give you the names of twenty mid-rankers from Colombia who sell kidneys, livers, and eyes these days and sleep better for it.”
“He says things have changed since he last looked into it.”
Perhaps I had pressed a secret switch of some kind. She gave me the naked look of appraisal, then said, “You don’t know a damned thing about it, do you? He picked you because you speak English and know how to dress? You’re a peasant boy from up-country?”
“He wants you to teach me the ropes. That’s what he said.”
I thought I had at last surprised her. She pondered for a moment. “Why not? So long as Vikorn delivers, I can find a use for you.”
We both paused when two men walked in dressed like lawyers who spoke in British accents. They were discussing a local real estate project and how difficult the sheikh-in-charge could be. Lilly stared at them for a moment, seemed to categorize them precisely-I could almost hear her ticking off the points: net worth, personality traits, sexual preferences, corruptible or not-and turned away. “I can’t initiate you here. Let’s meet at my hotel in an hour. It’s the other six star, you know the one I mean?”
At the other six star the staff uniforms were not the same, and you beheld the sailboats in the bay from a quite different angle. In the lift I stood behind a burly bellhop until we reached the highest floor. He rang Lilly’s bell, keeping his body between me and the dear valued guest until she had confirmed she wanted to see me.
Up until this moment I had been quite interested to discover what theme of suite she had chosen. Had she gone for minimalist, or overblown Oriental, or something in between? Now I lost interest in the suite because for a second I did not recognize the woman who was welcoming me into her sanctum. She was wearing an apres-tennis short-sleeve V-neck cotton pullover, a pair of white shorts, and hotel slippers that revealed her toenails, which had been painted with individuated flower patterns. Now I saw she had done the same to her fingernails. She could have been ten years younger, and there was even a twinkle of preppy mischief in her eyes as she welcomed me in with a French kiss on one cheek, then offered her own for me to reciprocate. Even more impressive than her genius for shape-changing was her intuition: her persona of an hour ago I had found intimidating and sexually off-putting. Now I thought her sexy as hell.
“You changed,” I said.
She produced a smile and led me gaily into the suite.
I could have kicked myself for not coming as someone else and wondered if my days as apprentice organ hunter were not already numbered. Meanwhile I was impressed with the suite, which didn’t go at all with the new Lilly. It was perfectly executed belle epoque, exactly like the interior of Maxim’s, in Paris, where my mother’s client Truffaut used to take us for lunch at least twice a week.
I was so hit with nostalgia, I could have raised the hots for one of the lady lamps. I wanted to play the girl, tell Lilly the eyes and her personality change had left me feeling dizzy. I needed to sit down but was afraid to show weakness.
She led me to a giant sofa and a low glass table with a fruit bowl big enough to breed sharks in. She was imitating the snake in Jungle Book, with its deep-throat gurgle-not to mention Eve herself-when she asked, “Would you like an apple?” I couldn’t help it, I broke into peals of laughter.
A Mozart sonata suddenly erupted from her cell phone. She listened for a moment, then spoke in impeccable French: “Yes, tomorrow, first-class, three in a row, one window, correct.” She pressed a couple of buttons on the phone, said, “Excuse me,” then spoke again, this time in a language that sounded Chinese, although I could not tell which dialect. She closed the phone, chucked it playfully to the other end of the sofa, and cocked her head to see if I had any questions.
I did have one. As a semilinguist myself, I was jealous. “Tell me, Lilly, how is it you speak so many languages fluently?”
Lilly picked up an apple-not a golden delicious but a big green one full of juice-and took a bite. She spoke with her mouth full. “It’s all thanks to Dad and Granddad. The old man was a big industrialist in Shanghai. When he saw Mao was going to win the civil war, he put his entire factory on a ship and moved everything and everyone to Hong Kong. He was an old-style Confucian. Appreciated bound feet on women, especially his wives and his mistresses, and liked to relax with an opium pipe on a Friday night.” Lilly looked at the apple, perhaps at the big chunk she had taken out of it with her perfect teeth. “He brought my father up very strictly, which is to say Dad learned how to obey and that was about it. When the old man died, my father didn’t know what to do about anything, so he imitated the British. He got a British nanny for my sister and me when we were hardly more than zero years old. When you grow up bilingual, you can pick up languages very easily, like picking up shells from the seashore.
“We didn’t like the British nanny much-she was built like a bulldog and went all red and blotchy when she was angry. She believed in spanking, so when we wanted to get rid of her, we exaggerated and told Dad she was a sadistic lesbian-we were very precocious and loved learning about weird things from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He was so shocked that lesbianism existed that he sacked her on the spot without making inquiries. Anyway, our English was better than our Putonghua at that stage, so we didn’t need her.
“In those days the Brits thought the French were the top of the cultural league, so we got a French governess. She was a total pain in the ass with rules for everything and this nasty high-pitched arrogance. She always dressed impeccably, so we found ways of messing up her clothes and hair. Over time the sustained disorientation sent her psychotic-literally. She called it Chinese torture. They had to take her away in an ambulance, but we were pretty much perfect in French by then.
“Next was a German, a hyper-hygienic bitch with an enormous bosom. When we’d learned the language, we told Dad about the Nazis. He only knew about Japanese genocide during the war, so he freaked out and got rid of her. Next was an Italian. She was great. Unbelievably lazy, very soft and indulgent, but she had to have sex with a new man every month to prove she was irresistible. Unfortunately, Mum found out and sacked her.” She proceeded to munch. “Actually, the real center of our family-the foyer, as the French say-was the Fukienese maid. She was mum, dad, sister, grandmother all in one. We adored her and took care of her in her old age. She died a few years ago, and we gave her the big Chinese funeral with tons of hell money and cognac. We cried for a month. Fukienese is our real mother tongue.”
Lilly gave an exaggerated toothy grin and made rings around her eyes with thumbs and index fingers. I guessed the idea was a caricature of the Chinese face, which might have been crude from anyone else but from her was hilarious. Her new persona-call it Lilly II-was a lot of fun. I shook my head.
“And the Arabic?”
She threw me a knowing look. “That came later. We were in our twenties before we realized that the big money wasn’t necessarily in the West anymore. As I said, Daddy was very out of touch. Standard Arabic isn’t difficult, we cracked it in six months, and you get access to the whole of North Africa.”
“Am I going to meet your sister?”
Lilly took another bite out of her apple. “How d’you know you haven’t already?”
I must have been getting slow. It took quite a few beats before I saw the answer to the conundrum. “She’s your twin?”
“Got it in one, Captain Kirk.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine, as if I were penetrating a mystery that was not really mine. I didn’t believe Vikorn ever got this far. “What’s her name?”
“Polly.”
I let a few minutes pass in silence. “Which one are you?”
She took another bite out of the apple. “Not telling you.”
I groaned. “Just tell me this, are you the same woman I met this morning, sold one thousand seven hundred sixty-four eyes to, and went to Starbucks with?”
“Excuse me one minute,” she said, and stood. I watched her walk through an arch at the other end of the suite, I supposed to the master bedroom. I was left alone with the giant fruit bowl and the view. Those two sailboats were starting to seriously get on my nerves: Why didn’t they move? Didn’t mankind invent sail for exactly that purpose? Was everything upside down in toy town?
There was a movement beyond the arch. A woman appeared. So far as I could tell, it was the same woman I met this morning, done up in the same Vogue costume, exhibiting the same HiSo hauteur, but with a sly smile flickering over her face. So now I had to restate the conundrum: Was this one woman posing as two, or two women posing as one? And what did it all have to do with the market price of kidneys? Nothing in my background had prepared me for this kind of challenge-perhaps if I’d gone to an Ivy League college or a Swiss finishing school, I would have had the appropriate social response at my fingertips. (Is that you, darling, or are you the to-die-for little doppelganger?) As it was, I simply stared like a spaced-out peasant.
She walked over to me in an exaggerated catwalk gait, carefully smoothed her backside, then sat demurely next to me, laid an impeccable hand on my forearm, and said, “Forgive us, but if you want to work with us, you’ll have to get used to our little jumelles ways.” Then she broke out into a grin that belonged to the other one-if there was another-reached for the apple she-or the other-had half-eaten, took a huge non-Vogue bite out of it, and burst into hysterics.
All women are aware of the debilitating power of subtle mockery; this one (or two) had it down to a fine art. In my preferred persona as police officer, I have always known how to handle it: male authority figure trumping female frivolity with a higher, realer purpose. As apprentice organ trafficker, though, I had to confess it was doing my head in. Somehow she’d managed to shrink me, and I thought it best to retreat and regroup. I stood, as an inevitable response to my own thought process, without having figured out an excuse to leave. “Ah, I, ah, forgot something-I’d better go back to my hotel,” I mumbled like an embarrassed kid.
“Oh, if it’s only something, surely it can wait?” Lilly said, also standing.
Now she blocked off one avenue of retreat with her tall, elegant form. I turned to walk around the coffee table in the opposite direction, and was just in time to slip past her as she tried to head me off. It seemed we were engaged in a noncontact form of martial art in which each protagonist occupied an inviolable personal space, which was to be used as a kind of colonizing gambit. Lilly was very good at this silent game, which had me searching for a nonviolent way of getting out of there, and her cleverly dominating the ground zero of the door. We had chased each other from the tropics of the coffee table to the northern reaches of the fridge before I was able to slip away and walk with huge strides (running would have been an admission of defeat and probably against the rules) to the door. I had
the latch under my finger when she arrived and jammed the door with her foot. I cannot do justice to the expression that flickered across her face for a split-second, as though she had been taken over by an ungovernable rage, which nevertheless passed in a flash. Now with a sudden change of heart, she opened the door and said with a big chummy smile, “Please do come back this evening about nine o’clock. All will be revealed. Sorry about our little game. You’re so incredibly cute, we couldn’t resist. After all, we’re only girls, you know.”
As I was leaving the hotel’s atrium, the heat socked me in the head and my body went into shock. My lungs had trouble with the superheated air they were trying to process. To cover the half mile between the two six stars seemed an impossible task. It dawned on me that after a lifetime in the tropics I was experiencing the first symptoms of heatstroke: there is no heat like desert heat at two in the afternoon. It all added to the surreal feeling of the place, along with a pair of twins who could have been one schizophrenic female organ trader. Instead of grabbing a cab I started to run, in a panic, and my mind flipped. I saw Lilly Yip holding a human eye in the palm of her hand as if it were a living creature and crooning over it: It is sooo beautiful… Then I saw an army of eyeless ghosts marching reproachfully toward me.
Back in my room I drank cold water from the refrigerator, which is supposed to be the worst thing you can do when you overheat, and checked my e-mail. When I saw there was a message from Chanya, I immediately started to feel better, at the same time feeling pathetic that my well-being should have depended on a few lines from her: Sorry to take so long to write to you darling, I got so caught up in Dorothy’s new thing and trying to finish my f**cking thesis at the same time I even forgot to be jealous of your exotic new case in exotic Dubai-thank Buddha all the girls are Muslims and risk getting stoned to death if they look at your beautiful face the wrong way-yes, I’m missing you and feeling horny. Speaking of which: did you brilliantly interpret my cryptic SMS? Well, this is the fuller version. You remember that middle-aged blond farang with the moustache who was sitting there having a cock massage with D’s eyes on stalks? Well, he noticed and being obviously a Don Juan was quite flattered and also assumed D was on the game, so he came over to our table and bought us drinks, told us his name was Jimmy Clipp, and after about five minutes he asked D if she would like him to pay her bar fine-and she said yes! Just like that! Your mum of course is a total pro and kept a straight face while he paid D’s imaginary bar fine (which your mum gave to me to give back to D because D’s not on her payroll-yet!) and D didn’t look me in the eye again but just sat there with that dogged look on her face like she was waiting for a bus while your mum gave the john his change and then D followed Jimmy Clipp out into the street (I got up and went to the door to watch) and across to the short-time hotel and I had to put my fist in my mouth because I was literally hysterical with laughter. Got to rush, more in a couple of hours when I take a break. Love love love, C.