I miss the afternoon flight and have to take the early evening one instead. I don’t want to use the chopper service in case a member of the Yip party has the same idea, so I take a taxi right up to the helipad. When I check out the other two houses, there is no sign of life. I’m curious about Inspector Chan’s landfill theory and take a second look at the level area on the other side of the mountain. It’s twilight, so visibility is low, but from certain angles it does seem as if a huge hollow in the mountainside has been filled in and leveled off.
I return to the main property, but I don’t feel secure sleeping in it. I decide to wait on the balcony. After a while I realize I’m going to need some support for my aching backside, so I go back into the house to collect some cushions. It’s been long day. I find the corner of the balcony that is in the most darkness and bed down. The moon has aged greatly since I started coming to Phuket on this case; it’s only just on the eastern horizon when my eyes start to get heavy.
I awake because of a vibration that is shaking my body. The force is coming through the teak deck: footsteps, quite heavy. I freeze at the same time as I open my eyes and slightly adjust the position of my head so I can see who is there. At floor level all that is visible is a pair of legs dressed in fatigues tucked into army boots. If I turn my head a few degrees, I can see as far as a black T-shirt and a couple of brawny arms holding a combat rifle. I watch the rifle cover all sides and corners of the balcony in a professional sweep.
It must be quite late because the moon has reached far to the west and there is a quietness about the night that only occurs in the small hours.
If I dare to raise my head a couple inches more, I’ll be able to see his face. As I try to do so, one of the cushions slips, making a faint catching sound on the wood. Instantly the gunman freezes, then crouches. Now he repeats the sweep of the balcony with greater concentration. The sound I made was so faint, though, it could have been anything, a rat or a mouse or even a cockroach. He relaxes again and stands up straight. But now I know who he is. I am surprised at how tall: at least six foot two, maybe more, with an athletic body.
He resumes his inspection of the balcony and pauses in the most westerly corner. Now, when I dare to raise my head, I see him in sharp black profile against the silver moon: the wrecked face, the missing nose, the lopsided mouth: it is the blunt face of a giant bat. In addition to the M16, he is wearing a holster with a handgun. Everything about him says career soldier. After all, this once was a young man so fired with military ambition, he was prepared to sleep with a general.
He remains illuminated by the moon for maybe five minutes, then crosses to the house, which he enters, closing the sliding door behind him. I roll over to the door and press my face against it. I am just in time to see him cross the vast salon and enter the hall that leads to the front door, and the road. When I reach the front door, I open it with agonizing care. He has gone, but I can guess where to. I scramble over to the heliport. Sure enough, he appears at the entrance gate to the second house and leans forward to press his eyeball into a security device. The gate opens, then clangs shut behind him. A light goes on for a moment, escaping from a crack where shutters join, then darkness. I am thinking: Om must know this and Om never told me this and What else does Om know? • •
Rough hands shake me while their owner talks to himself in Cantonese. It’s hard to see him clearly because it is still dark.
“Chan?”
“What are you doing on your back, Third-World Cop?”
“Waiting for you.”
“So, here I am.”
I groan. “It must be about five in the morning.”
Chan checks his watch. “Four forty-two.”
He is dressed in shorts and T-shirt with a soft sports bag. We enter the mansion, where he takes a pair of black coveralls from his bag and pulls them on. I take him across the common ground to the heliport and then to the other house. I watch while he walks around the perimeter, examining the walls and the CCTV cameras. He disappears behind the house, then reappears on the other side and walks quickly toward me.
“I’ll have to make a move now, while it’s still dark. If I set off an alarm, you’ll have to cover for me somehow. Find some way of making it legal.”
“There’s no way to do that.”
“Sure there is. The next governor of Bangkok will make it right-he’ll have to if he wants to be prime minister.” Chan touches my hand. “It’s okay. I won’t trigger the alarms.”
“Sure?”
“I was in a tactical unit for six years. I know how to bypass security systems. This one is nothing special.”
I wait on the heliport. It’s not quite dawn but no longer quite dark when I see the main gate open and Inspector Chan appears, beckoning me to enter.
Chan closes the gate behind me. To my unspoken question, he says, “No sign of your friend. Maybe he left after his last patrol.”
I look nervously at the CCTV cameras, but Chan claims to have neutralized them. Instead of the front door, he takes me to the back of the house and points to a shuttered window on the second floor. I stand while he climbs on my shoulders and manages to hoist himself up to the window ledge. His burglary skills are so well honed, he has opened the shutters and the window in moments. I walk back to the front of the house to wait. Now there is a sound of bolts, and the front door opens. With all shutters and doors closed, it is dark inside the house, despite that the sun has started to appear in the east.
Chan takes out a pencil flashlight. “I had to cut the electricity where it enters the building,” he explains. He gives the impression of familiarity with the house’s purpose. He traces the frame of the front door with his flashlight. “See anything unusual?”
“Looks like the doorway has been enlarged.”
“Right. Why?” I shrug. “Hospitals also have extrawide doorways, to allow for the passage of gurneys flanked by medical staff.” I flash him a look. “I knew three things: a place like this must exist; it could not be in Hong Kong or I would have found it; you would sooner or later lead me to it.”
“What do you call your technique, parasitical policing? You could have admitted you were riding on my back.”
He sighs. “Still the medieval mind-set, the fixed cosmology, the stunted Old Testament sense of truth and justice, right and wrong. Ever hear of cloud policing?”
“What?”
“It’s going to be the next phase in humanity’s descent. No one cop will have all the evidence-it will be shared out among significant players. A cop will need to maintain high-level contacts, like a diplomat. Guilt will be only one factor in any investigation and by no means conclusive. Negotiation, relative politico-socio-economic status, guanxi, all become relevant.”
“Did you take your lithium yet today?”
He grunts. “You don’t believe me.”
I lose it and hiss at him, “What’s to believe? Every time I meet you you’re someone else.”
“That also is a feature of modern policing. I believe we already touched on it. A fixed sense of personal identity will be a fatal impediment in law enforcement of the future. A murder squad detective will have also to be a murderer in some sense. See?”
“No identity, no loyalty, no rulebook?”
“Oh dear,” Chan says, and shakes his head.
“You need to meet Vikorn.”
“I have,” Chan says with a smile. “Medium height, in his sixties, prowls instead of walks, a criminal genius almost on a level with Mao, if I was not mistaken.”
I’m shocked. “Where?”
“China,” Chan says. “Don’t worry, he wouldn’t recognize me. I was just some little cop in deep background.” I scratch my jaw. “You need to stop trying to work it out. No one person has all the answers.”
“Not even the Yips?”
“Those little girls? So long as they’re allowed to be as naughty as they like, they don’t ask questions either. They don’t know.”
“Cloud killing?”
“You could say that.”
I follow Chan in his examination of the house. Now we are standing in what was once a bedroom with a view over the mountain. It is empty, like all the others we have checked: no people, no furniture. We return to the ground floor and notice a new hole in the wall. On examination it turns out to be a doorway that we missed because it is designed to be invisible when shut. It obviously leads to a cellar. We stare at each other: Someone must have gone down or come out while we were checking the house.
I watch Chan become seduced by the big black rectangle presented by the open door. It smells musty when we poke our heads into the cavity. A set of raw concrete stairs leads downward, like an invitation to sink into a lightless ocean of infinite depth. Only the inspector would find it irresistible.
“I’m going down,” Chan says. He raises an eyebrow at me. “Why don’t you stay here where it’s safe, Third-World Cop?”
I groan and follow.
The underground room is a kind of operating theater. The stairs drop down into the huge chamber with-so far as I can make out-a dome-shaped roof. It is as vast as an emperor’s tomb. Chan’s pencil flashlight cannot penetrate from one end to the other. Little by little Chan edges forward while I cover his back.
There is a bank of refrigerators against one wall, shelves full of bandages, disinfectants, anesthetics, boxes labeled CYCLOSPORINE. There are five stainless-steel gurneys with drainage outlets, two operating tables side by side, red blankets, and some high-tech electronic gadgets on portable stainless-steel tables, including what I suppose are three heart monitors. It is cool down here, and there is a slight breeze from a ventilation system.
“They even have a backup generator,” Chan says, pointing, “just like a real hospital. Look, see how close the two operating tables are? They wouldn’t get away with that in a legal clinic-the donor and donee have to be decently separated. In the parallel trade, of course, it’s all no-frills.”
“So who are the donors?”
Chan stares at me in the gloom. “Don’t you see? Anybody. Anybody at all. A young person coming home from school in India, a minor felon from China, a Western tourist led into a trap in Malaysia, desperate Africans without travel papers searching for work, unemployed Brazilians from shantytowns, orphaned kids in Isaan-in this business, nobody cares where the meat is grown, so long as it’s still on the hoof and breathing when it arrives. Right now, I guess you could say we are in danger of becoming donors ourselves.” I meet his gaze. “I told Interpol, but they didn’t take me seriously. The Yips are too smart and the operation too big-it boggles the mind.”
“Tell me how it works.”
“Take Lourdes, the Yips’ favorite hunting ground. They find someone with, say, terminal liver problems. In the course of a number of interviews, they dismantle whatever faith the patient has left in their god. Now you have a true citizen of the twenty-first century, a totally confused human soul with no identity, no direction, no faith, no religion, no politics, no instinct other than to survive. The Yips impose a culture of absolute secrecy, which is sealed by hints that if the authorities find out, the patient, also, will be an accessory to a serious crime. By this time, the patient, nailed to a cross of hope and terror-a real Christian at last-will do whatever they’re told.
“They are given to understand they are being taken to China, where they will receive the organ of an executed prisoner who would have died and had his organs sold by the state in any event. That’s the great Yip innovation. Everyone has heard of China’s organ sales. Everyone with a serious problem with a solid organ has been through the thought process: Well, I don’t agree with it, of course, but if the poor bastard’s going to die anyway, why should someone else get the liver? And of course they tell the patient they’re flying to China in a private jet.
“They are heavily sedated before they arrive at Phuket-as far as the patient is concerned, it could be anywhere, but they’ve been told it’s somewhere in China, and they’re happy to go with that. They have also paid a great deal of money by now, perhaps the whole of their wealth. They’re committed. You could say they have finally become believers. They are already under the anesthetic when the chopper brings them up to Vulture Peak.”
“And the donor?”
“Sometimes it really is an executed felon. Why not? The organ is popped into a chilled Jiffy Bag minutes after the bullet, but there simply are not enough legal executions to go around. The list of people in need of livers, kidneys, eyes, faces grows by the hour. In Shanghai you told me the Yips showed you some of the e-mails. And what happens when the disposable income of average Chinese and Indians reaches a point when, say, half a billion people are looking for organs to buy… perhaps even for frivolous reasons? You’re a cop-you know to what lengths narcissism can drive people. What we do to poodles today we do to ourselves tomorrow. Suppose someone is sick of the face in the mirror and decides to buy another. D’you see?”
“Faces are still a challenge,” I say. “It’s going to be a while before someone can look at someone else’s face and say, ‘Gimme, or you will never see your daughter again.’ ”
“Sure. Personal computing, also, took a while to get off the ground.”
I pause to take in the enormity of his argument. “I wouldn’t want to be a film star in the economy of the future.”
“Now you’re getting the point. The human being has already been commodified by stealth. In the future everybody is viewed as an item for sale. Crowds become sources of stupendous wealth, so long as you can get away with murder-as the rich and powerful always do. In addition to corporate raiders, we already have organ raiders. Take the Yips. It’s market logic: the only true god.”
“The Yips saw all that?”
“Yes. When it comes to business, they are very mature and well ahead of the curve.”
“But where does Manu fit in? He’s not exactly a poster boy.”
Chan nods. “Love.” He smiles at me. “In the future love still exists, but it is twisted, thwarted, cowed by market forces. Only the strongest, and richest, can afford it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“General Zinna. The Yips’ setup here would be impossible without overwhelming political power and protection. They could never get away with it in Hong Kong-or even China. That’s why I’ve been searching for this place for so long. That’s why I got so interested in you, after I heard you’d been to Monte Carlo with them. The General runs Phuket. Part of the deal is that they take care of Manu. As soon as face transplants become more aesthetically pleasing, he goes under the knife again. Next time he will choose whatever face he likes-maybe someone he sees on the street, or a movie star on TV. In the meantime he is the organization’s problem child, who has to be indulged.”
As he spoke, Chan took hold of my arm. His flashlight had picked out a bank of refrigerators of the kind with transparent lids that open from the top. Corner shops used to sell ice cream from this model. At first I cannot see beyond the frost. Chan obligingly opens the lid of one of them, takes something out, brushes it off, and plays his light over it. “Of course, it’s totally unusable. The flesh is dead, and all the cells will have been corrupted by ice. We’re talking about a form of insanity, after all.”
I am looking at the face of Mr. To, aka Wong; the moustache is a tad frosty. Chan gives it to me to hold, while he dips into the fridge and brings out two more faces. A quick brush with his forearm, and I recognize To’s two women assistants. All three look pretty glum with drooping mouths, but I guess that’s only to be expected.
“Let’s get out of here,” I tell Chan. “We have all the evidence we need now.”
“Not yet,” Chan says. “We haven’t finished here yet.”
He flashes his light around and finds another door, which opens onto a storeroom crowded with shelves.
“Embalming is big in the future-as a spinoff of the organ-transfer business.”
“I didn’t mind being brave when we had a good reason, but now we don’t need to be, and he could be-”
He stops me by holding up a hand and nods at a set of shelves where bell jars sit in serried ranks. There is no liquid in them, however. As he passes the light from one to another, I see that each bears a label in Chinese script. He reaches up to one of the jars and takes it down to lay it on a metal table. “The labels are all names of previous owners.” He lifts the top of the jar to pick up the embalmed penis. He reads the label: “An Chen Cheung.”
He closes one eye while he strokes the cock. “Alas, poor Inspector An Chen Cheung! I knew him well, Horatio. A fellow of infinite lust. Here hung those famous testicles-quite sterile now. Here rises that cock he used to give pleasure to so many. There was hardly a woman he would not share it with, when asked nicely-and he was a handsome fellow.” Chan smirks. He turns the set from side to side. “An Chen Cheung was a great cocksman-perhaps the finest on the force at the time.” The smirk grows. “They took him to Monte Carlo. Of course, they didn’t kill him there, they merely spoiled him. In the officers’ mess one day he bragged to us that they offered him their dubious loins simultaneously in a threesome, but I have my doubts. In all my studies of the Twins, I’ve never seen any real evidence of copulation with a living male organ.
“Anyway, poor An Chen Cheung’s mouth was bigger than his cock. He disappeared soon after the Monte Carlo trip-I always wondered.” Chan holds the cock at arm’s length to turn it under the beam of his contemplation. “He was a keen amateur sportsman. D’you think those mighty lungs are beating in someone else’s chest? Are those twin kidneys still together, or have then been divided by the market, with one in Mecca and the other in Tel Aviv? Is one purifying the piss of a Jew and the other an Arab? And how about that miracle organ, the liver? Did they cut it in half and send the pieces north and south, one to Vladivostok, the other to Melbourne? Isn’t globalism great?”
As a cop, I wonder most about the labels in Chinese. Chan reads my thoughts. “They must operate here in an atmosphere of absolute security. What do you know about this army general, Zinna?”
“The original gay bull-a control freak-uses the promotion carrot to seduce ambitious cadets. Very rich from the meth trade with Burma.”
“Right.”
“But why the labels on the jars?”
“Ever hear of good old-fashioned male triumphalism? You think women haven’t always wanted a piece of that? These are trophies, my friend.”
“Do they use all of them?”
“Sure. Can’t you imagine the fights? ‘I think I’ll have An Chen Cheung tonight,’ says Lilly. ‘I’ve been thinking about him all day.’ ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ says Polly, ‘I’m having him. Why don’t you have Tom, Dick or Harry-have all three if you like.’ ” Chan looks at me. “Or something like that.”
Chan’s features have started to twitch. “Where’s your lithium?” I say.
“I left it in my other bag, in the big house.”
I’m thinking that this would be a good moment for Chan to take his medication. Too late. His gaze has morphed into the thousand-mile stare, a cold sweat has broken out over his face, and his lips have started to tremble.
“It’s such a shame society has poured its disapproval over those of us with the bipolar gift. I’ve seen things, Detective, that no ordinary cop can see.” He is shivering.
“Like what?”
“Like dawn on Andromeda.” His teeth are chattering. “I’ve seen this new millennium laid out before my eyes in all its tragic futility. I’ve seen our species descend to insect level in a prolonged orgy of narcissism which we will continue to call progress until we’ve descended into such a state of functional barbarism that we are all eating one another. I’ve seen the organ market rise in importance until it’s bigger than oil. I’ve seen hearts and lungs for sale on eBay. I’ve seen women turn into men and vice versa. I’ve seen the average human reduced to a babbling idiot, so far gone he demands to be exploited. The false is to be preferred over the real-trash trumps excellence-truth is something that only interests religious fanatics-science has to be applied to titillation and video games if it is to receive funding-soccer is the only world religion with any influence-the age of the little man, and woman, will be worse than anything perpetrated by a tyrant. I’ve seen the war of all against all-and I’ve seen the end. As the prophet said, nine-tenths of humanity will be destroyed.
“Why did I become a cop? Certainly the law has no interest for me, and detection is extremely boring most of the time-you are never permitted to prosecute the real villains. Only now and then the criminal world turns up a prophet through whose eyes one may discern what happens next. What criminals do today, the respectable do tomorrow. Look how popular fraud has become on Wall Street. From that point of view, you could say I’m the luckiest cop on earth. I have in-depth knowledge of the minds of two of our greatest modern prophets, two spoiled girls who read the future better than any Internet entrepreneur and are probably billionaires as a consequence.”
He inhales. “Like so many vocational cops, I was propelled by the heroic impulse. Make the streets safe for… et cetera. Bang up the bad guys… et cetera. Make sure they never again… et cetera. How cute. Now I’m forty-five years old. At my age guilt and innocence get turned on their heads. No authentic hero ever reaches fifty. I was sure the Yips would have a commodity shop like this-I saw it underground somewhere-but was it a paranoid fantasy? Was it my illness talking?
“Now there is only one more detail I need to know, then I’m out of here. I’ve come here to die, Detective. They can have my liver, my kidneys, my face, my cock-small prices to pay for liberation from their brave new world. What’s your excuse for getting yourself carved up this day?” He glares at me with his lower lip trembling. “Did you ever read the Gospel of Judas?”
“No.”
“You should. It’s revolutionary. In it Jesus muscles Judas into arranging for his crucifixion sooner rather than later so he can escape the cloying human form and dissolve in a spiritual lake so pure not even angels have seen it. See, Judas was the only disciple who really understood him. I thought Christianity was strictly for children until I read that.”
There is a click. The lights go on. Now the vast underground chamber is washed in neon. Chan’s reaction is instant: he raises both arms. I follow his lead. Whoever made the click makes no further sound, so Chan and I are left to turn slowly around.
Close up, Manu is hard to look at. It is like seeing two different men in the same body: the perfect manly form of the tall, disciplined soldier holding a giant combat rifle, which is pointed at us; the maimed and frozen face.
The effect on Chan is electric. The expressions that come and go on his face bring vividness to the word bipolar. Now he has wrinkled his own features and is slowly lowering one of his hands. He points at Manu. “Translate,” he hisses at me. Then: “I love you.”
“He loves you,” I tell Manu in Thai. There is no reaction from that Halloween mask. Only the eyes move. They glow with the dark energy of an edge dweller.
“I’ve been looking for you all my life,” Chan says. “You are more of a pariah than I’ll ever be. You are weirder than me, you live in an extreme atmosphere. I envy you above all men. There is no darkness you have not penetrated with your fearless gaze, no illusion you have not torn apart with your incredible ugliness.”
I translate. Manu makes a gurgling sound in his throat. His eyes are sparkling, and I wonder if the gurgling is not a form of laughter.
“I understand you because I’ve aspired to be like you, but I don’t have your courage. If I looked like you, I wouldn’t have the strength to carry on. I would have done myself in right after the operation, when they gave you the mirror and came out with a whole lot of stupid excuses.” Manu jerks the gun upward, as if encouraging Chan to continue. “But in my small way I too live on the other side. I’m a crazy bipolar-ask this guy here-he had to rescue me from a public toilet when I was having one of my raving sessions. See, I’m not so different. You could say I’m worse-if they could look at my mind they’d find it even weirder, uglier, stranger, more inhuman even than your mug. I admire you. The integrity of your suffering and isolation is beyond anything I’ve ever come across. You are urban man in his most pure form. I would be honored to be executed by a real man instead of slowly ground down into another clapped-out cipher. Why not make me your slave, keep me here with you in your underground lair, oh King of Hades? Or kill me right now if you like.”
Manu shakes his head and turns his back. He moves like someone pottering around at home. We watch him go to the fridge where the faces are kept and lift the lid.
Chan does not take his eyes off that deformed figure. “You have to get into his mind,” he whispers. “He’s learned that without a face, he doesn’t exist. Therefore he is invisible. Now he is making himself visible to us.”
Manu has pulled out a face-it is To’s-and slapped it over his own with one hand. It remains there for a moment while he turns to look at us. The gray flesh does not resemble anything living, more a macabre mask with drooping mouth. He cocks his head coyly, as if asking if we like his new looks. Then he turns back to the fridge, pulls off To, and puts on the face of the older woman who was To’s secretary. He pirouettes and poses coquettishly.
“He’s using us as a mirror,” Chan explains. “Be polite.” Chan starts to clap, and nudges me. I also clap; the lonely sounds are quickly lost in the huge chamber. Manu takes off the dead face and stares at us. He seems perplexed. Chan has twisted his features into those of a groveling sycophant. Out of the corner of his mouth he whispers: “He is going to become fascinated with me. I’m going to prove to him that I love him. That’s your signal to run. Get the fuck out of here. This isn’t your moment. This case belongs to me. Translate what I say until I tell you to go.”
Chan drops to his knees. Manu’s gurgling is an attempt to communicate, but I cannot work it out. Something in the sounds resembles Thai words, but there is too much distortion to be sure. Now my mind has flipped to Om: I think of her making love to this monster, perhaps spending the night with him, seeing his face on the pillow, listening to the air passing through the hole that once was a nose. And now I understand what Manu is trying to say. “He wants you to kiss him,” I explain.
Chan stands, embraces Manu, kisses those busted lips, and sinks his tongue into that mutilated mouth. Manu is holding the gun by the barrel while the stock rests on the ground. This would be a good moment to rush him. “Don’t rush him,” Chan says out of the side of his mouth. “Get the fuck out. Run. He’s too far gone to care if you escape or not. I’m his next face. That’s all he knows right now.”
But there is no need to run. Manu seems pleased with Chan. He steps back from him and balances the gun against his stomach with one finger still on the trigger. With a single jerk of his head, he tells me to go. When I turn to find the stairs, though, he shakes his head and points to a door at the opposite end of the operating room. I have the feeling he is laughing at me.