Vulture Peak sj-5

by John Burdett

  “That’s just amazingly brilliant. You’re a genius,” I say. I do not add: I just hope I’m still sane when you get your Ph. D. In my insecurity I want to ask about the rumors, but in my insecurity I don’t have the courage. She’s basically a very honest girl, and I don’t think I could handle any form of toxic truth right now.

  While she’s out, Lek comes with a sizable package, takes one look at me, asks where I keep my skins, rolls me a big one, shakes his head, and leaves. Now Chanya is back, and I’m quite high. At least I’ve got control of the demons. Thanks to the power of cannabis, I’m able to shrink them with my brand-new green demon-shrinking gun, which sort of grew out of my right hand after the third joint. Chanya smells the dope, gives a mildly disapproving glance, shrugs, goes back to her computer. Time passes (it could be a minute or a couple of aeons, this is export-quality stuff).

  She comes back over to me. “You sure you’re okay?”

  This time the floodgates open. “No, I’m not fucking okay,” I bawl. Now I’m blurting, mostly about the eyeballs I sold that won’t give me any peace, but also about those three anonymous corpses in Phuket.

  She raises her eyes to the ceiling. To complicate matters still further, I am horny. I can just about reach her left breast, thanks to the way she’s leaning over, which suddenly seems to offer solace in a cruel world, so with the directness of a monkey I grab it. I wouldn’t call it a lecherous gesture, myself, more like a dash for safety by a threatened psyche.

  She sighs. “Oh, Sonchai, it’s always the same.”

  “What is?”

  “When you smoke too much. You go space traveling for a couple of hours, disdaining the earth and everything on it. Then when you finally get back, you’re like a horny sixteen-year-old.”

  I release her breast like a drowning man releasing a straw. “I’m in a state,” I admit. “I’m kind of scared, but it’s not that exactly.” She frowns, because she sees I’ve gone into that mood of meticulous self-analysis that often accompanies a comedown. “It’s more like fear overlaying something fundamental. I mean it is fear, but it’s mixed in with something more general, like what’s happening to the species?”

  “What species?”

  “Humanity.”

  She curses. “It’s Vikorn who’s done this to you. That old bastard. I hate him. I hate having to look at his hypocritical bloody mug on every third lamppost. I hate the way he’s going to win the election and bleed Bangkok white.” She pulls her cell phone out of her jeans pocket and stabs at one of her autodial numbers. “Get me Vikorn,” she snarls at the reception.

  Well, I may be a basket case and on the verge of terminal catatonia, but Chanya going for Vikorn in a toe-to-toe standoff is too good to miss. I perk up a bit. Unfortunately, our cell phones don’t work so well in the hovel, so she has to go out into the yard. I see her walking up and down, her left hand flaying while she yells at the phone. I have no idea what she’s saying, but I’m sure of the psychology: she and Vikorn own me jointly, and there are clear demarcation lines. He has trespassed on her turf, and the she-wolf is in a rage. She comes back into the house fuming and shaking.

  “What did you say?”

  “I let him have it,” she says in the tone of one who might have gone a tad too far.

  “What did he say?”

  “He just asked where you were.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That you were stoned out of your brain on the bed killing demons with a big green demon-killing gun.”

  I scratch my head. “How did you know about the gun?”

  “Have you any idea how stoned you were half an hour ago? You kept telling me about it, over and over.” She pats my head, then cuddles me a bit the way she did in the old days. After a while, she says, “D’you want to hear about Dorothy?”

  “Yes,” I gulp.

  “Well, the man she went off with that night, this Jimmy Clipp, she’s crazy about him. Totally gaga. I checked him out with the girls at your mother’s bar. He’s a regular there. Very popular. He’s generous, considerate, never hurts anyone, and they say he’s quite the finger artist. His cock isn’t too big, and it’s not crooked. You know how superstitious the girls are and how they think a crooked one is seriously bad juju. Best of all, he’s funny. He doesn’t take sex seriously at all and makes jokes in the middle of boom-boom that crack everybody up.

  “But he’s a total jao choo — a butterfly. Even when he’s got the hots for a girl one weekend, he dumps her next time he’s in town, because he’s got curious about another, or he decides to go back to one of his old lusts. And he likes to do two at a time. He’s an engineer on some road they’re building to Laos. It’s China-driven-you know how they want trucks to run from Beijing to the Gulf of Thailand within the decade?”

  For the record, DFR, my darling does not normally describe life in quite such mannish terms; she’s doing it to amuse me and somewhat succeeding. I’ve managed a wan smile or two already.

  “I haven’t told Dorothy this-she’s in blind lust at the moment. She sort of confided in me she’s never really had good sex in her life before. A few gropes here and there, a night now and then with an incompetent or, even worse, an alcoholic. She tried to be a lesbian like all the other female sociologists in her circle, but it just doesn’t work for her. Most of the men in her life have been male feminists, and everyone knows what cockless wonders they are-now this new guy of hers is a world-class player. For her he’s like nirvana itself. She can’t believe sex can be such fun. That’s why she decided that brothels can be good for women too. He’s back up north working on his road, and she e-mails and SMS’s him all the time.” She pauses for breath. “See, so long as she’s in this state, she agrees with my whole point about prostitution, and she’s going to pass my thesis with full recommendations. That’s why I’m working my buns off to get it finished. You understand, darling?”

  “You mean when he dumps her, she’ll change her mind, and brothels will be wicked engines of exploitation all over again?”

  “Right. And she’ll start giving me a hard time with my thesis all over again.”

  We are discussing how bad it’s going to be when Jimmy Clipp forgets to contact Dorothy next time he’s in town and what we can do to cushion the blow (find Dorothy another john in another brothel?), when we hear a police siren in the distance. We exchange a glance, and Chanya goes pale. This is District 8, after all, and in normal circumstances only one cop in D. 8 is allowed to use his siren. Sure enough, the siren gets louder, and Chanya gets paler. Now the siren is at the beginning of our soi and quite deafening.

  Chanya has gone to the window and pulled back the curtain. “Sonchai, where’s your gun?” she asks softly.

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t kill a cop, especially not a colonel, especially not Vikorn.”

  “Not to kill him. For myself. I don’t think I can stand it. Oh, Buddha, it is him!”

  I’m still in bed, so I have to imagine Vikorn in his fatigues getting out of the car and prowling to our front door. There is a knock. It is neither loud and arrogant nor soft and humble. Nor is it anything in between. It is a Vikorn knock, the kind no one ignores.

  “Can you go, darling?” Chanya says. “I don’t feel so good.”

  So much for equality. The first sign of trouble and she hides behind her man. “No,” I say, “I’m already stoned, terrified, catatonic, and hysterical at the same time. I’m staying in bed. Anyway, in bed is exactly how he should find me.”

  She goes to the door and opens it. It is a feature of our luxurious apartment that I can see the front door from the bed; see Chanya back away while giving Vikorn the high wai; see his polite wai in return; notice how he hardly seems to notice her, prowls toward me. He is about three inches shorter than me, but he fills the hovel like a giant. Chanya has retreated to a corner, half bent over in some kind of groveling posture.

  Now he is staring down at me. He is accompanied by two armed cops in uniform who have been with him long
enough to be telepathically sensitive to his every gesture. When he jerks his chin, they retreat and close the front and only door behind them. Chanya draws up our only chair for him to sit on. She backs away as soon as she has placed it next to the mattress.

  “How stoned is he?” Vikorn snaps without sitting and without looking at her.

  “He’s coming down.”

  “Has he asked for sex yet?”

  “Yes,” in the tone of a witness for the prosecution, “about ten minutes ago.”

  “When did he last smoke?”

  “About two and a half hours ago.”

  “So he got out of his skull as usual, did a tour of Andromeda, then the blood sank back down to his balls, and he wanted to screw you?”

  “Yes.”

  He examines me. “You look awful,” my Colonel says. “What’s the matter? Wouldn’t she fuck you? I can’t say I blame her.”

  “Everything’s the matter. Especially the eyeballs.” I look at him. “I hate you for making me sell them. And I want to know about those bodies in Phuket-did you do it as part of your election strategy? Yes or no? I don’t care if you kill me, I’m not working for you anymore.”

  He rubs his jaw, decides to sit on the chair, then makes an almost imperceptible jerk of the chin toward Chanya behind him. I say, “Darling, why don’t you get yourself a hairdo?” Chanya never has hairdos, but she says, “Oh, yes, oh thank you, darling,” and gives me a high wai in the mode of dutiful wives of yesteryear, then leaves the house in a rush.

  Vikorn has stood up and is watching her disappear down the soi; now he turns to stare at me. “Suppose I told you I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Who did it.”

  “Don’t know? What kind of godfather are you? You’re supposed to know even if you didn’t order it yourself.”

  “Aren’t you taking everything a little too seriously, Sonchai?”

  “What, the eyeballs? What can be more serious than a thousand human eyeballs staring at you resentfully every time you close your own? Oh yes, you can still see with yours, you can open and close your eyelids, aren’t you the lucky one! That’s what they say.”

  Vikorn has never had a hallucination in his life, so my state is exotic to him. He frowns in concentration. “Really? They talk to you?”

  “All the time.”

  “What language do they use?”

  “What language? Thai, of course.”

  “But none of those eyeballs were Thai. They were mostly Korean.”

  “From the North?”

  “North, South, what’s the diff? They’re more likely to speak Korean than Thai, aren’t they?”

  “How would you know? They don’t talk to you.”

  He pauses to look at me for a moment, he seems to hesitate, then asks, “What’s it like to be loony? I’ve always wanted to know.”

  “I’m not loony. I’m suffering from aftershock. It can kill-there are farang statistics.”

  “People in shock don’t hold conversations with eyeballs.”

  The discussion seems to have reached a wall. Vikorn turns away to look out the window, then examines the room for a moment. His eyes come to rest on Chanya’s generic computer, her old printer, tubular steel chair, and collapsible desk. After a few beats I say, “Come on. You can tell me, whodunit? Was it Zinna?”

  Vikorn shakes his head. “Unclear. That’s the problem. I need something to go on.” He shakes his head again and repeats, “That’s the problem.” He looks me in the eye. “Zinna’s even more psycho than you. He comes out with threats that make even my blood curdle. Then the next day he’s in a different mood, quiet as a kitten, keen to make peace. That’s queer love for you. I’ve never understood it, the way they get so intense-how can you be so hung up about another man’s hairy asshole? You surf the Net-what’s the explanation?”

  It’s not a real question. I don’t reply. He goes to the window that looks out onto the street where his cop car is parked. “Policing,” he says to the glass, then turns to me. “You think you’ve got it tough. You don’t have any idea how it was when I joined the force. The whole cake was divided down to the last crumb. The big boss got seventy percent, and the portions got smaller as you descended the totem pole. I got maybe half a crumb. And I was damned grateful for that.” He prowls back to the chair, holds it by the back. “And no complaining. You learned to keep your mouth shut at all times- you wouldn’t have survived the first week.”

  He sighs. “You see, what nobody tells you about capitalism is that it’s warlordism in disguise. That leaves the only job in the jungle worth having as apex feeder-the rest is slavery at various levels of discomfort. Socially, psychologically, we’re still in the rain forest. I feel sorry for you, but I didn’t design the system, I simply learned to win in it.” He sighs again. “I think I’ve tolerated you because you’re the opposite to me. Sometimes I don’t think you’re interested in survival at all-then the next thing you’re in bed sucking your thumb, thinking you’re scared shitless. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  “What kind of question is that? I know if I’m scared or not, don’t I?”

  “No. I’ve seen you in firefights when you didn’t even break a sweat. Bad men don’t scare you. What scares you is the thought you might not be on the side of the angels. I think you’re staging this whole drama because you fear for your karma.”

  “How could anyone work for you and not fear for their karma?”

  “Easy. You stop believing in karma.”

  “An unstructured, cause-free universe where evil always prevails?”

  “Now you’re sounding like a grown-up.”

  Time passes. We stare at each other for a moment; then when that becomes embarrassing, we look away. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Sorry for what?”

  “That I let you get away without the full initiation. Maybe it’s because you’re half farang, so you won’t get promotion anyway-what was the point?”

  “The point of what?”

  “Making you see.” He rubs his jaw. “The rule of law is just another piece of farang hypocrisy-a piece of theater designed to dazzle the masses while the movers and shakers clean up. As a cop, you are expected to participate in this theater. That’s your real job-play the game as if it’s real.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “But nobody can stop you from writing your own script. That’s all we have, Sonchai. Our real privilege as cops is that now and then we get to write the screenplay. Any cop who doesn’t grab the chance while he has it…” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

  “That’s what you’re using me for, to clean up?”

  He gives me one of his wise-old-man looks, even makes his eyes twinkle. “You know what my own mentor told me, after I’d seen a few things that scared me? I was a lot younger than you. He said, ‘Think about it. What is the easiest crime in the world to solve?’ ”

  The Colonel stops strategically. I say, “Okay, okay, I’m hooked. What is the easiest crime in the world to solve?”

  “The kind you plan yourself,” Vikorn says. He puts a hand on my shoulder and chuckles as he pats me. “That’s policing. He said he got it from the British. What did they do when they wanted to impose law and order in India? They invented Thugees. Amazing. You invent a massive crime wave, then you get the kudos for suppressing it, and you end up with a docile populace and a few thousand dead down-and-outs. That’s real policing.”