Vulture Peak, page 16
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.”
I let him stare out to sea for five minutes, then say softly, “Tell me what goes on at the house. What happens at Vulture Peak, Sally-O?” I’m afraid my use of his stage name might be too dramatic, too obvious. Tears appear at the corners of his eyes, but he seems to have regained some control.
“You’re right, she was using me all along, wasn’t she? Not a word, not a gesture, not a single second when she was not working me like a cheap whistle, right?” He gives a great heaving sigh. “I know you think I’m just the biggest sucker in the world, a total loser who let a female demon persuade him to have his dick cut off, but it’s not that simple. There was something else.”
“Tell me.”
“She can divide herself in two.”
“Huh?”
“Just like some Himalayan mystic, she can be in two places at the same time. She only did it to me once. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a thousand.”
“Tell me.”
“It was very soon after the operation. She invited me up to Vulture Peak. She had the opium pipe already laid out. Maybe you can understand what that means to a smoker. You enter a room where there is a pipe laid out with opium—that means you enter a sacred place, a temple, an Aladdin’s cave in which anything can happen. I was still very weak, and of course there was that hole between my legs that threatened to totally destroy my mind. And we smoked.” He chokes for a moment, coughs, looks away.
When he looks back his eyes are streaming. “She’d already had it embalmed. Cock and balls, the whole set. Somehow she’d made my poor cock twice the size it used to be when erect. I wouldn’t have believed it was mine if not for the birthmark on the tip. I guess she injected some clever embalming solution that set like stiff plastic.” He suddenly looks directly into my eyes. “She took it out of a special case she’d had made for it, like a jewelry case. She said, ‘Look, I can enjoy you whenever I want now. Your flesh has become my flesh. We are one.’ ”
I blink. “She used it?”
“Yes. She used it in front of me,” he sobs. “Even though I was high on the opium, I knew she was doing that. I mean I knew I wasn’t dreaming it. Then she left me, took my cock with her. I’m not sure what happened next. I found myself wandering around the house, looking for my cock and balls. I went into one of the bedrooms and found two of them sharing my dick. I mean there were two identical Lilly Yips. They were naked and both looked up at me at the same time. She—they—had a look in her eyes of a woman bloated on lust, as if she and her double intended to grind away at my poor cock for days on end, like hyenas with a kill. That blew me away forever. I knew I was her slave from then on. She even said it, after we fell out: ‘So long as I have your dick, I have you.’ ”
“You fell out?”
He shrugs. “She grew bored with me. I had a tantrum, threatened to tell all I knew.” He stops, searches my face. “I thought she was going to have me snuffed. I’m sure she thought about it. Then she changed her mind. We have an arrangement. I keep my mouth shut, she supplies me with opium. She’s very regular. That boat boy you used, he brings it. That’s how he knew to charge five hundred baht for a short trip across the water. She’s got me under control. I guess I always was. You could say I’m a prisoner on parole with a location device. I’m allowed to be on the boat, at work, or with Freddie.” He shrugs. “But when I call her, she tells me I’m the luckiest man in the world, I get the best painkiller on the planet free of charge for life. I think she really doesn’t understand how I miss her. She is so exotic, so superior. No matter how she treats me, I know my fantasy life is safe with her. I’m a katoey, after all. A snob. And I find it difficult to keep my mouth shut when someone like you shows up and wants to talk.”
I am thinking, as I am sure you are, DFR, Well, you’re not keeping your mouth shut now, are you? when I see the first boat moving from the jetty in the early light. I glance at the clerk.
“Don’t worry. It’s just the boat boy, bringing me my fin. I sent an SMS this morning, after I saw you’d smoked the last of it.”
“That’s a very efficient boat boy.”
“He works for her, of course. She has that effect on anyone she employs. She pays double and expects one hundred percent loyalty and efficiency.” We stand and watch as the boy rows toward us. He has about three hundred yards to cover, and he rows with steady, manly strokes that extract the maximum efficiency from each pull. As he comes nearer, though, I’m reminded of the wide innocence of those young eyes, the flawless flesh of youth, the unwrinkled face, the bloom in both cheeks. He was an undemonstrative young fellow when he rowed me out last night; this morning finds him quite lively as he ships the oars and glides toward us.
I’m surprised he seems to be aiming for the bow, though, where the clerk and I are standing, instead of the stern, where there is the platform to climb aboard. I guess he must get on well with the clerk, because he holds up a package in a black plastic bag and waves it. When I check the clerk’s face, though, it is incomprehending, as if the boy is behaving in some way eccentrically. I’m still too distracted by the remains of the opium dream to react quickly. The clerk understands quicker than I, but not quickly enough. The boy drops the black bag to reveal a big handgun, some kind of Magnum, which he points directly at the clerk.
I did not detect a moment when those big innocent eyes lost their innocence; he simply aimed the way he had been trained to do; no doubt he telephoned Hong Kong for instructions after he brought me out last night. Lilly must have supplied him with some exotic bullets, because the one that hits the clerk in the throat causes his neck to explode. The bullet—I guess of the soft-nose exploding type—rips through his vertebrae; body and head hit the deck separately; the head rolls until it is stopped by the guardrail.
The kid is so shocked that he has decapitated a man with one shot, he is experiencing a kind of extreme ecstasy that could go either way: he can no more come to terms with the headless corpse—or the separated head—than I can. I’m so absorbed by the transformation that is taking place before my eyes (a million years of torment before this boy gets another chance at the human form, and on some level he knows it) that I fail to consider that Lilly might have had plans for me too. After all, I’m the one he was talking to.
