Vulture Peak (31 page)

“Perfect,” Chan says. “Perfect. Where are you right now?”

“Outside the second house.”

“Good. Is it far back from the mansion?”

“About three hundred yards.”

“So it’s looking down at a valley?”

“Not quite. There’s a flat area.”

“Examine the flat area. What’s the vegetation like?”

I walk across to take a look, holding the phone to my ear. “Looks like it’s been planted with grass and shrubs.”

I hear a sharp intake of breath. “Okay, what about the contours? Is it unexpectedly flat, considering the shape of the mountain?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Fill. Landfill. Digging tunnels these days is easy with the right machinery, especially if you have plenty of dough and come from Hong Kong. The problem is where to dump the extracted material. What are the dimensions of the flat area?”

“More than a hundred yards long, about twenty wide.”

He whistles. “Just what I thought. Except that I was expecting them to have dumped the fill over the cliff on the sea side. That’s how I saw it, but I must have got that detail wrong. That’s why I was checking out the cliff with my scope that day on the boat.”

“You
saw
it?”

“I trained in the States for three months in the eighties. They let me take a remote viewing course. I’ve been trying to use it on the Yips for years. Recently I saw tunnels and landfill—and a lot of other things. But I didn’t know where in the world they were.”

“D’you want to come over here now?”

“No. This isn’t the moment. If we raid now, all we end up with is empty properties that could have been used by anyone. You can bet the Yips have plenty of backup alibis. But they have to visit Vulture Peak soon.”

“Why?”

“Because the clerk and the boat boy have disappeared. They need to know why, and they need to do the investigating themselves. They have no choice. I know they arrived back here in Hong Kong from a trip to Beijing yesterday, so they probably held consultations with their cadres. I have my nerds checking all flight bookings from Hong Kong to Thailand. It’s important that I reach Phuket before they do, so as soon as I see they’ve reserved a flight, I’ll get on an earlier one. Don’t call me again. I’ll send an SMS.” He hangs up.

Now I’m all alone on the hill without a taxi. I shrug and call the chopper company to send someone to pick me up. At the airport I go straight to the computers to access Wikipedia.

Back in Bangkok I take a cab to the station and race up the stairs to Vikorn’s office. He listens to my breathless report without comment, nods, and jerks his chin at the door as a sign for me to leave.

Today Chanya is
kikiat
and won’t be doing any work of any kind.
Kikiat
is usually translated as “lazy,” which is misleading because of the disfavor into which this vital component of mental health has fallen in the work-frenzied Occident; over here
kikiat
is not a fault so much as a frank statement of the human condition. To fail to lend a helping hand because you have something more important to do may provoke anger in others, but to fail to perform a chore because you are feeling
kikiat
will, in all but the most extreme circumstances, meet with an understanding sigh; indeed, the word itself has a kind of pandemic effect, so that one person declaring themselves
kikiat
can cause a whole office to slow down. You may spend a lot of time over here, DFR, learn our customs, know our history better than we do ourselves, and even speak our language, but until you have penetrated to the very heart of indolence and learned to savor its subtle joy, you cannot claim really to have arrived.

Naturally, now that Chanya has declared herself
kikiat
for the day, I myself am thinking of spending the next few hours in bed, calling in sick, and maybe getting up around noon to go to temple. After all, I’m the one who got back from Phuket yesterday. Surely I’m entitled to be idle too?

Now my hasty declaration that I too am
kikiat
absolves me from the duty of getting up to boil water for coffee, so we hang there in bed
for an hour or so. Sometimes Chanya hooks a leg over mine; then after about half an hour I’ll hang my leg over hers; about twenty minutes after that we will decide that too much flesh on flesh is distracting from the purity of our
kikiat
, so we’ll turn aside from each other as if we’ve had an argument; then Chanya will turn back, or I will, and the first one to return to the flat position will hook their leg over the other’s leg or body. We spent most of our honeymoon in this way, with breaks for beer, sex, and
somtam
. Of course, we went swimming in the sea from time to time, but too much exercise has a corrosive effect on
kikiat
. Eventually one of us will get up to boil the water, but we will do it slowly, drowsily, and resentfully, so as not to disturb the fragile condition. Communication is achieved by single words or, preferably, grunts. Try it at home, DFR—you’ll find it a perfect cure for jogging.

After a while I sigh and put water in the electric kettle for three-in-one and grope around to see if there’s anything to eat. Since she’s been studying so hard, Chanya has developed a taste for fig rolls; I never paid any attention to them before, but recently I’ve developed an addiction myself; they seem to go with cannabis and coffee quite well. So I bring over the half-eaten packet with the two mugs of three-in-one while pointing the fan at the top of the bed. Normally, for sleeping, I turn it away from us, so the fact that I’ve now deliberately pointed it at the pillows, on one of which rests Chanya’s dopey head, is a signal we are officially no longer asleep: a sort of indoor equivalent to sunrise. Chanya turns over with her face pointed at the pillow, but turns back after five minutes, yawns, and rubs her eyes. She sees that I’m still standing and jerks a chin toward her computer. “Guess what—my secret admirer sent me another message, even more explicit.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I wanted to show it to you in the interests of a totally open relationship. You do get my drift, Mr. Phuket? Jog the mouse, and you’ll see.”

The voodoo works: now I’m very aware that my partner is as capable of cheating on me as I on her. I jog the mouse. Nothing happens. Chanya groans because she forgot that she had turned the machine off. Now she has to get up, sit at her chair, stab in her security PIN,
and wait for the Internet. Now she enters her inbox and clicks on a JPEG attachment.

It is the same naked male body but a new clip: the penis periodically grows larger and larger until its tumescence fills the screen; then it bursts in an orgasm like a fireworks display and shrinks back to flaccidity. She makes no effort to disguise her fascination. I guess she must be as alienated from me as I am from her. So why am I angry? Why am I jealous? Why am I thinking of Om? I’m steaming but holding myself steady when I whisper, “Does it turn you on?”

“I’m not sure. It’s silly, but I keep looking at it. I’m trying to understand.” She turns just enough to give me a low-grade smile. “Trying to understand men. What it must be like with one of those between your legs. It has to be a different experience. With a woman, whatever way you look at it, it’s a kind of absence, by nature passive, quiescent, an aching wound waiting to be sated. Psychologically it must be quite another experience to have something hard and tumescent to thrust into someone. I guess you’d want to rape first, ask questions later.”

I put my hand on her shoulder and look down her T-shirt. She is not wearing a bra. I say, “He must be a volcano of rage and frustration.”

She nods. “Perhaps. Or maybe he’s just saying, ‘Hey, I’m a real boy, this is what being male is all about. I’m sharing here.’ ”

“Only a woman would think so.” I do not say:
a frustrated woman suffering from a serious dose of seven-year-itch. Like her husband
.

She turns to look at me. “Really? Why d’you say that?”

“Male virility is shy when it’s real. That guy has a serious problem. Exhibitionism is for people who can’t get it on any other way.”

“Is that right?” She shrugs. “So, did you have sex when you were in Phuket?”

“No. I spent the night in a monastery.”

She blinks at me. “Really?”

“Really. If you don’t believe me, you can go ask the abbot of the Golden Goose.”

“That one on the top of the hill? You really, really didn’t go with anyone?”

“I really, really didn’t.”

“So why did I have such a strong intuition that you were cheating, or thinking of cheating?”

“I don’t know.”

We take our coffee mugs back to the mattress. Now she hooks her leg over mine and opens a
kikiat
-style discussion with the single word
Dorothy
. There is a protocol here: since I was the one who went on yet another exotic trip yesterday, I should be the one to humbly listen to local news as if it were the most exciting thing in the world. Chanya allows a good five minutes to pass before she says, “We’re going to have to help her. Or I am.”

“Oh? But I thought you said she had tamed her man and now it was all happiness ever after.”

“I was being loyal. In reality no woman ever tames a man like that.” A pause. “You see, I asked your mother to call me next time Jimmy Clipp turned up at her bar. Well, she called me two nights ago—while you were away, as usual. He’s back with his buddy on weekend R&R. But when I spoke to Dorothy, she didn’t know he was in town. She wasn’t expecting him for a month. He told her he only gets one weekend off every three months, which is a lie. Generally he finds a way to get here every two weeks.” She turns to me. “What should I do?”

“Nothing, of course. Let him have his fun and go back up north. It’s not your business.”

“I know, but he’s not exactly trying to be discreet by going to your mum’s bar. He’ll make sure Dorothy knows he’s back and ignoring her.”

I’m quite shocked and raise my eyebrows. “Really?”

“You don’t know anything about men. I was on the game for nearly ten years, Sonchai. This Jimmy Clipp is a classic: apparently kind, magnanimous, sensitive, great lover, still good-looking at fifty, extremely promiscuous. Such men are immensely cruel underneath. He’ll find a way of feeding off her suffering.” She flashes me a glance.

“That’s why you’re
kikiat
today?”

“Yes. I’m trying not to deal with it. At the same time I feel totally responsible. I should never have set up that night at your mum’s bar.”

“Why not? Dorothy’s a sociologist. She’s supposed to know something about human life.”

“No, she’s not. I’ve only recently realized what a freak I am. I’m a real person who happens to be studying sociology. Most of the rest are Dorothys—nonpeople who study people in the hope that one day they’ll be people too. I handled it all wrong. Instead of being confrontational, I should have grasped the existential reality, namely that I was the educating mother, not her. I should have spent time teaching her how to have sex, introducing her to different men, how to get the best out of them—that’s really why she’s over here, I see that now. She wants to be a real girl.” She tuts at herself. “To let the whole situation blow up like this—it’s unforgivable on my part.” She shakes her head. “But I didn’t know. She’s so big and dogged and speaks with
farang
certainty—I’d forgotten what a fraud it all is. I thought she was going to be the adult in the room helping with my thesis. I fell for the description instead of the reality—now I’m stuck with the mess on the floor.”

(At this point, DFR, I feel it no less than my chivalric duty to warn that at times of stress my darling tends to revert—temporarily—to an earlier incarnation; no, I did not say
bitchy whore.
) “It’s all because of her tits, of course.”

“Really? I thought they were good enough for polite company,” I opine. “Not your earth mother mammaries, I agree, but a lot of women are small and manage—like men.”

“She’s flat-chested. Worse, they’re tiny and flat but still flop around like a couple of half-fried eggs. She’s terribly self-conscious about it, which is why she wears a padded bra most of the time. Then she gets into a defiant mood and leaves it off so everyone sees what the problem is. Next day she’s crippled with embarrassment. Of course, she’s way too much of a feminist to have implants.”

“Aren’t you being a little premature? You haven’t even spoken to her this morning.”

Chanya closes her eyes and makes a screwed-up face to demonstrate psychic concentration. “She’s already called five times.” I frown. “I turned off the sound. Check the log.”