I booked a seat on the next plane and took a cab to Vulture Peak. I don’t know why I decided to climb up the iron stairs instead of having the driver take me to the front door: a hunch, I guess. Well, it was a bad hunch. The place is deserted, and I might just as well have taken the taxi all the way to the mansion. I spend a couple of minutes checking out the garage, which is cut out of the rock; access to the house is by a set of stairs that lead up to the deck. The garage is empty, not only of cars but of everything except a red fire extinguisher.
It’s a beautiful evening on suicide balcony. There are some boats far out with their navigation lights bobbing, and the moon is a little fatter; under the balcony there is a nice black void, from which slapping sounds emerge far below. If I had the guts, I would slip under the safety rail with my legs hanging over, close my eyes, and meditate on the relentless invitation to jump made by the slapping waves.
Well, I do have the guts. There’s that little hole that seems to open up in the area of the solar plexus when you slip under safety rails-I’m sure you know what I mean, DFR-and you wonder if maybe you really are crazy. Then comes the realization that it would be a mistake to fall asleep or forget you are sitting above a hundred-foot drop. Then, if you are a meditator, you remind yourself that you’re going to die one day anyway and it’s part of the path to experience that reality.
Sure enough, when I close my eyes I’m attacked by terror. It’s been a while since I did anything like this. I try again. Best to let the fear in gradually, take a good look at it, let the higher mind deal with it. Good. Now, what do I see? The clerk dead on the deck of his master’s boat, his blood splashed all over the teak, his head rolling. I slip back under the safety rail and pull on the handle of the big glass sliding door that leads to the vast lounge.
I’m tactile: I like to feel my way around before I turn lights on. Anyway, there’s enough moonlight to see the outlines of the pools and the furniture-and two shadows sneaking down the hall to the front door, opening it silently, sliding through like ghosts, and closing it again. I run, stumble, fall, crack my knee on the floor, and make for the front door in a running limp, and fumble with the handle. By the time I’m outside, they have disappeared. I didn’t hear or see a car.
Bad nerves cause me to fumble with my cell phone and my wallet where I keep the card with the heart. I listen to a recorded message in her soft tones. When I call the Chung King bar, I ask to speak to the mamasan, who says in a dry tone, “Om is not available.” It’s standard brothelspeak meaning The girl you want is with another client.
I turn around to face the house. From the driveway it looks as if it has only one story, because the land falls away on the ocean side. The design is so much the Thai temple style, it could almost be a temple. There’s no light pollution on the Peak-everything is washed in moonlight. It’s quiet too. It’s entirely possible that a couple with reasons to keep their relationship secret have taken to meeting up here. Perhaps they heard the house was empty most of the time, parked their car by the seashore, and climbed up the back way, entering through the sliding door, like me. I imagine the man talking the girl into it and her pretending not to know what they would do when they arrived in the great mansion; but it doesn’t fit. That was Om with her monster, or I’m a North Korean.
Before I return to the house, I walk to the end of the driveway, where it meets a one-lane road glistening with tarmac of the expensive kind that includes flecks of granite. Now I can make out the other two houses that are part of the development. They are both in darkness. I wonder who owns them and why they never seem to be inhabited. Back in the mansion I find a bank of switches near the front door. There seem to be dozens of them, and for five minutes I have fun illuminating the pools without the side lights, side lights without the pools, the balcony without the house. Then I find the switch that turns on the serious lights that the cleaning staff need. Now the whole place is bathed in white neon, every flaw and defect clearly visible. But there are not many flaws-the place was very well put together by serious money. In the main bedroom all signs of death have been cleaned up by the forensic team. The white sheet covers the gigantic bed without any sign of recent frolicking bodies. The same is true of the beds in the other bedrooms.
The maid’s room, though, at the far end of the house near the road, is a different matter: a small narrow bed with the sheets almost pulled off, a half-drunk can of beer, a glass with water and a smudge of lipstick. Odd, with so many grand bedrooms with grand beds to choose from, that a romantic couple should choose this little room-except that it’s as far away from the scene of the crime as it’s possible to be. And Thai girls are very superstitious. But in that case, why come to this house at all?
Proximity to sex and death has started a new continuum, which proves a relentless driver. I forget Vikorn and call a cab.
Down on the main street in Patong, business is booming. It seems a few more jumbos carrying a few more thousand tourists with an overabundance of single men have landed at Krung Thep in the past few days, with a sizable number of the passengers making straight for Phuket. The snake charmers are charming the snakes with added gusto, the katoeys are even more extravagantly made up, and halfway down the street one of the larger bars has set up a Muay Thai boxing ring where two battered fighters are slugging it out-or pretending to: no need to throw or take any serious kicks for a bunch of foreigners who don’t understand what they’re looking at.
In the Chung King I have to squeeze between girls and clients to reach the bar. I don’t hold out any hope that Om will be here, but I ask anyway. This time the mamasan smiles: “She’s just arrived. Over there.” She points. Om is in a very short skirt with a skimpy silk blouse tied under her breasts that looks like it would fall open with a single tug; I’m pretty sure she’s not wearing a bra. She is talking to a tall farang, her body language restrained although the smile is as seductive as usual. “He’s not a regular,” the mamasan says. “D’you want me to call her over?”
I do not say You bet, but she gets the picture. I’m surprised she takes the trouble to squeeze between bodies to reach Om and whisper a few words in her ear. Om turns immediately and smiles at me across the room. All this may not sound strange, DFR, but it is; my upbringing makes me abnormally sensitive to breaches of brothel etiquette. When Om arrives she puts a hand on my shoulder. I cannot resist placing one on her hip. Inexplicably we behave like old lovers, delighted to have come across each other again after a long break. I’m feeling bewitched when I say “I, I, ah-” and blush.
She smiles. “D’you want to pay my bar fine?”
It hadn’t crossed my mind, but of course it’s the obvious thing to do. If I pay her bar fine I own her for the rest of the evening. I can do what I like with her. I can even interrogate her. I say, “Yes.”
She disappears for a moment to bring me a bill on a silver plate. I throw a thousand baht onto the plate without looking at her and wait. Ten minutes later she’s in jeans and T-shirt when she brings me my change. Now I can hardly believe I’m walking down the main street with her, holding her hand. I can’t believe how good it feels. How right.
“I have to talk to you,” I say, after we’ve watched the Muay Thai for a while.
“D’you want to take me back to Bangkok?”
“The beach will do.”
She makes a little pout of disappointment. When we reach the beach, we sit in the same chairs as before, looking out to sea. She waits. I ask for a cigarette. My hand is shaking a bit when I take it and let her light it. I remain silent for a long moment to give the impression of being in control. “Just tell me where you were earlier this evening.”
She feigns surprise. “This evening? I’ve been-”
“Don’t,” I say, “don’t spoil it.”
“Spoil what?”
“Your beautiful face with a lie,” I say with more tenderness than I intended and, surprised, experience one hell of a hard-on.
She takes a long toke on her cigarette. “Where do you think I’ve been?”
“Up on Vulture Peak. With a client.”
She turns away to blow smoke into the black night. “Yes.”
I take five minutes to reply. “Who was the client?”
“Who do you think?”
“Manu.”
She shrugs.
“You knew it was me up there when you ran away, didn’t you?”
A nervous toke on the cigarette. “I guessed. Who else would it have been?”
“You know I can arrest you?”
“For what?”
“Just about anything, from breaking into a house, violating a crime scene, to suspicion of murder-a triple murder. An atrocity of the worst imaginable kind.”
She shocks me by bursting into laughter, then recovers.
“I’m sorry.”
“You have protection?”
“Yes.”
“The army?”
She is quiet for a long time. Finally she says, “Detective, get out of Phuket. This isn’t Bangkok. Nobody here will take you seriously. It was I who told the mamasan that if you came tonight, she was to let me know immediately. I like you. Maybe I feel about you the same way you feel about me. That’s why I’m trying to save your life. There’s a rumor going round that someone was murdered-a clerk from the land registry.”
“So?”
“There are people who want to know who did it, and they’re not cops who can be bribed.”
I let that pass and go back to her earlier sentence. “How do you know how I feel about you? You hardly know me.”
“I think I know men. Get out of here. Don’t stay the night. Go back to your wife. If you can’t get a flight, take a cab to Surat Thani and stay the night there. You have no idea how big this is. I haven’t told anyone that you were up at that house tonight. But-”
“But he will?”
She lets the moment hang, then changes tack. “So what is this all about? I thought it was a murder investigation? So, the case is solved. You know who did it, because I told you.”
I look away down the beach. “I suppose it’s because you’re a professional you guessed I’m married?” She doesn’t answer.
I’m trying to puzzle it out, sending all the conflicting information into the great reservoir of consciousness the Buddhist theorists talk about.
It works. After a few minutes I think I have it. “You go to temple a lot?”
“Yes.”
“You’re devout?”
“I’m a whore.”
“But you take the Dharma seriously?” She doesn’t answer. “You would do anything, including screw me for free, so as not to have my death burdening your karma? But it is unusual for anyone to think like that-unless there are other deaths weighing on your conscience. Of course, if you were dragged into the organ-trafficking business, somehow, against your will perhaps…”
She’s quiet for a long while. She seems depressed. “Please leave Phuket tonight.” She stands and walks away.
I sit there for a few minutes, thinking, then give a good long sigh. I haul myself up from the chair and make my way to the main street. When I see a cab, I hail him and, standing in the road feeling a little theatrical, tell him in a loud voice to get me to the airport immediately. When we’re out of the main street, though, I change my mind. “Take me up to Golden Goose temple,” I tell him.
“I can’t take you all the way up. You have to climb the last half mile.”
“I know.”
It seems like a long shot, but really it isn’t. Of course, Buddhism is a science of the mind, so in theory it doesn’t matter where you worship. It doesn’t matter if you worship at all, so long as you follow the path. But I know sixty million Buddhists who don’t think that way. Not a believer, from lowly farmwives to aristocrats, who doesn’t have their favorite power center, that special temple that has always brought them luck, that particular monk who seems more enlightened than the rest.
The Golden Goose mountain is one of those places that have probably been sacred to humans for as long as there have been humans. I bet before Buddhism it was the center of an animist cult, and before that they probably sacrificed people up there. It’s just such a perfect takeoff spot for the other side. And it happens to be held in respect by many of the ladies who work the night and need somewhere to go now and then to cleanse themselves.
The cab drops me at the end of the road, and I find the steps that lead up. It must be about one in the morning by now: the moon has completed more than half its transit. I’m tired, though, and the steps are steep. When I reach the doors of the temple, they are locked, but an old man is on guard, which is to say awake on a mat under an awning. I tell him I’m a former monk in need and give him a few hundred baht. He opens the gate and shows me a kuti, a monk’s shack on stilts, which is empty, probably because it’s the most decrepit they have. He says he’ll tell the abbot about me in the morning.
I fall asleep on the bamboo floor of the kuti and wake up before dawn to the sounds of monks moving around. I find the temple building itself and wait at the back until it is full of saffron-robed men sitting on their ankles, like me. Soon we are all roaring out the “Homage to the Buddha” as if it’s the first day on earth. For an instant I’m young, innocent, and high. When the monks have all gone on their alms rounds, I ask to see the abbot. When I describe Om, he knows who I’m talking about.
“She’s the real thing,” he tells me. “She comes here whenever she can and meditates. I try to persuade her to become a maichi, a nun, but she says she is her family’s only breadwinner, she can’t just leave them to starve. I tell you, that woman has the Buddha in her more than most of my monks.”
“Does she talk to you?”
“About herself and her troubles? No, not at all. I have to drag it out of her. Even then she never complains. Like I tell you, she’s the real thing.”
I ask him about a certain day or night last month. He doesn’t want to answer at first, but eventually he agrees that he has seen her upset once or twice. “Life isn’t easy for anyone, especially the spiritually awakened.”
To keep the conversation going, I ask him about farang. His temple has become world famous and is mentioned in all the guidebooks. He rolls his eyes. “I never know where to start. They’re so programmed by materialism, they think they want enlightenment, when all they’re really looking for is a new kind of gratification, a thrill they can’t get from a pill or a bottle or a video game. When I try to explain that strong emotion is inherently unreliable and isn’t what the Buddha meant when he referred to the heart, they think I’m being cruel. Thai monks may not be what they were, but they still have the perspective. For farang I despair. Hardly a one of them I meet who has a hope of being reborn into the human form. I see sheep and dogs of the future in designer T-shirts climbing up and down this mountain, getting in and out of the tourist buses.”
“They’re stuck in Aristotelian logic: ‘A cannot be not-A.’ ”
“Tell me about it! The discovery of nirvana is the psychological equivalent of the invention of zero but vastly more important. Think of where mathematics was before zero, and you have the level of mental development of the West: good/bad, right/left, profit/loss, heaven/hell, us/them, me/you. It’s like counting with Roman numerals.”
I tell him about my time in a monastery a long time ago, when I was in my teens. My abbot was one of the most respected, and strict, in Thailand.
He shakes his head. “If I were to behave like that today, no monk would ordain with me. Everyone has gone soft. Can you believe there are abbots who spend fortunes on air-conditioning for the kutis, so the poor pampered little things can stay cool?”
We continue chatting for more than an hour. When I’m about to leave, his features change. A lifetime of ruthless discipline is suddenly written in those wrinkles-he has dropped the kind-uncle mask without a second thought.
“If you’re not careful, she’ll destroy you.”
“Who?”
“Don’t play games, you know who I mean. To love a woman for her body is no big deal-a man can get over it. But to secretly love a spirit as strong as that and think you can somehow own it-that’s looking for serious trouble.”
“But she’s on the game,” I blurt, and instantly regret it. I cannot stand his gaze and look away.
“Who isn’t? Under materialism everyone is a whore. Go home to your wife.”
“How d’you know I’m married?”
“If you weren’t married, you wouldn’t feel so tortured, would you?”
I walk back down the stone stairs. A delivery van has just unloaded some provisions. The driver agrees to take me back to the main road for fifty baht. Halfway down the hill we turn into a rest area to let a tourist bus pass. I look up at the windows, and for a brief moment I see dogs and sheep staring out. It’s quite a detailed vision, very surreal. That abbot must be well on the way to Buddhahood.
At the bottom of the hill I wave down a cab and tell him to take me to the airport. When we reach a fork, though, I tell him to stop for a moment while I think about the case. Why, exactly, did I come to Phuket this time? Because the Colonel insisted that there was something I was missing. I’m not going to even try to figure out how he might know more than me, but I feel bad about returning to Bangkok with nothing much to report. So I tell the driver to take me to Vulture Peak again.
At the same time I’m wrestling with a nagging thought hovering just at the border of consciousness. It goes like this: I knew about the heliport with its giant H on that mound about two hundred yards from the house without thinking about it. That’s how I realized there had to be a chopper service from the airport. But when I reflect, I don’t understand how I knew about the heliport. So, I’m trying to think it through: I was in the registry with Lek and the clerk, examining the plans of the house, which are attached to the land registration, and I picked up on the fact that there is a tiny heliport not far away. What’s wrong with that? Well, the plan was supposed to be only of the house and grounds, and yet it shows a heliport on common land quite a distance from the house’s perimeter.
There is only one explanation. I call Lek to have him call the registry and check for me, but I’m confident I’ve finally got the picture: the registration, which at first glance seemed to be the official record of sale of one house, was in fact a record of a sale of the whole project, incorporating a total of three houses-along with all the common land. Instead of having the cab stop at the mansion, I tell him to keep going as far as the heliport, then pay him and get out.
Now I’m standing on top of the mound that forms the heliport to check out the other two houses. They were built as if to complement the main mansion. Each must have pretty good views of the Andaman Sea, but neither boasts that fantastic drop into infinity that the main property offers. I decide to ask the Buddha for help. I stroll up to each of the other houses with my mind as open as I can manage. As I suspected, it is the one on the right that causes the hairs to stand on the back of my neck. I’m not surprised it owns better security than the main property. It is surrounded by a wall about ten feet high with a gate that was originally a work of wrought iron in an open-scroll pattern, but it has been boarded up with sheet steel to prevent anyone from looking into the grounds. CCTVs perch on each corner of the wall, and more cameras are fixed to the house.
The sense of the sinister is so strong, I call Inspector Chan.
“I’m at Vulture Peak,” I tell him, and explain my theory about the other houses perhaps forming part of the estate bought by the Yips.
“Perfect,” Chan says. “Perfect. Where are you right now?”
“Outside the second house.”
“Good. Is it far back from the mansion?”
“About three hundred yards.”
“So it’s looking down at a valley?”
“Not quite. There’s a flat area.”
“Examine the flat area. What’s the vegetation like?”
I walk across to take a look, holding the phone to my ear. “Looks like it’s been planted with grass and shrubs.”
I hear a sharp intake of breath. “Okay, what about the contours? Is it unexpectedly flat, considering the shape of the mountain?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Fill. Landfill. Digging tunnels these days is easy with the right machinery, especially if you have plenty of dough and come from Hong Kong. The problem is where to dump the extracted material. What are the dimensions of the flat area?”
“More than a hundred yards long, about twenty wide.”
He whistles. “Just what I thought. Except that I was expecting them to have dumped the fill over the cliff on the sea side. That’s how I saw it, but I must have got that detail wrong. That’s why I was checking out the cliff with my scope that day on the boat.”
“You saw it?”
“I trained in the States for three months in the eighties. They let me take a remote viewing course. I’ve been trying to use it on the Yips for years. Recently I saw tunnels and landfill-and a lot of other things. But I didn’t know where in the world they were.”
“D’you want to come over here now?”
“No. This isn’t the moment. If we raid now, all we end up with is empty properties that could have been used by anyone. You can bet the Yips have plenty of backup alibis. But they have to visit Vulture Peak soon.”
“Why?”
“Because the clerk and the boat boy have disappeared. They need to know why, and they need to do the investigating themselves. They have no choice. I know they arrived back here in Hong Kong from a trip to Beijing yesterday, so they probably held consultations with their cadres. I have my nerds checking all flight bookings from Hong Kong to Thailand. It’s important that I reach Phuket before they do, so as soon as I see they’ve reserved a flight, I’ll get on an earlier one. Don’t call me again. I’ll send an SMS.” He hangs up.
Now I’m all alone on the hill without a taxi. I shrug and call the chopper company to send someone to pick me up. At the airport I go straight to the computers to access Wikipedia. Remote viewing (RV) is the apparent ability to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or sensing with mind. Scientific studies have been conducted, and although some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results, none of the newer experiments concluded with such results when under properly controlled conditions, and therefore, like any other forms of ESP, constitutes pseudoscience. ^ [1][2][3][4] Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. ^ [5][6][7] The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974. ^ [8] Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. Although one Stargate viewer was awarded in 1984 a legion of merit for determining “150 essential elements of information (…) unavailable from any other source,” ^ [9] the program was eventually terminated in 1995, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community. ^ [10]
Back in Bangkok I take a cab to the station and race up the stairs to Vikorn’s office. He listens to my breathless report without comment, nods, and jerks his chin at the door as a sign for me to leave.