“You knew what you were doing. You did it because of the fly.”
“You didn’t win with the fly.”
“No, but I almost did. You were scared shitless. You bet on four to get even.”
“It wasn’t four, it was thirteen.”
“Even worse. Even gweilos know it’s unlucky. And it adds up to four. You’ve ruined the evening.”
Polly made a face, but she was shaken. Lilly looked as if she were about to cry. “I brought the shrine,” Polly said, and put an arm on Lilly’s elbow.
“You did?”
Polly opened her handbag to show something to her sister.
Lilly collared one of the supervisors. “We want to go to the prayer room,” she told him.
“Certainly,” he said.
“Excuse us for a moment,” Polly said to me.
I watched them disappear into some private room of the casino-and never saw them again. I hung around for about an hour and a half, then grabbed one of the supervisors. When I mentioned the name Yip, he shrugged and allowed himself a slight smirk. There was no message waiting back in the hotel, and reception told me the sisters had not returned to their room.
Next morning a message was waiting for me on the hotel’s system. It gave the reservation number and other details of an e-ticket in my name: a single seat, first-class, Nice-Bangkok via Dubai.
11
Back in Bangkok, Vikorn’s mug was everywhere, just as he had promised: every third lamppost. His undisguised intention was to crowd out the competition, which was numerous. It’s one of our paradoxes: we are a shy people who love to run for public office. Men and women, who cannot hope to get votes other than from family members dress in their Sunday best-white military costumes for the boys, serious colors and high necklines for the girls-so they can share lampposts with the likes of Vikorn, whose life and times had begun to be discussed in a discreet way by the media. One brave journalist hinted that a Bangkok cop might not be the wisest choice for governor when you thought of how creative former holders of that office had been with those purchasing contracts for buses and police cars, not to mention the multibillion-baht extension to the Skytrain. I was not comfortable, either. The man who had controlled my destiny for more than a decade now loomed at me from every corner: master crook of the universe.
Those three Americans had checked out my people’s value system and decided to present Vikorn on the street as Father Wisdom, with gray hair whitened a shade, a confident smile (which had triumphed over deep suffering), right hand held slightly palm up, in a subliminal reference to a Buddha image, the sparkling city behind him as if it had elected him already. Voting day was more than a month away, though, and he had not yet gone public with his “Stop Organ Trafficking Now” campaign, although I’d seen some of the advance publicity: “Devout Buddhist police colonel who has worked steadily and selflessly on his own time for more than a decade to stop this ghoulish trade and, now, thanks to meticulous detective work headed up by his hand-selected protege, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, can humbly reveal that a vast international network, which uses the sacred soil of Thailand as an organ depot, has been broken and busted.”
He hadn’t debriefed me yet, however, because I’d taken a day to recover from the Yip sisters. Apart from Vikorn’s election campaign, the other news on the radio and TV was all about the Sukhumvit Rapist, as he’d come to be known. Early sympathy for the deformed stalker had evaporated since he sexually assaulted two women and attempted to rape a number of others. Sergeant Ruamsantiah of District 8 had declared that he personally would not rest until the streets were safe again for respectable women and girls.
I intended to take a motorbike taxi to the station, but Vietnam was getting one hell of a lashing again, and the skies were black all over the eastern Pacific. (I bet boat people make good organ donors: I imagined them hanging on to the gunwales, a saltwater gargle every twelve seconds; now a luxury yacht shows up with a pair of Chinese twins in bikinis and wrap-around sunglasses: “One kidney each, and your troubles are over, my little chou-chous.”) I would have taken a cab if there were any available, but each one that passed carried a passenger, its red wang sign turned off.
It just happened that one of my favorite kao moo cooked-food stalls was around the corner on Soi 51; it provided an overhead tarpaulin, so I made a dash for it. And now I was sitting at the rickety iron table with the braised pork leg with rice in a bowl steaming before me, liberally loading up on nampla fish sauce with enough granulated chili to melt the spoon, when my eye caught things floating just under the surface. Of course, they were only eggs cut in half with the yolk visible, but for one psychotic moment I was seeing human eyeballs. It was a genuine hallucination, the first I’d experienced without dope, so in addition to everything else, I was wondering if I was not-you know-a total loony.
I was sweating, the blood drained from my face. Talk about karma. I’d lost my appetite and to hell with the rain, I needed to get to the station and safety. I wanted to feel bored, because bored seemed the opposite of crazy.
Sure enough, when I was at my desk and logged into my personal e-mail account, I opened two spam offers to enlarge my penis and five to send me improbably cheap Viagra by anonymous post: serenity had returned. I was pushing my chair back and waiting for Lek to bring me my first iced lemon tea of the day when Manny, Vikorn’s secretary, called: the Old Man had heard I was in the office and wanted me upstairs, pronto.
Now I was sitting in the hot seat opposite him on the far side of his huge desk. To avoid his gaze, I stared at the anticorruption poster above his head and wondered when it was going to include a reference to human organ trafficking. I’d just told him the whole story of my trip to Dubai. We were in the midst of one of those silences: he looked almost stupid while his criminal genius worked deep down in the brainstem.
Finally he came out of his trance. I saw that I might have succeeded in shocking him. “They’re twins? Identical?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I didn’t know that.” He stood up, stumped, turned on me, said, “Twins?” again, then went to the window, held his chin, and nodded to himself in the way of a man who was once badly burned but has only this minute understood how the scam had worked. He turned on me again with the same aggressive sweep. “They’re compulsive gamblers, you say?”
“The type they call whales in Las Vegas. They bet fifty thousand dollars and a gold bracelet on a fly walking up a window.” I saw a deep reprogramming taking place somewhere in the depths. When he turned again, his eyes said, So that was it. He returned to his seat, sat, and nodded to himself again. I watched in fascination as that special thing geniuses have-that extra half inch of willpower the rest of us lack-started to stir at the back of his retinas.
I said, “Sir, may I ask a personal question?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I need to, sir, if my investigation is to proceed.” He raised his eyes. “About these twins, sir. They are very mischievous-somewhere between bad and evil, it seems to me at this point-but girlish at the same time. Rich and out of control, sir. Without any moral compass at all. I don’t think they’re really into sex, but they know how to project it. Manipulative to a degree that’s hard to believe.” He was daring me to continue. I continued. “I wouldn’t put it past them to make a bet-a pretty big one, I would guess-on whether or not one or the other-or even both-could seduce a man-say an alpha male of the Asian type-say a-”
“Get out, Detective,” he whispered. “Get the hell out of my office, right now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Well, now I’ve brought you up to date, DFR, and told you all I know. Nothing neat and tidy, I’m afraid, only a collection of fragments that may or may not be related. A few days after I reported to Vikorn, which is to say about a week after I got back from Monte Carlo, I received the call to Vulture Peak, where lay the three anonymous cadavers with every salable organ missing. Am I the only observer who does not see the Colonel’s hand in this? Call me naive, but it’s just not Vikorn’s style-and anyway, he already has the election in the bag. On the other hand, anyone who doubts that organ theft happens on the sacred soil of Thailand will soon be considering voting for the Colonel, once the story breaks. Very interesting, think about it.