Vulture Peak (7 page)

At Dubai the theme was stars: stars on the stainless-steel handrails, stars on the carpets, stars on the ceiling. I should have understood immediately, but I didn’t. Only after I’d passed through immigration did I remember: desert stars. When I saw a Bedouin in full flowing white
kandura
, I thought I would have liked to be one such: a life under
les belles étoiles
, the good clean emptiness of the desert, a wholesome existence dedicated to Allah; but he arrived in a big new four-by-four and wore a lot of gold around his neck and wrists. At the six star I let them take a copy of my black Amex and enjoyed the full six-star treatment; I was reminded of a well-run brothel where, once they’re convinced of your value, they’ll do anything for you, anything at all.

The girl under the scarf told me my box of medical supplies had already arrived and they’d taken the liberty of leaving them in my suite, plugged into an electric socket. She spoke of my mysterious package with respect, as if she’d guessed what it was. I wanted to ask her what
she
thought was in the box. The six-star made me feel like I’d arrived in the future, as I took the noiseless elevator, which whisked me up to the thirty-first floor in about a second without a jolt, so I was left thinking,
How did I get so high so fast?
The medical supplies played on my mind; they made me feel hyper-important and hyper-crooked at the same time. Ever feel that way yourself, DFR, like you’re simultaneously winning and losing?

•  •  •

The suite was all about minimalism and silk: vast with floor-to-ceiling windows that featured sand and sea plus two sailboats with white sails, which had perhaps been hired by the hotel to hang there in the middle of the view. Now the house phone rang: it was the deputy manager; he wanted to know if the suite suited me, or did my taste tend to the more luxurious? He ticked off the names and themes of some of the other suites, and I wondered what this was all about, until I realized someone at reception must have told him about my good friend BlackAm. They probably had a rule: black Amex gets deputy manager treatment. If you were
famous
and owned the dark card, you’d probably get the manager himself, who was certainly a sheikh; you had to be in that country only an hour to realize everyone at the top of a pyramid was a prince.

I told him the suite was fine, then even before I checked the medical supplies, which I couldn’t find for a moment, I had a panic attack and called Chanya so I could remember who I was. All I got was the Thai voicemail system, which meant she’d turned off her mobile so she could concentrate on her thesis. Or was she having an affair? Was she glad I was out of the country so she could bang someone she had got the hots for? I didn’t want to believe the rumors that she’d developed a friendship with a handsome young cop; that she’d been seen with him. (Every cop shop in the world is a gossip city.) But did she really need a male nude as a screen saver? Why? Was she trying to tell me something? The psychology behind my paranoia was subtle: I’d been finding other women attractive for quite some time; my wisdom body was maybe pointing out that I was not the only one who might be suffering from seven-year itch. Now I saw the box in a corner of the business lounge area of the suite.

It was not of the dimensions I had in mind. When the check-in clerk first said
medical supplies
, my imagination had flashed up a discreet box about two feet long by six inches by six inches. I didn’t know where I got the idea that medical supplies would come in boxes like that. I also thought the box would be red or white, or both, with maybe a red cross on it. Then when she talked about a truck, I immediately thought of something huge, maybe the size of a large fridge. Now I had to reprogram: the box was gray with stainless-steel bands and stood
about two feet high. It seemed to be a perfect cube with a thick black electrical cable, which emerged at the bottom and was plugged into the wall. When I put my ear to it, I couldn’t hear any whirring. Its lid was locked down with combination locks on all four sides, and wherever you looked, you were affronted by black block capitals that said:
HEAT SENSITIVE MEDICAL SUPPLIES, KEEP REFRIGERATED, TO BE OPENED BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. There were other block capitals in other languages which I suppose said the same thing.

In my anxiety about Chanya, I’d changed the profile on my cell phone so that on receipt of an SMS or phone call, it gave a huge space-age whoosh and vibrated at the same time. Now the thing went off in my Zegna pocket and vibrated the hell out of my left testicle:

Now I felt terrific (except that she didn’t end with
love
C, and I didn’t know what a
public imaginary
was); I was ready for the authorized personnel. When nothing happened for an hour, I called Vikorn again, but he was still not receiving calls. I tried out all the sofas and chairs, forced myself to stare at the unreal view, which really existed on the other side of the window (or did it?), and wondered if I should tour Dubai. It occurred to me, though, that this was one place in the world where the tourist DVD might reflect the reality, so I extracted it from the hotel’s welcome package and shoved it into the state-of-the-art Sony player.

Here we go: desert music from Arab pipes by someone in New York; now we’re playing in the sand with a four-wheel bike—ATVs or all-terrain vehicles, according to the commentary, and don’t forget your designer crash helmet. Now it’s the crocodile show with a reptile
too doped to remember to shut its mouth when the trainer puts his head in it, even though you
really
wish it would—hey, let’s take the amphibious bus to the other side of the river, after all, none of the locals do—or maybe golf in the sun for those who want to grow some melanomas? Oh, no, not the monotonous water scooters up and down, round and round the artificial lake—let’s go to the airplane acrobatics with the colored smoke, bet you’ve never seen that before—and to finish, how about the ten-story water slide—don’t worry, the brawny slave with the perfect smile is waiting to catch you at the bottom, it’s all safe and clean here.

Thank Buddha for DVDs—now I didn’t have to do any of that crap. Finally the phone rang. It was reception. “Sorry to trouble you, sir. You have a guest waiting downstairs named Madame Lilly Yip. Do you want to come down to collect her, or shall I have someone bring her up to you?” A cough. “Or shall I tell her you are indisposed?”

Something gaped in the middle of my stomach. I said, “Please bring her up,” and closed the phone.

I couldn’t stop looking at the perfect cube squatting in the corner of the room. A bell rang softly and sonorously; I went to the door. The first person I saw was a burly bellhop in hotel livery; someone was standing behind him. He made sure I wanted to receive the woman I couldn’t see—he didn’t mind being rude to her, she wasn’t a guest.

“Yes, please let her in.” He stood aside.

She was younger than I expected: early thirties, jacket and three-quarter-skirt combination, Chinese of the tall willowy kind—I could imagine her leaning on a humped stone bridge in one of the gardens of Suzhou; sophistication to freeze an erection on any man except a horny aristocrat; beauty worn like a personal fortune that is implied in every detail. She liked the impression she was making on me as she extended a perfect product of the manicurist’s art: “Mr. Jitpleejeep? Lilly Yip. I understand you have something for me?”

“Yes.”

When I didn’t say anything else, she smiled approvingly, as if I were a fellow professional who knew the ropes. Now she took a piece of paper out of her designer handbag. It was an irrevocable letter of credit to the value of $200,000, payable to a corporation registered in Geneva. I supposed the corporation belonged to Vikorn, but I didn’t see how I could let her have the box until I’d got approval from the Colonel, and I could not understand why he hadn’t returned my calls.

I allowed an awkward pause to intervene, covered up by closing the door; I became fascinated by how smoothly it shut and opened, noted that I’d not dented her perfect poise, and said, “I’m afraid my principal hasn’t been in touch since I arrived an hour ago.” When she frowned, I said, “Maybe you’d like to check the merchandise while we’re waiting?”

An unplanned twitch corrupted the cosmetics for a moment. Irritation? Excitement? It was impossible to be sure. “Yes, of course.”

“You have the combination?” I said. She looked at me as if something were wrong, as if I were stupid. I said, “Of course you do,” and led her to the cube.

She quickened her step as she approached, apparently forgetting me. When she reached the cube, she stabbed in the combination numbers from memory. I was surprised that every lock had a different number and that she seemed to know each one by heart. I walked over to help her with the lid. She seemed excited. Together we lifted. I took the full weight of the lid and stepped back. Now I was seeing her at an angle that caught the hollow of her left cheek from behind; I was looking at the jaw of a Manchurian wolf.

Under the lid there was a layer of high-tech packing material, and under that a layer of smaller cubes. Something in the main cube started to whirr, and some wisps of condensation collected on the surface. She took out one of the smaller cubes, which seemed to be made of plastic, opened the lid, removed some more packing material, gave a soft gasp, and nodded at me to look. I leaned over her. It was a perfect human eye with dark iris: moist, almost tearful as if on the point of telling a sad story. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured and looked up at me for confirmation. I wanted to puke, but I said, “Yes, perfect.”

“Where is your fridge?”

I jerked my chin in the direction of the six-star fridge. It seemed she must examine each eye, so we stored the examined ones temporarily in the hotel refrigerator, crowding out the Evian and the tinned caviar. One thousand seven hundred and sixty-four human eyes, none of them blue, gray, or green. To break the monotony, I leaned over her shoulder halfway through the quality-control exercise and said, “Chinese?”

She cocked her head, peered more closely with her lips quivering. “Korean. From the North.”

Now we put them all back in the mother cube one by one, each in its own jewelry box like a gigantic gem, and closed the lid. We’d been working for more than an hour, and I was exhausted by the tension. Lilly Yip hadn’t broken a sweat. My cell phone whooshed.

“What’s happening?”

“Where have you been?”

“In a traffic jam. I forgot I’d turned off my cell phone. Everything okay? You’ve made contact with Lilly?”

“She’s here now.”

“Good. She’s given you an ILC?”

“Yes.”

“For two hundred thousand dollars payable to my corporation in Geneva?” He gave the name of the corporation.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Let her take them away.”

“Not until you tell me where you got the merchandise.”

“Don’t worry, it’s a cadaver-only trade.”

I wanted to ask how the former owners of the eyes became cadavers, but Lilly Yip was listening while pretending to look at the view. I didn’t put it past her to understand Thai. I closed the phone. “That was my principal. It all seems to be in order.”

She nodded and fished her phone out of her handbag. She spoke in fluent Arabic. Then, without asking, she went to the house phone on the desk in the business end of the suite and again spoke in Arabic. She turned to me with a smile out of
Vogue
, Shanghai edition. “A security team will pick them up in thirty minutes. If you confirm with reception that they are allowed to remove the container, we can take a stroll through the Gold Souk. I think this is your first visit to Dubai, no? We can have some lattes at Starbucks.”

Her English was finishing-school perfect. I lifted the house phone to call reception.

In Dubai’s Gold Souk all that glittered was at least eighteen carat. I strolled side by side with Lilly in my top-of-the-range trafficker’s kit, so we looked like a brace of beautiful Asian billionaires (probably childless by choice but who might adopt a half-dozen third-world orphans for the cameras), at the same time wondering if some of the local eye problems didn’t originate here; I was looking forward to the muted colors of Starbucks. Wherever you put your elbow, there was some garish yellow object demanding attention: window after window, shelf after shelf was crammed with that highly polished kind of gold that, from a distance, is indistinguishable from brass. To our left were ten-chain necklaces laden with heart motifs that surely only a weight-lifter could wear; to our right, browsing Muslims examined the very latest in superfine yellow webs to patch on any remaining area of unadorned flesh. It was one of those terraced malls popular in the East where you can look up at level after level of distilled ostentation designed to burn your retinas into submission.

Now here was the coffee shop: good old corporate identity, I would have recognized that couch anywhere in the world. It was midday and most good Muslims were on their knees in the gilded mosques, so Starbucks was almost empty save for a
farang
couple with two brats who were moaning about the size of the swimming pool at their luxury
hotel. I didn’t know why Lilly had brought me here, but I was sure it was not for a romantic interlude.

Or was I? I’m a humble, self-effacing Buddhist, but I was brought up in the flesh trade. Lust does subtle things to women’s faces, and the light around Lilly had shifted from ultraviolet to something lower down the spectrum. She seemed younger, more impish. This was a shape-changer for sure, with the dough to buy a lot of enigma. In the circumstances I had to wonder which, if any, of my organs she might be interested in. Maybe it was shrewd of her to have chosen Starbucks: you could be anyone you liked in a place like this. Dropping the French-style hauteur, she insisted on carrying our tray, commanded the milk and sugar stand—I told her two packets of Equal and a nuance of nonfat, please—and led me to a sofa where we could sit and watch the gold go by.