The Godfather of Kathmandu - By John Burdett Page 0,18

Somewhere the biocomputer was going through its elaborate calculations, which ended with a brief flash of inspiration on my part. “You were in the resistance?”

He inhaled deeply, then exhaled. “Thousands of us voluntarily disrobed so we could fight for our country. It didn’t seem such a stupid thing to do; after all, we had America on our side, in the form of the CIA.”

“Yes,” I said. “I read about it somewhere. You were betrayed.”

He shrugged. “You could put it like that. Or you could simply call it a flaw in democracy. America voted for Nixon.”

I remembered now. The president with the meatloaf mind saw China as a useful counterbalance to the Soviet Union—and to hell with human rights, which, as a part-time burglar himself, he’d never had any time for anyway. As soon as he got into power he ordered the CIA to hold back on support for the Tibetan resistance.

“But you must have been very young,” I said.

“Fifteen. I’d already been in the robes for seven years. When I heard that my father and all the men in my home village had gone to fight, I joined the other monks who disrobed at that time. Of course, the Chinese slaughtered us. But that wasn’t the point. Was it?” He stopped, waited for my question.

“You escaped to Dharamsala?”

He puckered his lips. “Maybe it’s better you don’t know what I did next.” Another pause. “Sure, in the end I got to Dharamsala, paid my respects to His Holiness, accepted his gracious offer to find me a place in a monastery there so I could continue my religious studies.”

Again a pause, as if he were calculating exactly how much information to let out. “But when the time came to take my vows again, I couldn’t do it. In my soul the Chinese had replaced the Buddha with hatred. Things that happen when you’re still young are hard to overcome.” He sighed. “So I found a girl.” He smiled. “Or, I should say, a girl found me. A Westerner, of course. A natural born do-gooder, which is the same as saying someone blind to their own badness. It was her notion that love and marriage would heal me. I believed her. I was so new to the West, so disillusioned with everything else, I assumed she had the right answer. That’s how naïve I was.”

He looked at me with a comic expression. “I had a well-trained mind from my monastic studies, so I went through the usual third-world thing of collecting qualifications. I ended up with a doctorate in Tibetan history—really useful for joining corporate America, right? Naturally, love and marriage failed in the end, as they always must. The wife who would have died for me on day one was starting to think about having me bumped off by day one thousand. I had been brought up to take vows seriously, so there was no way I was ever going to leave her.” Here he let a few beats pass while he contemplated me. “But when the self-righteous, hypochondriacal, self-pitying, life-fearing, man-resenting, competitive, criminal-minded, infantile bitch dumped me I wept with relief. Thank Buddha there were no children.” He held up both hands, one deformed, the other whole. “Me voilà.” He cocked an eyebrow.

“You are a misogynist?”

“Nope. It can happen to anyone. Let’s say the aspect she offered of her multifaceted humanity was pretty unvarying toward the end.”

I stopped short. “The whole of humanity is that bad?”

“Actually, I was going easy on her. And the rest of us. I left out ‘homicidal.’”

It would be a characteristic of his conversation that I seemed frequently to find myself at the receiving end of some kind of spiritual revelation when I thought we were having a normal chat. He leaned closer to me to whisper, “Do you really think that in the future it will be nations alone fighting for scarce resources? Don’t be so naïve, we’ll be fighting each other, all against all, down to the last square inch of commercially viable dust. Actually, that is what we’re doing already. Without spiritual aspiration we revert, do you see? Not merely to the monkey state, that wouldn’t be so bad. No, all the way back down the evolutionary spiral. Those are the stakes. How would you like to be worker number ten million and twelve in a termite nest?”

Something about Tietsin made you feel he wasn’t just shooting his mouth off; it was as if he were reading from a text in the sky. I