The Buddha of Brewer Street

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.’

  ‘You feeling all right, Tom?’

  ‘Shakespeare. Richard II,’ Goodfellowe explained. ‘Richard built this hall, you know. It was his finest achievement. Something to hand on, something that would survive him. Mind you, a ripe plum would have been enough for that.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They dragged him off his throne and killed him.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘When I come up here at night I think I can feel some of it. You know, this is where they sentenced King Charles. They hauled him away, too. Cromwell chopped his head off and promised an end to all miseries – just like an election campaign. But did it change anything? Hell no. Another of history’s over-ripe plums. When it came to Cromwell’s turn to die, they couldn’t wait to bring back a new king and stuck old Ollie’s head on a stick for twenty years, just over there.’ He waved vaguely into the gloom.

  ‘There must be a moral to this tale.’

  ‘A pox on Parliament! At the end of it all, this place doesn’t make a damned bit of difference,’ he muttered, disconsolate.

  ‘That’s your job, Tom. To make the difference.’

  ‘But can I? Can anyone? Sometimes I think I can hear their voices, all the great men of the past, and they do nothing but scream and contradict and cancel each other out. What does any of it matter?’

  ‘A little heavy for this time of day, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wander through my life convincing myself I’m saving the world from stupidity and bureaucracy. Then I realize that, while I’m out there saving the world, I seem to do nothing but hurt those I love. Like Sam. She’s appearing in her play tonight. Cleopatra. She’ll be beautiful. And I’ll be missing, as always. As I’m always missing for Elizabeth. And somehow I’ve managed to hurt you, too. Never meant to, never intended it, but it happened and it was my fault.’

  She was silent for a moment. Up here, when it was quiet and where dusty shadows fell beneath these great oak hammerbeams, she too could feel the atmosphere. Not understand it, not be in touch in the way that he was, but perhaps that nonsense he had of ley lines and energy channels had something in it after all.

  ‘You know, Mickey, they used this hall not only as a place of execution but also for entertainment. Henry VIII used to play tennis here. A little while ago when they were working on the roof they found tennis balls stuck in the rafters. So that’s it.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This whole place. Nothing but a load of old balls.’

  ‘Truly profound, Goodfellowe,’ she offered caustically, recognizing one of his Black Dog days when it felt as if the whole world was pissing against his trouser leg. ‘So you get this far and then start wondering whether it’s all worth it, eh? Let me tell you it’s too bloody late for that. You don’t do what you’ve done to me – we don’t do what we’ve done to each other – simply to wash our hands of it all. Oh no.’

  ‘But what’s the point?’

  ‘The point is you try. Why do you think I can forgive your appalling manners and intolerable tempers that would make me disembowel any other man with my fingernails? Because you try. You make mistakes that are many and sometimes grotesque, but you make them for all the right reasons. The right motivations.’

  He heard another voice. Hadn’t the Dalai Lama said much the same thing to him all those years ago, that it was his motivation that mattered?

  ‘I think Shakespeare said in the same play that all men are but gilded loam or painted clay,’ Mickey continued.

  He looked at her sharply.

  ‘Don’t do that to me, Goodfellowe. Don’t go underestimating me again, thinking you’re the only one who can quote sodding Shakespeare. I got my English GCSE, you know.’

  He hung his head in remorse.

  ‘So you prove my point. You’re not like most men. No one could claim you’ve much gilding. More a gentle creasing. And you’re not painted clay like so many of the rest in this place. That’s why I understand. And why I can forgive.’

  ‘I keep giving you things to forgive.’

  ‘Don’t ever expect me to forget what I’ve had to do with Paddy. There will always be a part of me that feels unclean. That will hate you for making me try to hate him.’

  The light cast mournful shadows on his face, like a gargoyle on the buttresses meant to frighten the children. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

  ‘You said it was necessary. Well, it was.’

  ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I nearly broke my back on his bloody desk. Then I think I found what you need to break him. Damn you, Goodfellowe!’

  He couldn’t bring himself to smile in the face of her distress. So he shook his trouser leg. The Black Dog ran off.

  Mickey’s news had instilled a new mood of determination within Goodfellowe, but it didn’t appear to be infectious. When he arrived for the council of war at the small Buddhist shrine in Bloomsbury, late, trousers tucked into his socks, and breathless, he found troubled eyes turned towards him. The enthusiasms of the band of Tibetan warriors had been ground down by contact with reality. They had survived so long on hope and faith, but the facts kept getting in their way. Particularly the fact that they had no means of finding the Chinese child.

  ‘If only we knew where to search,’ Kunga muttered, barely able to conceal his frustration.

  ‘It’s like trying to catch a swallow on a summer’s night,’ Phuntsog complained.

  ‘What can we do but wait,’ Wangyal asked, ‘until they find the child themselves? By which time it will be too late.’

  Frasi simply sat dejectedly and shook his head.

  A darkness surrounded them, which the glow of butter lamps and the deep brilliance of the temple colours could do nothing to relieve. They faced Goodfellowe. Not all of their expressions were generous.

  ‘We need you more than ever, Tummo,’ Kunga declared. ‘I believe you are the only one who can help us now.’

  ‘Be bold, it’s not as bad as that,’ he encouraged. ‘After all, they haven’t found the child either. And they’re spending most of their time fighting each other.’ He told them of the rumours he had planted around Chinatown. And Jiang’s troubles. And what was still to come. ‘Tomorrow the fire department will be calling. They’ve had reports of blocked exits. And suggestions that internal fire partitions were removed during renovations.’ He made no effort to hide his satisfaction. ‘Jiang’s not the only one who can spit in the soup.’

  ‘The Himalaya passed every inspection without difficulty,’ Wangyal commented gloomily, as if in sympathy with his fellow proprietor.

  ‘And how does that help us find the child?’ Phuntsog complained. He always seemed to be the one to complain. Their faith needed to be rekindled. They’d spent too long sitting around, waiting.

  ‘It causes confusion in their ranks,’ Goodfellowe argued. ‘Distracts them. It buys us a little time. And time may buy us better fortune.’ Yet he was all too aware that in their view his words amounted to nothing. A big fat zero. He had to give them something more. He was beginning to find the smell of stale incense oppressive. ‘If we were in Tibet, what would we do now, Kunga Tashi?’ Goodfellowe asked.

  ‘We would look for a sign, an omen. Listen for the voices that are with us all. In the mountains there are voices on the wind and in the meltwaters as they trickle over the rocks. But we are a long way from Tibet. This is a vast and bustling city, where the voices of the mountains are drowned out. This is your place, Tummo. You must listen for the voices.’

  ‘I’ve been trying.’

  ‘And what do they tell you?’

  ‘That nothing is ever as it seems.’

  ‘We shall make a Buddhist of you yet. His Holiness used to argue that the facts should never be allowed to get in the way of the truth.’

  ‘But facts are the only means I have of getting to the truth.’

  ‘Your facts haven’t helped us get to the child,’ Phuntsog offered ungraci
ously.

  ‘Perhaps because we’ve been dealing with the wrong facts.’

  ‘What wrong facts?’

  ‘I keep asking myself why we are searching for a boy with a Chinese face.’

  ‘Because you told us to!’ Phuntsog exploded in irritation.

  ‘You miss my point. The Dalai Lama’s instructions clearly said a Chinese face. But why not simply a Chinese?’

  ‘Chinese? Chinese face? What’s the difference?’

  ‘Phuntsog, there is wisdom also in silence,’ Kunga interjected, his softness lending the rebuke all the more majesty.

  ‘When the moon in Tibet shines on the mountains, it sometimes appears as light as day. Even though it’s not day,’ Goodfellowe continued.

  ‘So the Chinese face …?’

  ‘Doesn’t necessarily make the boy Chinese. At least, perhaps not fully Chinese. I keep thinking that he may only look Chinese.’

  ‘But not be Chinese?’

  ‘Perhaps part-Chinese. And possibly part-Tibetan.’

  ‘The reconciliation,’ Kunga whispered. ‘Not Tibetan. Not Chinese. But both?’

  ‘Is there any chance? You keep telling me you know everyone in the Tibetan community but, over the years, could it be that someone has gone missing? Lost contact? Perhaps precisely because they got tangled up with a Chinese?’

  The suggestion was greeted in awed silence.

  Phuntsog in particular seemed agitated, bracing his shoulders as though forcing his way against a gale, his impatience doing battle with his reason. His long nose twitched violently. Finally he spoke. ‘It is possible,’ he said bluntly. ‘Most Tibetans came to this country in the 1970s. It took us some time to organize … It is possible.’

  ‘Someone might have slipped away?’

  ‘Possible.’

  ‘Forgotten?’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘We must ask the old folk.’

  ‘It must be done quickly.’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Could it be that simple?’

  ‘The truth is often a straight line.’

  ‘But where? Where could the child be?’

  As they inspected their new hopes, Kunga had prostrated himself before the gilded statue of Shakyamuni, where he remained for many moments, his arms outstretched, withered hands pointing towards the Buddha figure. When eventually and with some difficulty he rose, he stared fiercely, almost wildly, at Goodfellowe. ‘I believe you are correct. This is the answer. This is why you were sent to us.’ He was rubbing his scarred palm. It had begun to burn again, not the whole scar, simply the small part of it that seemed to indicate the position of the capital city, London. ‘He is very close. We must hurry.’

  And they did, with new fire in their bellies, enthusiasm on their lips, departing quickly into the night to make contact with their community. Even Phuntsog had spirit in his face.

  It was as Kunga was leaving that he turned to Goodfellowe and took hold of him. Goodfellowe felt an astonishing heat-filled, almost burning, sensation coming from the old monk’s broken hands.

  ‘The Chinese searchers have been distracted, but they are still looking,’ Goodfellowe warned. ‘The child has a Chinese face. He is still their target. We may not have much time left.’

  ‘I know. But thanks to you we can at least join in their game. Numbers don’t always decide. We may yet win.’

  Goodfellowe said nothing. In spite of everything, he didn’t believe the monk, couldn’t share the optimism he himself had generated in the others. He wasn’t an optimist. It was simply that he was congenitally stubborn. Elizabeth was right, he liked a fight. He turned to go but still the monk clung to his hand.

  ‘I have one more thing to ask of you, Tummo.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘How can it be that you know what moonlight is like in the Tibetan mountains?’

  And, for the first time that evening, Goodfellowe had no answer.

  ‘Chaos! All is chaos! And it is your fault, Mo.’

  ‘There are rumours everywhere. Ambassador. They are not my fault.’

  ‘Yet it is your neck. Mo. Never forget that. We fail and we are dead, both of us. But you first.’

  ‘What am I to do? What can I do?’

  ‘Forget Jiang. Tell everyone, tell them all yourself.’

  ‘Tell them what?’

  ‘That the reward has doubled. And if it is the right child there will be no questions asked about where he came from. Or what condition he’s in.’

  ‘Dead or alive?’

  ‘Mo, why do you think it matters? What do you think will happen to him when they get him back to Beijing?’

  ‘I had preferred not to think.’

  ‘So start to think, Mo. About the child. About a football stadium and a bullet in the back of the neck. Think about it hard. Then double the reward, triple it if necessary. Just find that child!’

  A sudden splinter of fear passed through the mother. She had lost him. As soon as they had reached the park he had begun to run, as he always did, as though he had too much to see and not enough time to fit everything into one life. She had lost sight of him. And now he was gone. She cast around in anxiety then she, too, began to run, short distances, first one way then another. Surely he couldn’t have gone far? Unless something had happened. Every mother’s unspoken nightmare …

  She was on the point of crying for help when she heard a familiar gurgle of pleasure. She spun round and found him less than five feet away, sitting, almost obscured by a thick bush of lavatera that was alive with butterflies. His hands were raised in front of his face and on each sat a butterfly with blood red wings shot through with streaks of buttercup yellow.

  ‘Gelug, gelug,’ he warbled in delight.

  And he was right. They were the colours of the Gelugpa, like monks meditating on the mountain top, their robes being blown by the gentle wind. It was one of her earliest childhood memories, before the great storm of exile. Yet somehow, in a manner she didn’t fully understand, this two-year-old who had never lived anywhere other than above a dry-cleaners in the heart of Soho seemed to share it.

  So it came to pass. They unearthed faded memories of her. A young girl who had arrived in this country in the early years, a Pestalozzi child who had been brought up and educated at that great school for orphans in Surrey.

  She had been made an orphan on the march across the mountains. They had encountered the most terrible storm. Her mother had simply frozen, her face a mask of ice that eventually sealed her eyes and blocked the airways, her tears sparkling like jewels of ice in the moonlight. And when it became clear that the food would run out long before they reached safety, that they were all going to starve to death, her father had sat in the snow and refused to move, insisting that it was enough that he should die facing freedom and that his share be given to the child. So she had survived, with two others out of the ten that had set out, and her last view of her father was as a stone Buddha sitting in the distant snow.

  There was no lingering bitterness. Such things happened in the mountains. In her new country she had grown and flourished and when as an eighteen-year-old she had fallen in love, it did not matter to her that he was Chinese. Yet it had mattered to some of the elderly members of her community, and to many in his own, so the lovers had followed their own path, honouring their different ancestries but submitting to neither. And when she had failed to become pregnant and the old wives had muttered about punishment and bad joss they had moved away, deliberately distancing themselves from the competing cultures that for others could never be fully reconciled.

  But she had left a fragment that had stuck in someone’s memory. One word. Her married name. Wong.

  ‘It’s enough!’ cried Goodfellowe in exaltation when they heard.

  ‘There must be thousands of Wongs,’ Phuntsog pronounced with characteristic caution.

  ‘But if she was married and she had a child two years ago, one name is enough!’

  His enthusiasm had tak
en him on the charge to the Family Records Centre in the City. Here were gathered census returns, wills, electoral registers – and a record of every birth, marriage and death dating back to 1837. The anatomy of the nation. Along the shelves in this place could be found every sinew and fibre of the populace – and many of its sins and sorrows. Here you might search forever for your grandparents’ marriage certificate, and never find it – not because it was lost, but because it had never existed. And the many fathers who clearly existed but who were not recorded, either because they were not known or no longer required on life’s long voyage. Every entry told a tale. It was all here, a comprehensive catalogue of life’s miracles and muck-ups.

  Which is why, when Goodfellowe arrived with perspiration on his brow and renewed hope in his heart, he discovered it had been taken over by Americans. The package tours were in town and every second inhabitant of the state of New York seemed to have forgathered with the ambition of climbing their family tree. The place was packed, patience on short ration and the air-conditioning all but overwhelmed. It was a battle, standing shoulder to shoulder with the crowd, fighting for every inch of desk space. All around came the clatter of heavy registers being pushed and pulled across metal shelves like horses being hauled through trench mud. But at least Goodfellowe didn’t have to fight across a broad front. His target was specific. Wong. A boy. Last two or three years.

  His heart sank. As he joined the fray and examined the first volume he discovered there were, if not Phuntsog’s thousands, then many hundreds. Wongs were everywhere. It surely had to be the most common name in the country, he thought, gazing down the endless lists. And a heavy proportion of them in London. Which one? A needle in a noodle factory. Yet there was help, the maiden names of the mothers were also listed. The Chous, the Hos, the Lams, the Lees, the Yips and the Yaus. He found another name, too, and felt the nape of his neck begin to bristle in exhilaration …

  With a mounting sense of urgency he checked the rest of the quarterly registers, he couldn’t afford to miss any possibility. But there was only one. Maternal maiden name of Rinchen. Unmistakably Tibetan. Registered in the district of Westminster.