sang out after a beautiful corkscrewing incandescent missile (which put me in mind of a fully realized soul zooming back to nirvana and made me kind of jealous) went shooting past.
But when the chopper tilted the other way, I could see the Hmong women below collecting their little packets of opium sap in piles for other women to hump back to the village by means of a bamboo rod across their shoulders, as they had done for a thousand years.
“Never saw Vikorn move so fast in my life,” Zinna chuckles. Obviously, he believes he got the better of Vikorn in the somewhat fraught negotiations that followed, even though Vikorn worked loopholes into the agreement you could ride a buffalo cart through.
Zinna jerks his chin at the window. Two soldiers have brought Lek to stand in front of the glass. He looks thoroughly humiliated.
Now I’m so angry I’m fantasizing about kicking Zinna in the crotch; I can even feel the blow as I would deliver it with the tip of my shoe. I would enjoy him writhing on the floor, it would be worth the beating. Then something odd happens to my mind. Tietsin’s mantra starts repeating itself automatically in my brain. I experience the same sensation as in the teahouse, a kind of floating in which consciousness is withdrawn from the tyranny of the here and now. All of a sudden even Lek’s suffering is unreal. Now Zinna is staring at me.
“Well?”
I force my attention back into the five senses. “The day the Australian Rosie McCoy was arrested, we got a tip-off. The call came from Kathmandu in Nepal. We checked the origin of the call. Apart from the fact that it came from the Himalayas it was the standard sort of thing. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s a trafficker stabbing a former partner in the back. When the tip-offs are specific we notify Immigration. This was very specific, so I showed up and assisted with the bust. That’s all I can tell you.”
“But you went to see her today?”
“Of course. I wanted to see if I could get any more information. I’m a cop.”
Zinna sneers. “You’re not a cop, you’re Vikorn’s poodle. You jump at your master’s voice.” He lets a beat pass for the insult to sink in. “But you knew she was one of ours, didn’t you?”
“We didn’t know anything.” I scratch my ear. “But she was carrying a lot of smack. Since she wasn’t one of ours, we did rather think she might belong to you.”
I’m waiting for Zinna to ask more about the Tibetan connection, and not at all sure how I’m going to answer.
“The informant, he actually gave you his name. A Doctor Tietsin?”
I raise my palms. “Anyone can invent a name.”
The General stares at me with unnerving intensity for more than a minute, then seems to withdraw his interest. “That’s right, anyone can invent a name. Even a name like that.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of joke in Tibetan,” I offer. To his skeptical frown, I add, “You know, like someone might say Mickey Mouse or Napoléon Bonaparte—a joke in Tibetan culture, I mean.”
“What do you know about Tibetan culture?” he asks suddenly.
“Nothing.”
To my surprise he seems reluctant to pursue the subject. “Okay, you can go.”
When I stand up I say, “She didn’t talk, by the way.”
“Who?”
“The Australian, Rosie McCoy. She didn’t say a thing. I don’t think she knows anything. You run a tight operation, don’t you? There wouldn’t be anything to connect her to you or your people?”
“There wasn’t anything to connect her to your Tibetan either, until you busted her.”
“D’you want me to talk to Vikorn, see if we can persuade Immigration to drop the case—I mean as a kind of preliminary sweetener to your upcoming negotiations?”
He thinks about this, before saying, “No. This is something I want to deal with myself.” He gives a sudden phony smile. “I shan’t be troubling you.” As I’m leaving he surprises me with a final comment. “That whole thing up in Nepal, the crown prince massacring his family in June 2001, the collapse of the monarchy, the success of the Communists—you know what it was all about, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, now you do. They’ve been moving stuff from Tibet down into Nepal for twenty years. It’s a bigger operation than anything we have in Thailand. Whoever runs the government runs the trafficking. Actually, it’s a lot bigger than Colombia, but it’s Himalayan, so nobody knows, not even the Americans. The CIA have no real