Vulture Peak (17 page)

“Not really.”

He is pointing at the jagged coastline of the island and showing how close it is to the mouth of the Pearl River. “The ships from India—Patna was the capital of opium—would unload onto the rafts, so smaller riverboats could take the product up into the heart of Canton.”

I nod politely while scratching my jaw. Chan just doesn’t look like the kind to carry resentment for the colonial debt. Nor does any other Hong Kong Chinese I’ve ever met; in this former colony, at least, the symbiosis between races was deeply satisfying to both. The locals
made even more dough out of Hong Kong than the colonizing Brits, from opium to coffins: most of the caskets used during the Vietnam War were made in Hong Kong.

“Of course, like everything else in history, different generations have different interpretations. When I first heard about how grotesque the British narco empire was, I couldn’t believe it. Then, soon after I made inspector, a very gifted Chinese academic from the mainland enlightened me.”

The inspector is watching me closely, like a man dropping hints incomprehensible to the recipient. I have not a clue where he is going. To be polite I say, “What did this historian tell you?”

Chan screws up his eyes in a kind of concentration. “Oh, it wasn’t that he was interested in the human suffering angle. He wasn’t a historian. He was an economist.”

He is waiting to see how I react, so I say, “An economist?”

“Yes. He said think about it.”

“Think about what?”

“Think about why the British, who were quite fanatical Christians in those days, should have blackened their names and their souls for all time by becoming the biggest narcotics traffickers in the history of the world.”

“So, what was the answer?”

Chan loses interest in the map and concentrates on my face. “Suppose, in the logic of empire, they had no choice? Suppose that in their time—we’re talking about the early nineteenth century—there was just enough wealth and employment in China for, say, ten percent of the population. And most of the rest of the world, even working-class England, was in the same boat. The British were almost as addicted as the Chinese. You see, opium was even cheaper than gin. According to this economist, even the great Wilberforce, whom the Brits like to cite as the honorable Englishman who got slavery abolished, he too was an opium addict.” He pauses. “Looked at from that point of view, the opium trade was not so bad. It was a way of keeping twenty million unemployed men docile. As soon as opium was suppressed, China tore itself apart in revolution—and the U.K. lost its empire.”

“A modern Chinese economist told you that?”

“Yes, but only by way of illustration. After all, economists are there to forecast the future. See, his punch line was: the world economy has positioned itself in such a way that almost everyone is going to be unemployed by the middle of this century. The American sucker-consumer is now bankrupt for the next fifty years, and there’s no way Asians generally are going to waste their money en masse on toys like iPods—hoarding is hardwired in every head east of Suez. Americans are strange people. They allow themselves to be bled white by gangsters for generation after generation and call it freedom. But that blissful ignorance may be in its endgame. The consumer economy is already dead—what we’re experiencing right now is its wake. What do you think governments are going to use to keep everyone docile when the shit finally hits the fan?”

“Surely not opium?”

“No. Not opium. Opium is an ugly way of dying. How about cannabis? The Spanish used it in Spanish Morocco to keep the Riff tribesmen sedated. The best thing about it: young men delude themselves into believing they’re already war heroes. They don’t need to kill anyone.” He smiles. “When this economist came here and told a select group of cadres that the PRC was thinking of legalizing it within the next decade, everyone left the room to make calls to Beijing, to get in on the ground floor with one of the consortiums. Imagine the value of a license that permits you to sell marijuana to a significant portion of two billion people. Salivation in floods from Shanghai to Lombard Street.” He pauses. “Of course, there will be other consequences of extreme poverty, worldwide.”

It must be clear from my posture and my expression that I have no idea what he’s talking about. He makes a decision, smiles at the same time as he loses interest in me except perhaps as a distant colleague to whom he should show hospitality. He puts an arm around me as he leads me out of the station. “If you stay one more night, I can get you invited to a box in Happy Valley on the finish line for the Wednesday-night races.”

“Would that involve gambling, by any chance?”

We are in the police parking lot outside the station. He talks to a sergeant who seems to be running the cars. Chan makes a point of
opening the back door of the cop car and says, “Remember, no one’s elected in Beijing. That means they have time to plan ahead. They have teams looking fifty, even a hundred years into the future. They have detailed economic and social models. And they don’t have democracy. They know what’s coming next.”

“Like what?”

“Like organs for sale on eBay.”

“Okay.”

“Bear that in mind next time you talk to the Yips.”

“Okay.”

“And tell me every damned thing you learn.”

“Okay.”

“Or forget about entering Hong Kong, or China, ever again.”

“Okay.”

Now my Chinese colleague makes an Elizabethan bow: “ ‘Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ ” He checks my incredulous expression. “See, Hong Kong was still a crown colony when I went to school. The Brits saw their culture as something to ram down the throats of wogs, chinks, and nignogs in far-flung colonies, so they could pretend to be improving instead of exploiting. Unselfishly, they kept very little of it for themselves. I know Shakespeare better than any Brit I ever met.”

Now I’m in a Hong Kong police car racing to the airport. Once I’m in the terminal, I make a beeline for the computers that give free Internet access so long as you don’t take more than fifteen minutes. It’s takes less than one to access Wikipedia:

I have over an hour to wait for my flight, so I find a seat and close my eyes to try to work out what it is that’s bothering me about the Filipina maid Maria. Something I left out, some subtle semaphore. I put the problem together with Chan’s insults about Thai poverty, and I see where I went wrong. I call her, and she answers on the third ring.

“Maria, I hope this is not too late.”

“Oh, no, sir. I am just in a taxi on my way home, so we can talk.”

“Maria, would you trust me to send you a thousand Hong Kong dollars by Western Union? I have to apologize, you must have thought me very mean.”

“Oh, no, sir. That’s okay, sir. We have a very high cost of living in Hong Kong, that is all.”

“Where d’you want the money sent?”

“To my mother in Oriental Mindoro, sir, care of the post office in our village. I think it better if I SMS on this number.”

“Okay, I promise to send it tomorrow. Now, please, regarding the Twins, there’s something you left out, right? Why is there such hostility between them? Why do they want to kill each other? They are beautiful, healthy, HiSo, rich, have the very best of everything. It seems unnatural.”

“Yes, sir,
unnatural
is certainly the word that comes to mind, sir. So far as I am aware, there are three schools of thought, sir.”

“Okay.”

“The first posits exposure to the nefarious practices of their
grandfather, who enjoyed having rivals tortured to death in front of him. There are two strands to this hypothesis, the first being that the girls themselves witnessed such atrocities, the other, more subtly, suggesting that they inherited the old man’s sadistic gene.”

“That’s school one?”

“Yes, sir. The second school, inevitably perhaps in today’s fallen world, posits a rape/seduction by the father, who was a known pedophile.”

“Ah! And the third?”

“The third school, sir, takes this theme and adapts it to all that is known about them, their family, and the relationship with the father.”

“Yes?”

“According to the third school, sir, they quite callously calculated in their early teens that it would be to their advantage to seduce their father themselves. I think the leverage that would have accrued from such a strategy is obvious.”

“Wow! So, Maria, which school do you bat for?”

“All three, sir.”

I pause. “All three?”

“Yes, sir. Of course, I am merely floating a hypothesis, but it seems to me to be consistent with the facts that they did indeed inherit the grandfather’s hunger for absolute power at any cost, plus a dastardly capacity to enjoy the sufferings of others. I think they also seduced their father, and that the father immediately became addicted to their attentions. Naturally, after that moment they held the balance of power in the family and could get away with literally anything. I think they blackmailed him for every indulgence they could dream up while he was alive. At the same time the guilt he experienced as a direct consequence of his fatal weakness drove him to drink. I think that also was a part of the diabolical strategy they had hit upon.”

“Murder by forcing the victim into a slow suicide by alcohol?”

“Exactly that, sir. On the other hand, I do believe the daughterly instinct remained present in a perverse and twisted way. They loved their father exactly for his weakness and indulgence, and each blames the other for his ugly death.”

I let a few beats pass. An irrelevant but compelling question has
floated into my head and will not go away. “Maria, if you don’t mind my asking—what level of education do you have?”

“I have a master’s in private and public international law, sir, obtained from one of our distant learning institutions. It is the enduring regret of my life that I lack the wherewithal to set myself up in practice, but it is not for me to question the ways of the Lord.”

“Ah! I’m sorry. I’m sure you’d make a fantastic lawyer.”

“Thank you, sir. That is most kind.”

“Suppose I send an extra thousand Hong Kong. You have a punch line worth a thousand bucks, perhaps?”

She coughs. “They are cannibals, sir, and they use embalmed human penises, rendered tumescent by means of some kind of stiffening agent, as dildos.”

I gulp. “Ah, what was that, Maria?”

“I think you heard me, sir, and I will not repeat it. Please ensure you keep your side of our contract. Good night, sir.”

I close the phone, then it whooshes: an SMS from Maria with her account details.

I fell asleep on the plane and now we’re just coming in to land. The lethargy of total disorientation makes me drag my steps all the way to immigration, then customs, where I snarled and flashed my cop’s ID, because they look as if they’re about to search me. In the cab on the way home, I loll in the backseat, where the latest radio reports of the Sukhumvit Rapist’s adventures penetrate my dormant brain: a young woman’s sobs and gulps fill the airways; at first they are indecipherable, only slowly the meaning of her words dawns on me:
“No, he didn’t rape me.… Yes, I think he was going to but a noise disturbed him.… No, I don’t have any physical injuries.… Why am I so distraught??? Because I was just this hour trapped in a dark alley by a seven-foot monster that looked like half-man half-monkey and it’s scared the living shit out of me, idiot.”

Lek is normally the most self-effacing of assistants, with the discretion of a trusted servant. When he feels he has served beyond the call of duty and craves recognition over and above the usual, however, he acquires the characteristics of a neglected wife. He ambushed me as I walked into the station and hasn’t stopped following me and talking for the past ten minutes:

“Talk about
footwork
, oh Buddha, you wouldn’t
believe
what I’ve gone through the past two days when you were off shopping in Hong Kong. How you must have
suffered
, darling. I feel so
sorry
for you.”

I arrive at my desk, pull back the chair, sit, and put my feet up on the desk while he stands beside me. “Tell me about it, Lek. What angle were you following up? I forget.”

“Oh,
he forgot
. The maharaja of District Eight carelessly distributes duties, assigns tasks, and goes tiger hunting. You told me to check out the shareholders of the mansion in Phuket—you do remember
Phuket, Vulture Peak
? You know,
the case
?”

I let him have my best patrician smile, the kind that sends a message of infinite tolerance for the intellectual shortcomings of slaves. “Tell me about the shareholders.”

“Well of course,
none
of them are in Bangkok—that would have been just too
easy
, wouldn’t it? And when I checked out the registered home addresses, of course there are
no
telephone numbers.”

“Where are the registered addresses?”

“Each and every one of them in Isaan, darling. And I don’t mean urban Isaan, like Udon Thani or Khorat—oh no, nothing easy like that, I mean
deep country
Isaan, the kind of place that was genuine jungle with monkeys swinging from tree to tree about five minutes ago and even now is hardly more than shacks with corrugated roofs.”