Vulture Peak

7

She was younger than I expected: early thirties, jacket and three-quarter-skirt combination, Chinese of the tall willowy kind-I could imagine her leaning on a humped stone bridge in one of the gardens of Suzhou; sophistication to freeze an erection on any man except a horny aristocrat; beauty worn like a personal fortune that is implied in every detail. She liked the impression she was making on me as she extended a perfect product of the manicurist’s art: “Mr. Jitpleejeep? Lilly Yip. I understand you have something for me?”

“Yes.”

When I didn’t say anything else, she smiled approvingly, as if I were a fellow professional who knew the ropes. Now she took a piece of paper out of her designer handbag. It was an irrevocable letter of credit to the value of $200,000, payable to a corporation registered in Geneva. I supposed the corporation belonged to Vikorn, but I didn’t see how I could let her have the box until I’d got approval from the Colonel, and I could not understand why he hadn’t returned my calls.

I allowed an awkward pause to intervene, covered up by closing the door; I became fascinated by how smoothly it shut and opened, noted that I’d not dented her perfect poise, and said, “I’m afraid my principal hasn’t been in touch since I arrived an hour ago.” When she frowned, I said, “Maybe you’d like to check the merchandise while we’re waiting?”

An unplanned twitch corrupted the cosmetics for a moment. Irritation? Excitement? It was impossible to be sure. “Yes, of course.”

“You have the combination?” I said. She looked at me as if something were wrong, as if I were stupid. I said, “Of course you do,” and led her to the cube.

She quickened her step as she approached, apparently forgetting me. When she reached the cube, she stabbed in the combination numbers from memory. I was surprised that every lock had a different number and that she seemed to know each one by heart. I walked over to help her with the lid. She seemed excited. Together we lifted. I took the full weight of the lid and stepped back. Now I was seeing her at an angle that caught the hollow of her left cheek from behind; I was looking at the jaw of a Manchurian wolf.

Under the lid there was a layer of high-tech packing material, and under that a layer of smaller cubes. Something in the main cube started to whirr, and some wisps of condensation collected on the surface. She took out one of the smaller cubes, which seemed to be made of plastic, opened the lid, removed some more packing material, gave a soft gasp, and nodded at me to look. I leaned over her. It was a perfect human eye with dark iris: moist, almost tearful as if on the point of telling a sad story. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured and looked up at me for confirmation. I wanted to puke, but I said, “Yes, perfect.”

“Where is your fridge?”

I jerked my chin in the direction of the six-star fridge. It seemed she must examine each eye, so we stored the examined ones temporarily in the hotel refrigerator, crowding out the Evian and the tinned caviar. One thousand seven hundred and sixty-four human eyes, none of them blue, gray, or green. To break the monotony, I leaned over her shoulder halfway through the quality-control exercise and said, “Chinese?”

She cocked her head, peered more closely with her lips quivering. “Korean. From the North.”

Now we put them all back in the mother cube one by one, each in its own jewelry box like a gigantic gem, and closed the lid. We’d been working for more than an hour, and I was exhausted by the tension. Lilly Yip hadn’t broken a sweat. My cell phone whooshed.

“What’s happening?”

“Where have you been?”

“In a traffic jam. I forgot I’d turned off my cell phone. Everything okay? You’ve made contact with Lilly?”

“She’s here now.”

“Good. She’s given you an ILC?”

“Yes.”

“For two hundred thousand dollars payable to my corporation in Geneva?” He gave the name of the corporation.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Let her take them away.”

“Not until you tell me where you got the merchandise.”

“Don’t worry, it’s a cadaver-only trade.”

I wanted to ask how the former owners of the eyes became cadavers, but Lilly Yip was listening while pretending to look at the view. I didn’t put it past her to understand Thai. I closed the phone. “That was my principal. It all seems to be in order.”

She nodded and fished her phone out of her handbag. She spoke in fluent Arabic. Then, without asking, she went to the house phone on the desk in the business end of the suite and again spoke in Arabic. She turned to me with a smile out of Vogue, Shanghai edition. “A security team will pick them up in thirty minutes. If you confirm with reception that they are allowed to remove the container, we can take a stroll through the Gold Souk. I think this is your first visit to Dubai, no? We can have some lattes at Starbucks.”

Her English was finishing-school perfect. I lifted the house phone to call reception.