Before we fell asleep, Chanya said, “Do you care about dying?”
“In some ways yes, in other ways no. How about you?”
“I feel the same. It’s a filthy world. I went to temple today-I think I had a breakthrough.”
“How?”
“I finally understood-but it’s unnamable. Afterward I realized I didn’t mind dying. Even if you weren’t there, I could handle it-I never felt that way before.”
“Sounds like the real thing.”
“But when I came home, I got angry with Dorothy, and the Unreal grabbed me all over again.”
“I know the feeling. Try being a cop.”
“Yes, I thought about that. I thought about how the more you get involved in the world, the lonelier it gets. I understood you a bit more, maybe. Is it like you’re in some underground cave system and only connected to the light by a string that could snap any minute?”
“Exactly like that.”
“And for you I’m that string?” By way of answer, I slipped my hand between her thighs, right up to the top: the origin of life. There was nothing erotic about the gesture, it was too childlike for sex. She responded by holding my cock in the same way. “But if you rely on me too much, then you’ve lost your own center-your whole life will depend on the whim of the unknown, namely me.”
“Did you get all this from a book?”
“That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? That you’ve lost me to books?”
I withdrew my hand. I did not say, Not only books. This was not a good moment to mention the rumors.
5
In the morning I woke to feel the world on my shoulders, which is where it normally sits. I know there are other cops all over the planet who feel the same way. The steady accumulation of human dirt-let’s call it evil-makes it a little harder, day by day, to find the light. On the other hand, I also felt a new thrilclass="underline" this case was a big one, whatever way you looked at it. Maybe it would be the trump to get me out of the hole forever? Remember that Leonard Cohen song: “The card that is so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another”? For a second I allowed my ego to inflate; I saw my name in headlines: foreign media flashing my mug around the world; the Nobel Prize for law enforcement. I also tried to see the good I might be doing-but that detail eluded me.
Chanya was already up, making coffee called three-in-one: the sugar and creamer are included in the little sachet with the coffee. She handed me a mug while I was still in bed. “I’ve been thinking about your new case. Isn’t it kind of-ah-”
“Morally ambiguous.”
“Yes, that’s the phrase. Isn’t it?”
“A crime without a victim, most of the time. Most of the time the illegal organ sale is voluntary. The real crime is letting people get that poor. The real crime is capitalism, of which this trade is an inevitable product. Yes.”
“I hadn’t gone into it that deeply. I was thinking of the beneficiary-I mean, lives are saved, right?”
“And ruined. There are young men all over the third world, from Manila to Rio de Janeiro, who were conned into selling one kidney for a thousand or so dollars, usually to some Caucasian old person who abused their body in their youth and wasn’t going to live more than another five years anyway. Now those young men have lost their youthful good health, they fall sick easily, suffer from diminished energy, and are unable to do heavy manual work, so they get rejected by their tribes. Girlfriends and others know what the saber-shaped scar on their abdomen means. Shame and a sense of deep self-betrayal dogs their lives. Organs are very personal things. You sell one, it’s the same as saying you don’t really exist except as an economic unit. They become very angry young men.”
Chanya listened with wrinkled brow. “I think Dorothy gave me a paper to read on organ trafficking. It was her second specialization after prostitution in Southeast Asia-they sort of go together in her mind. Maybe we should consult her. She claims the trade might have altered the whole rhetoric of gift, especially in India.”
“Then there are the cases where the donor doesn’t agree to donate at all. It’s a feature of modern wars. Civilized man doesn’t take scalps-he strips POWs of organs, like an environmentally aware butcher, not wasting a single valuable item.”
“Really? That happens?”
“The Kosovar army harvested human organs like rice in October.”
Now Chanya was ready to go to her computer, which would trap her spirit for the rest of the day. I asked her to first try to book me a business-class ticket to Dubai. The task interested her, and in a few minutes she’d found out the prices, the flight times, and how to register for air miles. We sat together at the monitor to see how well the black Amex card worked. It worked fine. Now we printed out my ticket on the rickety little printer that always seemed on the point of dying. We exchanged a glance.
After breakfast I called Vikorn to tell him I had the ticket; now I needed some way of contacting the Vultures. Vikorn had it at his fingertips: “The name the lead vulture is using at the moment is Lilly Yip. Here’s her cell phone number.” He called out a ten-digit number with a Hong Kong prefix, which I wrote down. “When you get to Dubai, call her. She’ll come to your hotel to check you out. She does a lot of work for Zinna, but she also knows me. I might send her a little something she’ll like.”
“Really?”
“You’ll understand when you meet her. She’s a pro.”
“You’ve already given her immunity, if this thing really takes off?”
Vikorn coughed and ignored the question. “What time is your flight?”
“It’s a red-eye tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. Listen. I mentioned you to the election committee. They’re happy for you to do this, but they want to meet you.”
I looked into the mouthpiece of my phone as if it were malfunctioning. I repeated his words slowly. “Your election committee is happy for me to carry out a law and order assignment? Well, I’m certainly relieved about that.”
“If you keep on being sarcastic, I’ll take away your black Amex and replace it with a parking ticket. Get your ass over here at eleven A.M. ”
Chanya caught the expression on my face when I closed the phone. “I have to go see Vikorn and his election team at eleven,” I tell her. “I think they’re going to brief me about my law and order assignment.”
“Wow,” Chanya said. “This is getting seriously Californian.”
As I was knocking on Vikorn’s door I heard American voices that suddenly stopped. Instead of the usual “Yeah” from the boss, Manny opened the door. I remembered that Manny spoke English and often interpreted for Vikorn when he needed to talk to Miami.
What was shocking to me at this moment was the new sofa. It was beige leather and looked Italian and quite incongruous. Vikorn prided himself on his bare wooden boards and couple of hard chairs for hard cops to sit on while he dished out orders. I think he must have told Manny to go buy the most expensive sofa she could find, and now here it was supporting two American bottoms, one female, the other male. There was a third stranger, an older American man who had been given a chair that, though old and retrieved from some storeroom somewhere, nevertheless had arms and therefore could be said to be the equal in protocol of Vikorn’s own chair, which also had arms. The two armless chairs had been relegated to a position in the corner, but now Manny brought me one to sit on.
The two men and the woman owned in common a specifically North American seriousness, which seemed to freeze nerve endings in the area of the cheeks and mouth. I knew instinctively not to appear too human around those people.
“Sonchai, how nice to see you.” Vikorn beamed.
I threw him an incredulous look, which I had to modify immediately. “Great to see you too, Colonel,” I said. We had spoken in Thai, but Manny was under instructions to translate everything into English. “The Colonel said, ‘How nice to see you,’ and Detective Jitpleecheep said it was nice to see the Colonel too,” Manny explained. The three guests allowed their lips to part in nanosecond smiles that bloomed and self-erased while Vikorn told me everybody’s names. The woman was called Linda, the older man was Jack, and the younger man sitting on the sofa with Linda (I decided he was older than he seemed: one of those John Kennedy-type faces that look thirty when the owner is at least forty) was called Ben. Vikorn told me he had outlined the bare bones of my trip to Dubai and the basic strategy of making contact with the global organ-trafficking community.