Vulture Peak

17

I tell Lek I don’t want him to come with me to Phuket. He’s already had a minor standoff with the clerk, and anyway two cops together look official and intimidating. I’m sitting at my desk in the open-plan office, thinking of a way to placate Lek, who has decided to sulk, and trying to decide whether to just show up at the airport or book the ticket using the Internet, which could easily take longer than simply taking a cab to the airport, when my cell phone rings.

“Hi, brother, how are things?” a male voice says in English with a Chinese accent.

“Inspector Chan?”

“The same. So, how’re things?”

“Up and down. How about you?”

“I’m on vacation-holiday, as the Brits say.”

I pause to stare at my cell phone. “Really? Where?”

“Oh, about a mile down the road from where you are now, assuming you’re at the station.”

“You’re in Thailand?”

“You’ve been taking intelligence-enhancing medication?”

“But I mean, why?”

“To see a couple of people, you being one of them.”

“You’ll have to wait.”

“Why?”

“I’m a busy third-world policeman. I have to cope with an existential reality that would have you messing your diaper, Spoiled Brat Hong Kong Cop.”

“Hey-”

“I’m back in two days.”

“Where are you going?”

“Not telling you.”

The clerk’s weekday pad in Phuket is in a back street on the third floor of an apartment building, but he’s not in. I knock quite a few times and make all the usual checks for signs of life, but the place has a deserted feel. Of course he could be out on the town, but I doubt it. I remember those dark, unsocial eyes, the quick temper before he remembered he was a public servant-and the whole feel about him of a young man who might have had himself mutilated by mistake. It’s a cop’s hunch that sends me to the Phuket Yacht Club. I arrive at twilight with the last of the sun sinking like a plutonium rod in an asphalt sea. The bartender knows who I’m talking about.

“He comes quite often to spend the night on his sponsor’s boat,” the barman tells me.

“He takes care of it?”

“No, there’s a full-time boat boy does that. He just comes and stays the night. If he’s not working the next day, he sits on it staring out to sea. He doesn’t like company.” The barman coughs. “He likes to dress up when he’s alone.”

I have the barman point the boat out to me. It’s hard to see clearly in the dusk, although the cabin lights are on.

“It’s a forty-foot twin-screw motor cruiser made in Taiwan. The farang used to have something really special, a two-masted schooner about seventy feet long. All teak and oak, a vintage sailboat that won some kind of competition in the thirties. Beautiful it was. Broke the old man’s heart when he had to sell it for some reason. Broke the katoey ’s heart too. Actually, he wasn’t a katoey at that stage-just a sad young man who thought he was a woman but wasn’t sure.”

I stare at the dark and silent bay for a moment. I was expecting the boat to be tied up to a berth on a jetty. I didn’t expect it to be on a permanent anchorage. “How can I get out there?”

“You can pay one of the boat boys to take you out on a skiff with an outboard-or you can get someone to row you out.” I suppose the last suggestion is somewhat exotic from the way he looks at me. Surely only a cop who wanted to retain the element of surprise, or an assassin, would go for the manual option.

“Can you find someone to row me out? It’s such a beautiful evening, I don’t want to pollute it with noise.”

He gives me a cynical glance and calls to someone behind the bar. A robust boy about sixteen years old appears. The barman speaks quickly in the local dialect, and the boy answers back in a low murmur. I don’t know how much he’s demanding, but it’s enough to make him shy.

“He’ll do it for five hundred baht,” the barman says, clearly expecting me to bargain.

“Okay, let’s go,” I say. Then I remember I have one more question for the barman. “Years ago, when the farang still owned the sailboat-did he have a lot of visitors? Boats like that are a great way of expanding your social life.”

“Sure. Every weekend a small crowd would come out. Mostly they were middle-aged showbiz people from the U.K.-I understand he used to be some kind of pop singer. It changed over the years, fewer and fewer guests. In the end he had to hire crew just to grind the winches when he took the boat out. He was a good skipper, though, knew how to sail. Not easy with an old two-master like that.”

“Were any of the people Chinese? I mean Chinese and female, who spoke Thai with a strong accent? Very elegant?”

“Her? Why didn’t you say it was her you were interested in? Sure, she came out a couple of times. But it wasn’t to socialize, as far as I know. Not the sort of woman you forget once you’ve seen her.”

“So what was it for?”

“She’s the one who bought the sailboat.”

I let a couple of beats pass to let that sink in. “She only came on her own? Not with another woman who looked like her?”

“I only ever saw her alone.”

“What did she do with the boat? I don’t see any two-masted schooners out there right now.”

“She had it shipped back to Hong Kong. That’s money. Any normal person would have hired crew to sail it over there for next to nothing, but she had it dismasted and packed onto a container ship. I didn’t see her as a sailor, myself.”

It’s a beautiful evening to be on the water. The moon is not yet up, the first stars are twinkling, and the water is so calm the kid’s oar strokes are the only disturbance, save for small fish that jump now and then. The boy knows I declined an outboard motor because I want to retain the element of surprise, so he diminishes his efforts when we’re about a hundred yards from the yacht; he doesn’t want to give me any excuse to renegotiate his exorbitant fee. He lets the rowboat glide for the last twenty yards so we’re almost at a natural halt when we reach the swimming platform. There is no sign of life anywhere on the boat. The boy whispers, “When do you want to come back?”

“I don’t know. I’ll flash a light or sound a horn-or maybe fire my gun.” Of course, he has seen my cop’s standard-issue pistol jammed down the back of my belt. He looks disappointed. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay next time you see me. I’m not likely to disappear, am I?”

He guides the boat around to make it easy for me to step onto the swimming platform. I climb up and sit on one of the padded seats where pampered guests drink champagne and tell the host what a wonderful weekend they’re having. Just in case the clerk is in a homicidal mood, I’ve taken the gun out of the back of my pants. But there is still no sign of him, so I begin to wonder if the barman was wrong. Maybe the clerk slipped away sometime in the afternoon without being spotted and left the cabin lights on by mistake. If there were someone else on the vessel, they would have felt my arrival for sure.

Like any cop, I check out the whole of the top deck: nobody. By now I’ve made the boat sway left and right simply by moving around; you’d expect anyone on board to notice. I open the sliding-glass door to the stairs that lead below. When I duck my head to check out the salon, I see a human figure sitting motionless in an upright chair that is screwed to the floor with brass bolts. The figure is in a gray one-piece gown with extremely wide and long sleeves and a black hat with earpieces that stick out horizontally. It’s the clerk, and I’m quite sure he is dead, because I’ve never seen anyone sit so stiffly for such a long period of time without breathing. He is also wearing a lot of makeup, mostly rouge and some kind of whitening cream. Up close, I see he has developed a thousand-mile stare. When I put my ear close to his nose, I hear the faintest inhalation and exhalation.

Now I notice the long opium pipe lying on the table, plus an oil lamp that has gone out and some transparent plastic squares. A black oily substance is sandwiched between them. When I bend over to sniff, I am able to confirm the sweet aroma of opium. Now I’m really stuck. Opium is so exotic these days, I don’t think I’ve seen it in Bangkok since I was a cadet. I scratch my head. It’s not at all the sort of expensive old-world habit you would expect from a lowly clerk in the local civil service. Nor is it a habit generally acquired by katoeys, who, if they use drugs at all, usually go for meth or coke. But then, katoeys do not normally dress up in fifteenth-century Ming gowns and winter hats, especially not in the tropics.

I fish out my cell phone to check the time. Seven forty-five P.M. The clerk would probably not have begun smoking until after dusk, so as not to be disturbed by boat boys and others. If so, that would give him about seven more hours of intoxication, on the basis that an opium high usually lasts about eight hours. I bob my head, trying to decide what to do. I don’t really want to stay on the boat for another five hours, but on the other hand the weakened psychological state of the clerk after the collapse of his dream world could be useful. I remember him as a possible hard nut with a ton of resentment of one kind or another, who might be impossible to interrogate when sober. I find a flashlight in the wheelhouse and wave it in an arc in the direction of the boat boy, who rows over. I give him his five hundred baht and tell him I might want him in the morning. Then I sit at the bow gazing at the sky as the first of Orion’s stars emerge with the moon.

I’m feeling Zennish. I remember a tale of a Zen monk who gave up his only robe to a starving and shivering old woman and wished he could share the moon with her as well. It’s a great yarn, but it makes me feel ashamed because it’s only about fifteen minutes since I dismissed the boat boy along with my last chance of making land before morning, and already I’ve started to feel bored. Well, it’s more the fear of boredom: all those hours with nothing to do, no TV or radio, no podcasts, nothing to read, no one to talk to, no bright lights, no dope-only this silent and slow-rising moon.

I spend about an hour moving from below to above to below again. The clerk remains catatonic with a beatific smile on his face. When the boredom reaches an intolerable level, I shine the flashlight in his eyes: oblivious pupils the size of pinheads, behind which a soul gorges on bliss. I’m jealous as hell of his nirvanic state. I decide to go back on deck, out of sight of temptation. Now I remember to call Chanya. “Honey, sorry, but I’m in Phuket again and-” She’s hung up.

Okay, I’m giving in, but let it be recorded that I held out for a full two hours before I found the clerk’s aspirin, which I ground up, mixed with his opium, and smoked…

Take my advice, DFR: don’t try it, so you’ll never know how good it is. It is amazing. I see my life pass before my eyes without any anguish attached. Everything takes place against a backdrop of eternity; I see behind the surface of things, which dissolve into serene vistas where transparent archetypes from the origin of consciousness wait at crossroads in the middle distance. Colors acquire the reality of living creatures: imagine a mode of consciousness called Scarlet. Now my mother, Nong, and I are looking into each other’s eyes, telling truths we’ve never told; it is as if our presiding angels have broken through and are talking to each other, silently. Now my long-lost father appears as a young GI, his face blackened for battle. He puts a hand on my shoulder and says, Sorry; I say, Don’t worry about it. The source of pain is blocked; isn’t this what one was looking for all along?

Dawn. The opium dream melts, leaving only the sound of running water. Well, maybe it’s the clerk making the sound of running water in the galley below. I blink at a sky only recently illuminated: the mysteries of night still hang around in corners and cause everyday objects to glow sullenly.

“Want some coffee?” the clerk calls.

“Please.”

Now he appears below, in a checked shirt and tight shorts: almost manly, no sign of the makeup. I find my eyes drifting to the area of his mutilated crotch, but catch myself just in time. He stares up at me. “You smoked my fin. ”

“I got bored waiting. Want to report me to the cops?”

He climbs the stairs and dumps a mug of coffee next to my elbow. Together we stare across the bay.

A couple of buzzards are already circling high overhead. Nothing else is moving. “You know why I’m here?” I say. We are both surprised at how normal we sound; like me, the clerk still has one foot in another world.

“Where do you want to start?” the clerk says.

“Start with the opium. I’ve been a cop in Bangkok for more than fifteen years. I haven’t seen fin in all that time. Who taught you to smoke? Who gets it for you?”

The clerk stares at the ever-increasing glow in the east; already sweat has started beading on my forehead. Close up, the clerk, also, is looking a little worse for wear: the grayness of flesh that is said to accompany his hobby.

“ She did,” the clerk says. “You know who I mean.”

“Do I?”

“She took you to Monte Carlo. I had a great laugh about that.”

I blink into the sun and look away, thinking I really need to change professions. In less than a second a low-ranking clerk has turned the tables on me. It’s quite a neat maneuver, too: if I say How did you know? then that’s an admission. If I deny, then he knows I’m not leveling with him.

“Who did?”

He smirks at me. “You really want to play that game?”

“Okay. A Chinese woman, probably calling herself Lilly. Lilly Yip.”

“Correct.”

“Now you.”

The clerk wipes his face with the back of his hand. “She’s the one taught me to smoke opium,” he says. “Isn’t that what you asked?” Then he turns to look at me with eyes of infinite sadness. “She trapped me in a dream. I never would have cut it off otherwise. For ninety percent of katoeys, the operation is just a wish, a posture-we never really intend to go through with it. We simply need to be part of the conversation.”

“She persuaded you to have your cock cut off? Why?”

“She wanted it. As a trophy. She has hundreds.”

“That’s all? Just to add it to her collection?”

“The thrill of the hunt, Detective. Like a python lying in wait-she saw me and pounced. Her speed is incredible.” He shakes his head. “Don’t you see? It’s the ultimate proof of female power: to separate a man from his own cock. Ha, ha.”

With the benefit of the narcotic, I see that the clerk is totally deranged. On the other hand, I have not emerged from that other universe myself; I am not yet restored to Social Man, more an electric storm of perception with no particular shape. “You’re still in shock? You can’t believe what has happened to you? But you wanted to be a katoey, that’s what you told your lover, Freddie? You wanted to experience your true nature as a woman?”

“That’s what every katoey says. Like I just told you, only a tiny percentage go all the way-most are safe because they don’t have the dough. For the majority, gender reassignment is one fantastic topic of gossip that never fails. I told her I didn’t really have the courage, that I was just a little fantasizing mediocrity like everyone else. She advised me not to think like that. She told me that successes and heroes are simply people who follow their dreams. That’s why she introduced me to opium.”

“Did she smoke it with you?”

“Sometimes. She used to spin yarns about how wonderful life was going to be after the operation. She knew all the katoey buzzwords and could play on every fantasy. And she made me feel so important.”

We are standing together at the bow. The clerk’s eyes are gleaming around the pupils but smeared at the edges. There is a kind of despair in his tone, which is nonetheless triumphant. “See, I didn’t need to say it. For once I didn’t need even to hint. She saw it in me.”

“Saw what?”

“That I am the reincarnation of Zheng He, of course.”

I look at him. For a second I see him through his own eyes: gathered behind him the greatest fleet the ancient world ever saw-probably the greatest fleet that was ever assembled before World War II. Lilly would have known about the clerk’s Zheng He fantasy from talking to Freddie. “Of course you are.”

“Oh, you can say that because you already know. But she saw it, without any prompting, d’you see? When a stranger recognizes your true nature, it’s so liberating. It’s a final proof.”

“Final proof? But you’re not entirely sure you’ve done the right thing! You’re on the horns of a dilemma. Did you commit the greatest stupidity in the history of the world, namely let some sadistic, criminal-minded bitch talk you into having your balls and penis amputated, just so she has a new toy to play with for a moment before she chucks it in the trash? Or does that other, magical world really exist, the one you always longed for, the one she herself understands so well because that’s where she lives most of the time? The world where Zheng He still rules, no?”

He is staring at me in horror. “Chucks it in the trash?” He has pressed his hands against both ears. The opium is still poisoning my blood, causing me to turn on him. I think I understand Lilly. The clerk is so completely lost, so utterly manipulable-I expect he triggered in her a primeval response to destroy. I too find contempt taking over. “But it was more than just your cock she wanted. She has a whole room full of men’s embalmed dicks she uses as dildos-it’s how she gets her thrills. Your manhood was just the icing on the cake. What she wanted was a whole castle. You got her Vulture Peak.”

I think I have delivered an overdose of reality. The clerk’s brain seems to scramble. He stares at me and blinks, then says, “Yes. I got her Vulture Peak. That’s true.”

“Want to tell me how it went?”

He sags against the outside of the wheelhouse, inhales. “It all started because Freddie needed a new liver and sent an e-mail to someone called Dr. Gray. Lilly Yip appeared. She spoke Thai and a lot of other languages. Of course, she saw I was katoey. And she saw I’d not yet had the operation. She seemed to understand craving. Somehow my whole focus was on that operation. I don’t even know why, she just led me into this mind-set: I had to be released from being male. That was my only way out.”

“So you both had reasons to bond. She offered the full katoey fantasy trip, including the operation, probably free of charge, and opium for life. In return you would help her screw the old man for more than half his fortune, and you would procure for her the most fabulous property in Phuket-somehow. What did you do?”

“Nothing very much. The place was already owned by Hong Kong Chinese. I happened to know who the real owner was-and the ghost shareholders here in Thailand.”

“She must have wanted the property quite badly, to go to that kind of trouble.”

“She did, but it wasn’t really for her. It was for some conglomerate in China-a group she was involved with. And there was a Thai army general involved.”

“Did she say who?”

“The general? No, never.”

“The Chinese conglomerate?”

“There was a government ministry, and some banks too. They were some kind of lobby group. Lilly Yip seemed to need to keep them charmed. You know, entertaining your most valued clients. That’s why it had to be the biggest palace on the island-a face thing. Actually, she’s right, there isn’t another property like that-probably isn’t another one in Thailand.”

“But that mansion, that’s where Freddie woke up after his operation. You must have moved pretty quick.”

“As I said, I knew the owner at the time. I was a clerk in the land office. I knew how to process a real estate purchase in an hour if I needed to. She’d already bought the place and owned it for more than a year before everything was ready for Freddie’s transplant.”

When I look into the clerk’s smeared eyes, I see that exactly the same thing is happening to him as happened to me just now: an opium flashback, a sensation not of memory but of displacement in time: for a second I was nine years old again, and Nong was young and sexy, pulling out all the stops for one of her johns somewhere in France or Germany. (There were horse chestnut trees, empty streets black from rain, and old European houses built of stone that looked so solid. A strange light that had no origin permeating everything.)

Seeing the clerk lose control of his mind in the same way, I pounce. “But she included you in the house activities-she must have done. She had turned you into her best friend. No, let’s put it another way: she had made herself your only friend, because she understood you so much better than Freddie did. Freddie is a useful sugar daddy but has no depth. The anguish of being alive is something he drowned with booze years ago-like a lot of Brits, he is just one long alcoholic escape trip. But you-yes, it would have been an important part of her plan to include you, to make you an intimate. Otherwise you might have reverted to katoey jealousy and tried to bring her down. You do have that vicious katoey thing, don’t you? And let’s face it, you’ve never been a man with a big social life.”

“But I’m not a man,” he says, “I don’t need big face. I don’t need a social life.”

“But you need to be understood. We all do. For you, it must have been intriguing and terrifying.”

“What?”

“To be understood by a woman, perhaps for the first time in your life.”

Truth can be a radical interrogation technique, and I’m not sure this clerk will survive. He is grinding his jaw and seems on the point of tears. I think I’ve pushed as far as I dare and give him time. He stares and stares out to sea, as if the answer lies there. Finally, he starts to spill his guts.

“She is very skillful with the fin. She prepares the pipe with exactly the amount for the effect she wants. We became intimate very quickly-I don’t mean sex, I mean something much deeper than that. ‘Soul fucking,’ she called it. I was pleased and flattered that such a woman would take an interest in me, even though I knew she had reasons. She had a way of using the fin to create a landscape. She introduced certain magic phrases when we were high, happy words like ‘When we’re totally free,’ and ‘Are you as delighted as I am to have found a soul mate?’ The best was ‘I understand you, Khun Sally-O. I don’t like sex either, it’s a bad joke. So much nicer to hold hands and be friends.’ ” He lets a couple of beats pass. “Pathetic, no? Not the sort of thing anyone would fall for without opium, right?” He sighs. “But fantasy is addictive. You know what she told me once? That she could only take about one hour of reality every day. The world was just too harsh. I can’t tell you how wonderful it felt, to have met someone-a woman of all things-who understood me that well. Me.”

I let him stare out to sea for five minutes, then say softly, “Tell me what goes on at the house. What happens at Vulture Peak, Sally-O?” I’m afraid my use of his stage name might be too dramatic, too obvious. Tears appear at the corners of his eyes, but he seems to have regained some control.

“You’re right, she was using me all along, wasn’t she? Not a word, not a gesture, not a single second when she was not working me like a cheap whistle, right?” He gives a great heaving sigh. “I know you think I’m just the biggest sucker in the world, a total loser who let a female demon persuade him to have his dick cut off, but it’s not that simple. There was something else.”

“Tell me.”

“She can divide herself in two.”

“Huh?”

“Just like some Himalayan mystic, she can be in two places at the same time. She only did it to me once. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a thousand.”

“Tell me.”

“It was very soon after the operation. She invited me up to Vulture Peak. She had the opium pipe already laid out. Maybe you can understand what that means to a smoker. You enter a room where there is a pipe laid out with opium-that means you enter a sacred place, a temple, an Aladdin’s cave in which anything can happen. I was still very weak, and of course there was that hole between my legs that threatened to totally destroy my mind. And we smoked.” He chokes for a moment, coughs, looks away.

When he looks back his eyes are streaming. “She’d already had it embalmed. Cock and balls, the whole set. Somehow she’d made my poor cock twice the size it used to be when erect. I wouldn’t have believed it was mine if not for the birthmark on the tip. I guess she injected some clever embalming solution that set like stiff plastic.” He suddenly looks directly into my eyes. “She took it out of a special case she’d had made for it, like a jewelry case. She said, ‘Look, I can enjoy you whenever I want now. Your flesh has become my flesh. We are one.’ ”

I blink. “She used it?”

“Yes. She used it in front of me,” he sobs. “Even though I was high on the opium, I knew she was doing that. I mean I knew I wasn’t dreaming it. Then she left me, took my cock with her. I’m not sure what happened next. I found myself wandering around the house, looking for my cock and balls. I went into one of the bedrooms and found two of them sharing my dick. I mean there were two identical Lilly Yips. They were naked and both looked up at me at the same time. She-they-had a look in her eyes of a woman bloated on lust, as if she and her double intended to grind away at my poor cock for days on end, like hyenas with a kill. That blew me away forever. I knew I was her slave from then on. She even said it, after we fell out: ‘So long as I have your dick, I have you.’ ”

“You fell out?”

He shrugs. “She grew bored with me. I had a tantrum, threatened to tell all I knew.” He stops, searches my face. “I thought she was going to have me snuffed. I’m sure she thought about it. Then she changed her mind. We have an arrangement. I keep my mouth shut, she supplies me with opium. She’s very regular. That boat boy you used, he brings it. That’s how he knew to charge five hundred baht for a short trip across the water. She’s got me under control. I guess I always was. You could say I’m a prisoner on parole with a location device. I’m allowed to be on the boat, at work, or with Freddie.” He shrugs. “But when I call her, she tells me I’m the luckiest man in the world, I get the best painkiller on the planet free of charge for life. I think she really doesn’t understand how I miss her. She is so exotic, so superior. No matter how she treats me, I know my fantasy life is safe with her. I’m a katoey, after all. A snob. And I find it difficult to keep my mouth shut when someone like you shows up and wants to talk.”

I am thinking, as I am sure you are, DFR, Well, you’re not keeping your mouth shut now, are you? when I see the first boat moving from the jetty in the early light. I glance at the clerk.

“Don’t worry. It’s just the boat boy, bringing me my fin. I sent an SMS this morning, after I saw you’d smoked the last of it.”

“That’s a very efficient boat boy.”

“He works for her, of course. She has that effect on anyone she employs. She pays double and expects one hundred percent loyalty and efficiency.” We stand and watch as the boy rows toward us. He has about three hundred yards to cover, and he rows with steady, manly strokes that extract the maximum efficiency from each pull. As he comes nearer, though, I’m reminded of the wide innocence of those young eyes, the flawless flesh of youth, the unwrinkled face, the bloom in both cheeks. He was an undemonstrative young fellow when he rowed me out last night; this morning finds him quite lively as he ships the oars and glides toward us.

I’m surprised he seems to be aiming for the bow, though, where the clerk and I are standing, instead of the stern, where there is the platform to climb aboard. I guess he must get on well with the clerk, because he holds up a package in a black plastic bag and waves it. When I check the clerk’s face, though, it is incomprehending, as if the boy is behaving in some way eccentrically. I’m still too distracted by the remains of the opium dream to react quickly. The clerk understands quicker than I, but not quickly enough. The boy drops the black bag to reveal a big handgun, some kind of Magnum, which he points directly at the clerk.

I did not detect a moment when those big innocent eyes lost their innocence; he simply aimed the way he had been trained to do; no doubt he telephoned Hong Kong for instructions after he brought me out last night. Lilly must have supplied him with some exotic bullets, because the one that hits the clerk in the throat causes his neck to explode. The bullet-I guess of the soft-nose exploding type-rips through his vertebrae; body and head hit the deck separately; the head rolls until it is stopped by the guardrail.

The kid is so shocked that he has decapitated a man with one shot, he is experiencing a kind of extreme ecstasy that could go either way: he can no more come to terms with the headless corpse-or the separated head-than I can. I’m so absorbed by the transformation that is taking place before my eyes (a million years of torment before this boy gets another chance at the human form, and on some level he knows it) that I fail to consider that Lilly might have had plans for me too. After all, I’m the one he was talking to.

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