“Welcome to the Kingdom of Hu,” Sun Bin says. He is short, slim, and wiry, with a thin face molded by mean streets.
I already know that Hu is the local name for Shanghai because I forgot to bring anything to read for the flight from Bangkok, so I was stuck with the in-flight magazine. That’s about the limit of my knowledge, though. The airport is hypermodern, shiny and high tech, and so is the train into town. Then things start to slow down somewhat. I’ve never seen so many people crammed into the same space. They are everywhere, like a moving jungle where you have to negotiate your way around forests of Homo sapiens and avoid all bottlenecks. Sun Bin is a skilled guide, though, and demonstrates unusual talent for overtaking on bends and exploiting almost invisible openings in great walls of humans.
At the morgue he shows me three cadavers that have been mutilated in exactly the same way as the three on Vulture Peak. He watches closely as I become fascinated by exactly how accurately the atrocities have been replicated, down to the absence of faces and eyes. We exchange glances. I nod. He nods back.
Now we are in a cab on our way to some other part of Sun Bin’s precinct. Now we are entering a high-end apartment building with a lobby to beat the Ritz, uniformed security, marble everywhere. Sun Bin flaps his wallet at the receptionist, who sees his police badge and nods. On the thirty-third floor we exit the lift and stride down a corridor until we come to a yellow tape stretched between two traffic cones. Sun Bin takes out a key, and we enter the apartment.
It is vast and must boast about six bedrooms. The floor-to-ceiling windows reveal a modern city like no other. In the distant days of aristocratic art, it was said that architecture is frozen music; I guess what I’m looking at is a pretty good three-dimensional representation of iTunes, with the great rap phallus of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower thrusting into the skyline, the Bolshoi-ish Exhibition Center, the orphic HSBC building, and the pop-songy Sassoon House in a riot of eclecticism. Sun Bin takes me into the master bedroom, where a tall figure in a floral tourist shirt and smart casual slacks is waiting, hands in pockets.
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” Chan says.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I counter.
He jerks his chin at the king-size bed upon which three life-size paper cutouts have been placed, to represent where and how the bodies were found. Chan and Sun Bin give me a couple of minutes to take it all in, then raise their eyes and wrinkle their brows.
“It’s a copycat triple homicide, with Asian attention to detail,” I advise.
“Laid out in exactly the same way as the bodies in Phuket?” Chan says.
“Exactly the same way.”
“Same positions on the bed-I mean longitudinally, with heads pointing to the wall?”
“The same.”
“And the bodies at the morgue?”
“In my opinion the injuries are identical to those suffered by the victims on Vulture Peak.”
“In your honorable and expert opinion, would you say they were murdered by the same professional team?”
“Certainly.”
Chan and Sun Bin exchange glances and let a couple of beats pass. “Want to bet on it?”
The two Chinese cops are looking at me with hardened expressions. Even Sun Bin, who has been the very avatar of Oriental hospitality, seems to have succumbed to a demon more powerful than himself.
“Maybe not,” I say, mentally backing away from those two.
“I’m offering six to one these killings were carried out by a totally different team. Put in a thousand dollars, you get six thousand back plus your original bet. If you’re so sure it’s the same team,” Sun Bin says.
“He wants me to open an escrow account in Hong Kong, so punters feel safe betting with him,” Chan says. “He’s already got half his precinct signed up.”
“Why would you be so sure it’s a different team that did it?”
Chan says something to Sun Bin, which I think must be standard Putonghua, because it doesn’t sound like the Shanghainese dialect I’ve been hearing since I arrived. Sun Bin looks at me and smiles sheepishly. “I must humbly beg your pardon. The inspector here has reminded me that it is contrary to Confucian wisdom to take advantage of strangers. Naturally, we of the mainland need to take lessons from our Hong Kong brothers and sisters in such matters.”
I have no idea if Sun Bin is serious or exercising a local form of sarcasm. Chan doesn’t seem to know either and Sun Bin is unusually inscrutable for a Chinese. “You mean there are reasons for thinking this is some kind of revenge conspiracy killing for the murders on Vulture Peak?” I ask.
Now they are both staring at me. “In China, conspiracy theories are always well founded,” Sun Bin advises with a smile.
I take a couple of steps back so that the two of them are silhouetted against the mad city on the other side of the window. I think I’m beginning to understand what are sometimes referred to as the “deeper” layers of the case.
“Would it be consistent with the new Confucianism to tell this humble stranger exactly what you two honorable forensic geniuses think is going on here?”
Both nod independently. “Come into the kitchen,” Sun Bin says.
The kitchen is a fashion statement in stainless steel. It is also starkly empty except for a tablet laptop, manufactured by LG, on the stainless-steel island. The computer is plugged into a socket in the center of the island. The three of us pull up the stools that go with the island and watch Sun Bin jog the mouse and bring the machine to life. My eyes are swamped by a swarm of Chinese characters I cannot decipher. It’s amazing to me how quickly Sun Bin can manipulate the 47,035 characters of his alphabet; it seems superhuman. Now we are looking at a split screen with a graph on one side and what looks like an address book on the other.
Chan and Sun Bin both stare at me as if I’m supposed to experience revelation.
“Start with the address book,” I say. “If that’s what it is.”
“It’s a list of suspects, except they are not people.”
“So what do you have for suspects if not people?”
“Government departments, especially the uniformed services, large private enterprises, and some groups that are consortia in all but name but have no legal status.”
“But there seem to be thousands of them.”
Sun Bin nods. “That is correct. There are thousands and thousands of them. With two billion of us, everything is multiplied. It’s logical, isn’t it? In a country like America, with only three hundred million, you have-say-half a dozen suspects at the beginning of an inquiry. So we generally start with a hundred times that number. The increase is exponential.”
“He’s trying to impress you,” Chan says. “He knows who did it, don’t you, Sun Bin?”
“I’m working with a short list of ten,” Sun Bin says.
Chan sighs. “He does everything by the book. Including the gambling. He has no emotional intelligence at all. Do you, Sun Bin?”
“None at all,” he confesses. “When I was at school, everything was about industrial logic. Now when I start hearing about ‘emotional intelligence’ from foreigners like you, it makes me feel stupid.”
“See what we have to contend with?” Chan says. “I live in Hong Kong, China, but to him I’m a foreigner. Sun Bin thinks Shanghai is sooo special, don’t you, Sun Bin?”
“Shanghai is the eye of the storm called modernism,” Sun Bin says.
Chan groans. “I’ve said it a hundred times. The Yips didn’t do the Phuket job, and they didn’t do this one either. Just because I know that intuitively, and can’t prove it, doesn’t mean I’m not right.”
“You have inherited from the British a tendency to overuse the word I. At the time of Chairman Mao, it would have been said that you suffer from bourgeois self-centeredness,” Sun Bin says.
“It would have been said that I was a Capitalist Running Dog, and they would have shot me. But I think the West won that side of the class war.”
“But your addiction to either/or strikes me as quite American monopolar, even British colonial,” Sun Bin says. “It lacks a sense of the plurality of the modern world.”
My eyes are flitting from one to the other, then to the computer and back again; at the same time I begin to see the China connection as an impenetrable wall. It’s like being told that the answer to your question is to be found in the Library of Congress without anyone specifying the department, never mind the full reference.
“You mean there could be a third party?” I say.
“Third, fourth, fifth, sixth.”
“Are there really so many skilled in the art of organ removal?”
Sun Bin seems embarrassed and looks away. Chan stares at me with his lips twisted. I have a feeling that I’ve transgressed some unwritten rule of local etiquette. Into the silence Chan says, “Hey, let’s take a walk down Nanjing Road.”
Sun Bin seems to have fallen into depression and says he won’t come. Chan grabs a cab at the ground floor of the apartment building, and within seconds we are stuck in a jam. Chan tells the driver it’s worth double the usual fare, which inspires the driver to take a few shortcuts. In the middle of the traffic jam, I ask why Sun Bin’s mood suddenly changed.
“Everyone has mood swings,” the inspector says, looking defensive.
“Okay.”
Chan sighs. “He’s shy of you because at least two of the suspect consortia are police. One of them is run by Sun Bin’s boss. He may have to give up on the case.”
“But if the Yips didn’t do these three in Shanghai, what was the point of dragging me over here?”
“Two reasons. The main one is I talked him into it. But he chickened out.”
“Chickened out of what?”
“My idea was that he would tell you everything. He wasn’t supposed to just show you three corpses at the morgue. He was supposed to show you more than a dozen others-logistically, not all of them could have had their organs removed by the Yips. Nor could any one single agency be responsible.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m explaining what Sun Bin was supposed to explain. In every major Chinese city today, right this minute, the recently dead are having their organs removed by a skilled team under the protection of one consortium or another.”
I let a couple of beats pass, unable to process this revelation. “And the other reason-there was some other reason why Sun Bin agreed to invite me?”
“He’s desperate to go to Bangkok to get laid. It’s tough in China at the moment, unless you’re rich. Sure, there are women who will sleep with you, but it’s a battleground-like sleeping with your enemy. He yearns for the sweet pussy of your medieval culture.”
Chan is indulging in one of his smirks. I think I’ve begun to read him better. “You’re lying, just to make some politically incorrect point.”
The smirk broadens. “Of course Sun Bin wants to go to Bangkok to get laid, but that’s not the only reason for getting to know you.”
“So?”
“You haven’t asked the only question worth asking.”
“Which is?”
“All these human organs looking for a body, and all these terminally ill patients looking for an organ-where is the surgery done?”
I shrug. “Here in China?”
He nods. “Sure, some of it is, at the lower end of the market, but what about the Yips? They don’t have a base on the mainland, probably wouldn’t want one-the government is too capricious, it could change its mind about them anytime and clap them in jail. Nor can they afford to expose their upmarket Western clients to some makeshift surgery in a garage that might be raided at any time by a rival consortium-or even by the police on a legitimate law enforcement exercise.”
“What are you saying? The Yips have a fully equipped surgery somewhere overseas, which they rent out to rival groups when they’re not using it themselves?”
Chan smiles.
Now we are shuffling along Nanjing Road amid a great herd of humans, the slow pace set by the law of density. Inspector Chan ostentatiously takes out a small pillbox and pops something into his mouth. I guess there must be a message here, something he wants me to know, or he wouldn’t take his medication so openly. I raise my eyebrows in case he is waiting for a prompt.
“Lithium,” he says. “But don’t tell anyone, or I’ll be forced to deny it and sue you for defamation.”
“You’re bipolar, and you haven’t told your superior officer?”
He throws me a glance, then jerks his chin at the solid block of people moving slowly forward in front of us, each one of them in a tearing hurry that they are forced to repress, like snails fleeing a fire. “Can you believe it? I live in Hong Kong, but I can’t take crowds like this. I just can’t.”
I myself have felt the odd jolt of fear at being trapped on all sides by a slow-moving human tsunami, which might lift you up and dump you just about anywhere.
“I’m going to have to dive in here,” Chan says.
He’s referring to a Starbucks right on Nanjing Road. Inside, it seems almost as crowded as the street, but the Chinese patrons prefer to stand. Chan and I grab a spare couch; then I go to order two lattes, trying to separate merged flesh without being rude. Now I’m negotiating the press of customers with the tray and two lattes, catching sight of Chan from time to time between bodies; he has turned gray and looks awful. When I reach the couch again and sit next to him, he jerks a chin at the crowds on the other side of the window. I look on the solid block of people and remember how humid it is out there; the thought of going out into that urban “war of all against all” is daunting.
“I don’t know if I’m bipolar or if it’s something worse,” the inspector admits. “Schizoaffective disorder and cyclic major depression are also possibilities. The shrink said he wasn’t sure, but since lithium is the standard medication for all three, I may as well take it-or go to some expensive doctor who will end up prescribing the same thing after a lot of tests that would bankrupt me. No one gets cured of mental illness anymore. You are expected to make the drug companies richer by staying sick. Naturally, a citizen should feel privileged to be contributing to capitalism in however small a way.” He sips his latte. “Personally, I think I’m just lonely.”
“You don’t have a partner?”
“Me? I’m too confused. Look, I grew up in a genuinely modern city, where nobody even pretends to know who they are. I could be gay. I’ve thought about it. It’s true that I’m sexually aroused by young naked women, but on the other hand I can never convince myself that my sperm would be safe with them. Next thing you know she’s had your baby, never wants to see you again, but demands child support for the next twenty years as an alternative for having you indicted for rape. At least with a man you’re safe from that gambit.” He shakes his head. “Cops know too much.”
I freeze with the latte halfway to my lips because of the way he’s looking at me. “You can’t be serious?” I say.
“Why not? How d’you know it wouldn’t work? Your wife wouldn’t have to find out.”
“You are serious?”
He shifts his gaze. “Just speculating. What d’you think of Sun Bin?”
“Ah, in what way? His sexual attraction, professionalism, mental health-my whole image of a modern cop has expanded since I met you.”
“Yeah, you’re kind of old-fashioned, even quaint. He’s a homophobe. That’s another reason why he’s acting funny around you. He’s not sure if you and I do it together or not, and if we do, would we want him to join in a threesome-that kind of thing. He thinks anyone from Hong Kong is fey and likely queer.”
“Really?”
Chan jerks a chin at the window. “Look at that, will you? How can anyone take murder detection seriously, when the only rational reaction is to shoot half of them just to clear the street?” He frowns. “This is the way your head goes, sooner or later. It has to. We weren’t designed for this.” He sighs. “So, you really want to talk about the case?”
“Yes.”
“What d’you want to know?”
“Everything you know.”
“What will you do for it?”
“Nothing.”
He grins. “Just testing. So, let’s start with the Yips. Their grandfather was one of the biggest gangsters in Shanghai before the revolution. He got out of opium and into heavy armaments when he saw the war with Japan was inevitable. He didn’t know a thing about armaments, just made a factory owner an offer he couldn’t refuse and made himself gloriously rich. When he saw Mao was about to win the civil war in forty-nine, he put the whole damned factory on a ship and set up shop again in Hong Kong. Naturally, he made sure he brought the factory’s general manager with him, along with the most skilled workers. But he kept up his connections to the Shanghai underworld, which quickly got itself party cards.
“His son, his only child, was sent to one of those British schools for colonial quislings, which turned him into a pedophile-a total no-no as far as the old man was concerned. So the son takes to drink after he’s managed with great effort and years of trying to sire twin daughters, who are allowed to do what they like from the age of about zero. They’re intellectually very gifted, but wild and compulsive gamblers, and the first big gamble of their lives-the big win that brings them all they dream of at that time-is to seduce their father when they are about thirteen years old.
“Naturally, the poor creep is instantly addicted to their little game-at the same time loathing himself from the bottom of his heart. They quickly drive him deeper into drink-and death. They teach anatomy after graduation for about a minute, then get restless and decide to use their grandfather’s connections. Some of the mob from that time are still alive. Some are quite senior in the party. One is a party cadre in Correctional Services.” Chan looks at me, waiting for comment.
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. You’re stuck in the parochialism of a medieval culture. I’m trying to teach you third-millennium social reality here. Today everyone has to have an edge-even beautiful, highly educated women from the upper strata of Hong Kong society. And for those two that edge was always going to be crime.” He stares at the street and adds in a sad tone: “Chinese are connoisseurs of power-we’ve been victims of it for five thousand years.”
“You’re not going to tell me these cases are really all about rival consortia with the best guanxi?”
“Those consortia have created identities. Those identities are at war-identities usually are. Any Chinese would understand that. Of course, what the war is really about… I guess you need to be not only Chinese but mainland as well. Shanghainese may be the only ones properly wired for this case. There are theories by Chinese academics to the effect that psychologically we Chinese are never far from the Warring States period, when the country was in total anarchy.” He sips his latte.
“How exactly do the Yips get away with it?”
“I told you,” Chan says. “They’re with the Ministry of Correctional Services. You see, good doctors are a scarcity in China-no way they want to waste them on the dead. A reasonably gifted person with good digital coordination can be trained to remove organs without damaging them in about a week. When two pure-blood Chinese girls with degrees in anatomy turned up, boasting connections with high-level party cadres, were they going to say no?”
“No to what?”
“A couple of freelancers who preferred to do their own organ removal in order to maintain quality control for their gweilo — sorry, farang — clients.”
I watch a local make her way to the counter, to see how it should be done. She uses her head as a wedge to break apart clumps of humans-none too gently as far as I can tell. “You mean they saw a business opportunity in the resale value of organs of executed felons, constructed a five-year plan, then borrowed money to set up shop, purchase equipment, and develop contacts-generally followed the capitalist blueprint for wealth down to the last detail?”
“Exactly right,” Chan says. “Except, as usual, you have a bourgeois medieval running dog tendency to miss the macro point.” He shakes his head at the crowds.
I think about his hidden meaning. “You mean it wasn’t-isn’t-just executed felons whose organs the Yips find irresistible? It’s the freshly dead in general?”
“Do you think it is only the legally condemned that national and regional governments execute?”
I have not stopped staring at the crowds. Now I gulp and nod. The full ambit of the Yips’ empire has begun to dawn. “Regional governments as well? Political rivals? Self-financing executions by a crack two-girl team?”
“Even Mao couldn’t run China without allies. For allies, read ‘regional warlords.’ If Beijing is making money out of executed criminals, d’you think the regional bosses restrain themselves?”
I shrug.
“And have you thought what a perfect alibi a twin can generate-assuming nobody knows you’re a twin? How intimidating that might be to an eyewitness, to hear respectable, independent witnesses from another hemisphere say, ‘Yes, I definitely saw her in Paris or New York or San Francisco on that day when such and such an atrocity was committed in Beijing, or Shenzen.’ ”
“They made themselves irresistible to the wet department of every national and local government ministry?”
“Now you’re getting close.”
Chan seems to be silently urging me to work out the rest. The clue, again, comes from the crowds, who now look twice as desperate as before. “There are business rivals?”
“Worse. Take it a little further. Bear in mind, the Yips have been doing what they do best for almost a decade. They know how to turn ‘I win, you lose’ into win-win.”
“You don’t mean… a whole profession of competitive organ extractors using the Yips’ business model, cutting corners and cutting prices, but needing to pay off the Yips for-expertise, foreign contacts, offshore surgeries?”
“Correct.”
“All of them contractors to national and local government?”
“Not exclusively, but it’s a good way to start, the way a lot of lawyers start their professional lives working for government prosecution departments, before they go private.”
“And by selling the organs, of course-”
“You make your victim pay for his own assassination. The Yips had to stop charging for nonjudicial killings, which were thrown in as a loss leader.”
“Because of the competition?”
“You got it.”
“But they stayed way ahead of the game because of their superior access to Western markets, their perfect upper-class English and other linguistic skills, their contacts in high society?”
Chan looks toward the sidewalk, which is invisible due to the number of people on it. “But with a whole army of consortia breathing down their necks. Look how good Sun Bin’s English is, and he’s never had a native teacher, or even a lesson. Learned it all from books and television. It’s despair that creates genius.”
“Geniuses like the Yips?”
“Correct. But none of it stacks up unless you posit something special the Yips have to offer-something that makes them attractive to their competitors.”
“The luxury ‘offshore’ clinic?”
“Right.”
“So nobody really knows who removed the organs from those three on Vulture Peak?”
“I know who I think didn’t do it.”
“The Yips. What makes you so sure?”
“They took you to Monte Carlo. Suppose we speculate that somehow they heard about an atrocity that had occurred on Vulture Peak. The timing of the deaths is unknown-the bodies could have been lying there for days. What better witness to an alibi than the cop who would likely be investigating the case? That’s why I thought you were such a sucker. There’s also the added advantage of maybe being able to find out from you how the case stands from moment to moment. Expect more invitations to exotic jaunts.”
“So why did they need an alibi? No Thai cop knew anything about them.”
“Because they run Vulture Peak,” Chan says, watching me watching the crowd, which has now ground to a halt in front of the cafe, blocking the exit right up to the door itself. “They knew that if you were worth ten cents as a cop, you would find that out sooner or later. That banker, To/Wong, had guanxi with the top brass of the Ministry of Correctional Services. He was in the Yips’ own camp. On the other hand, anyone who wanted to set them up…”
“You mean they got word of the murders, but at that moment had no idea who did them? All they knew was that they would be suspects if anyone found out about their ownership of Vulture Peak?”
“It’s a theory that fits.”
“But they didn’t invite me to Dubai. Vikorn sent me there to meet Lilly Yip.”
“Exactly,” Chan says.
Throughout this conversation an intense frown has appeared and disappeared on Chan’s face. It is less than thirty minutes since he took the lithium, so I suppose the medication has not yet reached the bloodstream. I have a feeling that he is going to lose coherence any minute.
“Are you okay? You keep frowning.”
“I already told you I’m nuts. I’m frowning to stop myself talking. If I let go of my will for even a second, I’ll be babbling like a madman. You’ll start to hate me.” He gives me a look. “No wonder I can’t find a partner, huh?”
“Well, before you lose your mind, tell me something. How is it that these warring tribes from the most populous nation on earth are interested in my boss, Colonel Vikorn? Why would anyone in China care so much? Why him for governor?”
Chan stands. I think he is going to the bathroom to talk to himself until the lithium starts to work. “You really think they would stop at governor of Bangkok?” he says, and starts to push through the crowd to reach the bathroom.
I sit with our half-drunk lattes for five minutes, taking in his last words. Then ten. I suppose I should go to the bathroom to check on him, and in any other city I might have done, but here the effort of crossing the jam-packed room is daunting. After fifteen minutes a man in a black suit and white shirt with a thin black necktie emerges from the throng. I think he might be the manager, but I’m not sure. “Your friend needs help,” he says in English. He has enunciated the words perfectly, as if he consulted a talking dictionary before approaching me.
When I reach the bathroom, I hear a voice coming from one of the stalls. When I stand outside the stall, I can hear Chan talking to some invisible person with passionate intensity. He’s speaking in Cantonese interspersed with English phrases like top secret, damn and blast, I’ll blow your fucking head off, terribly sorry old boy. I knock. He forces himself to silence for at least a minute, then continues with his monologue. When the man in the black suit enters, I explain that the inspector has recently taken his medication, and he’ll be fine in ten minutes. He takes fifteen before he emerges. He reestablishes dignity by ignoring me, steps up to the trough, and begins to pee. I take the hint, leave the bathroom, and wait for him by the glass door at the entrance to the cafe.
While I’m waiting, I’m watching the crowd: everyone except me has adjusted to the reality out there: men, women, and children, all have mastered the art of cramped behavior. I think: a state that executes its own people, having presold their organs to the highest bidder-it’s like Moctezuma meets Margaret Thatcher. Or should we say that, thanks to the supreme power of the profit motive, state and antistate have become one? From Washington to New Delhi to Beijing we let gangsters bleed us white and the newspeak calls it freedom. Now that’s modern.
Finally Chan arrives, and we open the door to brave the people, the humidity, and the heat. He doesn’t speak until the crowd forces us to come to a halt twenty yards down the street. “We’re all damaged,” the inspector says, still gray from his internal ordeal. “That’s why we’re here.”
As soon as the plane lands in Bangkok, my phone bleeps (I grew tired of being whooshed and reverted to factory settings, in case you’re wondering DFR). It’s an SMS from Vikorn, so I take a cab straight to the station. I’m expecting to have to address the Colonel’s election committee, but when I arrive at his office, he’s alone. He is sitting behind his desk and jerks his chin at me to indicate that I should sit in the chair opposite. These and other clues, which I have absorbed with the instinct of a jungle animal in the half minute since I entered the room, tell me all I need to know about his state of mind. While capable of tyranny of the cruelest type, Vikorn learned long ago that the only way to survive at the top of the greasy pole is to make oneself into a humble, if strategic, listener, from time to time. With the Colonel this involves a bizarre form of role play wherein he stares at you with wide-eyed innocence, as if you were recounting the most important, fascinating, and informative crime story he has ever heard.
At the end of my narrative he even adds an Isaan word which might be the equivalent of wow, crikey, or jeez, depending on which dialect you use. Now he stands and prowls to the window to stare at the cooked-food stalls, while somewhere deep in the brainstem he carefully analyzes my report and begins to reshape the case. After about five minutes he returns to his seat, where he rocks back and forth for another five minutes. Now he says. “So, it’s already all over China, this industry? Apart from the three cadavers in the morgue at Shanghai, you saw no other hard evidence?”
“Not hard evidence as such. But that was a very upmarket condo-I mean, two little cops, only one of them local-in a multimillion-dollar condo in China; it looked liked the real thing. It looked serious. Why would they mislead me?”
He thinks about it and nods. “Hm. And the Shanghai cop, this Sun Bin. He seems honest?”
“Very. The kind of cop who martyrs himself for truth, sooner or later, whether he wants to or not. Couldn’t deceive to save his life. Like me.”
Vikorn ignores the jibe, if that’s what it was. He pats the top of his head, normally a positive sign. Now his eyes are twinkling. “And somehow the Yips are facilitators, all over the country. How does it work?”
“According to the Hong Kong cop, Inspector Chan, they purchase fresh cadavers for their farang clients and also make available premises for organ-transfer operations beyond Chinese jurisdiction, presumably for rich or influential Chinese who don’t trust their own medical system, while servicing their offshore clients on their own account.”
He nods. Frowns. Rocks. Now he stands to prowl to the window again, shaking his head. “It’s all a matter of timing,” he mutters to himself. Finally he looks me between the eyes. “There’s still something you’re missing at that house. There must be.”
“You want me to go down there again tomorrow?”
He shakes his head. “Things are moving too fast-and there’s the election only a week or so away. Go now. Do not call me. Anything you see or hear, you keep to yourself until you’re back in this office. No phone calls. Got it?”
“Do I at least have time to see my wife before I catch another plane?”
“No. Waiting is part of what wives do. Go see her when you get back-after you’ve reported to me.”