The Godfather of Kathmandu (24 page)

“So, what was the plot?”

A frown crumples her brow for a moment, then she laughs. “I’m not telling you. We said we wouldn’t. We said we would wait for the final version before we talked in public about the plot.”

“But he’s dead. Murdered. Doesn’t that change anything?” She smiles again. “I’m a cop.”

“Are you going to arrest me for not answering questions?”

I blush deeply. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m pushing too hard. No, I don’t have any investigative powers over here. It just strikes me as strange that you don’t want to talk about the plot of a film you spent months working on. Were you the female lead?”

She shakes her head. “There were no leads. It wasn’t that kind of film. It was experimental, artistic. We didn’t use the star system.”

“Can you tell me who else worked on it? Maybe I should speak to someone else?”

“Yes. Perhaps someone else would feel able to talk.”

“Can you put me in touch? Do you have e-mail addresses, phone numbers—is there anyone in Kathmandu at the moment you could introduce me to?”

She takes a long moment to think about it. From her body language I believe she is carefully going through everyone who worked on the film with her, before she shakes her head. “You see, almost everyone was Tibetan apart from some of the technical staff. All the players in the Himalayan scenes were Tibetans like me. But most of them were illegals—that was something Frank Charles insisted on. They were illegal immigrants who knew something about film. Or maybe not.” She giggles. “A few didn’t know anything at all, and of course they couldn’t speak English or any of the Nepali dialects, so I had to translate. I don’t think they really knew what the film was about either, they didn’t understand how movies are made. They just did as they were told; mostly it was inspired improvisation.”

“That must have been difficult, even for an experienced director, to work with people who didn’t speak his language and to try to improvise?”

“Yes. I think for someone else it would have been impossible. But Frank Charles was very gifted. Very passionate. His inspiration was easy to go with.”

I shake my head. “It doesn’t sound like a Hollywood director to me.”

“How would I know? He’s the only one I ever worked with.”

“But doesn’t it seem strange to you, that a gifted director who was so passionate about the film should not get around to finishing it?”

My question seems to puzzle her. “But he surely would have finished it sooner or later. It’s only seven years ago we stopped filming.”

I say, “Do you know someone called Tietsin?” I don’t believe I gave the name any undue emphasis, but to me it was like dropping a piece of iron on a tiled floor: it clanged in my head.

She immediately whips a hand up to her mouth—it’s the left hand that she doesn’t like to use very much, but I can see from her eyes she is laughing.

“I know five hundred people called Tietsin, it’s even more common than Rinpoche.”

“Sorry, it’s a
Doctor
Tietsin.”

Now she doesn’t try to hide her laughter. “Every third Tibetan man is a doctor of something, it’s a title many still acquire in monasteries.”

“He gives seminars on Tibetan history and Buddhism in a second-floor room overlooking Bodnath.”

“I don’t go to Bodnath so much anymore. I’ve decided to try to assimilate more with the Nepalis who have been so hospitable to us.”

I take a deep breath. There is no point in pressing the investigation and alienating her; and there’s not a lot of point in pretending the case is the only thing on my mind.

Well, here goes. I say, “You are very beautiful.”

Corny? I suppose, but I think also honest and to the point. I’ve given her a choice. She can end the interview in a charming way, which a woman like her knows how to do—or she can pick up on my offer of courtship on any terms she likes.

I watch while her face changes somewhat. For a long moment I am convinced that she alone in the restaurant had not realized I have a romantic agenda. Now she stares directly into my eyes, offering a clear view of her limpid soul. Then she makes a little twitch with her mouth which is not without humor, before raising her left hand in front of my face, then bringing the right hand up to use its fingers to remove the top joints of the three middle digits of the other. She drops the tiny metal prostheses on the table with a clatter, leaving me staring at the black stubs of her left hand, which she then drums loudly on the tabletop. When the Frenchman with the
farang
wife turns to stare, she waves them at him, and he looks furious because she has spoiled his meal.

“Do you still want to sleep with me?” she asks in a tone entirely free of guile, then adds with a laugh, “I promise I don’t have anything else missing.”

I can’t tell you about it just yet,
farang
. It’s sort of sacred, embarrassing, and comic at the same time. And it doesn’t show me in a particularly good light. Anyway, it’s all still alive down there in my guts, sending conflicting signals all over my nervous system, killing my appetite for food or work—and all you want to know is did we do it or not, Tara and I, right? I’ll get back to you. Meantime, I’m going on a tour of Freak Street in search of the Nixon Guesthouse. If you’ve forgotten Freak Street,
farang
, here’s an aide-mémoire: Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were both still alive; their work formed the sound track to a social experiment which began in San Francisco but was much better tolerated here, where the dope market was a significant segment of the economy. For the full initiation you needed to have traveled overland through those wonderful, exotic countries the late twentieth century turned into impenetrable battlefields in the name of civilization. Pilgrims who survived were distinguished by lice, long hair, dysentary, entry-level mysticism, a massive dope habit, and an addiction to rock and roll.

I could hardly find the place and kept winding up back at the market, where women in shawls squat over gigantic melons, carrots, radishes, and other vegetables of such outlandish size you wonder if the whole Kathmandu Valley hasn’t been magically modified. Carbon monoxide, plentiful in the air, does nothing to stunt the spectacular growth of the local produce, nor are conscientious housewives put off by the presence of free-range hens, cows, monkeys, and dogs at the morning market, where the
main attraction today is a bucket of fish someone has caught in one of the rivers—perhaps the Baghmati, where all those cadavers crackle and pop on the ghats? After a good deal of searching I find a wan, handwritten sign attached to a lamppost:
FREAK STREET THIS WAY
.

The Nixon Guesthouse is a large four-story half-timbered converted Elizabethan-style terrace house with a small courtyard where laundry hangs; presumably you could have breakfast sitting between the billowing sheets if you remembered to stock up on your yogurt and granola the night before. I arrive at ablution time: no guests are visible and I retreat into the street while two brawny cleaning women in saris throw buckets of water over the tiled floor, which quickly floods into the courtyard. I decide to hang out for ten minutes until they’ve finished and go back to the market. I am in the process of examining a carrot more than fifteen inches long—with phallic implications not lost on the toothless, betel-crunching female vendor—when Lek sends me a text message.

Now I have to go back to my guesthouse to pick up a document he has faxed. There are suddenly no taxis, but a trishaw driver miraculously appears and presents himself as an obvious and only alternative. Like a fool I forget to negotiate a price in advance, and by the time he has heroically pedaled me all the way back up to Thamel and the Kathmandu Guesthouse, guilt has crippled my negotiating power, and I give him the small fortune he is demanding while ostentatiously groaning and rubbing his calves and thighs. I realize how badly I’ve been screwed from the way his eyes pop when I hand over the full sum he named as fairly representing the extent of his suffering. Now he is thanking me with extravagant gestures for bringing early retirement; I think he sees me as an unlikely avatar of Krishna.

In the guesthouse they have put Lek’s single faxed document into a brown envelope, a sophisticated touch I had not expected. When I pull it out, all I see is a group picture prominently featuring a man in his late forties whom I do not recognize. From the context—he is with six Asians—I would say he is quite tall, over six feet. He is very handsome, looks American, slightly overweight but not much. He is also clean shaven. I call Lek.

“You’re not going to tell me it’s him?”

“Darling, that is a
verified
photo of Frank Charles.”

“It must have been taken about a hundred years ago?”

“Nope. It’s a media pic sent out when he was filming up in northwest Nepal seven or eight years ago.”

“That would make him early fifties. But he looks younger than that. It’s shocking. Even for an American, it’s shocking how fat he got so quickly.”

“Mmm, quite a hunk. I suppose they all run to seed in the end.”

I close the phone on Lek and meditate for a moment on the photograph of Frank Charles. He is smiling generously, his arms around two women, one of whom is Tara. Others of the group I assume are actors or part of the film crew. Many are in traditional Tibetan costume, and at least a couple of the men look quite wild with their heads tied up in rags, just like highland yak rustlers. I fold the photo in a way that does not distort his face, slide it into a pocket, and go back out onto Thamel.

There are plenty of cabs now; that must be because I’ve decided to walk. When I finally get back to the Nixon, I’m pleased to see the Augean stables have been flooded back to cleanliness by the Herculean cleaning ladies, and a man can light a joint among the billowing sheets once more.

And what am I thinking while the THC goes to work? You already know the answer to that,
farang
, because you wondered the same thing yourself when I told you about the photograph of Frank Charles with his arm around Tara: did he sleep with her or not? Am I alone in lamenting the way karma from our reptilian incarnations continues to trap us in the sewer of sexual jealousy? Is this the time to confess all I know about Tara? Well, here goes.

As you recall, Tara said,
Do you still want to sleep with me?
shortly after showing the obnoxious Frenchman not one finger, but three, all blackened, the tips lost to frostbite. Naturally, that was the moment when she morphed from a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth product of UN social engineering, mostly of the northern European kind, to a beautiful bitch with attitude. Of course I said yes. Three times, like this:
Yes, yes, yes
, not with the shy lust of a young man, but with the full-bodied desperation of one hurtling toward forty whose wife has retreated to a nunnery, whose only child is dead, and who really did, at that moment, see her as salvation in the form of a last chance.

She explained it would have to be her place rather than mine. After all, despite appearances, this was a very conservative, third-world town and a girl really could not afford to be seen visiting a foreigner in his hotel room. Bottom line, as a Tibetan refugee she risked expulsion for prostitution. It seemed indiscreet to ask how the situation could be improved by a man visiting her in her own room, but I figured it out when we arrived at what must be a kind of unfinished housing project on the way to the airport. From the costumes of the men and women, their highland roughness, the raggedness of the dress, and an indefinable atmosphere of
anything goes
, I concluded that this was an exclusively Tibetan compound for young people between the ages of about twenty and thirty, who seemed to be squatting in the raw, half-finished buildings made of reinforced concrete. The Tibetan version of the Hindu mandala, thanka, was everywhere, for this seemed to be an artists’ enclave; someone was blowing a huge Tibetan horn about ten feet long, sending a low wave of yearning sound to bounce off the walls and out into the city. There were kids who had the air of belonging to everyone and no one, playing in an unfinished house at twilight. There were also Tibetan prayer flags everywhere, making great parabolas on cables which stretched from the earth to the roofs. When we had entered her small room—the communal toilet was outside—and she had locked the door with a sliding bolt, she came close to me, smiled, and quickly found my member with her good hand. It was a strangely familiar kind of reconnoitering caress which puzzled me. I was further puzzled by the tone in which she told me to go wash under the hose outside. I obeyed, returned to the room, and waited while she showered in turn. We had not yet kissed.

Then came the moment of revelation, when she returned wearing only a towel. She grinned at my discomfort, then parted the ends of the towel in a theatrical manner. I smiled and paid homage to her breasts. When she took me to the mattress on the floor and had me lie down, she examined my penis carefully, using both sight and touch, as if she were looking for something. Now I was laughing at myself.

I said, “It’s okay, I’m clean.” She seemed not to understand why I would say that, but the signs were too many for me to be fooled any longer. I said, “Look, I understand. You’ve found the one guy in the world who is not going to judge you. My mother was on the Game, I help out in a go-go bar she runs, I could fairly be called a part-time pimp. I have no
moral objection to any woman from a poor background making an extra buck or two—especially a refugee.”

I thought I was saying the right thing, but I only succeeded in making her frown. She shook her head, then told me to relax and close my eyes. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I want to do it a little differently. Ask me about it afterward. All you have to do is lie there the first time. Try not to come too soon.”

When I was about to speak, she covered my mouth with her left hand—I felt the rough edges of the stubs resting on my forehead—then with the long finger of her right hand found a pressure point between my anus and scrotum, which she pushed on forcefully. It had the effect of diminishing the immediate need for orgasm without ruining the erection. How could this not be a professional? And one of a skill level I had never before encountered. When she leaned over so that her breasts were dangling around my chin, she whispered, “Don’t get emotional, you’ll ruin the ecstasy.”