24
I’m at one of the cooked-food stalls in the street outside the station when my cell phone rings. When I check the window, I see it is a “private number,” meaning no one close to me: if it was Chanya or Vikorn, the phone would definitely let me know. I look at the screen for a moment and realize the phone is the only thing in my life that I have under control right now. It seems natural for me to exercise my sovereignty by pressing the “silent” button; now the caller is holding his/her cell to their ear thinking they’re making a noise in my life when actually they’re suffering from the great delusion of our times: that someone is listening. After a minute or so the caller gives up, and I restore the ring tone.
Now the thing starts again. I stare at the screen: “private number.” I press “silent.” The caller gives up. I restore the ring tone. The caller calls again. On the fifth attempt, I start to weaken. Suppose it’s important? I check to see how long the caller is prepared to go on ringing into emptiness: three minutes this time. Maybe it is important? I decide to see if they’ll go to nine attempts, nine being a lucky number over here. Yep. To fulfill my conditions for accepting their call, I decide they must wait until they’re at two and a half minutes on the ninth call. Would you believe, they gave up after a minute and a half? Now I’m wondering who the hell it was and wishing they’d ring back.
I’ve finished my somtam, paid, and I’m strolling down the street-when it rings again. I press the pickup button. Now a woman is speaking urgently into my left ear, but I don’t understand a word. I scratch my jaw, trying to identify the language. It must be a Chinese dialect because there are a lot of x — type vowels, which can sound seductively soft one moment, then make you wonder if the speaker has a cockroach stuck in her throat the next. Got it: Shanghainese. I speak very slowly in English: “I do not understand a word you are saying,” and hang up.
The caller must have my number on autodial, because it starts ringing again faster than anyone could plug the numbers into a cell phone. I say, “Yes.”
“Is that the Honorable Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep?”
Now the voice is male, Chinese. The English seems almost perfect, despite the literal translation from formal Chinese. “Yes.”
“Honorable Detective, I am Detective Sun Bin from Shanghai Yangpu District, Thirteenth Precinct.”
My heart has inexplicably skipped a beat. “Yes?”
“Detective, I am not at liberty to tell you how I obtained your private telephone number-”
“Inspector Chan of the Hong Kong police gave it to you, didn’t he?”
“Ah, I’m not too clear about that. Detective, I am calling to see if it would be possible for you and I to collaborate on a matter of mutual interest.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Detective, it has fallen to me to investigate a very sad and tragic case of triple homicide.”
“Where?”
“In Shanghai, Detective. I have become aware of the similar circumstances in which three people died in a case you are brilliantly investigating for the Honorable Royal Thai Police Force.”
“How did you become aware of those circumstances?”
“Ah, I’m not too clear, Honorable Detective. However, I can reveal that in the present case, which occurred in a luxury apartment building here, the victims were all shot in the back of the head and their solid organs were surgically removed with great skill.”
He knows he’s got my attention and lets the silence hang for a moment.
“What gender were your victims?” I ask.
“Two males and one female.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
I take a deep breath. “Do I come to you, or do you come to me?”
“In my humble opinion the honorable detective, who lives in a country which grants its citizens certain democratic rights, would find it considerably easier to obtain a visa for the PRC than your humble correspondent would find it to visit your honorable country.”
“Where did you learn English?”
“Books and TV.”
“You are a genius.”
“Forgive me, but I cannot accept such a compliment from a giant in the art of detection such as yourself.”
“Did Chan tell you to talk like this when you spoke to me?”
“Ah, I’m not too clear.”
25
“Welcome to the Kingdom of Hu,” Sun Bin says. He is short, slim, and wiry, with a thin face molded by mean streets.
I already know that Hu is the local name for Shanghai because I forgot to bring anything to read for the flight from Bangkok, so I was stuck with the in-flight magazine. That’s about the limit of my knowledge, though. The airport is hypermodern, shiny and high tech, and so is the train into town. Then things start to slow down somewhat. I’ve never seen so many people crammed into the same space. They are everywhere, like a moving jungle where you have to negotiate your way around forests of Homo sapiens and avoid all bottlenecks. Sun Bin is a skilled guide, though, and demonstrates unusual talent for overtaking on bends and exploiting almost invisible openings in great walls of humans.
At the morgue he shows me three cadavers that have been mutilated in exactly the same way as the three on Vulture Peak. He watches closely as I become fascinated by exactly how accurately the atrocities have been replicated, down to the absence of faces and eyes. We exchange glances. I nod. He nods back.
Now we are in a cab on our way to some other part of Sun Bin’s precinct. Now we are entering a high-end apartment building with a lobby to beat the Ritz, uniformed security, marble everywhere. Sun Bin flaps his wallet at the receptionist, who sees his police badge and nods. On the thirty-third floor we exit the lift and stride down a corridor until we come to a yellow tape stretched between two traffic cones. Sun Bin takes out a key, and we enter the apartment.
It is vast and must boast about six bedrooms. The floor-to-ceiling windows reveal a modern city like no other. In the distant days of aristocratic art, it was said that architecture is frozen music; I guess what I’m looking at is a pretty good three-dimensional representation of iTunes, with the great rap phallus of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower thrusting into the skyline, the Bolshoi-ish Exhibition Center, the orphic HSBC building, and the pop-songy Sassoon House in a riot of eclecticism. Sun Bin takes me into the master bedroom, where a tall figure in a floral tourist shirt and smart casual slacks is waiting, hands in pockets.
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” Chan says.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I counter.
He jerks his chin at the king-size bed upon which three life-size paper cutouts have been placed, to represent where and how the bodies were found. Chan and Sun Bin give me a couple of minutes to take it all in, then raise their eyes and wrinkle their brows.
“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.”
