Vulture Peak sj-5

by John Burdett

  I fall asleep on the bamboo floor of the kuti and wake up before dawn to the sounds of monks moving around. I find the temple building itself and wait at the back until it is full of saffron-robed men sitting on their ankles, like me. Soon we are all roaring out the “Homage to the Buddha” as if it’s the first day on earth. For an instant I’m young, innocent, and high. When the monks have all gone on their alms rounds, I ask to see the abbot. When I describe Om, he knows who I’m talking about.

  “She’s the real thing,” he tells me. “She comes here whenever she can and meditates. I try to persuade her to become a maichi, a nun, but she says she is her family’s only breadwinner, she can’t just leave them to starve. I tell you, that woman has the Buddha in her more than most of my monks.”

  “Does she talk to you?”

  “About herself and her troubles? No, not at all. I have to drag it out of her. Even then she never complains. Like I tell you, she’s the real thing.”

  I ask him about a certain day or night last month. He doesn’t want to answer at first, but eventually he agrees that he has seen her upset once or twice. “Life isn’t easy for anyone, especially the spiritually awakened.”

  To keep the conversation going, I ask him about farang. His temple has become world famous and is mentioned in all the guidebooks. He rolls his eyes. “I never know where to start. They’re so programmed by materialism, they think they want enlightenment, when all they’re really looking for is a new kind of gratification, a thrill they can’t get from a pill or a bottle or a video game. When I try to explain that strong emotion is inherently unreliable and isn’t what the Buddha meant when he referred to the heart, they think I’m being cruel. Thai monks may not be what they were, but they still have the perspective. For farang I despair. Hardly a one of them I meet who has a hope of being reborn into the human form. I see sheep and dogs of the future in designer T-shirts climbing up and down this mountain, getting in and out of the tourist buses.”

  “They’re stuck in Aristotelian logic: ‘A cannot be not-A.’ ”

  “Tell me about it! The discovery of nirvana is the psychological equivalent of the invention of zero but vastly more important. Think of where mathematics was before zero, and you have the level of mental development of the West: good/bad, right/left, profit/loss, heaven/hell, us/them, me/you. It’s like counting with Roman numerals.”

  I tell him about my time in a monastery a long time ago, when I was in my teens. My abbot was one of the most respected, and strict, in Thailand.

  He shakes his head. “If I were to behave like that today, no monk would ordain with me. Everyone has gone soft. Can you believe there are abbots who spend fortunes on air-conditioning for the kutis, so the poor pampered little things can stay cool?”

  We continue chatting for more than an hour. When I’m about to leave, his features change. A lifetime of ruthless discipline is suddenly written in those wrinkles-he has dropped the kind-uncle mask without a second thought.

  “If you’re not careful, she’ll destroy you.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play games, you know who I mean. To love a woman for her body is no big deal-a man can get over it. But to secretly love a spirit as strong as that and think you can somehow own it-that’s looking for serious trouble.”

  “But she’s on the game,” I blurt, and instantly regret it. I cannot stand his gaze and look away.

  “Who isn’t? Under materialism everyone is a whore. Go home to your wife.”

  “How d’you know I’m married?”

  “If you weren’t married, you wouldn’t feel so tortured, would you?”

  I walk back down the stone stairs. A delivery van has just unloaded some provisions. The driver agrees to take me back to the main road for fifty baht. Halfway down the hill we turn into a rest area to let a tourist bus pass. I look up at the windows, and for a brief moment I see dogs and sheep staring out. It’s quite a detailed vision, very surreal. That abbot must be well on the way to Buddhahood.

  At the bottom of the hill I wave down a cab and tell him to take me to the airport. When we reach a fork, though, I tell him to stop for a moment while I think about the case. Why, exactly, did I come to Phuket this time? Because the Colonel insisted that there was something I was missing. I’m not going to even try to figure out how he might know more than me, but I feel bad about returning to Bangkok with nothing much to report. So I tell the driver to take me to Vulture Peak again.

  At the same time I’m wrestling with a nagging thought hovering just at the border of consciousness. It goes like this: I knew about the heliport with its giant H on that mound about two hundred yards from the house without thinking about it. That’s how I realized there had to be a chopper service from the airport. But when I reflect, I don’t understand how I knew about the heliport. So, I’m trying to think it through: I was in the registry with Lek and the clerk, examining the plans of the house, which are attached to the land registration, and I picked up on the fact that there is a tiny heliport not far away. What’s wrong with that? Well, the plan was supposed to be only of the house and grounds, and yet it shows a heliport on common land quite a distance from the house’s perimeter.

  There is only one explanation. I call Lek to have him call the registry and check for me, but I’m confident I’ve finally got the picture: the registration, which at first glance seemed to be the official record of sale of one house, was in fact a record of a sale of the whole project, incorporating a total of three houses-along with all the common land. Instead of having the cab stop at the mansion, I tell him to keep going as far as the heliport, then pay him and get out.

  Now I’m standing on top of the mound that forms the heliport to check out the other two houses. They were built as if to complement the main mansion. Each must have pretty good views of the Andaman Sea, but neither boasts that fantastic drop into infinity that the main property offers. I decide to ask the Buddha for help. I stroll up to each of the other houses with my mind as open as I can manage. As I suspected, it is the one on the right that causes the hairs to stand on the back of my neck. I’m not surprised it owns better security than the main property. It is surrounded by a wall about ten feet high with a gate that was originally a work of wrought iron in an open-scroll pattern, but it has been boarded up with sheet steel to prevent anyone from looking into the grounds. CCTVs perch on each corner of the wall, and more cameras are fixed to the house.

  The sense of the sinister is so strong, I call Inspector Chan.

  “I’m at Vulture Peak,” I tell him, and explain my theory about the other houses perhaps forming part of the estate bought by the Yips.

  “Perfect,” Chan says. “Perfect. Where are you right now?”

  “Outside the second house.”

  “Good. Is it far back from the mansion?”

  “About three hundred yards.”

  “So it’s looking down at a valley?”

  “Not quite. There’s a flat area.”

  “Examine the flat area. What’s the vegetation like?”

  I walk across to take a look, holding the phone to my ear. “Looks like it’s been planted with grass and shrubs.”

  I hear a sharp intake of breath. “Okay, what about the contours? Is it unexpectedly flat, considering the shape of the mountain?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Fill. Landfill. Digging tunnels these days is easy with the right machinery, especially if you have plenty of dough and come from Hong Kong. The problem is where to dump the extracted material. What are the dimensions of the flat area?”

  “More than a hundred yards long, about twenty wide.”

  He whistles. “Just what I thought. Except that I was expecting them to have dumped the fill over the cliff on the sea side. That’s how I saw it, but I must have got that detail wrong. That’s why I was checking out the cliff with my scope that day on the boat.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I trained in the States for three months in the eighties. They let
me take a remote viewing course. I’ve been trying to use it on the Yips for years. Recently I saw tunnels and landfill-and a lot of other things. But I didn’t know where in the world they were.”

  “D’you want to come over here now?”

  “No. This isn’t the moment. If we raid now, all we end up with is empty properties that could have been used by anyone. You can bet the Yips have plenty of backup alibis. But they have to visit Vulture Peak soon.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the clerk and the boat boy have disappeared. They need to know why, and they need to do the investigating themselves. They have no choice. I know they arrived back here in Hong Kong from a trip to Beijing yesterday, so they probably held consultations with their cadres. I have my nerds checking all flight bookings from Hong Kong to Thailand. It’s important that I reach Phuket before they do, so as soon as I see they’ve reserved a flight, I’ll get on an earlier one. Don’t call me again. I’ll send an SMS.” He hangs up.

  Now I’m all alone on the hill without a taxi. I shrug and call the chopper company to send someone to pick me up. At the airport I go straight to the computers to access Wikipedia. Remote viewing (RV) is the apparent ability to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or sensing with mind. Scientific studies have been conducted, and although some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results, none of the newer experiments concluded with such results when under properly controlled conditions, and therefore, like any other forms of ESP, constitutes pseudoscience. ^ [1][2][3][4] Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. ^ [5][6][7] The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974. ^ [8] Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. Although one Stargate viewer was awarded in 1984 a legion of merit for determining “150 essential elements of information (…) unavailable from any other source,” ^ [9] the program was eventually terminated in 1995, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community. ^ [10]

  Back in Bangkok I take a cab to the station and race up the stairs to Vikorn’s office. He listens to my breathless report without comment, nods, and jerks his chin at the door as a sign for me to leave.

  27

  Today Chanya is kikiat and won’t be doing any work of any kind. Kikiat is usually translated as “lazy,” which is misleading because of the disfavor into which this vital component of mental health has fallen in the work-frenzied Occident; over here kikiat is not a fault so much as a frank statement of the human condition. To fail to lend a helping hand because you have something more important to do may provoke anger in others, but to fail to perform a chore because you are feeling kikiat will, in all but the most extreme circumstances, meet with an understanding sigh; indeed, the word itself has a kind of pandemic effect, so that one person declaring themselves kikiat can cause a whole office to slow down. You may spend a lot of time over here, DFR, learn our customs, know our history better than we do ourselves, and even speak our language, but until you have penetrated to the very heart of indolence and learned to savor its subtle joy, you cannot claim really to have arrived.

  Naturally, now that Chanya has declared herself kikiat for the day, I myself am thinking of spending the next few hours in bed, calling in sick, and maybe getting up around noon to go to temple. After all, I’m the one who got back from Phuket yesterday. Surely I’m entitled to be idle too?

  Now my hasty declaration that I too am kikiat absolves me from the duty of getting up to boil water for coffee, so we hang there in bed for an hour or so. Sometimes Chanya hooks a leg over mine; then after about half an hour I’ll hang my leg over hers; about twenty minutes after that we will decide that too much flesh on flesh is distracting from the purity of our kikiat, so we’ll turn aside from each other as if we’ve had an argument; then Chanya will turn back, or I will, and the first one to return to the flat position will hook their leg over the other’s leg or body. We spent most of our honeymoon in this way, with breaks for beer, sex, and somtam. Of course, we went swimming in the sea from time to time, but too much exercise has a corrosive effect on kikiat. Eventually one of us will get up to boil the water, but we will do it slowly, drowsily, and resentfully, so as not to disturb the fragile condition. Communication is achieved by single words or, preferably, grunts. Try it at home, DFR-you’ll find it a perfect cure for jogging.

  After a while I sigh and put water in the electric kettle for three-in-one and grope around to see if there’s anything to eat. Since she’s been studying so hard, Chanya has developed a taste for fig rolls; I never paid any attention to them before, but recently I’ve developed an addiction myself; they seem to go with cannabis and coffee quite well. So I bring over the half-eaten packet with the two mugs of three-in-one while pointing the fan at the top of the bed. Normally, for sleeping, I turn it away from us, so the fact that I’ve now deliberately pointed it at the pillows, on one of which rests Chanya’s dopey head, is a signal we are officially no longer asleep: a sort of indoor equivalent to sunrise. Chanya turns over with her face pointed at the pillow, but turns back after five minutes, yawns, and rubs her eyes. She sees that I’m still standing and jerks a chin toward her computer. “Guess what-my secret admirer sent me another message, even more explicit.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I wanted to show it to you in the interests of a totally open relationship. You do get my drift, Mr. Phuket? Jog the mouse, and you’ll see.”

  The voodoo works: now I’m very aware that my partner is as capable of cheating on me as I on her. I jog the mouse. Nothing happens. Chanya groans because she forgot that she had turned the machine off. Now she has to get up, sit at her chair, stab in her security PIN, and wait for the Internet. Now she enters her inbox and clicks on a JPEG attachment.

  It is the same naked male body but a new clip: the penis periodically grows larger and larger until its tumescence fills the screen; then it bursts in an orgasm like a fireworks display and shrinks back to flaccidity. She makes no effort to disguise her fascination. I guess she must be as alienated from me as I am from her. So why am I angry? Why am I jealous? Why am I thinking of Om? I’m steaming but holding myself steady when I whisper, “Does it turn you on?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s silly, but I keep looking at it. I’m trying to understand.” She turns just enough to give me a low-grade smile. “Trying to understand men. What it must be like with one of those between your legs. It has to be a different experience. With a woman, whatever way you look at it, it’s a kind of absence, by nature passive, quiescent, an aching wound waiting to be sated. Psychologically it must be quite another experience to have something hard and tumescent to thrust into someone. I guess you’d want to rape first, ask questions later.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder and look down her T-shirt. She is not wearing a bra. I say, “He must be a volcano of rage and frustration.”

  She nods. “Perhaps. Or maybe he’s just saying, ‘Hey, I’m a real boy, this is what being male is all about. I’m sharing here.’ ”

  “Only a woman would think so.” I do not say: a frustrated woman suffering from a serious dose of seven-year-itch. Like her husband.

  She turns to look at me. “Really? Why d’you say that?”

  “Male virility is shy when it’s real. That guy has a serious problem. Exhibitionism is for people who can’t get it on any other way.”

  “Is that right?” She shrugs. “So, did you have sex when you were in Phuket?”

  “No. I spent the night in a monastery.”

  She blinks at me. “Really?”

  “Really. If you don’t believe me, you can go ask the abbot of the Go
lden Goose.”

  “That one on the top of the hill? You really, really didn’t go with anyone?”

  “I really, really didn’t.”

  “So why did I have such a strong intuition that you were cheating, or thinking of cheating?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We take our coffee mugs back to the mattress. Now she hooks her leg over mine and opens a kikiat — style discussion with the single word Dorothy. There is a protocol here: since I was the one who went on yet another exotic trip yesterday, I should be the one to humbly listen to local news as if it were the most exciting thing in the world. Chanya allows a good five minutes to pass before she says, “We’re going to have to help her. Or I am.”

  “Oh? But I thought you said she had tamed her man and now it was all happiness ever after.”

  “I was being loyal. In reality no woman ever tames a man like that.” A pause. “You see, I asked your mother to call me next time Jimmy Clipp turned up at her bar. Well, she called me two nights ago-while you were away, as usual. He’s back with his buddy on weekend R amp;R. But when I spoke to Dorothy, she didn’t know he was in town. She wasn’t expecting him for a month. He told her he only gets one weekend off every three months, which is a lie. Generally he finds a way to get here every two weeks.” She turns to me. “What should I do?”

  “Nothing, of course. Let him have his fun and go back up north. It’s not your business.”

  “I know, but he’s not exactly trying to be discreet by going to your mum’s bar. He’ll make sure Dorothy knows he’s back and ignoring her.”

  I’m quite shocked and raise my eyebrows. “Really?”

  “You don’t know anything about men. I was on the game for nearly ten years, Sonchai. This Jimmy Clipp is a classic: apparently kind, magnanimous, sensitive, great lover, still good-looking at fifty, extremely promiscuous. Such men are immensely cruel underneath. He’ll find a way of feeding off her suffering.” She flashes me a glance.