Vulture Peak, page 17
The boy is recovering quickly, switching paranoid glances now, between me and the clerk’s remains; but I’m like a blinded deer: I do not see it coming until it’s too late. I watch in a paralysis of will while he raises the gun again and takes aim. There is nowhere to flee, the stairs that lead below are about six feet behind me. I know that if I panic and dash for cover, he will blow me away with that miniature cannon. And I left my gun downstairs with the opium pipe. But suppose I made it below, what then? I’d simply be a fish in a barrel for him to slaughter.
The moment freezes. Vikorn was right when he said I’m a steady hand in a firefight, but this is different. I’m mesmerized. The kid’s reckless waste of his chance of personal evolution has totally thrown me. What, exactly, does a soul do when it has just condemned itself to hell? I’m locking eyes with the clerk and in some way his terror, confusion, pride, loss, and iron determination are penetrating my heart.
Then something goes wrong with the kid’s body. He jerks, seems to experience a stab of unendurable pain, then jerks twice more before collapsing into the rowboat. I can see a pulsating fountain of blood spraying from his chest—pink, fresh from the lungs. Without thinking, I dive into the water. When I reach the rowboat, the kid has all but bled out. The best I can do is row back to the yacht, which I’m now sharing with two cadavers. Good morning, Phuket!
Back at the bow I search the bay with my eyes, paying special attention to a stand of trees somewhat to the south, not far from the road or the clubhouse. My heart thumping, my head raging with poisoned monologues by demons who stayed behind after the opium dream, I take out my cell phone and look for Chan’s number.
He answers on the first ring. “Hi, Third-World Cop. Still alive, huh?”
“Thanks to you.”
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s say I know the Yips. What happened just now could not be prevented—or it could have been if you’d let me into your investigation a little more deeply. But you didn’t, so it had to be Plan B.”
“You must be one hell of a shot.”
“Not really. Modern technology, you know, a child could have done it.”
“What d’you want to do now?”
“I want to go for a jolly on a yacht in sunny Phuket,” Chan says in his best British accent. “D’yah think you could sail it as far as the jetty, old chap?”
“I’m not doing a damned thing till you tell me how you knew where I was.”
“Cell phone. When it comes to women, you are truly pathetic. That was a woman you broke cover for, wasn’t it? You just had to call her, didn’t you? She who has you by the balls. There is only one transmission tower in the part of Phuket where you are. When the backroom boys in Hong Kong told me you were in the vicinity of a yacht club, I just knew you had to be under Yip surveillance. Funny how that popular holiday destination keeps cropping up in this investigation, no?”
“It’s where the original victims were butchered.”
“Exactly.”
As it happens, I know motorboats (Florida Keys; the john saw it in his interest to teach me how to work the controls on his sixty-foot floating knocking shop, so he could take Mum down below for boom-boom). The clerk left the keys in the ignition, so I fire up the twin turbo-charged diesel engines, roar across the bay, and (I blame the opium) nearly forget the most important lesson of all: boats don’t have brakes. I manage to steer away from the jetty just in time to avoid staving in the bow, although I deliver quite an impressive sideswipe by the stern before I’m able to slow everything down by reversing the engines. Call me Captain Pugwash. To recover dignity I jump onto the boards like a pro, with a line in my hand, which I slip over a bollard before sitting on it.
Chan is wearing a short-sleeve shirt with tropical fruit all over, long walking shorts, and sandals. He is taller, slimmer, and fitter than I remember. In fact, he looks like an athlete as he strolls down the jetty with a large sports bag hanging from one shoulder.
“I tied the rowboat up to the buoy with the kid’s cadaver still in it,” I explain. “I had to put the clerk’s head in the sink in the galley because it kept rolling around on deck, but I didn’t move the trunk except to shift it out of the way of the anchor chain.”
Chan skips lightly aboard to check out the headless clerk. “I saved your life,” he says. “I’m not looking for credit, but isn’t there a word for that in your culture?”
“Gatdanyu,” I say.
“Meaning?”
“Roughly speaking, ‘I owe you one all the way to death.’ ”
“Good,” Chan says. “So let’s go pick up the kid and do some serious evidence destruction. Otherwise the cops on this island will hold you for a year, until their owners tell them to let you go.”
“Owners?”
“The Yips are big here, but the cops are controlled by some army general. I bet you can tell me the name.”
“Zinna. How did you know?”
He seems to consider the question. “Fanaticism. One day very soon it will overtake you. Then you’ll want to know every tiny thing about Vulture Peak. Just like me.”
We hook up the rowboat to the stern and head out to sea. I feel dirty about what we are doing—in my own way I have always honored the deeper rules of law enforcement—but Chan is right: Zinna and the Yips would never let me off the island if they could find an excuse to keep me here. When we’re about a mile out to sea, I watch him drag the clerk’s body into the rowboat. He finds an adjustable wrench in the wheelhouse and unscrews the bolt at the winch that holds the anchor chain. He drags the chain and anchor across the teak deck to the rowboat and ties up the two cadavers with it, including the anchor. He is sweating from the effort, but won’t let me help. The clerk’s head is a problem, though. Chan solves it by putting it into a bin liner, then making a skein out of some rope to keep it from bloating and floating. Now he ties the skein to the anchor chain.
I jump into the rowboat and together we haul the corpses and chain overboard. Back on the swimming platform, Chan empties the Magnum’s chamber into the bottom of the rowboat. Seawater floods in as if from spigots, and soon the boat also sinks. Chan jerks his head at the wheelhouse and tells me to make way.
“Where to?”
“Any position that gives a view of Vulture Peak.”
Boats are very slow compared to cars. It takes more than three hours to round the various headlands until the mountain with the mansion comes into view. It’s hot now. Chan and I are both stripped to our shorts, glistening with sweat. Whether out of some kind of respect for the dead, or a need to suffer, or because we are on serious business, is hard to say, but neither of us thinks of turning on the air-conditioning.
I drop anchor at the spot that Chan indicates and watch while he empties the contents of his sports bag onto a table. The main items are three light, hardened aluminum pipes that screw into one another. When put together with a few more parts, they transform into a singleshot rifle with an exceptionally long barrel, a high-tech scope, and a clever way of calibrating the angle of the shot to the finest tolerances.
“It takes time to aim. You were lucky the kid was so blown away by his first kill that he stood motionless for over a minute. Otherwise you’d be dead.”
“You brought that from Hong Kong? I thought you were on vacation.”
“Of course I didn’t bring it from Hong Kong. Don’t you know you can buy anything in Bangkok?”
We go out on deck, where Chan uses the sight from his gun to examine Vulture Peak. He seems fascinated.
“Don’t you want to go up there to have a look?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “It’s too soon. If anyone even suspects I’m here, we could blow the whole operation.”
“What operation?”
He scratches his head. “If I’m right, then probably one of the biggest in the history of crime detection. But there’s no way you would believe me at this moment. You might not appreciate it, but I’ve been working on your education since the night we met.” He gives me a patronizing smile, then turns back to his scope. “And there’s still a way to go. You examined the whole house up there on top of the hill?”
“Well, I took a look at it the day I was put on the case.”
“And it’s just a big house with bedrooms, a side lounge, deck, et cetera”
“Basically, yes, just that. Very fancy, but in the end just a house.”
“Garage? There must be a garage.”
“Yes, a big one carved into the rock. It would take at least three limos.”
“And how was it?”
“Empty.”
He nods.
I leave him to roast in the sun with his telescope while I retreat into the wheelhouse. It’s been more than twenty-four hours since I was last in the world, so I switch on the radio. The story of the day is the Sukhumvit Rapist again, but with a difference. It seems he followed a maichi, a Buddhist nun, to her family home, where she was visiting, and tried to rape her. The maichi, though, had other ideas:
“He took all his clothes off and made signs for me to undress in front of him,” the maichi is telling a press conference.
“Was he aroused?”
“Well, I’m not an expert, but I certainly got that impression.”
Laughter.
“Then what happened?”
“I’m afraid I lost my composure and told him what I thought of him.”
Snickers. “What did you say?”
“I said that I could quite understand why he would think of a nun as some kind of symbol worth violating, but he was wrong. As a maichi I’m as much divorced from the culture as he is. I told him that far from being a suitable target, I represent the only force in the world that could help or understand him. I probably despise the superficiality of a society that judges by appearances even more than he. I’ve certainly spent decades of my life thinking about it. Anyway, what could he possibly achieve by shoving his thing inside me and moving it in and out for a few minutes? I have no particular use for that organ at all, I would just wash it afterward hoping he hadn’t given me a disease, then I would dissolve the whole incident in meditation. So what could he possibly achieve? I’ve never been pretty, and now I’m scrawny with a shaved head, so it wasn’t as if he was going to possess a beautiful woman for five minutes.”
“You said all that?”
“Yes.”
“And what happened?”
“His thing went floppy, and he looked as if he was about to cry. I felt sorry for him. He put his clothes on and left.”
Roars of laughter.
“So those Buddhist power words did the trick?”
“Oh, I don’t think he paid much attention to what I was saying. I said it all looking him in the eye, you see? I wasn’t horrified. My stomach didn’t fall out at the sight of his ugliness. I told him by my body language that I knew he was not a demon, just another tormented human along with six billion others. I think that’s what did it.”
It’s an amusing crime story so I go out into the blaze to tell Chan. He listens while he continues to check out the mansion in a kind of manic overdrive. I have to wonder if he is—well—a hundred satang to the baht. When I’ve finished telling the story, he says, “Does anyone know who he is?”
“No one knows for sure, but all the betting is on a young man who used to be Zinna’s lover. We all thought he was attending a monastery in Cambodia, but it’s looking like he decided to return to the world.”
I tell Chan about Zinna and the tragic accident. He takes the scope away from his face for a moment. “Another transplant in China? Interesting, don’t you think?” Then he returns to his distant surveillance of the empty house and, it seems, every inch of the mountain it stands on.
Part 2
18
When things go wrong between us, Chanya and I try to mend our relationship by going out to eat. We’re both too shy to yell at each other in public, and we love food and wine, so there’s nothing for it except to make polite intelligent conversation on all topics save the ones raging in our hearts. If we’re still mad at each other after the cheese course, we tend to settle scores in the cab on the way home.
Tonight we’re eating at a brand-new Italian place that’s just opened on a soi off mid-Sukhumvit, impelled not so much by rage as by sadness that we seem to be drifting apart in separate rudderless boats. Chanya orders a Caesar salad, I order mozzarella with tomatoes drizzled in extra-special extra-virgin olive oil from some olive grove in southeastern Sicily; the bottle sports an explanatory tag with a coat of arms to prove it. For the main course we both order fegato alla veneziana, because it’s almost impossible to get in the tropics. Chanya tells me to order the wine, in deference to the oenologique education I received from my mother’s richest client, Monsieur Truffaut. But that was more than twenty years ago, and all the finest vintages have changed. Since we’re eating on Vikorn’s tab via his black Amex, I figure the simplest selection procedure is to choose the third most expensive Barolo, my thinking being that the two most expensive wines on any list are always irresponsibly overpriced by reason of glamour and cachet, but the cost of the third is probably fair value for an excellent wine. When the sommelier has me taste it, I’m fortified in my strategy and gaze at Chanya with triumph.
“It’s good,” I tell her.
“I can see that from the smug look on your face,” Chanya says.
It becomes clear to both of us that the ensuing awkward silence can be relieved only by gossip, and the subject of that gossip is going to be the same as everyone else’s.
“One of my women’s groups has access to news stories the police try to suppress,” she tells me as she sips the wine. “Apparently he brutally raped an army wife.”
“He hurt her? So far he hasn’t been violent. That story about the maichi almost rehabilitated him.”
“I know. We were so proud of her, all the women at Uni sent her congratulatory e-mails. Such dignity, courage, compassion—a great example of womanhood at its best. I had an argument with a feminist who moaned that the maichi was a product of a medieval paternalistic exploitative system and she’d only prevailed against the predatory male by neutering herself. I was so mad I nearly punched her.”
I sip the wine—actually, it’s more a glug than a sip. “I agree. I felt sick in my heart after I heard the story. It made me realize how I’d strayed from the Buddhist path. Even my thought processes seem to have become superficial. I find myself fixating on things that don’t matter, like a farang.”
“Yes,” Chanya agrees. “I’m so glad you finally said it—all those eyes. You were really freaking when you came back from Dubai. But you’re probably still not seeing the full horror—you’re in denial, that’s what makes people superficial. Look at the Brits, still in denial about the atrocities of empire and superficial as hell. They all watch East Enders, like Dorothy. That’s not culture, it’s despair in disguise.”
Affronted by her lack of kindness, I return to an earlier topic. “So, the rapist—he beat up his latest victim?”
Chanya shakes her head. “I didn’t say that.”
“You said ‘brutally raped.’ ”
She takes another sip of wine. “You can’t do that to a terrified woman without hurting her, Sonchai, no matter how much KY Jelly you use. The harder the thrust, the worse the psychological damage.”
I stare at my mozzarella and tomato salad, which has been drizzled with that deep green olive oil that looks so special. “I guess.”
From the Sukhumvit Rapist, we move on to the extension to the Skytrain; then over the main course Chanya reports on Dorothy.
“You know what’s amazing? She seems to have tamed Jimmy Clipp.”
“Who?”
“You know, that American civil engineer who was in your mother’s bar that night getting a hand job and then took Dorothy to the short-time hotel where she fell in love with him.”
“She tamed him? What did she do?”
“Apart from threatening suicide about fifty times, I’m not sure. He’s American, so maybe he’s seduced by pubescent adulation. You know how they are.”
That story sees us safely through the fegato, and neither of us wants to risk our waistlines on a sweet, tempting as they are (I have an almost insurmountable weakness for profiteroles, but with superhuman will I decline the whole desert trolley), so I pay with a dark flourish from BlackAm and add a hefty tip for the Thai man-and-woman team who have been trying so valiantly to follow the arcane system of HiSo farang restaurant rituals, not to mention forcing their tongues around such lingual torment as profiteroles, Barolo, et cetera: we tend to hold the r sound in contempt and whenever possible substitute the infinitely more elegant and playful l; few Thais can hear the difference. (The Balolo cost roughly two hundred dollars, by the way, DFR; I know you’ve been dying to ask.)
Chanya and I take a cab back to the hovel. We’re silent for most of the journey, and my mind eventually flips back to the case. The deeper I sink into it, the less I am able to understand Vikorn’s part. And now that he’s popped into my mind, I realize the Colonel is the only remaining source of relationship-neutral conversation.
“He’s a control freak,” I tell Chanya as the cab turns into our soi. “For more than thirty years he has outmaneuvered, outcheated, outwitted, outflanked, outsold, outbought, and outkilled his enemies so that he could have total and absolute control of his kingdom. Now, suddenly, he decides to enter politics, we have three Americans running his life, and everything is in the hands of people in Beijing. It’s not like him.”
“Isn’t it out of character for him to run for governor in the first place? It just isn’t his style—he’s way too shrewd to want to become a minor public figure. Is someone making him do it?”
“Force Vikorn to run for political office? Who in Thailand would have the power to do that?”
“Someone he owes a lot of money to—or someone with the power to blackmail him.”
“Blackmail Vikorn? Vikorn in debt? He owns everyone.”
Chanya shrugs. It’s my problem, not hers. Then she says, “What about that Yunnan trip all those years ago? Something happened to get you all excited for a day. You were running around all over town and wouldn’t tell me what it was about except that it was on urgent Vikorn business and that he was stuck in Yunnan with Ruamsantiah. Then it all suddenly faded, and next thing I knew Vikorn and the sergeant were back in town. I was sure there would be a coda to that one day. You told me Vikorn got himself into a tight spot and had to throw money at it. Maybe he still owes someone a favor?”
