John Burdett - Vulture Peak

Frowning, I ask her in. “Chanya, this is Linda, Linda, Chanya.”

Chanya smiles graciously up at the tall American. She’s embarrassed there’s no chair to sit on-it’s occupied by her thesis again. She makes as if to clear it and dump the manuscript on the floor, but Linda stops her.

“It’s okay, I’ll sit on a cushion. The last thing I want is to inconvenience you.” But she remains standing with her hands in her jeans pockets. I think she’s shocked that fully evolved human beings live like this, but way too much of a pro to show it. She turns to me and says, “It’s about Colonel Vikorn.” She turns to Chanya. “He’s a great man but as elusive as the smile on a Cheshire cat. Sonchai probably told you, my team has been hired to get him elected governor of Bangkok. Translated, that means we’re being paid quite a lot of money to be good old American control freaks. But he won’t let us control him. Jack and Ben spent most of last night drinking with him, which has left them flat on their backs this morning. Apparently the Colonel has a hollow leg. Now I’m following up with a morning call to his most gifted detective.” She smiles warmly at us.

We stare at her with bug eyes until Chanya remembers to say, “Won’t you sit down?”

Linda sits on a cushion and leans against the wall with her long legs folded so that her face almost disappears behind her knees, while Chanya and I sit cross-legged in the middle of the room.

Linda does a cute little thing with her hands that ends up with the index fingers pointed upward and joined together. “I don’t drink myself, which is why I let the boys do their bonding with the Colonel last night. No reason why I should play Big Nurse at your house though.” At first I have no idea what she is talking about, until I realize that with supernatural speed she has taken in and registered a quite small reefer roach, which I must have left in the ashtray when I indulged in a joint after returning from Phuket.

Chanya doesn’t get it so I say, “You want to smoke?”

“Why not? Let’s us all do some bonding, hey? Been a damn long time, to tell you the truth. I was based in Kabul for a few months about five years ago, and man do they have some good stuff there. That was the last time, though. I’m wedded to the job.”

“I see.” I take our little plastic stash box down from a shelf. I’m thinking if she hasn’t smoked since Kabul, that’s going to be one high American. I start rolling.

She has impressive lungs. The joint diminishes by at least an inch with one long toke. She holds it well but splutters somewhat on the exhalation. To Chanya and me, it’s like watching a thriller and trying to guess the ending. We keep quiet and are careful not to share glances: Linda is hyperobservant with a built-in cutting-edge mood detector. We wait. After about five minutes I deduce the silence must be dope-driven: farang don’t tolerate it without assistance for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Is that not true, DFR?

Now Linda looks fondly at Chanya. “So, ah, tell me. I’ve always wanted to know. What’s it like being a real woman?”

Chanya is startled but recovers quickly. “I feel like asking you the same question.”

“Really? How about that. Well.” Linda takes another toke. “Let me put it this way. When I started with the CIA, I studied Standard Arabic-most of us did. We got to study the history too. The Islamic empire, which was really the Arab empire, once stretched from Pakistan and western India in the east to Spain and southwest France in the west. The civilization they put together in Andalusia was fabulous beyond anything we have today.

“At its peak it was run by a guy named Abd ar-Rahman III, who built an amazing palace called Az-Zahra. After he died, somebody found a note of his that read-see, I remember it pretty much word for word: ‘Fifty years have passed since I’ve been caliph. Treasures, honors, pleasures, I’ve enjoyed them all to the point of exhaustion. Princes admire me, fear me, and envy me. Everything man desires has been mine for the asking. So I’ve calculated how many days of happiness I’ve enjoyed during all this time, and the number comes to fourteen.’ ” Linda takes another long toke and hands me the joint.

“Well, I’ve had pretty much the best America has to offer. I’ve had any man I ever really wanted, any job. When I was young, I intended to travel and learn foreign languages, which I did. When I moved from the CIA to the private sector, I went from well paid to extremely well paid-you could almost say excessively well paid. I’ve known the best of the world, and you know what? I envy that old caliph his fourteen days, ’cause I can’t remember more than a few hours of happiness myself, mostly when I’ve had the chance, which comes maybe once or twice a decade, to smoke some decent dope without risking my career. Too damned anxious staying ahead of the competition to even think about being happy-it would take up too much time.” She smiles again at Chanya. “That’s what being a fully liberated woman has done for me. How about you?”

I hand Chanya the joint, and she takes a few tokes before answering. “I’m Buddhist. We don’t think that way. The question has no meaning for me.”

“Uh-huh? How’s that?”

“The kind of happiness you’re talking about is a form of clinging-of greed, part of a cycle. Of course it leads to unhappiness in the end.”

Linda stares at her. “Well, I’ll be damned. I wish you’d been around when the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution. They’ve got three hundred million of us chasing our own asses in the pursuit of that same happiness you Buddhists already knew didn’t exist.” She laughs. “I did always wonder why it was the pursuit of happiness-like you’re never really expected to get there. Kind of a Godot thing right at the center of the American mind. The best is always yet to come, yet to come, yet to come…”

The dope has reached her, and now she’s stuck in a vortex like the slow-spin phase of a washing machine. She shakes her head and smiles beatifically as if nothing unusual has happened. I think Chanya must be stoned too, because she gets a gleam in her eye and stands up.

“D’you get anonymous porn in your inbox, Linda?” she asks. “I got a prize yesterday. Want to look?”

Personally, I don’t think it’s such a good idea to show the American her porn collection. I guess she’s decided it must be the way farang women bond these days. She goes to her computer and jogs the mouse. “Come and see,” she says to Linda, who has to use the wall as support before she can stand. Now Chanya calls to me: “Sonchai, there’s another one. He must have just sent it. Want to see?”

I get up to stand with the two women. Chanya clicks on the new attachment to the latest e-mail. It seems the anonymous one is smarter than we thought. He’s not so much a random pornographer, more a focused campaign strategist. Now the image unfolds from the feet up, as before, and just as before, we are treated to a veritable fireworks display of male virility-but the revelation no longer stops at the neck; it continues unrolling until we have the full face.

Linda doesn’t have time to reach the yard before she throws up; as a resourceful American, she manages to open the window just in time before emptying her stomach’s contents. The room is filled with the sound of her retching while Chanya stares in fear and awe at the monitor, and I feel a strange kind of rage. At first I can hardly credit what I’m looking at. Then I have to shove a fist into my mouth. “Oh, no,” I mutter. “No, no. It can’t be.” Can’t be what? Can’t be a human face. Well it is. A face put together by a demon, to mock our species all the way to annihilation. Nothing is aligned properly, the ears, the eyes, the mouth-especially the mouth-and it’s hard to see anything that isn’t scar tissue. There is no nose, only a hole, and a chunk of the upper lip is missing, showing crooked teeth and crimson gum. This is man inside out. If I was that young fellow, I’d probably rape anything that moved.