Authors: James Luceno
The doors opened on a stone corridor with a vaulted ceiling. Pressed between the two Tibetans, Li Peng was hauled along at a brisk pace, past dank stairways and fixed-pane windows, then steered to the right into a shorter corridor that ended in an arrowhead arch, filled with lattice-work double doors. The fright Li Peng had experienced on first being abducted had returned, and he began to tremble slightly in the tight grip of his captors.
The room beyond the lattice doors was crowded with ornate furniture, large pillows and sheepskins, inlaid tables, and the low pallets favored by opium smokers. A worn Persian rug, askew to the entry, warmed a portion of the cobblestone floor, and the light from a roaring fire, a lattice-covered skylight, and several table lamps and chandeliers cast a checkerboard of shadows on the walls.
Perhaps a dozen Asian and Western women lounged in studied abandon on the room’s slightly elevated upper tier, their faces rouged and their raven hair bunned and braided. Silver and ivory cigarette holders dangled from their slender manicured hands. They wore tattered, tight-fitting Mandarin gowns, beaded flapper dresses, sheer robes, and lingerie. The presence of their stout madam attested to the fact that they were on loan from the brothels of Shanghai or Hong Kong. Interspersed among them reclined Chinese men in silk pajamas and skullcaps, nodded out with their opium pipes, along with a few mysterious-looking Westerners in black suits, who were being ministered to by servants bearing trays of food and wine. The room reeked of cheap perfume, cypress smoke, and the sweet smell of fired opium.
Though much of him was in shadow, the man who had ordered Li Peng snatched from his home on the western shore of Lake Manasarovar was seated at a gilded table on the far side of the room. Sunlight pouring in from a bank of windows behind him made it impossible to see Ying Ko’s face. Only his hands were visible: the right, feeding scraps of meat to a bearish, short-haired chow; the left, holding a cigarette. Two armed guards wearing long coats and ear-flapped caps flanked him, and Wu, his chief adviser, was bent over the table, displaying the contents of a large, leather-bound ledger. Three attendants hurried away from the table as the two Tibetans dragged Li Peng forward; otherwise, no one seemed to be paying Li Peng the slightest attention.
The whores’ madam started the phonograph, and the strains of big band music began to waver from the machine. The bald Tibetan kowtowed his way out of the room, closing the curved-top doors behind him. Still in the grip of his knife-wielding abductor, Li Peng stood silently in the center of the room, waiting.
Wu closed the ledger, bowed slightly to his employer, and stepped around the table to approach Li Peng, the yard-long book held close to his chest.
“Ying Ko asks too much,” Li Peng whispered harshly when Wu was within earshot. “My poppy friends are a glass of water in a rainstorm compared to his. His lips are always moistened with tea or butter, while the rest of us go thirsty.”
The hand that had been feeding the dog now held a poppy capsule, which it rolled in a steeplechase over charcoal-smudged knuckles. Ying Ko’s fingernails were an inch long and lacquered a dark burgundy. A veil of cigarette smoke drifted lazily in front of him.
Wu compressed his lips. He was an old man, whose sight required the help of round, wire-rim glasses, and whose hairless face bore a mole near the right nostril. He wore a black
p’u-fu
robe with vibrant mandalas embroidered on the front and back, and a round fur cap, whose crown was enlivened by a peacock-feather tassel.
“You and your brothers murdered three of our men,” Wu said, as if to remind Li Peng. “We can’t let that go unaccounted, can we?”
The captive’s whisper grew insistent, and he nodded toward Ying Ko. “He would have done the same if anyone had tried to demand an unfair percentage of the opium trade.” Li Peng used the Chinese term,
a-fou-yong
—a rendering of the Arabic
ofium.
“He already controls all the fields below Kang Rimpoche, from the mountain to the lake, and most of the land beyond. The opium trade with Shanghai, Tientsin, Marseilles, and Buenos Aires—it’s all his. And as a
philing
—an outlander—he has direct access to both the Corsican crime syndicate and American mafiosi. Everyone knows of his barbaric raid against the tribal chiefs of Barga. Even the Potola in Lhasa isn’t sacred to him.”
Without warning, he threw off the hand of the guard and took a bold step in Ying Ko’s direction. “Send three more and I’ll kill them, as well,” he warned the shadowed figure.
Ying Ko’s filthy hands came to a sudden stop in the room’s eldritch light. The poppy capsule was seized in his right hand, and when he opened it nothing was there.
Li Peng martialed his courage. “I’m entitled to my piece,” he said, aiming a shaking forefinger at the drug lord. “Kill me if you must, but I promise, my brothers will come for you.”
Except for the snap of the fire and the inconstant swirl of the brassy music, the room fell quiet. But at last, and with deadly intent, Ying Ko spoke:
“And I promise you . . . that I will bury them beside you.”
In need of a shave and framed by disheveled black hair that fell dully to the tops of broad shoulders, the face that leaned forward into the light had the pale and haggard look of opium addiction. But Ying Ko had a Western face, not more than thirty years in the making, at once captivating and frightening to behold.
Ying Ko directed a casual gesture to his long-haired henchman, and Li Peng immediately felt a hand vice itself on the back of his neck. In the same instant, a glint of firelight off the double-edged blade of the henchman’s knife caught his swollen left eye. With the practiced elegance of a trained fighter, Li Peng sent an elbow backward into the Tibetan’s solar plexus, even as his right hand was reaching out for the knife. Attempting to come around Li Peng’s left side, the guard stepped directly into his captive’s backhand and was spun ninety degrees, falling face first to the floor. At the same time, Li Peng—the long knife firmly in hand now—reached out for Wu.
The struggle had lasted only a moment, but Li Peng suddenly had the knife to Wu’s throat and was using him as a shield. Revolvers had flashed into view from the waist sashes of Ying Ko’s flankers, but neither gunman was positioned for a clear shot. Li Peng could see the prostitutes only peripherally, but their murmurings told him he had their attention.
“I wish only to leave,” he announced, his voice raspy with apprehension. “Let me leave.”
For emphasis, he pressed the blade to Wu’s throat. The old man’s palsied hands were clamped on Li Peng’s knife hand, though his elbows continued to support the ledger. Throughout, Wu had found amusement in Li Peng’s threats—smiling and bobbing his eyebrows—but no longer; Li Peng could hear and feel Wu’s labored breathing.
Ying Ko himself had come to his feet. A wool blanket that had covered his lap fell to the floor as he edged around the table and advanced on the stairs. Muscular and over six feet tall, he was barefoot and dressed in a richly embroidered black silk tunic and trousers. His assassins kept their weapons raised but remained where they were. The guard was still facedown on the floor, more, Li Peng surmised, out of humiliation than the force of his backhand.
“I’ll cut Wu’s throat,” he warned. “He’s your friend, Ying Ko, your right hand. Even you wouldn’t chance seeing him killed.”
Ying Ko glanced at the gunmen, calculating something.
“Your men aren’t marksmen enough to shoot around him,” Li Peng said quickly.
“You’re right.” Ying Ko answered, his hands at shoulder height in a gesture that begged sensibility. “You’re right.” Then, looking at Wu with narrowed eyes, he added: “You’ve been a wonderful friend, Wu.”
Wu gasped for breath. “Thank you, Ying Ko.”
Ying Ko turned a slow about-face. “Shoot through him,” he said to the assassins, plainly delighted to be delivering the unexpected.
The gunmen exchanged smiles.
Li Peng’s premature grin faded, and his eyes went wide. He had the knife raised to throw when two shots rang out. The rounds struck the ledger between the large Chinese characters that adorned the cover, ripped through Wu, and tore into Li Peng. Out of concern for their open-toed pumps and fur-topped slippers, the women closest moved their feet to accommodate the fall of the bodies. Rudely awakened from pipe dreams, a black woman with bobbed hair lifted her head in uncertain surprise; others talked quietly among themselves, as if assessing the entertainment value of the deaths.
Ying Ko wore a look of savage excitement. He lifted a brass goblet from his desk and took a long drink; then he raised his arms in the air and uttered a Tibetan phrase that set the entire room laughing. Stepping over the bodies, he walked slowly toward the double doors, appraising the women on his left, some of whom primped for him.
“You,” he said, motioning. “And you.”
The two stood and followed, one of them belting a white satin robe over her ensemble of black-mesh lingerie. Behind Ying Ko, skullcapped attendants moved in to dispose of the bodies. Almost to the door, the drag lord turned and gestured to a third woman on the other side of the room.
“And you,” he said, with a tilt of his chin.
Eurasian, she wore a loose-fitting sheer dress and high-heeled slippers. She had laughed loudest and longest at Ying Ko’s joke, but now her painted face fell in arrant dissent. “No,” she told her fireplug of a keeper. “I don’t want to.”
The madam responded by chiding her in Chinese and lashing her with a short-handled, leather-thonged whip.
“All right, I go,” the woman said finally. Extricating herself from her gaggle, she hurried for the door, adding her professional sway to the train of flesh Ying Ko was leading from the room.
Night passes quickly in a bed crowded with warm bodies.
Normally, Ying Ko would have ordered a blazing fire built in the bedroom’s blackened maw of a fireplace, but that night he had comfort enough on both sides of him, the press of warm skin, the soft caress of fox furs.
The room was a lofty stone perch, with an enormous bed, heavy wooden wardrobes and dressers, and French doors leading to a narrow balcony. Open just now, the doors admitted a cool breeze that stirred diaphanous curtains. Kailasa’s shark-fin snowcap hung in the night, an inverted bowl of argent light, and the stars went on forever.
Ying Ko lay on his back, two of the women spooned to his right side, the third to his left. The orbs of his eyes danced wildly under drawn lids, while his mind’s eye grappled with a recurring image that had plagued his sleep from the start: that of a teenage Tibetan boy, with shaved skull and serene, though cunning, features.
Ying Ko sat up with a start, sensing that someone was in the room. He listened intently for a moment, then cautiously climbed off the foot of the bed, the women repositioning themselves behind him. He glanced at the balcony and moved toward the center of the room. He hadn’t made it halfway when he glanced movement in the crepuscular light.
The meaty fist that caught him on the chin and knocked him unconscious seemed to appear out of nowhere.
C
onsciousness ebbed and waned through indeterminate hours, abetted by a rocking motion that carried him back into vivid dreams each time he neared sleep’s liquid surface.
He awoke facing a rising sun to find himself on horseback, his hands bound behind him. The horse was tethered to a lead animal, atop which sat a large Tibetan wearing a fleece-lined longcoat, a short fur cape, an ear-flapped cap, and muddy trousers tucked into knee-high felt boots. When the man turned to give him a look, Ying Ko saw that he had a red scarf pulled up over his mouth and nose. A second man, similarly attired and also powerfully built—the likely owner of the ham-sized fist that had stiffened his jaw—rode nearby.
They were following a narrow trail, lined at intervals with prayer flags and mani walls constructed of flagstones inscribed with the sacred Buddhist mantra:
Om mani padme hum.
In the near distance, Ying Ko could discern the pinnacle top of a large stupa.
He was wearing his black silk trousers, and someone had thrown a black goat hide over his bare shoulders. The coppery taste of blood lingered in his mouth, and his wrists had been chafed by the rope.
“Are you Li Peng’s brothers?” he asked in Mandarin. “Or do you simply belong to him?”
The rider beside him seemed to grin, and shook his head as if to say, you should be so lucky.
Ying Ko shrugged it off. Perhaps they were no more than thieves. Drawing pilgrims as it did, the Kailasa region was notorious for the robbers that preyed on them. Either way, he was impressed. Only capable agents could have infiltrated the palace and spirited him from it unseen. Or had there been a gunfight as well?
“Where are you taking me?” he asked.
The same rider nodded in the direction of Kailasa.
Ying Ko assessed his surroundings. The thin air told him that they had climbed several thousand feet above the valley floor and the road that ringed the mountain, along which pilgrims performed their circuit of prostrations.
“A
tulku
wishes to see you,” the rider added after a long moment.
Ying Ko raised an eyebrow. The term referred to a lama of supreme rank—a living Buddha. “A holy man wants to see me?” He laughed heartily. “I think you’re going to find out you grabbed the wrong guy.” He laughed and settled in for the ride.
Hours passed. The trail switchbacked higher up the slopes toward the tree line, gradually leveling out as it closed in on a sheer rock wall that buttressed the southern flanks of the sacred mountain itself. The area was strewn with elaborate stupas and chortens, and a profusion of prayer flags snapped in the wind. The only structure that might have served as a home, however, was a simple wattle-and-daub goat herder’s hut, centered in a grouping of stone corrals. A far cry from the monastery Ying Ko had been imagining.
“Nice
gompa,”
he said when the horses had stopped. “Or maybe you meant to say that a
hermit
wanted to see me.”