by John Burdett
Without a second thought for its audience, the fly took off, having failed to reach either border. The sisters relaxed. Polly played with her bracelet.
I took the opportunity to ask a question that had been on my mind since last night. “Is Monte Carlo the only reason for going to France, Polly?”
“Actually we’re on our way to Lourdes.”
“Ah, why Lourdes?”
Polly picked up a pack of roasted almonds the flight attendant had placed on the arm of her pod. She pulled it open and slipped a couple into her mouth. Despite her mouth being half full, she answered in precise English, with a touch of the schoolmarm in her manner. “Of the world’s three universal religions, one is based on a profound insight into human psychology and one is based on a profound insight into the kind of social structure that is necessary for people to live in peace and harmony. Got it so far?”
“I think so.”
“The former is Buddhism, and the latter is Islam. The other world religion is an insane collection of primitive magic and mumbo-jumbo, with cadavers resurrecting and walking around with holes in them, lepers suddenly healing and the blind suddenly seeing, virgins giving birth and snakes that talk. Since it’s all a blatant lie, something has to be done to keep the faithful dropping coins onto the plate, or the economic model on which the whole pious edifice is based will collapse in less than a generation. It needs miracle machines. Lourdes is the most important. Of course, since there are no miracles, you have to have a large collection of people willing to lie to themselves. We are talking about the terminally ill, of course.”
“Okay. Why are we so interested?”
She made a gesture of impatience. “Terminally ill-not every organ is busted-need money for real medical treatment when the abracadabra fails-sell something-anything-find a close relative to sell one of theirs-alternatively need a new organ-will pay anything, ask no questions.”
“It’s your marketplace?”
“One of them.”
At Nice a guy in a business suit was waiting with a sign: MADEMOISELLES YIP AND PARTY. He led us to his limo, which was a big, dark Benz with automatic gearshift and tinted windows. In a few minutes we’d joined the motorway system that goes all the way to Italy. We turned off at Monaco, and suddenly we were in a Ferrari jam: any color you like, so long as it’s red or yellow. They were driven by middle-aged men wearing cravats, all of whom had women beside them wearing Hermes scarves over their heads, along with sunglasses, which could be worn on the scarf or nose, according to taste. When we got to the hotel, which was almost as famous as the casino, the staff all knew the Twins. They didn’t try to distinguish between them, simply called them both Mademoiselle Yip.
My room was king-size with a view over the Mediterranean, which didn’t strike me as much different from the other seas I’d seen. I was wallowing in the king-size tub with faux-ancient tap fittings circa 1920 (you could turn them on and off with your big toe, but it was quite a stretch-the gel was out of this world: lime and thyme with a touch of primrose and great bubbles), when a deep gong announced someone at the door.
It was housekeeping with a complete casino-goer’s rig: tuxedo, black pants with shiny stripe down the outside leg, plum bow tie ready-tied (a handy hook-and-eye catch at the back for bumpkins like me), shiny black patent leather shoes, and dress shirt with frills down the front and pearl buttons. It all fit perfectly. It was ten P.M., the hour when serious players start to make their way to the tables.
At the top of the steps to the famous casino a footman in livery bowed at Lilly, Polly, and me.
“The best of France is a museum,” Lilly whispered.
“The more you pay, the better behaved the exhibits,” Polly said.
“They think a vagina is masculine, and their patron saint is a transsexual roasted in a suit of armor,” Lilly said.
“No wonder they’re so screwed up,” Polly said.
I didn’t know much about gamblers, but I knew vice when I saw it. The Twins, both in black evening gowns with pearls, silver earrings, and icy diamonds that glittered, owned all the signs, including fetishism. These two wealthy heiresses who took limos and six-star hotels for granted swooned over the casino’s old brass and worn carpets, while a delicious tension came and went in their eyes, and they clasped and unclasped each other’s hands. “Every time is like the first,” Lilly said.
“You remember the first?” I asked. I imagined Maurice Chevalier introducing them to champagne right here in the velvet lobby.
“We won twenty dollars. Daddy wouldn’t let us bet more.”
“I remember the roulette wheel, how big and heavy and silent, and how everyone seemed to hold their breath.”
“One of the Beatles was here, I forget which one-he lost ten thousand dollars in a bet on black.”
I already knew that roulette was the star of the show, and we would proceed slowly toward the wheel by way of lesser pleasures. They bought a bunch of chips from the tux behind the grille, and we paused at the slot machines. These were not serious bets, but both women had serious faces. I understood: this was the reading of the entrails before the invasion of Troy. How well or badly they did would determine how recklessly or conservatively they played on the grown-up tables.
Lilly gasped, squealed, giggled: three oranges in a row. The machine coughed up chips as if it had taken an expectorant, but the total win was hardly more than a hundred dollars. Polly didn’t fare so well, but she was happy enough with a couple of pineapples and a carrot, which delivered about five dollars. They gazed into each other’s eyes like newlyweds, then remembered me and held my hands on either side.
Let’s face it, every man likes to be king for a night. I was feeling like a million dollars myself when we finally took the steps up into the main hall. All the guys in tuxedos envied me. The more generous shared humorous grins, while the meaner spirits would have liked to spit on the carpet: two beautiful women, and I wasn’t even Italian! Hey, I was having a ball after all. These startlingly beautiful, rich, young(ish) women were spoiling me here. I was almost skipping while I hummed: As I walk along the boulevard with an independent air I can hear the girls declare He must be a millionaire He’s the man who broke the bank at Monte Caaaaarlo.
(Okay, so I am a tad bipolar, but there’s no need for anyone to get judgmental: what do you do for variety yourself, DFR?)
We spent an hour or so on blackjack, then finally took the short set of steps up to the big table. The Yip party will only play French roulette, messieurs-don’t even think of imposing English rules, merci all the same.
“Faites vos jeus,” the croupier said, but like all pros, Lilly and Polly waited until a nanosecond before the ball fell into the last two rows of the wheel, which is to say just before the implacable Frenchman said “Rien ne va plus.” Lilly put a thousand dollars on red, which was an even-money bet. Polly also put five hundred on red, and a hundred dollars each on 9, 11, 13, and 15. Focus on the spinning wheel was total. The table was silent. A public hanging would not have produced greater concentration in a crowd. The ball stopped on red, which was good for Lilly, but-even better for Polly-it landed on 13. At 35 to 1 it was a serious win. Lilly and Polly exchanged glances. Did I detect a certain reticence in both sets of Chinese eyes?
“One and three add up to four,” Lilly said, “the number of death. I can’t believe you did that.”
“Me either,” Polly said, “I just wasn’t thinking.” She seemed seriously penitent, as if she had inadvertently made a pact with the devil.
“You knew what you were doing. You did it because of the fly.”
“You didn’t win with the fly.”
“No, but I almost did. You were scared shitless. You bet on four to get even.”
“It wasn’t four, it was thirteen.”
“Even worse. Even gweilos know it’s unlucky. And it adds up to four. You’ve ruined the evening.”
Polly made a face, but she was shaken. Lilly looked as if she were about to cry. “I brought
the shrine,” Polly said, and put an arm on Lilly’s elbow.
“You did?”
Polly opened her handbag to show something to her sister.
Lilly collared one of the supervisors. “We want to go to the prayer room,” she told him.
“Certainly,” he said.
“Excuse us for a moment,” Polly said to me.
I watched them disappear into some private room of the casino-and never saw them again. I hung around for about an hour and a half, then grabbed one of the supervisors. When I mentioned the name Yip, he shrugged and allowed himself a slight smirk. There was no message waiting back in the hotel, and reception told me the sisters had not returned to their room.
Next morning a message was waiting for me on the hotel’s system. It gave the reservation number and other details of an e-ticket in my name: a single seat, first-class, Nice-Bangkok via Dubai.
11
Back in Bangkok, Vikorn’s mug was everywhere, just as he had promised: every third lamppost. His undisguised intention was to crowd out the competition, which was numerous. It’s one of our paradoxes: we are a shy people who love to run for public office. Men and women, who cannot hope to get votes other than from family members dress in their Sunday best-white military costumes for the boys, serious colors and high necklines for the girls-so they can share lampposts with the likes of Vikorn, whose life and times had begun to be discussed in a discreet way by the media. One brave journalist hinted that a Bangkok cop might not be the wisest choice for governor when you thought of how creative former holders of that office had been with those purchasing contracts for buses and police cars, not to mention the multibillion-baht extension to the Skytrain. I was not comfortable, either. The man who had controlled my destiny for more than a decade now loomed at me from every corner: master crook of the universe.
Those three Americans had checked out my people’s value system and decided to present Vikorn on the street as Father Wisdom, with gray hair whitened a shade, a confident smile (which had triumphed over deep suffering), right hand held slightly palm up, in a subliminal reference to a Buddha image, the sparkling city behind him as if it had elected him already. Voting day was more than a month away, though, and he had not yet gone public with his “Stop Organ Trafficking Now” campaign, although I’d seen some of the advance publicity: “Devout Buddhist police colonel who has worked steadily and selflessly on his own time for more than a decade to stop this ghoulish trade and, now, thanks to meticulous detective work headed up by his hand-selected protege, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, can humbly reveal that a vast international network, which uses the sacred soil of Thailand as an organ depot, has been broken and busted.”
He hadn’t debriefed me yet, however, because I’d taken a day to recover from the Yip sisters. Apart from Vikorn’s election campaign, the other news on the radio and TV was all about the Sukhumvit Rapist, as he’d come to be known. Early sympathy for the deformed stalker had evaporated since he sexually assaulted two women and attempted to rape a number of others. Sergeant Ruamsantiah of District 8 had declared that he personally would not rest until the streets were safe again for respectable women and girls.
I intended to take a motorbike taxi to the station, but Vietnam was getting one hell of a lashing again, and the skies were black all over the eastern Pacific. (I bet boat people make good organ donors: I imagined them hanging on to the gunwales, a saltwater gargle every twelve seconds; now a luxury yacht shows up with a pair of Chinese twins in bikinis and wrap-around sunglasses: “One kidney each, and your troubles are over, my little chou-chous.”) I would have taken a cab if there were any available, but each one that passed carried a passenger, its red wang sign turned off.
It just happened that one of my favorite kao moo cooked-food stalls was around the corner on Soi 51; it provided an overhead tarpaulin, so I made a dash for it. And now I was sitting at the rickety iron table with the braised pork leg with rice in a bowl steaming before me, liberally loading up on nampla fish sauce with enough granulated chili to melt the spoon, when my eye caught things floating just under the surface. Of course, they were only eggs cut in half with the yolk visible, but for one psychotic moment I was seeing human eyeballs. It was a genuine hallucination, the first I’d experienced without dope, so in addition to everything else, I was wondering if I was not-you know-a total loony.
I was sweating, the blood drained from my face. Talk about karma. I’d lost my appetite and to hell with the rain, I needed to get to the station and safety. I wanted to feel bored, because bored seemed the opposite of crazy.
Sure enough, when I was at my desk and logged into my personal e-mail account, I opened two spam offers to enlarge my penis and five to send me improbably cheap Viagra by anonymous post: serenity had returned. I was pushing my chair back and waiting for Lek to bring me my first iced lemon tea of the day when Manny, Vikorn’s secretary, called: the Old Man had heard I was in the office and wanted me upstairs, pronto.
Now I was sitting in the hot seat opposite him on the far side of his huge desk. To avoid his gaze, I stared at the anticorruption poster above his head and wondered when it was going to include a reference to human organ trafficking. I’d just told him the whole story of my trip to Dubai. We were in the midst of one of those silences: he looked almost stupid while his criminal genius worked deep down in the brainstem.
Finally he came out of his trance. I saw that I might have succeeded in shocking him. “They’re twins? Identical?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I didn’t know that.” He stood up, stumped, turned on me, said, “Twins?” again, then went to the window, held his chin, and nodded to himself in the way of a man who was once badly burned but has only this minute understood how the scam had worked. He turned on me again with the same aggressive sweep. “They’re compulsive gamblers, you say?”
“The type they call whales in Las Vegas. They bet fifty thousand dollars and a gold bracelet on a fly walking up a window.” I saw a deep reprogramming taking place somewhere in the depths. When he turned again, his eyes said, So that was it. He returned to his seat, sat, and nodded to himself again. I watched in fascination as that special thing geniuses have-that extra half inch of willpower the rest of us lack-started to stir at the back of his retinas.
I said, “Sir, may I ask a personal question?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I need to, sir, if my investigation is to proceed.” He raised his eyes. “About these twins, sir. They are very mischievous-somewhere between bad and evil, it seems to me at this point-but girlish at the same time. Rich and out of control, sir. Without any moral compass at all. I don’t think they’re really into sex, but they know how to project it. Manipulative to a degree that’s hard to believe.” He was daring me to continue. I continued. “I wouldn’t put it past them to make a bet-a pretty big one, I would guess-on whether or not one or the other-or even both-could seduce a man-say an alpha male of the Asian type-say a-”
“Get out, Detective,” he whispered. “Get the hell out of my office, right now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Well, now I’ve brought you up to date, DFR, and told you all I know. Nothing neat and tidy, I’m afraid, only a collection of fragments that may or may not be related. A few days after I reported to Vikorn, which is to say about a week after I got back from Monte Carlo, I received the call to Vulture Peak, where lay the three anonymous cadavers with every salable organ missing. Am I the only observer who does not see the Colonel’s hand in this? Call me naive, but it’s just not Vikorn’s style-and anyway, he already has the election in the bag. On the other hand, anyone who doubts that organ theft happens on the sacred soil of Thailand will soon be considering voting for the Colonel, once the story breaks. Very interesting, think about it.
12
Meat scares me and makes my flesh crawl, even when it doesn’t resemble anything human. Am I getting soft or are the cases getting harder? Why do I see three faceless corpses whenever I close my eye
s? Why does my mind keep fixating on the deep gashes and the floppy blubber where livers and kidneys used to be? And no eyes, sweet Buddha, no eyes. The worst was this morning just before waking: an army of the blind and faceless moving in a dogged mass toward rebirth and revenge.
I’m curled up on my bed sucking my thumb and trembling. If anyone asks, I’m going to say I caught a touch of fever in Dubai. This case has got to me like no other, and I’m not even convinced it’s a case. To make matters infinitely worse, my partner, my darling Chanya, doesn’t seem to have noticed there’s something wrong. She watched me drag myself across the room after only a couple of hours on duty, blinked at me without losing that glazed look she has for everything and everyone except her computer monitor, seemed to have a bright idea while I limped broken and shattered to the bed, and started stabbing ferociously at her keyboard just as I collapsed.
I called Lek on my cell phone to tell him to get me a supply of dope from Sergeant Ruamsantiah. I’m going to smoke until I forget who I am, and I’m not coming back to earth until they’ve improved it. Really, this time I’ve had it with everything. I can feel it, that thing that happens to your mind when they add that extra few ounces to your paranoia and you sink under the weight. Every time I close my eyes I see someone with a curved knife aiming for my vital organs with an expression of insane greed. I see monsters from the deep, breaking the surface after billions of years in the lightless zones: blind, hideous, eel-gray, voracious for human flesh. I’m trembling.
“I’m just going out to buy some more printer ink. D’you want anything?” Chanya calls.
“No,” I groan.
She comes over to the bed. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Good. Listen, I just wrote this brilliant paragraph. I’ve nearly finished my thesis, and I had to get the ending right. I know you won’t understand much, but you can get the idea: Thus the comodification of bodies, whether superficially in the sense of a prostitute painting herself in a way designed to send the required signal to prospective customers, or in the more extreme sense of a person selling, or having taken from them, a vital organ such as a kidney, is obviously and unavoidably a consequence of the present economic system which relies on what has been called “the promiscuity of objects.” This system carries with it the unspoken implication that once something has been defined as an “object,” it is automatically assumed to be “promiscuous” in the sense that it may be bought and sold like any other object, even if the object in question is somebody’s kidney or liver-or whole body. This kind of thinking is exactly what underpinned the slave trade for hundreds of years: as soon as a captive West African was defined as “property,” then he could be treated as a “promiscuous object,” that is to say an object whose human rights have been magically transmuted into a money value in the accounts of the property owner. What is unclear, however, is why modern Western culture has continued to target prostitution by adult volunteers as “immoral” (i.e., in Professor Smith’s definition “the enemy”). Consider the manner in which both Hollywood and the advertising industry have been comodifying bodies for the purpose of profit (i.e., treating both male and female models as “promiscuous objects” to be traded). At first glance it seems strange that the line should be drawn at what one might call the “cottage industry” of street-level prostitution, especially in Bangkok, where the practitioners are relatively free of exploitation by pimps and can therefore fairly be described as choosing to commodify their bodies on their own account for the purpose of survival. It may be that the answer can be found in a parallel paradox: the obsessive repression of “soft” drugs like marijuana, despite the wealth of data which proves that the “hard” drug alcohol is far more dangerous to health and responsible for almost an infinitely greater number of diseases and deaths. It is not difficult to see what the private trading of marijuana and street-level prostitution have in common: these are industries any private person can develop on their own account without being squeezed out by big business or falling liable to tax. Thus it is in the suppression of prostitution and soft drugs that we see the hypocrisy at the heart of the culture. It is in the interests of government and big business to appear to uphold a “moral code,” the true purpose of which is to ensure that impoverished individuals cannot escape their poverty except by becoming fiscally and commercially useful: read slaves. In other words, it is a “code” driven by exactly the same dynamic as the slave trade. But, as Professor Steiner points out (op. cit.), the peculiar reverence we have for moral codes depends exactly on their being founded on something beyond functionalism. A money-driven morality is no morality at all.