looked at Linda.
“Don’t look at me, Jack,” Linda said, “I don’t have one.”
Jack looked at Ben and said, “Well?”
“The left,” Ben confessed with a pout.
“So, think about all the possessive, tender, and above all proprietorial feelings you have about your left testicle,” Linda said. “Then think about someone taking it away from you and giving it to another man.”
“Or woman,” Jack said.
“Or woman,” Linda said. “Now, hold that moment-the point where it’s lost and gone forever, that oh-so-very- important part of you-”
“Wait,” Jack said. “I think we’d better make it his cock, now I see where you’re going.”
“We’re already committed to the testicle,” Linda said.
“Oh, okay. So, your left testicle,” Jack said, looking at Ben and jerking his chin. “Close your eyes. Right.” Jack looked at Linda.
“Go deep into that very specific personal proprietorial male agony, that nightmare of nightmares, far worse than dying, right?”
“Right,” Ben said, keeping his eyes closed.
“Now project that over the population of the third world-like, say, four billion people divided by two gives two billion males with those kind of feelings.”
“What kind of feelings we talking about here?” Jack said.
“I already got the message,” Ben said, opening his eyes. “Yeah, so what you’re saying is, this could all backfire badly owing to the very powerful and unpredictable feelings this new industry provokes in people. Instead of associating the Colonel with a major law and order breakthrough, we might end up with a labeling problem where he gets associated with a Frankensteinian experiment, even though he’s the good guy trying to fix it, or, even worse, as the guy preventing people from undergoing life-saving operations by busting the racket. The disgust, loathing, and paranoia could spread to all parties. At the same time you get a medical lobby kicking in defending the industry, and you end up with a public relations oil slick. Yeah, I get that.”
“But we do need to at least pay lip service-” Jack murmured.
“Oh, I think we can pay lip service, so long as we all agree we might have to finesse it,” Linda murmured back.
As if by common tribal programming, the three Americans seemed to have come to an agreement indecipherable to the rest of us. Now they were looking at me again. The two men kind of glazed over me with their eyes: I was not a member of their secret society, not an initiate, therefore I hardly existed except in the field of basic courtesy. The woman, though, double-checked my face and saw that I had indeed picked up on certain incongruous phrases: might have to finesse it; need to pay lip service. She gave me a split-second chance to ask the question, but I hadn’t decided which way to jump.
“Can we move on to the next item?” Linda said.
Now we were all waiting for Jack, who nodded and put his elbows on the arms of his chair and pressed his palms together at the same time as he kissed the tips of his fingers. He let a lot of beats pass before he said, “What we don’t want to have to deal with is a Noriega-type situation.”
“Right,” Linda said.
“Those photos of the younger Bush on a certain island not a hundred miles from the west coast of Panama- that little punk in jail after Big Daddy’s invasion and threatening to tell all-how toxic was that, for Chrissake?” Ben said.
“Bush was a cinch compared to Yeltsin. I never saw so many skeletons in one cupboard,” Ben said.
“Yeltsin? This is a breeze in comparison,” Linda said. “Try getting instructions out of a terminal alcoholic.”
“Yeah, Ben bore the brunt of that one,” Jack said with the ghost of a twinkle. Linda coughed. “Except the time he came on to Linda,” Jack added.
“If he’d been able to get it up, I woulda shot the creep,” Linda said.
“Well, what do we do?” Jack said.
Silence. Now Linda coughed again. Jack looked at her. “We’ve got to have more detailed data, so we can analyze the risks,” Linda said.
“That’s right,” Ben said.
“So, do we have a conclusion to this meeting?” Jack said.
“Well, I think we let the detective follow present instructions from the Colonel and keep a close eye.”
“That’s just the present issue-what about security in general?” Jack said.
“Like I said, we need all the relevant data-all of it,” Linda said.
“Like with Yeltsin?” Jack said. He shared a dirty grin with Ben, who was delighted.
“You boys,” Linda said.
“How’d you get out of it again?” Jack said.
“Chrissake, Jack,” Linda said.
“How’d she do it, Ben?” Jack said.
“Kicked him in the balls so hard she nearly killed the client.”
Jack’s eyes took on a new life. “Yeah. The one time they rushed him to the hospital for non-alcohol-related injury.”
“Okay, okay,” Linda said.
“So,” Jack said. “We stand pat for the moment and let the detective go to Dubai on business as usual, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily take the thing any further than that. Good. What was the detective’s name again?”
“Jit-plee-cheep,” Manny said.
“Right,” Jack said.
There was a kind of satisfied pause. The three serious Americans seemed to have talked themselves into a mood of indomitable optimism that made Vikorn smile. There was one more item on the agenda, though, something that had perhaps been alluded to so far only in code. I had a premonition of a knotty problem they were about to share with me. Linda mumbled something impossible for me to catch. Jack mumbled back. Ben said, “Better you than me, Linda.” Linda gave him a stern glance but prepared to speak.
She looked at me. “Ah, I wonder if you could help us with this, Detective. Thing is, we know the Colonel here is a genius-level administrator, but-ah-put it down to American insecurity, but it bothers us the way nothing at all is visible. I mean, no docs, no computer program-there’s nothing for us to look at. How can we know what’s supposed to happen next in any of his multiple operations? To do the job properly, we have to know everything he’s up to to make sure nothing goes wrong. I mean, with Bush we knew exactly how much coke he did and who he screwed when he was wild, and with Yeltsin we actually took control of his vodka supplier for two months prior to the election. What we thought was-”
“Some kind of project management software, with full security, firewalls, et cetera, that we could have access to, the three of us, or maybe only Jack, whatever, just so we’re not working in the dark,” Ben said.
“So far the Colonel has been kind of resistant,” Linda said.
Manny translated everything to Vikorn, who went on smiling like a gnome.
I spent the rest of the day shopping for clothes to wear in the United Arab Emirates. They say it’s one of the richest countries in the world, and I needed to look like a successful organ trader, so I went to the swank men’s shops at Chitlom. At Armani, Zegna, and Yves St. Laurent I wanted to pay with my shiny new black Amex, but none of the Thai sales assistants had ever seen one and wouldn’t take it, so I had to use a bank machine to get cash. (The machine had heard of black Amex and delivered pronto; if it could have spoken, it would have called me sir.) I have a thing about shoes: I can almost never find ones I like, and when I do, I tend to wear them out in months. It took me hours to settle on a pair of Baker-Benjes and some chamois-soft Bagattos. The shopping spree took all day, and I think there must be quite a lot of woman in me because I enjoyed it; we still think like that over here, by the way, DFR. We still have freedom of speech too.
By the time I reached home, I had to take Chanya to the One World Hotel, because she’d arranged to meet Dorothy there for supper; then the three of us were to visit my mother’s bar on Soi Cowboy. I wanted to wear my new Zegna pants with my new black Armani shirt with silver studs and my cream linen tropical jacket that comes
