The Godfather of Kathmandu

by John Burdett

  When I find out from the station where Suzuki’s personal effects are being held, I go over to the storage depot and sign a form. I wait in a dusty office while a clerk brings me an unusually long metal box, which she opens in front of me. According to the rules I am supposed to put on a pair of plastic gloves; I do so in order to pick up the heavy object in one corner of the box. It is much smaller than I imagined, far smaller than the kind of rotary saws that surgeons use, but I guess it is just as powerful, if not more so. In any event, the disk is easily big enough to cut through a quarter inch of human bone, and, of course, being a tool of the jewelry trade, the disk’s edge is enhanced with industrial diamonds. It is also encrusted with blood. And then there is the other kind of disk, a DVD, black and wordless on the title side; I pick it up to examine it, turning it in the light so I can see where the band of data has been burned into the plastic, then replace it. The other object of interest—and the reason why the box needed to be so long—is a samurai sword; its blade, still bloodstained, is wrapped in a clear plastic sheath. I’m not an expert, but I would judge from the damascene pattern and the perfect heft that it must be of the highest quality.

  I am afraid there is not much to do but sigh. I could, of course, have the bloodstains on the saw tested to see if the blood belonged to Frank Charles, but I don’t really have the time. Tietsin is dropping the smack tomorrow. And anyway, who cares? As far as the world is concerned, two unrelated suicides, one a diminutive Japanese jeweler, the other a fantastically outsized American movie director, happened to occur within hours of each other on the same night in Bangkok. What else is new? And that’s just the way Kongrao and the Japanese gem traders want it left. But I had to solve the case, didn’t I?

  50

  Tietsin is dropping the smack tomorrow: you did notice me coyly slip this dangerous intelligence between the plump thighs of the previous chapter, farang? Are your knees trembling the way mine are right now? Don’t you wish you were stoned? I do. Under the contract he only has to give us twenty-four hours’ notice within a certain time window. I faxed him a copy of the letter of credit so his bankers could check it, and he sent me a text message yesterday consisting of a single word—tomorrow—and I’ve been up all night. I’ve vomited in the sink twice already and it’s only six in the morning. I’m not going through with it, I tell my face in the mirror. Oh yes, you are, the face replies. My own mind has conspired against me: I have no options anymore. Supposing some of them are kids who use the stuff? I ask myself. You accepted Vikorn’s money, didn’t you, you took the job. Are you a man at all? So it goes on, the war of the self against the self. I do believe I might be turning 100 percent farang. But I have one of those wily Oriental solutions up my sleeve, which you’ll probably despise for not being confrontational enough, but it might just do the trick, even if Vikorn snuffs me for it, which he certainly will. I don’t care. I’d rather die early and (relatively) innocent. Look at my record: more than ten years in the Royal Thai Police and I’ve committed no major crime, nor even a minor one as far as I can recall. (I’m not including smoking dope; sometimes the law is wrong.) Is there another serving officer who can swear on the Pali Canon that he is equally clean? No, the hell with it, Tara is never coming to live with me in Bangkok, so there’s no use kidding myself I have a life at all; what’s to lose?

  Do you also have the martyr cutoff psychology, farang? The kind that says, Only so much and so far, I prefer death to further degradation? It’s quite a powerful mantra, but you risk having to put your life where your mouth is sooner or later.

  Now you’re saying, So why didn’t you think of this before, why leave it to the last minute? Answer: cowardice. I just didn’t want to face it. I’m coming out of an extended Hamlet moment: I just couldn’t make up my mind. Now I have. And the Buddha, for once, is quite explicit. He visited me last night in a dream, in the form of a child’s plastic Buddha. He actually told me how to get out of this fix. The only trouble with advice straight from Gautama himself, though: he doesn’t place any value on flesh at all. I mean, to him, there’s no difference between the two shores; he is master of both. Now I’m not sure if the dread in the bottom of my gut is from the crime or the Buddha’s plan to prevent it.

  It is a common observation among Buddhists of all persuasions that after death one is not initially aware of one’s altered state; the clue comes from the people around who can no longer see or hear you, and in this sense the condition cannot be said to differ greatly from your basic urban paranoia: Am I dead already? Have I always been that way? These are the kinds of thoughts which illuminate a mind focused wonderfully by the knowledge that it may well be slotted before morning. Nevertheless, I’m off to the local hardware store at the bottom of the street, which sells gas bottles for cooking. I choose two of medium size—the kind that can supply the cooking needs of a normal Thai family for a month—then buy two little camping gas burners—are you beginning to get the picture, farang?—and take everything home in a taxi. Then I buy my first car. Well, why not? I’m consigliere, I deserve a car. In view of its short life expectancy, however, I go for a secondhand Toyota. The more I develop my secret plan, the prouder and scareder I become. It’s now midday. The next few hours are going to be tough; I see quite a few joints coming on.

  Now I’m at the station not half as stoned as I would like to be, fiddling with paperwork, making constant checks on my cell phone to see if Tietsin has texted me again, even though I would have heard the bleep if he had. I’m waiting for the final signal that will tell me which of twenty named locations in Bangkok the Tibetan will actually use for the drop. He has calculated that even Vikorn and Zinna together cannot ambush twenty separate drop-off points to steal his product without paying for it—not without drawing undue attention to themselves, anyway—so he faxed a map with twenty different crosses on it. General Zinna immediately pointed out that half the locations were on the river, so the Tibetan was surely planning to come by water. Vikorn sees it differently: He’s probably trying to make us think he’s coming by river because he’s not.

  The question—How is he going to bring the stuff into the country?— has brought the two old dogs together in a competitive kind of way. I have had to attend bull sessions in the General’s map room, as if the Tibetan were preparing to invade Bangkok. Basically, Zinna is convinced the stuff will come by sea and be taken up the Chao Phraya River by sampan. Vikorn doubts there is time for the sea route, which is exactly what intrigues him as a fellow professional: how do you shift that much smack across a modern border and get away with it? As far as he can see there are only two solutions: overland from Cambodia or overland from Burma. But in both cases, the Tibetan has to get the stuff out of the Himalayas first, not easy in the present climate. Even if he has bent people in the Nepali government, there is still India to deal with. Vikorn only pretends to have a view on how Tietsin will bring it off; in reality he is waiting to find out. You can see why the cop is richer than the general.

  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 bod
y 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 g
ood 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’?”