by John Burdett
The room rate includes breakfast, which is laid out buffet style in a room downstairs. I’m the only guest up at this hour, and there are no staff. The coffee has been stewing all night on a hot plate, the imitation croissants are inedible, and the granola is old and stale.
I already paid for the room, so I’m a free man, walking along the beach at seven-thirty in the morning, wondering what Chanya did last night. I find a small cafe near the sea that serves real coffee and not-bad pain au chocolat. I ask the kid behind the bar if he knows anything about the mansions up on the hill-you can see the peak from this part of the beach, but not the houses-and he says no. He’s a Muslim from Pattani, speaks standard Thai with a strong accent, and has only been here a week. The cafe was the only business he could find that was hiring workers and didn’t sell alcohol. He confides how disgusted he is with farang decadence, especially the alcohol-and the sex. He’s never seen anything like it. He understands why Allah sent the tsunami seven years ago, but nobody seems to have got the message. What will Allah do next, destroy the whole island?
I check the clock on my cell phone. Eight-thirty. If I take it slowly, I’ll be at the police station around nine, when the two patrol cops start work.
I sense nervousness in the desk sergeant, which is not unusual. No provincial police force likes visits from the big city; very often the business models are incompatible. He cannot prevent me from seeing Constables Hel and Tak, but he is able to slow me down quite a bit. He says the interview room isn’t ready, and the two cops are preparing to go out on patrol, so when the interview room is ready, they won’t have much time for me, maybe ten minutes at best. I wonder if I should try to bribe him, then think better of it.
“Look, Sergeant,” I say in my best let’s-be-straight-about-this voice, “this isn’t just any old murder. It’s not sex-related, and it doesn’t look like a drugs vendetta. When the story breaks, it will be all over the world. Everyone who checks the news on their Internet account will see headlines like ‘MURDER AND ORGAN THEFT IN SUNNY PHUKET, THAILAND. ’ People very very high up in government will want to be sure the Phuket police have done all they can to cooperate.”
He’s about fifty and has been on the local force about thirty years, which in itself says survivor with no scruples. That character trait is confirmed by a sloe-eyed cynicism and a way of looking into the distance as if I’m a pain in the neck who has to be tolerated, but not for an unreasonable length of time. Now he turns his best blank stare onto me, lets a beat pass, then says, “Those houses have protection.” He shrugs. The shrug is a reference to my future: do I really want to challenge the protector of the houses-or not?
I stare back without saying anything. I guess I don’t always come across as a law enforcement fanatic, but I can get into the part when I need to. He shrugs again, picks up the desk telephone, speaks so softly I can’t hear what he says, then leads me to an interview room and tells me to wait. About five minutes later two cops walk in: overweight, dumb, and probably honest in the context of local cops. The sergeant is with them and looks like he intends to stay during the interview.
“If you don’t get the fuck out, I’ll say in my report that you refused to permit these men to speak freely,” I say in an even voice with a smile. That’s quite a no-frills challenge, and the atmosphere congeals. He gives me that look again, with a touch of pity in it this time, but he turns to leave the room and closes the door softly behind him.
Like simple men the world over, Constables Hel and Tak decide to obey whatever superior is standing before them at the present moment. They look at me politely and expectantly.
“Just tell me all you know about the mansion on Vulture Peak,” I say, already weary.
Hel and Tak look at each other. “It has protection,” Hel says and looks at Tak, who nods.
“But do you ever go up there?”
“Only when someone invites us.”
“About once a year.”
“Have you been this year?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“About five months ago.”
“What happens when you visit?”
“A Thai man, a manager, welcomes us. He’s very polite and makes us feel welcome.”
“A really nice guy.”
“Is he alone?”
“Twice he’s been alone, three times there have been people there.”
“What kind of people?”
“Chinese people.”
“We don’t know that.”
“No, we don’t know that. Looked like Chinese people.”
“What were they doing, the Chinese people?”
“Playing mahjong.”
“Not always mahjong.”
“Sometimes cards.”
“Gambling?”
“We don’t know that.”
“No, we don’t know that.”
I stare at them, then turn away to look out the window. It’s frustration, not technique, that suddenly turns me on my heels to stare them in the face, one by one. “Where does the protection come from?”
“The army,” Hel says, taken by surprise. Tak nudges his elbow. Hel stares at his partner, then looks scared.
“You don’t know that,” Tak says.
“Everybody knows it,” Hel says.
“General Zinna, by any chance?”
Hel and Tak lose the color from their cheeks and stare at me as at a condemned man. “We don’t know that,” they say in unison.
I’m in a cab on my way to the airport when I remember I’ve forgotten to call Chanya this morning. She could be feeling a tad insecure, with me all alone in Phuket-always assuming those rumors are untrue. There’s also something troubling me; I refer to a kind of telepathy between a man and woman who live together. In the back of my mind is that sweet shot of weakness I felt last night, that love-twinge which passed in the twinkling of an eye, but which remains as an afterthought. I have no intention of calling Om tonight or any night, but the memory of her sitting in that deck chair under the moon has yet to fade.
At exactly the moment I’m thinking that thought, my phone whooshes:
Hi there, you okay? C.
I text back: Sure. You?
Okay. Where did you stay last night?
Cheap hotel
Who with?
Alone
Don’t believe you
14
Hong Kong is the world’s biggest shopping mall, but the business of Hong Kong is China. Apart from a brief moment when the Chinese Communist Party was communist, it has always been so, from the nineteenth century, when Britain sent gunboats up the Pearl River to force opium down the lungs of twenty million Chinese, to the present day, when the gigantic container port of Kwai Chung sends goods to and receives goods from the mainland that, if spread out horizontally, would occupy a land area as vast as a medium-sized country, or if placed end to end would stretch around the world three times, depending on what statistic you prefer. After Mao’s revolution of 1949, when the great expat party that was Shanghai finally came to a bloody end, the remains of the Raj continued its largely alcoholic contribution to world culture right here in the former narcotics entrepot, where the fortunes of a few were made out of the misery of the millions. From the start in the 1840s, if you wanted to be a real player, what you needed was a place on the peak called Victoria from which you commuted by palanquin carried by a team of four coolies who, for reasons of survival, were inevitable end consumers of your honorable product, with a life expectancy of maybe thirty years if they were lucky. (The more one eats and drinks at the Hong Kong Club, the more of one’s dope Johnny Chinaman has to smoke so he can haul one up the hill afterward, ha, ha. Can’t go wrong, old boy.)
The opium has gone and there is a funicular railway, but the ultimate proof of wealth beyond measure remains a spread on the peak, where you can rely on a refreshing breeze when everyone else is sweating down on the shore, and a Scottish mist weaves romantically over the hills during winter. Naturally,
the first thing Lilly and Polly’s grandfather did when he arrived with his factory from Shanghai was to buy a home up here, and it seems the property has remained in the family ever since. It was not difficult to find all this out by making a few inquiries before I left Bangkok, but I’ve not yet decided whether to forewarn them of my arrival, or to simply turn up at the door. Of course, there’s no guarantee they will be at home: they could still be trading organs with les miserables at Lourdes, or playing roulette at Monte Carlo. I’m taking a flier, as usual.
The address I’ve been given involves taking a path called Stanley around the top of the peak. Naturally, those who live up here may use their cars to commute, but the rest of us have to walk. I find the house easily enough. There is an iron gate with a large red button to push and a microphone to speak into-and a speaker that says, “Yes?”
“Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep,” I announce.
Silence, then something clanks at the bottom of the iron gate, which begins to swing open so slowly, I am over the threshold long before it has reached the full compass of its aperture, whereupon it immediately starts to close again. I’m about twenty yards down a hundred-yard drive before I hear it clank shut. I ought to add that it’s a magnificent day up here on billionaire mountain, with almost zero humidity, a cerulean blue sky against which contrasts perfectly the dark foliage of bodi leaves, ferns, and beech. The house from this side looks like a long half-timbered bungalow in the Elizabethan style, but a glance over the hedge reveals that the top floor of the house must be no more than a kind of lobby, for living quarters, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and what looks like a Chinese garden in the Ming style spread out about twenty feet below.
I must confess I was expecting, in the circumstances, to be greeted by a maid; instead an arched door (English green oak) has been left fully open for me to stride through. Inside: an intimidating selection of classic Chinese blackwood furniture stands on gray flagstones: stern chairs with curved backs, a student’s bench at which would-be mandarins once knelt, a blanket trunk with mother-of-pearl inlay, a wardrobe in polished elm more than seven feet tall with great brass locks-and a collection of black-and-white photographs which form a family narrative that circumnavigates the long room. I would like to study the pictures, which from a quick glance seem to feature old Shanghai with the wealthy all dressed in top hats, monkey suits, and flowing dinner gowns and the poor in traditional Chinese peasant dress, but feel like an intruder who needs to identify himself before someone calls the police.
A second door, also oak and arched, also open, leads to a set of broad stone stairs that turn on themselves to land me on the ground floor. Corridors that must have been cut into the rock lead to the left and right, while an oval solarium of generous proportions, populated by a hundred varieties of orchid, invites me onward. The solarium is of the wrought-iron kind that reached a perfection of style a hundred years ago.
The main door is fitted with tinted glass, which throws a jolly collage of color onto the flagstones. I open it to emerge into the fresh air. The tennis court and swimming pool are on my left, the Ming garden with tiny humped stone bridges and trickling brooks on my right; the frozen psychosis of Hong Kong with its motherboard of steel and glass towers hums far below. At a marble table in the garden on the other side of the bridge, the Twins are sitting with a carafe of white wine and two glasses. One of them-I would not dare to guess which-is holding a revolver to her head while the other watches with considerable concentration. The one with the gun slowly squeezes the trigger until there is a click, then replaces it on the table. Jaw jutting, her sister now picks up the gun, holds it to her head, and slowly pulls the trigger until it clicks. She replaces the gun on the table. I am not surprised to note a sudden relaxation in the atmosphere, permitting them both to look up.
“Detective, what a surprise,” one of them-the last to fail to die-says. They smile.
“Tell me it wasn’t loaded,” I say as I approach.
By way of answer she hands me the gun. “This is what we call our shrine.”
When I spin the chamber, I see there is one cartridge in it. I look at the sisters, who raise their eyebrows. “It’s a blank, right?” The eyebrows rise higher. I align the cartridge with the trigger and point-it must be the boy in me-at the crystal carafe. I already know the answer by the way they have both moved their chairs back, but I fire anyway. There goes the crystal carafe, as the shot echoes over the mountain. The last of the Chablis dribbles over the marble.
Suddenly I need to sit down. One of the sisters drags up a chair. “Do you do this often?” I say.
“Only when it’s the maid’s day off,” one says. “That’s why there was no one to greet you at the door. Very sorry, appalling manners and all that-but as you see, we were in the middle of something exciting.”
Not for the first time in the company of these two, I am dragged into another world: surreal, exotic, rich, and mad. The scene is still playing in my mind: yes, the gun was loaded with a live shell; yes, each of them did raise it to her head and pull the trigger. But I still can’t believe it; I’m tempted to ask them to do it again.
“I don’t believe you play it every week. One of you would be dead by now.”
They exchange glances. “That’s true. You must be a good detective.”
Silence. Now one of them says, “So, which do you think I am, Lilly or Polly?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, neither do we,” they say in unison.
Nothing in my career as a cop, or as a human, has prepared me for this conversation. The beauty of the day here on the mountaintop, the ancient genius of the garden, the buzzards hanging in the air close to the peak, the sailboats and pleasure vessels in the harbor-it all seems to have taken on a darker hue, like a hallucination that has started to go wrong. “What do you mean, ‘Neither do we’?” I say.
One of them-I shall have to call her Lilly or I’ll go mad-makes a sulky face. “Sometimes I’m her and she’s me. It’s easy to get mixed up.”
“You’re a Buddhist,” Polly says. “You must know there’s no such thing as a self. Think of it: when you want to see yourself, you look in a mirror. You have a choice whether to look or not.”
“But with us the other is there all the time in a mirror that follows you around. The same but different,” Lilly says.
“It’s not at all unusual for twins to go homicidal and want to kill each other,” Polly explains.
“Oh,” I say.
“It’s a trick we discovered when we were teens. The Russian roulette. We both knew we would murder each other one day if we didn’t do something-so we used the gun.”
“It has a way of clearing the air.”
“Sure does,” I say. “You mean you were in the middle of an argument?”
“A serious one.”
“What about?”
They exchange a glance. “Livers and kidneys.”
“She bet five kidneys in a game of blackjack yesterday-”
“I did not. It was three kidneys.”
“You use human organs as betting chips?”
“We use commodities. Sometimes it’s gold, sometimes livers, sometimes kidneys, sometimes pig belly futures.”
“I wanted to talk about something else,” I say.
They look at me expectantly. I keep looking at the gun and the splinters of glass on the floor. I let too many beats pass and miss my cue, perhaps deliberately. Now that I’ve found the Twins, I realize that any meeting with them would be futile without more background.
Lilly says, “Let me show you around. We haven’t taken you on the standard tour yet.”
The other, Polly, remains at the table while Lilly and I climb the stairs to the top floor, where I came in. We start at the beginning of the photographic display, with a Chinese man in top hat and tails standing in a Chinese street that looks like circa 1930s. He is young, with a cigar in his hand and a shine in his eyes that promises a ruthless and successful future. “That’s Gra
ndfather. He was a very strong man-you can see it in his eyes. Strong men castrate their sons, a psychologist told us ages ago: that’s what Peter the Great did to his son. That’s what Grandfather did to Daddy. Daddy was an alcoholic and a gambler. Grandfather saw what a dead loss he was, so he put almost the whole of the property and his fortune in a trust a few years before he died. Daddy couldn’t touch it except for living expenses, otherwise he would have gambled it all away.
“It still is in trust, otherwise we would have gambled it all away. That old bastard gave us such a piddling allowance, we had to scrounge around for years and years until we discovered organ trafficking. We knew at once we were just made for it. Imagine what it does to your worldview when you can see profit in everyone you meet. We felt the same excitement Grandfather told us about, to be perfectly placed in an industry that’s about to take off.”
“What industry was he in?”
“Armaments. At the beginning of the Second World War.”
She gives me the big Chinese smile. Is she joking? Trying to scare me? Or is she just insane? Or-scariest of all-simply telling the truth? I see a world in which we size each other up not for sex appeal but for the resale value of our livers.
We stop in front of a cabinet in the same blackwood.
“Opium pipes?” I say. “With all the bits and pieces.” Behind the glass must be the most complete sets I’ve seen, each one a work of art. I missed them on the way in. “They’re exquisite,” I say.
“They’re called layouts. Each one includes two pipes laid on each side of the mother-of-pearl inlay. The bowls are made of Yixing clay. The miniature cupboard at the end is for the opium and whatever one used to thicken it, quite often just aspirin.”
“They look well used.”
“Mmm. Grandfather smoked every Friday night. He started in Shanghai, of course, and continued over here. In those days the British didn’t take it seriously, even though it was already illegal. He forbade my father to smoke it, though. He said it was harmless so long as you were strong enough to use it sparingly. So Daddy became an alcoholic instead. Do you think that was an improvement? To die from opium addiction is, of course, a disgusting death-but not as bad as coughing up your own liver.”