The Godfather of Kathmandu - By John Burdett Page 0,15

the eyes particularly hard to look at. Sure, anyone can simply glance at something like that without suffering psychic overload, but try absorbing its significance on a deeper level—okay, okay, farang, you don’t want to know about that, you want to know about sex, drugs, and murder, I understand. Anyway, I did my three and a half turns without neglecting a single prayer wheel, all the time surrounded by Tibetans, most of them monks and nuns—professionals, in other words—who talked on cell phones, chanted and gossiped and spun the wheels and laughed and ate (they seemed to be compulsive snackers, like Thais) their way around the fantastically oversized stupa like Canterbury pilgrims. I was at first offended by an elderly nun who begged me for a few coins. This was strictly un-Buddhist and for a moment very disappointing: the true meaning of alms is not to keep the monk or nun from hunger, but to provide an opportunity of grace for the lay donor. She should not have asked; she should have simply stood there to let me make merit. She was pretty decrepit, though, and perhaps not all that smart, so, feeling like a sucker, I dipped into my pocket to give her a bunch of coins and notes. Actually, I did my usual trick of not looking at what I was bringing out of my pocket. When I calculated how much I had given her it amounted to more than five dollars, a fortune for her. She took the money indifferently, as if it was no more than her due, then gave me a look which, in my mildly disorientated and slightly paranoid state, seemed to say, What kind of international drug trafficker are you?

Then that name flicked across the screen behind the forehead which some call the third eye: Tietsin, it said, in bright flashing neon. Tietsin.

On an impulse I went to find Shiva Taxi. The whole stupa was surrounded by teahouses, thanka shops, souvenir collections, and a thousand places where you can get your digital pix loaded onto a CD or access the Internet. It took me thirty minutes of running around the gigantic compound before I found him and told him it was time to go. He stared at me, wondering why I was suddenly exhibiting signs of stress.

When I got back to the hotel I found a message waiting. Tietsin’s people would come for me about ten o’clock the next morning. Feeling restless, I left the hotel to walk on Thamel.

Which has a way of exploding in your face. Less than twelve inches from the perimeter of the guesthouse, a couple of trishaw drivers pulled up and almost trapped me against a wall; a woman who might have been Tibetan held a dead baby in her arms while she thrust out a hand and sobbed; taxies honked as they tried to get past the trishaws; runners from some of the other guesthouses tried to persuade me to relocate; a young man almost in rags whispered that he had hashish as a couple of men in black leatherette jackets drove up on a mid-range Honda motorbike and offered the same thing at the same price, though with infinitely more gravitas. Someone—a man whose face I never saw—asked if I wanted a girl or two tonight. When I squeezed past the trishaws and crossed the street, I was accosted by chillum and pipe salesmen; craftsmen who had spent the day carving chess sets wanted to sell me their masterpieces; and it all happened against a specifically Hindu soundtrack of honks and yells and men making their habitual ablutions, which included some elaborate hoiking, right there on the street—but you can’t really blame them, for the dust gets everywhere. Then there were the farang backpackers who moved heavily with their towering burdens which must have contained clothing for six months and medical accessories for a year. Some had aluminum tent poles sticking out. Quite a lot of them were single women or women traveling in pairs, both young and middle aged; Nepal was supposed to be safe, all the guidebooks agreed. I saw clones of Rosie McCoy. At the same time Nepali women in traditional dress (mostly saris, although a lot wore tapered pants under a long upper garment) were rushing in and out of shops and carrying groceries wrapped in gray paper, or cooking over gas burners in the open doorways of their medieval homes, taking care not to jostle the bony cows who also emerged