The Godfather of Kathmandu (26 page)

“My informants? Why didn’t you ask before? One’s called Narayan, the other’s Shah.”

To my astonishment and rage, he has suddenly closed his phone. I
stare at my own for a moment, then go to the phone’s log to try to find the number he was using, but the log shows it as an anonymous call. Stumped, I close my phone and slide it into my pocket. This has the effect of triggering another bout of paranoia, because I feel diminished without the gadget in my hand.

Now I’m recovering from the moment and my energy is returning. I know Tietsin is right: I have to get away from the stupa. Its great, looming, sepulchral whiteness is too much, and when I look at it I start to feel ill all over again. With no doubt in my heart this time, I have a cab drive me to the Thai Airways offices on Durber Marg, where I book myself on the next plane to Bangkok.

When I land at Suvarnabhum Airport, it is about six in the evening. I have no luggage to collect, so I grab a taxi and I sit in the back with my eyes closed, exhausted. When I reach home, I remember to switch my phone back on just before crashing.

A tiny voice makes insect noises in the depths of my cell phone’s miniature speaker, after shattering my fragile sleep with “All Along the Watchtower”: “So, how’s it going? Feeling better?”

I hold the phone closer to my ear. He’s not using his UN accent tonight: it’s straight New York with a touch of Brooklyn that penetrates the blackness.

“D’you know what time it is?”

“Sure. For you it’s four o’clock in the morning, for me it’s two hours earlier than that, but I don’t sleep much. Four o’clock is when all good monks get up to start their daily practice.”

“I’m not a monk.”

“Who are you kidding?”

I let a beat pass. “My son died. I didn’t tell you. I thought you’d
see
it, you being enlightened and all. I was testing you. He was killed in an accident. You didn’t know, did you?”

We hang in silence for a moment. “No, I’m sorry. Very sorry. I didn’t know.”

“But you knew I was going to be hit by something devastating. You said so.”

“The spirit is always devastating on its first visit. When you insisted on the initiation, I knew you were going to take a hit. Same as me. I didn’t invent dharma. You have Western blood, you wanted the karma of ten thousand lifetimes all rolled up into one hit so you can take the fast track
to enlightenment and get the gold medal before anyone else. Well …” He sighs. “But I’m still sorry. There is no worse feeling than the first time you get whacked, no matter what any of the old hands tell you. I’m just glad it’s you and not me—and you’ll feel the same, one day.”

“Thanks.” I decide to change the subject. “We’re having a little problem here, a girl, an Englishwoman in her late twenties, a mule named Mary Smith—somebody busted her. She has a Nepali visa in her passport. D’you know who busted her?”

“Sure, General Zinna. You know that.”

“I mean, who busted her to Zinna?”

“I did.”

The unadorned confession leaves me speechless for a moment. “Are you crazy? D’you know what Vikorn is going to do when he finds out? It’s my duty to tell him.”

“So tell him. I don’t mind. In fact, I insist. I don’t want you trying to make me responsible for your failure of duty.”

“But I thought you had a deal with him—with us. D’you think he’s still going to deal with you after this?”

“I’m sure of it. In fact, he’ll want to deal even more.”

I’m lost. All I can think of to say for the moment is, “Why?”

“Vikorn doesn’t have the money. He told me. I need forty, and the most he can raise on short notice is twenty.”

The full implications of this take a while to dawn on me. “You’re trying to muscle him? Look, one: he doesn’t muscle easy, in fact he doesn’t muscle at all, and two: he really can’t raise that much in a week. He just can’t do it.”

“I know that.”

“So?”

“His chum, General Zinna, he’s in the same boat.”

I’m so aghast I can hardly speak. I’m also disillusioned: Tietsin is coming across as a dangerous amateur. “You went to Zinna when you already had a deal with us?” I pause to allow myself a cooling inhalation. “Look, you may be a great guru or yogin or whatever, but that’s one big no-no. Over here, I’m sorry to have to say, that’s dumber than dumb. You have just screwed the whole thing up. Maybe you should look somewhere else for a deal, how about Amsterdam, or somewhere not less than five thousand miles away?”

“No. I like you. I’m sticking with you. I told you, Tibetans are a naturally loyal people. We don’t give up on someone we take to—not in one lifetime anyway. I might have gone off you before the Maitreya Buddha arrives, but there’s plenty of time.”

“How can you be so cocky?”

“It’s not cocky. Think about it. Think out loud for me.”

“Okay, I’m thinking out loud. I’m thinking that you have double-crossed the most powerful drug lord in Thailand, after having first busted that Australian mule who was working for the second-most powerful drug lord in Thailand. That’s two very big enemies and no friends except me, and from a business perspective I’m also starting to have my doubts. Maybe you should stick to teaching enlightenment through voluntary psychosis.”

He has the audacity to sigh, as if I’m a slow learner. “You’re too Western in your outlook. It’s too black-and-white. People are driven by psychology. What does Buddhism tell us about that? What are the three motivations of ordinary men?”

“Fear, lust, and aggression.”

“Right. Why was your Colonel so keen to deal with me?”

“Because what you’re offering is so big he’ll be able to annihilate Zinna. Aggression.”

“And what would be the reason why General Zinna might see me as a gift from heaven?”

“Okay, so he can get big enough to annihilate Vikorn, but—”

“Stop, you’re too stuck in the here and now. Make the blade wheel work for you. It doesn’t have to be a full-blown internal workout every time, you can calibrate it a bit. Take a full minute to let it enter your mind, let it rise up from the subconscious, where you have carefully buried it.”

I close my eyes and relax. Damn him, it starts to work. But I still don’t understand how he’s going to get away with alienating his main business partner.

“So,” he says, “how far have we got?”

“Well, like I just said, it’s all about fear, lust, and aggression. You don’t have to be Buddhist to know that.”

“And what happens when aggression collapses, as it inevitably does?”

“You start again with fear. It’s the vicious circle in the middle of the mandala: snake, pig, and eagle, usually.”

“And what would Vikorn fear most in these circumstances?”

“Easy. That he might get annihilated by Zinna.”

“Right. And what does Zinna fear most?”

My eyes start to open. I’m stammering at his audacity when I say, “You’re, you’re, you’re playing them off against each other? But how—?”

“When I spoke to Zinna he said the same thing as Vikorn. He can only get twenty at short notice. That’s when I knew the dharma was on my side. Two and two make four, right?”

I gasp. “You really think you can get them to work together? Form a partnership to raise forty million?”

Another of those intimidating sighs. “You just told me they will. Fear: what choice do they have?”

Still gasping: “Each one has to be
in
because the other is
in?
You’re amazing. But I don’t think you’ll get away with it. They’ll kill each other first. Assuming they can’t get to Kathmandu to kill
you.”

He pauses to let the darkness speak, then: “Hmm, you may be right. I don’t like to be complacent. That’s why I’ve got you.”

“I only work for Vikorn; I don’t work for Zinna.”

“You are a peacetime consigliere—after you left I watched the DVDs. I thought Brando was terrific, as was Pacino, and you are a perfect Hagen. So, do peace. After all, you’re only trying to make your boss richer.”

I’m exploring my left ear with my left pinkie. “I still don’t get why you had to bust the English girl.”

“It wasn’t my idea. Zinna insisted. He had to start on an even footing, he said, and I’d already busted one of his. The trouble is, he’s psychotic, and with psychotics you have to accept there’s a wall in them they can’t get around. He can’t get around his jealousy of your boss. Vikorn has a better mind, and he’s not psychotic.”

“So what is he?”

“Go figure—I have never come across anything like him before! When I was in the monastery we spent a whole year on
citipati
, which is a highly specialized kind of fire demon, and Vikorn could belong to a subspecies, but I’m not sure. You really need an expert. It’s as tricky as sexing a kitten. Anyway, I think you get the idea, and the General is expecting a visit. I wouldn’t take Lek if I were you, he gets the soldiers all excited.”

“How do you know about—”

He’s closed his phone. Now I realize I forgot to ask if he had ever met
Frank Charles; after all, the American didn’t have just one Nepali visa in his passport, he had about a dozen. It’s four-thirty in the morning. I also forgot to ask him how he knew the names of those two mules in the first place. Joint time.

That’s better. I’m not encouraging you to break the law,
farang
, but if on your next trip to Amsterdam and those wonderful smoking cafés (funny how many software companies hold their office parties there), or when you’re hanging out in good ol’ Humboldt County, home to the medicinal herb (they say at least 1 percent really
are
on chemo), or maybe you make regular trips to the Riff Mountains over in Morocco, or you contribute in some other clandestine way to the global community of secret smokers (do you realize that the number of people who voted in the last American presidential election were only a tiny fraction of the number of people who smoke marijuana, worldwide? Globalism cuts both ways)—if, as I say, you find yourself partaking perhaps out of mere social duty, as is de rigueur for all presidential candidates these days and I’m glad to hear it (if the last president had taken a toke before bedtime, how many lives might have been saved?), then allow me to recommend the humble herb not only as a meditation aid, but also for the purposes of forensic investigation: it’s not good on detail, but it provides a terrific overview. For example, what do we have here exactly, at the present time of smoking? One hell of a tangle, is what we have. Mellowing it all out under the influence of the life-giving weed, I find as follows:

I am investigating the most colorful and photogenic murder of my career under the name of my most serious professional rival, who will get all the credit when I solve it—which I will do because I’m drearily good at that sort of thing—while trying to arrange a huge smack shipment with a rogue Tibetan yogin, who happens also to be my meditation guru at my own insistence, despite a life-threatening conflict of interest with regard to my boss, Colonel Vikorn, who is most interested not in selling smack but in ruining General Zinna, who is equally keen to ruin Vikorn and couldn’t really give a damn about commerce as long as Vikorn goes to jail for longer than he does at the end of the day, and the task of your investigative reporter-cum-consigliere-cum-detective at this stage is to persuade these two old bull elephants to join hands in joyful harmony for
the purpose of buying said karma-laden poison from the most selfless and enlightened being I have met in a lifetime of searching, who has turned my head upside down with some ultra-powerful magic from the ultra-powerful but not very well-known Vajrayana school of Buddhism, also known as Tantra, also known as Apocalyptic Buddhism. Can you blame me for rolling another?

Just because it’s dawn doesn’t mean I’m sober. My assisted meditation got a little off track toward five o’clock this morning and I started to develop this question for you,
farang
, which I’m having trouble getting out of my head. This hand-started universe of yours, this
Big Bang
—for Buddha’s sake, what kind of cosmology is that? Was the guy who invented it also responsible for the Virgin birth? And now there are strings attached. Did you know that according to Wikipedia (which is never wrong), the relationship of one
string
, in terms of mass, to one atom is roughly the same as the ratio of an apple to the sun? Frankly, I prefer the original Sanskrit.

Okay, I’m in my bathroom staring at the unshaven guy in the mirror and watching my image of him, which is really his image of me, getting fleshed out as memory floods back. I am becoming more recognizable to myself by the second. Did you ever observe that there are two quite different forms of waking up available to the human species? One when you’re happy, the other when you’re not; there’s no comparison, right? These days Guilt and Horror stand guard at my bedside every morning. Their karmic sources seem interchangeable: Pichai’s death can fill me with guilt or horror, depending on which demon happens to prevail. Similarly, the heroin: I can be crippled with guilt or crippled with horror, according to the way my mood is running. Right now, I can hardly move. I am transfixed by what has happened to the guy staring out at me from the glass, the very one who from time to time in his life has seemed really quite close to the full spiritual awakening promised by the Buddha. Not this morning.
And the whole agony of the thing seems bound up with Tietsin’s blade wheel; I have never had to get to know myself so well before. The consequence is like waking in a shallow grave and having to shake off the clay before you can start work. I groan when I remember my duties today.

It seems I have to moderate a meeting between Vikorn and Zinna, who have been impatiently awaiting my return from Kathmandu so they can move forward with structuring a temporary partnership which will allow them to pool resources to buy forty million dollars’ worth of smack from Tietsin. There are a lot of points to cover. Vikorn has written some down for me, but I have issues of my own, the most basic being how to get the dough to Tietsin safely.

This is deep consigliere stuff, and not without a certain dignity of office. I imagine the chairman of the World Bank often has to tackle this kind of thing, though with less visible threat to his health. Vikorn conceded the venue, which will be Zinna’s army HQ, in return for naming me secretary to the board. Zinna is putting up with me because I seem to have a way with the supplier; that, at least, is the story Vikorn has sold to him. Anyway, I am the only one on the Thai national team who has actually met Tietsin, and now that Lek has spread the word about what a terrifying witch the Tibetan is, having more or less turned me into his zombie and slave, no one else is keen to step up for the position of lead negotiator to Free Tibet. On the downside, colleagues have started giving me strange looks; I have the feeling people are reluctant to find themselves alone with me. Sometimes I’m tempted to turn them all into frogs. (That was a joke,
farang.)