The 37th mandala : a novel (19 page)

"I am Huon."

"All right."

Derek entered ahead of him. It was a small restaurant with a counter running down the middle, where several isolated patrons sat sipping soup and watching the kitchen or reading newspapers; the opposite wall was lined with booths. Derek slid into the far corner of the last booth. Huon stood for a moment removing a gray plastic raincoat, revealing a neat tweed jacket, a striped oxfordcloth shirt with several pens in the pocket, black tie knotted in a double Windsor. He folded his coat carefully and laid it on the bench cushion. As he sat beside it, Derek saw that the man's left ear was missing. A gnarled clump of scar tissue was all that remained of it; that and a livid scar like a fresh bruise.

Huon caught him staring and touched the spot with a scarred finger. Derek made a point of not looking away; he would not be squeamish with a man who, after all, had come to stare at him.

"Many suffered," he said, "under the Khmer Rouge. Physical anguish was often the least of it. I assume you know something of Cambodia? Democratic Kampuchea? The Pol Pot, Ieng Sary regime?"

"I didn't come here for a history lesson."

"Oh, but this is not history—it is more like current events. The Khmer Rouge are a power in Cambodia today."

"What does this have to do with me?"

Huon sighed and tilted his head to one side, folding his hands. The waiter appeared at the end of the table. "That is what I would like to know," he said. "Coffee only?" Derek nodded. Huon ordered for the two of them, speaking what Derek supposed was Khmer. The plump little waiter nodded, his eyes lingering on Huon at least as openly as Derek's had, then he moved away slowly, glancing back at them twice in the time it took him to reach the kitchen. He continued to look over occasionally from beyond the counter. When he returned he carried two water glasses with a half inch of condensed milk at the bottom of each and steel coffee filters perched on their rims, draining into the milk. Derek found such stuff undrinkable, cloying and bitter at the same time; he hated the taste of the canned milk. He pushed the glass away from him. "Just bring me a cup of black coffee," he said. "You can take this away."

"I'm sorry," Huon said. "I thought you might be more of a connoisseur."

"I can't imagine why."

"Mr. Crowe ..." Huon blinked several times, as if finding the right place in a teleprompted script.

"Mr. Huon ..."

"No, that is my first name. I prefer not to give you my last, just now. I am a city councilman in Southern California, and I wish to keep all this very quiet, in order to protect my people—Cambodian refugees, I mean—from more harm."

"What can I possibly do to harm your voters?"

"You have already done a great deal, I'm afraid, merely by printing your book."

"I don't follow you at all."

"I think you must." Huon's voice, warm and conciliatory, suddenly opened to expose a reach of colder, deeper levels—those depths in which he had weathered privation and suffering yet found the strength to survive. Nothing in his outward appearance had changed, but suddenly Derek realized that the man was graver than he had suspected. He felt another twinge of fear. Did this really have to do with Elias after all?

"I think you must, because you have the mandalas. You have them exactly. And there is only one place you could have had them from."

Derek's coffee arrived. He gulped it hastily, burning several layers of tissue inside his mouth but hardly feeling it as he tried to anticipate Huon's next words and plan his response. He must get Huon off his track somehow, if what he feared was coming. .. .

"What does the name Tuol Sleng mean to you?" Huon said.

Derek relaxed, because the name meant nothing to him. He shrugged, pleased to be able to appear wholly innocent now.

"Another Cambodian restaurant?" he asked.

He was glad to see Huon look disappointed. "Tuol Sleng," he repeated. "The name means, in Khmer, the Hill of the Poison Tree. It is a district in Phnom Penh, but more importantly, it was an interrogation center in that spot, established by the Khmer Rouge during their control of Cambodia, between about 1975 and 1979. Where were you during those years, Mr. Crowe, if I may ask?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but I was in college and then working in an ad agency. I certainly wasn't gallivanting about Southeast Asia like one of those hippy mystics you must have mistaken me for."

"No one went 'gallivanting' in Cambodia during those years. Do you know where I was, Mr. Crowe?"

"If I could hazard a guess, I suppose I'd say you were in Tuol Sleng."

"Very good! But only at the very end of the regime. No one lasted very long there. Only a few survived its collapse. I escaped, yes—first Tuol Sleng and then the Vietnamese invaders. I fled to Thailand, collecting some of these scars on the way to the border." He raised his scragged hand. "We were not supposed to leave the path, you see; it was mined all around. But whenever shells went off around us, someone always panicked and jumped for cover. In this case it was several children I was looking after. Orphans. I chased after, trying to stop them, but too late. Their bodies shielded me from worse damage. They all died. These lumps—" He touched some of the grainy scars on the back of his hand—"These are shards of their bone, along with shrapnel, buried in my flesh. All that remains of those children."

Huon held Derek's eyes, as if daring him to look away. "That was at the border, among friends." His hand traveled slowly to the left side of his face; he laid the finger along his blackened jaw. "This I lost in Tuol Sleng."

Derek's coffee tasted cold and bitter. He realized he had been holding it in his mouth without swallowing; he almost gagged as he forced it down.

"One man I knew there, just before the end, lost more than this. You could say he lost almost everything he had, before they found they could keep him alive no longer. This man, I think you know a great deal about him."

Derek groped clumsily for the face he'd put on a few moments ago, but it seemed inappropriate now. The best he could manage was to look stupid and horrified.

"Maybe you did not know him. How could you, after all, being a young ... what, copywriter? But what he had, everything he had to give, came to you, I feel. I am not sure how that could be. but I will not question too much. Is it not strange how things come together, as if with a will of their own? Look how far I have come, Mr. Crowe—all the way from Cambodia to Long Beach, and now to you. I think there is a reason for this. I think it is because you are meant to give me what you have. It never truly belonged to you, and you have done enough damage with it already. I am begging you to give it to me, so that I may destroy this awful thing."

Derek realized he had to get a better grip on the situation, or Huon would surely drag him into an endless circle of accusations.

"Could you possibly be any vaguer?" he said. "If I had the slightest idea what you were talking about, or getting at, I might have broken off this conversation before now. As it is, the only reason I'm still sitting here is to marvel at how one man can say so much without making a shred of sense. It's all very touching, I assure you; I feel for the refugees, and I'm sorry your people are in their present plight. But the rest of it—you haven't said a single word that means a thing to me."

"Mr. Crowe—"

"No, wait a minute, please, Huon. Have you read my book?"

"I have seen the mandalas, as you call—"

"That's not what I asked. Have you read it?"

Huon shook his head reluctantly, as if it pained him to concede any ground. Oh, he is a politician, Derek thought.

"If you'd read my book, you would know how the mandalas came to me. They were channeled, by forces I was unaware of until the moment they announced themselves, through a woman I was seeing for spiritual counseling."

"I thought you were in advertising."

"That was in the seventies. In the eighties I turned to spiritual pursuits. My point is, if you think you recognize these symbols, maybe it's because they have revealed themselves to both of us from the same source."

Huon's face darkened. "That is ... scarcely possible."

"I would have said so myself, a few months ago." And here he had it: the inspiration that would draw Huon off his scent and send him on an even more insane and complicated trail. It was exactly what he needed! "But then I began to see the mandalas around town. On posters, billboards, flyers. The mandalas from my book—but having nothing to do with me."

Huon's fingers tightened around his water glass, still full of coffee he had not touched. The bone scars, mine scars, stood out like white kernels beneath the flesh.

"My book had yet to be published, you see? No one else knew of the designs. Until that moment I still might have half-believed they were a delusion of my patient—'Ms. A' I call her—but these came from an independent source. There is, even now, a nightclub preparing for its grand opening, with no other purpose than to dazzle the city with a huge display of mandalas. And they are not my mandalas, as you call them. They belong to everyone. They've revealed themselves everywhere."

Huon's mouth gaped. "This cannot be."

"Club Mandala," Derek said, smug and confident now. Oh, it had worked well and truly. "I suggest, if you're going to stay in the city another day or two, you check them out. Perhaps they know your friend from Poison Hill." He fumbled in his pocket and found the Post-it. "Here you go. You can call them right up."

He laid the yellow square on the table between them. Huon stared at it in disbelief. Derek had never felt quite such a feeling of triumph; it was a small battle, but who knew where it might have led had he lost it?

"A nightclub ... ?"

"Horrible, isn't it? If you ask me, that would be far more disturbing to your people than anything in my book, which has only noble intentions behind it."

He watched as Huon picked up the scrap, which clung stickily to his fingers.

"The fellow you want to talk to is called Etienne," Derek said.

Huon rose abruptly, upsetting his glass. Derek grabbed a handful of napkins from the steel canister and slapped them down in the pool, but not before some of it had leaked over into his lap. He slid out of the booth, cursing, but there was no one left to blame. Huon's form was vanishing out the front door, and now the waiter was coming toward him with a towel, looking faintly suspicious at the other man's sudden departure.

Derek grimaced and dug in his pocket for his wallet. So Huon had stiffed him for the tab. It was a small enough price for getting the politician off his back, but it still rankled.

The aftermath of his victory was equally hollow. As he climbed the stairs to his apartment, he realized how many pitfalls surrounded him, gaping like sudden sinkholes in what had seemed the solid surface of his life. He had to reduce his risks somehow. It was time, perhaps, to remove the tangible evidence that would tie him to Elias Mooney. He didn't know why he'd clung to it so long, except that the notebooks might still contain enough unused material to yield a second book—maybe enough to turn into a nice fat Mandala Tarot. Well, the notebooks were one thing; they were only words on paper. But there was no reason at all to hang onto the worst part of Elias's legacy, the part at which he was quite sure Huon had been hinting.

The box was still sitting where he had left it, next to his couch, partially open. He had avoided looking at it, dealing with it, but now was the time. He wondered at the best way. Fire? Burial? The garbage disposal?

He went into the kitchen for rubber gloves. When he got back into the room, the box was opening slowly of its own accord, the flaps creaking up. Well, he'd disturbed them, they were unfolding under pressure. It was creepy but explicable. He stood watching the flaps, waiting for the thing inside to emerge, his hands hanging at his sides in bright yellow gloves.

Come on
, he thought.
Show yourself, you ugly thing.

Then he chuckled, disgusted with himself. He was clearly insane!

How had it come to this? How?

"You know very well," he muttered. "Don't pretend you don't."

We are the corruptors among you, the instillers of deceit and futility.

—from
The Mandala Rites
of Elias Mooney

We are the angels among you, the instillers of wisdom and tranquility.

—from
The Mandala Rites
of Derek Crowe

Wizards, seers, and sorcerers traditionally inhabit dark caves, drafty castles, decrepit mansions with crumbling spires... the sort of places that even when new seem haunted. In the back of his mind, Derek was expecting something along these lines on the day he first drove to meet Elias Mooney. He knew quite well that California offered little in the way of castles—outside of Hollywood, that is. But he pictured finding Mooney ensconced in a ruinous old Victorian or at least a weathered farmhouse.

Disappointment came quickly. Once he crossed the Bay Bridge and passed through the charred Oakland hills, emerging at the east end of the Caldecott tunnel, he saw nothing but new tract homes lining the weedy yellow hillsides. San Diablo lay in a dry region beyond reach of the bay's fogs. Once farmland and nut orchards, the area had been given over to developers with a penchant for expensive condominiums in artificial woodlands. Once a small, discrete town with an identity and history of its own, San Diablo's boundaries had blurred with those of its neighbors, becoming one contiguous bedroom community. Only a sign at the freeway offramp remained to distinguish it from the rest of the suburban sprawl.

None of Derek's maps showed any route finer than the main strip, a minor freeway lined with fast-food franchises and motels, few buildings more than a decade old. He stopped at a gas station where the pump accepted his credit card and dispensed gasoline without human intervention. The young attendant sat secure in a glass booth, indicating with hand signs that his intercom was out of order when Derek asked for directions. It seemed only proper that he remain inside the malfunctioning booth, cut off from all human contact, rather than step out to answer a question. He was secure in his job, and suspicious of the world beyond it.

Likewise, no one shopping or working in the nearby 7-Eleven actually lived in San Diablo. Minor miracle: A vending machine in the parking lot dispensed local maps. With the aid of one of these, he made his way to Blackoak Avenue.

His encounter with the automated and fortified gas station, the apathetic store personnel, and the fortuitous map machine gave him a sense of disorientation that only increased when he realized he was going to meet a man raised in the days of horse-drawn wagons, general stores, and little red schoolhouses. Someone who, in this bland suburban setting, could discourse about astral travel, reincarnation, and alien civilizations yet to arise. On the other hand, it was easy to see how an old man could have grown lonely and loony and paranoid living out here. San Diablo posed exactly the sort of oppressive, lifeless scene that had always sent Derek fleeing toward the heart of the nearest city. The risks of the urban lifestyle were much more obvious and avoidable, he thought, than the insidious dangers of the placid, conformist suburbs.

Mooney's house was a tiny, neat bungalow with a roof of pink Spanish tile, set back from the sidewalk on a scrap of parched lawn. The driveway was as empty as the street, which presumably meant Mooney's visiting nurse had already been and gone; still, he parked at the curb across from the house, watching the place for a moment in the afternoon heat, searching in vain for some sign of its inhabitant's eccentricity. The dead grass was neatly trimmed, the fence pickets not too faded. No pentacles or runes in sight; not even so much as a ceramic dwarf peering out from under the hedge of sharp-tipped, waxy leaves. The only feature that distinguished the place from its neighbors was a wheelchair ramp leading up to the door at the side of the house.

He checked the address against the black iron numbers pinned to the white stucco wall of the house. He started to slot a fresh cassette into his tape recorder, then saw that the one already in it was nearly blank. He reversed to the beginning, and switched it on, realizing at the sound of ringing that this was his first conversation with Elias. He had to tape everything, since he was a lousy note-taker.

He heard the clatter of a phone snatched up, then labored breathing. An old man's voice, deep and hushed, said, "
Yes?
"

"Hello, is this Elias Mooney?"

Suspiciously, though he'd sent him the number himself and invited Derek's call: "
Who's calling?
"

"This is Derek Crowe. I just got your card and I didn't want to waste any time."

"
Oh, good!
" And he suddenly sounded delighted, all suspicion fled. "
How grand to hear from you. You took my letter in the proper spirit?
"

"I can't tell you how pleased I was to read it. Of course I've heard of you, Mr. Mooney."

The old man grumbled something.

"I'm sorry?"

"
Steiger's book?
" he said. "
That's lies, you know. All lies. He twisted everything I told him to fit his imbecilic theories.
"

"Well, that was obvious," Derek said hastily. "But knowing his prejudices in advance, it was easy enough to get past them and see what you really intended."