The Godfather of Kathmandu (15 page)

I’m waiting for Zinna to ask more about the Tibetan connection, and not at all sure how I’m going to answer.

“The informant, he actually gave you his name. A
Doctor
Tietsin?”

I raise my palms. “Anyone can invent a name.”

The General stares at me with unnerving intensity for more than a minute, then seems to withdraw his interest. “That’s right, anyone can invent a name. Even a name like that.”

“Maybe it’s some kind of joke in Tibetan,” I offer. To his skeptical frown, I add, “You know, like someone might say Mickey Mouse or Napoléon Bonaparte—a joke in Tibetan culture, I mean.”

“What do you know about Tibetan culture?” he asks suddenly.

“Nothing.”

To my surprise he seems reluctant to pursue the subject. “Okay, you can go.”

When I stand up I say, “She didn’t talk, by the way.”

“Who?”

“The Australian, Rosie McCoy. She didn’t say a thing. I don’t think she knows anything. You run a tight operation, don’t you? There wouldn’t be anything to connect her to you or your people?”

“There wasn’t anything to connect her to your Tibetan either, until you busted her.”

“D’you want me to talk to Vikorn, see if we can persuade Immigration to drop the case—I mean as a kind of preliminary sweetener to your upcoming negotiations?”

He thinks about this, before saying, “No. This is something I want to deal with myself.” He gives a sudden phony smile. “I shan’t be troubling you.” As I’m leaving he surprises me with a final comment. “That whole thing up in Nepal, the crown prince massacring his family in June 2001, the collapse of the monarchy, the success of the Communists—you know what it was all about, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, now you do. They’ve been moving stuff from Tibet down into Nepal for twenty years. It’s a bigger operation than anything we have in Thailand. Whoever runs the government runs the trafficking. Actually, it’s a lot bigger than Colombia, but it’s Himalayan, so nobody knows, not even the Americans. The CIA have no real intelligence about Tibet at all, except what they get from the Dalai Lama’s people in Dharamsala and a few spies in Lhasa.” He looks at me. “And they know better than to talk about the Business.”

At the door I say, “How do you know?”

“A Tibetan told me.”

“Tietsin? He was here? He called you from Kathmandu?” Zinna jerks his chin to indicate that he doesn’t answer questions. “But why move it through Tibet? Why not through Pakistan and India? Mumbai, New Delhi, and Calcutta are notorious trafficking centers.”

“That’s why. Those places are notorious. All the big Western security agencies are in India in invasion numbers, not only the CIA and the DEA, but all the French and German and Dutch, too, along with the British MI6. But when the product disappears into Tibet there are no traces. No tip-offs. And apparently there are hundreds of routes from Tibet into Nepal, routes only Tibetans, Sherpas, and Gurkhas know about. It arrives by foot without a history. Nervous buyers prefer it that way.” He gives me a quizzical look.

In the cab on the way back to Krung Thep, Lek and I are silent for most of the journey. When we finally reach the outskirts, Lek says, “You want to know if they fucked me or not, don’t you?”

“No. I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell me.”

“There are so many ways to fuck someone like me, aren’t there? What does it matter how they did it?”

Ten minutes later when he’s getting out of the cab, he says, “I suppose there’s nothing for it but to go home and have a good cry. I expect I’ll be all right in the morning.”

If I know I’m crazy, does that mean I’m not? I ask this question because it’s three twenty-two a.m. This is the time I awake with a groan every night: three twenty-two exactly. And I know that the noise I just heard, the one which woke me up, although it sounded like someone moving in the yard outside, was a pure product of psychosis. Yes, my heart is thumping wildly, my head is sweating so much the pillow is wet, and I’m supine with terror. Surely I’m not yet insane enough to be able to hear imaginary noises in full, normal, daylight consciousness? Oh yes I am. There it goes again: not out in the yard, but inside my skull: a weird and terrifying chirping, like that of a trapped bird warning the others:
Danger, don’t come here
. It’s just like the nun said: I’m breathing deep into my solar plexus in which a loose nerve is causing havoc. I look down with fascination at my heaving chest and close my eyes.
Now
, I tell myself,
now, choose this moment to face it, whatever it is
. I swallow.
Okay, now, I’m going to look this devil in the eye. I’m going to stare it down
.

I’m afraid of having to see Pichai’s small body sliding into the oven all over again. I’m afraid of the depth of grief, how far down it might take me, like a subterranean river roaring all the way to hell. How impossible will it be to return? Like a diver slipping at night into a freezing sea, I force my breathing to steady, to slowly dominate my wildly jumping mind.
Okay
, I say to myself,
okay, now: look!

Isn’t it always the way, that when you finally screw your courage to the sticking place, the phone rings? It’s a real ring, not an imaginary one; I
can still tell the difference. Blinking rapidly, having been jerked so violently back into the mundane, I grope for the cell phone and manage to press the green glyph as I lay it on the pillow next to my ear.

The caller does not declare himself. He has no need. “What’s happening?”

I let a beat pass. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you forever.”

“When the seeker is ready, the master will come.”

“Have you spent a lot of time in California?”

He chuckles. “See, it’s not as bad as all that, or you wouldn’t be capable of sarcasm.”

“I was expressing disgust. I don’t need Spiritual Quest One-oh-one just now, thanks.”

Another chuckle. “Good, you’re getting stronger. Just tell me what you were doing just now. I’ll tell you what it felt like at my end. It felt like you were dressing up in a suit of armor to get ready to skewer a dragon.”

“I hate the way you’ve perfected telepathy. If it weren’t for that, I could dismiss you as a charlatan in a heartbeat.”

“You can do that if you like. Go ahead, dismiss me as a charlatan. It’s a basic early step. We might have to postpone your enlightenment for this lifetime, but that’s okay. Just make sure you rebirth in a decent body with the right cultural influences. That’s not so easy, of course. The best estimate is a few hundred more screwups in disastrous socioeconomic circumstances before your chance comes around again. And that’s only rebirths in the human form. For the rest, I would choose mammals with short life spans. It’ll save time.”

“Now you’re really sounding like a salesman,” I grumble.

“I told you, I once did my best to join corporate America.”

I sigh. “Just tell me why you called me.”

“Actually,
you
called
me
. I tried to contact you on the other side, but you were all closed up with fear. Clairvoyantly, if you must know, you looked like a fetus with its eyes sewn up.”

“I was just about to face my deepest fear.”

He clears his throat. “That’s what I called about. Your courage is noted, but this is not the moment.”

“Why?”

“You’re still too weak, there are too many holes in your subtle bodies—that
demon would smash you if you attacked symmetrically. Just relax, let go.”

I exhale slowly. “Look, while you’re on the line, there’s business we need to discuss. A little matter of import and export.”

“This isn’t a business call.” His voice is suddenly smooth as silk, like that of an experienced mother soothing a disturbed child. “Are you still in bed? If so, turn onto your front and place the pillow across your shoulders. Have you done that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, now I’m going to repeat the mantra to you in a certain tone of voice. You will concentrate on the tone, not the words. Just relax. You may not know it, but you did well tonight. You summoned the courage to face the dragon. That’s good. Now all we need is to train you so you have a chance of winning the bout. Feeling sleepy yet?”

The next time I open my eyes it’s late morning. When I finally get to the station, I find a new e-mail from the FBI:

Sukum refuses to meet me in Soi Cowboy, so I tell him to wait for me at the Asok Skytrain station. I take the train myself to save time. It’s an education in the healing power of money. Eight years ago if you rode the elevated line, you saw dozens of unfinished buildings doomed to remain skeletal cadavers, uninhabited save by squatters and dogs. That was after the financial disaster of the late nineties. Now the market god has changed his mind and speculation is pushing up steel-and-glass towers again like mushrooms after rain.

Sukum is waiting at the entrance to the station, wearing his usual generic black pants, white shirt, black shoes; he has dared to leave his jacket at the office, however. We take the pedestrian subway under Asok itself and emerge a few paces away from Cowboy. It is one of the oldest red-light districts in the city and was popular with Americans on R&R from the Vietnam War. Perhaps the names of the clubs and bars say it all: Suzy Wong’s, Rawhide, Country Road, Fanny’s, Toy Bar, Vixens, Fire House. We start at the British-looking pub on the corner with Soi 23, where an outdoor system of air-conditioning emits wonderful clouds of condensation. The mist splits the light and makes rainbows over our heads as we sit at a table on the street.

Now we’ve done twelve bars in Soi Cowboy, including Fire House, Vixens, Rawhide, and Suzie Wong’s. In other words, I’ve been studiously avoiding the Old Man’s Club, my mother’s bar. It’s about six in the evening, which is not a bad time to be asking questions. Few of the bars are officially open and a lot of the girls have only just gotten up. They are mostly on the street in shorts and T-shirts eating takeaways from the cooked-food stalls which line the
soi
, all manned by mom-and-pop teams of Isaan clanspeople, frequently from the very villages the girls themselves hail from, so there’s a kind of country-fair atmosphere right in the heart of Krung Thep.

Regarding the Case of the Fat
Farang
, we’ve had a few hits; in fact, Frank Charles visited all these bars in his time, some of them fairly recently, but he didn’t take any of the girls out, although he paid generously for some intense groping. In the Pussy Cat he allowed himself to be felated in a quiet corner by a team of three professionals who took turns.

“He was a good customer,” the
mamasan
of the Pussy Cat said, “very polite, paid well, bought me a drink—and the girls said he was a gentleman, the best kind of
farang
, a pleasure to work with. He paid as much for the blow job as if he had taken them upstairs.”

Out in the street I see Sukum is getting hungry; he’s not quite Isaan himself, hailing from the great plain north of Bangkok, but his village is far enough east for him to have a taste for
somtam
and sticky rice. I have to say the noodle fritters with tuna and ginger salad look pretty good, so I give in, and we order
somtam, tom yam gung
, green curry with pork, and five little wicker cartons of sticky rice to take back to the Old Man’s Club, where Nong is presiding. Until recently my mother seemed resigned to the generous lines of skirts and jackets designed for middle-aged female executives, but after watching a biography of Tina Turner she’s gone back to the tight leggings and fashion T-shirts of her working years. She’s looking pretty sexy, I have to say, although there’s no denying the wrinkles as she pulls heavily on a Marlboro Red and takes out her reading glasses to look at Sukum’s photo of Frank Charles.

“Sure, he’s been in here,” my mother says. “I had him down as a good prospect so I put Salee on to him. She worked hard, I watched her, and she was really pulling out all the stops, but he wouldn’t take her upstairs. I asked him why not—after all, they were almost doing it right here in the bar, and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford her bar fine—and he said, ‘She’s great, but I’m looking for something even wilder.’ Then he left, and I happened to look out onto the street a couple of hours later and who should I see him strolling down the
soi
arm in arm with but Mad Moi.”

A stunned silence, after which Sukum and I say in unison,
“Doctor Mimi Moi, the chemist-cum-pharmacist?”

Nong nods over a sneer of tobacco smoke. “Well, he said he wanted wild, and I guess that’s what he got.”

Suddenly I remember that my mother knows Moi from a short and stormy acquaintance years ago, a brief and ridiculous moment when Doctor Moi decided she would try prostitution for a while—as a sort of reflex
of ennui—and intimidated the hell out of the down-market johns who frequent Nong’s bar, without consenting to sleep with any of them. When she wasn’t too stoned to do it with the hairy red-faced middle-aged punters in walking shorts from the Northwest, she was terminally disgusted at the notion of even sitting next to them at the bar. In deference to her social position, Nong waited a whole week before she sacked her.