Hong Kong is the world’s biggest shopping mall, but the business of Hong Kong is China. Apart from a brief moment when the Chinese Communist Party was communist, it has always been so, from the nineteenth century, when Britain sent gunboats up the Pearl River to force opium down the lungs of twenty million Chinese, to the present day, when the gigantic container port of Kwai Chung sends goods to and receives goods from the mainland that, if spread out horizontally, would occupy a land area as vast as a medium-sized country, or if placed end to end would stretch around the world three times, depending on what statistic you prefer. After Mao’s revolution of 1949, when the great expat party that was Shanghai finally came to a bloody end, the remains of the Raj continued its largely alcoholic contribution to world culture right here in the former narcotics entrepot, where the fortunes of a few were made out of the misery of the millions. From the start in the 1840s, if you wanted to be a real player, what you needed was a place on the peak called Victoria from which you commuted by palanquin carried by a team of four coolies who, for reasons of survival, were inevitable end consumers of your honorable product, with a life expectancy of maybe thirty years if they were lucky. (The more one eats and drinks at the Hong Kong Club, the more of one’s dope Johnny Chinaman has to smoke so he can haul one up the hill afterward, ha, ha. Can’t go wrong, old boy.)
The opium has gone and there is a funicular railway, but the ultimate proof of wealth beyond measure remains a spread on the peak, where you can rely on a refreshing breeze when everyone else is sweating down on the shore, and a Scottish mist weaves romantically over the hills during winter. Naturally, the first thing Lilly and Polly’s grandfather did when he arrived with his factory from Shanghai was to buy a home up here, and it seems the property has remained in the family ever since. It was not difficult to find all this out by making a few inquiries before I left Bangkok, but I’ve not yet decided whether to forewarn them of my arrival, or to simply turn up at the door. Of course, there’s no guarantee they will be at home: they could still be trading organs with les miserables at Lourdes, or playing roulette at Monte Carlo. I’m taking a flier, as usual.
The address I’ve been given involves taking a path called Stanley around the top of the peak. Naturally, those who live up here may use their cars to commute, but the rest of us have to walk. I find the house easily enough. There is an iron gate with a large red button to push and a microphone to speak into-and a speaker that says, “Yes?”
“Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep,” I announce.
Silence, then something clanks at the bottom of the iron gate, which begins to swing open so slowly, I am over the threshold long before it has reached the full compass of its aperture, whereupon it immediately starts to close again. I’m about twenty yards down a hundred-yard drive before I hear it clank shut. I ought to add that it’s a magnificent day up here on billionaire mountain, with almost zero humidity, a cerulean blue sky against which contrasts perfectly the dark foliage of bodi leaves, ferns, and beech. The house from this side looks like a long half-timbered bungalow in the Elizabethan style, but a glance over the hedge reveals that the top floor of the house must be no more than a kind of lobby, for living quarters, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and what looks like a Chinese garden in the Ming style spread out about twenty feet below.
I must confess I was expecting, in the circumstances, to be greeted by a maid; instead an arched door (English green oak) has been left fully open for me to stride through. Inside: an intimidating selection of classic Chinese blackwood furniture stands on gray flagstones: stern chairs with curved backs, a student’s bench at which would-be mandarins once knelt, a blanket trunk with mother-of-pearl inlay, a wardrobe in polished elm more than seven feet tall with great brass locks-and a collection of black-and-white photographs which form a family narrative that circumnavigates the long room. I would like to study the pictures, which from a quick glance seem to feature old Shanghai with the wealthy all dressed in top hats, monkey suits, and flowing dinner gowns and the poor in traditional Chinese peasant dress, but feel like an intruder who needs to identify himself before someone calls the police.
A second door, also oak and arched, also open, leads to a set of broad stone stairs that turn on themselves to land me on the ground floor. Corridors that must have been cut into the rock lead to the left and right, while an oval solarium of generous proportions, populated by a hundred varieties of orchid, invites me onward. The solarium is of the wrought-iron kind that reached a perfection of style a hundred years ago.
The main door is fitted with tinted glass, which throws a jolly collage of color onto the flagstones. I open it to emerge into the fresh air. The tennis court and swimming pool are on my left, the Ming garden with tiny humped stone bridges and trickling brooks on my right; the frozen psychosis of Hong Kong with its motherboard of steel and glass towers hums far below. At a marble table in the garden on the other side of the bridge, the Twins are sitting with a carafe of white wine and two glasses. One of them-I would not dare to guess which-is holding a revolver to her head while the other watches with considerable concentration. The one with the gun slowly squeezes the trigger until there is a click, then replaces it on the table. Jaw jutting, her sister now picks up the gun, holds it to her head, and slowly pulls the trigger until it clicks. She replaces the gun on the table. I am not surprised to note a sudden relaxation in the atmosphere, permitting them both to look up.
“Detective, what a surprise,” one of them-the last to fail to die-says. They smile.
“Tell me it wasn’t loaded,” I say as I approach.
By way of answer she hands me the gun. “This is what we call our shrine.”
When I spin the chamber, I see there is one cartridge in it. I look at the sisters, who raise their eyebrows. “It’s a blank, right?” The eyebrows rise higher. I align the cartridge with the trigger and point-it must be the boy in me-at the crystal carafe. I already know the answer by the way they have both moved their chairs back, but I fire anyway. There goes the crystal carafe, as the shot echoes over the mountain. The last of the Chablis dribbles over the marble.
Suddenly I need to sit down. One of the sisters drags up a chair. “Do you do this often?” I say.
“Only when it’s the maid’s day off,” one says. “That’s why there was no one to greet you at the door. Very sorry, appalling manners and all that-but as you see, we were in the middle of something exciting.”
Not for the first time in the company of these two, I am dragged into another world: surreal, exotic, rich, and mad. The scene is still playing in my mind: yes, the gun was loaded with a live shell; yes, each of them did raise it to her head and pull the trigger. But I still can’t believe it; I’m tempted to ask them to do it again.
“I don’t believe you play it every week. One of you would be dead by now.”
They exchange glances. “That’s true. You must be a good detective.”
Silence. Now one of them says, “So, which do you think I am, Lilly or Polly?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, neither do we,” they say in unison.
Nothing in my career as a cop, or as a human, has prepared me for this conversation. The beauty of the day here on the mountaintop, the ancient genius of the garden, the buzzards hanging in the air close to the peak, the sailboats and pleasure vessels in the harbor-it all seems to have taken on a darker hue, like a hallucination that has started to go wrong. “What do you mean, ‘Neither do we’?” I say.
One of them-I shall have to call her Lilly or I’ll go mad-makes a sulky face. “Sometimes I’m her and she’s me. It’s easy to get mixed up.”
“You’re a Buddhist,” Polly says. “You must know there’s no such thing as a self. Think of it: when you want to see yourself, you look in a mirror. You have a choice whether to look or not.”
“But with us the other is there all the time in a mirror that follows you around. The same but different,” Lilly says.
“It’s not at all unusual for twins to go homicidal and want to kill each other,” Polly explains.
“Oh,” I say.
“It’s a trick we discovered when we were teens. The Russian roulette. We both knew we would murder each other one day if we didn’t do something-so we used the gun.”
“It has a way of clearing the air.”
“Sure does,” I say. “You mean you were in the middle of an argument?”
“A serious one.”
“What about?”
They exchange a glance. “Livers and kidneys.”
“She bet five kidneys in a game of blackjack yesterday-”
“I did not. It was three kidneys.”
“You use human organs as betting chips?”
“We use commodities. Sometimes it’s gold, sometimes livers, sometimes kidneys, sometimes pig belly futures.”
“I wanted to talk about something else,” I say.
They look at me expectantly. I keep looking at the gun and the splinters of glass on the floor. I let too many beats pass and miss my cue, perhaps deliberately. Now that I’ve found the Twins, I realize that any meeting with them would be futile without more background.
Lilly says, “Let me show you around. We haven’t taken you on the standard tour yet.”
The other, Polly, remains at the table while Lilly and I climb the stairs to the top floor, where I came in. We start at the beginning of the photographic display, with a Chinese man in top hat and tails standing in a Chinese street that looks like circa 1930s. He is young, with a cigar in his hand and a shine in his eyes that promises a ruthless and successful future. “That’s Grandfather. He was a very strong man-you can see it in his eyes. Strong men castrate their sons, a psychologist told us ages ago: that’s what Peter the Great did to his son. That’s what Grandfather did to Daddy. Daddy was an alcoholic and a gambler. Grandfather saw what a dead loss he was, so he put almost the whole of the property and his fortune in a trust a few years before he died. Daddy couldn’t touch it except for living expenses, otherwise he would have gambled it all away.
“It still is in trust, otherwise we would have gambled it all away. That old bastard gave us such a piddling allowance, we had to scrounge around for years and years until we discovered organ trafficking. We knew at once we were just made for it. Imagine what it does to your worldview when you can see profit in everyone you meet. We felt the same excitement Grandfather told us about, to be perfectly placed in an industry that’s about to take off.”
“What industry was he in?”
“Armaments. At the beginning of the Second World War.”
She gives me the big Chinese smile. Is she joking? Trying to scare me? Or is she just insane? Or-scariest of all-simply telling the truth? I see a world in which we size each other up not for sex appeal but for the resale value of our livers.
We stop in front of a cabinet in the same blackwood.
“Opium pipes?” I say. “With all the bits and pieces.” Behind the glass must be the most complete sets I’ve seen, each one a work of art. I missed them on the way in. “They’re exquisite,” I say.
“They’re called layouts. Each one includes two pipes laid on each side of the mother-of-pearl inlay. The bowls are made of Yixing clay. The miniature cupboard at the end is for the opium and whatever one used to thicken it, quite often just aspirin.”
“They look well used.”
“Mmm. Grandfather smoked every Friday night. He started in Shanghai, of course, and continued over here. In those days the British didn’t take it seriously, even though it was already illegal. He forbade my father to smoke it, though. He said it was harmless so long as you were strong enough to use it sparingly. So Daddy became an alcoholic instead. Do you think that was an improvement? To die from opium addiction is, of course, a disgusting death-but not as bad as coughing up your own liver.”
“That’s how he died, your father?”
She twists her head to indicate she didn’t like the question. “People with strong affections develop fetishes. I can’t tell you how many Polly and I have about gambling. And the other things we do.” A smile. “Grandfather loved everything to do with opium-he even grew poppies in the greenhouse. When you love something, you want it every way you can get it. But he was so strong, he never let the opium dominate. I have a luck charm tattooed on the top of my left thigh. Maybe I’ll show you one day.” She has come significantly closer.
There is a sound on the stairs. Polly appears, daggers in her eyes.
“You see what I mean about twins?” Lilly says. “Insanely jealous. She’s not attracted to you at all. She just couldn’t stand the thought of my having you. Isn’t that right, love?”
Polly walks over to kiss me on the cheek. “She doesn’t want you either. Neither of us likes sex. She’s just provoking me. She’s angry that I didn’t die just now, aren’t you?”
“Same to you with knobs on,” Lilly says, and sticks out her tongue.
They are standing on either side of me, and the experience is making me feel faint. I am quite certain they know what they are doing. (I hope you will not laugh at me, DFR, when I explain to you that these women are not human at all. They are a variety of pawb or ogre that lives in human bodies, native to Southeast Asia. I didn’t want to test your credulity by mentioning it before, but now I trust the matter is obvious. FYI, there are plenty of demons masquerading as humans all over the world, many of them in high places-political leaders, captains of industry; they are quite unaware of their true identity but often betray themselves by a tragic lack of depth.) The combined force of their malevolence is quite debilitating. I think the game of Russian roulette was set up for my benefit, a shock tactic to disorient me.
A buzzer sounds. They exchange a glance. Polly goes to the door to press a button. “Yes?”
“Polly? Lilly? It’s Sam. Just popped by to say thanks for the other night.” It’s a woman’s voice with a British accent.
Polly and Lilly share a glance, then Polly squeals into the microphone. “Sam! Darling! How wonderful. ”
“I hope I’m not disturbing anything. My chauffeur just came back from the shops and-you know what gossips Filipinos are-he told me he saw the most gorgeous man standing outside your gates, so I won’t come in. I just wanted to say thankseversomuch for such a wonderful party-you two still know how to throw them-and how, loves.”
“Of course you must come in!” Polly squeals again into the mike. “Stop being so absolutely disgustingly polite and British. You know we both adore you to bits!” She presses a button, exchanges another glance with her sister, and shrugs.
The three of us wait in silence until there’s a knock on the door. Lilly opens it, and a tall blond woman in her thirties enters, brimming with health, smiles, and money. Everyone squeals except me: “Darling!”
“Darlings!”
“Oh, darling, you look absolutely fantastic!”
“So do you two! Ohmygod, you’re wearing the same clothes! It’s like seeing double. And after all these years.”
“Guess who’s who,” Lilly says.
“Yes, guess.”
“A glass of Pimm’s if you get it right.”
“Two if you get it wrong.”
Laughter. The woman called Sam throws me a glance.
“Oh, gosh, forgot to introduce you. This is-Detective-ah-”
“Jitpleecheep,” I say.
The blond woman shakes my hand. Blue Brahmin eyes check me out: what caste do I belong to? I’m a cop and Eurasian, not her level at all. “So pleased to meet you.”
“Enchante,” I say, Buddha knows why.
“Well,” Sam says, “an absolutely gorgeous policeman who speaks French, only you two could pull that off. Where on earth did you find him?”
“He took us to Monte Carlo. Didn’t you, Detective?”
“Well,” Sam says again, definitively upstaged, “how interesting. Look darlings, I must be off. TTD, you know.”
“Oh, it’s always things to do with you. Won’t you stay for a Pimm’s, love?”
“I really can’t, loves. I’ve got to go down to the snake pit to buy a birthday present for James. He’s terribly sensitive about these things, and he has done rather well on the derivatives market lately, so he does deserve a little TLC.”
“Are you going down into the city?” I say on impulse. “I’m going that way myself.”
“Well, of course,” Sam says, “I’ve got the driver waiting up top. Are you ready?”
“Oh, yes,” I say, “I’m ready.” I turn to the Twins. “Wonderful as ever.” I kiss them each on both cheeks as they turn them.
“You don’t have any bags or anything?” Sam says.
“Oh, no, he doesn’t have any bags,” Lilly says.
“How long have you known the Twins?” Sam asks. We are in the back of a long, low Jaguar with a polished walnut dashboard and a Filipino chauffeur in gray livery.
“About a month. You?”
“Ever since we moved here eight years ago. It’s a village up on the peak, everyone knows everyone, and the Twins-everyone calls them that-grew up here. They’re as much a fixture as the mountain itself. Our kids go to the same school they went to. Aren’t they amazing?”
“Yes, amazing.”
“Of course, being ethnic Chinese and speaking the lingo, they have guanxi coming out of their ears. Were there any servants there, by the way?”
I want to ask what guanxi is, but I’ve missed the moment. “No. It’s the maid’s day off.”
Sam snorts and leans forward. “Did you hear that, Hill? They told him it’s the maid’s day off.” Hill chuckles. She turns back to me. “They’re notorious for not being able to keep servants. Wait till I tell everyone they told you it’s the maid’s day off.” She gives a big, hard English laugh. “See, they use the same agency as we do, and Hill is in with the agent, so we get all the gossip.”
“Really? I’m looking for a servant myself,” I say. “Which agency do you use?”
She gives me her first frank expression: shrewd, penetrating, clever. “You’re investigating them for something? The usual thing, I suppose.”
“Yes, the usual thing.”
She leans forward again. “Hill, do you have an agency card with you, so we can be of service to the police?”
Hill pulls a card out of his jacket and passes it back to her. She hands it to me. “Which unit of the police are you with? Fraud?”
“Not exactly. But if you have any information on how the Twins make a living, that would be helpful.”
“Make a living? Well, they both have degrees in medical science, quite good ones they say. But nobody could imagine them working as physicians, not even them, so they taught anatomy for a few years at the Chinese University. That was hardly a living wage for them, so they went into business, some kind of China trade. No one seems to know exactly, but they travel a lot and are able to get hold of money these days. If you’re not fraud, what are you?”
“Murder.”
Silence. “I see. May I know if anyone up on the peak has been murdered?”
“Oh, I’m not based in Hong Kong. I’m from Bangkok.”
“Oh,” she says.
“What would ‘the usual thing’ be, by the way?”
She moves away to look out the window. “I’m sorry, I thought you were local police. We’re in Central now-where would you like to be dropped?”
The domestic staff agent-a woman with a Filipina accent-will not give me the maid’s name or telephone number, but when I say I’m willing to pay for information, she promises to pass on my own number. I take a stroll among the glittering caverns of Central, then take the Star Ferry to Kowloon. I’m staring across the harbor at the architectural hysteria of downtown Hong Kong when my cell phone rings. A young woman’s voice speaks slowly and precisely in old school English: “May I speak to Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, please?”
She agrees to meet me this evening in the Neptune II bar in Wanchai. • •
The bar is an underground cavern that seems to be a Filipina hangout as well as a pickup joint for freelancers. I order a beer and watch the Filipino band get ready on the stage and wait. I gave the maid-her name is Maria-my description. After the band has started into a perfect imitation of an old Bruce Springsteen number, a woman in her midtwenties sits down on the stool beside me. She is heavily made up. I think she comes here to make some extra money now and then.
“Hello, sir. I am Maria.”
I buy her a drink. She smiles and wriggles in a way that could be provocative, or not, depending on what I want. When I ask about the Twins, she asks about money. I pass a few notes in Hong Kong dollars under the counter. Then she starts to talk. It seems the Twins are notorious. They have to pay double the going rate for maids, and even then most quit after a month or so.
“The first thing that disturbs one is their fights, sir,” Maria says. “They are quite bloodcurdling. Quite often one will run after the other with a weapon, a knife or some heavy object, and the other will have to lock herself in a room until the danger is past. Many a time I was frightened for my life. Then one of the former maids told me they have both spent time in mental hospitals. They are quite insane, sir, in my opinion.”
“That’s why the maids always leave?”
“Not exactly, sir. There is a room, sir, which they keep shut for the first week of one’s engagement. Then when they have decided one is strong enough, they order one to clean it. I shudder when I think of it, sir.” She shudders. “It is the most terrifying experience of my life.” I wait for her to finish shuddering. “That room is full of human organs, sir.”
“Human organs?”
“Yes, sir. The organs are embalmed in bottles on shelves, just like in a hospital or laboratory. They appear to collect them.”
“They collect human organs?”
“Yes, sir. All with labels in Chinese characters. It is their hobby. They receive body parts and dissect them at home. They appear to be quite skilled. It would appear to be legal, however, otherwise they would not be so open about it. But that room is full of ghosts, sir. We Filipinas are quite sensitive to such matters. In my village in Oriental Mindoro, there is a good deal of lore on the subject, so I know what I am talking about. Ghosts of those who have died violently and who are seeking a new bodily vehicle in which to express themselves. I have spoken to the other maids, all of whom agree with me on this point.”
“I heard they often get into trouble with the police.”
“That is quite a different matter, sir. It seems they are frequently short of funds and have recourse to fraudulent practices. However, they always seem to find the money in time to pay off the debt and avoid prosecution. In any case, they have guanxi, so they are able to get away with such things. That is all I can tell you. If you wish, I can ask some of the other maids to contact you. I am sure they will corroborate my evidence.”
I pass her some more notes under the counter and forget to ask what guanxi is.
The bar is warming up. Since we have been talking, a number of Chinese women with mainland accents have arrived, along with more Filipinas and quite a few Thais. Some middle-aged men have dropped in after work in their business suits. It’s almost like home. Maria seems to have a friendship with one of the men who looks like a British businessman and excuses herself. I watch the band get ready for their next number, which is vintage Beatles from Abbey Road. Then they play “California Dreaming” for the old folks before segueing into “Between the Moon and New York City,” then a couple of Cantopop numbers I’ve never heard before, each song reproduced perfectly to the point of being indistinguishable from the original. While I’m listening to the music, a Thai woman in her early twenties approaches me. As soon as she realizes I’m Thai, she gives up on the proposition, and we talk about Bangkok politics and the proposed extension to the Skytrain.
I must have been enjoying myself because more than two hours have passed. It’s about ten-thirty, and the bar has filled. There’s plenty of light groping going on, but it’s pretty tame compared to my mother’s bar; couples disappear up the stairs to the short-time hotels just the same, though. I also climb up the steps to street level, where I’m immediately surrounded by four uniformed cops and an inspector, also in full uniform with resplendent stars and a shiny peaked cap. At about six foot, he is unusually tall for a local Chinese.
“Passport,” the inspector says. I give it to him. He examines it, then jerks his chin toward a police van parked down the street. “I’m afraid I must ask you to accompany us to the police station,” he says.
Now, DFR, a tip from a pro: the first thing you do when apprehended by police in a capitalist democracy, where everyone is equal under the law, is prove to them that you possess high monetary value and social status, whether you do or not. So when he gives me back my passport, I make a point of opening my wallet as if I keep it there, and allow the black Amex to fall out. I was afraid he might not know what it is, but this is Hong Kong and he is Chinese. He has instantly adapted his manner. Now we are walking together to the police van as if we are chums, and he gets in the back with me.
“It’s a little thing, probably won’t take up too much time,” he explains, sitting on the opposite bench. “Just that some busybody gwaipaw British woman complained that you were impersonating a Hong Kong police officer. Of course, she was just trying to be important and collect gossip at the same time. You weren’t, were you?”
“Of course not. If it’s that HiSo woman in the Jaguar you’re talking about, all I said was that I was a police officer, then when she asked more, I told her I was based in Bangkok.”
“Good,” he nods, “very good. Even if you’re lying your head off, which you probably are, there’s no way I can challenge that line of defense.” He removes his hat and puts a hand on his spiky black hair, as if he enjoys the feeling of bounce. (I understand: there is something irresistible about the feel of spiky Asian hair when it’s short. Whenever one of my mother’s girls goes that way, we like to bounce our hands up and down on it; it has the feel of a soft broom.) The van trundles toward a set of lights. “Anyway, I don’t really care if you were impersonating a police officer, I’m more interested in what you were doing with the Yip twins. So how about we do a deal? I’ll pretend to believe you are not here on police business, and you’ll pretend to believe I have a right to interrogate you about the Yips.”
“That’s what I call policing,” I say. • •
At the station Inspector Chan does not lead me to the cells or the interrogation rooms, although they all look pretty comfortable compared to District 8, but straight to his office. (Such luxury: air-conditioned to exactly twenty-four Celsius, and he has his own door that he shares with no one. That’s a tiger economy for you.) Chan hangs his hat on a hook so he can press a hand up and down on his spikes while he sits in his executive chair, opens his top drawer to fiddle with something, and stares at me. “You told the gwaipaw you were investigating a murder,” he says.
“No, I didn’t. I told her I was from the murder squad.”
“So you’re from the murder squad investigating tax evasion? Is that how Thai law works?”
“We already agreed I wasn’t investigating anything.” I stand up. “Where’s your voice recorder? In your top drawer, by any chance?”
He smiles, takes out a digital voice recorder from a drawer, and lays it on his desk. “Just testing. Turn it off yourself so you feel comfortable.”
I look at it for a moment as I sit down again. I say in a loud voice, “I am here in Hong Kong purely for private interest and have no professional purpose to pursue during my stay in the SAR of the People’s Republic of China,” then switch it off and give it back to him.
Now he’s laughing. “Streetwise, that’s for sure. Kind of third-world, though. You remind me of the sort of cops we had here under the British. They were so corrupt, everyone spent their entire working lives covering their backs. Had to-it was what the job was all about.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s all about guanxi — a different ballgame altogether.”
I’m about to ask what guanxi is, when he stands abruptly and starts to pace with his hands in his pockets. “I’ll be straight. I run the cops up on the peak, and one of my most important assignments is to keep an eye on the Yips.”
“They are trouble?”
“They’re gifted maniacs. Eccentrics of the old school, the kind of Chinese women the West doesn’t yet know much about. Ha! A lot of gweilo have this fantasy our women are all submissive slaves who would still have their feet bound if not for Western enlightenment. Anyone who thinks that way should meet the Yips.”
“Tell me.”
“No. You first.”
It may not seem it, DFR, but I’m in a tricky spot. Chan could easily find some excuse for locking me up and delaying my departure if I don’t play his game, but on the other hand it has occurred to me that everything I’ve done that involved the Yip sisters has been either illegal or highly eccentric. I’m playing for time when I say, “They like to gamble.”
Chan stops pacing and stares at me. “You don’t say.”
“I mean, they’ll gamble for astronomical stakes on anything, like a fly crawling up a window.”
“So would ninety percent of the population of this city. How d’you think we got so good at capitalism?” He is watching me with a slightly altered attitude. “They didn’t invite you to Monte Carlo by any chance?”
“Monte Carlo?”
“From your body language I think they did.”
“Did they invite you?”
“Yes, but unlike you, I didn’t go. You went, didn’t you?”
I’m fighting a blush. “It was part of an ongoing investigation I’m not at liberty to talk about.”
He extends an arm in order to point a finger directly at me and says, “Ha! You did. You went. Ha, ha, you fell for it. Now you’re pissed that you were not the only one. Ha, ha. They corrupted you in a heartbeat, ha, ha. Poor little Thai cop lives in a hovel and drives a clapped-out Toyota if he drives at all, dazzled by money and glamour-I’m assuming that black Amex is just on loan-from a wealthy superior perhaps who has a vested interest in the case? Now the Yips have you in the palms of their hands. Ha, ha. ”
This guy sure knows how to irritate. I’ve never used soft-obnoxious as an interrogation technique myself, although I’ve heard of it. Just to spite him, I refuse to ask how many other men the Twins have taken to Monte Carlo over the years.
“D’you want to know how many other men have fallen for that?”
“No.”
“Liar. I’ll tell you. I keep records. You are the last of at least five we know about.”
“Were all the others Hong Kong cops?”
He frowns and sits in his chair, puts his feet up on the desk. “No.”
“But some were?”
“One.”
“Did he live in a hovel and drive a Toyota?”
Chan stares at me. I know what the stare means because I’ve used it so many times myself. It means that if I don’t tell him something useful, or at least a piece of gossip worth repeating, he’ll hold me for the night out of pure spite. “I’m on a special assignment,” I confess.
The phrase, hackneyed and overused though it is, seems to strike a chord in Chan. He raises his brows. “About time. That’s what I’ve been trying to get at since we picked you up.”
“But I mean, it’s a Thai special assignment.”
“Meaning? Don’t tell me, let me guess. Meaning illegal, not at all the sort of thing cops do, but something you have to do to lick the ass of your superior?” He waves a hand. “We study Thai police as an example of how not to do things. Now I’ve met you, I know why.”
I have to make a choice. On the one hand, I really want to get back to Bangkok; on the other, if I tell all, I risk getting snuffed by Vikorn. But I really want to get back to Bangkok. “It’s to do with organ trafficking,” I say.
To my surprise, Chan looks suddenly bored. “Really?”
“You know that’s what they do?”
“Sure, but they don’t do it in Hong Kong.” He has suddenly and totally lost interest-or is he faking? “How far have you got?”
“Nowhere yet-I’m at the beginning.”
“That’s why you’re here? Nothing else? No other dimensions to your investigation?”
“What ‘other dimensions’ could there be?”
“Not telling you.” Chan bites his thumbnail for a while. “D’you gamble?”
“Not at all.”
“Really? They say Thais are worse than Chinese. The milliondollar blackjack tables at Las Vegas are dominated by your people these days.”
“The Thais who play at Vegas all have Chinese blood. They’re Chiu Chow, from Swatow. They run the economy.”
Chan assesses me with his eyes. “And you? You’re half gweilo? A half-caste product of a GI on R amp;R from Vietnam and a Thai peasant?”
“The GI was a peasant too, from the Midwest. I have pure blood.”
The volatile Chan seems to have decided he likes me for saying that. As an interrogator myself, I can see he has made a decision of some sort. He has changed his tone and manner by about a hundred and eighty degrees and speaks almost gently when he nods at the map on his wall. It is of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, the New Territories, and the various islands that make up the Hong Kong SAR. Now he stands to walk up to it and points at a giant island at least twice the size of Hong Kong.
“Lantao Island. Heard of it?”
“Isn’t that where the airport is located?”
“Correct. It’s where you landed. Personally, I find it mysterious the way Lantao Island has become important all over again, thanks to the airport.”
“Why, what was it important for before?”
“Opium storage. There were pontoons used as go-downs at all the western beaches-it’s closest to Macao and the Pearl River. They had square miles of pontoons where opium was stored. You see?”
“Not really.”
He is pointing at the jagged coastline of the island and showing how close it is to the mouth of the Pearl River. “The ships from India-Patna was the capital of opium-would unload onto the rafts, so smaller riverboats could take the product up into the heart of Canton.”
I nod politely while scratching my jaw. Chan just doesn’t look like the kind to carry resentment for the colonial debt. Nor does any other Hong Kong Chinese I’ve ever met; in this former colony, at least, the symbiosis between races was deeply satisfying to both. The locals made even more dough out of Hong Kong than the colonizing Brits, from opium to coffins: most of the caskets used during the Vietnam War were made in Hong Kong.
“Of course, like everything else in history, different generations have different interpretations. When I first heard about how grotesque the British narco empire was, I couldn’t believe it. Then, soon after I made inspector, a very gifted Chinese academic from the mainland enlightened me.”
The inspector is watching me closely, like a man dropping hints incomprehensible to the recipient. I have not a clue where he is going. To be polite I say, “What did this historian tell you?”
Chan screws up his eyes in a kind of concentration. “Oh, it wasn’t that he was interested in the human suffering angle. He wasn’t a historian. He was an economist.”
He is waiting to see how I react, so I say, “An economist?”
“Yes. He said think about it.”
“Think about what?”
“Think about why the British, who were quite fanatical Christians in those days, should have blackened their names and their souls for all time by becoming the biggest narcotics traffickers in the history of the world.”
“So, what was the answer?”
Chan loses interest in the map and concentrates on my face. “Suppose, in the logic of empire, they had no choice? Suppose that in their time-we’re talking about the early nineteenth century-there was just enough wealth and employment in China for, say, ten percent of the population. And most of the rest of the world, even working-class England, was in the same boat. The British were almost as addicted as the Chinese. You see, opium was even cheaper than gin. According to this economist, even the great Wilberforce, whom the Brits like to cite as the honorable Englishman who got slavery abolished, he too was an opium addict.” He pauses. “Looked at from that point of view, the opium trade was not so bad. It was a way of keeping twenty million unemployed men docile. As soon as opium was suppressed, China tore itself apart in revolution-and the U.K. lost its empire.”
“A modern Chinese economist told you that?”
“Yes, but only by way of illustration. After all, economists are there to forecast the future. See, his punch line was: the world economy has positioned itself in such a way that almost everyone is going to be unemployed by the middle of this century. The American sucker-consumer is now bankrupt for the next fifty years, and there’s no way Asians generally are going to waste their money en masse on toys like iPods-hoarding is hardwired in every head east of Suez. Americans are strange people. They allow themselves to be bled white by gangsters for generation after generation and call it freedom. But that blissful ignorance may be in its endgame. The consumer economy is already dead-what we’re experiencing right now is its wake. What do you think governments are going to use to keep everyone docile when the shit finally hits the fan?”
“Surely not opium?”
“No. Not opium. Opium is an ugly way of dying. How about cannabis? The Spanish used it in Spanish Morocco to keep the Riff tribesmen sedated. The best thing about it: young men delude themselves into believing they’re already war heroes. They don’t need to kill anyone.” He smiles. “When this economist came here and told a select group of cadres that the PRC was thinking of legalizing it within the next decade, everyone left the room to make calls to Beijing, to get in on the ground floor with one of the consortiums. Imagine the value of a license that permits you to sell marijuana to a significant portion of two billion people. Salivation in floods from Shanghai to Lombard Street.” He pauses. “Of course, there will be other consequences of extreme poverty, worldwide.”
It must be clear from my posture and my expression that I have no idea what he’s talking about. He makes a decision, smiles at the same time as he loses interest in me except perhaps as a distant colleague to whom he should show hospitality. He puts an arm around me as he leads me out of the station. “If you stay one more night, I can get you invited to a box in Happy Valley on the finish line for the Wednesday-night races.”
“Would that involve gambling, by any chance?”
We are in the police parking lot outside the station. He talks to a sergeant who seems to be running the cars. Chan makes a point of opening the back door of the cop car and says, “Remember, no one’s elected in Beijing. That means they have time to plan ahead. They have teams looking fifty, even a hundred years into the future. They have detailed economic and social models. And they don’t have democracy. They know what’s coming next.”
“Like what?”
“Like organs for sale on eBay.”
“Okay.”
“Bear that in mind next time you talk to the Yips.”
“Okay.”
“And tell me every damned thing you learn.”
“Okay.”
“Or forget about entering Hong Kong, or China, ever again.”
“Okay.”
Now my Chinese colleague makes an Elizabethan bow: “ ‘Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ ” He checks my incredulous expression. “See, Hong Kong was still a crown colony when I went to school. The Brits saw their culture as something to ram down the throats of wogs, chinks, and nignogs in far-flung colonies, so they could pretend to be improving instead of exploiting. Unselfishly, they kept very little of it for themselves. I know Shakespeare better than any Brit I ever met.”
Now I’m in a Hong Kong police car racing to the airport. Once I’m in the terminal, I make a beeline for the computers that give free Internet access so long as you don’t take more than fifteen minutes. It’s takes less than one to access Wikipedia: Guanxi describes the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence, and is a central idea in Chinese society. In Western media, the pinyin romanization of this Chinese word is becoming more widely used instead of the two common translations-“connections” and “relationships”-as neither of those terms sufficiently reflects the wide cultural implications that guanxi describes. Closely related concepts include that of ganqing, a measure which reflects the depth of feeling within an interpersonal relationship; renqing, the moral obligation to maintain the relationship; and the idea of “face,” meaning social status, propriety, prestige, or more realistically a combination of all three… As articulated in the sociological works of leading Chinese academic Fei Xiaotong, the Chinese-in contrast to other societies-tend to see social relations in terms of networks rather than boxes. Hence, people are perceived as being “near” or “far” rather than “in” or “out.”
I have over an hour to wait for my flight, so I find a seat and close my eyes to try to work out what it is that’s bothering me about the Filipina maid Maria. Something I left out, some subtle semaphore. I put the problem together with Chan’s insults about Thai poverty, and I see where I went wrong. I call her, and she answers on the third ring.
“Maria, I hope this is not too late.”
“Oh, no, sir. I am just in a taxi on my way home, so we can talk.”
“Maria, would you trust me to send you a thousand Hong Kong dollars by Western Union? I have to apologize, you must have thought me very mean.”
“Oh, no, sir. That’s okay, sir. We have a very high cost of living in Hong Kong, that is all.”
“Where d’you want the money sent?”
“To my mother in Oriental Mindoro, sir, care of the post office in our village. I think it better if I SMS on this number.”
“Okay, I promise to send it tomorrow. Now, please, regarding the Twins, there’s something you left out, right? Why is there such hostility between them? Why do they want to kill each other? They are beautiful, healthy, HiSo, rich, have the very best of everything. It seems unnatural.”
“Yes, sir, unnatural is certainly the word that comes to mind, sir. So far as I am aware, there are three schools of thought, sir.”
“Okay.”
“The first posits exposure to the nefarious practices of their grandfather, who enjoyed having rivals tortured to death in front of him. There are two strands to this hypothesis, the first being that the girls themselves witnessed such atrocities, the other, more subtly, suggesting that they inherited the old man’s sadistic gene.”
“That’s school one?”
“Yes, sir. The second school, inevitably perhaps in today’s fallen world, posits a rape/seduction by the father, who was a known pedophile.”
“Ah! And the third?”
“The third school, sir, takes this theme and adapts it to all that is known about them, their family, and the relationship with the father.”
“Yes?”
“According to the third school, sir, they quite callously calculated in their early teens that it would be to their advantage to seduce their father themselves. I think the leverage that would have accrued from such a strategy is obvious.”
“Wow! So, Maria, which school do you bat for?”
“All three, sir.”
I pause. “All three?”
“Yes, sir. Of course, I am merely floating a hypothesis, but it seems to me to be consistent with the facts that they did indeed inherit the grandfather’s hunger for absolute power at any cost, plus a dastardly capacity to enjoy the sufferings of others. I think they also seduced their father, and that the father immediately became addicted to their attentions. Naturally, after that moment they held the balance of power in the family and could get away with literally anything. I think they blackmailed him for every indulgence they could dream up while he was alive. At the same time the guilt he experienced as a direct consequence of his fatal weakness drove him to drink. I think that also was a part of the diabolical strategy they had hit upon.”
“Murder by forcing the victim into a slow suicide by alcohol?”
“Exactly that, sir. On the other hand, I do believe the daughterly instinct remained present in a perverse and twisted way. They loved their father exactly for his weakness and indulgence, and each blames the other for his ugly death.”
I let a few beats pass. An irrelevant but compelling question has floated into my head and will not go away. “Maria, if you don’t mind my asking-what level of education do you have?”
“I have a master’s in private and public international law, sir, obtained from one of our distant learning institutions. It is the enduring regret of my life that I lack the wherewithal to set myself up in practice, but it is not for me to question the ways of the Lord.”
“Ah! I’m sorry. I’m sure you’d make a fantastic lawyer.”
“Thank you, sir. That is most kind.”
“Suppose I send an extra thousand Hong Kong. You have a punch line worth a thousand bucks, perhaps?”
She coughs. “They are cannibals, sir, and they use embalmed human penises, rendered tumescent by means of some kind of stiffening agent, as dildos.”
I gulp. “Ah, what was that, Maria?”
“I think you heard me, sir, and I will not repeat it. Please ensure you keep your side of our contract. Good night, sir.”
I close the phone, then it whooshes: an SMS from Maria with her account details.
I fell asleep on the plane and now we’re just coming in to land. The lethargy of total disorientation makes me drag my steps all the way to immigration, then customs, where I snarled and flashed my cop’s ID, because they look as if they’re about to search me. In the cab on the way home, I loll in the backseat, where the latest radio reports of the Sukhumvit Rapist’s adventures penetrate my dormant brain: a young woman’s sobs and gulps fill the airways; at first they are indecipherable, only slowly the meaning of her words dawns on me: “No, he didn’t rape me… Yes, I think he was going to but a noise disturbed him… No, I don’t have any physical injuries… Why am I so distraught??? Because I was just this hour trapped in a dark alley by a seven-foot monster that looked like half-man half-monkey and it’s scared the living shit out of me, idiot.”