The Buddha of Brewer Street

by Michael Dobbs

  The couples were still bickering as they departed, overfortified and fractious. Goodfellowe, left alone at last with Elizabeth, smirked wickedly as he helped her carry dishes into the small galley kitchen.

  ‘That was splendid,’ he suggested. ‘A dinner table should be like a battlefield. There should always be casualties.’

  ‘With you left to bayonet the wounded, I suppose.’

  ‘Merely putting them out of their misery.’ He smiled a trifle smugly.

  ‘You really gave the woman that advice? About her husband?’

  ‘Good God, no. It was all nonsense. I made it up.’

  She turned from the sink to study him. ‘But what would you have said if the woman had asked you for advice?’

  ‘Frankly?’ He took a swig of whisky and considered. ‘No bloody idea. I would have done, once. But not any more.’

  ‘You don’t understand women very well, do you?’

  ‘Not up close. Not a lot of practice recently. And understanding women at a distance seems to be a peculiarly pointless type of torment.’

  She dried her hands thoroughly. ‘One thing I want you to understand is that I deliberately gave you a hard time this evening.’

  ‘You succeeded. But why?’

  ‘To pay you back a little. To say to hell with your unreliability, with your committees and distractions and late-night votes and absurd diary. Always insisting on being the centre of attention, then dashing off for some other performance. In front of someone else. Politicians make lousy lovers.’

  ‘I’ve hurt you.’ Just for a moment he wondered if others had, too. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘But I also wanted to show you something else. That if you’re interested in picking up our relationship, it’s not going to be smooth and simple. Or on your terms. I like you, Tom, in fact I could like you a lot. But if you’re not going to be there when I want you, don’t expect me to be hanging around waiting for the odd day when you’ve found a spare slot in your Filofax.’

  He felt uncomfortable. He stretched his painful leg, but it didn’t seem to help. ‘It seems my education has begun.’

  ‘And it’s not finished yet.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  She was facing him. ‘Remember I told you that timing was everything with a woman?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Her long, sensuous fingers with their elegant nails reached up to her neck, hesitated, trapped his eyes, then slowly descended and brushed the straps from her shoulders. Her dress fell open to the waist. She sucked in a huge, lung-bursting breath; he could count every rib.

  ‘Goodfellowe, I think it’s time …’

  Suddenly, and for the first time in many years, he stopped feeling sore.

  FIVE

  They knew who. They’d squeezed that much from Sherab. But they had no idea where. To the Chinese eyes that sought them, the three Searchers had become less than grains of sand in the desert.

  They had kept careful watch for Kunga on the roads leading down from the mountains, particularly at Namche Bazar, the first village on the Nepali side, and at the reception centres in Kathmandu. But Kunga knew they would be waiting there, the body of Osel had told him so. He and Dawa walked through Nepal at night, and outwitted them once again.

  The other two Searchers were equally elusive at first. Gompo had left his post in Geneva almost two years before, no one knew for where, while the ascetic Yeshe had spent half a lifetime in solitary retreat and seemed to have retreated once more. The Chinese had their informants, particularly in McLeod Ganj – like the official in the Ministry of Information and International Relations whose family in Tibet was under arrest in Gutsa Gaol. Then there was the member of the Kashag, or Parliament-in-Exile, whom the Chinese corrupted with whisky and women, while the lowly secretary in the Dalai Lama’s office they had simply bought. Now these informants were both bribed and bullied, even occasionally bruised, but none knew or could do anything other than speculate wildly. Until Yeshe – soft, innocent, unworldly Yeshe – applied for a visa.

  The application had arrived at the British High Commission in New Delhi, flagged with an appeal that it should be processed urgently. So the reference was taken up, which marked a trail back to McLeod Ganj – and to one of the many Chinese informers. The paper trail then led to where Yeshe was hiding, in Old Delhi, in the part of the ancient Mogul city that is a vortex of noise and poverty and dust, a community apparently held together by little more than a cat’s cradle of illicit power cables that snake across roads and around buildings in an organized conspiracy to defraud the authorities. Old Delhi was a good place to hide, but it was a terrible place to be trapped. For once you were caught, no one would ever find you, or even notice you were missing.

  Old Delhi is a city of open palms. There were many hands for hire on the back streets, with no questions asked. It was a city of blind eyes and deaf ears, so no one saw the minor scuffle in the night. It disturbed no one but the alley cats. No one heard the brief strangled shout of dismay announcing that Yeshe was theirs, and no one cared as they dragged him back to a room above an empty warehouse on the Street of Sorrows. There they hung him by his thumbs from a rafter so that his toes barely touched the floor. They left him overnight. By morning both his shoulders were dislocated and he was in agony.

  There is little point in recounting the details of the many tortures to which Yeshe was subjected over two days. They wanted what he knew, and in a hurry, but he would not tell them, not even after many of his bones were broken. Only once did they release him from the chair to which they had bound him. The pain had made him foul himself, and even his tormentors were beginning to find the conditions unbearable. So they untied him in order that he could clean himself up in the corner. And with so many fractures, he was scarcely in a position to walk, let alone run.

  Yet a Buddhist’s training enables him, or her, at higher levels of enlightenment to separate mind from body and to block out many of the physical traumas that distract the spirit. Yeshe was better trained than most, but he knew that even his reserves of detachment were failing. Soon he would have no choice. He would give them everything they wanted. Had they left him alone for a night, he would have willed the consciousness to leave his body and by morning they would have found nothing but a husk. But these people would never leave him alone. And he had little strength left. He must focus it, and his mind.

  How a man who can scarcely walk could throw himself through a glass window three storeys up was beyond the understanding of either his captors or their angry superiors. Their only benefit from the entire incident was that when Yeshe’s body hit the Street of Sorrows it was immediately run over by an oil truck, so hiding many of the marks of his ordeal. Only the undertaker’s assistant noticed that every single one of the knuckles on the victim’s fingers had been broken, and both forearms smashed in two places. Unusual injuries for a traffic accident. Practically unique. But nobody was interested in his observations. This was just another body on the Street of Sorrows, one amongst so many.

  On reflection, however, this was not the only benefit that accrued to Yeshe’s captors. After all, they knew there had been three Searchers. Now there were only two.

  And Yeshe had been heading for Britain. So now they knew where to look for the others. And for the Lama.

  Mo resented his new duties, but had learned not to allow his feelings to show. It was irritating that a woman who seemed to have so much difficulty dealing with her own emotions was often notably lacking in sympathy for the feelings of others. He had performed many duties for his Ambassadors – lied, covered up, even stolen for them. Babysitting went beyond the limit.

  It had been two years since Madame Lin’s only daughter had given birth to a strapping and healthy boy who, in Mo’s view, rather resembled a frog. Sadly, the overcrowded Beijing hospital at which the birth took place had failed to notice the pre-eclampsia until it was too late and the new mother, Madame Lin’s daughter, had succumbed without ever seeing her child. That sad episode had ma
rked a change in Madame Lin. While she remained the consummate professional, her disillusionment about the state of affairs in the homeland had grown ever more apparent to those like Mo who were close to her. Even for a diplomat stationed in a distant land, there was no escaping the problems that grew like mould on rotten fruit. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had sunk into chaos. The bills weren’t being paid, the instructions were constantly countermanded as Beijing’s rulers squabbled. And in the confusion that had become China, daughters died. Unnecessarily. Without cause. Unnoticed and unmourned by any except close family. For what is one life in a country where the lives of hundreds of millions are daily at risk?

  Yet it mattered to Madame Lin. Her grandson was her only family and became the prime focus of her life. She had brought him from Beijing to London, away from confusion, so that she might be responsible for his welfare. And every day at lunchtime she had the child brought from the Residence in Hampstead to the Embassy, where they would play while she doted like an old amah – except on days such as this when unexpected official duties got in the way and Mo was instructed to take over. How he hated it. Babysitting a mewling two-year-old.

  He gave a sigh. Get it in perspective, Mo. There were sacrifices to be made in order to remain at the right hand of one of the most powerful Ambassadors anywhere in the world. In her own way, because she controlled him, she trusted him. His was a position of privilege.

  And whichever way he looked at it, this was better than being taken to a football stadium, knelt down in front of a baying mob and having his brains blown out through his ears.

  ‘Come on, Frog-Face,’ he instructed, taking the boy by the hand. ‘Let’s go and kick a few vases. With any luck you’ll break a few.’ He brightened. ‘Then you can take the blame.’

  The obscure birthmark of the painting had turned out to be a tattoo. Small but exquisite – in Goodfellowe’s eyes, at least. High on the front-inside of her thigh, the smoothest of flesh for a canvas. And colourful. As he came to examine it more closely he saw that it was not the regulation butterfly of air hostesses or entwined cobra of the leather brigade, but a most unexpected delight. He brushed it gently with his thumb to make sure, once, twice. It was a hammer and sickle.

  ‘The inspiration came from my husband. My ex-husband,’ she explained. ‘We met when we were both in the security services.’

  ‘You? A spy?’

  ‘A dirty job but somebody has to do it. Like washing-up. Or sleeping with politicians.’ She adjusted her position to make his weight more comfortable. ‘I resigned when we got married, to give our relationship a chance. Should’ve known. He was totally dedicated to his job. Lived, breathed, ate and slept it. I got drunk in Prague one night and decided he might as well screw it, too.’ The faintest touch of acid. ‘Took him three months even to notice.’

  ‘I’d have defected, no question,’ Goodfellowe ventured.

  ‘Then my husband would have had you shot.’

  ‘Elizabeth, you could’ve won the Cold War single-handed …’ her fingernail trickled down through the hair around his navel, bringing forth a low moan of distraction – ‘or … whatever … the appropriate anatomical metaphor is.’

  ‘Why, Goodfellowe, you make it sound like a patriotic duty. Which, in the view of the security services, is precisely what it was.’

  He was intrigued. He found everything about her tantalizing. The more he knew, the more mysterious and challenging she became. He propped himself up on one elbow. ‘Did you? Did you ever? You know, as a patriotic duty?’

  ‘As a politician you should be familiar with the concept of personal sacrifice,’ she replied evasively.

  ‘Yeah. But only of others.’

  Was she merely teasing? Or hiding something from her past? He didn’t find out that night, but by the following morning he reckoned he could recreate every twist and curve of the tattoo. It was only a hammer and sickle, of course, but for Goodfellowe it was one of the major triumphs of his life.

  Inevitably, in the days that followed, Goodfellowe found himself thinking of little else. Everywhere it seemed there were reminders of that night – references to Prague, foreign correspondents reporting from in front of the Kremlin, even an article in Time magazine on tattoos. Everything seemed to conspire to inflame his imagination and to raise unanswered questions. The most disturbing question for Goodfellowe was whether it had ever, even once, been like that with Elinor? Or with any woman? He couldn’t recall anything like it and it was difficult to escape the conclusion that this had been the most mind-mincing sex he’d ever had. Yet one night seemed tragically little on which to base such a devastating conclusion. He decided he would reserve judgement, pending further enquiries.

  But, amidst the fanfare and newly resprayed colours of his thoughts, other echoes of the past kept intruding. At the back of a drawer he found the prayer beads given to him those years before by the Dalai Lama. On the long nights when once again he was alone, wishing he could be with Elizabeth, he found the small sandalwood beads of great comfort. He took to carrying them with him all the time in his pocket. He also found himself reading the copy of Sun Tzu, which told him how the finest doctors are those whose patients never fall sick and the greatest warriors are those whose armies never need to go to war. True, of course. But also a little naive. Who would have heard of Joshua if it hadn’t been for Jericho, or remembered Hannibal without his elephants? The lesson of all history was unmistakable – bring me chaos and bring me fame! Otherwise they would all die old and unmourned. Funny, he had once wanted very much to die famous, as Prime Minister, to leave behind him the great and rehabilitated name of Goodfellowe that his swindling father had destroyed. Now he decided he’d much rather live, a very long life, preferably lost between the legs of Elizabeth and without the attention of the world’s media gathered on his doorstep.

  He found his sleep, like his life, had taken on more colour, too. The dreams had grown vivid – not taunting dreams as they had been during his worst times, but images of mountains, of great lakes covered in mist and lands he had never known yet which seemed almost like home. The Dalai Lama entered into one dream, sitting in a cave. He said nothing, simply smiled and laughed in that deep, booming manner of his. And beckoned.

  Goodfellowe was lost in a daydream, feet up on his House of Commons desk while trying to figure out this strange new world of his, when Mickey walked in bearing the daily mountain of correspondence.

  ‘Mickey, tell me true. Could you fancy me?’

  She studied him carefully. ‘Do you have an Aston Martin?’

  ‘Not even a tandem.’

  ‘Next question.’

  ‘You’re a real morale booster, you know.’

  ‘What do you want? Platitudes? You want encouragement to go out there and make a complete fool of yourself?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘I see. So you got your date with Elizabeth.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She sat coquettishly on the edge of his desk, the twinkle of interrogation in her dark eyes. ‘And did the earth move for you?’

  ‘Mind your own bloody business!’ He paused, tried to look fierce, and failed. ‘Well, she lives above the underground line. It might just have been the passing of a late-night train.’

  ‘Way to go, Goodfellowe,’ she congratulated softly, leaning forward and kissing him warmly on the forehead. ‘You deserve it.’

  Goodfellowe became distracted. As she leaned forward, his horizon suddenly consisted of nothing but cleavage. Generous, free-spirited and … well, there. Right there. In front of his nose. Scarcely a night out of Elizabeth’s bed and already he wanted to be a slut. As her breasts loomed ever larger they brushed across the letter on top of the mountain. It became dislodged and fluttered to the floor. Hastily he ducked to retrieve it.

  The letter was marked ‘Strictly Personal and Confidential’. He allowed Mickey to open all his mail on the basis that with a life like his he never received correspondence that was strictly personal, le
t alone confidential, except from madmen and the Inland Revenue. With luck and Elizabeth, that might have to change.

  The letter, on cheap off-coloured paper and written in a neat but rather archaic hand, was from Lhamo, who introduced himself as the late Dalai Lama’s private secretary.

  ‘We did not meet during His Holiness’s last trip to Britain but I am, of course, aware of your close personal association with him …’

  What close association? Goodfellowe wondered. Why were they always trying to treat him as part of the family?

  ‘Through the means of this letter I have the honour of introducing to you Representative Gompo Chérdrol Khendro, one of His Holiness’s most intimate associates who is currently engaged on a vital mission on behalf of the late Dalai Lama …’

  And taking one hell of a time to finish the job, Goodfellowe considered. The Lama’d been dead three years.

  ‘I regret to inform you that, sadly, this mission has become one of considerable danger. Another colleague engaged on the same task was recently murdered, we believe by forces opposed to a Free Tibet. I must therefore ask you to treat the contents of this letter as an issue of the gravest consequence, indeed a matter of life and death …’

  Goodfellowe found himself uttering a highly unimaginative oath.

  ‘Representative Gompo is currently hiding in St Petersburg.’

  Russia? Why on earth Russia …?

  ‘We wish to obtain for him a visitor’s visa to your country, but believe there may be extreme danger in applying through the orthodox channels. The purpose of this letter is therefore to ask you to use your good offices to secure for him a visa in a manner that is both speedy and completely confidential.’

  This was a joke. A hoax. Had to be. ‘You still got the envelope?’