Vulture Peak

22

In Dr. Supatra’s underground lair, death imbues everyday tools with an outlandish dignity: giant pruning shears; those big handsaws normally used for cutting up logs; and rotary electric saws of various sizes. The one that gives me the creeps more than any other is the longhandled wire cutter, the kind you see in war movies when the sappers crawl on their bellies to cut through barbed wire: Supatra uses it to bust her way through rib cages. In the case of the three anonymous ones, though, there wasn’t a lot left to investigate.

The doctor is in her office next to the autopsy room. She smiles when she sees me through the glass wall and stands to come to the door to greet me. “Detective, that software I told you about finally arrived. I’m halfway through. It’s quite exciting.”

She leads me to her desk and gestures for me to pull up a chair. She is finding it difficult to suppress a girlish glee in her new toy. When she jogs her mouse, a human head appears on her monitor in stark ghost white against a green background: eyeless, faceless, thin neck.

“It’s the second girl, the thin one.”

“I thought you said it was two men and a woman?”

Dr. Supatra shifts her gaze to something on the wall. “We all make mistakes. We thought she was a young male who had been castrated. It turns out she had very poorly developed genitals-not uncommon.” She glances at my face, then turns back to the computer. “Sometimes even the Olympic organizers can’t tell a man from a woman. It’s not always totally clear. She had no breast development at all.” She pauses to look at me. “Of course, in reality sexual identity is merely another illusion we seize on in our pathetic need to be someone. You know that.”

She clicks on the mouse, and a second portrait appears. “You see, the computer takes a three-D photograph of the skull, or rather a whole series of photographs turning three-hundred-sixty degrees, then puts together a three-D image. That’s the easy part. Then we have to input other details, such as approximate age, genetic origins, et cetera. I wasn’t sure so I simply clicked on ‘Southeast Asian.’ ”

Now we are looking at a generic bald Southeast Asian with somewhat slit eyes, flat nose, and high cheekbones. It’s a boyish face with no distinguishing features.

“That’s as far as we’ve gone with that one. There’s still a lot of data to input.” She clicks on a side panel a few times, then types something on her keyboard. “I’ve reached about the same point with the other woman. But the man is nearly finished. Now, here is the untouched three-hundred-sixty-degree image of the male.”

The screen is filled with another eyeless, faceless skull, somewhat fuller and stronger-looking than the other. At the next click we are staring at the skull-plus-eyes-and-skin phase. Once again the eyes are slightly mongoloid in the Thai style and the nose small and flared. I nod.

“Now, here he is after I’ve put in all the data.”

The next window produces an individuated male face with black hair, oval eyes with black pupils, and a well-modeled nose, still small but slightly aquiline. My jaw is hanging open.

“What’s the matter? D’you recognize him?”

“Can you squash the eyes a bit more, make them more Mongoloid-I mean Chinese, not Thai?” A few clicks, and the eyes stretch. “A moustache, tightly clipped, very thin, jet black, for the whole length of the upper lip.” More clicks. “Make the hair a bit longer at the front with a cowlick that crosses his forehead from left to right, and a beauty spot just under his left eye.” More clicks. I’m riveted by the screen. “Can you make him smile? The teeth are perfect, slightly large for the mouth, and brilliant white. Good, now darken his skin just a little, not Thai brown, but not Chinese porcelain either-between the two.” I’m squashing my own face between my palms.

“Do you know his name?”

“Not To.”

“Not To? You mean Notto, or his name is not To?”

“Yes. Can we work on the other two together?”

It takes about an hour, with Supatra constantly cross-referring to her base data to make sure I’m not straying from what is scientifically justified. Now we have Notto and his two female assistants, one hardly distinguishable from a boy, the other full-bodied and voluptuous with black-rimmed spectacles. I stand up and pace the room, throwing wild glances at the monitor, as Supatra clicks, and To with his two assistants appear one by one in a revolving show.

There goes my beautiful theory; I make a note of the life lesson: that’s what you get from premature victory dances. “Can you do a group portrait with the man in the middle, the young woman on his right, the older woman on his left? Perfect.” I am transfixed. As I pass and repass the screen, Notto’s eyes follow me. I can almost hear him speak: Oh no, you do not go anywhere. You stay here in Bangkok. “Please print everything. I need copies of each plus copies of the three together.”

“So, do you have a lead now?” Supatra says as I prepare to leave with the printouts.

“No. I have to start from scratch.”

In the cab on the way to the airport, I fish out my cell phone and the card with the heart on it.

She answers on the third ring. “Hello, Detective.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I kept your number on my phone. I even put you in my address book under Det. Must be love, no?”

“Does your charm always work so well?”

“I don’t use it on anyone else.”

“Because you don’t need to?”

“You sound excited. Are you going to tell me why you called?”

“I just happen to be on my way to Phuket. Want to meet me at the airport?”

“Anything you say.”

She is waiting for me: jeans, T-shirt, flip-flops. Her hair is shiny and full-bodied, a black forest of unlimited fecundity. I am overwhelmed by tenderness. She sends me the same message with a touch of humor in her infinitely yielding eyes. If I were twenty, I would whisk her away somewhere-a lonely beach hut where we could live happily ever after until the world caught up. I take her hand, in flagrant violation of all the rules of interrogation, and lead her out of the terminal.

“I thought we were flying?” she says, leaning toward me.

“We are,” I say.

The office for the helicopter company is about a hundred yards from the terminal down a service road. I already booked by phone, and the reception says the chopper is waiting. It’s a small one with only four passenger seats. Now two pilots arrive and greet us with wais, and we’re taking off in that oblique turning motion that reminds me of Vietnam movies. I think Om has been in the chopper before. She knows where we are going.

The entire journey takes about ten minutes. Now we’re at the helipad on Vulture Peak, a giant H painted atop a mound in a circle of asphalt about two hundred yards from the house, concealed by shrubs. Om has turned to stone-this isn’t the romantic assignation she had in mind-but she follows me to the house, slavelike. I use the key I obtained from the forensic team to open the magnificent door. When she has closed it behind us, I turn to look her in the eye.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks.

“You’re used to luxury,” I say. “I couldn’t afford anything so grand myself.”

She is bewildered but shows no sign of fear. I take her hand and lead her into the vast salon, with its tinkling streams and giant teak pillars. We cross one of the streams to the balcony. It’s dusk; the sun’s glancing rays have turned the sea to blue velvet. It might have been a Tantric moment-two spiritual beings joining our bodies for the salvation of the world-but it would have needed different bodies in a different age. When I put my arm around her, she sags against me, resigned to whatever male fantasy I have in mind.

“Which room do you normally use?” I ask.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“For your customer. The one who brings you here. Which room is it?”

She stares into my eyes. “You’re jealous? That’s what this is all about? If you care that much, why don’t you do something about it? Make me your second wife? Look after me? If that’s what you want. I don’t care about money, just so long as I have enough for my mother’s medicine and some food. I’m not greedy. If it’s just sex you want, tell me how you want it. I’ll do what you want, so long as it doesn’t hurt.”

“How much do I have to pay?”

She turns away, humiliated. “Whatever you want to pay. Nothing, if it makes you feel better. Will it prove that I like you if I don’t take any money? Okay, I don’t want money.”

“What do you wear, usually, when you come here? Does he make you change into anything?”

“He doesn’t make me change into anything. It’s not like that.”

I’m grasping her wrists. “Not like that? Then what is it like?”

“What is it like?” From the wild look in her eyes, I guess that she has guessed: now she knows I know, but it’s impossible to talk about: an emotional furnace. I’m sweating. She turns her wrists to let me know I’m hurting her. I let go.

My voice is quite hoarse when I say, “Do you want to take a shower first? There are towels and bathrobes in every room. You don’t have to use the master bedroom if you don’t want to.”

She shrugs and turns away, puzzled. I watch her cross the salon and enter one of the bedrooms. I choose the master bedroom itself, which the forensic team have cleaned up in the neat Thai way. I wonder if I too should undress. May as well go the whole hog and shower under the great chrome splash shower, use up the last of the gel, grab a towel that the cleaning staff must have renewed, and change into a buff dressing gown with monk’s hood. When I leave the bathroom, I hear her showering in the other room. I take out three photocopies from my backpack and lay them on the bed. The noise of the shower stops. She spends about five minutes drying herself, then walks through the door, also in a buff dressing gown, looks for me, sees me standing by the bed, and smiles. She has eyes only for me and does not see the three photocopies.

I know too much about whores not to understand that she is still clinging to the hope that I will provide a way out; second wife may not offer much in the way of status, but the income is usually regular, and the dignity infinitely greater than bar work. Her smile is frank, vulnerable, sincere. I wish she were more cynical; it would make what I have in mind a lot easier. When I stare at her, she pulls at the belt on her robe, which falls open.

I stride up to her and pull the gown off her shoulders until it drops to the ground. “Tell me how it is with him,” I say. “Is it like this?” I slide my hands down her back, grab her buttocks, and press her pelvis against mine with as much harshness as I can manage. “Is it?”

She is shocked, disillusioned: her dream of a more dignified future has collapsed in less than a second. She shakes her head, tearful.

“No?” I hear the roughness in my voice. “Or maybe like this?” I fall to my knees and lick her nipples one after the other with pathetic gratitude. Her hand drops to my shoulder, then follows the line of my neck to my ear, which she cups and fondles. “Like this?”

“Yes,” she says behind the tears, “like that.”

“Every time? No dominance, no rough stuff, no fantasy?”

“Only the first time. Manu changed after the first time.”

“Manu? That’s his name? And you are the only one who can tame him?”

A shrug. “That’s what he says.”

I stand up and turn away from her. “Please get dressed,” I say to the window. I hear her leave the room. Five minutes later she is back in her jeans and T-shirt, waiting for my next move. I point to the bed where I have placed the photocopies of To and his two women. She puts a hand over her mouth and closes her eyes.

“A lot of people use this house,” Om says. “But they are all connected.” She is dressed, sitting upright on one of the chaise longues while I watch her from a rosewood chair of classic Chinese design. There is a tinkling brook between us. “Manu’s lover, that army general, owns it jointly with that Chinese woman, but he never comes. He uses it to maintain his connections with Beijing. Especially his banking and military connections. He and the Chinese woman put it at the disposal of that Chinese creep-that’s his picture you put on the bed.”

“Mr. To?”

“His name’s Wong.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. My father was Chinese. That’s why my skin is light. He was a peasant from Canton who fled the Cultural Revolution. He was quite old by the time he reached Thailand and married my mother. He said the only thing he could give me was his language. Cantonese. Wong was a Hong Kong Chinese, and so were those women he dragged everywhere with him, so they always spoke Cantonese. They didn’t know I could understand everything they said. I never let on.”

“Go on.”

“What happened that night I told you about, it was all true, but it was only the first time. It seems I was a great success with the Chinese bankers that Wong was entertaining here.”

“Wong was at the party?”

“Oh no, he was much too high up for that. He just made the place available and paid for the entertainment.” She stares at the flow of pure water in the little brook between us. “I didn’t even meet him until the next time.”

“The next time?”

“Yes. Like I said, we were a hit. Especially me. Those were just peasant boys at that party who got recruited into banking-they’d never seen anything like it. Especially that little trick with the gold ring. The word spread. Wong’s masters in Beijing were delighted, so Wong did it over and over again. Only this time he insisted on private rehearsals.”

“I see.”

“The Hong Kong Chinese woman was his face at the party, making sure everything went smoothly, but he planned everything.”

“And he-”

“He never screwed me. He groped me a lot, but he was a born voyeur. He sat with his two weird women and watched me do things for him. Often he would have them film me while he masturbated. And every time what he wanted was a little weirder, a little more extreme. He got very aroused just having me as his creature, telling me ‘Do this, do that’-all the time pretending it was a rehearsal, of course. He would turn bright red, and the sweat would pour down his face.”

“And at the same time you were-I mean, Manu was your client?”

“There was overlap. That General Zinna called the bar one night-he’d heard about us from Wong-to say he had a special assignment, money no object. He told the mamasan about his problem, and she came up here with me the first night. Nobody knew how Manu would react. They kept him locked up in the main bedroom while they explained to me that he could be difficult. I got scared and asked if he had AIDS. They said no, nothing like that, no communicable disease-but he’d been in an accident. It would be better for both of us if I worked in the dark. So I did. He was like an animal at first, but I could feel his hurt. He had me every way he wanted, but he stopped being rough after a while. They paid me more money that night than I had earned for six months. I bought my mum a house. The mamasan said they were very pleased with me.

“Then the client-Manu-wanted me again. So the second time I told him to switch the lights on. It was a shock-I thought I was going to ruin everything by vomiting-but I remembered my vow to help all living creatures toward enlightenment, and that saved me. When he realized I could have sex with him knowing what he looked like, he just melted. He can’t live without me. He’s like a child with me.” She looks me in the eye. “You know he can hardly talk, only whimper and blather? When he wants to tell me something, he has to write it down. The accident ruined his larynx almost completely.” Om swallows and looks away.

“How many entertainments did you take part in all together?”

“I’m not sure. About ten.”

“And the clients-were they always midlevel bankers?”

She looks away, bites her lip.

“Om?”

“No. But I told you, these were all people from the north, in the Beijing area. They didn’t speak Cantonese so I didn’t know what they were talking about.”

“Always from the north, Om?”

She is holding out on me. She exhales. “No, not always from the north.”

“So there were occasions when you did understand everything that was being said, when they assumed you could not understand a word?”

Reluctantly: “Yes.”

“And what were they talking about?”

“It happened twice. Once it was a bunch of cops from Shenzen, the other time it was a group of prison officers from somewhere in Guanzhou.”

I wait. It seems she has forgotten the question. “What were they talking about, Om?”

“Body parts,” she says. She looks into my eyes. “That was the connection. Even when the group was from the north, I could understand some words. I didn’t follow the story until the Cantonese-speaking groups came. Then I put the picture together. It seems there is quite an industry-everything that goes on in this house is connected. Even Manu-he is connected through his operation. He knows some of the players. He knew Wong, for example, who you call To.”

I think about that. “But I still don’t get it. What’s the connection between a bunch of men on stag parties to Phuket and the organ-trafficking industry?”

“Exactly that. The parties were all for men who had had successful transplants of one kind or another. They were allowed to invite their guanxi group to celebrate their survival-‘like being reborn,’ was what they kept saying. Ordinary Chinese are just as superstitious as Thais. If they think some piece of good fortune has saved their lives, they feel obliged to share the joy, give thanks.”

“Transplant operations made possible by removing the organs of people who had been executed… by that particular work group?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. When it was the cops, yes. I think they had a thing going, you know, if a fellow cop needed a fresh new liver, or kidney, or something, they would go and find one for him. Same with the prison officers. These were tightly knit male groupings, you know, with that thing men do: all for one and one for all.” She scowls, then shrugs. “Survival.”

I let about five minutes pass while she stares at the stream and twists a tissue into a knot and slowly shreds it over the floor. “So, Om, are you going to tell me who killed Mr. Wong and his two assistants?”

She stares down at the little pile of white tissue fragments on the parquet, then looks up at me. “You see, Manu thinks of this house as his own. He likes to feel he can sneak up here anytime he likes, like a wild animal with a secret nest. And he has all the keys. Of course he stays away when there’s a party or something, but it’s part of his relationship with Zinna that he can have anything of Zinna’s-because of Zinna’s guilt.

“One night I was here ‘rehearsing’ in front of Wong and the other two. They were facing me, and I was standing in front of the balcony, so I was the only one who saw Manu. He used his key to slip in, but he must have known there were people here because of the car outside. So he made no noise. I was naked, and Wong was telling me what he wanted. It was quite extreme, and I felt humiliated because of Manu. Manu disappeared for a moment, and I thought he’d gone. But it seems he just went somewhere in the house where there was a gun. It was a pistol.

“Suddenly he wasn’t Manu the cripple anymore. I could see the kind of young man he must have been before the accident. He walked tall. I was sure he’d do something cruel to them, because he was in such a rage. But he didn’t. He controlled himself. He was a soldier, so he knew how to aim a gun. He shot all three of them in the back of the head, one after the other in less than a second. It was an execution.” Silence, then: “Who cares if people like that die? They were going to be reborn as pigs or insects anyway.”

She is staring into space. I say, “The three cadavers were expertly harvested for all major organs, even faces. Who did that?” She stares at me until her eyes grow big, but she doesn’t answer. “Who called a certain telephone number to bring in the experts? The ones who know how to extract valuable organs and sell them on the international market?”

She continues to stare, as if my question has no meaning.