Vulture Peak (24 page)

“It’s better than a gun, a Ferrari, or an erection,” I say. “You can take it into any hotel, office, or department store and get treated like the sultan of Brunei. Even ATM machines work faster.”

Outside on the street we can hardly move for traders, tourists, pimps, and whores. Ever since Pat Pong achieved worldwide fame, merchandisers have been annexing territory, so now you have the whole street taken up with stalls selling clothes, watches, videos,
incense, and other tourist junk, which creates an interesting sociological study:
farang
who arrive in a family group for the safe, clean crime of buying a couple of fake Rolexes to show friends at home maintain a strict seclusion from those
farang
men who arrive as lone wolves and hardly notice the stalls in the middle of the street because they’re focused on the girls in shiny swimming costumes and long silver cloaks who beckon them into the bars.
Farang
wives watch curiosity work their husbands’ libidos, no matter how good a boy they married;
farang
husbands don’t notice the curiosity their wives also feel. Respectable women, who would die a thousand deaths rather than sell their bodies, wonder for a moment
exactly
what it must be like to do such a thing. I see a mother cover the eyes of her son of maybe nine years: too late, the kid saw his dad’s pupils dilate in a most undadlike way at a glimpse of a forbidden world.

Ruamsantiah pays no attention to the stalls, though, as he pushes between bodies to get to the other side of the street where the Shangri-La bar is situated.

Like my mother’s bar, the Shangri-La is known for the extra care it takes with the pay and selection of its girls. As a result, you have maybe the most beautiful women in the world strutting their stuff and inviting offers: gracious smiles greet us at the same time as loins gyrate and chests inflate. Ruamsantiah goes for the back seats and sags into one with a sigh. I know he’s been here before and that he was looking forward to this moment, which replicates an earlier moment, and so on all the way back to puberty. “It’s always the same,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. “There isn’t a single one I don’t want to fuck. I could sit here all night and still not make up my mind.”

“You remember the run-in you and the Colonel had with that Chinese general in Yunnan a few years ago?”

He orders a bottle of Mekong whiskey with ice and water on the side, now brought by one of the staff, also a beautiful young woman who can be hired, though for an extra premium because a replacement would have to be found to serve drinks. The sergeant gives her a long, appraising look, accompanied by a magnificent smile, and tells her to give the chit to me. He is pretending he didn’t hear my
question. I groan. I won’t get any sense out of him for hours, and we’ll both be drunk by then. Such is his plan.

It’s 1:25
A.M
. The evening went pretty much as I expected, and now I’m in a cab on the way home.

Ruamsantiah kept inviting girls down off the stage and buying them drinks, so that after a couple of hours we were buying drinks for six girls, all of whom had lightly groped, and been lightly groped by, the sergeant, who with every grope given and received was that much further away from deciding which two he would take with him to the short-term hotel. He told me he needed to leave the bar for a while to clear his head, and we strolled across to Pat Pong II, where we climbed the stairs to the Wallabi bar. He sat in a corner where he got a blowjob by twin sisters who shared the labor fifty-fifty while he sent me to buy him Viagra. I walked across the street to the pharmacy where the owner, a Thai woman in her fifties, threw two blue pills into a tiny brown paper bag with a big sneer and charged five hundred baht per pop. I wondered if she’d ever thought of going on the game or trading in heroin to cheer herself up. How about body parts? By the time I got back to the Wallabi, Ruamsantiah had already ejaculated and the twins had disappeared somewhere to gargle with Listerine while he lit up another cheroot without bothering to flash his cop ID, because as a general rule the upper floors are lawless anyway.

The sergeant popped a whole Viagra when half is the recommended dose and ordered a beer while he waited for his next erection. I tried to start up the conversation I had invited him out for, but he was reliving the experience he’d just had and didn’t answer while a smile of obscene gratification played over his lips. By that time I was resigned to playing his game, whatever it was, and even felt a certain relief when he reported the drug was starting to have effect and maybe we should return to the Shangri-La. I guess the chemical was building up quite a bit of steam by the time we got back to that bar, because with shocking speed the sergeant chose two of the girls he’d formerly been entertaining and had me pay for their services on the credit card.
While they were changing into street clothes, he leaned over to me and said, “Yeah, I do remember. How could I ever forget? It’s at times like that you find out what leadership means. I was scared shitless, but the Colonel never turned a hair—didn’t faze him at all.”

Then he admitted he’d known from the start that I would want to talk about Mr. To, but he was afraid that if he spilled his guts earlier on, I’d disappear with the BlackAm, but now that the evening was building toward its second climax, he was ready to talk, and anyway he needed something to distract him while he suffered the sweet torment of gratification delayed: bar girls are known to take an age to put on the couple of bits of clothing they need to cross the street to the short-term hotel where they take them off again.

“But you
know
what happened. You went to talk to the bank’s number-one enforcer with
guanxi
in Beijing. So there was the Colonel and me in a barrack cell, with armed guards outside, thinking this might just be the end, when there’s a whole brain-bending show of the latest military disorientation devices going off outside the cell: noise, zinging like you wouldn’t believe, flashes to blind you, quite a few real-sounding bullets from small arms, a few glimpses of some very serious-looking soldiers dressed in black, like Chinese special forces. Then our cell door gets busted open with a small explosive device, and we’re dragged out and frog-marched to a light aircraft. I just have time to see a few bodies on the tarmac before we’re thrown in the plane, and next thing you know we’re over Thai airspace and about to land in Bangkok. On the plane they told us that a special services agent of your build pretended to deliver the dough about five minutes before the attack. They needed the evidence for the prosecution. But you must have guessed all that.”

“Yes, I guessed all that. But the deal with To—that sounds like a very expensive operation. Vikorn must have mortgaged more than his Bentley.”

The sergeant looked at me with a frank expression that seemed to ask for counsel: had I pampered, spoiled, and indulged him to the point where it would have been unreasonable for anyone to expect him to keep the secret—or should he have held out for more? I didn’t
know how to signal that I’d spent more than a thousand dollars on him, and no way anyone could seriously expect him not to share his most intimate secrets with me after accepting such hospitality, but he sagged anyway. “The deal? It was open-ended.” I blinked. “You know how the Chinese work: they leave one enormous favor on the table, which they remind you of from time to time—until the moment comes for payback.”

“Vikorn pledged to do just about anything, when the time came?”

Ruamsantiah shrugged. “We were in a tight spot. No matter what face the Colonel put on it, and he really is made of steel, there was only a fifty-fifty chance of getting out of there in one piece. Sure, he promised the world—because he knew that was the price.”

“And am I right in thinking it’s Beijing, through To, who forced him to run for governor?”

Ruamsantiah stared me in the eye for a long, serious moment; then his girls started to arrive, and he relaxed.

There are women so beautiful, the glittering bikinis they wear on stage only distract from their charms, and it’s not until you see them in plain old skintight jeans, T-shirt, and flip-flops that your jaw really drops. I was jealous as hell of what he was about to do with her and for a wobbly moment wondered if I should use the BlackAm to hire a couple of girls for myself, but he had managed to choose the two most beautiful in the bar, so no matter what I did, he was going to end up as alpha-male apex feeder.

At that moment the sergeant and I were sitting next to each other on a padded bench with our bodies touching, so I was able to decipher his movements as he undid the waistband of his pants, reached down to rescue his member, which had stiffened in an awkward position and was now stuck painfully between pocket and inner thigh, then did up the button again, all while beaming with appreciation at the first half of his forthcoming orgy.

“Well?” I said.

Ruamsantiah stopped grinning at the girl in jeans and T-shirt long enough to say, “I don’t know. Let’s say I was very surprised when he told me he was going to run, and I came to the conclusion that it was
not a decision he made all on his own. Khun To is a wild card, a money genius with
guanxi, ganqing
, and
renqing
coming out of his ears, but he may be out of control. They say he plays hard and weird.”

Then the second girl arrived. If anything, she was even more stunning in her street clothes than the first, but my libido had switched off. I watched in a distracted way as he led them out of the bar.

So who says life is all bad? I’m up, washed and shaved, and ready to put on my organ trafficker’s outfit to wear to the bank. Chanya can’t resist ogling me, and to raise the libido level, I refuse to tell her where I’m going, even though the question that cracked open the mystery came from her. Yep, DFR, I am telling you to put that suspect list away now, because Jitpleecheep has solved the case. Excuse me while I go out into the yard in my shorts to do my victory dance. (It’s from my Lakota incarnation: wood fires around the wigwams at dawn, a squaw who looked a lot like Chanya and another who looked like Om, white men with killing machines on the horizon, Red Horse and the braves grinning to crack their faces.
What a fantastic day to die!
) Chanya knows what I’m up to but takes no notice. She’s seen it before.

Just in case you haven’t worked it out, DFR, let me hand it to you on a plate:

The man who is not To (hereafter “Notto”) is not only a highranking Hong Kong banker who runs the Bangkok office sotto voce in the Confucian style; he is not only an ace troubleshooter for said bank and whoever of its most highly valued clients may need him from time to time—I bet Vikorn has close to a billion tied up there for him to get that kind of service; but Notto is also the incarnation of
guanxi
with some of the oldies who run China. That much, I trust, is clear. So, when a very fat cat like Vikorn needs the kind of help he needed with
General Xie (deceased), dollar signs light up in Notto’s eyes. Perhaps his first impulse was to charge the Colonel a few million for the hostage-busting service, but then he talked to Beijing, who had a better idea. Or maybe Notto had the idea all on his own and simply made a phone call to Beijing for approval. Either way, somebody senior saw a senior-size opportunity to make a lot of dough. Everyone knows how corrupt our civil service is (we came in
behind
Malaysia in the how-dirty-is-your-country statistics last year—which only leaves Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and Laos for us to sneer at), and everyone knows how lucrative for a merchant bank big infrastructure projects can be. Instead of bleeding Vikorn white in the old-style subprime-mortgage win-lose equation in which so many have lost their homes, they used the enlightened win-win equation that, as we know from the news networks, all of which are large corporations with vested interests, is saving the world. “You are the next governor of Bangkok,” Notto said to Vikorn the day after he got back from Yunnan, or words to that effect. I imagine the conversation running like this:

I’m pretty confident that’s how it went, DFR—you agree? It’s a wrap that explains everything, including the clumsy way Beijing and the Americans are going about the Colonel’s election campaign, and including sending me on some photo-op in Dubai with those crazy Twins, but especially dumping those three bodies in that house on Vulture Peak. Can’t you see the way the meeting went?