The Godfather of Kathmandu - By John Burdett Page 0,96

don’t mind blood. When she has washed she takes me into her office, where we examine her report on Frank Charles on her computer. We’ve just about finished, when I say, “What’s that, on page twenty-one, at the bottom?”

“Diamond fragment,” she reads, and rubs her eyes. “That’s right, I forgot. Apparently a fragment of industrial diamond was found, but we couldn’t be sure where it came from, and anyway it had nothing at all to do with the cause of death.”

“And this, on page three of the toxicologist’s report. Beryllium. What’s that?”

“Don’t know, except that it’s a kind of oil we found under his fingernails. Once again, it had nothing to do with the cause of death, so we didn’t waste time on it.”

It wasn’t heroin, I’m telling myself in the cab on the way back to the station. I’ve quite forgotten about Frank Charles; I’m thinking about the anonymous dead girl on Supatra’s autopsy table, her internal organs ripped out, her personality defined, so to speak, by her death, whence she derives a certain power over me, even though I had nothing to do with her demise. No doubt she was just a dumb kid who got handed some yaa baa and had no reason for not using it. But she was going to die young anyway, so was it really anyone’s fault? Metaphysics aside, I feel awful. And I know exactly what kind of nightmare I’m going to suffer through tonight.

34

Ever tried calling your Zurich-based Lichtenstein bankers outside office hours? I mean, even half a minute after five p.m. on a Thursday? You can see why they’re strong on clocks. I’m calling the main banking man dealing with the Lichtenstein trust in a small matter of forty million dollars, to tell him to go ahead and courier the documents we talked about when I first spoke to him about my special shipment of Lapsang souchong tea for wholesale to Europe and the need to set up a Lichtenstein trust for that very purpose—a transparent excuse he didn’t blink at—and he’s gone home. Nor will he answer his cell phone, and his assistant’s cosmology is equally clockwork: she’s gone home too. Finally, by going through the switchboard I get a secretary on overtime who knows what documents I’m talking about; she agrees to send them, emphasizing that she is using her own initiative and risking a reprimand and that she is an Ethiopian refugee whose English is not great. That done, there is nothing to do but wait for a couple of days. Without having to rush around town, my mind starts to dig one of those big dangerous black holes.

Why am I doing this? Why? My son is dead, I don’t need to worry about college fees ever again, and my partner has left me to go to a monastery. I don’t need the dough! But I’m stuck in this filthy continuum. I’m not even particularly afraid of dying. But I’m stuck in this filthy continuum. Last night I dreamed of future victims, all of whom looked like the girl on the autopsy table: vivid images of kids with giant hypodermic needles sticking out of their skulls. I’m not made for this line of work, and yet everyone thinks I am, including Vikorn, Zinna, and Tietsin.

Why not concentrate on the Fat Farang file, you want to know? Well, apart from wallowing in a dark mood of self-disgust, I’ve decided to let Doctor Moi sweat for a few days. I also need to rethink the whole strategy. So I decide to go to temple.

This time I go to the hyper-sacred Wat Bowonniwet. On my way in the back of a cab I think I’m too tense, too uptight, too scared for a successful meditation. But when I’m on my knees giving the Buddha the high wai, I feel Tietsin’s blade wheel start to spin. It is different on each occasion; this time I conceive it as a great Ferris wheel with giant spadelike cutters lumbering toward me. I know not to give in to terror; I know I have to stand my ground. And it turns out that the extreme state of mind induced by the hallucination reveals my true nature: bitter. At bottom with me it is not old-fashioned greed like Vikorn’s, or lust, like Zinna’s—those two vices show at least a desire to be happy, however misguided. No, with me it has always been a clinging to bitterness as the last word on reality—like a modern thriller