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the little sachet with the coffee. She handed me a mug while I was still in bed. “I’ve been thinking about your new case. Isn’t it kind of—ah—”
    “Morally ambiguous.”
    “Yes, that’s the phrase. Isn’t it?”
    “A crime without a victim, most of the time. Most of the time the illegal organ sale is voluntary. The real crime is letting people get that poor. The real crime is capitalism, of which this trade is an inevitable product. Yes.”
    “I hadn’t gone into it that deeply. I was thinking of the beneficiary—I mean, lives are saved, right?”
    “And ruined. There are young men all over the third world, from Manila to Rio de Janeiro, who were conned into selling one kidney for a thousand or so dollars, usually to some Caucasian old person who abused their body in their youth and wasn’t going to live more than another five years anyway. Now those young men have lost their youthful good health, they fall sick easily, suffer from diminished energy, and are unable to do heavy manual work, so they get rejected by their tribes. Girlfriends and others know what the saber-shaped scar on their abdomen means. Shame and a sense of deep self-betrayal dogs their lives. Organs are very personal things. You sell one, it’s the same as saying you don’t really exist except as an economic unit. They become very angry young men.”
    Chanya listened with wrinkled brow. “I think Dorothy gave me a paper to read on organ trafficking. It was her second specialization after prostitution in Southeast Asia—they sort of go together in her mind. Maybe we should consult her. She claims the trade might have altered the whole rhetoric of gift, especially in India.”
    “Then there are the cases where the donor doesn’t agree to donate at all. It’s a feature of modern wars. Civilized man doesn’t take scalps—he strips POWs of organs, like an environmentally aware butcher, not wasting a single valuable item.”
    “Really? That happens?”
    “The Kosovar army harvested human organs like rice in October.”
    Now Chanya was ready to go to her computer, which would trap her spirit for the rest of the day. I asked her to first try to book me a business-class ticket to Dubai. The task interested her, and in a few minutes she’d found out the prices, the flight times, and how to register for air miles. We sat together at the monitor to see how well the black Amex card worked. It worked fine. Now we printed out my ticket on the rickety little printer that always seemed on the point of dying. We exchanged a glance.
    After breakfast I called Vikorn to tell him I had the ticket; now Ineeded some way of contacting the Vultures. Vikorn had it at his fingertips: “The name the lead vulture is using at the moment is Lilly Yip. Here’s her cell phone number.” He called out a ten-digit number with a Hong Kong prefix, which I wrote down. “When you get to Dubai, call her. She’ll come to your hotel to check you out. She does a lot of work for Zinna, but she also knows me. I might send her a little something she’ll like.”
    “Really?”
    “You’ll understand when you meet her. She’s a pro.”
    “You’ve already given her immunity, if this thing really takes off?”
    Vikorn coughed and ignored the question. “What time is your flight?”
    “It’s a red-eye tomorrow morning.”
    “Okay. Listen. I mentioned you to the election committee. They’re happy for you to do this, but they want to meet you.”
    I looked into the mouthpiece of my phone as if it were malfunctioning. I repeated his words slowly. “Your election committee is happy for me to carry out a law and order assignment? Well, I’m certainly relieved about that.”
    “If you keep on being sarcastic, I’ll take away your black Amex and replace it with a parking ticket. Get your ass over here at eleven A.M. ”
    Chanya caught the expression on my face when I closed the phone. “I have to go see Vikorn and his election team at eleven,” I tell her. “I