Vulture Peak sj-5

by John Burdett

“But?”

  “Well, since she was Hong Kong Chinese and spoke Mandarin fluently, and since the operation took place in China-you know what they do with the bodies of executed prisoners… I didn’t see what else it could be. I mean, the timing was all guaranteed months in advance, it wasn’t like a last-minute traffic accident, it was all a lot more relaxed and sedate than that.” He frowns. “I don’t have anything to reproach myself for-the poor bugger was going to croak anyway, right? It wasn’t as if they were killing him just for me. And if it hadn’t been me got the liver, it would have been someone else, right? Not necessarily more deserving than me, either. I’m not the only bloke in the world fucked up his liver with booze and mainlining, am I?”

  “Where in China did they take you?”

  Freddie frowns again. “I already said I don’t know. There was a lot of talk about Shanghai, so it could have been there.”

  “ ‘Could have been there’? What does that mean?”

  Freddie opens his hands. “I just don’t know. See, once you’ve paid up the first slice of the money, they go to work on you, get you ready for the operation.”

  “Who does?”

  “Actually, it was Lilly herself. She also sedated me before the flight. That way they could wheel me off the private plane into the operating theater-so I suppose it was near an airport. It was all done in the just-in-time-delivery style. Could have been any airport. I was totally out a couple of minutes after we got on the plane. I didn’t know anything until I woke up in Phuket with a new liver.”

  Lek and I exchange a glance. I enunciate the words slowly: “You-woke-up-in-Phuket?”

  Freddie doesn’t understand the heavy emphasis, shakes his head, and shrugs. “That was part of the deal. After the operation they had me recuperate at some fantastic mansion on a hill there.” He scratches an itch on his neck. “Actually, the mansion wasn’t too far from where Sal works, so I wondered if there was a connection.”

  “But the operation itself took place in China, maybe Shanghai?”

  “That’s what they told me. That’s what I paid for. It must have been China ’cause that’s where they executed the prisoner whose liver I’m using.”

  A pause. “Where is Sally-O now?”

  He stares as if the question is without meaning. “At work, of course.”

  I let my attention wander until it comes to rest on the oil painting. “Who’s that a portrait of?” I ask.

  Freddie turns to follow my gaze. “You don’t recognize her? That’s Sal in her ancient Chinese costume. She’s dressed as a court eunuch in the late Ming dynasty.”

  “Right. Why?”

  Freddie allows himself a shrug. “She’s katoey, love. They’re all a bit that way.”

  17

  I tell Lek I don’t want him to come with me to Phuket. He’s already had a minor standoff with the clerk, and anyway two cops together look official and intimidating. I’m sitting at my desk in the open-plan office, thinking of a way to placate Lek, who has decided to sulk, and trying to decide whether to just show up at the airport or book the ticket using the Internet, which could easily take longer than simply taking a cab to the airport, when my cell phone rings.

  “Hi, brother, how are things?” a male voice says in English with a Chinese accent.

  “Inspector Chan?”

  “The same. So, how’re things?”

  “Up and down. How about you?”

  “I’m on vacation-holiday, as the Brits say.”

  I pause to stare at my cell phone. “Really? Where?”

  “Oh, about a mile down the road from where you are now, assuming you’re at the station.”

  “You’re in Thailand?”

  “You’ve been taking intelligence-enhancing medication?”

  “But I mean, why?”

  “To see a couple of people, you being one of them.”

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a busy third-world policeman. I have to cope with an existential reality that would have you messing your diaper, Spoiled Brat Hong Kong Cop.”

  “Hey-”

  “I’m back in two days.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Not telling you.”

  The clerk’s weekday pad in Phuket is in a back street on the third floor of an apartment building, but he’s not in. I knock quite a few times and make all the usual checks for signs of life, but the place has a deserted feel. Of course he could be out on the town, but I doubt it. I remember those dark, unsocial eyes, the quick temper before he remembered he was a public servant-and the whole feel about him of a young man who might have had himself mutilated by mistake. It’s a cop’s hunch that sends me to the Phuket Yacht Club. I arrive at twilight with the last of the sun sinking like a plutonium rod in an asphalt sea. The bartender knows who I’m talking about.

  “He comes quite often to spend the night on his sponsor’s boat,” the barman tells me.

  “He takes care of it?”

  “No, there’s a full-time boat boy does that. He just comes and stays the night. If he’s not working the next day, he sits on it staring out to sea. He doesn’t like company.” The barman coughs. “He likes to dress up when he’s alone.”

  I have the barman point the boat out to me. It’s hard to see clearly in the dusk, although the cabin lights are on.

  “It’s a forty-foot twin-screw motor cruiser made in Taiwan. The farang used to have something really special, a two-masted schooner about seventy feet long. All teak and oak, a vintage sailboat that won some kind of competition in the thirties. Beautiful it was. Broke the old man’s heart when he had to sell it for some reason. Broke the katoey ’s heart too. Actually, he wasn’t a katoey at that stage-just a sad young man who thought he was a woman but wasn’t sure.”

  I stare at the dark and silent bay for a moment. I was expecting the boat to be tied up to a berth on a jetty. I didn’t expect it to be on a permanent anchorage. “How can I get out there?”

  “You can pay one of the boat boys to take you out on a skiff with an outboard-or you can get someone to row you out.” I suppose the last suggestion is somewhat exotic from the way he looks at me. Surely only a cop who wanted to retain the element of surprise, or an assassin, would go for the manual option.

  “Can you find someone to row me out? It’s such a beautiful evening, I don’t want to pollute it with noise.”

  He gives me a cynical glance and calls to someone behind the bar. A robust boy about sixteen years old appears. The barman speaks quickly in the local dialect, and the boy answers back in a low murmur. I don’t know how much he’s demanding, but it’s enough to make him shy.

  “He’ll do it for five hundred baht,” the barman says, clearly expecting me to bargain.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I say. Then I remember I have one more question for the barman. “Years ago, when the farang still owned the sailboat-did he have a lot of visitors? Boats like that are a great way of expanding your social life.”

  “Sure. Every weekend a small crowd would come out. Mostly they were middle-aged showbiz people from the U.K.-I understand he used to be some kind of pop singer. It changed over the years, fewer and fewer guests. In the end he had to hire crew just to grind the winches when he took the boat out. He was a good skipper, though, knew how to sail. Not easy with an old two-master like that.”

  “Were any of the people Chinese? I mean Chinese and female, who spoke Thai with a strong accent? Very elegant?”

  “Her? Why didn’t you say it was her you were interested in? Sure, she came out a couple of times. But it wasn’t to socialize, as far as I know. Not the sort of woman you forget once you’ve seen her.”

  “So what was it for?”

  “She’s the one who bought the sailboat.”

  I let a couple of beats pass to let that sink in. “She only came on her own? Not with another woman who looked like her?”

  “I only ever saw her alone.”

  “What did she do wi
th the boat? I don’t see any two-masted schooners out there right now.”

  “She had it shipped back to Hong Kong. That’s money. Any normal person would have hired crew to sail it over there for next to nothing, but she had it dismasted and packed onto a container ship. I didn’t see her as a sailor, myself.”

  It’s a beautiful evening to be on the water. The moon is not yet up, the first stars are twinkling, and the water is so calm the kid’s oar strokes are the only disturbance, save for small fish that jump now and then. The boy knows I declined an outboard motor because I want to retain the element of surprise, so he diminishes his efforts when we’re about a hundred yards from the yacht; he doesn’t want to give me any excuse to renegotiate his exorbitant fee. He lets the rowboat glide for the last twenty yards so we’re almost at a natural halt when we reach the swimming platform. There is no sign of life anywhere on the boat. The boy whispers, “When do you want to come back?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll flash a light or sound a horn-or maybe fire my gun.” Of course, he has seen my cop’s standard-issue pistol jammed down the back of my belt. He looks disappointed. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay next time you see me. I’m not likely to disappear, am I?”

  He guides the boat around to make it easy for me to step onto the swimming platform. I climb up and sit on one of the padded seats where pampered guests drink champagne and tell the host what a wonderful weekend they’re having. Just in case the clerk is in a homicidal mood, I’ve taken the gun out of the back of my pants. But there is still no sign of him, so I begin to wonder if the barman was wrong. Maybe the clerk slipped away sometime in the afternoon without being spotted and left the cabin lights on by mistake. If there were someone else on the vessel, they would have felt my arrival for sure.

  Like any cop, I check out the whole of the top deck: nobody. By now I’ve made the boat sway left and right simply by moving around; you’d expect anyone on board to notice. I open the sliding-glass door to the stairs that lead below. When I duck my head to check out the salon, I see a human figure sitting motionless in an upright chair that is screwed to the floor with brass bolts. The figure is in a gray one-piece gown with extremely wide and long sleeves and a black hat with earpieces that stick out horizontally. It’s the clerk, and I’m quite sure he is dead, because I’ve never seen anyone sit so stiffly for such a long period of time without breathing. He is also wearing a lot of makeup, mostly rouge and some kind of whitening cream. Up close, I see he has developed a thousand-mile stare. When I put my ear close to his nose, I hear the faintest inhalation and exhalation.

  Now I notice the long opium pipe lying on the table, plus an oil lamp that has gone out and some transparent plastic squares. A black oily substance is sandwiched between them. When I bend over to sniff, I am able to confirm the sweet aroma of opium. Now I’m really stuck. Opium is so exotic these days, I don’t think I’ve seen it in Bangkok since I was a cadet. I scratch my head. It’s not at all the sort of expensive old-world habit you would expect from a lowly clerk in the local civil service. Nor is it a habit generally acquired by katoeys, who, if they use drugs at all, usually go for meth or coke. But then, katoeys do not normally dress up in fifteenth-century Ming gowns and winter hats, especially not in the tropics.

  I fish out my cell phone to check the time. Seven forty-five P.M. The clerk would probably not have begun smoking until after dusk, so as not to be disturbed by boat boys and others. If so, that would give him about seven more hours of intoxication, on the basis that an opium high usually lasts about eight hours. I bob my head, trying to decide what to do. I don’t really want to stay on the boat for another five hours, but on the other hand the weakened psychological state of the clerk after the collapse of his dream world could be useful. I remember him as a possible hard nut with a ton of resentment of one kind or another, who might be impossible to interrogate when sober. I find a flashlight in the wheelhouse and wave it in an arc in the direction of the boat boy, who rows over. I give him his five hundred baht and tell him I might want him in the morning. Then I sit at the bow gazing at the sky as the first of Orion’s stars emerge with the moon.

  I’m feeling Zennish. I remember a tale of a Zen monk who gave up his only robe to a starving and shivering old woman and wished he could share the moon with her as well. It’s a great yarn, but it makes me feel ashamed because it’s only about fifteen minutes since I dismissed the boat boy along with my last chance of making land before morning, and already I’ve started to feel bored. Well, it’s more the fear of boredom: all those hours with nothing to do, no TV or radio, no podcasts, nothing to read, no one to talk to, no bright lights, no dope-only this silent and slow-rising moon.

  I spend about an hour moving from below to above to below again. The clerk remains catatonic with a beatific smile on his face. When the boredom reaches an intolerable level, I shine the flashlight in his eyes: oblivious pupils the size of pinheads, behind which a soul gorges on bliss. I’m jealous as hell of his nirvanic state. I decide to go back on deck, out of sight of temptation. Now I remember to call Chanya. “Honey, sorry, but I’m in Phuket again and-” She’s hung up.

  Okay, I’m giving in, but let it be recorded that I held out for a full two hours before I found the clerk’s aspirin, which I ground up, mixed with his opium, and smoked…

  Take my advice, DFR: don’t try it, so you’ll never know how good it is. It is amazing. I see my life pass before my eyes without any anguish attached. Everything takes place against a backdrop of eternity; I see behind the surface of things, which dissolve into serene vistas where transparent archetypes from the origin of consciousness wait at crossroads in the middle distance. Colors acquire the reality of living creatures: imagine a mode of consciousness called Scarlet. Now my mother, Nong, and I are looking into each other’s eyes, telling truths we’ve never told; it is as if our presiding angels have broken through and are talking to each other, silently. Now my long-lost father appears as a young GI, his face blackened for battle. He puts a hand on my shoulder and says, Sorry; I say, Don’t worry about it. The source of pain is blocked; isn’t this what one was looking for all along?

  Dawn. The opium dream melts, leaving only the sound of running water. Well, maybe it’s the clerk making the sound of running water in the galley below. I blink at a sky only recently illuminated: the mysteries of night still hang around in corners and cause everyday objects to glow sullenly.

  “Want some coffee?” the clerk calls.

  “Please.”

  Now he appears below, in a checked shirt and tight shorts: almost manly, no sign of the makeup. I find my eyes drifting to the area of his mutilated crotch, but catch myself just in time. He stares up at me. “You smoked my fin. ”

  “I got bored waiting. Want to report me to the cops?”

  He climbs the stairs and dumps a mug of coffee next to my elbow. Together we stare across the bay.

  A couple of buzzards are already circling high overhead. Nothing else is moving. “You know why I’m here?” I say. We are both surprised at how normal we sound; like me, the clerk still has one foot in another world.

  “Where do you want to start?” the clerk says.

  “Start with the opium. I’ve been a cop in Bangkok for more than fifteen years. I haven’t seen fin in all that time. Who taught you to smoke? Who gets it for you?”

  The clerk stares at the ever-increasing glow in the east; already sweat has started beading on my forehead. Close up, the clerk, also, is looking a little worse for wear: the grayness of flesh that is said to accompany his hobby.

  “ She did,” the clerk says. “You know who I mean.”

  “Do I?”

  “She took you to Monte Carlo. I had a great laugh about that.”

  I blink into the sun and look away, thinking I really need to change professions. In less than a second a low-ranking clerk has turned the tables on me. It’s quite a neat maneuver, too: if I say How did you know? then that’s an admission. If I deny, then he knows I’m not leveling w
ith him.

  “Who did?”

  He smirks at me. “You really want to play that game?”

  “Okay. A Chinese woman, probably calling herself Lilly. Lilly Yip.”

  “Correct.”

  “Now you.”

  The clerk wipes his face with the back of his hand. “She’s the one taught me to smoke opium,” he says. “Isn’t that what you asked?” Then he turns to look at me with eyes of infinite sadness. “She trapped me in a dream. I never would have cut it off otherwise. For ninety percent of katoeys, the operation is just a wish, a posture-we never really intend to go through with it. We simply need to be part of the conversation.”

  “She persuaded you to have your cock cut off? Why?”

  “She wanted it. As a trophy. She has hundreds.”

  “That’s all? Just to add it to her collection?”

  “The thrill of the hunt, Detective. Like a python lying in wait-she saw me and pounced. Her speed is incredible.” He shakes his head. “Don’t you see? It’s the ultimate proof of female power: to separate a man from his own cock. Ha, ha.”

  With the benefit of the narcotic, I see that the clerk is totally deranged. On the other hand, I have not emerged from that other universe myself; I am not yet restored to Social Man, more an electric storm of perception with no particular shape. “You’re still in shock? You can’t believe what has happened to you? But you wanted to be a katoey, that’s what you told your lover, Freddie? You wanted to experience your true nature as a woman?”

  “That’s what every katoey says. Like I just told you, only a tiny percentage go all the way-most are safe because they don’t have the dough. For the majority, gender reassignment is one fantastic topic of gossip that never fails. I told her I didn’t really have the courage, that I was just a little fantasizing mediocrity like everyone else. She advised me not to think like that. She told me that successes and heroes are simply people who follow their dreams. That’s why she introduced me to opium.”

  “Did she smoke it with you?”

  “Sometimes. She used to spin yarns about how wonderful life was going to be after the operation. She knew all the katoey buzzwords and could play on every fantasy. And she made me feel so important.”