“Are you okay? You keep frowning.”
“I already told you I’m nuts. I’m frowning to stop myself talking. If I let go of my will for even a second, I’ll be babbling like a madman. You’ll start to hate me.” He gives me a look. “No wonder I can’t find a partner, huh?”
“Well, before you lose your mind, tell me something. How is it that these warring tribes from the most populous nation on earth are interested in my boss, Colonel Vikorn? Why would anyone in China care so much? Why him for governor?”
Chan stands. I think he is going to the bathroom to talk to himself until the lithium starts to work. “You really think they would stop at governor of Bangkok?” he says, and starts to push through the crowd to reach the bathroom.
I sit with our half-drunk lattes for five minutes, taking in his last words. Then ten. I suppose I should go to the bathroom to check on him, and in any other city I might have done, but here the effort of crossing the jam-packed room is daunting. After fifteen minutes a man in a black suit and white shirt with a thin black necktie emerges from the throng. I think he might be the manager, but I’m not sure. “Your friend needs help,” he says in English. He has enunciated the words perfectly, as if he consulted a talking dictionary before approaching me.
When I reach the bathroom, I hear a voice coming from one of the stalls. When I stand outside the stall, I can hear Chan talking to some invisible person with passionate intensity. He’s speaking in Cantonese interspersed with English phrases like top secret, damn and blast, I’ll blow your fucking head off, terribly sorry old boy. I knock. He forces himself to silence for at least a minute, then continues with his monologue. When the man in the black suit enters, I explain that the inspector has recently taken his medication, and he’ll be fine in ten minutes. He takes fifteen before he emerges. He reestablishes dignity by ignoring me, steps up to the trough, and begins to pee. I take the hint, leave the bathroom, and wait for him by the glass door at the entrance to the cafe.
While I’m waiting, I’m watching the crowd: everyone except me has adjusted to the reality out there: men, women, and children, all have mastered the art of cramped behavior. I think: a state that executes its own people, having presold their organs to the highest bidder-it’s like Moctezuma meets Margaret Thatcher. Or should we say that, thanks to the supreme power of the profit motive, state and antistate have become one? From Washington to New Delhi to Beijing we let gangsters bleed us white and the newspeak calls it freedom. Now that’s modern.
Finally Chan arrives, and we open the door to brave the people, the humidity, and the heat. He doesn’t speak until the crowd forces us to come to a halt twenty yards down the street. “We’re all damaged,” the inspector says, still gray from his internal ordeal. “That’s why we’re here.”
As soon as the plane lands in Bangkok, my phone bleeps (I grew tired of being whooshed and reverted to factory settings, in case you’re wondering DFR). It’s an SMS from Vikorn, so I take a cab straight to the station. I’m expecting to have to address the Colonel’s election committee, but when I arrive at his office, he’s alone. He is sitting behind his desk and jerks his chin at me to indicate that I should sit in the chair opposite. These and other clues, which I have absorbed with the instinct of a jungle animal in the half minute since I entered the room, tell me all I need to know about his state of mind. While capable of tyranny of the cruelest type, Vikorn learned long ago that the only way to survive at the top of the greasy pole is to make oneself into a humble, if strategic, listener, from time to time. With the Colonel this involves a bizarre form of role play wherein he stares at you with wide-eyed innocence, as if you were recounting the most important, fascinating, and informative crime story he has ever heard.
At the end of my narrative he even adds an Isaan word which might be the equivalent of wow, crikey, or jeez, depending on which dialect you use. Now he stands and prowls to the window to stare at the cooked-food stalls, while somewhere deep in the brainstem he carefully analyzes my report and begins to reshape the case. After about five minutes he returns to his seat, where he rocks back and forth for another five minutes. Now he says. “So, it’s already all over China, this industry? Apart from the three cadavers in the morgue at Shanghai, you saw no other hard evidence?”
“Not hard evidence as such. But that was a very upmarket condo-I mean, two little cops, only one of them local-in a multimillion-dollar condo in China; it looked liked the real thing. It looked serious. Why would they mislead me?”
He thinks about it and nods. “Hm. And the Shanghai cop, this Sun Bin. He seems honest?”
“Very. The kind of cop who martyrs himself for truth, sooner or later, whether he wants to or not. Couldn’t deceive to save his life. Like me.”
Vikorn ignores the jibe, if that’s what it was. He pats the top of his head, normally a positive sign. Now his eyes are twinkling. “And somehow the Yips are facilitators, all over the country. How does it work?”
“According to the Hong Kong cop, Inspector Chan, they purchase fresh cadavers for their farang clients and also make available premises for organ-transfer operations beyond Chinese jurisdiction, presumably for rich or influential Chinese who don’t trust their own medical system, while servicing their offshore clients on their own account.”
He nods. Frowns. Rocks. Now he stands to prowl to the window again, shaking his head. “It’s all a matter of timing,” he mutters to himself. Finally he looks me between the eyes. “There’s still something you’re missing at that house. There must be.”
“You want me to go down there again tomorrow?”
He shakes his head. “Things are moving too fast-and there’s the election only a week or so away. Go now. Do not call me. Anything you see or hear, you keep to yourself until you’re back in this office. No phone calls. Got it?”
“Do I at least have time to see my wife before I catch another plane?”
“No. Waiting is part of what wives do. Go see her when you get back-after you’ve reported to me.”
26
I booked a seat on the next plane and took a cab to Vulture Peak. I don’t know why I decided to climb up the iron stairs instead of having the driver take me to the front door: a hunch, I guess. Well, it was a bad hunch. The place is deserted, and I might just as well have taken the taxi all the way to the mansion. I spend a couple of minutes checking out the garage, which is cut out of the rock; access to the house is by a set of stairs that lead up to the deck. The garage is empty, not only of cars but of everything except a red fire extinguisher.
It’s a beautiful evening on suicide balcony. There are some boats far out with their navigation lights bobbing, and the moon is a little fatter; under the balcony there is a nice black void, from which slapping sounds emerge far below. If I had the guts, I would slip under the safety rail with my legs hanging over, close my eyes, and meditate on the relentless invitation to jump made by the slapping waves.
Well, I do have the guts. There’s that little hole that seems to open up in the area of the solar plexus when you slip under safety rails-I’m sure you know what I mean, DFR-and you wonder if maybe you really are crazy. Then comes the realization that it would be a mistake to fall asleep or forget you are sitting above a hundred-foot drop. Then, if you are a meditator, you remind yourself that you’re going to die one day anyway and it’s part of the path to experience that reality.
Sure enough, when I close my eyes I’m attacked by terror. It’s been a while since I did anything like this. I try again. Best to let the fear in gradually, take a good look at it, let the higher mind deal with it. Good. Now, what do I see? The clerk dead on the deck of his master’s boat, his blood splashed all over the teak, his head rolling. I slip back under the safety rail and pull on the handle of the big glass sliding door that leads to the vast lounge.