The Godfather of Kathmandu

by John Burdett

  “I want you to call the Thai Chamber of Commerce here in Kathmandu, if there is one, or whoever at the embassy deals with this kind of stuff. If the Thai government can’t help, ask Kimberley to contact the American Chamber of Commerce. I want to know the names of all the agencies here that might be involved in filmmaking, you know the kind of thing?”

  “Of course I don’t, I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. I suppose I’ll work it out, though. And by the way, what did your last slave die of?”

  Naturally, I try all the numbers Tietsin gave me to contact him. Naturally, none of them are in operation, either because he’s turned his phones off or because the network is not operating just now. I go to my room to unpack, then stroll down the driveway, through the iron gates manned by impressive men with black moustaches and military uniforms, out onto Thamel.

  26

  Once on Thamel, though, I realize I simply cannot resist a visit to Bodnath, even though I’ve not been able to contact him.

  It’s almost dark by the time I arrive, with just the faintest glow in the west, when I begin my ritual journey around the giant stupa. Its brilliant white breast disappears with the last of the sun, but the two great eyes benefit from spotlights. There are not so many pilgrims and tourists spinning the brass prayer wheels at this time of day, and the eyes have an intimidating aspect to them. Without the certainty of clear daylight, it’s easy to imagine the mind behind them as master of the night.

  The journey all the way around the stupa takes much longer than during the day. Strange thoughts assail me; my mind changes. It occurs to me that a stupa was originally a means of contacting the dead, that it is a Neolithic burial mound that I’ve come to pay my respects to. It occurs to me that the Far Shore is never all that far away, had we not been programmed to pretend it doesn’t exist. It occurs to me that our ancestors, long before the Gautama Buddha arrived with his clarifications, knew more about death than we know about the motions of the stars. With their short, hard lives they must have faced the mysterious disappearance of loved ones every year; it must have seemed as if the whole stream of human life led straight back to the stupa—the sepulcher, you might say—and the more enduring world of the dead. And it occurs to me that nothing has changed, except that the extra twenty or thirty years we can expect to spend on the planet these days seem to have blinded us to a truth that for our ancestors was brutally obvious.

  This meditation takes me one complete circumnavigation. I deliberately began in the west so after three and a half turns I will end in the east. When I start the next round, I am thinking, I know he is watching. He knows I am here. Nevertheless, the second round with the brass I spend in a kind of trance state in which thought, though it still exists, is relegated to a secondary function while some kind of emptiness, a beautiful, indescribable absence, takes its place. So it’s not until the last leg, the half turn from west to east that will finish my tour, that I remember what the stupa looks like when I see it through Tietsin’s eyes. And suddenly there it is: black under a bloated full moon, quite still, no people anywhere, only me dwarfed by this great dark mountain of death from which a lurid lightning bolt seems to split the sky.

  But this time the vision doesn’t fade. It stays with me in the cab on the way back to the guesthouse, and when I lie down to close my eyes it becomes obvious that this is where Tietsin’s blade wheel has been leading. That all the great fuss I’ve made about my state of mind is as nothing compared to what comes next. And it’s not Tietsin whose name I call just before nodding off. I hear myself whispering, Pichai, my brother, my self. Pichai, tell me, what happens after you die, really?

  Well, what happened to me at that crucial moment in my spiritual development was that I fell asleep. Now it’s some awful predawn nightmare that has awakened me; no, wait, that really was “All Along the Watchtower” I was hearing in my sleep. I find I’ve not corrected the clock on my cell phone, so I can tell at a glance it is six a.m. in Bangkok.

  “This is your katoey secretarial service. I hope you took plenty of clothes, I hear it’s freezing up there. I got a short list. Actually, there are only three agencies worth considering, only two of those do high-altitude locations—I’m assuming that’s what we’re talking about here—and only one really looks like the kind of outfit Charles would have used, I mean with fluent English speakers, contacts in LA, et cetera.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The agencies—the people who assist foreign film crews, especially Americans, to make a movie in a foreign location. Sorry, I am speaking to Detective Sonchai ‘Never Left a Case Unsolved’ Jitpleecheep of Bangkok and Kathmandu?”

  I blink. Sarcasm and work are two different modes of consciousness, and I can only cope with one at a time right now.

  “There’s only one agency?” I say with considerable relief. I was not looking forward to spending the day talking to wannabe Asian Hollywood producers in dark glasses and black T-shirts. “So, what are the details?”

  “I’ve sent them by e-mail. I don’t trust you to get the details right this early in the morning. Have you been smoking?”

  “No. I forgot to score. Too busy. I’ll try today, thank you for reminding me.”

  “Sonchai?”

  “Yes?”

  “Master?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is there really no such thing as love?”

  For a moment I’m tempted to spill bitterness all over the cell phone. Then I see the inherent irony in the question. You could say Lek has been chasing love all his life in his own way, lifting the rock every morning, watching it roll back down the hill every night, just so he can endure the full day. His martyrdom is immeasurably vaster than mine.

  “Not for me, Lek, I don’t have your strength. I’ve retired permanently. They amputated my heart—nothing I can do.”

  There’s a click as he closes his phone. When the guesthouse finally opens its business center at eight o’clock Kathmandu time, I have them print out the e-mail from Lek. It contains the address of the agency, which occupies a first-floor office over the commercial area leading to the Yak & Yeti Hotel. It seems I must find someone called Atman.

  I eat breakfast in the garden of the guesthouse. It’s basic backpacker stuff: bacon and eggs, toast, fried tomatoes, as much yogurt and granola as you can put down, cheese by Firestone. The clientele here is frequently serious about mountains and trekking, but this is not the time of year to lay siege to Everest, for it is spring in the Himalayas: all over the country snows are melting and rhododendron blooming. I know from the guidebook what to do and where to go, so when I feel strong enough for the Thamel onslaught I walk to the taxi rank and take the first in line. As usual it has no handles for the windows in back so they are permanently open, enabling one to feel like a genuine participant in the honking, the jams, and the pollution. But it takes less than thirty minutes to reach a large tree shrine to Ganesh, the elephant god, in a forest next to a river. The rhododendron here are the forest. It’s like being in an oil painting that is all about abundance: a million mauve, crimson, and white blossoms, like bursts of awareness in a dark age.

  That’s all I needed, ten minutes of sanity; or maybe it’s the most I can cope with? After I pay my respects to Ganesh with a bunch of marigolds, for which the shrine keeper charges like a wounded elephant, we drive back to town and the Yak & Yeti. When I get there they tell me that Atman is on location. The good news is that the location is Bhaktapur, which is no more than half an hour away. I sigh, find my second cab of the morning, and negotiate a day price.

  Bhaktapur: I have been directed to Durbar Square, which is bigger than Kathmandu’s, with a charming Grecian atmosphere of deserted plinths on which black goats hang out to be fed and photographed by tourists. Not today, though; the whole square has been cordoned off with yellow plastic tape for the benefit of a film crew, and the goats have been moved on.

  “It’s a murder mystery set in the fifteenth-century,” Atman explains. He
nods at a group of actors who are standing in the firing line of cameras, up on top of the main dais in the square, which has been brilliantly renovated by a few tricks of the silver screen. The actors are all done up in costumes not dissimilar to Shakespearean players, with the women in traditional long dresses, aprons, and bonnets, the men in tapered pants with swords and knives at the ready: the father, the mother, the lover, the evil cousin, the girl, and the witch.

  “We’ve even got a decent budget—some seed money from a venture-capital fund in the United States. Not much, but enough to give it a good college try,” Atman explains. It seems he has been told to expect my visit, and has made assumptions as to who I am.

  His English is perfect, but not Western. I think he learned it in India. I’m afraid he is wearing a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt, but there are no dark glasses. Atman explains that as far as plot is concerned, he has little control over its basic themes: fatal sexual jealousy followed by clan wars, followed by sudden enlightenment, followed by a dance routine which expresses inconsolable grief, followed by miraculous forgiveness. These are all cultural givens with which he must work, and Atman needs the locals on his side because of an additional grant he got from some NGO with connections to the UN which tries to cultivate indigenous talent. Therefore Atman is trying to finesse his themes into a style that might attract the Best Foreign Film subcommittee of the Oscar nominations. He has cunningly decided to so construct his oeuvre that he can easily take out the dance routines for the American market without damaging the plot.

  “I’m walking a tightrope,” he explains, then looks at me. “You are from the producers, right?”

  “No. I’m a cop from Bangkok. I’m investigating a death.”

  He nods, as if this somewhat radical reprogramming were merely a question of the right number of head movements. “Oh! Frank Charles? It was on CNN for about ten seconds. They only said he was dead in Bangkok. They didn’t specify how.”

  “His death is all we have given out until now. I’m telling you because we’ll have to go back to the media in a day or two. It was murder.”

  More nods. “Right. That’s a shame. He was a good guy.”

  “He was?”

  “Sure. Very sensitive. Very generous. So they say, anyway. I mean, that’s what everyone says who worked with him. I only met him once. I didn’t work for this outfit then.”

  “Is there someone here who did?”

  I fancy the nods are somewhat more considered this time. “Yes. Tara. She worked with him on his film. She’s Tibetan.” He jerks his chin toward the witch on the dais. She is about a hundred years old, and even though she has removed her black pointed hat, her awful jowls, long nose, bent back, and shriveled flesh are enough to make you fear the hex.

  I notice that Atman does not call her, but instead mounts the dais to say a few words, which causes her to look my way. She nods and comes down to greet me. When we are face-to-face she giggles and pulls off the mask.

  The French call it coup de foudre, meaning “lightning bolt.” I am thinking, quite objectively, This is the last thing I need right now. It is as if I can see my own heart etherized upon a table and I am reluctant as hell to undergo an operation that will mean more life.

  27

  Beauty creates its own mental environment. You have a choice: adapt or look away. I haven’t looked away for more than an hour. The only person not embarrassed at our end of the restaurant is Tara. Needless to say, out of the face mask and the costume Tara is younger—much, much younger. I can’t believe what’s happening to me, but I’m not looking away.

  The waiters have all noticed and made various signals to one another ranging from the how sweet to the downright vulgar, and one young Frenchman sitting at the next table (whose companion is not beautiful) has said something despicably sarcastic, which he doesn’t know I understood. But who gives a damn? I’m not taking my eyes off my oxygen source. She reminds me somewhat of Chanya, with the same high cheekbones and wide generous face, but Chanya is from peasant stock, whereas this woman has something almost haughty about her. She speaks perfect UN English and hardly uses her left hand, which she likes to leave in her lap except when pressing it to her face in an odd, slightly nervous gesture. She does not drink alcohol, and I’m feeling self-conscious about ordering another beer, but I do so anyway. More as a way of soothing my nerves than out of professional interest, I decide to work on the case a bit.

  “So, how was it, working with the great Frank Charles?”

  “Great? Is he great in your country? We thought so, because he was very kind and thoughtful and always encouraged us. We said he was a natural Buddhist. Obviously, he had been exposed to Buddhism in some earlier incarnation.”

  She has a soft voice which includes in its tone forgiveness and compassion for all living things. I’m thinking she reached the Far Shore some time ago and feel intimidated. I say, “He was famous, anyway. And very rich. A successful man and filmmaker.”

  “Yes. He was always very professional.”

  “Would you mind telling me what his film was about?”

  She expresses suspicion with the simplicity of a child: “Why don’t you know?”

  “Because it was never released, and I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy. Do you have one?”

  She smiles. “No. Nobody has one.”

  “Why not? What’s so secret about it?”

  “Nothing. There is nothing secret. It wasn’t released because he never finished it. After we were through with filming on location, he told us he would finish the work in a studio in Los Angeles. That was five or six years ago. At first some of us would write to him, asking when the film would be done. He was always very apologetic. He would say that he’d run out of funding, but there were always ways of getting money sooner or later and we should be patient. He’d made sure we were all paid, you see? He was very careful about treating us honorably. He knew how vulnerable we are, how impossible it would be for us to enforce any contracts.” She looks up and smiles. It is not a seductive smile, nor a mischievous one. It’s a smile from the other side, full of lightness and freedom—a smile that really doesn’t give a damn.

  “So, what was the plot?”

  A frown crumples her brow for a moment, then she laughs. “I’m not telling you. We said we wouldn’t. We said we would wait for the final version before we talked in public about the plot.”

  “But he’s dead. Murdered. Doesn’t that change anything?” She smiles again. “I’m a cop.”

  “Are you going to arrest me for not answering questions?”

  I blush deeply. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m pushing too hard. No, I don’t have any investigative powers over here. It just strikes me as strange that you don’t want to talk about the plot of a film you spent months working on. Were you the female lead?”

  She shakes her head. “There were no leads. It wasn’t that kind of film. It was experimental, artistic. We didn’t use the star system.”

  “Can you tell me who else worked on it? Maybe I should speak to someone else?”

  “Yes. Perhaps someone else would feel able to talk.”

  “Can you put me in touch? Do you have e-mail addresses, phone numbers—is there anyone in Kathmandu at the moment you could introduce me to?”

  She takes a long moment to think about it. From her body language I believe she is carefully going through everyone who worked on the film with her, before she shakes her head. “You see, almost everyone was Tibetan apart from some of the technical staff. All the players in the Himalayan scenes were Tibetans like me. But most of them were illegals—that was something Frank Charles insisted on. They were illegal immigrants who knew something about film. Or maybe not.” She giggles. “A few didn’t know anything at all, and of course they couldn’t speak English or any of the Nepali dialects, so I had to translate. I don’t think they really knew what the film was about either, they didn’t understand how movies are made. They just did as they were told; mostly it was ins
pired improvisation.”

  “That must have been difficult, even for an experienced director, to work with people who didn’t speak his language and to try to improvise?”

  “Yes. I think for someone else it would have been impossible. But Frank Charles was very gifted. Very passionate. His inspiration was easy to go with.”

  I shake my head. “It doesn’t sound like a Hollywood director to me.”

  “How would I know? He’s the only one I ever worked with.”

  “But doesn’t it seem strange to you, that a gifted director who was so passionate about the film should not get around to finishing it?”

  My question seems to puzzle her. “But he surely would have finished it sooner or later. It’s only seven years ago we stopped filming.”

  I say, “Do you know someone called Tietsin?” I don’t believe I gave the name any undue emphasis, but to me it was like dropping a piece of iron on a tiled floor: it clanged in my head.

  She immediately whips a hand up to her mouth—it’s the left hand that she doesn’t like to use very much, but I can see from her eyes she is laughing.

  “I know five hundred people called Tietsin, it’s even more common than Rinpoche.”

  “Sorry, it’s a Doctor Tietsin.”

  Now she doesn’t try to hide her laughter. “Every third Tibetan man is a doctor of something, it’s a title many still acquire in monasteries.”

  “He gives seminars on Tibetan history and Buddhism in a second-floor room overlooking Bodnath.”

  “I don’t go to Bodnath so much anymore. I’ve decided to try to assimilate more with the Nepalis who have been so hospitable to us.”