As is proper, the details of B.C.A. Company are also recorded in the register. I am not surprised that the eight shareholders are Thai; I would be surprised, though, if any of them invested any equity at all in the company. Whoever is the true owner of the mansion has made sure someone searching the registry-a cop like me, for example-will not so easily discover their identity.
I thank the clerk. He has transformed into a female doormat who fawns and moans as he hefts the heavy tome and tramps slope-shouldered down the aisle between shelves that hold the larcenous secrets of a real estate boom more than thirty years old, while Lek and I retreat gratefully to the heat wave that awaits outside.
I try to avoid Lek’s eye while we look around for a taxi, but he grasps my arm.
“It’s part of the other thing, isn’t it?”
“Too early to say,” I reply. He treats me to a fishwife leer of disbelief.
2
I shall tease you no further, DFR, but straightaway tell you what I know. It all began on an inauspicious Thursday last week.
“I looked into body parts about five years ago,” Police Colonel Vikorn said, and gave me one of his dangerous smiles. We were in his spartan but spacious office, where he sat at his desk under a great anticorruption poster of which he is inexplicably fond. “But the logistics seemed too nerve-wracking. In the end I decided to stay with what I knew. Smack never goes bad, especially if you keep it in morphine bricks during a bear market.”
My Colonel stood. He is of average height with gray hair almost cropped. As on most days, he was dressed in an informal version of the Thai cop’s brown uniform, a worn cotton combination that looks like military fatigues. It is one of his idiosyncrasies that he never walks but only prowls. Now he prowled to the window to look down on the cooked-food stalls that line the street below. “So many things you have to set up. The surgeon to harvest the parts from the donor or the cadaver. The other surgeon to pop them into the donee. Nursing support for both. And if you do it right, you probably need a specialist in whatever organ you’re transplanting-kidneys are the gold standard, but there’s quite a lot of liver, heart, lung trafficking these days, and they say that whole eyes and faces are now viable. Then there’s the clinic to set up. If you’ve got some farang calling the shots, he’s not going to expect it all to happen in a third-world garage.”
He pursed his lips. “And you have to have a good organ hunter to work the supply side in the first place, not to mention the nurse to take the blood samples to check compatibility.” He turned to face me. “But I could see the point, of course. Suppose some rich little shit on Wall Street needs a new heart. Is he going to wait in line in the hope that the health system will find him a replacement before he croaks-or is he going to buy himself one on the black market? If he’s on the point of dying, obviously he’ll pay whatever price the organ hunter demands. If he’s worth eight hundred million, surely a mere million is not too much to ask in return for another twenty years of bleeding the world white? See, the hunter is the key to it all.” He paused and frowned. “Sure, it would be a first-class racket if it wasn’t for the short shelf life of the product. Did you know that lungs and hearts only last six hours? After that they’re useless.”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”
Vikorn flashed me a glance and nodded thoughtfully. “Eyes, of course, last longer. Just pop them out and chuck them in a fridge, they’re good for a week.”
“I thought you said eyes were only just coming onstream.”
“I said whole eyes. Corneas are entry-level stuff-you don’t even need a real surgeon, a well-trained nurse could do it-but the corneas are kept intact on the eyeballs until they’re needed-it’s called an eye bank. No civilized country is without one.” He covered his mouth to cough. “The United Arab Emirates is one of the big markets for corneas. It’s all that sun, burns them out. How long do you think human testicles would last on ice?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never heard of transplanting testicles.”
“There’s an incredible demand for them in North Korea, did you know that?”
“No.”
“Of course, with North Koreans you never know if they’re going to transplant them or eat them.”
He let the moment hang for a few beats, then said in a suddenly formal and almost public tone of voice, “Organ trafficking is a deplorable thing, don’t you think? It’s outrageous that people use our country as a staging post for such an appalling crime. Someone needs to do something about it. I spoke to the deputy secretary yesterday, he’s right behind me. He’s given me tacit approval to lead the charge.”
Now I’d lost the plot entirely. Vikorn lead a law and order campaign? In your mythology, DFR, that would be like Judas running for pope. Stranger still, this was the first I’d heard of Thailand being a world organ-trading center. Shrewdly, my master gave me a few moments to adjust to the new reality. Then he said, “So I’m appointing you as lead investigator.”
“Huh?” In more than a decade of feudal service to my chief, he has never asked me to perform a socially useful task. On the contrary, my contribution to the community has largely consisted in modifying his personal interpretation of Western capitalism. “You started out admitting that you looked into the trade for personal profit. Now suddenly you want to wipe it out. May I ask why?”
He turned to stare me full in the face. “Why d’you think?”
“I have no idea…” My voice trails off, then I emit an “Oh.”
“Right,” Vikorn says, and turns to the window.
“Uhh, how long has General Zinna of the Royal Thai Army been in the business?”
“Ever since that car accident he got all twisted out of shape about. Five years or so. I turned a blind eye to it for a while, because it was relatively small bucks, but now the business has exploded. Organ trafficking today is what personal computers were in the eighties. I can’t let him get too rich. Before you know it, he’ll be trying to wipe me out again. You know what a competitive asshole he is.”
I stared at him. “Why me?”
“Who else? You speak English. You are the half- farang bastard son of an American serviceman and so can pass for near white. You are also accustomed to international travel. That’s already three qualifications not owned by anyone else in District Eight. If you must know, there is a fourth.” Predictably, he paused with his eyebrows crooked. When I refused to rise to the bait, he added, “You’re actually interested in truth and justice. I had a feeling that might come in useful eventually.”
I was not in the mood for those kinds of games, so I scowled instead of smiled. This modest symptom of insubordination used to be enough to get you traffic duty at the Asok/Sukhumvit interchange in the old days; it still was in most cases, but when the Master has bigger fish to fry, he can be amazingly tolerant. Now he was grinning into my bad mood; not a good sign. Still standing, he reached down to pull out the top drawer of his desk, from which he extracted what looked like a scroll about eighteen inches in width. Now he was holding one edge of the document in his left hand next to his left cheek, while unrolling it with his right. Okay, now I saw it was not a document. It was a poster showing him in a brilliant white military-style uniform with brass studs, which is the identity of choice for any Thai man who needs to make an impression on the community. But it was the caption underneath his picture that was drilling holes in my psyche from every direction.