The Godfather of Kathmandu

by John Burdett

  Now I was starting to get a sense of what he meant. No one would dream of calling Vikorn on a matter of law enforcement, so who the hell from Kathmandu would want to talk to him? “The caller, was it a Thai or a Nepali or a farang, a he or a she?”

  “None of the above.” He grinned. “It was a Tibetan who claimed to be a kind of lama. You know about this stuff, that’s pretty high up, isn’t it?”

  “Spiritually at the top. The Dalai Lama himself often says he can’t match his lamas for technical accomplishment—you know, like living on a teaspoon of rice in a freezing cave for fourteen years while meditating naked in the lotus position and making purple rain. Lamas are those kind of guys.”

  “But he could speak some Thai. Not well, in fact pretty badly, but somehow educated. Like he’d learned it all from tapes or something.”

  A Tibetan lama who speaks Thai? That still wasn’t half as weird as a Tibetan lama who would want to speak to Vikorn. “What did he say?”

  A frown passed over my master’s face, and he shook his head. “He said a lot.” He stared at me. “He knows all about us. He knows what we do. And he knows about the problem I have with General Zinna—our permanent feud. And he made an offer.” He looked up at me. “An offer which, if it’s real, we can’t refuse.”

  “What sort of offer?”

  “An offer to put Zinna out of business and allow me to clean up not only on the retail side, which we have pretty much under control, but on the supply side too.” Here came the crunch, and he took the moment to check my face. “He offered to solve all of our supply-side problems—all of them, transportation from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Bangkok.”

  I shook my head. “So, it’s just someone trying to get a piece of the action while dealing in fantasy. You haven’t been able to solve your supply-side problems for thirty years. How could some religious fanatic in the Himalayas help?”

  “I know, I know. So did he. That’s why he’s offering us first choice after demonstrating his credentials and effectiveness. If we say no, he’ll sell his services to Zinna.”

  “This doesn’t sound like a spiritual personality.”

  “If he was genuinely spiritual, he wouldn’t be of any use to us, would he?” Vikorn scratched the stubble under his chin. “But when I say he knows all about us, I mean it. He knows about you. He mentioned you. He wants you on the team. You are the only reason he is favoring us above Zinna. Buddha knows how he got his information. Anyway, he’s shrewd enough to point out that if we force him to go to Zinna, Zinna will get so rich he’ll be able to wipe us out in five years.”

  “How do we know this isn’t some hoax, maybe by the anticorruption squad?”

  “By following his instructions, which aren’t too difficult.”

  I jerked my chin. “What instructions?”

  “You go to the Immigration desks at Suvarnabhum Airport tomorrow at about ten-thirty in the evening. Make yourself known to the officer in charge. Someone will try to pass through Immigration to take a KLM flight to Amsterdam. According to the Tibetan they will be detained. You are to watch and be there, that’s all.” I wait for the revelation. After a minute he reaches into his desk drawer and takes out a piece of paper with a photo on it. “He asked for my private Internet address and sent this.”

  Vikorn passed over the paper. On one side was a color photograph of an exceptionally attractive young blond woman in her mid-to late twenties. “He says her name is Rosie McCoy. She’s Australian. A mule who works for Zinna.”

  “I don’t understand. What does this prove, even if it’s true?”

  “It proves he’s got the guts and the know-how to hurt Zinna—as long as we accept his offer.” Vikorn stared at me until I lowered my eyes. He had successfully transferred the full emotional force of the words hurt Zinna; could there be a better justification?

  I took the paper and started to leave. When I reached the door, Vikorn said, “If this is the real deal, we’ll need you to take a trip to Kathmandu.”

  5

  We are a hub. Flights to Los Angeles and other American destinations leave early in the morning, flights to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and all points north and south leave every few minutes during the day, and flights to Europe mostly happen late in the evening. So why are there so few toilets in our brand-new airport? The farang design team and the Thai approval committee obviously didn’t feel comfortable with too many comfort rooms. I had three iced lemon teas on my way and now I needed to take a leak pretty bad. (Iced lemon tea: full of sugar and polluted ice; in this heat it’s like heroin. Don’t try it, so you’ll never know how good it is.) I took my place in line.

  One thing I had to admit, the designers were democratic in their incompetence: there were plenty of first-class-looking types with perfectly coordinated monogrammed luggage sets waiting, all of them doing the mustafapee dance according to their programming, along with grassroots types like me, everyone of us under the sway of the equality Buddha. We all watched with unnerving intensity while one guy shook hard and looked like he was about to zip up and let someone else at the relief trough—then an agonizing change of mind as he found more water to drain. Another shake, so vigorous I feared the thing might fly off—surely he was feeling the collective psychic pressure behind him?—then finally we moved forward by one man. By the time I got to the Immigration Police offices it was nearly ten-thirty, which was the moment when passengers for Europe hit passport control.

  The police colonel in charge of Immigration was not as unhappy to see me as I expected. A woman and a devout Buddhist, she took the view that all help in stemming the evil tide of drug trafficking was welcome, and anyway her officers were pretty busy and could do with some backup. She hinted that she didn’t really understand this particular tip-off, which seemed to originate somewhere in the Himalayas, so maybe I could be of some real help. In addition to being devout, conscientious, and good-looking, she was also single and about my age. I’m not bragging here, but she really did look as if she could eat me, before directing me to an obscure corner of the airport with a good view of passport control, where a couple of her “girls,” in smart white shirts with epaulettes, navy skirts, and fierce mugs, were standing. They didn’t mind my company, but wondered aloud how a man could help with this particular case. I said I was just there to observe, because Colonel Vikorn had gotten the same tip-off.

  Basically, there wasn’t anything much to do but flirt. I loyally told them how happily married I was, with a son I was totally crazy about, and they told me about their families, which left the way clear for plenty of hints, nudges, and winks before the perp arrived. Suddenly we were all in combat-ready professional mode.

  I took out the picture, just to make sure, but there was really no doubt about it: the girl who had just taken up her place in one of the lines for foreign passports was the girl in the photo from the Himalayas. If anything, she was even more stunning in the flesh: blond hair which was almost white—the kind Asian men would kill for—and one of those bodies which have been sculpted from the inside out by an abundance of female hormones, producing a bosom you couldn’t buy in Hollywood, a centerfold shape, and a nonchalance that came from the certainty that she could get away with almost anything. I didn’t think there was any conscious arrogance in that careless walk as she dragged her Samsonite carryon across the floor, nor in the way she made her buttocks swing. It was genuine animal narcissism. Her true arrogance lay in the smack she had hidden somewhere about her person, if the tip-off was for real.

  We all waited for her to reach the booth, because we had to be sure her passport corresponded with the information.

  As the line moved up and she approached the Immigration officer sitting at the booth behind the isometric digital camera, I could almost hear her words of reassurance to herself (I worked the airport myself a long time ago): It’s okay, you’re with the professionals, the people who run Thailand, no way are you going to get caught. How could you? Someone would have had to snitch, and you’ve joi
ned the non-snitchers, right? You belong to the ones the snitchers snitch to, how can you lose?

  Now she took out an iPod and a set of white earphones and played some music. I wondered if it was Buddha Bar. By the time she reached the booth she had so successfully controlled her mind that she was able to smile at the Thai man in the white shirt with blue epaulettes without a shadow of guile. As he took in her face and upper body he gave a brief flick of a smile in return before plugging her passport details into his computer. Reassured by his smile and the magic her breasts were working in his imagination—she had taken care to show such cleavage as could reasonably be attributed to the heat in the under-cooled airport—she took the liberty of leaning on the front of the booth with one elbow in a slightly provocative manner. Even when he picked up the telephone at his elbow, she did not exhibit the slightest degree of panic. He was probably arranging a tea break, right? So when the three female Immigration officers and I arrived from nowhere, and the officer who had been the most exuberant flirt ten minutes before put a hand on her shoulder, and the rest of us stood close around in case she tried to run, she looked like her insides were turning over in one prolonged churning, sickening, soul-destroying motion, which caused her to stagger.

  “Please, come with us,” the officer said. Her hand had slipped from on the woman’s shoulder to under it. Her English was very good, albeit with an unmistakable Thai accent. All of a sudden Ms. Rosie McCoy could not speak. She nodded helplessly, like a terrified child. We took her to a long room divided into two. At the near end were a few plastic seats; at the other a radiographer in a white jacket worked with some Immigration officers. There were four travelers in front of Rosie, all men in line for the X-ray machine.

  The radiographer worked very fast: it seemed there was no need for the suspects to undress. Now they stood Rosie upright against the plate and stepped back. There was a click, and then it was all over.

  Suddenly an outbreak of excited jabbering in Thai. The English-speaking officer was bringing the X-ray plate to show her, and the rest of us followed in a group infected with schadenfreude. There it was: a condom nestling inside her vagina exactly like an erect but sluggish penis, clearly packed with white powder, which seemed to shine with horrific brilliance in contrast to the gray contours of her bones and flesh. The contraband in her lower intestine was less brilliant, but quite obvious to an experienced eye: five cosh-shaped objects. According to our source, it was all 100 percent pure heroin. In Amsterdam or Maastricht she would have cut it to five times its present volume and sold it for sixty dollars a gram.

  She freaked. Her life about to come to an abrupt end at age twenty-seven, a scream started from the bottom of her lungs and emerged from her mouth without any act of will on her part. The Immigration officer slapped her face very hard, which put a stop to the scream. Now she started feeling in her pockets for her cell phone and fished it out with shaking hands.

  “No,” the officer said, and grabbed it.

  “Oh please, oh please, look, this is all the money I have, I’ll give it to you if you let me make just one call. Please? I’m begging you.”

  The officer stared at her for a moment, then at the open money belt, then at the other officers. “Put your money away. I don’t care if you make one call, but don’t try to delete anything. If you do, you’ll regret it, big time.”

  Rosie made the call. Apparently for weapons she had nothing but an extensive stock of Australian expletives.

  “You slime bucket, you dag, you fuckwit, you fucked-up piece of dog shit, you motherfucker, d’you know what I’m going to do to you? I’m going to dob you in it so fucking deep you’ll swing for this, you asshole, I’m not going down alone, you lump of green vomit, you string of colon plaque, I’m taking you with me, you said this was safe, this was the A-stream, no one working this one ever got caught in the last twenty years, they had customs under control, you stupid, fucked-up, lying asshole. YOU’RE GOING DOWN, YOU’RE GETTING THE INJECTION, NUMB NUTS.”

  Exhausted, she closed the phone and burst into tears. Calming her down the best they could, the officers led her to a female toilet, where she was given the choice of extracting the condom in her vagina herself or leaving the job to one of the officers.

  They told me afterward that Rosie claimed she could manage it, but terror and despair had caused her vulva to shrivel like a walnut and her hands to shake violently. When they sat her on a chair with a rubber sheet, she urinated involuntarily. In the end one of the officers donned a pair of plastic gloves and, using K-Y Jelly to ensure the condom didn’t break and spill its contents into her body, pulled it out with the gentleness, kindness, and compassion a Buddhist woman ought to show a fellow female. After that it was simply a matter of accompanying Rosie to a nearby hospital, where nurses experienced in these things would administer a laxative: with that much poison in her gut the officers were not taking any chances. In the meantime, I checked Rosie’s cell phone in order to find the last number she dialed.

  Which turned out to be the cell phone number of one Mark Whiteman, an Englishman who I happened to know was a minor player in a large and successful trafficking ring run by none other than General Zinna of the Royal Thai Army. I had the information I had come for. I fished out my own mobile to call Vikorn.

  “The source is straight,” I said. “His information is good. Zinna is hurt.”

  “Get a ticket to Kathmandu while you’re there.”

  “I’m traveling first-class. I’m consigliere.”

  “Go business. First-class attracts attention.”

  “I’ll get the first flight tomorrow, there aren’t any tonight.”

  When I closed the phone I strolled over to one of the airport bookshops to buy a guidebook to Nepal.

  Did I forget to mention that when I was finally given a glance at Rosie McCoy’s passport I discovered a full-page visa for the Kingdom of Nepal, together with entry and exit stamps? She had flown to Thailand after three months in that Himalayan country. What a coincidence.

  6

  I am still in the men’s room at the Rose Garden, but I’ve finished the joint and stopped sniveling. No one in my state of mind should fool with this stuff, I explain to myself as I roll another joint. The thing is, you get addicted to the emotional roller coaster. It becomes a fascination to see how the great Ferris wheel of Self gets stuck with you strapped into the top seat with your legs dangling over the void.

  How different would life have been if I had not flown to Nepal that morning? Totally, totally different, I mutter as I take a toke. Would you do it any differently today? I ask the haggard face in the mirror with the funnel-shaped joint hanging from its lips. No, I tell the poor distraught fellow staring back at me, for then I would never have met Tietsin. With the detachment of the truly psychotic I start to cackle, then double over, whether in genuine hilarity or some caricature thereof is hard to say: I wouldn’t have missed him for the world, I say, cackling and shaking my head, not for the world, damn him. And all of a sudden he is there, large as life, in the men’s room with me, in his old parka jacket unzipped at the front, his long gray hair in a ponytail, his straggly beard somehow comic, his eyes rolled back, revealing only the whites. “Your problem is you’re not remembering in enough detail,” he explains. “Your Western blood makes you superficial—go deeper in. What have you got to lose?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I say with theatrical emphasis. “Only my mind, and there’s not much left of that, is there?” But of course he was a hallucination and has disappeared like mist.

  • • •

  In Nepal we don’t fly through clouds, because the clouds have rocks in them.

  The guidebook used this quote from a Royal Nepal Airlines pilot to open the section on Nepalese geography. The poorest country on earth is also the most vertical. Anyway, why would you worry about national resources when you have Everest? Overachievers from developed countries pay tens of thousands of dollars to get frostbite, lose limbs, and die at twenty-nine thousand fee
t, so they can call themselves summiteers. I also learned, for the first time, that Mr. Everest was a humble surveyor of the British Empire who really did not want the biggest rock on earth named after him, and neither did anyone else within a radius of ten thousand miles, since they had had their own names for the mountain for a good five thousand years before the ever-ready Everest turned up with his theodolite: Chomolungma (Mother of the Universe) in Tibetan; Sagar-martha (Goddess of the Sky) in Nepali.

  Take a tip from me: if you’re approaching Nepal from East Asia, try to get a window seat on the right. I’d never seen the Himalayas before, and they come up on you disguised as clouds, delicate white wispy things at first, you think, until it dawns on you: it’s not a cloud, it’s not a mountain, it’s fifteen hundred miles of wall many miles high built by gods as a six-star dwelling place (there is no other rational explanation). As we landed I felt Vikorn’s genius and influence evaporate after holding my spirit prisoner for more than a decade. He was vicariously out of his depth too.

  But as a cop, I could not help falling in love with the airport. It’s the only one I’ve found that insists on throwing your luggage through a security machine after landing; but the good news is the machine doesn’t work, probably never has, and anyway the guy with the knitted topi on his head sitting behind it chatting to a friend probably wouldn’t know what to do with a sizzling little electronic device if he found one. Outside, there was the usual collection of hustlers, hotel runners, half-legal taxis, and ragged people who like to watch planes land and take off. On a whim I grabbed a taxi hustler with a rag tied around his head and such an array of astrological charms and charts all over the windows and roof of his cab he put your average Bangkok cabbie to shame. His eyes were black oil wells with insane flecks of red. His name was Shiva, of course.

  Shiva wanted to know where I was staying. After studying the guidebook I narrowed the short list down to two: the five-star Yak & Yeti (I was most tempted by the name), which used to be someone’s palace, or the downmarket but internationally loved Kathmandu Guest House. To make a decision I really needed to think about the psychology of my business partners. I mean, in your line of work, farang, everything depends on projecting the right image, correct? Which was exactly my dilemma. On one hand, I was here to arrange a high-value supply-side contract, which would normally mandate the Yak & Yeti as the only joint in the whole Himalayas qualified to provide the appropriate ambience; on the other hand, it was not exactly my style and I was dealing, if my information was correct, with a mind master of considerable skill and insight—didn’t he just destroy the life of Rosie McCoy and put one huge crimp in General Zinna’s operation, without, apparently, leaving his cave? No, I didn’t think the Yak & Yeti was a smart decision; with guys like Tietsin, you better go naked or not at all.