Vulture Peak (11 page)
Authors: John Burdett
Those three Americans had checked out my people’s value system and decided to present Vikorn on the street as Father Wisdom, with gray hair whitened a shade, a confident smile (which had triumphed over deep suffering), right hand held slightly palm up, in a subliminal reference to a Buddha image, the sparkling city behind him as if it had elected him already. Voting day was more than a month away, though,
and he had not yet gone public with his “Stop Organ Trafficking Now” campaign, although I’d seen some of the advance publicity: “Devout Buddhist police colonel who has worked steadily and selflessly on his own time for more than a decade to stop this ghoulish trade and, now, thanks to meticulous detective work headed up by his hand-selected protégé, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, can humbly reveal that a vast international network, which uses the sacred soil of Thailand as an organ depot, has been broken and busted.”
He hadn’t debriefed me yet, however, because I’d taken a day to recover from the Yip sisters. Apart from Vikorn’s election campaign, the other news on the radio and TV was all about the Sukhumvit Rapist, as he’d come to be known. Early sympathy for the deformed stalker had evaporated since he sexually assaulted two women and attempted to rape a number of others. Sergeant Ruamsantiah of District 8 had declared that he personally would not rest until the streets were safe again for respectable women and girls.
I intended to take a motorbike taxi to the station, but Vietnam was getting one hell of a lashing again, and the skies were black all over the eastern Pacific. (I bet boat people make good organ donors: I imagined them hanging on to the gunwales, a saltwater gargle every twelve seconds; now a luxury yacht shows up with a pair of Chinese twins in bikinis and wrap-around sunglasses:
“One kidney each, and your troubles are over, my little chou-chous.”
) I would have taken a cab if there were any available, but each one that passed carried a passenger, its red
wang
sign turned off.
It just happened that one of my favorite
kao moo
cooked-food stalls was around the corner on Soi 51; it provided an overhead tarpaulin, so I made a dash for it. And now I was sitting at the rickety iron table with the braised pork leg with rice in a bowl steaming before me, liberally loading up on
nampla
fish sauce with enough granulated chili to melt the spoon, when my eye caught things floating just under the surface. Of course, they were only eggs cut in half with the yolk visible, but for one psychotic moment I was seeing human eyeballs. It was a genuine hallucination, the first I’d experienced without dope, so in addition to everything else, I was wondering if I was not—you know—a total loony.
I was sweating, the blood drained from my face. Talk about karma. I’d lost my appetite and to hell with the rain, I needed to get to the station and safety. I wanted to feel bored, because bored seemed the opposite of crazy.
Sure enough, when I was at my desk and logged into my personal e-mail account, I opened two spam offers to enlarge my penis and five to send me improbably cheap Viagra by anonymous post: serenity had returned. I was pushing my chair back and waiting for Lek to bring me my first iced lemon tea of the day when Manny, Vikorn’s secretary, called: the Old Man had heard I was in the office and wanted me upstairs, pronto.
Now I was sitting in the hot seat opposite him on the far side of his huge desk. To avoid his gaze, I stared at the anticorruption poster above his head and wondered when it was going to include a reference to human organ trafficking. I’d just told him the whole story of my trip to Dubai. We were in the midst of one of those silences: he looked almost stupid while his criminal genius worked deep down in the brainstem.
Finally he came out of his trance. I saw that I might have succeeded in shocking him. “They’re twins? Identical?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I didn’t know that.” He stood up, stumped, turned on me, said, “Twins?” again, then went to the window, held his chin, and nodded to himself in the way of a man who was once badly burned but has only this minute understood how the scam had worked. He turned on me again with the same aggressive sweep. “They’re compulsive gamblers, you say?”
“The type they call
whales
in Las Vegas. They bet fifty thousand dollars and a gold bracelet on a fly walking up a window.” I saw a deep reprogramming taking place somewhere in the depths. When he turned again, his eyes said,
So that was it
. He returned to his seat, sat, and nodded to himself again. I watched in fascination as that special thing geniuses have—that extra half inch of willpower the rest of us lack—started to stir at the back of his retinas.
I said, “Sir, may I ask a personal question?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I need to, sir, if my investigation is to proceed.” He raised his eyes. “About these twins, sir. They are very mischievous—somewhere between bad and evil, it seems to me at this point—but girlish at the same time. Rich and out of control, sir. Without any moral compass at all. I don’t think they’re really into sex, but they know how to project it. Manipulative to a degree that’s hard to believe.” He was daring me to continue. I continued. “I wouldn’t put it past them to make a bet—a pretty big one, I would guess—on whether or not one or the other—or even both—could seduce a man—say an alpha male of the Asian type—say a—”
“Get out, Detective,” he whispered. “Get the hell out of my office, right now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Well, now I’ve brought you up to date, DFR, and told you all I know. Nothing neat and tidy, I’m afraid, only a collection of fragments that may or may not be related. A few days after I reported to Vikorn, which is to say about a week after I got back from Monte Carlo, I received the call to Vulture Peak, where lay the three anonymous cadavers with every salable organ missing. Am I the only observer who does
not
see the Colonel’s hand in this? Call me naïve, but it’s just not Vikorn’s style—and anyway, he already has the election in the bag. On the other hand, anyone who doubts that organ theft happens on the sacred soil of Thailand will soon be considering voting for the Colonel, once the story breaks. Very interesting, think about it.
Meat scares me and makes my flesh crawl, even when it doesn’t resemble anything human. Am I getting soft or are the cases getting harder? Why do I see three faceless corpses whenever I close my eyes? Why does my mind keep fixating on the deep gashes and the floppy blubber where livers and kidneys used to be? And no eyes, sweet Buddha,
no eyes
. The worst was this morning just before waking: an army of the blind and faceless moving in a dogged mass toward rebirth and revenge.
I’m curled up on my bed sucking my thumb and trembling. If anyone asks, I’m going to say I caught a touch of fever in Dubai. This case has got to me like no other, and I’m not even convinced it’s a case. To make matters infinitely worse, my partner, my darling Chanya, doesn’t seem to have noticed there’s something wrong. She watched me drag myself across the room after only a couple of hours on duty, blinked at me without losing that glazed look she has for everything and everyone except her computer monitor, seemed to have a bright idea while I limped broken and shattered to the bed, and started stabbing ferociously at her keyboard just as I collapsed.
I called Lek on my cell phone to tell him to get me a supply of dope from Sergeant Ruamsantiah. I’m going to smoke until I forget who I am, and I’m not coming back to earth until they’ve improved it. Really, this time I’ve had it with everything. I can feel it, that thing that
happens to your mind when they add that extra few ounces to your paranoia and you sink under the weight. Every time I close my eyes I see someone with a curved knife aiming for my vital organs with an expression of insane greed. I see monsters from the deep, breaking the surface after billions of years in the lightless zones: blind, hideous, eel-gray, voracious for human flesh. I’m trembling.
“I’m just going out to buy some more printer ink. D’you want anything?” Chanya calls.
“No,” I groan.
She comes over to the bed. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Good. Listen, I just wrote this brilliant paragraph. I’ve nearly finished my thesis, and I had to get the ending right. I know you won’t understand much, but you can get the idea:
Thus the comodification of bodies, whether superficially in the sense of a prostitute painting herself in a way designed to send the required signal to prospective customers, or in the more extreme sense of a person selling, or having taken from them, a vital organ such as a kidney, is obviously and unavoidably a consequence of the present economic system which relies on what has been called “the promiscuity of objects.” This system carries with it the unspoken implication that once something has been defined as an “object,” it is automatically assumed to be “promiscuous” in the sense that it may be bought and sold like any other object, even if the object in question is somebody’s kidney or liver—or whole body. This kind of thinking is exactly what underpinned the slave trade for hundreds of years: as soon as a captive West African was defined as “property,” then he could be treated as a “promiscuous object,” that is to say an object whose human rights have been magically transmuted into a money value in the accounts of the property owner. What is unclear, however, is why modern Western culture has continued to target prostitution by adult volunteers as “immoral” (i.e., in Professor Smith’s definition “the enemy”). Consider the manner in which both Hollywood and the advertising industry have been comodifying bodies for the purpose of profit (i.e., treating both male and female
models as “promiscuous objects” to be traded). At first glance it seems strange that the line should be drawn at what one might call the “cottage industry” of street-level prostitution, especially in Bangkok, where the practitioners are relatively free of exploitation by pimps and can therefore fairly be described as choosing to commodify their bodies on their own account for the purpose of survival. It may be that the answer can be found in a parallel paradox: the obsessive repression of “soft” drugs like marijuana, despite the wealth of data which proves that the “hard” drug alcohol is far more dangerous to health and responsible for almost an infinitely greater number of diseases and deaths. It is not difficult to see what the private trading of marijuana and street-level prostitution have in common: these are industries any private person can develop on their own account without being squeezed out by big business or falling liable to tax. Thus it is in the suppression of prostitution and soft drugs that we see the hypocrisy at the heart of the culture. It is in the interests of government and big business to appear to uphold a “moral code,” the true purpose of which is to ensure that impoverished individuals cannot escape their poverty except by becoming fiscally and commercially useful: read slaves. In other words, it is a “code” driven by exactly the same dynamic as the slave trade. But, as Professor Steiner points out (op. cit.), the peculiar reverence we have for moral codes depends exactly on their being founded on something beyond functionalism. A money-driven morality is no morality at all.
“That’s just amazingly brilliant. You’re a genius,” I say. I do not add:
I just hope I’m still sane when you get your Ph.D
. In my insecurity I want to ask about the rumors, but in my insecurity I don’t have the courage. She’s basically a very honest girl, and I don’t think I could handle any form of toxic truth right now.
While she’s out, Lek comes with a sizable package, takes one look at me, asks where I keep my skins, rolls me a big one, shakes his head, and leaves. Now Chanya is back, and I’m quite high. At least I’ve got
control of the demons. Thanks to the power of cannabis, I’m able to shrink them with my brand-new green demon-shrinking gun, which sort of grew out of my right hand after the third joint. Chanya smells the dope, gives a mildly disapproving glance, shrugs, goes back to her computer. Time passes (it could be a minute or a couple of aeons, this is export-quality stuff).
She comes back over to me. “You sure you’re okay?”
This time the floodgates open. “No, I’m not fucking okay,” I bawl. Now I’m blurting, mostly about the eyeballs I sold that won’t give me any peace, but also about those three anonymous corpses in Phuket.
She raises her eyes to the ceiling. To complicate matters still further, I am horny. I can just about reach her left breast, thanks to the way she’s leaning over, which suddenly seems to offer solace in a cruel world, so with the directness of a monkey I grab it. I wouldn’t call it a lecherous gesture, myself, more like a dash for safety by a threatened psyche.
She sighs. “Oh, Sonchai, it’s always the same.”
“What is?”
“When you smoke too much. You go space traveling for a couple of hours, disdaining the earth and everything on it. Then when you finally get back, you’re like a horny sixteen-year-old.”
I release her breast like a drowning man releasing a straw. “I’m in a state,” I admit. “I’m kind of scared, but it’s not that exactly.” She frowns, because she sees I’ve gone into that mood of meticulous self-analysis that often accompanies a comedown. “It’s more like fear overlaying something fundamental. I mean it
is
fear, but it’s mixed in with something more general, like
what’s happening to the species
?”
“What species?”
“Humanity.”
She curses. “It’s Vikorn who’s done this to you. That old bastard. I hate him. I hate having to look at his hypocritical bloody mug on every third lamppost. I hate the way he’s going to win the election and bleed Bangkok white.” She pulls her cell phone out of her jeans pocket and stabs at one of her autodial numbers. “Get me Vikorn,” she snarls at the reception.
Well, I may be a basket case and on the verge of terminal catatonia, but Chanya going for Vikorn in a toe-to-toe standoff is too good to miss. I perk up a bit. Unfortunately, our cell phones don’t work so well in the hovel, so she has to go out into the yard. I see her walking up and down, her left hand flaying while she yells at the phone. I have no idea what she’s saying, but I’m sure of the psychology: she and Vikorn own me jointly, and there are clear demarcation lines. He has trespassed on her turf, and the she-wolf is in a rage. She comes back into the house fuming and shaking.