by John Burdett
“Tara?”
“The Chinese killed all my family. I’m an orphan, and I’m a cripple, too. Is that the kind of man you are, to use and abuse a girl who was only looking for love and shelter? If I still had a brother he would go over there and punch you on the nose.” This was followed by what sounded like floods of tears.
“Tara, I can’t believe this is you.”
She let a couple of beats pass, then said in her normal voice, “It’s okay, don’t worry, I was exorcising a demon. It’s good practice, you should do it too. Since the demon came from you, I thought you’d like it back. You felt slightly raped after our Tantric evening, didn’t you? Since then I’ve had to deal with a whole stream of minor goblins from the Southwest. That’s you. You must have been feeling like an abused teen to churn up those guys—you wouldn’t believe how ugly some of them are.”
“Tara, this is just crap. It’s sheer low-grade, bargain-basement, boulevard occultism you’re doing here.”
“Oh, yes? Then how do I know you had a wet dream about me last night? You did, didn’t you? And I can tell you exactly what you did to me in that dream. Listen.”
I’m not telling you what she said next, farang, it’s too embarrassing. I broke out into a cold sweat. “Tara, do one thing: at least admit you’re in league with Tietsin, that way I can try to explain you rationally to myself.”
“You know very well I never met him until you came into my life like a little orphan left on my doorstep. And what are you doing indulging in a need for rational explanations at this stage? You’re not supposed to still be a novice.”
I hesitated, then said, “Tara, that was the most fantastic sex I ever had. I mean it. I didn’t understand what you were doing at the time, I admit that, but I’ve been thinking about it and I’m starting to understand. To sublimate like that really is the essence of Buddhism—it’s just a little unnatural at first.”
“What is?”
“Resigning yourself to only having one orgasm a year.”
She giggled. “Try being a refugee—a lot of deprivations come naturally to us after a while.”
I couldn’t help myself; the question almost asked itself: “Tara, are you enlightened?”
“Who is ever going to say yes to that question, except a charlatan? Let’s say I’m conscious of being free from suffering.”
“An anesthetic for life? Congratulations. Must play havoc with lovers who aren’t at your level.”
“It was your idea, you made a pass at me, don’t forget.”
“I agree. I, of all men, should know the risks of an emergency lay. But let’s say you owe me one.”
“One what?”
“One question.”
A pause. “Okay.”
“Did you sleep with Frank Charles?”
A long pause.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.”
“And you did it with him the same way you did it with me?”
“We said one question.”
“Only you didn’t distance yourself quickly enough, didn’t snuff out the incipient affair.”
“Stop it.”
“You were younger, after all, and maybe not so disciplined, not so above female vanity that having a famous American director fall at your feet didn’t still hold a teeny-weeny bit of temptation. I don’t think he first visited Nepal because he wanted to make a movie. I think he decided to make a movie in Nepal after he met you.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“He fell, didn’t he? Oh, he fell. You’re not like any woman any non-Tibetan man has ever met. You’re a fusion of the primeval wild and the enlightened future with no electricity in between. For this American brought up to believe that the answer to all anguish is to be found between the thighs of the perfect woman—the Madonna thing they all have—the zipperless fuck that takes you to nirvana without having to meditate first: you were it, all of it, for him, that poor starved angry man from the spiritual third world.”
“Detective, I’m not answering, haven’t you noticed?”
“He couldn’t get you out of his head. But there had to be something else to cause him to deteriorate like that. Something you did to him far beyond what you did with me, causing him to go up there to Kathmandu again and again—to meet you, was it? Or to pathetically pine for you? Or for you to do something to fix his head? He made you initiate him, didn’t he? He knew to keep asking until you couldn’t say no. And even though he couldn’t have been less suitable, being emotionally stuck at the age of about thirteen, even so, you went ahead and irresponsibly shared your mantra with him. That’s the real reason you got cold feet about me and called Tietsin. You didn’t want déjà vu.”
Silence. She had closed the phone.
She didn’t kill him, though, I reflected into the silence. Even if it made psychological sense, which it doesn’t, she could never get out of Nepal. I saw her travel document; with paper like that she had difficulty leaving Kathmandu, never mind international destinations. A dakini of the Far Shore, she is a stateless exile over here on the left bank, frostbitten and occasionally suspected of prostitution. Naturally, all that makes me crazier about her than ever.
33
This morning both Vikorn and Zinna e-mailed to ask me to download a portrait of Clive of India; so there he was for a moment, gracing my monitor in his powder, wig, and ruff, the Shropshire lad himself, that whoring, bloody, racist, suicidal, alcoholic, upwardly mobile, treacherous, opium-addicted narcotics trafficker who started globalism. I think the two of them will put him in a frame high up on a wall and wai him daily like any Oriental guru.
Now someone is calling using the 977 prefix. I stare at the screen, not sure who in Kathmandu I’m most afraid of at this moment, Tietsin or Tara.
“So, how did the meeting go?” It’s Tietsin.
“Perfect. Everything is arranged. They’ve decided to entrust me with the irrevocable letter of credit, so you better be nice to me.”
“Not a chance. If you run off with the dough we’ll turn you into a louse in the anus of a rabid dog. And the date? We have a date?”
“The one you wanted.” For the first time with Tietsin I sense a normal human emotion on his part, like relief.
“Thank you, Detective. That’s good. That date is good.”
“You’re sure you can bring in that much at one time without getting caught?”
“Of course. I’m a magus, aren’t I?”
“Where is the drop-off point?”
He snorts. “You still think I’m some airhead from the mountains who doesn’t know scat about shifting smack, don’t you?”
“Okay, don’t tell me. But how are we going to know where to meet you?”
“I’ll tell you exactly ten minutes before delivery. Just make sure you have fast transport, because we’re not going to wait more than five minutes for you to show up. One thing about poison, you can always find a buyer.”
“Doctor Tietsin, I have just one question, a personal one. As a devout Buddhist, isn’t there anywhere in your mind just the slightest doubt—”
“No.”
“What are you going to do with the money?”
“How many times do I have to explain? I and my movement are going to invade China.”
I sigh. “That’s just nuts, and I know you don’t believe it. You may be crazy, but you’re not stupid. How can anyone invade the most dynamic economy in the world, which happens to own a million-man army, with forty million dollars?”
“Ever hear of Gandhi? And there was a guy named Jesus who was supposed to have transformed the world, although the reportage is suspect. They didn’t have armies, they used words instead—and they weren’t even Buddhist. What kind of Theravada wimp are you, anyway?” he says, and hangs up. When I angrily call the number again, I get the engaged tone. When I try Mimi Moi’s number, I get exactly the same tone. Must be my cologne. I’m so depressed, I’m taking a cab to the morgue.
I hate autopsies and avoid them whenever I
can. If not for the urgency I now feel about the Frank Charles case, I would not dream of being here, in the morgue, while Doctor Supatra is at work on a cadaver. Actually, most cops feel the same way; the only person who really enjoys autopsies is the pathologist. For them it’s a wonderful hunt, which 99 percent of the time ends with a successful conclusion: they find the cause of death. It’s an adventure that combines science, art, instinct, and extreme drama, and usually only lasts a day or so. Don’t let them fool you with their graveyard demeanors, those pathologists are very happy campers: lords of death to whom cops like me pay reluctant homage.
The good doctor in her medical greens is at this moment showing two students, also in masks and coveralls, how to turn a corpse over. Sounds easy? Just try it at home. In death even the most upright citizen turns into a slippery character. If you do need the information one day, here’s how: you wrap an arm around the inner thigh opposite to you, place the other hand under the neck and up and around, then use your weight to push the body over in a roll. The deceased in this case is a slim Thai girl, but I’ve seen the doctor heave over dead men three times her size.
“Now you try,” she tells one of her students, then turns to me for the first time. Her mask covers the whole of her face.
“I’ve come about the Frank Charles case,” I tell her.
“Him! He was gigantic. I couldn’t roll him over at all, I had to call for help.”
There’s a scream from her students, who together have managed to get their cadaver into quite a cliff-hanger: her head and upper body have slipped over the side of the autopsy table; it looks like she is trying to commit suicide. The doctor shakes her head and returns to the job at hand. “You’ll have to put on a mask and talk to me while I’m working, if you’re really in such a hurry. Better put on some coveralls as well, I don’t want to be responsible if you catch something from the corpse.”
So now I’m all in green with a mask and no more than six inches from the corpse, and I’m still having trouble believing the kid is dead. Her face is not bloated; she’s really quite beautiful, probably in her early twenties. When Supatra takes her boning knife and makes the great Y incision from above the breasts to the solar plexus, then down to the lower abdomen in a single stroke, cutting deeply through the flesh right down to the bone, I turn my face away. When I turn back, Supatra has lifted up the top flap and flopped it over the dead girl’s face at an irregular angle; it looks like a wind has blown the corner of a scarlet drape over her head. Now the doctor has peeled away the flesh from the chest area and is using a pair of garden secateurs to snap open the rib cage.
“It’s about the list of drugs the toxicologist found in the American’s body,” I say.
“Hm, quite a list. Traces of cocaine, cannabis, opium, and a few uppers of the prescribed kind.” Supatra is a little breathless from the exertion with the secateurs. “It wasn’t drugs that killed him though, nor was it the removal of the top half of his head. It was loss of blood from the way the perpetrator gutted him. Of course, to survive long term he would have needed a skull even if they’d left his guts intact.”
I watch in revolted fascination while she digs her hands into the corpse and brings out a heart. “Check it for abnormalities,” she tells her students as she passes it to them, “use your hands, change to thinner gloves if you have to at this stage, you need to develop your sense of touch, especially with hearts, livers, and kidneys: any hardening, lumps, gritty spots, undue fattiness—the eye can’t tell you half as much as a good grope.”
“What about the chunk the killer took out of the victim’s brains for lunch?”
She cocks her head. “How do you know it wasn’t breakfast or supper? I couldn’t give a precise time of death. And to answer your question, no, the chunk taken out of the left lobe may have impaired quite a few functions, but it wasn’t lethal.”
“Okay, if it wasn’t drugs that killed him, or the hole in his brain, surely something must have been used to knock him out while he was being scalped? You said in your report there was no sign of struggle.”
“That’s correct. I had the toxicologist check for all the usual anesthetics, sedatives, et cetera, and he didn’t find any. There is no general check for drugs—you use a specific test for each chemical, and you need to have a good idea what you’re looking for, because many drugs will be untraceable after a few days, either because they have decomposed or because they have combined with body chemicals to form some other substance.” To her students: “Here’s the liver. There’s nothing wrong with it. Just handle it for a few minutes, start to get a sense of what a healthy one feels like, squeeze, that’s right.” She watches the student for a moment, then says, “Certainly, I was aware that something must have kept him quiet while the brain surgery was in progress. My guess was that given his size and probable life habits, a little opium and cocaine were not enough to sedate him. So I asked for special tests for various unusual drugs that have come onstream recently, and guess what? The toxi found tubocurarine chloride in his blood.”
“That’s what I wanted to ask about.”
“It’s quite exotic, used mostly in the U.S. and Japan as a neuromuscular blocker.” She looks at me. “It’s made from curare, obtained from a South American plant which jungle tribes use for arrow poison.”
“What does it do?”
“Causes paralysis without loss of consciousness.”
“But how would someone obtain it?”
“A well-connected pharmacist would be a minimum requirement. Even then, the pharmacist would normally have to explain to someone why they wanted it.” We exchange glances.
She stops in her labors for a moment as if she has just remembered an interesting but minor detail. “One thing did strike me as unusual: the neatness of the work. As a pathologist I don’t have to be particularly careful with the rotary saw, but whoever removed the skull of Frank Charles was in a class of their own. Even brain surgeons don’t work to such fine tolerances.”
Now she turns back to what is left of the young woman. The whole of the chest cavity is open, and most of the organs have been removed. A tube is draining the fluids that have washed down the stainless-steel table into the trough below. “So, everything is healthy. Just as I suspected. Now, this is how to hold the buzz saw. Always use both hands or it will run away from you.”
It is similar in size and shape to any small circular DIY saw, though a little more gentrified. It makes a screaming noise that deadens just a tad when it bites into skull bone.
“Ha!” the doctor says when she has removed the scalp. “Just as I thought. A massive subarachnoid hemorrhage caused by a burst brain aneurysm, caused, in all probability, by a serious overdose of methamphetamine. There would have been a predisposing weakness in the cerebral artery, probably congenital. The yaa baa would have sent the heart racing like crazy, putting pressure on the aneurysm, causing it to rupture. What a waste! Still, she most probably would have died young anyway—any serious exertion, especially from sport, would likely have caused the aneurysm to burst.” She smiles. “Did you know autopsy means ‘see for yourself’?”
“Thanks, Doctor,” I say, and catch the look of happiness on her face: another successful hunt. It’s a beautiful profession if you 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.
