Vulture Peak (14 page)

I feel like a naïve
farang
for the thumping in my heart, a sense of hurt. Some whores can affect you like that, even a part-time pimp like
me. I don’t want to think about her at that party; she’s too beautiful. I watch a Thai couple walk past along the shore, the moon directly overhead now, a pure silver scythe. “You have no idea what business they might have been in, those middle-management-type men?”

She shrugs. “One of them who took an interest in me kept saying
tanakan
. I think that was the only word he knew in Thai.”

“Bankers?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he was trying to say he’d just been to the bank. He was drunk.”

“And the Chinese woman—she was the only woman there apart from you girls?”

“The only one I saw.”

“She was arranging the party?”

“I don’t know. We got there about eleven-thirty in the evening, so most of the party was over. We were the final show.”

“Can you describe her?”

“She was the tall, willowy kind of Chinese woman. Hard to say how old because she’d taken such great care of her skin—you could see how much money had been spent on her. She was HiSo for sure. Very elegant. She spoke perfect English and not bad Thai. I don’t think she was mainland Chinese at all.”

By the time she has finished speaking, she is on her feet. Anyone spying on us would assume I had sat down to proposition her and she had refused after a short polite conversation. So she’s not only beautiful and modest when off duty, she’s a smart operator too. And lucky. That was a decent chunk of gold. I give her five minutes to disappear, so nobody thinks I’m following her, then walk along the road opposite the sea until I come to a guest house with a
ROOMS VACANT
sign. I don’t bother to check out the room. When I lie down on the narrow bed next to the tiny window that overlooks the sea, I close my eyes, expecting to see Chanya there, where she usually is just before I fall asleep, nestled behind my eyelids. Instead I see Om.

When I wake up, a solid block of golden light is shooting through the window like something out of a space travel movie, as if a beautiful
Venusian is about to materialize before my eyes. It’s quite blinding, and I have to draw the curtains for a moment, until I remind myself that light is good, light is what it’s all about.

The room rate includes breakfast, which is laid out buffet style in a room downstairs. I’m the only guest up at this hour, and there are no staff. The coffee has been stewing all night on a hot plate, the imitation croissants are inedible, and the granola is old and stale.

I already paid for the room, so I’m a free man, walking along the beach at seven-thirty in the morning, wondering what Chanya did last night. I find a small café near the sea that serves real coffee and not-bad
pain au chocolat
. I ask the kid behind the bar if he knows anything about the mansions up on the hill—you can see the peak from this part of the beach, but not the houses—and he says no. He’s a Muslim from Pattani, speaks standard Thai with a strong accent, and has only been here a week. The café was the only business he could find that was hiring workers and didn’t sell alcohol. He confides how disgusted he is with
farang
decadence, especially the alcohol—and the sex. He’s never seen anything like it. He understands why Allah sent the tsunami seven years ago, but nobody seems to have got the message. What will Allah do next, destroy the whole island?

I check the clock on my cell phone. Eight-thirty. If I take it slowly, I’ll be at the police station around nine, when the two patrol cops start work.

I sense nervousness in the desk sergeant, which is not unusual. No provincial police force likes visits from the big city; very often the business models are incompatible. He cannot prevent me from seeing Constables Hel and Tak, but he is able to slow me down quite a bit. He says the interview room isn’t ready, and the two cops are preparing to go out on patrol, so when the interview room is ready, they won’t have much time for me, maybe ten minutes at best. I wonder if I should try to bribe him, then think better of it.

“Look, Sergeant,” I say in my best let’s-be-straight-about-this voice, “this isn’t just any old murder. It’s not sex-related, and it doesn’t look like a drugs vendetta. When the story breaks, it will be all over the
world. Everyone who checks the news on their Internet account will see headlines like ‘M
URDER AND
O
RGAN
T
HEFT IN
S
UNNY
P
HUKET
, T
HAILAND.
’ People very very high up in government will want to be sure the Phuket police have done all they can to cooperate.”

He’s about fifty and has been on the local force about thirty years, which in itself says
survivor with no scruples
. That character trait is confirmed by a sloe-eyed cynicism and a way of looking into the distance as if I’m a pain in the neck who has to be tolerated, but not for an unreasonable length of time. Now he turns his best blank stare onto me, lets a beat pass, then says, “Those houses have protection.” He shrugs. The shrug is a reference to my future: do I really want to challenge the protector of the houses—or not?

I stare back without saying anything. I guess I don’t always come across as a law enforcement fanatic, but I can get into the part when I need to. He shrugs again, picks up the desk telephone, speaks so softly I can’t hear what he says, then leads me to an interview room and tells me to wait. About five minutes later two cops walk in: overweight, dumb, and probably honest in the context of local cops. The sergeant is with them and looks like he intends to stay during the interview.

“If you don’t get the fuck out, I’ll say in my report that you refused to permit these men to speak freely,” I say in an even voice with a smile. That’s quite a no-frills challenge, and the atmosphere congeals. He gives me that look again, with a touch of pity in it this time, but he turns to leave the room and closes the door softly behind him.

Like simple men the world over, Constables Hel and Tak decide to obey whatever superior is standing before them at the present moment. They look at me politely and expectantly.

“Just tell me all you know about the mansion on Vulture Peak,” I say, already weary.

Hel and Tak look at each other. “It has protection,” Hel says and looks at Tak, who nods.

“But do you ever go up there?”

“Only when someone invites us.”

“About once a year.”

“Have you been this year?”

“Once.”

“When?”

“About five months ago.”

“What happens when you visit?”

“A Thai man, a manager, welcomes us. He’s very polite and makes us feel welcome.”

“A really nice guy.”

“Is he alone?”

“Twice he’s been alone, three times there have been people there.”

“What kind of people?”

“Chinese people.”

“We don’t know that.”

“No, we don’t know that. Looked like Chinese people.”

“What were they doing, the Chinese people?”

“Playing mahjong.”

“Not always mahjong.”

“Sometimes cards.”

“Gambling?”

“We don’t know that.”

“No, we don’t know that.”

I stare at them, then turn away to look out the window. It’s frustration, not technique, that suddenly turns me on my heels to stare them in the face, one by one. “Where does the protection come from?”

“The army,” Hel says, taken by surprise. Tak nudges his elbow. Hel stares at his partner, then looks scared.

“You don’t know that,” Tak says.

“Everybody knows it,” Hel says.

“General Zinna, by any chance?”

Hel and Tak lose the color from their cheeks and stare at me as at a condemned man. “We don’t know that,” they say in unison.

I’m in a cab on my way to the airport when I remember I’ve forgotten to call Chanya this morning. She could be feeling a tad insecure, with me all alone in Phuket—always assuming those rumors are untrue. There’s also something troubling me; I refer to a kind of telepathy between a man and woman who live together. In the back of my mind
is that sweet shot of weakness I felt last night, that love-twinge which passed in the twinkling of an eye, but which remains as an afterthought. I have no intention of calling Om tonight or any night, but the memory of her sitting in that deck chair under the moon has yet to fade.

At exactly the moment I’m thinking that thought, my phone whooshes:

Hi there, you okay? C.

I text back: Sure. You?

Okay. Where did you stay last night?

Cheap hotel

Who with?

Alone

Don’t believe you

Hong Kong is the world’s biggest shopping mall, but the business of Hong Kong is China. Apart from a brief moment when the Chinese Communist Party was communist, it has always been so, from the nineteenth century, when Britain sent gunboats up the Pearl River to force opium down the lungs of twenty million Chinese, to the present day, when the gigantic container port of Kwai Chung sends goods to and receives goods from the mainland that, if spread out horizontally, would occupy a land area as vast as a medium-sized country, or if placed end to end would stretch around the world three times, depending on what statistic you prefer. After Mao’s revolution of 1949, when the great expat party that was Shanghai finally came to a bloody end, the remains of the Raj continued its largely alcoholic contribution to world culture right here in the former narcotics entrepot, where the fortunes of a few were made out of the misery of the millions. From the start in the 1840s, if you wanted to be a real player, what you needed was a place on the peak called Victoria from which you commuted by palanquin carried by a team of four coolies who, for reasons of survival, were inevitable end consumers of your honorable product, with a life expectancy of maybe thirty years if they were lucky. (
The more one eats and drinks at the Hong Kong Club, the more of one’s dope Johnny Chinaman has to smoke so he can haul one up the hill afterward, ha, ha. Can’t go wrong, old boy.
)

The opium has gone and there is a funicular railway, but the ultimate proof of wealth beyond measure remains a spread on the peak, where you can rely on a refreshing breeze when everyone else is sweating down on the shore, and a Scottish mist weaves romantically over the hills during winter. Naturally, the first thing Lilly and Polly’s grandfather did when he arrived with his factory from Shanghai was to buy a home up here, and it seems the property has remained in the family ever since. It was not difficult to find all this out by making a few inquiries before I left Bangkok, but I’ve not yet decided whether to forewarn them of my arrival, or to simply turn up at the door. Of course, there’s no guarantee they will be at home: they could still be trading organs with
les misérables
at Lourdes, or playing roulette at Monte Carlo. I’m taking a flier, as usual.

The address I’ve been given involves taking a path called Stanley around the top of the peak. Naturally, those who live up here may use their cars to commute, but the rest of us have to walk. I find the house easily enough. There is an iron gate with a large red button to push and a microphone to speak into—and a speaker that says, “Yes?”

“Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep,” I announce.

Silence, then something clanks at the bottom of the iron gate, which begins to swing open so slowly, I am over the threshold long before it has reached the full compass of its aperture, whereupon it immediately starts to close again. I’m about twenty yards down a hundred-yard drive before I hear it clank shut. I ought to add that it’s a magnificent day up here on billionaire mountain, with almost zero humidity, a cerulean blue sky against which contrasts perfectly the dark foliage of
bodi
leaves, ferns, and beech. The house from this side looks like a long half-timbered bungalow in the Elizabethan style, but a glance over the hedge reveals that the top floor of the house must be no more than a kind of lobby, for living quarters, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and what looks like a Chinese garden in the Ming style spread out about twenty feet below.

I must confess I was expecting, in the circumstances, to be greeted by a maid; instead an arched door (English green oak) has been left fully open for me to stride through. Inside: an intimidating selection of classic Chinese blackwood furniture stands on gray flagstones: stern chairs
with curved backs, a student’s bench at which would-be mandarins once knelt, a blanket trunk with mother-of-pearl inlay, a wardrobe in polished elm more than seven feet tall with great brass locks—and a collection of black-and-white photographs which form a family narrative that circumnavigates the long room. I would like to study the pictures, which from a quick glance seem to feature old Shanghai with the wealthy all dressed in top hats, monkey suits, and flowing dinner gowns and the poor in traditional Chinese peasant dress, but feel like an intruder who needs to identify himself before someone calls the police.

A second door, also oak and arched, also open, leads to a set of broad stone stairs that turn on themselves to land me on the ground floor. Corridors that must have been cut into the rock lead to the left and right, while an oval solarium of generous proportions, populated by a hundred varieties of orchid, invites me onward. The solarium is of the wrought-iron kind that reached a perfection of style a hundred years ago.

The main door is fitted with tinted glass, which throws a jolly collage of color onto the flagstones. I open it to emerge into the fresh air. The tennis court and swimming pool are on my left, the Ming garden with tiny humped stone bridges and trickling brooks on my right; the frozen psychosis of Hong Kong with its motherboard of steel and glass towers hums far below. At a marble table in the garden on the other side of the bridge, the Twins are sitting with a carafe of white wine and two glasses. One of them—I would not dare to guess which—is holding a revolver to her head while the other watches with considerable concentration. The one with the gun slowly squeezes the trigger until there is a click, then replaces it on the table. Jaw jutting, her sister now picks up the gun, holds it to her head, and slowly pulls the trigger until it clicks. She replaces the gun on the table. I am not surprised to note a sudden relaxation in the atmosphere, permitting them both to look up.