Vulture Peak sj-5

by John Burdett

  When I reach the bathroom, I hear a voice coming from one of the stalls. When I stand outside the stall, I can hear Chan talking to some invisible person with passionate intensity. He’s speaking in Cantonese interspersed with English phrases like top secret, damn and blast, I’ll blow your fucking head off, terribly sorry old boy. I knock. He forces himself to silence for at least a minute, then continues with his monologue. When the man in the black suit enters, I explain that the inspector has recently taken his medication, and he’ll be fine in ten minutes. He takes fifteen before he emerges. He reestablishes dignity by ignoring me, steps up to the trough, and begins to pee. I take the hint, leave the bathroom, and wait for him by the glass door at the entrance to the cafe.

  While I’m waiting, I’m watching the crowd: everyone except me has adjusted to the reality out there: men, women, and children, all have mastered the art of cramped behavior. I think: a state that executes its own people, having presold their organs to the highest bidder-it’s like Moctezuma meets Margaret Thatcher. Or should we say that, thanks to the supreme power of the profit motive, state and antistate have become one? From Washington to New Delhi to Beijing we let gangsters bleed us white and the newspeak calls it freedom. Now that’s modern.

  Finally Chan arrives, and we open the door to brave the people, the humidity, and the heat. He doesn’t speak until the crowd forces us to come to a halt twenty yards down the street. “We’re all damaged,” the inspector says, still gray from his internal ordeal. “That’s why we’re here.”

  As soon as the plane lands in Bangkok, my phone bleeps (I grew tired of being whooshed and reverted to factory settings, in case you’re wondering DFR). It’s an SMS from Vikorn, so I take a cab straight to the station. I’m expecting to have to address the Colonel’s election committee, but when I arrive at his office, he’s alone. He is sitting behind his desk and jerks his chin at me to indicate that I should sit in the chair opposite. These and other clues, which I have absorbed with the instinct of a jungle animal in the half minute since I entered the room, tell me all I need to know about his state of mind. While capable of tyranny of the cruelest type, Vikorn learned long ago that the only way to survive at the top of the greasy pole is to make oneself into a humble, if strategic, listener, from time to time. With the Colonel this involves a bizarre form of role play wherein he stares at you with wide-eyed innocence, as if you were recounting the most important, fascinating, and informative crime story he has ever heard.

  At the end of my narrative he even adds an Isaan word which might be the equivalent of wow, crikey, or jeez, depending on which dialect you use. Now he stands and prowls to the window to stare at the cooked-food stalls, while somewhere deep in the brainstem he carefully analyzes my report and begins to reshape the case. After about five minutes he returns to his seat, where he rocks back and forth for another five minutes. Now he says. “So, it’s already all over China, this industry? Apart from the three cadavers in the morgue at Shanghai, you saw no other hard evidence?”

  “Not hard evidence as such. But that was a very upmarket condo-I mean, two little cops, only one of them local-in a multimillion-dollar condo in China; it looked liked the real thing. It looked serious. Why would they mislead me?”

  He thinks about it and nods. “Hm. And the Shanghai cop, this Sun Bin. He seems honest?”

  “Very. The kind of cop who martyrs himself for truth, sooner or later, whether he wants to or not. Couldn’t deceive to save his life. Like me.”

  Vikorn ignores the jibe, if that’s what it was. He pats the top of his head, normally a positive sign. Now his eyes are twinkling. “And somehow the Yips are facilitators, all over the country. How does it work?”

  “According to the Hong Kong cop, Inspector Chan, they purchase fresh cadavers for their farang clients and also make available premises for organ-transfer operations beyond Chinese jurisdiction, presumably for rich or influential Chinese who don’t trust their own medical system, while servicing their offshore clients on their own account.”

  He nods. Frowns. Rocks. Now he stands to prowl to the window again, shaking his head. “It’s all a matter of timing,” he mutters to himself. Finally he looks me between the eyes. “There’s still something you’re missing at that house. There must be.”

  “You want me to go down there again tomorrow?”

  He shakes his head. “Things are moving too fast-and there’s the election only a week or so away. Go now. Do not call me. Anything you see or hear, you keep to yourself until you’re back in this office. No phone calls. Got it?”

  “Do I at least have time to see my wife before I catch another plane?”

  “No. Waiting is part of what wives do. Go see her when you get back-after you’ve reported to me.”

  26

  I booked a seat on the next plane and took a cab to Vulture Peak. I don’t know why I decided to climb up the iron stairs instead of having the driver take me to the front door: a hunch, I guess. Well, it was a bad hunch. The place is deserted, and I might just as well have taken the taxi all the way to the mansion. I spend a couple of minutes checking out the garage, which is cut out of the rock; access to the house is by a set of stairs that lead up to the deck. The garage is empty, not only of cars but of everything except a red fire extinguisher.

  It’s a beautiful evening on suicide balcony. There are some boats far out with their navigation lights bobbing, and the moon is a little fatter; under the balcony there is a nice black void, from which slapping sounds emerge far below. If I had the guts, I would slip under the safety rail with my legs hanging over, close my eyes, and meditate on the relentless invitation to jump made by the slapping waves.

  Well, I do have the guts. There’s that little hole that seems to open up in the area of the solar plexus when you slip under safety rails-I’m sure you know what I mean, DFR-and you wonder if maybe you really are crazy. Then comes the realization that it would be a mistake to fall asleep or forget you are sitting above a hundred-foot drop. Then, if you are a meditator, you remind yourself that you’re going to die one day anyway and it’s part of the path to experience that reality.

  Sure enough, when I close my eyes I’m attacked by terror. It’s been a while since I did anything like this. I try again. Best to let the fear in gradually, take a good look at it, let the higher mind deal with it. Good. Now, what do I see? The clerk dead on the deck of his master’s boat, his blood splashed all over the teak, his head rolling. I slip back under the safety rail and pull on the handle of the big glass sliding door that leads to the vast lounge.

  I’m tactile: I like to feel my way around before I turn lights on. Anyway, there’s enough moonlight to see the outlines of the pools and the furniture-and two shadows sneaking down the hall to the front door, opening it silently, sliding through like ghosts, and closing it again. I run, stumble, fall, crack my knee on the floor, and make for the front door in a running limp, and fumble with the handle. By the time I’m outside, they have disappeared. I didn’t hear or see a car.

  Bad nerves cause me to fumble with my cell phone and my wallet where I keep the card with the heart. I listen to a recorded message in her soft tones. When I call the Chung King bar, I ask to speak to the mamasan, who says in a dry tone, “Om is not available.” It’s standard brothelspeak meaning The girl you want is with another client.

  I turn around to face the house. From the driveway it looks as if it has only one story, because the land falls away on the ocean side. The design is so much the Thai temple style, it could almost be a temple. There’s no light pollution on the Peak-everything is washed in moonlight. It’s quiet too. It’s entirely possible that a couple with reasons to keep their relationship secret have taken to meeting up here. Perhaps they heard the house was empty most of the time, parked their car by the seashore, and climbed up the back way, entering through the sliding door, like me. I imagine the man talking the girl into it and her pretending not to know what they would do when they arrived in the great mansion; but it doesn’
t fit. That was Om with her monster, or I’m a North Korean.

  Before I return to the house, I walk to the end of the driveway, where it meets a one-lane road glistening with tarmac of the expensive kind that includes flecks of granite. Now I can make out the other two houses that are part of the development. They are both in darkness. I wonder who owns them and why they never seem to be inhabited. Back in the mansion I find a bank of switches near the front door. There seem to be dozens of them, and for five minutes I have fun illuminating the pools without the side lights, side lights without the pools, the balcony without the house. Then I find the switch that turns on the serious lights that the cleaning staff need. Now the whole place is bathed in white neon, every flaw and defect clearly visible. But there are not many flaws-the place was very well put together by serious money. In the main bedroom all signs of death have been cleaned up by the forensic team. The white sheet covers the gigantic bed without any sign of recent frolicking bodies. The same is true of the beds in the other bedrooms.

  The maid’s room, though, at the far end of the house near the road, is a different matter: a small narrow bed with the sheets almost pulled off, a half-drunk can of beer, a glass with water and a smudge of lipstick. Odd, with so many grand bedrooms with grand beds to choose from, that a romantic couple should choose this little room-except that it’s as far away from the scene of the crime as it’s possible to be. And Thai girls are very superstitious. But in that case, why come to this house at all?

  Proximity to sex and death has started a new continuum, which proves a relentless driver. I forget Vikorn and call a cab.

  Down on the main street in Patong, business is booming. It seems a few more jumbos carrying a few more thousand tourists with an overabundance of single men have landed at Krung Thep in the past few days, with a sizable number of the passengers making straight for Phuket. The snake charmers are charming the snakes with added gusto, the katoeys are even more extravagantly made up, and halfway down the street one of the larger bars has set up a Muay Thai boxing ring where two battered fighters are slugging it out-or pretending to: no need to throw or take any serious kicks for a bunch of foreigners who don’t understand what they’re looking at.

  In the Chung King I have to squeeze between girls and clients to reach the bar. I don’t hold out any hope that Om will be here, but I ask anyway. This time the mamasan smiles: “She’s just arrived. Over there.” She points. Om is in a very short skirt with a skimpy silk blouse tied under her breasts that looks like it would fall open with a single tug; I’m pretty sure she’s not wearing a bra. She is talking to a tall farang, her body language restrained although the smile is as seductive as usual. “He’s not a regular,” the mamasan says. “D’you want me to call her over?”

  I do not say You bet, but she gets the picture. I’m surprised she takes the trouble to squeeze between bodies to reach Om and whisper a few words in her ear. Om turns immediately and smiles at me across the room. All this may not sound strange, DFR, but it is; my upbringing makes me abnormally sensitive to breaches of brothel etiquette. When Om arrives she puts a hand on my shoulder. I cannot resist placing one on her hip. Inexplicably we behave like old lovers, delighted to have come across each other again after a long break. I’m feeling bewitched when I say “I, I, ah-” and blush.

  She smiles. “D’you want to pay my bar fine?”

  It hadn’t crossed my mind, but of course it’s the obvious thing to do. If I pay her bar fine I own her for the rest of the evening. I can do what I like with her. I can even interrogate her. I say, “Yes.”

  She disappears for a moment to bring me a bill on a silver plate. I throw a thousand baht onto the plate without looking at her and wait. Ten minutes later she’s in jeans and T-shirt when she brings me my change. Now I can hardly believe I’m walking down the main street with her, holding her hand. I can’t believe how good it feels. How right.

  “I have to talk to you,” I say, after we’ve watched the Muay Thai for a while.

  “D’you want to take me back to Bangkok?”

  “The beach will do.”

  She makes a little pout of disappointment. When we reach the beach, we sit in the same chairs as before, looking out to sea. She waits. I ask for a cigarette. My hand is shaking a bit when I take it and let her light it. I remain silent for a long moment to give the impression of being in control. “Just tell me where you were earlier this evening.”

  She feigns surprise. “This evening? I’ve been-”

  “Don’t,” I say, “don’t spoil it.”

  “Spoil what?”

  “Your beautiful face with a lie,” I say with more tenderness than I intended and, surprised, experience one hell of a hard-on.

  She takes a long toke on her cigarette. “Where do you think I’ve been?”

  “Up on Vulture Peak. With a client.”

  She turns away to blow smoke into the black night. “Yes.”

  I take five minutes to reply. “Who was the client?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Manu.”

  She shrugs.

  “You knew it was me up there when you ran away, didn’t you?”

  A nervous toke on the cigarette. “I guessed. Who else would it have been?”

  “You know I can arrest you?”

  “For what?”

  “Just about anything, from breaking into a house, violating a crime scene, to suspicion of murder-a triple murder. An atrocity of the worst imaginable kind.”

  She shocks me by bursting into laughter, then recovers.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You have protection?”

  “Yes.”

  “The army?”

  She is quiet for a long time. Finally she says, “Detective, get out of Phuket. This isn’t Bangkok. Nobody here will take you seriously. It was I who told the mamasan that if you came tonight, she was to let me know immediately. I like you. Maybe I feel about you the same way you feel about me. That’s why I’m trying to save your life. There’s a rumor going round that someone was murdered-a clerk from the land registry.”

  “So?”

  “There are people who want to know who did it, and they’re not cops who can be bribed.”

  I let that pass and go back to her earlier sentence. “How do you know how I feel about you? You hardly know me.”

  “I think I know men. Get out of here. Don’t stay the night. Go back to your wife. If you can’t get a flight, take a cab to Surat Thani and stay the night there. You have no idea how big this is. I haven’t told anyone that you were up at that house tonight. But-”

  “But he will?”

  She lets the moment hang, then changes tack. “So what is this all about? I thought it was a murder investigation? So, the case is solved. You know who did it, because I told you.”

  I look away down the beach. “I suppose it’s because you’re a professional you guessed I’m married?” She doesn’t answer.

  I’m trying to puzzle it out, sending all the conflicting information into the great reservoir of consciousness the Buddhist theorists talk about.

  It works. After a few minutes I think I have it. “You go to temple a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re devout?”

  “I’m a whore.”

  “But you take the Dharma seriously?” She doesn’t answer. “You would do anything, including screw me for free, so as not to have my death burdening your karma? But it is unusual for anyone to think like that-unless there are other deaths weighing on your conscience. Of course, if you were dragged into the organ-trafficking business, somehow, against your will perhaps…”

  She’s quiet for a long while. She seems depressed. “Please leave Phuket tonight.” She stands and walks away.

  I sit there for a few minutes, thinking, then give a good long sigh. I haul myself up from the chair and make my way to the main street. When I see a cab, I hail him and, standing in the road feeling a little theatrical, tell him in a loud voice to get me to
the airport immediately. When we’re out of the main street, though, I change my mind. “Take me up to Golden Goose temple,” I tell him.

  “I can’t take you all the way up. You have to climb the last half mile.”

  “I know.”

  It seems like a long shot, but really it isn’t. Of course, Buddhism is a science of the mind, so in theory it doesn’t matter where you worship. It doesn’t matter if you worship at all, so long as you follow the path. But I know sixty million Buddhists who don’t think that way. Not a believer, from lowly farmwives to aristocrats, who doesn’t have their favorite power center, that special temple that has always brought them luck, that particular monk who seems more enlightened than the rest.

  The Golden Goose mountain is one of those places that have probably been sacred to humans for as long as there have been humans. I bet before Buddhism it was the center of an animist cult, and before that they probably sacrificed people up there. It’s just such a perfect takeoff spot for the other side. And it happens to be held in respect by many of the ladies who work the night and need somewhere to go now and then to cleanse themselves.

  The cab drops me at the end of the road, and I find the steps that lead up. It must be about one in the morning by now: the moon has completed more than half its transit. I’m tired, though, and the steps are steep. When I reach the doors of the temple, they are locked, but an old man is on guard, which is to say awake on a mat under an awning. I tell him I’m a former monk in need and give him a few hundred baht. He opens the gate and shows me a kuti, a monk’s shack on stilts, which is empty, probably because it’s the most decrepit they have. He says he’ll tell the abbot about me in the morning.