Vulture Peak (15 page)

“Detective, what a surprise,” one of them—the last to fail to die—says. They smile.

“Tell me it wasn’t loaded,” I say as I approach.

By way of answer she hands me the gun. “This is what we call our shrine.”

When I spin the chamber, I see there is one cartridge in it. I look at
the sisters, who raise their eyebrows. “It’s a blank, right?” The eyebrows rise higher. I align the cartridge with the trigger and point—it must be the boy in me—at the crystal carafe. I already know the answer by the way they have both moved their chairs back, but I fire anyway. There goes the crystal carafe, as the shot echoes over the mountain. The last of the Chablis dribbles over the marble.

Suddenly I need to sit down. One of the sisters drags up a chair. “Do you do this often?” I say.

“Only when it’s the maid’s day off,” one says. “That’s why there was no one to greet you at the door. Very sorry, appalling manners and all that—but as you see, we were in the middle of something exciting.”

Not for the first time in the company of these two, I am dragged into another world: surreal, exotic, rich, and mad. The scene is still playing in my mind: yes, the gun was loaded with a live shell; yes, each of them did raise it to her head and pull the trigger. But I still can’t believe it; I’m tempted to ask them to do it again.

“I don’t believe you play it every week. One of you would be dead by now.”

They exchange glances. “That’s true. You must be a good detective.”

Silence. Now one of them says, “So, which do you think I am, Lilly or Polly?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, neither do we,” they say in unison.

Nothing in my career as a cop, or as a human, has prepared me for this conversation. The beauty of the day here on the mountaintop, the ancient genius of the garden, the buzzards hanging in the air close to the peak, the sailboats and pleasure vessels in the harbor—it all seems to have taken on a darker hue, like a hallucination that has started to go wrong. “What do you mean, ‘Neither do we’?” I say.

One of them—I shall have to call her Lilly or I’ll go mad—makes a sulky face. “Sometimes I’m her and she’s me. It’s easy to get mixed up.”

“You’re a Buddhist,” Polly says. “You must know there’s no such thing as a self. Think of it: when you want to see yourself, you look in a mirror. You have a choice whether to look or not.”

“But with us the other is there all the time in a mirror that follows you around. The same but different,” Lilly says.

“It’s not at all unusual for twins to go homicidal and want to kill each other,” Polly explains.

“Oh,” I say.

“It’s a trick we discovered when we were teens. The Russian roulette. We both knew we would murder each other one day if we didn’t do something—so we used the gun.”

“It has a way of clearing the air.”

“Sure does,” I say. “You mean you were in the middle of an argument?”

“A serious one.”

“What about?”

They exchange a glance. “Livers and kidneys.”

“She bet five kidneys in a game of blackjack yesterday—”

“I did not. It was three kidneys.”

“You use human organs as betting chips?”

“We use commodities. Sometimes it’s gold, sometimes livers, sometimes kidneys, sometimes pig belly futures.”

“I wanted to talk about something else,” I say.

They look at me expectantly. I keep looking at the gun and the splinters of glass on the floor. I let too many beats pass and miss my cue, perhaps deliberately. Now that I’ve found the Twins, I realize that any meeting with them would be futile without more background.

Lilly says, “Let me show you around. We haven’t taken you on the standard tour yet.”

The other, Polly, remains at the table while Lilly and I climb the stairs to the top floor, where I came in. We start at the beginning of the photographic display, with a Chinese man in top hat and tails standing in a Chinese street that looks like circa 1930s. He is young, with a cigar in his hand and a shine in his eyes that promises a ruthless and successful future. “That’s Grandfather. He was a very strong man—you can see it in his eyes. Strong men castrate their sons, a psychologist told us ages ago: that’s what Peter the Great did to his son. That’s what Grandfather did to Daddy. Daddy was an alcoholic and a
gambler. Grandfather saw what a dead loss he was, so he put almost the whole of the property and his fortune in a trust a few years before he died. Daddy couldn’t touch it except for living expenses, otherwise he would have gambled it all away.

“It still is in trust, otherwise
we
would have gambled it all away. That old bastard gave us such a piddling allowance, we had to scrounge around for years and years until we discovered organ trafficking. We knew at once we were just made for it. Imagine what it does to your worldview when you can see profit in everyone you meet. We felt the same excitement Grandfather told us about, to be perfectly placed in an industry that’s about to take off.”

“What industry was he in?”

“Armaments. At the beginning of the Second World War.”

She gives me the big Chinese smile. Is she joking? Trying to scare me? Or is she just insane? Or—scariest of all—simply telling the truth? I see a world in which we size each other up not for sex appeal but for the resale value of our livers.

We stop in front of a cabinet in the same blackwood.

“Opium pipes?” I say. “With all the bits and pieces.” Behind the glass must be the most complete sets I’ve seen, each one a work of art. I missed them on the way in. “They’re exquisite,” I say.

“They’re called layouts. Each one includes two pipes laid on each side of the mother-of-pearl inlay. The bowls are made of Yixing clay. The miniature cupboard at the end is for the opium and whatever one used to thicken it, quite often just aspirin.”

“They look well used.”

“Mmm. Grandfather smoked every Friday night. He started in Shanghai, of course, and continued over here. In those days the British didn’t take it seriously, even though it was already illegal. He forbade my father to smoke it, though. He said it was harmless so long as you were strong enough to use it sparingly. So Daddy became an alcoholic instead. Do you think that was an improvement? To die from opium addiction is, of course, a disgusting death—but not as bad as coughing up your own liver.”

“That’s how he died, your father?”

She twists her head to indicate she didn’t like the question. “People
with strong affections develop fetishes. I can’t tell you how many Polly and I have about gambling. And the other things we do.” A smile. “Grandfather loved everything to do with opium—he even grew poppies in the greenhouse. When you love something, you want it every way you can get it. But he was so strong, he never let the opium dominate. I have a luck charm tattooed on the top of my left thigh. Maybe I’ll show you one day.” She has come significantly closer.

There is a sound on the stairs. Polly appears, daggers in her eyes.

“You see what I mean about twins?” Lilly says. “Insanely jealous. She’s not attracted to you at all. She just couldn’t stand the thought of my having you. Isn’t that right, love?”

Polly walks over to kiss me on the cheek. “She doesn’t want you either. Neither of us likes sex. She’s just provoking me. She’s angry that I didn’t die just now, aren’t you?”

“Same to you with knobs on,” Lilly says, and sticks out her tongue.

They are standing on either side of me, and the experience is making me feel faint. I am quite certain they know what they are doing. (I hope you will not laugh at me, DFR, when I explain to you that these women are not human at all. They are a variety of
pawb
or ogre that lives in human bodies, native to Southeast Asia. I didn’t want to test your credulity by mentioning it before, but now I trust the matter is obvious. FYI, there are plenty of demons masquerading as humans all over the world, many of them in high places—political leaders, captains of industry; they are quite unaware of their true identity but often betray themselves by a tragic lack of depth.) The combined force of their malevolence is quite debilitating. I think the game of Russian roulette was set up for my benefit, a shock tactic to disorient me.

A buzzer sounds. They exchange a glance. Polly goes to the door to press a button. “Yes?”

“Polly? Lilly? It’s Sam. Just popped by to say thanks for the other night.” It’s a woman’s voice with a British accent.

Polly and Lilly share a glance, then Polly squeals into the microphone. “Sam!
Darling!
How
wonderful.
”

“I hope I’m not disturbing anything. My chauffeur just came back from the shops and—you know what gossips Filipinos are—he told me he saw the most
gorgeous
man standing outside your gates, so I
won’t come in. I just wanted to say
thankseversomuch
for such a
wonderful
party—you two still know how to throw them—and
how
, loves.”

“Of
course
you
must
come in!” Polly squeals again into the mike. “Stop being so absolutely disgustingly polite and British. You know we both
adore
you to bits!” She presses a button, exchanges another glance with her sister, and shrugs.

The three of us wait in silence until there’s a knock on the door. Lilly opens it, and a tall blond woman in her thirties enters, brimming with health, smiles, and money. Everyone squeals except me: “Darling!”

“Darlings!”

“Oh, darling, you look absolutely fantastic!”

“So do you two!
Ohmygod
, you’re wearing the same clothes! It’s like seeing double. And after all these years.”

“Guess who’s who,” Lilly says.

“Yes, guess.”

“A glass of Pimm’s if you get it right.”

“Two if you get it wrong.”

Laughter. The woman called Sam throws me a glance.

“Oh, gosh, forgot to introduce you. This is—Detective—ah—”

“Jitpleecheep,” I say.

The blond woman shakes my hand. Blue Brahmin eyes check me out: what caste do I belong to? I’m a cop and Eurasian, not her level at all. “So pleased to meet you.”

“Enchanté,”
I say, Buddha knows why.

“Well,” Sam says, “an absolutely gorgeous policeman who speaks French, only you two could pull that off. Where on
earth
did you find him?”

“He took us to Monte Carlo. Didn’t you, Detective?”

“Well,” Sam says again, definitively upstaged, “how
interesting
. Look darlings, I must be off.
TTD
, you know.”

“Oh, it’s always
things to do
with you. Won’t you stay for a Pimm’s, love?”

“I really can’t, loves. I’ve got to go down to the snake pit to buy a birthday present for James. He’s terribly sensitive about these things, and he
has
done rather well on the derivatives market lately, so he
does
deserve a little TLC.”

“Are you going down into the city?” I say on impulse. “I’m going that way myself.”

“Well, of course,” Sam says, “I’ve got the driver waiting up top. Are you ready?”

“Oh, yes,” I say, “I’m ready.” I turn to the Twins. “Wonderful as ever.” I kiss them each on both cheeks as they turn them.

“You don’t have any bags or anything?” Sam says.

“Oh, no, he doesn’t have any bags,” Lilly says.

“How long have you known the Twins?” Sam asks. We are in the back of a long, low Jaguar with a polished walnut dashboard and a Filipino chauffeur in gray livery.

“About a month. You?”

“Ever since we moved here eight years ago. It’s a village up on the peak, everyone knows everyone, and the Twins—everyone calls them that—grew up here. They’re as much a fixture as the mountain itself. Our kids go to the same school they went to. Aren’t they amazing?”

“Yes, amazing.”

“Of course, being ethnic Chinese and speaking the lingo, they have
guanxi
coming out of their ears. Were there any servants there, by the way?”

I want to ask what
guanxi
is, but I’ve missed the moment. “No. It’s the maid’s day off.”

Sam snorts and leans forward. “Did you hear that, Hill? They told him it’s the maid’s day off.” Hill chuckles. She turns back to me. “They’re notorious for not being able to keep servants. Wait till I tell everyone they told you it’s the maid’s day off.” She gives a big, hard English laugh. “See, they use the same agency as we do, and Hill is in with the agent, so we get all the gossip.”

“Really? I’m looking for a servant myself,” I say. “Which agency do you use?”

She gives me her first frank expression: shrewd, penetrating, clever. “You’re investigating them for something? The usual thing, I suppose.”

“Yes, the usual thing.”

She leans forward again. “Hill, do you have an agency card with you, so we can be of service to the police?”

Hill pulls a card out of his jacket and passes it back to her. She hands it to me. “Which unit of the police are you with? Fraud?”

“Not exactly. But if you have any information on how the Twins make a living, that would be helpful.”

“Make a living? Well, they both have degrees in medical science, quite good ones they say. But nobody could imagine them working as physicians, not even them, so they taught anatomy for a few years at the Chinese University. That was hardly a living wage for them, so they went into business, some kind of China trade. No one seems to know exactly, but they travel a lot and are able to get hold of money these days. If you’re not fraud, what are you?”

“Murder.”

Silence. “I see. May I know if anyone up on the peak has been murdered?”

“Oh, I’m not based in Hong Kong. I’m from Bangkok.”

“Oh,” she says.

“What would ‘the usual thing’ be, by the way?”

She moves away to look out the window. “I’m sorry, I thought you were local police. We’re in Central now—where would you like to be dropped?”

The domestic staff agent—a woman with a Filipina accent—will not give me the maid’s name or telephone number, but when I say I’m willing to pay for information, she promises to pass on my own number. I take a stroll among the glittering caverns of Central, then take the Star Ferry to Kowloon. I’m staring across the harbor at the architectural hysteria of downtown Hong Kong when my cell phone rings. A young woman’s voice speaks slowly and precisely in old school English: “May I speak to Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, please?”