Vulture Peak (5 page)

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.

“The Colonel just explained to the detective that he had already outlined to you the bare bones of the detective’s forthcoming trip to Dubai and the basic strategy of making contact with the global organ-trafficking community,” Manny said.

Now we were waiting for the Americans. The woman and the man on the sofa waited for the older man in the chair to speak. I thought, from the way he was twisted in the chair with his long shanks drawn up like Abraham Lincoln, that Jack must be very tall. He remained immobile, then turned to the woman with his brows raised and said, “Linda?”

Linda nodded thoughtfully, prepared to speak, coughed, remained silent. Nevertheless Jack treated this as a useful contribution and passed on. “Ben?” he said.

“Yeah,” Ben said, “I can see the point. The detective here discovers that Thailand is being used by unscrupulous organ traders as a center from which to conduct their evil trafficking. The Colonel busts them—it’s like the gold ring. The Colonel not only puts himself on the international law enforcement map, he makes Thailand into the squeaky-clean, non-organ-trafficking, righteous Buddhist center of humane governance of the world. Sure, I can see the upside.”

The older man said, “Linda?”

“I don’t know, Jack,” Linda said.

“Don’t know what, Linda?” Jack said from his arm chair.

“I don’t know if it would be a plus or a minus for us.”

“Surely a plus?” Ben said.

“Take us through that,” Jack said.

“Bust someone big in this trade, and you get the attention of the world,” Ben said.

“Sure,” Linda said, “I got that the first time. But the downside?”

“Take us through the downside, Linda,” Jack said.

Linda frowned, then sucked in her left cheek while leaving the right one inflated. “You know,” Linda said.

“What?” Jack said.

“It’s like, you start to give specific examples of what could go wrong, you end up arguing about the examples?”

“A forest-for-trees thing?” Jack said.

“Exactly that.”

“So give us the forest, forget the trees,” Jack said.

“Okay,” Linda said. “So, it’s the whole unknown of this industry. There are no responsible papers on public reaction to organ trafficking, but anecdotal reports indicate we’re in serious voodoo territory. I don’t mean the science is voodoo, I mean the ordinary uninstructed human reaction. We have to forget the professional oversight for a moment and look at it from a personal point of view. Think about your own favorite organ, Ben,” Linda said.

“Bet we know what his favorite organ is,” Jack said.

“Okay,” Ben said, struggling with a blush. “So, we’re talking about my liver.”

Linda and Jack smiled wryly at the joke. “No,” Jack said, “let’s make it your—wait, which is your favorite testicle?”

“My favorite testicle?” Ben said.

“Yeah, the one you’re most fond of,” Jack said, winking at Linda, who smirked.

“I don’t have a favorite testicle,” Ben said.

“Sure you do, Ben,” Jack said.

“Yes, Ben, sure you do,” Linda said.

“It’s the one you most like the lady to jiggle and bounce around a bit when you get laid,” Jack explained, and looked at Linda.

“Don’t look at me, Jack,” Linda said, “I don’t have one.”

Jack looked at Ben and said, “Well?”

“The left,” Ben confessed with a pout.

“So, think about all the possessive, tender, and above all proprietorial feelings you have about your left testicle,” Linda said. “Then think about someone taking it away from you and giving it to another man.”

“Or woman,” Jack said.

“Or woman,” Linda said. “Now, hold that moment—the point where it’s lost and gone forever, that oh-so-very-important part of you—”

“Wait,” Jack said. “I think we’d better make it his cock, now I see where you’re going.”

“We’re already committed to the testicle,” Linda said.

“Oh, okay. So, your left testicle,” Jack said, looking at Ben and jerking his chin. “Close your eyes. Right.” Jack looked at Linda.

“Go deep into that very specific personal proprietorial male agony, that nightmare of nightmares, far worse than dying, right?”

“Right,” Ben said, keeping his eyes closed.

“Now project that over the population of the third world—like, say, four billion people divided by two gives two billion males with those kind of feelings.”

“What kind of feelings we talking about here?” Jack said.

“I already got the message,” Ben said, opening his eyes. “Yeah, so what you’re saying is, this could all backfire badly owing to the very
powerful and unpredictable feelings this new industry provokes in people. Instead of associating the Colonel with a major law and order breakthrough, we might end up with a labeling problem where he gets associated with a Frankensteinian experiment, even though he’s the good guy trying to fix it, or, even worse, as the guy preventing people from undergoing life-saving operations by busting the racket. The disgust, loathing, and paranoia could spread to all parties. At the same time you get a medical lobby kicking in defending the industry, and you end up with a public relations oil slick. Yeah, I get that.”

“But we do need to at least pay lip service—” Jack murmured.

“Oh, I think we can pay lip service, so long as we all agree we might have to finesse it,” Linda murmured back.

As if by common tribal programming, the three Americans seemed to have come to an agreement indecipherable to the rest of us. Now they were looking at me again. The two men kind of glazed over me with their eyes: I was not a member of their secret society, not an initiate, therefore I hardly existed except in the field of basic courtesy. The woman, though, double-checked my face and saw that I had indeed picked up on certain incongruous phrases:
might have to finesse it; need to pay lip service
. She gave me a split-second chance to ask the question, but I hadn’t decided which way to jump.

“Can we move on to the next item?” Linda said.

Now we were all waiting for Jack, who nodded and put his elbows on the arms of his chair and pressed his palms together at the same time as he kissed the tips of his fingers. He let a lot of beats pass before he said, “What we don’t want to have to deal with is a Noriega-type situation.”

“Right,” Linda said.

“Those photos of the younger Bush on a certain island not a hundred miles from the west coast of Panama—that little punk in jail after Big Daddy’s invasion and threatening to tell all—how toxic was that, for Chrissake?” Ben said.

“Bush was a cinch compared to Yeltsin. I never saw so many skeletons in one cupboard,” Ben said.

“Yeltsin? This is a breeze in comparison,” Linda said. “Try getting instructions out of a terminal alcoholic.”

“Yeah, Ben bore the brunt of that one,” Jack said with the ghost of a twinkle. Linda coughed. “Except the time he came on to Linda,” Jack added.

“If he’d been able to get it up, I woulda shot the creep,” Linda said.

“Well, what do we do?” Jack said.

Silence. Now Linda coughed again. Jack looked at her. “We’ve got to have more detailed data, so we can analyze the risks,” Linda said.

“That’s right,” Ben said.

“So, do we have a conclusion to this meeting?” Jack said.

“Well, I think we let the detective follow present instructions from the Colonel and keep a close eye.”

“That’s just the present issue—what about security in general?” Jack said.

“Like I said, we need all the relevant data—all of it,” Linda said.

“Like with Yeltsin?” Jack said. He shared a dirty grin with Ben, who was delighted.

“You boys,” Linda said.

“How’d you get out of it again?” Jack said.

“Chrissake, Jack,” Linda said.

“How’d she do it, Ben?” Jack said.

“Kicked him in the balls so hard she nearly killed the client.”

Jack’s eyes took on a new life. “Yeah. The one time they rushed him to the hospital for non-alcohol-related injury.”

“Okay, okay,” Linda said.

“So,” Jack said. “We stand pat for the moment and let the detective go to Dubai on business as usual, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily take the thing any further than that. Good. What was the detective’s name again?”

“Jit—plee—cheep,” Manny said.

“Right,” Jack said.

There was a kind of satisfied pause. The three serious Americans seemed to have talked themselves into a mood of indomitable optimism that made Vikorn smile. There was one more item on the agenda, though, something that had perhaps been alluded to so far
only in code. I had a premonition of a knotty problem they were about to share with me. Linda mumbled something impossible for me to catch. Jack mumbled back. Ben said, “Better you than me, Linda.” Linda gave him a stern glance but prepared to speak.

She looked at me. “Ah, I wonder if you could help us with this, Detective. Thing is, we know the Colonel here is a genius-level administrator, but—ah—put it down to American insecurity, but it bothers us the way nothing at all is
visible
. I mean, no docs, no computer program—there’s nothing for us to look at. How can we know what’s supposed to happen next in any of his multiple operations? To do the job properly, we have to know everything he’s up to to make sure nothing goes wrong. I mean, with Bush we knew exactly how much coke he did and who he screwed when he was wild, and with Yeltsin we actually took control of his vodka supplier for two months prior to the election. What we thought was—”