Black Buddha

by Richard Waters

  ‘You have the carapace of war about you, but I suspect that’s not the truth.’

  The light outside was getting stronger, the blues and greys of night slipping into the Mekong. ‘If I told you this key could unlock the source to the world’s darkness and sadness would you believe me?’

  Jacques twiddled the brass key in his fingers. ‘No.’

  ‘Keys are curious things, oui? They open doors to good and bad, precious and mundane. They’re quite profound in their own way.’

  He felt the weariness of the night press down on him. The king motioned him to sit. Instead of settling back on his imperial seat he grabbed a chair and pulled it close to Jacques, so now they were just two men, only one was dressed in a silk dressing gown.

  ‘Do you believe in evil, Mr Deschamps? And by this I mean genuine evil, not the horrors of war that compel people to become that which they are not. I talk of evil from the cradle?’

  Jacques thought about it a moment, then the call to prayer of a gong upset his meditation. ‘No.’ he said finally. ‘I believe we are products of our environments and the actions visited upon us by others.’

  ‘And do you believe then that men such as Hitler could be justified in their dark brilliance just because of something that happened to them as children? How did such a monster come about’

  ‘He was an aberration, a freak of nature.’

  The king nodded, satisfied. ‘And what of destiny, Jacques – can I call you Jacques?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you believe our lives are written, that the stars or some unknown force has a plan of which we are unconsciously a part of, a cog that in turn affects others who in turn… you see where I’m going?’

  The Frenchman looked at the painting, snow drifting at the side of a lane bordered by a stone wall, a lemon dawn rising behind it. He wanted to leave Asia, he wanted to go back to Europe. ‘No, I believe we swim in hazard and nothing is preordained.’ He thought of Penny in the coffee shop, the day he’d first glimpsed her. It seemed like fate had brought them together; just at a time he was losing all meaning of himself and his hollow, regimented life as a soldier. But were that the case what the hell was he doing so far away from her? Everything was random, he was sure of it.

  ‘And your being here… does that seem odd to you?’

  Jacques nodded. ‘A little, it’s rather odd I have to admit.’

  Savang Vatthana smiled. ‘Yes it is. Let me cut to what you call the chase. The key in your hand is more precious than all the royal jewells and palaces in Laos. Sadly it is a key to something terrible, something locked inside a place; something that must never get out. And I want you to guard it.’

  ‘You want me to what?’ The Frenchman sensed the presence of another. He looked around to see the gardener stood patiently listening by the door; perhaps he’d been there all the time.

  Vatthana nodded and Yin stepped into the room. ‘My astronomer, my right arm, and sometimes my gardener.’

  ‘We’ve met.’

  ‘Please, listen to what he has to say and if you choose to have no part in this… then, we may have a problem.’ There was no threat in his voice, no undertone of imminent punishment. Somehow Jacques believed this regent with the soft voice and manner usually got what he wanted.

  ‘You were chosen,’ spoke Yin, his eyes catching a shaft of light through a half-open shutter. ‘We did not choose you, it was written long before we were here… over a thousand years ago. A man from another land will come, the mark of the guardian will be on his neck, and his son after him. Both of them will protect the people from the darkness in the mountain; one will ensure it never gets out, the other will continue go into the mountain himself.’

  ‘But I don’t have a son. I don’t understand. What is it you want me to do?’

  The king looked to Yin and back at him solemnly. ‘I want you to leave Laos and never come back. Never let that key and map I’m about to give you, ever return within a thousand miles of this country.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because…’ For the first time that evening the king was lost for words.

  Yin pressed his hands together and sighed. ‘You’re not a religious man are you?’

  ‘I used to take mass, but no, not any more. I’ve seen too many things that a benevolent god could never let happen.’

  ‘Then you won’t believe in second comings I suppose?’ said Yin.

  ‘I’m afraid not. Please, I’m tired. Now, if you want me to take this key when I leave, if it will help you sleep at night, I will. I plan to leave for England in a month. But your Highness, no more talk of mysticism, please.’

  The walls were touched in the rose light of dawn, the snow in the paintings looked as if it had turned to honey. It was the strangest request he’d ever heard. Why couldn’t the king find someone he trusted like his gardener/astronomer? ‘Don’t you trust anyone, I mean, there must be someone else who believes all this stuff?’ asked Jacques.

  ‘No, it is written that it will be you.’

  ‘Because I have a birthmark on my neck? With respect, that’s ridiculous.’

  Yin laughed. ‘Not everything in Buddhism is theory. We were given other things to too… predictions. And some of these were linked to the stars, like a timetable. The stars match up; your arrival exactly matches the present configuration that was predicted.’

  ‘And what else was predicted?’

  ‘That another will seek it. The second coming of Jai-Dam.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Blackheart. You would perhaps call him the antichrist.’ Said Yin, his eyes almost turquoise in the early morning light, ‘He lives as we speak. So you must leave Laos, and before it is too late.’

  ‘Why?’

  The king rose stiffly and poured some water, ‘Because he will try and take it from you, and with him come snakes and darkness, blood and sadness.’

  They were like a double act who knew their routine back to front; one started as the other stopped, perfectly calibrated. It was Yin who spoke next. ‘Perhaps destiny will draw you both together with its strange sense of humour, if it hasn’t already done so.’

  For a moment he thought of Carabas on the mountaintop, the blackness leaking from his mouth. Jacques shook his head and blinked as he rose. ‘And the map, what’s that for?’

  The king looked pained, as if guilty for the first time for the enormity of what they asked. ‘To help your son out of the maze.’

  - 32 -

  Nathan looked at me blackly, a hint of cruelty in his face. ‘Your story is beyond fantastical. There is no cult, only money… that’s the motivator.’

  ‘Perhaps. And maybe it is just heroin-related and you’re right… but after everything I’ve told you, after all the people who’ve been murdered,’ I said, ‘surely you’re not fool enough to go in there on your own?’ Silence. ‘Do you have a weapon?’ I asked.

  He fished for his SLR in a cupboard and pointed it at me.

  ‘Just evidence, like any good journalist, and this time I’ll make it stick. If I prove that it’s a drug lord behind this then I get my life back. I can take us home and work for a newspaper with my head held high. But until then, until I have proof, I wouldn’t get a job on the Croydon Gazette.’ He gathered some more things for his day pack in silence; a torch, a lock-knife.’

  ‘You’re going to need something bigger than that. How do you know where you’re going?’

  ‘I know exactly where it is. Place near Nong Khiaw and Muang Ngo Neua. I got inside the NPA and scoped it a couple of times with a telephoto lens but I never got right inside like you. On Google Earth there’s an army road that runs right into the heart of the park and stops abruptly near the bottom of the mountain. That’s where the raw drugs come in, get processed and leave. This time I’ll go a little closer.’

>   ‘Nathan, you’re worse than me. Listen to yourself? You’re one man against an unseen cast of maybe hundreds. Whoever is orchestrating this has had me followed from day dot since I got off the plane in Bangkok. That takes time and an awful lot of resources; money… people. You don’t think they’ll have the perimeter guarded?’

  He lit a cigarette and fished a motorcycle helmet from behind a pile of canvases depicting the mountain. ‘I did four years in the Specials in my twenties before I became a hack. I’m pretty good at creeping about.’

  Now that he mentioned it I noted the steel in his eyes, the tensile muscles in his reedy arms.

  ‘And what happens if you don’t come back? What do I tell Chloe?’ I said, peeking through the blinds to the temple opposite. Candles had been lit in the doorways and along the peninsula street as if for a royal occasion or religious ceremony. And yet the ancient city was eerily quiet.

  ‘I never asked for this to happen,’ said Moore, ‘I was just another scribe in paradise, until I lifted the stone and little by little my life started turning to shit…the papers stopped calling with commissions, Jenny threatened to leave me and then you turn up with your weird theories. I may not agree with you but after what happened to you my instinct tells me I have to act now while there’s activity up there. Jesus, I should have done this months ago.’

  He looked defeated and angry as I watched him cross the room to a drinks cabinet and remove and unbottle another quart of Sang Thip. He took a long lug and wiped the whiskey from his lips.

  ‘Where is Jenny?’ I said,

  ‘At work. She runs a little café down the main street… we don’t talk much at the moment… she takes Chloe in the evenings.’

  ‘Because of all of this?’

  He nodded. ‘Says I’m obsessed… the mountain, the missing children - they’re just children for fuck’s sake! Someone had to write the story.’

  I envied him the strength of his convictions.

  ‘She’s had enough, she says if I paint another mountain, that’s it, she’s leaving - period.’

  ‘So why go there and risk everything you have left? If I had a daughter I don’t think-’

  ‘I’m going tonight, I want the whole thing over… it’s contaminating. And not you or anyone else is going to stop me.’ Moore went to another room and came back wheeling an old Russian Minsk motorbike. ‘Lock the door after me, I’ll be back in the morning.’

  ‘And what if you’re not?’

  Indecision flashed across his narrow face, he rubbed his aquiline nose and grimaced, ‘Jen will be here in a minute to take Chloe, so you’d best keep yourself scarce. I don’t want anyone to know you’re here.’

  I shook my head in defeat. He looked at me roguishly, ‘I’m just taking photos, remember?’

  My body was feeling strange, floating away from my mind, blood capillaries bursting in pockets of red flame whenever I closed my eyes. I needed to sit down. A few minutes later I heard a key at the lock and stumbled into the kitchen. I never saw his wife, she didn’t come in. Just the sound of a brief adult exchange and his little girl telling him she loved him. And then she was gone.

  Moore came upstairs. I had a prescient stone in my stomach that neither of us would speak again. I hadn’t figured out the nature of the snake but unlike him I’d seen a bit further down the tunnel.

  ‘Nathan, everyone I’ve come in contact with has died or been one of them. If you go there now, I swear to god you won’t come back.’

  ‘Since when did this have anything to do with God?’ He looked at me coldly, shut the door behind him, and a moment later I heard the old Minsk splutter to life and disappear into the night.

  I sat on the floor and looked around impotently; stuck here with a dodgy ankle and no money, the local police making calls – I was a sitting duck. Without thinking… selfishly - or perhaps because I feared there were things I needed to tell her before something terminal happened - I picked up the phone and dialled Mum’s home number. I couldn’t bear the irony of her losing another of her men and never knowing what had happened to them. In a way perhaps I was mirroring my own father. Certainly I was following in his footsteps, even if they were choreographed for me.

  ‘But what are you doing in Laos?’ she said, her voice rising in panic.

  ‘I’ll be back in a week Mum.’

  She was silent at the other end of the phone, the distance crackling between us. ‘Are you alright Al?’ I hesitated perhaps a moment too long, ‘He was your best friend - you probably don’t want to come back and face things, but it’s okay, we’ll get through it.’ I could picture her in the sitting room at the back of her house, lukewarm daylight penetrating through the conservatory windows.

  She tried to reason with me. ‘I know you went to write about your Dad and that’s why you were going to Laos originally but surely what happened to Skip is more important than your book,’

  I could feel the anger rising in my throat, but for her sake I tried to keep it under check; she musn’t learn the full palette of shit I’d landed myself in. ‘If I’d known a little bit more about Dad, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said defensively, ‘What’s this got to to do with your Dad?’

  I looked through the window onto the river below, part of me still drifting upon it in a post-heroin stew, ‘I don’t want – I can’t - go into it now but it all relates to him, that’s why they killed Skip. He took something from Laos, it’s what was left to me in the will and now someone wants it back.’

  She breathed heavily down the line, evidently trying to stop herself from crying. ‘The money in the will? Why would anyone want that, it was only eight thousand-’

  ‘Not the money, Mum - the key and map they couldn’t find, remember? I took them. They were in her apartment. I think she was killed for it.’

  ‘But… but what are they for?’

  ‘They unlock a door in a mountain. A place some very bad things have been happening.’

  ‘But, who… who is behind it?’ She sounded desperate now. ‘Listen Al, talk to Sammy Casbaron. He called me after you left Bangkok. He said you’d left a message for him and he tried to reach you but you’d gone… Alain are you still there?’

  Outside I suddenly heard the slide of a car and the sound of an engine idling. ‘Where did he say he was?’ I said quickly,

  ‘He didn’t, he left a mobile number for you to call him. I told him about Skip. Look, whatever you’ve got yourself into, just come home!’

  I was whispering now. ‘Ok, I’ll call him.’

  She gave me Casbaron’s number. My forehead was crowded in sweat and I wanted to tell her the Lexus had finally come for me, that it was nighttime, their time, but I couldn’t. I heard the engine shut down and the sound of a car door being opened. ‘Mum, quick - did Dad ever say why he had to go back to Laos that last time? Please, it may be the last part of the puzzle.’

  ‘No. He just said it was something that needed to be done. Something that had to be dealt with.’

  ‘Someone, you mean?’

  ‘Really I don’t know. Will you call me tomorrow?’ her voice changed gear. I thought she was crying. ‘Do you want me to call the Embassy?’

  ‘There isn’t one. I’ve got to go… I love you.’

  I inched to the window and peered through the blind expecting to see the Lexus. Instead, I saw an old fashioned police car and a man in uniform with an unpleasant, vulpine face walking toward me. There was a knock at the door, a few inches from my head. I’d left it unlocked. I limped to the stairs and made for the bedroom as quietly as I could on my knees, my ankle pulsing with a separate heartbeat,

  ‘Hello? Mr Moore, it is Da Prom. Hello?’ he called impatiently.

  I staggered to the bedroom, the clock on the bedside table glowing ten p.m. I heard
the sound of the car drawing away, then silence. I continued to hide by the bedside for the next ten minutes, my mind racing as I tried to imagine what would happen to me. I ran through my options. If the Police were coming I had to get out, but where? This was my last sanctuary - there was nowhere else to go. I crept downstairs and rang his number in the darkness. My heart beat a little quicker as his voice, gruff and friendly, came to the phone, ‘Yeah, Sammy speaking?’

  ‘Sammy, it’s Alain,’ I whispered,

  ‘Jesus Christ, I finally got hold of you! Y’alright?’

  Just hearing his voice made me feel stronger, like I had a chance, an ally. ‘Where the hell are you? I’ve been worrying myself sick ever since I got your message. I’m sorry about your friend.’

  ‘Where were you?’ I said impatiently.

  ‘I was in Rangoon when you called, by the time I got back and tried to buzz you, you’d left the guesthouse in Khao San… I didn’t know where to look. I’m sorry I let you down.’

  He sounded genuine enough. It was time to call in a favour. ‘I’m in more trouble than before, you wouldn’t believe it.’

  He laughed, ‘If you’re anything like your dad I probably would! What’s happened, you need me to fly in the reserves?’

  ‘How quickly can you get them to Luang Prabang?’

  I heard him gasp at the other end, ‘Luang… what in God’s name are you doing there? Alain, you get your ass out of that place as quick as you can.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Listen, I’m in Bangkok; even if I drop everything right now, I still couldn’t get out there till tomorrow morning. You want to tell me what’s happened?’

  I hesitated. ‘The people who killed my friend, they’re after me; they have been ever since. ’

  He thought a beat. ‘Luang Prabang, there’s a restaurant there, at least it was a year ago, place called the Three Elephants… owner’s a westerner. I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can go outside, the Police are looking for me.’