Lilly took another bite out of her apple. “How d’you know you haven’t already?”
I must have been getting slow. It took quite a few beats before I saw the answer to the conundrum. “She’s your twin?”
“Got it in one, Captain Kirk.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine, as if I were penetrating a mystery that was not really mine. I didn’t believe Vikorn ever got this far. “What’s her name?”
“Polly.”
I let a few minutes pass in silence. “Which one are you?”
She took another bite out of the apple. “Not telling you.”
I groaned. “Just tell me this, are you the same woman I met this morning, sold one thousand seven hundred sixty-four eyes to, and went to Starbucks with?”
“Excuse me one minute,” she said, and stood. I watched her walk through an arch at the other end of the suite, I supposed to the master bedroom. I was left alone with the giant fruit bowl and the view. Those two sailboats were starting to seriously get on my nerves: Why didn’t they move? Didn’t mankind invent sail for exactly that purpose? Was everything upside down in toy town?
There was a movement beyond the arch. A woman appeared. So far as I could tell, it was the same woman I met this morning, done up in the same Vogue costume, exhibiting the same HiSo hauteur, but with a sly smile flickering over her face. So now I had to restate the conundrum: Was this one woman posing as two, or two women posing as one? And what did it all have to do with the market price of kidneys? Nothing in my background had prepared me for this kind of challenge-perhaps if I’d gone to an Ivy League college or a Swiss finishing school, I would have had the appropriate social response at my fingertips. (Is that you, darling, or are you the to-die-for little doppelganger?) As it was, I simply stared like a spaced-out peasant.
She walked over to me in an exaggerated catwalk gait, carefully smoothed her backside, then sat demurely next to me, laid an impeccable hand on my forearm, and said, “Forgive us, but if you want to work with us, you’ll have to get used to our little jumelles ways.” Then she broke out into a grin that belonged to the other one-if there was another-reached for the apple she-or the other-had half-eaten, took a huge non-Vogue bite out of it, and burst into hysterics.
All women are aware of the debilitating power of subtle mockery; this one (or two) had it down to a fine art. In my preferred persona as police officer, I have always known how to handle it: male authority figure trumping female frivolity with a higher, realer purpose. As apprentice organ trafficker, though, I had to confess it was doing my head in. Somehow she’d managed to shrink me, and I thought it best to retreat and regroup. I stood, as an inevitable response to my own thought process, without having figured out an excuse to leave. “Ah, I, ah, forgot something-I’d better go back to my hotel,” I mumbled like an embarrassed kid.
“Oh, if it’s only something, surely it can wait?” Lilly said, also standing.
Now she blocked off one avenue of retreat with her tall, elegant form. I turned to walk around the coffee table in the opposite direction, and was just in time to slip past her as she tried to head me off. It seemed we were engaged in a noncontact form of martial art in which each protagonist occupied an inviolable personal space, which was to be used as a kind of colonizing gambit. Lilly was very good at this silent game, which had me searching for a nonviolent way of getting out of there, and her cleverly dominating the ground zero of the door. We had chased each other from the tropics of the coffee table to the northern reaches of the fridge before I was able to slip away and walk with huge strides (running would have been an admission of defeat and probably against the rules) to the door. I had the latch under my finger when she arrived and jammed the door with her foot. I cannot do justice to the expression that flickered across her face for a split-second, as though she had been taken over by an ungovernable rage, which nevertheless passed in a flash. Now with a sudden change of heart, she opened the door and said with a big chummy smile, “Please do come back this evening about nine o’clock. All will be revealed. Sorry about our little game. You’re so incredibly cute, we couldn’t resist. After all, we’re only girls, you know.”
As I was leaving the hotel’s atrium, the heat socked me in the head and my body went into shock. My lungs had trouble with the superheated air they were trying to process. To cover the half mile between the two six stars seemed an impossible task. It dawned on me that after a lifetime in the tropics I was experiencing the first symptoms of heatstroke: there is no heat like desert heat at two in the afternoon. It all added to the surreal feeling of the place, along with a pair of twins who could have been one schizophrenic female organ trader. Instead of grabbing a cab I started to run, in a panic, and my mind flipped. I saw Lilly Yip holding a human eye in the palm of her hand as if it were a living creature and crooning over it: It is sooo beautiful… Then I saw an army of eyeless ghosts marching reproachfully toward me.
Back in my room I drank cold water from the refrigerator, which is supposed to be the worst thing you can do when you overheat, and checked my e-mail. When I saw there was a message from Chanya, I immediately started to feel better, at the same time feeling pathetic that my well-being should have depended on a few lines from her: Sorry to take so long to write to you darling, I got so caught up in Dorothy’s new thing and trying to finish my f**cking thesis at the same time I even forgot to be jealous of your exotic new case in exotic Dubai-thank Buddha all the girls are Muslims and risk getting stoned to death if they look at your beautiful face the wrong way-yes, I’m missing you and feeling horny. Speaking of which: did you brilliantly interpret my cryptic SMS? Well, this is the fuller version. You remember that middle-aged blond farang with the moustache who was sitting there having a cock massage with D’s eyes on stalks? Well, he noticed and being obviously a Don Juan was quite flattered and also assumed D was on the game, so he came over to our table and bought us drinks, told us his name was Jimmy Clipp, and after about five minutes he asked D if she would like him to pay her bar fine-and she said yes! Just like that! Your mum of course is a total pro and kept a straight face while he paid D’s imaginary bar fine (which your mum gave to me to give back to D because D’s not on her payroll-yet!) and D didn’t look me in the eye again but just sat there with that dogged look on her face like she was waiting for a bus while your mum gave the john his change and then D followed Jimmy Clipp out into the street (I got up and went to the door to watch) and across to the short-time hotel and I had to put my fist in my mouth because I was literally hysterical with laughter. Got to rush, more in a couple of hours when I take a break. Love love love, C.
9
Ever do something you absolutely know is going to lead you into a whole heap of trouble, DFR, but you just cannot seem to stop yourself? I don’t mean the kind of thing you’re forced into against your will-say, doing something illegal under pressure from the boss-trading in human organs would be a good example. No, I mean something you are quite free to refuse, where the pressure is minimal to nonexistent? Something that from one perspective makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, but from the other possesses an irresistible attraction? So the answer to your question, DFR, is: Yes, I did get myself tarted up and took a cab to Lilly’s six star to arrive fashionably late at about twenty past nine that fateful evening. Standing behind the bellhop outside her door, I was all in a dither about which one she would be. Would I at last find out if there were indeed two of them? Or was I dealing with a total psycho here, albeit a psycho of genius?
The door opened on a chain, a soft female voice spoke in Arabic, and the bellhop nodded at me and strode off down the corridor. I watched the door close so the chain could be unlatched and waited. The door remained slightly ajar. After thirty seconds I pushed and-feeling like a jerk-called out: “Lilly? Oh, Lilly!” No answer. I pushed harder. The door did not resist. Lights were tastefully dimmed. I closed the door behind me and made my entrance into the vast lounge area. I was pleased that it was too dark to see the sailboats, assuming they were still there. Instead I fixated on a tall, slim female figure standing by the window. The woman by the window did not move, and neither did I, for I was suddenly in the grip of an intense speculation of the erotic kind. It went like this:
I pray in aid the ancients who meditated on the erotic possibilities of twin sisters. (Don’t ask me which ancients-we all know what horny and imaginative buggers they were.) Suppose, for example, Twin One (let’s call her Lilly) stood before you in a man’s long-sleeve white shirt and nothing else. And suppose, further, that one made passionate love to her, after which one became, so to speak, mere putty in her hands. Now, by presenting appropriate proof, she demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that she is not Lilly but Polly: Are you head over heels in love with Polly or with Lilly? Or has the whole experiment busted the great taboo of courtly love by demonstrating existentially that crotches do not differ much in quality and kind from one lover to another, so
