John Burdett - Vulture Peak

To me, sitting in back of the cab waiting for the lights to change, the answer to the world economic crisis was obvious: legalize prostitution and tax it. At 15 percent per bang, deficits would shrink overnight. It would be safe to leverage as well. The worse things get, the more people bury their problems in sex. The better things get, the more people celebrate their good fortune with sex. It’s a tax revenue for all seasons, and with ever more sophisticated surveillance coming onstream, it won’t be long before governments will be in a position to tax sex between married couples. Hey, Obama, are you listening?

Out of boredom the cab driver switched on his radio. One of the chat shows reported that five women had complained separately about a stalker on Sukhumvit. It seemed a man with a grotesquely damaged face had been approaching women and scaring the hell out of them. Two complained to the police, but the police told them there was no law against being ugly. Now a bunch of people called to say they agreed with the police: What was Thailand coming to when people showed no tolerance for the afflictions of others? We were supposed to be a Buddhist nation, after all. Then one of the stalked women called in to say, “Have you any idea just how ugly this guy is? We’re talking about extreme mutilation, worse than any horror movie.” The story made me think of Zinna’s lover, whose face was smashed in that car accident; but of course he was in a monastery somewhere in Cambodia, so it couldn’t be him.

By the time we emerged from the jam, it was nine-thirty. A few more holdups kept me in the cab until we finally arrived at my little soi where my little hovel was waiting. I saw from the lights that Chanya was home, working in the corner of the room she calls her office. I called out “Hi,” and she said it back to me, without looking up from her monitor. I tried not to feel lonely, isolated, and rejected. I tried not to think of the nervous little bald guy who’d come into the Lonesome Cowboy a couple of hours before and was probably this minute being initiated into his new world in some upstairs room by those two katoeys who would have his money one way or another. I tried not to think of Burmese mothers selling their kidneys and their eyes to keep their babies alive for a few more years, or of all the other Asian women and men who had tried to help their families by selling body parts after the tsunami. It’s a beautiful, global world, so long as you keep your eyes shut.

The first thing I did when I arrived home was to grab a bunch of incense, light it, and hold it at eye level while I waied the electric Buddha we keep on a high shelf in the northeast corner. He’s quite gaudy with purple and red lights, which are kitsch enough to remind me it’s only a symbol I’m bowing at. On The Path, symbols are functional things, DFR; you really don’t want them to seduce you with their charm or resale value.

So I was practicing a gritted-teeth kind of husbandly tolerance when I went to the other corner of the room, picked up a bottle of red wine, poured her a glass, and set it in front of her keyboard, then poured another for myself. She was not a natural drinker; I’d started to insist on one glass per night, just to bring her down from that high-stress war with her supervisor whose name, inevitably perhaps, was Dorothy. I knew that if she didn’t have wine, she would hit a wall and slob out in front of the TV to watch her DVDs of Ice Road Truckers. You’d think there wouldn’t be much for a slender Thai girl to relate to in a series about great hairy white men driving massive trucks across frozen lakes in Alaska; the attraction of opposites, I guess.

She got the message and looked up apologetically. We clinked glasses. I said, “I have a new case.”

She struggled to emerge from her world into mine. “Really? What?”

“Vikorn’s decided to abolish illegal organ trafficking worldwide. At least while he’s running for governor.”

She searched my face for an explanation. I told her all about Vikorn’s election strategy and the latest ploy in his war with Zinna, and the black Amex card, which made her grin. “But isn’t it dangerous? If there’s so much money in that kind of trafficking, someone’s sure to try to kill you.”

“If I resigned, Vikorn would probably feel he had to bump me off. I know too much, and now that he’s running for governor, the stakes are much higher. Anyway, I’m a cop, how could I refuse a case like this?”

Talk of my death sobered her. Suddenly the war with Dorothy wasn’t so important. Suddenly she remembered she loved me. She shook her head, then started to caress me. I understood because I felt the same way. The likelihood that one will be hanged in the morning can make you horny as a rattlesnake.

We were lying naked together now, in the other corner of the room where the bed was. We’d finished talking about how we could get the most out of Vikorn’s credit card before an enraged organ hunter sent an assassin to kill me-half joking, half not-so now it was my turn to listen. But it was not a new story, it was an old one that kept pressing on Chanya’s mind like a thorn. An earnest look appeared on her face that signaled she was about to go intellectual.

“Dorothy just can’t get it out of her head that all Thai whores are slaves. It’s amazing. The idea that a woman would go on the game voluntarily, accept it like a challenge even, test herself that way to show she’s tough enough, beautiful enough, clever enough with men, sometimes even enjoy it-sometimes really enjoy it-it’s like it would destroy one half of her worldview. I’ve shown her all the evidence, but she goes blind when she sees anything she doesn’t like. A farang like her thinks that a prostitute is some kind of being, an entity in her own right, whereas it doesn’t really occur to the girls that prostitute as a word is any more than a nominal convenience-not even a description; what they are is women, daughters, mothers, farmers, and members of a rural community-all those things that traditionally form the sense of being in the ontological sense.”

She paused for breath, then continued, “I know of at least thirty girls who had breast transplants during their working lives, then had them removed the day they retired. They hung up their tits, you could say, washed their hands of the whole city, and returned to their home villages as if nothing had happened. Therefore they do not lose their identity when they sell their bodies, so that the profession of prostitution is never more than an economically driven distraction. Farang, on the other hand, are unable to see the sale of real biological sex-as opposed to fantasy sex in movies and pornography-as identical in nature to the sale of any other commodity like tomatoes or mangoes. It doesn’t make any sense. If one were to impose any logical value system, one would have to say the farang position is schizophrenic in that it encourages and exploits an obsession with sex but at the same time denies consummation to anyone who wants the convenience of paying for it with cash. Which is a lot more honest in most cases than pretending the flavor of the month is the lover of a lifetime. But for me the question is, why do farang get to live in a science fiction universe while the rest of us have to deal with reality for them? I finally told her she had to spend a night with me sitting in a corner at your mother’s bar. I called your mother, and she said it was okay, so long as Dorothy doesn’t scare off the customers.”

I said, “What does ontological mean?”

She looked at me, laughed, and said, “Sorry. You didn’t want to hear that mouthful when you’ve just come home.”

She let a couple of beats pass, embarrassed maybe to have intimidated me with her big words, then gave a little jump and said, “Look at what an anonymous admirer sent me today.” We went to her PC, and she clicked on an icon so we were looking at her e-mail window. Then she double-clicked on one of the items. Now we were looking at a screen that was blank save for two naked feet. While we watched, the feet slowly grew legs, then knees, then thighs. Chanya threw me a glance, grinned, and turned back to the screen. A further unscrolling revealed a tan penis and testicles, pubic hair, a mass of highly developed stomach muscles, an impressive hairless chest, terrific pecs, biceps, and triceps-a more perfect figure of a man you could not hope to find in your electronic inbox. But the scrolling stopped at the neck. It was a beautiful body without a head. Now a message in crimson Thai script was slowly spelling its way across the screen where the head should have been: I love you.