Vulture Peak sj-5

by John Burdett

  We are standing together at the bow. The clerk’s eyes are gleaming around the pupils but smeared at the edges. There is a kind of despair in his tone, which is nonetheless triumphant. “See, I didn’t need to say it. For once I didn’t need even to hint. She saw it in me.”

  “Saw what?”

  “That I am the reincarnation of Zheng He, of course.”

  I look at him. For a second I see him through his own eyes: gathered behind him the greatest fleet the ancient world ever saw-probably the greatest fleet that was ever assembled before World War II. Lilly would have known about the clerk’s Zheng He fantasy from talking to Freddie. “Of course you are.”

  “Oh, you can say that because you already know. But she saw it, without any prompting, d’you see? When a stranger recognizes your true nature, it’s so liberating. It’s a final proof.”

  “Final proof? But you’re not entirely sure you’ve done the right thing! You’re on the horns of a dilemma. Did you commit the greatest stupidity in the history of the world, namely let some sadistic, criminal-minded bitch talk you into having your balls and penis amputated, just so she has a new toy to play with for a moment before she chucks it in the trash? Or does that other, magical world really exist, the one you always longed for, the one she herself understands so well because that’s where she lives most of the time? The world where Zheng He still rules, no?”

  He is staring at me in horror. “Chucks it in the trash?” He has pressed his hands against both ears. The opium is still poisoning my blood, causing me to turn on him. I think I understand Lilly. The clerk is so completely lost, so utterly manipulable-I expect he triggered in her a primeval response to destroy. I too find contempt taking over. “But it was more than just your cock she wanted. She has a whole room full of men’s embalmed dicks she uses as dildos-it’s how she gets her thrills. Your manhood was just the icing on the cake. What she wanted was a whole castle. You got her Vulture Peak.”

  I think I have delivered an overdose of reality. The clerk’s brain seems to scramble. He stares at me and blinks, then says, “Yes. I got her Vulture Peak. That’s true.”

  “Want to tell me how it went?”

  He sags against the outside of the wheelhouse, inhales. “It all started because Freddie needed a new liver and sent an e-mail to someone called Dr. Gray. Lilly Yip appeared. She spoke Thai and a lot of other languages. Of course, she saw I was katoey. And she saw I’d not yet had the operation. She seemed to understand craving. Somehow my whole focus was on that operation. I don’t even know why, she just led me into this mind-set: I had to be released from being male. That was my only way out.”

  “So you both had reasons to bond. She offered the full katoey fantasy trip, including the operation, probably free of charge, and opium for life. In return you would help her screw the old man for more than half his fortune, and you would procure for her the most fabulous property in Phuket-somehow. What did you do?”

  “Nothing very much. The place was already owned by Hong Kong Chinese. I happened to know who the real owner was-and the ghost shareholders here in Thailand.”

  “She must have wanted the property quite badly, to go to that kind of trouble.”

  “She did, but it wasn’t really for her. It was for some conglomerate in China-a group she was involved with. And there was a Thai army general involved.”

  “Did she say who?”

  “The general? No, never.”

  “The Chinese conglomerate?”

  “There was a government ministry, and some banks too. They were some kind of lobby group. Lilly Yip seemed to need to keep them charmed. You know, entertaining your most valued clients. That’s why it had to be the biggest palace on the island-a face thing. Actually, she’s right, there isn’t another property like that-probably isn’t another one in Thailand.”

  “But that mansion, that’s where Freddie woke up after his operation. You must have moved pretty quick.”

  “As I said, I knew the owner at the time. I was a clerk in the land office. I knew how to process a real estate purchase in an hour if I needed to. She’d already bought the place and owned it for more than a year before everything was ready for Freddie’s transplant.”

  When I look into the clerk’s smeared eyes, I see that exactly the same thing is happening to him as happened to me just now: an opium flashback, a sensation not of memory but of displacement in time: for a second I was nine years old again, and Nong was young and sexy, pulling out all the stops for one of her johns somewhere in France or Germany. (There were horse chestnut trees, empty streets black from rain, and old European houses built of stone that looked so solid. A strange light that had no origin permeating everything.)

  Seeing the clerk lose control of his mind in the same way, I pounce. “But she included you in the house activities-she must have done. She had turned you into her best friend. No, let’s put it another way: she had made herself your only friend, because she understood you so much better than Freddie did. Freddie is a useful sugar daddy but has no depth. The anguish of being alive is something he drowned with booze years ago-like a lot of Brits, he is just one long alcoholic escape trip. But you-yes, it would have been an important part of her plan to include you, to make you an intimate. Otherwise you might have reverted to katoey jealousy and tried to bring her down. You do have that vicious katoey thing, don’t you? And let’s face it, you’ve never been a man with a big social life.”

  “But I’m not a man,” he says, “I don’t need big face. I don’t need a social life.”

  “But you need to be understood. We all do. For you, it must have been intriguing and terrifying.”

  “What?”

  “To be understood by a woman, perhaps for the first time in your life.”

  Truth can be a radical interrogation technique, and I’m not sure this clerk will survive. He is grinding his jaw and seems on the point of tears. I think I’ve pushed as far as I dare and give him time. He stares and stares out to sea, as if the answer lies there. Finally, he starts to spill his guts.

  “She is very skillful with the fin. She prepares the pipe with exactly the amount for the effect she wants. We became intimate very quickly-I don’t mean sex, I mean something much deeper than that. ‘Soul fucking,’ she called it. I was pleased and flattered that such a woman would take an interest in me, even though I knew she had reasons. She had a way of using the fin to create a landscape. She introduced certain magic phrases when we were high, happy words like ‘When we’re totally free,’ and ‘Are you as delighted as I am to have found a soul mate?’ The best was ‘I understand you, Khun Sally-O. I don’t like sex either, it’s a bad joke. So much nicer to hold hands and be friends.’ ” He lets a couple of beats pass. “Pathetic, no? Not the sort of thing anyone would fall for without opium, right?” He sighs. “But fantasy is addictive. You know what she told me once? That she could only take about one hour of reality every day. The world was just too harsh. I can’t tell you how wonderful it felt, to have met someone-a woman of all things-who understood me that well. Me.”

  I let him stare out to sea for five minutes, then say softly, “Tell me what goes on at the house. What happens at Vulture Peak, Sally-O?” I’m afraid my use of his stage name might be too dramatic, too obvious. Tears appear at the corners of his eyes, but he seems to have regained some control.

  “You’re right, she was using me all along, wasn’t she? Not a word, not a gesture, not a single second when she was not working me like a cheap whistle, right?” He gives a great heaving sigh. “I know you think I’m just the biggest sucker in the world, a total loser who let a female demon persuade him to have his dick cut off, but it’s not that simple. There was something else.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She can divide herself in two.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just like some Himalayan mystic, she can be in two places at the same time. She only did it to me once. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a thousand.”

  “Tell me
.”

  “It was very soon after the operation. She invited me up to Vulture Peak. She had the opium pipe already laid out. Maybe you can understand what that means to a smoker. You enter a room where there is a pipe laid out with opium-that means you enter a sacred place, a temple, an Aladdin’s cave in which anything can happen. I was still very weak, and of course there was that hole between my legs that threatened to totally destroy my mind. And we smoked.” He chokes for a moment, coughs, looks away.

  When he looks back his eyes are streaming. “She’d already had it embalmed. Cock and balls, the whole set. Somehow she’d made my poor cock twice the size it used to be when erect. I wouldn’t have believed it was mine if not for the birthmark on the tip. I guess she injected some clever embalming solution that set like stiff plastic.” He suddenly looks directly into my eyes. “She took it out of a special case she’d had made for it, like a jewelry case. She said, ‘Look, I can enjoy you whenever I want now. Your flesh has become my flesh. We are one.’ ”

  I blink. “She used it?”

  “Yes. She used it in front of me,” he sobs. “Even though I was high on the opium, I knew she was doing that. I mean I knew I wasn’t dreaming it. Then she left me, took my cock with her. I’m not sure what happened next. I found myself wandering around the house, looking for my cock and balls. I went into one of the bedrooms and found two of them sharing my dick. I mean there were two identical Lilly Yips. They were naked and both looked up at me at the same time. She-they-had a look in her eyes of a woman bloated on lust, as if she and her double intended to grind away at my poor cock for days on end, like hyenas with a kill. That blew me away forever. I knew I was her slave from then on. She even said it, after we fell out: ‘So long as I have your dick, I have you.’ ”

  “You fell out?”

  He shrugs. “She grew bored with me. I had a tantrum, threatened to tell all I knew.” He stops, searches my face. “I thought she was going to have me snuffed. I’m sure she thought about it. Then she changed her mind. We have an arrangement. I keep my mouth shut, she supplies me with opium. She’s very regular. That boat boy you used, he brings it. That’s how he knew to charge five hundred baht for a short trip across the water. She’s got me under control. I guess I always was. You could say I’m a prisoner on parole with a location device. I’m allowed to be on the boat, at work, or with Freddie.” He shrugs. “But when I call her, she tells me I’m the luckiest man in the world, I get the best painkiller on the planet free of charge for life. I think she really doesn’t understand how I miss her. She is so exotic, so superior. No matter how she treats me, I know my fantasy life is safe with her. I’m a katoey, after all. A snob. And I find it difficult to keep my mouth shut when someone like you shows up and wants to talk.”

  I am thinking, as I am sure you are, DFR, Well, you’re not keeping your mouth shut now, are you? when I see the first boat moving from the jetty in the early light. I glance at the clerk.

  “Don’t worry. It’s just the boat boy, bringing me my fin. I sent an SMS this morning, after I saw you’d smoked the last of it.”

  “That’s a very efficient boat boy.”

  “He works for her, of course. She has that effect on anyone she employs. She pays double and expects one hundred percent loyalty and efficiency.” We stand and watch as the boy rows toward us. He has about three hundred yards to cover, and he rows with steady, manly strokes that extract the maximum efficiency from each pull. As he comes nearer, though, I’m reminded of the wide innocence of those young eyes, the flawless flesh of youth, the unwrinkled face, the bloom in both cheeks. He was an undemonstrative young fellow when he rowed me out last night; this morning finds him quite lively as he ships the oars and glides toward us.

  I’m surprised he seems to be aiming for the bow, though, where the clerk and I are standing, instead of the stern, where there is the platform to climb aboard. I guess he must get on well with the clerk, because he holds up a package in a black plastic bag and waves it. When I check the clerk’s face, though, it is incomprehending, as if the boy is behaving in some way eccentrically. I’m still too distracted by the remains of the opium dream to react quickly. The clerk understands quicker than I, but not quickly enough. The boy drops the black bag to reveal a big handgun, some kind of Magnum, which he points directly at the clerk.

  I did not detect a moment when those big innocent eyes lost their innocence; he simply aimed the way he had been trained to do; no doubt he telephoned Hong Kong for instructions after he brought me out last night. Lilly must have supplied him with some exotic bullets, because the one that hits the clerk in the throat causes his neck to explode. The bullet-I guess of the soft-nose exploding type-rips through his vertebrae; body and head hit the deck separately; the head rolls until it is stopped by the guardrail.

  The kid is so shocked that he has decapitated a man with one shot, he is experiencing a kind of extreme ecstasy that could go either way: he can no more come to terms with the headless corpse-or the separated head-than I can. I’m so absorbed by the transformation that is taking place before my eyes (a million years of torment before this boy gets another chance at the human form, and on some level he knows it) that I fail to consider that Lilly might have had plans for me too. After all, I’m the one he was talking to.

  The boy is recovering quickly, switching paranoid glances now, between me and the clerk’s remains; but I’m like a blinded deer: I do not see it coming until it’s too late. I watch in a paralysis of will while he raises the gun again and takes aim. There is nowhere to flee, the stairs that lead below are about six feet behind me. I know that if I panic and dash for cover, he will blow me away with that miniature cannon. And I left my gun downstairs with the opium pipe. But suppose I made it below, what then? I’d simply be a fish in a barrel for him to slaughter.

  The moment freezes. Vikorn was right when he said I’m a steady hand in a firefight, but this is different. I’m mesmerized. The kid’s reckless waste of his chance of personal evolution has totally thrown me. What, exactly, does a soul do when it has just condemned itself to hell? I’m locking eyes with the clerk and in some way his terror, confusion, pride, loss, and iron determination are penetrating my heart.

  Then something goes wrong with the kid’s body. He jerks, seems to experience a stab of unendurable pain, then jerks twice more before collapsing into the rowboat. I can see a pulsating fountain of blood spraying from his chest-pink, fresh from the lungs. Without thinking, I dive into the water. When I reach the rowboat, the kid has all but bled out. The best I can do is row back to the yacht, which I’m now sharing with two cadavers. Good morning, Phuket!

  Back at the bow I search the bay with my eyes, paying special attention to a stand of trees somewhat to the south, not far from the road or the clubhouse. My heart thumping, my head raging with poisoned monologues by demons who stayed behind after the opium dream, I take out my cell phone and look for Chan’s number.

  He answers on the first ring. “Hi, Third-World Cop. Still alive, huh?”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s say I know the Yips. What happened just now could not be prevented-or it could have been if you’d let me into your investigation a little more deeply. But you didn’t, so it had to be Plan B.”

  “You must be one hell of a shot.”

  “Not really. Modern technology, you know, a child could have done it.”

  “What d’you want to do now?”

  “I want to go for a jolly on a yacht in sunny Phuket,” Chan says in his best British accent. “D’yah think you could sail it as far as the jetty, old chap?”

  “I’m not doing a damned thing till you tell me how you knew where I was.”

  “Cell phone. When it comes to women, you are truly pathetic. That was a woman you broke cover for, wasn’t it? You just had to call her, didn’t you? She who has you by the balls. There is only one transmission tower in the part of Phuket where you are. When the backroom boys in Hong Kong told me you we
re in the vicinity of a yacht club, I just knew you had to be under Yip surveillance. Funny how that popular holiday destination keeps cropping up in this investigation, no?”

  “It’s where the original victims were butchered.”

  “Exactly.”

  As it happens, I know motorboats (Florida Keys; the john saw it in his interest to teach me how to work the controls on his sixty-foot floating knocking shop, so he could take Mum down below for boom-boom). The clerk left the keys in the ignition, so I fire up the twin turbo-charged diesel engines, roar across the bay, and (I blame the opium) nearly forget the most important lesson of all: boats don’t have brakes. I manage to steer away from the jetty just in time to avoid staving in the bow, although I deliver quite an impressive sideswipe by the stern before I’m able to slow everything down by reversing the engines. Call me Captain Pugwash. To recover dignity I jump onto the boards like a pro, with a line in my hand, which I slip over a bollard before sitting on it.

  Chan is wearing a short-sleeve shirt with tropical fruit all over, long walking shorts, and sandals. He is taller, slimmer, and fitter than I remember. In fact, he looks like an athlete as he strolls down the jetty with a large sports bag hanging from one shoulder.

  “I tied the rowboat up to the buoy with the kid’s cadaver still in it,” I explain. “I had to put the clerk’s head in the sink in the galley because it kept rolling around on deck, but I didn’t move the trunk except to shift it out of the way of the anchor chain.”

  Chan skips lightly aboard to check out the headless clerk. “I saved your life,” he says. “I’m not looking for credit, but isn’t there a word for that in your culture?”

  “Gatdanyu,” I say.

  “Meaning?”

  “Roughly speaking, ‘I owe you one all the way to death.’ ”

  “Good,” Chan says. “So let’s go pick up the kid and do some serious evidence destruction. Otherwise the cops on this island will hold you for a year, until their owners tell them to let you go.”