The Godfather of Kathmandu (40 page)

Five p.m. comes and goes. So does six. The letter of credit is in the safe in Vikorn’s room; I can get it in five minutes. The gas bottles are in the trunk of my car. Six-thirty: it occurs to both Vikorn and me at the same time: Tietsin will wait until the last minute. According to the contract, he has until midnight to reveal the precise location; after that we have the right to kill the deal. Vikorn calls me: “What d’you think, he’ll stretch it out till then?”

“I don’t know. What does Zinna say?”

“Zinna? He isn’t even guessing anymore. The Tibetan has done his head in.”

Ever felt,
farang
, that you just don’t have the constitution for modern times? That theoretically you could see how living a better life might be achieved, but the logistics of the nervous system are against you? I keep thinking about those gas bottles and how I’m going to use my consigliere status to follow the smack once Vikorn has paid for it, to whatever warehouse they’re using, and use the small gas bottles to heat up and explode
the big ones—and my whole body starts to go into contortions at my desk and
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to carry it off;
I’m not sure my body will obey me.

At ten p.m. Tietsin texts me; within the same moment I’m calling Vikorn and Zinna on my cell phone, grabbing the letter of credit as Vikorn meets me at the door of his room, snatching my car keys—and I’m out of the station. “It’s location thirteen,” I’m telling Zinna as I’m walking down the steps to the garage. “Location thirteen, that’s right, on the river near Klong Toey commercial port.”

I get there first, so I position my car near where I think Vikorn will park his van, the one he’s going to use for the pickup. I’ve no sooner killed my engine when a tall camper van turns up with the two chemists, one representing Vikorn, the other Zinna: highly respected professionals, both of whom are aware that honest reporting is the likeliest way to stay alive. I’m pretty sure they are incorruptible, even by a Tibetan psychonaut. Now I hear the fairy crunches of army tires on the tarmac. Yep, Zinna’s here, with a twenty-man backup—Vikorn and I had to talk him down from a hundred-man squad. Speak of the devil, here’s the Colonel himself, rolling up in an ordinary police van with only a few bodyguards on motorbikes. He took the view a long time ago that there will be no trouble from Tietsin, as long as we come up with the cash.

Our high-tech Tibetan gave us GPS coordinates for the precise location of the drop, and both Zinna and Vikorn are following their lieutenants, who are playing with different GPS handhelds and bumping into each other trying to get the coordinates exactly right. It seems we have to walk a little more toward the river, then turn right onto the dock where some huge, black, and rusted cargo ships from China, Korea, and Vietnam are berthed. We are between a couple of container ships, standing under the bows of the
Flower of Shanghai
and looking the
Rose of Danang
up and down, when I say, “It’s that one.”

I’m pointing to a ship on the opposite side of the docks which was previously invisible but has come into view as we try to position ourselves in accordance with the Tibetan’s coordinates. I say, “The coordinates he gave are not where he is located. He’s taken us to the point where we can see him, that’s all.”

“See what? I don’t see a damn thing.”

“The prayer flags,” I say, unable to repress a grin. “On that ship over there, all the way up to the top of the mast.”

“Why the hell would he do that?” Zinna moans.

“Because we’re being watched by his people, have been since the minute we arrived,” Vikorn explains in a tone of respect and wonder. “By now he knows everything he needs to know about us. How many men, what kind of weapons, even our morale.”

When we finally arrive at the ship that’s festooned with Tibetan prayer flags gently swaying in the night air, the Tibetan wild man himself is sitting all alone in his open parka on a black iron bollard, his long gray hair tied back. With his eyes rolling, he looks insane.

“Sawatdee krup,”
he says in a not-bad accent, showing us the equality
wai
, with hands raised to eye level and no higher.

“Told you,” Zinna says. “I told you he would come by water.”

Everyone watches while I walk toward Tietsin with the letter of credit in my hand. I hold it in front of his eyes, but he makes no gesture to check it. Instead, he jerks his chin in the direction behind us. We turn to look, but all we can see are the high black bows and shadows in between.

Then they start to appear one by one, all dressed in black. One by one, Zinna, Vikorn, and I drop our jaws in amazement.

“Backpacks?” Vikorn says, gobsmacked, his voice squeaking in disbelief. “He brought in the whole fucking five hundred and thirty-three kilos in backpacks?”

I stare slack-jawed in wonder at Tietsin while his men continue to appear in commando-black T-shirts and pants, with black backpacks. When they have finished arriving there are thirty in all, which I calculate produces an average of about seventeen kilos—thirty-eight pounds—of heroin per backpack. Thirty-eight pounds is the maximum load for paid Sherpas in the Himalayas.

“We thought about other means,” Tietsin says, rolling his eyes back, “but none of them were viable. In the end I had to develop a customs officer mantra with all the ritual that goes with it. So far so good, it seems to have worked fine.” He beams.

“Please tell me you didn’t all take the same plane,” Vikorn says; the blood has drained from his face.

“Of course not. Half of us came on the morning flight, the other half in the afternoon.”

“You, you, you—” I say, then stop. Words fail one at times like this.

“What d’you expect? We’re Himalayans. We don’t know any better. Now, why don’t you tell your little friends to get their chemists working so we can all go home?”

Vikorn and Zinna use their men to seal off the area while the chemists’ van trundles up the docks and the two scientists examine the contents of the backpacks one by one. While they are working, a Tibetan, who was not one of those carrying the dope, comes up to Tietsin and whispers a few words into his ear. The yogin suddenly stares at me in a way that is physically uncomfortable, as if some painful ray has emerged from between his eyes to give me a sudden headache. My bowels turn over and the intolerable nerves of the day return to shake up my whole being. Tietsin doesn’t take his eyes off me while the chemists are taking their samples, so by the time they have finished and are confirming with smiles that they are satisfied it is indeed 99 percent smack in each one of the thirty backpacks, my knees have turned to Jell-O.

And all the time, more and more of his men are emerging from the shadows of the dock. Now it is hard to say how many people Tietsin has brought with him. At first I assumed that some of them, at least, were Thais he’d hired from some underworld connection, but after a few minutes I have changed my mind. You can take the Tibetan out of Tibet, it seems, but you can’t take the
vajra
out of the Tibetan—there’s something about their eyes that says you don’t exist in the way you think you do—even if they have all shaved and cut their hair. No doubt about it, these are highlander yak rustlers armed with cute little machine pistols who overcame hesitation about five thousand meditations ago. For a mystic, Tietsin has quite a practical side. He jerks his chin at me with demoralizing contempt. Now I am standing in front of him like a naughty schoolboy.

He speaks softly. “Detective, did you ever hear of an asshole named Clive of India?”

“Yes.”

“And do you know what this asshole named Clive of India did to the world?”

“British Empire.”

“Financed by?”

“Opium sales.”

“If you put it like that you risk trivializing his achievement. He was the
first to make the connection between arms and narcotics. This little thug from Shropshire, who would certainly have been hanged if he’d stayed in England, saw the way to finance a whole private army, and the model proved so effective they repeated it all over the world: narcotics, slaves, and weapons. It’s the great tripod upon which our global civilization continues to be based, even if they have changed the labels and the slaves get health insurance. The plain fact is, the sociopathic nature of the modern corporation started then and there with Clive. By the time the British narco empire collapsed, twenty million Chinese were addicted to opium and pink-faced syphilitic alcoholics in scarlet jackets were intimidating the whole world with their Maxim guns. The United Kingdom in its modern form is an opium derivative. And what was the point of the exercise? Answer: so middle-class girls in Kent and Sussex could go to school all dressed in white and play the violin instead of going on the Game. If that is good enough justification for enslaving the world and invading Tibet, don’t you think that forty million dollars’ worth of smack is a fair price for freedom and democracy?”

He sighs. “You thought you would play the martyr, get yourself a permanent seat in nirvana in return for your sacrifice, your undeniable stinking
goodness?
What are you, some kind of Sunday Christian? Didn’t I already make it clear that
good
isn’t good enough? You accepted the mantra, kid, and you can’t say nobody warned you. Good is even harder to kick than evil. They are a duality,
you know that
, you don’t get one without the other. I dread to think what kind of sanctimonious asshole you would have turned into, probably about five minutes before Vikorn snuffed you, if we didn’t get to you first.” He lets a couple of beats pass while he examines my shocked and terrified mug. “It just ain’t that easy, you of all people should know that. And anyway, you have no right to deprive me of my karma. It’s all
me
driving this. This is
my
moment, not yours, so who the fuck are you to screw it all up just because you can’t live with yourself? If you can’t live with yourself, dump your self.”

“The Buddha came to me in a dream,” I mumble. “He showed me the gas bottles.”

“Oh, yeah? Listen, around us you don’t talk about the Buddha. Which Buddha? Be specific.”

“He was in the form of a child’s toy.”

“See! Can’t you even interpret your own dreams properly by now? The
Buddha’s showing you it’s time to grow up already, dump your infant faith, and get into something adult. Didn’t they tell you the great Theravada admonition: ‘If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him’?”

“That’s Zen,” I explain.

“Really? Whatever.”

“And what about the gas bottles?”

“You weren’t supposed to take that literally, dummy. The gas bottles are you: pressurized gas, that’s all any of us is who has not reached the Far Shore.” He scratches his head, apparently genuinely perplexed. “I can’t understand how anyone could get that wrong.”

He stands up, comes intimidatingly close, and whispers in my ear, “Whatever little mind pictures you’ve got of me by now, kid, you better dump them. I don’t have an ego. Those Chinese burned every tiny little bit of it out of me, every root, every fiber with their cute little cattle prods—in the end I was secretly urging them on. I knew even then there was no way I was going to spend the next sixty years dragging a bleeding, damaged, heartbroken, resentful, miserable stump of ego around. If I had, I would have gotten sick and died thirty years ago. But I didn’t.” He lets a few beats pass while he assesses me. “You need to grow up. That great pile of black karma you’re so worried about, that huge Chomolungma of guilt that’s looming up in your mind and crippling your judgment—forget it.
The people who will use this stuff are already dead, can’t you understand? They are stuck in their diabolic continuum because they trafficked in previous lifetimes
. Whether they buy from us or someone else has no significance, because
buy they must
and
buy they will
—don’t you know that Clive himself is out there somewhere, shooting up in some squalid backroom above a supermarket in Shropshire, just another deadbeat with tattoos, paralyzed by the weight of his karma, helpless without his little brown servants and whores, the classic Caucasian male basket case of modern times? This isn’t my personal payback, this is world dharma we’re talking about.
The earth itself is making this happen, otherwise we would never have gotten the stuff past customs.”
He pauses for breath. “For my part, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to suck it all up and transform every last lost life into positive energy using the power of Tantra. And do you know how I acquired the means to do that? I’m not a Buddha, Detective; I’m not a bodhisattva; I’m not even a doctor of Buddhism, only of Tibetan history, and I’m not a monk. Detective, I have to tell you, I am
one hell of a lot better than all of those things.
I am a man, and I want my country back.”

He stops for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to speak his full mind. Finally, he leans closer so I can feel his breath on my ear.

“I am a mystery to you because I am psychically invisible. I show up on no one’s inner radar. I no longer exist in the way you do. I am your dharma. Get the fuck out of here right now and take your stinking pressurized gas with you.”

When he sees I am on the verge of obeying, he adds, “There’s someone at home waiting for you.”

I’m about ten paces away already when he calls out, “And don’t forget to watch CNN exactly one week from today.”

But leaving, it turns out, is easier said than done. I’m on the way to my car when I see that it is guarded by some of Zinna’s soldiers. I figure the game’s up with me, despite Tietsin’s help, and I just stand there for a moment, waiting to be shot or, more likely, taken away and tortured to death. Then I see there are quite a lot of soldiers, far more than Zinna’s quota, pouring in from the street. At the far end of the dock, Tietsin’s men seem to be rushing out of the area, as if they have an understanding with the soldiers. In spite of everything, I feel the need to warn Vikorn. Too late. Zinna is walking toward the Colonel. About five paces away, he suddenly raises one of his arms and clicks his fingers. Great spotlights originating in a military truck on the street suddenly illuminate most of the dock, especially Zinna and Vikorn, who are facing off in stark white light. The spotlights also reveal the extent of Zinna’s treachery: there must be over two hundred well-armed soldiers on the dock now, and a lot more outside the perimeter. Zinna smiles triumphantly, and almost apologetically, at Vikorn: “Looks like I won,” the little General says.