by Ronan Frost
It needed to be quality stuff, though, because out there on the mountains their lives were going to depend on it, so there was nothing to be gained by shaving off a few bucks here and there for the sake of safety.
Then there was the clothing, which was all specialist stuff. Ideally they wanted high-altitude all-in-one boots and separate hiking boots; some decent heavyweight wool socks; base-layer pants; long-sleeved and short-sleeved merino wool shirts; heavy base-layer climbing pants, preferably Polartec; snug, formfitting lightweight fleeces with hoods for over the base layer; trekking pants; soft-shell pants and jackets—no zip-off stuff, that was too light for the terrain; fully waterproof non-insulated hardshell pants and jackets; twenty-six-thousand-feet-rated down parkas and pants; gloves and liners; climbing helmets and ski hats and face masks or a balaclava system, head flashlights and glacier glasses.
All this stuff was core; without it, they were going to struggle out there, and given the city was a major staging post for assaults on the peaks, he was banking on the fact that capitalism would have reached this far, but just in case, he duplicated the list for Rask to source and fly anything in he couldn’t find locally.
Rye checked in with the concierge, who recommended several high-end climbing shops in the city, including a place in the bazaar that sold unused secondhand gear people had traded in when they’d done their visit to base camp and decided they’d scratched their adventurous itch.
“Do you think we’ll be able to source this stuff?”
He showed him his list.
“Of course. People come to Nepal for two reasons, to find inner peace or climb the mountains. Everything you need for both is readily available.”
He gave Rye directions to the bazaar.
He headed out of the cool air-conditioning of the hotel lobby into the humid afternoon.
He hadn’t been walking fifteen minutes before the fabric of his shirt clung to his back. In the distance he heard the banging of drums and decided to follow the sound. The drumbeats led him to voices, and he rounded a corner onto a large-scale protest with hundreds of monks in their saffron robes walking down the middle of the road. The monks, he realized, were protesting Chinese rule. This kind of demonstration was prevalent in the region, though reports in the West had diminished. It was hard to discredit the holy men as cranks or traitors, so the soldiers had little choice but to allow them to walk through the city, their voices raised in defiance of their would-be masters.
One man walked at the front of the line.
Across the street, Rye saw a face that looked impossibly familiar, but before he could be sure, the man turned away, and everything about the street scene changed.
It took Rye a moment to understand what was happening, and by the time he did it was too late to do anything to change the course of the monk’s death.
The voices lulled into a heartbeat of silence as the protester reached into the folds of his robes for the lighter he carried hidden in his pockets, and then rose again as the monk touched the naked flame to the oil-soaked undergarments.
The flames were voracious.
They spread across his body in the silence between one heartbeat and the next, engulfing the man in fire.
He carried on walking—one step, two, three—his hand reaching out as he fell to his knees.
Rye took a fourth into the road, instinctively moving to help, but before he could take a second felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Best not,” a voice said, close to his ear. The accent was cultured British, but not native. A second-language speaker raised on Austin Powers movies and Keira Knightley.
People along the sides of the road screamed their anguish while others ran to try and help the burning man, but the flames consuming him were so fierce none of them had a prayer of getting close enough to him to try and smother them. No, Rye realized with horror, they weren’t trying to get close enough to put out the flames, they were forming a protective cordon around the burning man so that the police couldn’t get to him. They were helping him die.
The woman behind him agreed. “They won’t move until the other monks have performed rituals of rebirth, to give his soul a better chance of a beneficial resurrection. If the police get hold of his remains the monk will be cremated, which is a secular rite, and as such denies his sacrifice any sort of progression on the wheel of life.”
Rye turned to see a well-groomed, middle-aged woman in chinos and a white cotton blouse. She looked like a 1930s photograph of an explorer. “They will keep him safe until the rites are complete, and then take him back to the temple where they will feed his corpse to the birds, honoring his life.”
“Jesus,” Rye said, trying to wrap his head around what he was seeing.
“Not quite,” she said. “But close enough. Cressida Mohr.” She held out a hand. “German embassy.”
“Ryerson McKenna. Rye to my friends. Uncouth American tourist.”
She met his smile with one of his own.
“Well, Rye, if you’re not averse to a little well-intended advice, I suggest we both get the hell out of here before things turn nastier than they already are. The police want that body and the crowd won’t surrender it without a fight.”
She was right. Rye saw batons coming out as one man was beaten to his knees even as others crowded around him.
He didn’t want to watch.
As Rye followed the woman away from the main street, Cressida explained the basic politics of what he’d stumbled into. “It’s a sadly common form of protest against the Chinese government who try to ignore the basic unrest in the region. This self-immolation is brutal, but it helps the monks avoid the wide-scale violence that would generally erupt through more traditional protests and marches. A burning man is a message that can’t be easily brushed aside.” It was hard to argue with that. “The key is that the monks cause no damage to property or other people in their freedom protests. Self-sacrifice is a noble death rooted deep in the traditions of Buddhism,” the German woman explained, leading Rye onto a third street, all the while putting distance between them and the protesters. “Remember, there are countless teachings of the Buddha doing similar, perhaps the most famous being the sacrifice where he surrenders his flesh to a dying tigress so she might feed her cubs. You see? Self-sacrifice is noble.”
“But burning yourself alive?”
“Indeed. It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
Rye nodded, though he didn’t have to imagine too hard at all.
“A lot of it is against forced resettlement of nomads and rampant mining and exploitation of the environment,” Cressida said, crossing the road. She didn’t look either way, obviously familiar with the traffic patterns of the city. A car horn blared its protest. She held up a hand in thanks and carried on walking. “Of course, the undercurrent is still autonomy from China’s rule and the issue of status, but that is much harder to win in a fight like this.”
Before they were three parallel streets away, the sounds of violence erupted behind them.
“Where can I take you?” Cressida asked.
“Nowhere. But you can walk with me to the bazaar if you’ve nothing better to do,” Rye said, grateful for the company.
“It would be my pleasure.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen that man in the crowd before, more than once, and that each time it had ended in death.
Tenzin Dawa.
But that was impossible. The man had died twice. And the second time, Iskra had made damned sure he wasn’t getting back up again with three bullets to the face.
But that didn’t change the fact Rye had seen him, or at least someone with more than a passing resemblance, which meant they knew they were here.
They.
The Brotherhood of Dzyan.
If Cressida noticed he kept looking back over his shoulder, she didn’t comment on it. She led him through a dozen streets, side streets and back streets, until the road before them opened up into
the sweeps and swags of the stalls’ brightly colored canopies. The bazaar was crowded with tourists and locals alike, with people pressed in around them haggling over the price of overripe fruit and bags of dried spices. The noise was overwhelming and, as a direct counterpoint to the fighting half a mile away, so much more intimidating. Life most definitely went on as usual in the city. He watched a small boy, no more than five or six years old, pocket an orange and scamper off through the crowd, somehow finding a path between all the legs and disappearing before the stall holder could set off after him. He couldn’t help but smile.
Another stall had a small transistor radio playing out a tinny and barely recognizable version of Madonna’s mindlessly chirpy eighties’ pop.
The climbing gear was in a shop across the street from the bazaar itself, with racks of high-end boots on display outside. In the window were faceless manikins dressed in fleeces and down jackets, modeling the wares. There were half a dozen people inside, going through the racks.
With one last check to see he wasn’t being followed, Rye crossed the marketplace to the store.
This time Cressida did notice, “Looking for someone?”
“Not sure,” he said. “I thought I saw someone I recognized back there.”
“Ah,” the German woman said, as though that explained everything. “You know, when I was in Italy last time, I bumped into three different people I knew, including my ex-husband. Most disconcerting.” The way she said it made him laugh, and the fact he laughed made it impossible not to sound flirtatious, even if that was the furthest thing from his mind.
“Well, this is me,” Rye told her, meaning this is where we part ways.
“It’s been a pleasure, Rye McKenna,” she said, offering him a crooked smile. “And if you intend to be in the city for a while, I would very happily serve as your tour guide.”
“I’m more likely to need a Sherpa by the time I’m done in here,” he said, inclining his head toward the store.
“Well, the offer is there. Might I ask where you are staying?”
“You might,” he said, giving nothing away.
“Ha. Allow me to rephrase that. Where might an interested lady find you, say around sevenish tonight?”
“In the bar, I suspect.”
“And which bar might that be?”
“The hotel bar,” he said helpfully.
“Give a girl a break. I’m trying to ask you out for a drink.”
“Hotel Moonlight.”
“It’s a date,” Cressida Mohr said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Rye said.
“If you’re looking for a way to kill time later, I highly recommend the monkey temple, it really is quite something.”
“Yeah, I think I’ll take a hike up there when I’m done.”
“You do that,” she said, and with that left him to his shopping.
The climbing shop was a veritable treasure trove of traded-in equipment, with more than enough quality gear to satisfy their needs. He gave an eager-faced assistant his shopping list, and after an hour of picking and choosing, arranged to have everything he needed delivered to the hotel before breakfast the next day.
Done, he headed back out into the city, not sure what to do with himself. With Byrne promising it would still be hours, if not days, before he got a hit on his end of things, he had time to kill.
Alone, the tourist thing was the most obvious way of killing time.
Rye had never been to Kathmandu, though again they had talked about it, one of those bucket list destinations for when they ran out of urban challenges and decided to tackle honest-to-god mountains again.
The white dome of the monkey temple, Swayambhunath, dominated the skyline.
It was a fairly easy walk up a long flight of stone steps, with rhesus monkeys waiting at the top, but even so, at 4,500 feet above sea level, the air made it heavier going than it might otherwise have been. Still, he was fit and healthy, and took the time to enjoy the climb, following the brightly colored semaphore of flags as they zigzagged up the hill to the white temple at its peak.
He turned frequently to look back down across the rooftops of the city.
Even though he was more than used to looking at the world from this kind of elevation, Kathmandu was an awe-inspiring sight. It wasn’t so long ago that a brutal earthquake had savaged the UNESCO heritage site, and the signs of it were still there to be seen, with several damaged walls and exposed brickwork where the plaster façade had crumbled.
It took him more than twenty minutes to walk up the hill. He smiled to every brightly dressed local and every considerably more restrained tourist he passed on the ascent. He couldn’t help but think about the German woman. There was something charming about the whole slightly too-stiff thing the Germans had going on. And thinking about Cressida, he realized that Hannah would have hated her.
That made him smile, too.
Most of the flashes of memory he’d had since her death in the Sheridan Meadows had been decidedly sanitized. It had been all of the good stuff, condensed. But the truth was she could be a sanctimonious cow, just like everyone else. It was nice to remember the real woman, not the Hollywood version of her.
Half a dozen monkeys climbed across the rooftop of the first building, while two more ran and leapt, splashing into what was probably a sacred pool. They were having such obvious fun it was contagious. Tourists watched as they swam back and forth, then clambered out dripping wet, to climb to another high point and launch themselves once again into the water.
Rye watched them for a full five minutes, enjoying the sun on his skin.
An overweight tourist struggled up the stairs, her laboring breath promising an impending cardiac arrest. Red veins stood out against Pillsbury Doughboy skin. She took a bottle of Coke from her pack and chugged it down like it was the elixir of life. She didn’t stop drinking until the plastic bottle buckled, empty. She wiped her lips and then her brow with the palm of the same hand, then lurched off with a rolling gait toward the holy shrine.
Rye wasn’t about to judge her; she was out, conquering the world, not at home conquering the couch.
He took a sip of water from his own bottle, then followed her.
There were countless golden statues of the Buddha, and bells suspended on frames, all of them segregated by chest-high hedgerows that grew mazelike across the summit. White-domed buildings were painted with eyes and eyebrows, giving them the vague appearance of the chubby holy man. And everywhere there was so much bunting, all the colored flags fluttering endlessly in the breeze. If the bright colors were meant to suggest prosperity, this place was wealthy beyond counting. Rye smiled.
He followed the other visitors into a main square with a few tourist shops bedecked with Tibetan masks of demons and elephant gods and selling CDs of Tibetan incantations and music. He saw a statue of Kali, the Hindu goddess of Time, Creation, Destruction, and Power amid the dozens of other small figurines on display with the gaudy handbags and postcards.
In the center of the square were row upon row of very different monuments. Without a tour guide to explain what, exactly, he was seeing, Rye could only guess. They looked like miniature reproductions of much grander temples and shrines.
Several times he turned, a flurry of movement drawing his eye, only to see more of the monkeys that gave the temple its name scurrying and scampering around, leaping from roof to roof around the square, lords of all they surveyed. They were fascinating creatures, utterly disinterested in the people trampling around their home. He noticed a couple of tourists trying to tempt them with food. One came forward to take a slice of fruit from an outstretched hand, then scampered back to the safety of the shadows.
Everything here was so peaceful it stood in direct contradiction to the burning man. He couldn’t reconcile the two faces of Kathmandu he’d been shown, but then all cities had aspects they didn’t want to show for fear of losing the tourist dollars.
He found a life-sized statue of the young Buddha with red
wax staining the middle of both of his hands like stigmata.
There was a red cloth and two chalices of water beside the statue. The visitor he’d followed into the square bent awkwardly to pick up the cloth and then struggled to kneel. He watched her wash the statue’s feet while a malnourished cow wandered around the square behind him.
The whole scene was so incredibly alien to him, he struggled to take it all in.
He saw a woman burning candles behind what looked like a grill and another lighting lanterns all around the stupa—the main shrine of the monkey temple. He made his way toward the golden door. It was guarded by statues of lions. The rattle of a prayer wheel being spun caught his attention and caused Rye to turn instinctively toward the sound. He thought for just a second that someone had been watching him—they’d disappeared around one of the corners out of sight—but knew he was seeing ghosts where there were none and put all thoughts of the dead man from his mind. He knelt at the steps of the stupa and offered a prayer for Hannah to whatever deity might have been listening.
As he stood again, he saw him, and this time there was no mistaking the face of the man.
It was him.
Tenzin Dawa.
The man who had already died twice.
A chill chased down the ladder of his spine.
It couldn’t be him, of course, his rational mind screamed. Men didn’t come back to life after you put bullets in their face. It couldn’t happen.
He looked around, trying to remember the curious layout of the monkey temple and how best to get out of the place without leaving himself exposed or putting others at risk. He didn’t want to turn his back to Dawa, either. So, he backed up a couple of steps, struggling to rationalize the enormity of what his return meant. Could the man truly be the demon Rask believed? What had he called them?