Kingdom (6 page)

‘Sure Nancy – but are you OK?’

‘Look, I’m about as OK as someone can be who’s just been dragged from a jetlagged stupor, interrogated and then threatened with life imprisonment . . .’

‘I am sorry – I really am. And please, just take it easy. We are pulling out all the stops this end to sort things out. The head of the Senate Foreign Relations committee is getting in touch with the Indian Ambassador. Just take it easy, do a local-colour story if you want to take your mind off things . . . something about elephants or farming . . . We’ll have everything cleared up momentarily. I promise. It’s important you stay there. Anton always wanted you to replace him if he ever went missing – so do it for him.’

For a second Nancy felt quite sick.

‘What do you mean? He told you to send me here?’

‘Yes. I always ask all my senior people who they think I should consider if regional vacancies come up . . . He always insisted you were perfect for the South Asia job . . .’

‘But he didn’t even know me; I met him so seldom . . . I hardly spoke to him . . .’

‘Well, the man read the paper, you know. He did actually read your articles.’

‘So he knew I was coming to Delhi?’

‘Well, how would he? No one has been in touch with him since he disappeared. I just meant he always recommended you to me. But forcibly, with passion. Like you were the only one he thought could do the job. That’s why I was so delighted you wanted it so much when it came up.’

Nancy shook her head in confusion: Dan Fischer didn’t know that the bone trumpet had been addressed to her and he hadn’t been privy to Inspector Lall’s insinuations. She had begun to accept that Herzog must have known – somehow, she didn’t know precisely how – that she was coming to Delhi. Perhaps he was so certain of his influence with the editor that he just assumed she would be the one to replace him. Perhaps it was a deliberate gamble on his part, just in case. To surprise her, make her perplexed. But why, why would he do that? It made no sense. For a moment Nancy felt she might throw up; then she felt strangely passive and as if she was being manipulated by forces beyond her comprehension. She thought of her compulsion to go to India, her vivid recurring dreams of the high green valleys of Tibet, of the fact that Herzog had indeed selected her for the cub reporter’s scholarship at the Sorbonne, and now – apparently – for this – but then a second later she remembered why she was newly released from the police station and her anger returned.

‘Look, Dan, that’s all very flattering. I don’t know what the hell to make of it, but sure, I’m overwhelmed. Delighted. Now, hotshot hack that I am, the question I’m running through my mind is why we don’t just run a story on Anton’s disappearance: tell the world that he’s missing, tell them that the Indian police are completely out of control? Stir things up a little, see what happens?’

‘Please, Nancy, have a little patience. Yes, eventually that might be a tactic. But at present, we need the help of these governments. Now is not the time to alienate them.’

‘Believe me, Inspector Lall and his friends seem pretty damn alienated to me already. I don’t understand you, Dan. He’s a friend of yours and he’s one of our team and you’re hanging him out to dry.’

‘Nancy, you have to let me call this one. I take your point, but I’m calling it and I believe I know what I’m doing. Just try to take it easy. Promise me you’ll do that, at least.’

‘Sure, I’ll take it easy. I’ll get myself straight to a Keralan yoga retreat and get myself busy comparing Ashtanga with Hatha, if that’s what you want. Just please let me know if you get any further with this business. And if you don’t hear from me, you know where I am – the black goddamn hole of Calcutta.’

Dan Fischer was probably more worried about headlines than anything else, she thought: ‘Renegade
Herald Tribune
Journalist Arrested for Espionage’ – that would hardly sell well with the shareholders. Herzog had always been a tricky horse to back; she had a sense that Fischer had been fire-fighting for him for years. She liked Dan Fischer; on a good day she would have considered him a friend. He was a formidable journalist; a powerhouse of ambition and courage. He was only forty-two years old himself, not that much older than her, and they had plenty of mutual friends. He was hilarious, quick as a whip and exceptionally cunning. He threw monumental parties and charmed everyone. He picked his battles carefully, and he knew perfectly well that anyone was expendable – the brand came first and the shareholders certainly wouldn’t want a big and very public row with the Chinese and Indian governments, she thought, with a mounting sense of revulsion; it might have a knock-on effect, it might cause other governments to withdraw support for the paper. It might hurt sales.

She sighed heavily and closed her eyes. The day was boiling, and she felt sweat trickling down the back of her neck. She had half a mind to do a story on Herzog herself, but what was the point? It would only get spiked by Dan. With all his cunning and political acumen, Dan realized that Herzog had become bad news. He had a plan, but it wasn’t international exposure, that was for sure. As Nancy rested her head on the greasy leather seat, she felt tired and afraid, but most of all she was simply glad she wasn’t Herzog right now; he seemed an increasingly lonely and abandoned figure; a man in dire need of friends. And whatever Dan Fischer said about not putting the authorities’ backs up, her conscience was not going to allow her simply to ignore Anton Herzog’s fate.

A young Tibetan woman hurried through the twilight across a jungle clearing, bowing her head from the relentless rain and clutching her shawl across her chest. She was a teacher from the village school who had trained as a nurse in Lhasa. Behind her on the jungle floor, on a makeshift stretcher, lay the body of the stranger. From the neck down he had been covered with a piece of blue plastic sheeting. His forehead was wrapped in a wet towel that shielded his eyes and the bridge of his nose. His white arms were folded across his chest, as if he were a fallen Viking warrior, awaiting the last rites of the funeral pyre. All around the clearing, little groups of monks were huddling beside makeshift fires, boiling up water for yak-butter tea.

The young woman ducked under a tarpaulin that had been strung between the branches of the trees to offer some protection from the endless rain. She bowed to the Abbot’s deputy and then knelt on the yak-wool rug. The old lama motioned to the two monks who sat near him to leave. Hastily they picked themselves up and darted across the clearing to join the tea-drinkers. The lama leant towards her, his voice urgent, almost desperate:

‘So, has he said anything?’

The girl had an anxious expression on her face.

‘He is feverish. The doctor is very concerned.’

‘But has he said anything?’

The girl hesitated. She was afraid she might get something wrong.

‘Yes – but I’m not sure. I can’t understand exactly. He is delirious. He sees things. Things that aren’t there . . .’

‘Well, tell me anything. What words has he said? His name?’

The girl looked confused.

‘No, lama. Sometimes he says things in Tibetan. Words like the monks use at public prayers. Then he speaks sometimes in other languages, languages I have never heard before, and then sometimes in English. He is delirious. He is calling for people I think. He is in so much pain. But once, when we stopped by the waterfall, he smiled and looked at me as if he could see me. He was happy. He held my arm and then he kept saying one thing only, over and over again: Shangri-La. Shangri-La. Shangri-La . . .’

The monk felt his heart stop and then resume suddenly, with a massive thump and a terrible pain, as if someone had just pushed a blunt needle into it. Trying to regain his composure, he nodded and then, with a sickly look on his face, he said, ‘Listen to him. Nurse him. Try to encourage him to speak.’

‘Yes, lama. I will remain by his side at all times.’

She stood up to go and then stopped.

‘Lama . . . what does it mean, Shangri-La?’

‘Don’t worry yourself girl,’ said the old lama. ‘Just stay by his side and tell me everything he says.’

She curtsied and left. The rain drummed on the tarpaulin. Shangri-La. The lama knew all too well what the word meant. It was the name that the Westerners gave to Shambala, the secret kingdom of the Himalayas that was hidden in the valleys to the west. Only a handful of lamas preserved the ancient secret knowledge of the precipitous route; even the Abbot himself was forbidden to approach.

He stared down at the stranger, as he lay like a corpse on the stretcher on the other side of the clearing, and then the lama shut his eyes and prepared to meditate.

Phantoms appeared in his mind’s eye. Images of long-dead lamas came to him – great lamas who had taught him as a boy. He could hear conversations in his head, as if he was back there, all those years ago, sitting at their feet. Once, at Kailash monastery, a venerable old lama had told him that a terrible war had once been fought in the lands of the West, far beyond the Himalayas. It had seemed at the time that the whole world was on the point of going over to the dark side; that the sun was going to set for ever on the world. Some white men had come, seeking the kingdom of Shambala. They intended to go there and ask the King for help. The lamas had tried to aid them on their quest. It had been a terrible mistake. The lamas did not realize that the white men came from a different world, a world steeped in blood. They should not have trafficked with them. They should never have helped them. Such men brought only destruction.

The deputy thought of these things and tried to regulate his breathing, but every time he attempted to begin his meditation the word on the stranger’s lips came back to haunt him: Shangri-La.

A desperate urge came over him to get up and run across the clearing and carry the dreaded stranger down to the river. There he could wade out into the middle of the stream, floating the stretcher and its cargo behind him, and then the ice-cold Himalayan waters would carry the nightmare away, off down to the great waterfall and on into India and beyond.

But the Abbot had specifically instructed them to care for this man. Against everything he had learned, he was to protect this white man, to save him if he could. And the lama shivered, and thought how much he wished the Abbot was with them now. If only the Abbot had heard the words himself . . .

The sun was long past its zenith by the time that Nancy Kelly arrived at the offices of the
International Herald Tribune
on Akhbar Street. The taxi had taken almost an hour to crawl around the rickshaws, cows, beggars and assorted broken-down vehicles that littered even Delhi’s most important roads. The first thing she had done when she got off the phone with Dan was call ahead to the office.

Waiting for the phone to connect, Nancy had stared out of the window, frustrated at the slowness of the journey and wondering what she should do now. Beyond, the ragged inhabitants of Delhi, struggling to survive. An old man carrying thousands of crushed plastic bottles on his back shuffled past, his careworn face a map of his wretched life; a cow was standing at the entrance to the next street forcing the traffic to swerve, so some vehicles almost collided with an angry vegetable stallholder’s stand. Nancy observed these incidents, but hardly registered them. All she could do was replay the interview again and again in her head and nervously finger the package on her lap. What could Herzog have done, she asked herself, that could so threaten the security of two powerful nations? Had he been interviewing the wrong people? Carrying political papers for Tibetan radicals? She couldn’t imagine it; you had to be pretty green these days to get yourself caught doing things like that, and he of all people would have been alert to the pitfalls.

Another thought dogged her, a truth that Inspector Lall had planted in her mind: Herzog would be far better off explaining himself in India than in China. She dreaded to think what might happen to him if he was caught over the border, no matter whether he was innocent or not. She recalled an article that a colleague of hers had once written on the interrogation techniques used during the Cultural Revolution – it was enough to make you lose all faith in humanity.

Finally, Nancy had a connection. The phone was answered briskly by Krishna Murthi, a thirty-year-old Indian, famous throughout the
Trib
’s Asian correspondents for being better informed and better read than anyone else on staff. Back in New York, before she left for Delhi, Nancy had lunched with colleagues who had recently been through the Delhi office. When she asked who she needed to keep sweet, they all said that Krishna Murthi was the key to a successful stay. He was a miracle worker of the highest order, they told her. A fixer, in the old-fashioned sense. Now, holding the phone in a sweaty hand, the other still holding on to the bizarre package, Nancy told Krishna Murthi who she was and apologized for not having been in touch sooner. ‘I’ll explain everything when I get to the office,’ she said, and rang off before the line cut out. Surely, she thought, Krishna Murthi would be able to shed some light on the mysterious activities of Anton Herzog.

Krishna Murthi was waiting for her when she pushed open the smoked-glass door of the office. Smartly dressed, slight of build, he put out a hand and said, ‘Ms Kelly I am delighted to meet you. I was phoned shortly after your call by Dan Fischer.’

No doubt, thought Nancy, to instruct you to make sure I stay put in Delhi and don’t do anything to rock the boat.

Krishna continued, ‘He explained matters further. I am so sorry this has been your welcome to India.’

Krishna ushered her into the room. He had intelligent eyes and a kind face, and he was a calming element in an office which looked as if it had recently been ransacked. As well as hundreds more of the figurines and stone statues Nancy had admired in the living room of the company flat, there were two desks, covered in paperwork, several telephones and computers. In front of the desks was a large, well-worn leather sofa, covered in piles of magazines. Krishna rushed over and cleared a space for her. Nancy collapsed into the well-worn leather seat, briefly overwhelmed with tiredness and nerves. As she collected herself, Krishna weaved his way through the clutter and between the two desks and went over to an open doorway. Beyond was a second room. Speaking to someone in this room, he gave a quick order in Hindi and then turned back to Nancy.