Vulture Peak sj-5

by John Burdett

  He extends an arm in order to point a finger directly at me and says, “Ha! You did. You went. Ha, ha, you fell for it. Now you’re pissed that you were not the only one. Ha, ha. They corrupted you in a heartbeat, ha, ha. Poor little Thai cop lives in a hovel and drives a clapped-out Toyota if he drives at all, dazzled by money and glamour-I’m assuming that black Amex is just on loan-from a wealthy superior perhaps who has a vested interest in the case? Now the Yips have you in the palms of their hands. Ha, ha. ”

  This guy sure knows how to irritate. I’ve never used soft-obnoxious as an interrogation technique myself, although I’ve heard of it. Just to spite him, I refuse to ask how many other men the Twins have taken to Monte Carlo over the years.

  “D’you want to know how many other men have fallen for that?”

  “No.”

  “Liar. I’ll tell you. I keep records. You are the last of at least five we know about.”

  “Were all the others Hong Kong cops?”

  He frowns and sits in his chair, puts his feet up on the desk. “No.”

  “But some were?”

  “One.”

  “Did he live in a hovel and drive a Toyota?”

  Chan stares at me. I know what the stare means because I’ve used it so many times myself. It means that if I don’t tell him something useful, or at least a piece of gossip worth repeating, he’ll hold me for the night out of pure spite. “I’m on a special assignment,” I confess.

  The phrase, hackneyed and overused though it is, seems to strike a chord in Chan. He raises his brows. “About time. That’s what I’ve been trying to get at since we picked you up.”

  “But I mean, it’s a Thai special assignment.”

  “Meaning? Don’t tell me, let me guess. Meaning illegal, not at all the sort of thing cops do, but something you have to do to lick the ass of your superior?” He waves a hand. “We study Thai police as an example of how not to do things. Now I’ve met you, I know why.”

  I have to make a choice. On the one hand, I really want to get back to Bangkok; on the other, if I tell all, I risk getting snuffed by Vikorn. But I really want to get back to Bangkok. “It’s to do with organ trafficking,” I say.

  To my surprise, Chan looks suddenly bored. “Really?”

  “You know that’s what they do?”

  “Sure, but they don’t do it in Hong Kong.” He has suddenly and totally lost interest-or is he faking? “How far have you got?”

  “Nowhere yet-I’m at the beginning.”

  “That’s why you’re here? Nothing else? No other dimensions to your investigation?”

  “What ‘other dimensions’ could there be?”

  “Not telling you.” Chan bites his thumbnail for a while. “D’you gamble?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Really? They say Thais are worse than Chinese. The milliondollar blackjack tables at Las Vegas are dominated by your people these days.”

  “The Thais who play at Vegas all have Chinese blood. They’re Chiu Chow, from Swatow. They run the economy.”

  Chan assesses me with his eyes. “And you? You’re half gweilo? A half-caste product of a GI on R amp;R from Vietnam and a Thai peasant?”

  “The GI was a peasant too, from the Midwest. I have pure blood.”

  The volatile Chan seems to have decided he likes me for saying that. As an interrogator myself, I can see he has made a decision of some sort. He has changed his tone and manner by about a hundred and eighty degrees and speaks almost gently when he nods at the map on his wall. It is of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, the New Territories, and the various islands that make up the Hong Kong SAR. Now he stands to walk up to it and points at a giant island at least twice the size of Hong Kong.

  “Lantao Island. Heard of it?”

  “Isn’t that where the airport is located?”

  “Correct. It’s where you landed. Personally, I find it mysterious the way Lantao Island has become important all over again, thanks to the airport.”

  “Why, what was it important for before?”

  “Opium storage. There were pontoons used as go-downs at all the western beaches-it’s closest to Macao and the Pearl River. They had square miles of pontoons where opium was stored. You see?”

  “Not really.”

  He is pointing at the jagged coastline of the island and showing how close it is to the mouth of the Pearl River. “The ships from India-Patna was the capital of opium-would unload onto the rafts, so smaller riverboats could take the product up into the heart of Canton.”

  I nod politely while scratching my jaw. Chan just doesn’t look like the kind to carry resentment for the colonial debt. Nor does any other Hong Kong Chinese I’ve ever met; in this former colony, at least, the symbiosis between races was deeply satisfying to both. The locals made even more dough out of Hong Kong than the colonizing Brits, from opium to coffins: most of the caskets used during the Vietnam War were made in Hong Kong.

  “Of course, like everything else in history, different generations have different interpretations. When I first heard about how grotesque the British narco empire was, I couldn’t believe it. Then, soon after I made inspector, a very gifted Chinese academic from the mainland enlightened me.”

  The inspector is watching me closely, like a man dropping hints incomprehensible to the recipient. I have not a clue where he is going. To be polite I say, “What did this historian tell you?”

  Chan screws up his eyes in a kind of concentration. “Oh, it wasn’t that he was interested in the human suffering angle. He wasn’t a historian. He was an economist.”

  He is waiting to see how I react, so I say, “An economist?”

  “Yes. He said think about it.”

  “Think about what?”

  “Think about why the British, who were quite fanatical Christians in those days, should have blackened their names and their souls for all time by becoming the biggest narcotics traffickers in the history of the world.”

  “So, what was the answer?”

  Chan loses interest in the map and concentrates on my face. “Suppose, in the logic of empire, they had no choice? Suppose that in their time-we’re talking about the early nineteenth century-there was just enough wealth and employment in China for, say, ten percent of the population. And most of the rest of the world, even working-class England, was in the same boat. The British were almost as addicted as the Chinese. You see, opium was even cheaper than gin. According to this economist, even the great Wilberforce, whom the Brits like to cite as the honorable Englishman who got slavery abolished, he too was an opium addict.” He pauses. “Looked at from that point of view, the opium trade was not so bad. It was a way of keeping twenty million unemployed men docile. As soon as opium was suppressed, China tore itself apart in revolution-and the U.K. lost its empire.”

  “A modern Chinese economist told you that?”

  “Yes, but only by way of illustration. After all, economists are there to forecast the future. See, his punch line was: the world economy has positioned itself in such a way that almost everyone is going to be unemployed by the middle of this century. The American sucker-consumer is now bankrupt for the next fifty years, and there’s no way Asians generally are going to waste their money en masse on toys like iPods-hoarding is hardwired in every head east of Suez. Americans are strange people. They allow themselves to be bled white by gangsters for generation after generation and call it freedom. But that blissful ignorance may be in its endgame. The consumer economy is already dead-what we’re experiencing right now is its wake. What do you think governments are going to use to keep everyone docile when the shit finally hits the fan?”

  “Surely not opium?”

  “No. Not opium. Opium is an ugly way of dying. How about cannabis? The Spanish used it in Spanish Morocco to keep the Riff tribesmen sedated. The best thing about it: young men delude themselves into believing they’re already war heroes. They don’t need to kill anyone.” He smiles. “When this economist came here and told a select group of
cadres that the PRC was thinking of legalizing it within the next decade, everyone left the room to make calls to Beijing, to get in on the ground floor with one of the consortiums. Imagine the value of a license that permits you to sell marijuana to a significant portion of two billion people. Salivation in floods from Shanghai to Lombard Street.” He pauses. “Of course, there will be other consequences of extreme poverty, worldwide.”

  It must be clear from my posture and my expression that I have no idea what he’s talking about. He makes a decision, smiles at the same time as he loses interest in me except perhaps as a distant colleague to whom he should show hospitality. He puts an arm around me as he leads me out of the station. “If you stay one more night, I can get you invited to a box in Happy Valley on the finish line for the Wednesday-night races.”

  “Would that involve gambling, by any chance?”

  We are in the police parking lot outside the station. He talks to a sergeant who seems to be running the cars. Chan makes a point of opening the back door of the cop car and says, “Remember, no one’s elected in Beijing. That means they have time to plan ahead. They have teams looking fifty, even a hundred years into the future. They have detailed economic and social models. And they don’t have democracy. They know what’s coming next.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like organs for sale on eBay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Bear that in mind next time you talk to the Yips.”

  “Okay.”

  “And tell me every damned thing you learn.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or forget about entering Hong Kong, or China, ever again.”

  “Okay.”

  Now my Chinese colleague makes an Elizabethan bow: “ ‘Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ ” He checks my incredulous expression. “See, Hong Kong was still a crown colony when I went to school. The Brits saw their culture as something to ram down the throats of wogs, chinks, and nignogs in far-flung colonies, so they could pretend to be improving instead of exploiting. Unselfishly, they kept very little of it for themselves. I know Shakespeare better than any Brit I ever met.”

  Now I’m in a Hong Kong police car racing to the airport. Once I’m in the terminal, I make a beeline for the computers that give free Internet access so long as you don’t take more than fifteen minutes. It’s takes less than one to access Wikipedia: Guanxi describes the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence, and is a central idea in Chinese society. In Western media, the pinyin romanization of this Chinese word is becoming more widely used instead of the two common translations-“connections” and “relationships”-as neither of those terms sufficiently reflects the wide cultural implications that guanxi describes. Closely related concepts include that of ganqing, a measure which reflects the depth of feeling within an interpersonal relationship; renqing, the moral obligation to maintain the relationship; and the idea of “face,” meaning social status, propriety, prestige, or more realistically a combination of all three… As articulated in the sociological works of leading Chinese academic Fei Xiaotong, the Chinese-in contrast to other societies-tend to see social relations in terms of networks rather than boxes. Hence, people are perceived as being “near” or “far” rather than “in” or “out.”

  I have over an hour to wait for my flight, so I find a seat and close my eyes to try to work out what it is that’s bothering me about the Filipina maid Maria. Something I left out, some subtle semaphore. I put the problem together with Chan’s insults about Thai poverty, and I see where I went wrong. I call her, and she answers on the third ring.

  “Maria, I hope this is not too late.”

  “Oh, no, sir. I am just in a taxi on my way home, so we can talk.”

  “Maria, would you trust me to send you a thousand Hong Kong dollars by Western Union? I have to apologize, you must have thought me very mean.”

  “Oh, no, sir. That’s okay, sir. We have a very high cost of living in Hong Kong, that is all.”

  “Where d’you want the money sent?”

  “To my mother in Oriental Mindoro, sir, care of the post office in our village. I think it better if I SMS on this number.”

  “Okay, I promise to send it tomorrow. Now, please, regarding the Twins, there’s something you left out, right? Why is there such hostility between them? Why do they want to kill each other? They are beautiful, healthy, HiSo, rich, have the very best of everything. It seems unnatural.”

  “Yes, sir, unnatural is certainly the word that comes to mind, sir. So far as I am aware, there are three schools of thought, sir.”

  “Okay.”

  “The first posits exposure to the nefarious practices of their grandfather, who enjoyed having rivals tortured to death in front of him. There are two strands to this hypothesis, the first being that the girls themselves witnessed such atrocities, the other, more subtly, suggesting that they inherited the old man’s sadistic gene.”

  “That’s school one?”

  “Yes, sir. The second school, inevitably perhaps in today’s fallen world, posits a rape/seduction by the father, who was a known pedophile.”

  “Ah! And the third?”

  “The third school, sir, takes this theme and adapts it to all that is known about them, their family, and the relationship with the father.”

  “Yes?”

  “According to the third school, sir, they quite callously calculated in their early teens that it would be to their advantage to seduce their father themselves. I think the leverage that would have accrued from such a strategy is obvious.”

  “Wow! So, Maria, which school do you bat for?”

  “All three, sir.”

  I pause. “All three?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, I am merely floating a hypothesis, but it seems to me to be consistent with the facts that they did indeed inherit the grandfather’s hunger for absolute power at any cost, plus a dastardly capacity to enjoy the sufferings of others. I think they also seduced their father, and that the father immediately became addicted to their attentions. Naturally, after that moment they held the balance of power in the family and could get away with literally anything. I think they blackmailed him for every indulgence they could dream up while he was alive. At the same time the guilt he experienced as a direct consequence of his fatal weakness drove him to drink. I think that also was a part of the diabolical strategy they had hit upon.”

  “Murder by forcing the victim into a slow suicide by alcohol?”

  “Exactly that, sir. On the other hand, I do believe the daughterly instinct remained present in a perverse and twisted way. They loved their father exactly for his weakness and indulgence, and each blames the other for his ugly death.”

  I let a few beats pass. An irrelevant but compelling question has floated into my head and will not go away. “Maria, if you don’t mind my asking-what level of education do you have?”

  “I have a master’s in private and public international law, sir, obtained from one of our distant learning institutions. It is the enduring regret of my life that I lack the wherewithal to set myself up in practice, but it is not for me to question the ways of the Lord.”

  “Ah! I’m sorry. I’m sure you’d make a fantastic lawyer.”

  “Thank you, sir. That is most kind.”

  “Suppose I send an extra thousand Hong Kong. You have a punch line worth a thousand bucks, perhaps?”

  She coughs. “They are cannibals, sir, and they use embalmed human penises, rendered tumescent by means of some kind of stiffening agent, as dildos.”

  I gulp. “Ah, what was that, Maria?”

  “I think you heard me, sir, and I will not repeat it. Please ensure you keep your side of our contract. Good night, sir.”

  I close the phone, then it whooshes: an SMS from Maria with her account details.

  I fell asleep on the plane and now we’re just coming in to land. The lethargy of total disorientation makes me drag my steps all the way to immigration, then cust
oms, where I snarled and flashed my cop’s ID, because they look as if they’re about to search me. In the cab on the way home, I loll in the backseat, where the latest radio reports of the Sukhumvit Rapist’s adventures penetrate my dormant brain: a young woman’s sobs and gulps fill the airways; at first they are indecipherable, only slowly the meaning of her words dawns on me: “No, he didn’t rape me… Yes, I think he was going to but a noise disturbed him… No, I don’t have any physical injuries… Why am I so distraught??? Because I was just this hour trapped in a dark alley by a seven-foot monster that looked like half-man half-monkey and it’s scared the living shit out of me, idiot.”

  15

  Lek is normally the most self-effacing of assistants, with the discretion of a trusted servant. When he feels he has served beyond the call of duty and craves recognition over and above the usual, however, he acquires the characteristics of a neglected wife. He ambushed me as I walked into the station and hasn’t stopped following me and talking for the past ten minutes:

  “Talk about footwork, oh Buddha, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve gone through the past two days when you were off shopping in Hong Kong. How you must have suffered, darling. I feel so sorry for you.”

  I arrive at my desk, pull back the chair, sit, and put my feet up on the desk while he stands beside me. “Tell me about it, Lek. What angle were you following up? I forget.”

  “Oh, he forgot. The maharaja of District Eight carelessly distributes duties, assigns tasks, and goes tiger hunting. You told me to check out the shareholders of the mansion in Phuket-you do remember Phuket, Vulture Peak? You know, the case?”

  I let him have my best patrician smile, the kind that sends a message of infinite tolerance for the intellectual shortcomings of slaves. “Tell me about the shareholders.”

  “Well of course, none of them are in Bangkok-that would have been just too easy, wouldn’t it? And when I checked out the registered home addresses, of course there are no telephone numbers.”

  “Where are the registered addresses?”

  “Each and every one of them in Isaan, darling. And I don’t mean urban Isaan, like Udon Thani or Khorat-oh no, nothing easy like that, I mean deep country Isaan, the kind of place that was genuine jungle with monkeys swinging from tree to tree about five minutes ago and even now is hardly more than shacks with corrugated roofs.”