Vulture Peak (2 page)

I thank the clerk. He has transformed into a female doormat who fawns and moans as he hefts the heavy tome and tramps slope-shouldered down the aisle between shelves that hold the larcenous secrets of a real estate boom more than thirty years old, while Lek and I retreat gratefully to the heat wave that awaits outside.

I try to avoid Lek’s eye while we look around for a taxi, but he grasps my arm.

“It’s part of the other thing, isn’t it?”

“Too early to say,” I reply. He treats me to a fishwife leer of disbelief.

I shall tease you no further, DFR, but straightaway tell you what I know. It all began on an inauspicious Thursday last week.

“I looked into body parts about five years ago,” Police Colonel Vikorn said, and gave me one of his dangerous smiles. We were in his spartan but spacious office, where he sat at his desk under a great anticorruption poster of which he is inexplicably fond. “But the logistics seemed too nerve-wracking. In the end I decided to stay with what I knew. Smack never goes bad, especially if you keep it in morphine bricks during a bear market.”

My Colonel stood. He is of average height with gray hair almost cropped. As on most days, he was dressed in an informal version of the Thai cop’s brown uniform, a worn cotton combination that looks like military fatigues. It is one of his idiosyncrasies that he never walks but only prowls. Now he prowled to the window to look down on the cooked-food stalls that line the street below. “So many things you have to set up. The surgeon to harvest the parts from the donor or the cadaver. The other surgeon to pop them into the donee. Nursing support for both. And if you do it right, you probably need a specialist in whatever organ you’re transplanting—kidneys are the gold standard, but there’s quite a lot of liver, heart, lung trafficking these days, and they say that whole eyes and faces are now viable. Then there’s the
clinic to set up. If you’ve got some
farang
calling the shots, he’s not going to expect it all to happen in a third-world garage.”

He pursed his lips. “And you have to have a good organ hunter to work the supply side in the first place, not to mention the nurse to take the blood samples to check compatibility.” He turned to face me. “But I could see the point, of course. Suppose some rich little shit on Wall Street needs a new heart. Is he going to wait in line in the hope that the health system will find him a replacement before he croaks—or is he going to buy himself one on the black market? If he’s on the point of dying, obviously he’ll pay whatever price the organ hunter demands. If he’s worth eight hundred million, surely a mere million is not too much to ask in return for another twenty years of bleeding the world white? See, the hunter is the key to it all.” He paused and frowned. “Sure, it would be a first-class racket if it wasn’t for the short shelf life of the product. Did you know that lungs and hearts only last six hours? After that they’re useless.”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”

Vikorn flashed me a glance and nodded thoughtfully. “Eyes, of course, last longer. Just pop them out and chuck them in a fridge, they’re good for a week.”

“I thought you said eyes were only just coming onstream.”

“I said
whole
eyes. Corneas are entry-level stuff—you don’t even need a real surgeon, a well-trained nurse could do it—but the corneas are kept intact on the eyeballs until they’re needed—it’s called an
eye bank
. No civilized country is without one.” He covered his mouth to cough. “The United Arab Emirates is one of the big markets for corneas. It’s all that sun, burns them out. How long do you think human testicles would last on ice?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never heard of transplanting testicles.”

“There’s an incredible demand for them in North Korea, did you know that?”

“No.”

“Of course, with North Koreans you never know if they’re going to transplant them or eat them.”

He let the moment hang for a few beats, then said in a suddenly
formal and almost public tone of voice, “Organ trafficking is a deplorable thing, don’t you think? It’s outrageous that people use our country as a staging post for such an appalling crime. Someone needs to do something about it. I spoke to the deputy secretary yesterday, he’s right behind me. He’s given me tacit approval to lead the charge.”

Now I’d lost the plot entirely. Vikorn lead a law and order campaign? In your mythology, DFR, that would be like Judas running for pope. Stranger still, this was the first I’d heard of Thailand being a world organ-trading center. Shrewdly, my master gave me a few moments to adjust to the new reality. Then he said, “So I’m appointing you as lead investigator.”

“Huh?” In more than a decade of feudal service to my chief, he has never asked me to perform a socially useful task. On the contrary, my contribution to the community has largely consisted in modifying his personal interpretation of Western capitalism. “You started out admitting that you looked into the trade for personal profit. Now suddenly you want to wipe it out. May I ask why?”

He turned to stare me full in the face. “Why d’you think?”

“I have no idea …” My voice trails off, then I emit an “Oh.”

“Right,” Vikorn says, and turns to the window.

“Uhh, how long has General Zinna of the Royal Thai Army been in the business?”

“Ever since that car accident he got all twisted out of shape about. Five years or so. I turned a blind eye to it for a while, because it was relatively small bucks, but now the business has exploded. Organ trafficking today is what personal computers were in the eighties. I can’t let him get too rich. Before you know it, he’ll be trying to wipe me out again. You know what a competitive asshole he is.”

I stared at him. “Why me?”

“Who else? You speak English. You are the half-
farang
bastard son of an American serviceman and so can pass for near white. You are also accustomed to international travel. That’s already three qualifications not owned by anyone else in District Eight. If you must know, there is a fourth.” Predictably, he paused with his eyebrows crooked. When I refused to rise to the bait, he added, “You’re actually
interested in truth and justice. I had a feeling that might come in useful eventually.”

I was not in the mood for those kinds of games, so I scowled instead of smiled. This modest symptom of insubordination used to be enough to get you traffic duty at the Asok/Sukhumvit interchange in the old days; it still was in most cases, but when the Master has bigger fish to fry, he can be amazingly tolerant. Now he was grinning into my bad mood; not a good sign. Still standing, he reached down to pull out the top drawer of his desk, from which he extracted what looked like a scroll about eighteen inches in width. Now he was holding one edge of the document in his left hand next to his left cheek, while unrolling it with his right. Okay, now I saw it was not a document. It was a poster showing him in a brilliant white military-style uniform with brass studs, which is the identity of choice for any Thai man who needs to make an impression on the community. But it was the caption underneath his picture that was drilling holes in my psyche from every direction.

I went gray, because all the blood had drained from my face and an attack of nausea had begun rolling something around in the depths of my stomach. “No,” I said, “you can’t be serious. Please tell me this is an elaborate joke to humiliate me, I can live with that. Just put that damned thing away before I puke.”

Even these strong words failed to dent his amused stare. “It’s official. You can check with the electoral commission if you like.”

“You as governor of Bangkok? You’re really going to run?”

“That’s what it says, isn’t it? There’s going to be one of these on every third lamppost in the city. I’ve already booked and paid for all the television time I’m allowed under the rules.” He rolled up the poster and threw it on his desk. Now he was rubbing the left side of his nose with his left index finger, a sign of unadulterated triumphalism. “Actually, I can hardly lose. None of the other candidates has the dough to beat me. My political counselors tell me there is only one element missing, only one minor flaw that could trip me on the way to the top.”

Now I was beginning to understand. “In twenty years as a colonel
in the Royal Thai Police, you have never done a single thing to fight crime, while doing a great deal to contribute to it.”

My words really should have had him in a rage, but instead the grin just got bigger. “That’s not entirely true. I have done one very important thing to fight crime, something that has cost me dearly over the years.” He paused for effect, then continued, “And now it’s payback time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You. I’ve put up with you and all your sniveling, bleeding-heart conscience, your holier-than-thou posture that gets up everyone’s nose and has had half the payroll moaning to me about you on almost a weekly basis for the past ten years. I’m not just talking about your monk manqué attitude, I’m talking about the number of man-hours you’ve wasted on forensic trivia when you could have been earning your keep. I’m talking about more than a decade of mollycoddling at considerable expense, taking into account how much money you would have made if I had listened to other voices. But I didn’t, did I? You’re still here, aren’t you? I knew I’d find a use for you in the end, though even I never thought it would take a whole decade.”

I was flushed, now; raging blood and a thumping heart replaced gray with near crimson. Suddenly the words were out: “Fuck you. I resign. Right here and now. You’ll have it in writing as soon as I get back to my desk.”

I was stunned that I still had not penetrated his impossible complacency. He was even shaking his head while smiling tolerantly. “Oh, no you don’t. You can’t.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because this is your big moment as well as mine. I’m giving you the highest-profile criminal campaign in the country, and your goody-two-shoes Buddhist conscience will drive you till you drop. All I ask in return for bestowing upon you such glory, such cosmic opportunity to mend and improve your karma to the point where, if you’re obliged to reincarnate at all, it will be as a prince or captain of industry or even, Buddha help us, a holy and revered abbot of a great monastery—all you have to do is tell the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That your soon-to-be-world-famous crusade to put an end to the nefarious practice of illegal trafficking in body parts, which is so vilely exploiting the poor and the helpless, et cetera, is driven by
me
. You don’t even have to confine yourself to Thailand—the Philippines is a world center for organ trading. You can even extend beyond Southeast Asia—in Moldova human kidneys are the staple of the economy. They grow them for cropping the way we grow rice. You’re going to be our first World Cop. It’ll put us on the law enforcement map like never before—we’ll get to be more self-righteous than Western Europe and the States put together. We’ll be the Mr. Squeaky Clean of organ sales.”

My jaw dropped. “You’re going to plaster it all over the media, aren’t you? I mean, the international media? You cunning bastard. The surest way to get the respect of the Thai people is to get the respect of the rest of the world first, especially the Western world. You’re going to give exclusive interviews to CNN and the BBC, which will run endlessly on Thai TV. Damn it, you can’t lose.” I was scratching my jaw furiously. “And you get to nail Zinna into the bargain. It’s two birds with one stone.”

“Right.”

I slumped. “And it’s true, I can’t refuse.”

“See, you agree with me on every point.”

“It’s also an easy way to get myself killed.”

“There is a risk factor, I agree. But how long do you think you would live if you resigned from the force?”

Stress now had me all curled up in my chair—if I were alone, I would have been in a reality-denying fetal position on a bed somewhere. Of course, he had anticipated this moment, just as he had stage-managed the whole interview. Now in one seamless action, he took out his wallet, extracted something small and black from it, sat on his chair, leaned back, and chucked the credit-card-sized black object across the desk. It landed in front of me. I refused to pick it up or even look closely at it. “What is it?”

Now he showed the first sign of irritation. “What does it look like?”

“A credit card.”

“What a genius detective you are.”

“A black one?”

“If you pick the bloody thing up, all will be revealed.”

Correction: if I picked it up, it would be a symbolic act of defeat. Well, he’d already defeated me, so I picked it up. “Amex? They make black ones? Is it for people with poor repayment records?”

He smirked. “You jerk. If you had one atom of street sense you would know you could buy a jumbo jet with it.”

I turned it over a couple of times and shrugged. “So congratulations, I already know you’re filthy rich. What’s it got to do with the price of human testicles?”

“Look again, mooncalf.”

I looked again and gasped. “It has my name on it.”

“You’ve no idea how I had to lie to get them to put you on the account. They checked you out—they told me things about you that were truly shocking, but I battled on. It’s a supplementary card. Just don’t tell any of my wives—they’ve been on at me to get them one ever since they found out what it is.”

“You mean—”

“Of course, I put a limit on it—a very generous one, actually.”

“How much?”

“Not telling you. Let’s say, if you find out, it will be because you’ve gotten uncharacteristically extravagant—or because the case has taken one of those turns that only money can control.”

All I could do for the moment was to stare, as if the sinister black piece of plastic had arrived from a distant planet. “But why do I need it? If the case requires cash, I can just come and ask you for it.”

He sighed. “You’ve missed the main clue, Detective.”

“Okay, I’m just a dumb monk manqué—what clue?”

“In the old days you would have got it in an instant. I deliberately let it drop early on in this interview. I’m very disappointed. And don’t say ‘fuck you’ again—you only get to play that card once in a lifetime.”