Vulture Peak sj-5 Read online

  I didn’t want to say I wasn’t sure exactly what commodifying meant in this context. Dorothy returned with two plates, one with roast beef and roast potatoes, the other with oysters and prawns from the seafood bar. She ate quickly, putting it all away within about fifteen minutes. I paid the bill and led the way across the bridge to the Skytrain station, then down again to the other side of Sukhumvit and the tunnel that took us to Soi Cowboy. As we approached the soi, we collected more and more participants in the trade, so that now we were in a crowd of middle-aged farang men and working girls aged somewhere between twenty and thirty-five. They were on their way to work in denims and T-shirts. Some arrived on the back of motorbike taxis. When we reached the cooked-food stalls at the entrance to Cowboy, a number of the girls eating at the tables had already changed into their working gear, bar uniforms that emphasized busts and buttocks; they were about as naked as they could get without breaking the law. Dorothy turned gray, as if she’d never seen anything like it before. Chanya claimed that Dorothy had done her thesis on Thai prostitution in a pub in South London.

  My mother Nong’s bar, the Old Man’s Club, was about halfway down the street, opposite the Suzie Wong, and when we arrived, the place was hopping. As a former player herself, Nong knew how to pull in the customers. Her advantage over all the other bars was that Colonel Vikorn owned most of the shares, so no cop was ever going to bust her. Consequently she allowed most forms of sexual activity, barring actual intercourse, in the corner of the bar known as the Office. (Johns could call their wives to say they were stuck in the Office and might be late for supper.) My mother’s girls tended to make more money than their rivals in other bars, so they were pretty content. The most attractive came here because we paid more: we were surrounded by beauty at its smartest and most avaricious. Chanya went up to Nong, giving her the high respectful wai due to the mother-in-law. I kissed her and introduced Dorothy.

  Nong led us to a table in a dark spot at the back wall, which nevertheless gave unobstructed views of the Office and the rest of the bar. She called one of her serving girls to bring us drinks and resumed her place on a stool at the end of the bar, where she ostentatiously broke the law by chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. She still looked pretty sexy in black leggings and a bright checked cowboy shirt, with plenty of gold jewelry.

  Chanya told me in Thai that she was going to call a girl over to talk to Dorothy and asked me which one would be most suitable. I said it would be better to let Dorothy choose the girl-it would look more objective that way. Chanya agreed and was about to speak to Dorothy when two farang men in their early fifties walked in and took up stools at the bar just in front of us. One of them, a blond, owned an Errol Flynn moustache, a flat stomach, and a blazing smile. Immediately two girls in bikinis slipped in between them, but they were quite small, so the farang could continue their conversation over their heads. They seemed to be civil engineers and were discussing a project up in the north, near the border with Laos; they were on leave in Bangkok for a few days.

  While they were talking the girls went to work on their flies and scooped out their cocks, taking care not to damage the merchandise on the zips. (How many times in my life have I seen that search-and-seizure operation with half-cupped hand that always finds the love object sooner or later, even if it requires excavating as far as the biceps femoris?) The farang continued talking about the project for a while, each one shielded from the other by his girl and perhaps not wanting his colleague to see what was happening. Then they broke off for a moment and looked down simultaneously, then up again at each other, and burst out laughing. The girls burst out laughing too. My mother grinned sardonically. Chanya and I both checked Dorothy to see if she had seen the humor, but she was looking at Errol Flynn’s erection. Cocks don’t age the way faces do, and this one could have belonged to a much younger man, especially considering its apparent virility; it was even bigger than his smile. The glans appeared and disappeared under the brown girl’s tiny hand. Dorothy’s eyes were like gimlets.

  “I guess I better go home and pack,” I said. I nudged Dorothy. “Drinks are on the house.”

  But out on the street I asked myself: Do I really want to go to the UAE tonight? I told myself to pause, think about it. The way Vikorn suddenly laid the new case on me, which so far wasn’t a case at all, along with his sudden declaration that he was running for governor of Bangkok, and those three very serious Americans-it was all too unreal. And wasn’t Dubai Muslim? I looked up and down the famous soi. Exterior air-conditioning was making misty rainbows in the tropical night, along with a half mile of neon; near-naked girls with welcoming smiles; unresisting johns: and not a girl, man, or katoey who wouldn’t have qualified for a stoning under Sharia rules. I imagined Mum, Chanya, and me tied to stakes at one end of the street and a gang of yobs in flowing white kanduras at the other taking aim, a builder’s truck laden with Halal crushed rocks behind them. I shrugged. A continuum is a continuum, after all.

  6

  So there I was at the airport in my new Zegna pants (metallic gray with a sheen; they fell from my hips perfectly, as they should have considering the price). I had decided on a black T-shirt under the cream Armani crushed-linen jacket, Bagattos to pamper my feet. I looked the very model of a modern organ trafficker. At check-in I told the girl under the scarf I had only carry-on, and I made sure she recorded my air miles.

  She smiled the way she’d been trained to and said, reading from the computer monitor: “Mr. Jitpleecheep, your medical supplies were safely placed in our refrigerated storage facility at four twenty-three this morning. In view of the emergency, they have already been cleared for customs in Dubai. You have no need to pick them up yourself, our staff at Dubai have arranged for a refrigerated truck to collect them and take them to your hotel.” She checked the name of the six-star hotel with me, and although the color had drained from my cheeks, I said: “Yes, thank you.” I did not say, What emergency? What medical supplies?

  When I left the check-in area and passed to air-side, I tried to call Vikorn, but he was not answering his mobile or landline. I sent him an SMS: Emergency medical supplies? When I cooled down a little in the CIP lounge, I realized that the medical supplies were just as ambiguous as everything else. Sure, he could have been using me for a piece of personal trading, but equally the medical supplies could have been part of my cover. Or they could have been both and neither. It was quite possible Vikorn hadn’t yet decided whether he was the hammer of organ profiteers or an organ profiteer himself. He liked to keep his options open and maybe he was waiting to see if he would win the election and become governor of Bangkok. This speculation didn’t arrive at a conclusion either: As governor, would he drop all his criminal activities and become squeaky clean, or would he use the office for even more personal gain? Was the either/or dichotomy relevant here? Was it ever?

  At Dubai the theme was stars: stars on the stainless-steel handrails, stars on the carpets, stars on the ceiling. I should have understood immediately, but I didn’t. Only after I’d passed through immigration did I remember: desert stars. When I saw a Bedouin in full flowing white kandura, I thought I would have liked to be one such: a life under les belles etoiles, the good clean emptiness of the desert, a wholesome existence dedicated to Allah; but he arrived in a big new four-by-four and wore a lot of gold around his neck and wrists. At the six star I let them take a copy of my black Amex and enjoyed the full six-star treatment; I was reminded of a well-run brothel where, once they’re convinced of your value, they’ll do anything for you, anything at all.

  The girl under the scarf told me my box of medical supplies had already arrived and they’d taken the liberty of leaving them in my suite, plugged into an electric socket. She spoke of my mysterious package with respect, as if she’d guessed what it was. I wanted to ask her what she thought was in the box. The six-star made me feel like I’d arrived in the future, as I took the noiseless elevator, which whisked me up to the thirty-first floor in about a second without a jolt, s
o I was left thinking, How did I get so high so fast? The medical supplies played on my mind; they made me feel hyper-important and hyper-crooked at the same time. Ever feel that way yourself, DFR, like you’re simultaneously winning and losing? •

  The suite was all about minimalism and silk: vast with floor-to-ceiling windows that featured sand and sea plus two sailboats with white sails, which had perhaps been hired by the hotel to hang there in the middle of the view. Now the house phone rang: it was the deputy manager; he wanted to know if the suite suited me, or did my taste tend to the more luxurious? He ticked off the names and themes of some of the other suites, and I wondered what this was all about, until I realized someone at reception must have told him about my good friend BlackAm. They probably had a rule: black Amex gets deputy manager treatment. If you were famous and owned the dark card, you’d probably get the manager himself, who was certainly a sheikh; you had to be in that country only an hour to realize everyone at the top of a pyramid was a prince.

  I told him the suite was fine, then even before I checked the medical supplies, which I couldn’t find for a moment, I had a panic attack and called Chanya so I could remember who I was. All I got was the Thai voicemail system, which meant she’d turned off her mobile so she could concentrate on her thesis. Or was she having an affair? Was she glad I was out of the country so she could bang someone she had got the hots for? I didn’t want to believe the rumors that she’d developed a friendship with a handsome young cop; that she’d been seen with him. (Every cop shop in the world is a gossip city.) But did she really need a male nude as a screen saver? Why? Was she trying to tell me something? The psychology behind my paranoia was subtle: I’d been finding other women attractive for quite some time; my wisdom body was maybe pointing out that I was not the only one who might be suffering from seven-year itch. Now I saw the box in a corner of the business lounge area of the suite.

  It was not of the dimensions I had in mind. When the check-in clerk first said medical supplies, my imagination had flashed up a discreet box about two feet long by six inches by six inches. I didn’t know where I got the idea that medical supplies would come in boxes like that. I also thought the box would be red or white, or both, with maybe a red cross on it. Then when she talked about a truck, I immediately thought of something huge, maybe the size of a large fridge. Now I had to reprogram: the box was gray with stainless-steel bands and stood about two feet high. It seemed to be a perfect cube with a thick black electrical cable, which emerged at the bottom and was plugged into the wall. When I put my ear to it, I couldn’t hear any whirring. Its lid was locked down with combination locks on all four sides, and wherever you looked, you were affronted by black block capitals that said: HEAT SENSITIVE MEDICAL SUPPLIES, KEEP REFRIGERATED, TO BE OPENED BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There were other block capitals in other languages which I suppose said the same thing.

  In my anxiety about Chanya, I’d changed the profile on my cell phone so that on receipt of an SMS or phone call, it gave a huge space-age whoosh and vibrated at the same time. Now the thing went off in my Zegna pocket and vibrated the hell out of my left testicle: Honey, sorry I’m not answering the phone. Dorothy has been plaguing me all day about last night, and I just can’t listen to her anymore. I have to get on with my work. (Basically she now believes in the re-empowerment of woman through inversion of the public imaginary of the brothel as exclusively male playground. In other words, I seem to be winning, but she’s stealing my idea. Yes, something happened, but I don’t have time to tell you right now.) I’m so glad you arrived safely, have a great trip. C.

  Now I felt terrific (except that she didn’t end with love C, and I didn’t know what a public imaginary was); I was ready for the authorized personnel. When nothing happened for an hour, I called Vikorn again, but he was still not receiving calls. I tried out all the sofas and chairs, forced myself to stare at the unreal view, which really existed on the other side of the window (or did it?), and wondered if I should tour Dubai. It occurred to me, though, that this was one place in the world where the tourist DVD might reflect the reality, so I extracted it from the hotel’s welcome package and shoved it into the state-of-the-art Sony player.

  Here we go: desert music from Arab pipes by someone in New York; now we’re playing in the sand with a four-wheel bike-ATVs or all-terrain vehicles, according to the commentary, and don’t forget your designer crash helmet. Now it’s the crocodile show with a reptile too doped to remember to shut its mouth when the trainer puts his head in it, even though you really wish it would-hey, let’s take the amphibious bus to the other side of the river, after all, none of the locals do-or maybe golf in the sun for those who want to grow some melanomas? Oh, no, not the monotonous water scooters up and down, round and round the artificial lake-let’s go to the airplane acrobatics with the colored smoke, bet you’ve never seen that before-and to finish, how about the ten-story water slide-don’t worry, the brawny slave with the perfect smile is waiting to catch you at the bottom, it’s all safe and clean here.

  Thank Buddha for DVDs-now I didn’t have to do any of that crap. Finally the phone rang. It was reception. “Sorry to trouble you, sir. You have a guest waiting downstairs named Madame Lilly Yip. Do you want to come down to collect her, or shall I have someone bring her up to you?” A cough. “Or shall I tell her you are indisposed?”

  Something gaped in the middle of my stomach. I said, “Please bring her up,” and closed the phone.

  I couldn’t stop looking at the perfect cube squatting in the corner of the room. A bell rang softly and sonorously; I went to the door. The first person I saw was a burly bellhop in hotel livery; someone was standing behind him. He made sure I wanted to receive the woman I couldn’t see-he didn’t mind being rude to her, she wasn’t a guest.

  “Yes, please let her in.” He stood aside.

  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.