Vulture Peak (20 page)

Now I notice the long opium pipe lying on the table, plus an oil lamp that has gone out and some transparent plastic squares. A black oily substance is sandwiched between them. When I bend over to sniff, I am able to confirm the sweet aroma of opium. Now I’m really stuck. Opium is so exotic these days, I don’t think I’ve seen it in Bangkok since I was a cadet. I scratch my head. It’s not at all the sort of expensive old-world habit you would expect from a lowly clerk in the local civil service. Nor is it a habit generally acquired by
katoeys
, who, if they use drugs at all, usually go for meth or coke. But then,
katoeys
do not normally dress up in fifteenth-century Ming gowns and winter hats, especially not in the tropics.

I fish out my cell phone to check the time. Seven forty-five
P.M
. The clerk would probably not have begun smoking until after dusk, so as not to be disturbed by boat boys and others. If so, that would give him about seven more hours of intoxication, on the basis that an opium high usually lasts about eight hours. I bob my head, trying to decide what to do. I don’t really want to stay on the boat for another five hours, but on the other hand the weakened psychological state of the clerk after the collapse of his dream world could be useful. I remember him as a possible hard nut with a ton of resentment of one kind or another, who might be impossible to interrogate when sober. I find a flashlight in the wheelhouse and wave it in an arc in the direction of the boat boy, who rows over. I give him his five hundred baht and tell him I might want him in the morning. Then I sit at the bow gazing at the sky as the first of Orion’s stars emerge with the moon.

I’m feeling Zennish. I remember a tale of a Zen monk who gave up his only robe to a starving and shivering old woman and wished he could share the moon with her as well. It’s a great yarn, but it makes
me feel ashamed because it’s only about fifteen minutes since I dismissed the boat boy along with my last chance of making land before morning, and already I’ve started to feel bored. Well, it’s more the
fear
of boredom: all those hours with nothing to do, no TV or radio, no podcasts, nothing to read, no one to talk to, no bright lights, no dope—only this silent and slow-rising moon.

I spend about an hour moving from below to above to below again. The clerk remains catatonic with a beatific smile on his face. When the boredom reaches an intolerable level, I shine the flashlight in his eyes: oblivious pupils the size of pinheads, behind which a soul gorges on bliss. I’m jealous as hell of his nirvanic state. I decide to go back on deck, out of sight of temptation. Now I remember to call Chanya. “Honey, sorry, but I’m in Phuket again and—” She’s hung up.

Okay, I’m giving in, but let it be recorded that I held out for a full two hours before I found the clerk’s aspirin, which I ground up, mixed with his opium, and smoked …

Take my advice, DFR: don’t try it, so you’ll never know how good it is. It is amazing. I see my life pass before my eyes without any anguish attached. Everything takes place against a backdrop of eternity; I see behind the surface of things, which dissolve into serene vistas where transparent archetypes from the origin of consciousness wait at crossroads in the middle distance. Colors acquire the reality of living creatures: imagine a mode of consciousness called Scarlet. Now my mother, Nong, and I are looking into each other’s eyes, telling truths we’ve never told; it is as if our presiding angels have broken through and are talking to each other, silently. Now my long-lost father appears as a young GI, his face blackened for battle. He puts a hand on my shoulder and says,
Sorry;
I say,
Don’t worry about it
. The source of pain is blocked; isn’t this what one was looking for all along?

Dawn. The opium dream melts, leaving only the sound of running water. Well, maybe it’s the clerk making the sound of running water in the galley below. I blink at a sky only recently illuminated: the mysteries
of night still hang around in corners and cause everyday objects to glow sullenly.

“Want some coffee?” the clerk calls.

“Please.”

Now he appears below, in a checked shirt and tight shorts: almost manly, no sign of the makeup. I find my eyes drifting to the area of his mutilated crotch, but catch myself just in time. He stares up at me. “You smoked my
fin.
”

“I got bored waiting. Want to report me to the cops?”

He climbs the stairs and dumps a mug of coffee next to my elbow. Together we stare across the bay.

A couple of buzzards are already circling high overhead. Nothing else is moving. “You know why I’m here?” I say. We are both surprised at how normal we sound; like me, the clerk still has one foot in another world.

“Where do you want to start?” the clerk says.

“Start with the opium. I’ve been a cop in Bangkok for more than fifteen years. I haven’t seen
fin
in all that time. Who taught you to smoke? Who gets it for you?”

The clerk stares at the ever-increasing glow in the east; already sweat has started beading on my forehead. Close up, the clerk, also, is looking a little worse for wear: the grayness of flesh that is said to accompany his hobby.

“
She
did,” the clerk says. “You know who I mean.”

“Do I?”

“She took you to Monte Carlo. I had a great laugh about that.”

I blink into the sun and look away, thinking I really need to change professions. In less than a second a low-ranking clerk has turned the tables on me. It’s quite a neat maneuver, too: if I say
How did you know?
then that’s an admission. If I deny, then he knows I’m not leveling with him.

“Who did?”

He smirks at me. “You really want to play that game?”

“Okay. A Chinese woman, probably calling herself Lilly. Lilly Yip.”

“Correct.”

“Now you.”

The clerk wipes his face with the back of his hand. “She’s the one taught me to smoke opium,” he says. “Isn’t that what you asked?” Then he turns to look at me with eyes of infinite sadness. “She trapped me in a dream. I never would have cut it off otherwise. For ninety percent of
katoeys
, the operation is just a wish, a posture—we never really intend to go through with it. We simply need to be part of the conversation.”

“She persuaded you to have your cock cut off? Why?”

“She wanted it. As a trophy. She has hundreds.”

“That’s all? Just to add it to her collection?”

“The thrill of the hunt, Detective. Like a python lying in wait—she saw me and pounced. Her speed is incredible.” He shakes his head. “Don’t you see? It’s the ultimate proof of female power: to separate a man from his own cock. Ha, ha.”

With the benefit of the narcotic, I see that the clerk is totally deranged. On the other hand, I have not emerged from that other universe myself; I am not yet restored to Social Man, more an electric storm of perception with no particular shape. “You’re still in shock? You can’t believe what has happened to you? But you wanted to be a
katoey
, that’s what you told your lover, Freddie? You wanted to experience your true nature as a woman?”

“That’s what every
katoey
says. Like I just told you, only a tiny percentage go all the way—most are safe because they don’t have the dough. For the majority, gender reassignment is one fantastic topic of gossip that never fails. I told her I didn’t really have the courage, that I was just a little fantasizing mediocrity like everyone else. She advised me not to think like that. She told me that successes and heroes are simply people who follow their dreams. That’s why she introduced me to opium.”

“Did she smoke it with you?”

“Sometimes. She used to spin yarns about how wonderful life was going to be after the operation. She knew all the
katoey
buzzwords and could play on every fantasy. And she made me feel so important.”

We are standing together at the bow. The clerk’s eyes are gleaming around the pupils but smeared at the edges. There is a kind of despair
in his tone, which is nonetheless triumphant. “See, I didn’t need to say it. For once I didn’t need even to hint. She saw it in me.”

“Saw what?”

“That I am the reincarnation of Zheng He, of course.”

I look at him. For a second I see him through his own eyes: gathered behind him the greatest fleet the ancient world ever saw—probably the greatest fleet that was ever assembled before World War II. Lilly would have known about the clerk’s Zheng He fantasy from talking to Freddie. “Of course you are.”

“Oh,
you
can say that because you already know. But she
saw
it, without any prompting, d’you see? When a stranger recognizes your true nature, it’s so liberating. It’s a final proof.”

“Final proof? But you’re not entirely sure you’ve done the right thing! You’re on the horns of a dilemma. Did you commit the greatest stupidity in the history of the world, namely let some sadistic, criminal-minded bitch talk you into having your balls and penis amputated, just so she has a new toy to play with for a moment before she chucks it in the trash? Or does that other, magical world really exist, the one you always longed for, the one she herself understands so well because that’s where she lives most of the time? The world where Zheng He still rules, no?”

He is staring at me in horror. “Chucks it in the trash?” He has pressed his hands against both ears. The opium is still poisoning my blood, causing me to turn on him. I think I understand Lilly. The clerk is so completely lost, so utterly manipulable—I expect he triggered in her a primeval response to destroy. I too find contempt taking over. “But it was more than just your cock she wanted. She has a whole room full of men’s embalmed dicks she uses as dildos—it’s how she gets her thrills. Your manhood was just the icing on the cake. What she wanted was a whole castle. You got her Vulture Peak.”

I think I have delivered an overdose of reality. The clerk’s brain seems to scramble. He stares at me and blinks, then says, “Yes. I got her Vulture Peak. That’s true.”

“Want to tell me how it went?”

He sags against the outside of the wheelhouse, inhales. “It all started because Freddie needed a new liver and sent an e-mail to
someone called Dr. Gray. Lilly Yip appeared. She spoke Thai and a lot of other languages. Of course, she saw I was
katoey
. And she saw I’d not yet had the operation. She seemed to understand craving. Somehow my whole focus was on that operation. I don’t even know why, she just led me into this mind-set: I had to be released from being male. That was my only way out.”

“So you both had reasons to bond. She offered the full
katoey
fantasy trip, including the operation, probably free of charge, and opium for life. In return you would help her screw the old man for more than half his fortune, and you would procure for her the most fabulous property in Phuket—somehow. What did you do?”

“Nothing very much. The place was already owned by Hong Kong Chinese. I happened to know who the real owner was—and the ghost shareholders here in Thailand.”

“She must have wanted the property quite badly, to go to that kind of trouble.”

“She did, but it wasn’t really for her. It was for some conglomerate in China—a group she was involved with. And there was a Thai army general involved.”

“Did she say who?”

“The general? No, never.”

“The Chinese conglomerate?”

“There was a government ministry, and some banks too. They were some kind of lobby group. Lilly Yip seemed to need to keep them charmed. You know, entertaining your most valued clients. That’s why it had to be the biggest palace on the island—a face thing. Actually, she’s right, there isn’t another property like that—probably isn’t another one in Thailand.”

“But that mansion, that’s where Freddie woke up after his operation. You must have moved pretty quick.”

“As I said, I knew the owner at the time. I was a clerk in the land office. I knew how to process a real estate purchase in an hour if I needed to. She’d already bought the place and owned it for more than a year before everything was ready for Freddie’s transplant.”

When I look into the clerk’s smeared eyes, I see that exactly the same thing is happening to him as happened to me just now: an
opium flashback, a sensation not of memory but of displacement in time: for a second I was nine years old again, and Nong was young and sexy, pulling out all the stops for one of her johns somewhere in France or Germany. (There were horse chestnut trees, empty streets black from rain, and old European houses built of stone that looked so solid. A strange light that had no origin permeating everything.)

Seeing the clerk lose control of his mind in the same way, I pounce. “But she included you in the house activities—she must have done. She had turned you into her best friend. No, let’s put it another way: she had made herself your
only
friend, because she understood you so much better than Freddie did. Freddie is a useful sugar daddy but has no depth. The anguish of being alive is something he drowned with booze years ago—like a lot of Brits, he is just one long alcoholic escape trip. But you—yes, it would have been an important part of her plan to include you, to make you an intimate. Otherwise you might have reverted to
katoey
jealousy and tried to bring her down. You do have that vicious
katoey
thing, don’t you? And let’s face it, you’ve never been a man with a big social life.”

“But I’m not a man,” he says, “I don’t need big face. I don’t need a social life.”

“But you need to be understood. We all do. For you, it must have been intriguing and terrifying.”

“What?”

“To be understood by a woman, perhaps for the first time in your life.”

Truth can be a radical interrogation technique, and I’m not sure this clerk will survive. He is grinding his jaw and seems on the point of tears. I think I’ve pushed as far as I dare and give him time. He stares and stares out to sea, as if the answer lies there. Finally, he starts to spill his guts.

“She is very skillful with the
fin
. She prepares the pipe with exactly the amount for the effect she wants. We became intimate very quickly—I don’t mean sex, I mean something much deeper than that. ‘Soul fucking,’ she called it. I was pleased and flattered that such a woman would take an interest in me, even though I knew she had reasons. She had a way of using the
fin
to create a landscape. She introduced
certain magic phrases when we were high, happy words like ‘When we’re totally free,’ and ‘Are you as delighted as I am to have found a soul mate?’ The best was ‘I understand you, Khun Sally-O. I don’t like sex either, it’s a bad joke. So much nicer to hold hands and be friends.’ ” He lets a couple of beats pass. “Pathetic, no? Not the sort of thing anyone would fall for without opium, right?” He sighs. “But fantasy is addictive. You know what she told me once? That she could only take about one hour of reality every day. The world was just too harsh. I can’t tell you how wonderful it felt, to have met someone—a woman of all things—who understood me that well. Me.”