Vulture Peak, page 22
“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?”
