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think they’re going to brief me about my law and order assignment.”
    “Wow,” Chanya said. “This is getting seriously Californian.”
    As I was knocking on Vikorn’s door I heard American voices that suddenly stopped. Instead of the usual “Yeah” from the boss, Manny opened the door. I remembered that Manny spoke English and often interpreted for Vikorn when he needed to talk to Miami.
    What was shocking to me at this moment was the new sofa. It was beige leather and looked Italian and quite incongruous. Vikorn prided himself on his bare wooden boards and couple of hard chairs for hard cops to sit on while he dished out orders. I think he must havetold Manny to go buy the most expensive sofa she could find, and now here it was supporting two American bottoms, one female, the other male. There was a third stranger, an older American man who had been given a chair that, though old and retrieved from some storeroom somewhere, nevertheless had arms and therefore could be said to be the equal in protocol of Vikorn’s own chair, which also had arms. The two armless chairs had been relegated to a position in the corner, but now Manny brought me one to sit on.
    The two men and the woman owned in common a specifically North American seriousness, which seemed to freeze nerve endings in the area of the cheeks and mouth. I knew instinctively not to appear too human around those people.
    “Sonchai, how nice to see you.” Vikorn beamed.
    I threw him an incredulous look, which I had to modify immediately. “Great to see you too, Colonel,” I said. We had spoken in Thai, but Manny was under instructions to translate everything into English. “The Colonel said, ‘How nice to see you,’ and Detective Jitpleecheep said it was nice to see the Colonel too,” Manny explained. The three guests allowed their lips to part in nanosecond smiles that bloomed and self-erased while Vikorn told me everybody’s names. The woman was called Linda, the older man was Jack, and the younger man sitting on the sofa with Linda (I decided he was older than he seemed: one of those John Kennedy–type faces that look thirty when the owner is at least forty) was called Ben. Vikorn told me he had outlined the bare bones of my trip to Dubai and the basic strategy of making contact with the global organ-trafficking community.
    “The Colonel just explained to the detective that he had already outlined to you the bare bones of the detective’s forthcoming trip to Dubai and the basic strategy of making contact with the global organ-trafficking community,” Manny said.
    Now we were waiting for the Americans. The woman and the man on the sofa waited for the older man in the chair to speak. I thought, from the way he was twisted in the chair with his long shanks drawn up like Abraham Lincoln, that Jack must be very tall. He remained immobile, then turned to the woman with his brows raised and said, “Linda?”
    Linda nodded thoughtfully, prepared to speak, coughed, remained silent. Nevertheless Jack treated this as a useful contribution and passed on. “Ben?” he said.
    “Yeah,” Ben said, “I can see the point. The detective here discovers that Thailand is being used by unscrupulous organ traders as a center from which to conduct their evil trafficking. The Colonel busts them—it’s like the gold ring. The Colonel not only puts himself on the international law enforcement map, he makes Thailand into the squeaky-clean, non-organ-trafficking, righteous Buddhist center of humane governance of the world. Sure, I can see the upside.”
    The older man said, “Linda?”
    “I don’t know, Jack,” Linda said.
    “Don’t know what, Linda?” Jack said from his arm chair.
    “I don’t know if it would be a plus or a minus for us.”
    “Surely a plus?” Ben said.
    “Take us through that,” Jack said.
    “Bust someone big in this trade, and you get the attention of the world,” Ben said.
    “Sure,” Linda said, “I got that the first time. But