style hauteur, she insisted on carrying our tray, commanded the milk and sugar stand-I told her two packets of Equal and a nuance of nonfat, please-and led me to a sofa where we could sit and watch the gold go by.
“So, how did you get into the business?”
She had sipped at her soy latte, dabbed her lips with a napkin, and dropped the opening question without looking at me; but she followed up with a stabbing glance that seemed to penetrate under the flesh, right to the gristle. I had to walk a middle path here. If I claimed to be a fellow professional, she’d nail me with a whole load of science that I wouldn’t understand. On the other hand, I did just sell her 1,764 human eyes.
“Actually, I’m not really in the business, but I would like to be. I found a principal, talked him into using me as a go-between. I guess I’ll just take it from here. You know, whatever comes through the door?”
She sipped the latte, gave the table her full concentration, and said, “Come off it, Detective,” and sipped some more latte, then looked up at me to see what effect she’d had.
“I, I, I-”
“You’re working for Vikorn, you’ve got to be. There are only two men in Thailand who could have delivered that merchandise so quickly, and the other one always calls me direct. Your Colonel got mad at me five years ago because I won a bet with him, and he’s a seriously bad loser.” She looked me in the eye and laughed. “Asian male pride is quite as ridiculous as Western male pride.”
I said, “Oh. Yes. I suppose that’s true.” Her laugh was gay, hearty, sincere. Or was it? Like a wolf she looked, when we lifted that lid.
“So tell me, has the price of smack gone through the floor, or is the DEA up his backside so he needs to diversify? There are plenty of drug barons who are seeing the light and getting into the organ trade, where there’s practically no law enforcement and no tax. I could give you the names of twenty mid-rankers from Colombia who sell kidneys, livers, and eyes these days and sleep better for it.”
“He says things have changed since he last looked into it.”
Perhaps I had pressed a secret switch of some kind. She gave me the naked look of appraisal, then said, “You don’t know a damned thing about it, do you? He picked you because you speak English and know how to dress? You’re a peasant boy from up-country?”
“He wants you to teach me the ropes. That’s what he said.”
I thought I had at last surprised her. She pondered for a moment. “Why not? So long as Vikorn delivers, I can find a use for you.”
We both paused when two men walked in dressed like lawyers who spoke in British accents. They were discussing a local real estate project and how difficult the sheikh-in-charge could be. Lilly stared at them for a moment, seemed to categorize them precisely-I could almost hear her ticking off the points: net worth, personality traits, sexual preferences, corruptible or not-and turned away. “I can’t initiate you here. Let’s meet at my hotel in an hour. It’s the other six star, you know the one I mean?”
At the other six star the staff uniforms were not the same, and you beheld the sailboats in the bay from a quite different angle. In the lift I stood behind a burly bellhop until we reached the highest floor. He rang Lilly’s bell, keeping his body between me and the dear valued guest until she had confirmed she wanted to see me.
Up until this moment I had been quite interested to discover what theme of suite she had chosen. Had she gone for minimalist, or overblown Oriental, or something in between? Now I lost interest in the suite because for a second I did not recognize the woman who was welcoming me into her sanctum. She was wearing an apres-tennis short-sleeve V-neck cotton pullover, a pair of white shorts, and hotel slippers that revealed her toenails, which had been painted with individuated flower patterns. Now I saw she had done the same to her fingernails. She could have been ten years younger, and there was even a twinkle of preppy mischief in her eyes as she welcomed me in with a French kiss on one cheek, then offered her own for me to reciprocate. Even more impressive than her genius for shape-changing was her intuition: her persona of an hour ago I had found intimidating and sexually off-putting. Now I thought her sexy as hell.
“You changed,” I said.
She produced a smile and led me gaily into the suite.
I could have kicked myself for not coming as someone else and wondered if my days as apprentice organ hunter were not already numbered. Meanwhile I was impressed with the suite, which didn’t go at all with the new Lilly. It was perfectly executed belle epoque, exactly like the interior of Maxim’s, in Paris, where my mother’s client Truffaut used to take us for lunch at least twice a week. I was so hit with nostalgia, I could have raised the hots for one of the lady lamps. I wanted to play the girl, tell Lilly the eyes and her personality change had left me feeling dizzy. I needed to sit down but was afraid to show weakness.
She led me to a giant sofa and a low glass table with a fruit bowl big enough to breed sharks in. She was imitating the snake in Jungle Book, with its deep-throat gurgle-not to mention Eve herself-when she asked, “Would you like an apple?” I couldn’t help it, I broke into peals of laughter.
A Mozart sonata suddenly erupted from her cell phone. She listened for a moment, then spoke in impeccable French: “Yes, tomorrow, first-class, three in a row, one window, correct.” She pressed a couple of buttons on the phone, said, “Excuse me,” then spoke again, this time in a language that sounded Chinese, although I could not tell which dialect. She closed the phone, chucked it playfully to the other end of the sofa, and cocked her head to see if I had any questions.
I did have one. As a semilinguist myself, I was jealous. “Tell me, Lilly, how is it you speak so many languages fluently?”
Lilly picked up an apple-not a golden delicious but a big green one full of juice-and took a bite. She spoke with her mouth full. “It’s all thanks to Dad and Granddad. The old man was a big industrialist in Shanghai. When he saw Mao was going to win the civil war, he put his entire factory on a ship and moved everything and everyone to Hong Kong. He was an old-style Confucian. Appreciated bound feet on women, especially his wives and his mistresses, and liked to relax with an opium pipe on a Friday night.” Lilly looked at the apple, perhaps at the big chunk she had taken out of it with her perfect teeth. “He brought my father up very strictly, which is to say Dad learned how to obey and that was about it. When the old man died, my father didn’t know what to do about anything, so he imitated the British. He got a British nanny for my sister and me when we were hardly more than zero years old. When you grow up bilingual, you can pick up languages very easily, like picking up shells from the seashore.
“We didn’t like the British nanny much-she was built like a bulldog and went all red and blotchy when she was angry. She believed in spanking, so when we wanted to get rid of her, we exaggerated and told Dad she was a sadistic lesbian-we were very precocious and loved learning about weird things from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He was so shocked that lesbianism existed that he sacked her on the spot without making inquiries. Anyway, our English was better than our Putonghua at that stage, so we didn’t need her.
“In those days the Brits thought the French were the top of the cultural league, so we got a French governess. She was a total pain in the ass with rules for everything and this nasty high-pitched arrogance. She always dressed impeccably, so we found ways of messing up her clothes and hair. Over time the sustained disorientation sent her psychotic-literally. She called it Chinese torture. They had to take her away in an ambulance, but we were pretty much perfect in French by then.
“Next was a German, a hyper-hygienic bitch with an enormous bosom. When we’d learned the language, we told Dad about the Nazis. He only knew about Japanese genocide during the war, so he freaked out and got rid of her. Next was an Italian. She was great. Unbelievably lazy, very soft and indulgent, but she had to have sex with a new man every month to prove she was irresistible. Unfortunately, Mum found out and sacked her.” She proceeded to munch. “Actually, the real center of our family-the foyer, as the French say-was the Fukienese maid. She was mum, dad, sister, grandmother all in one. We adored her and took care of her in her old age. She died a few years ago, and we gave her the big Chinese funeral with tons of hell money and cognac. We cried for a month. Fukienese is our real mother tongue.”
Lilly gave an exaggerated toothy grin and made rings around her eyes with thumbs and index fingers. I guessed the idea was a caricature of the Chinese face, which might have been crude from anyone else but from her was hilarious. Her new persona-call it Lilly II-was a lot of fun. I shook my head.
“And the Arabic?”
She threw me a knowing look. “That came later. We were in our twenties before we realized that the big money wasn’t necessarily in the West anymore. As I said, Daddy was very out of touch. Standard Arabic isn’t difficult, we cracked it in six months, and you get access to the whole of North Africa.”
“Am I going to meet your sister?”
