The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

  And if it weren’t for Simon Winterpole, thought Christopher, a lot of other people would sleep better.

  “Exactly what has any of this to do with me or my son’s disappearance?” he asked.

  “I don’t know this Nikolai Zamyatin, I’ve never heard of him, and I assume he has never heard of me.”

  Winterpole glanced at Christopher.

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” he said.

  There was something in Winterpole’s tone that unsettled Christopher. Like a swimmer who senses the first pull of the undertow plucking him down, he could feel the past tugging at him. He wanted to cry out, to struggle against drowning in waves that might be of his own devising; but his limbs felt tense and his throat was raw with the cold night air.

  “Go on,” he said quietly.

  “Zamyatin is half Russian, half Burial Mongol. His father was Count Peotr Zamyatin, a wealthy landowner from Cheremkhovo to the north of Lake Baikal. His mother was a Buriat woman, one of the peasants on his father’s estate. They’re both dead now.

  Nikolai was born about 1886, which makes him roughly thirty four

  “He had a little money as a child, enough to get what passed for an

  education in Irkutsk, but he learned soon enough that he had no hope of

  inheriting a penny from his father. By the age of sixteen,

  he was an active member of the Communist Party in the region, and before he turned twenty he had been sent to Moscow. He was about thirty when the Revolution started Sovnarkom, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, sent him out to help organize the new order in Transbaikalia. From that point on he led a charmed life.

  In Moscow, the Russians accepted him: he was the rebel son of an aristo claiming his own on behalf of the people. And in Transbaikalia he was a local boy made good. What had been a disadvantage his mixed parentage now became his passport to power “He was Moscow’s chief man in Transbaikalia throughout the Civil War. Now he talks with Lenin and Trotsky and Zmoviev about an empire beyond Siberia, a people’s republic stretching to the Pacific. China, Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet. They can all see that Europe’s hopeless now, that it may be hopeless for another fifty, another hundred years. But they need to dream, you see, and so they dream about the East. And all the time Zamyatin stands there whispering in their ears like a mesmerist, telling them that he can make their dreams reality.”

  Winterpole paused for a moment, staring into the darkness beyond the windscreen, as though he could see a second darkness gathering there, discrete, intact, waiting. He shivered. It was cold:

  cold and empty.

  “About a year ago,” he went on, “Zamyatin dropped out of sight.

  One minute, my people were sending me almost daily reports about him, the next he was gone. There were sightings at first, but they all proved negative. The internal pogroms had already started, of course, so my first thought was that he had fallen victim to his erstwhile friends in the Kremlin. Stalin is the coming man in Russia, and he wants socialism in one country. Zamyatin could have been a sacrifice, a reassurance that the others are not dreaming too hard.

  “But time passed and Zamyatin’s name wasn’t mentioned, and I knew he must still be alive. They have to denounce their victims, you see it’s no good just doing away with them some dark night.

  Their deaths are a sort of atonement, you understand, and their sins must be expiated in public. Pour encourager les autres.

  “Then, about four months ago, I had a firm sighting. One I could rely on, from one of my best men.” He hesitated.

  “He was seen in Tibet, in the west, near Mount Kailas, near a monastery called Phensung Gompa. He was alone, and he seemed to have been travelling for a long time. In Tibet, Christopher. Nikolai Zamyatin. I didn’t believe it at first. But my man managed to take some photographs. There’s no doubt about it. He was there. Am I making sense to you?”

  Christopher nodded. Winterpole was making a sort of sense.

  Tibet was Christopher’s territory, one of his special sectors. The agent who had sent the photograph had probably been one of his own men, recruited and trained by him. He followed the other man’s gaze into the darkness beyond the windscreen. More strongly than before, he felt that he was being sucked down beneath heavy waves. Thin hands above the water; the taste of salt on his lips; and a cold wind coming from the shore, driving him out to sea.

  “You were in the Kailas region back in 1912, weren’t you, Christopher?”

  Winterpole asked.

  “Yes,” said Christopher dully.

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I was looking for agents. Russian agents. We had received a report, a reliable report. I was sent to investigate.”

  “And what did you find?”

  Christopher shrugged.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “I spent a month up there, on the slopes of Mount Kailas itself and round Lake Mansarowar. It’s a sacred region. I made excursions to several of the monasteries. I spoke with pilgrims. If there were Russians, they must have been invisible.”

  He saw Winterpole shake his head.

  “Not invisible,” he said.

  “Dead.”

  Christopher realized that, with one hand, he was holding tightly to the door-handle beside him. Drowning men never let go: that is an axiom. He tightened his fingers on the cold metal.

  “There were two of them,” Winterpole went on.

  “Maisky and Skrypnik. Maisky was a Jew, the son of a watchmaker from the stetl. I met him once in Petersburg. A small man with bad teeth.

  “There was a third man with them, a Mongol guide. He made his way back to Russia after they died and managed to make a report. Badmayeffwas their expert on Tibet then. He interviewed the man and wrote the report himself.

  “Now, Maisky and Skrypnik had gone to Tibet officially as explorers, so heavily edited versions of the report were deposited in all the proper places the Institute of Oriental Languages at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Oriental Section of the Imperial Archaeological Society, and the Imperial Academy of Sciences.

  One or two articles were even published in journals. I read some of them myself.”

  He paused and fingered the steering-wheel again. No-one passed in the street. It was Tuesday night, and it was cold, and children were in bed at home, dreaming of fat Father Christmases and dining off brandied pudding in their sleep.

  “The real report, the unedited version, was locked away in a file in the Secret Service archives and promptly forgotten. The Mongol disappeared almost certainly killed because of what he knew.”

  “What did he know?”

  “Be patient, Christopher. I’ll come to that. I think Badmayeff planned to act on the report, but first of all he needed funds and the backing of the right people. However, it was already 1913 and circumstances were far from propitious for an undertaking in Tibet. The file stayed where it was, gathering dust. I had no idea of its existence, of course. No-one had any idea.

  “I only discovered what I have just told you this year, after I received the report about Zamyatin being sighted near Mount Kailas. My information was reliable. There were photographs, as I said. So I believed Zamyatin had really been there. And I asked myself what could possibly bring a man like Nikolai Zamyatin to such a God-forsaken place. A man on his way up. A man with access to the corridors of power.

  “It was then I remembered that you had been there in 1912.

  Looking for Russian agents. Perhaps, I reasoned to myself, you had been mistaken. Perhaps there had indeed been agents, or at least one agent. If so, I argued to myself, there must have been a report, there must still be a report somewhere .. . and Nikolai Zamyatin must have found it and read it.”

  Abruptly, Winterpole reached out a hand and cleared a space where fresh condensation had fogged the windscreen. Outside, the snow still fell, its faint flakes drifting down past the street-lamp, remote and colourless, like shadows falling from another planet.

  “I inst
ructed my best agent in Moscow to look for the report. It took him a week to find it. Or, to be precise, to find the file it had been in. The report itself was missing Zamyatin had either kept it or destroyed it, there was no way of knowing which. There was, however, a second file in Badmayeff’s hand. It contained a synopsis.

  of the full report, intended for the eyes of the Tsar himself. The synopsis is less than a foolscap page in length and it tells us very little. But it does make one thing clear: Maisky and Skrypnik were sent to Tibet expressly to search for something. And whatever it was, they found it.

  “What is also clear is that their discovery did not go back to Russia with their Mongol guide. It was left in Tibet. Badmayeff’s synopsis ends with a request for further finance in order to kit out an expedition to bring it back. But war broke out in Europe and everybody started waving flags, so no expedition was ever sent.

  Until this year. Until Nikolai Zamyatin appointed himself to the task.”

  Somewhere, footsteps sounded on hard ground and faded again.

  Someone was reclaiming the streets from Sunday’s violence. A light went on in a room opposite and was extinguished a few seconds later. A dog barked once and was silent. The night continued.

  “What has any of this to do with me or my son?” Christopher asked again.

  Winterpole leaned his forehead against the cold rim of the

  steering-wheel and breathed out slowly.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I wish to God I knew, but I don’t. I swear that’s the truth.”

  “Then why .. .”

  “Go through all this? Because, Christopher, although I cannot begin to explain it to you, I know that there is a connection. So far, all I know is that you were in the Kailas region eight years ago. And Nikolai Zamyatin was there four months ago.”

  “You mean that’s what brought you all the way up here? My son is kidnapped and you come here talking about coincidences. You tell me stories about a man I’ve never seen or heard of.”

  Winterpole did not answer at once. Outside, the snowflakes danced as he came closer to the heart of the thing. They were all dancing: himself and Christopher Wylam, and somewhere far away, Christopher’s son and a man called Zamyatin, all caught in a Dance of Death, turning round and round in the still darkness like figures on an old clock.

  “There’s something else,” he said at last, his voice flat and

  emotionless.

  “Go on.”

  “Last month,” he said, ‘a Tibetan monk arrived in Kalimpong in northern India. He was dying: he’d come over the high passes during some very bad weather. Somehow we’re not sure exactly how he managed to get a message to a man called Mishig.

  Mishig is a Mongol trader with his base in Kalimpong. He’s also an agent for the Russians. Until the Revolution, he worked quite happily for the Tsarist regime. Now he’s a messenger-boy for the Bolsheviks .. . and just as happy. He keeps them informed about traffic to and from Tibet. Low-grade information mostly, but from time to time it throws up pearls. So they’ve given him a small radio transmitter that he uses to communicate with a controller in Calcutta, whose identity is still unknown to us.

  “We know that Mishig’s control is able to get messages through to Moscow and Europe, but we haven’t yet worked out his system.

  In the meantime, we go on monitoring all the signals that pass between Mishig and Calcutta.”

  There was a pause. Winterpole took a deep breath.

  “On the tenth of November, we intercepted a message to Calcutta from Mishig. It was marked “urgent” and had been encoded quite differently to any of his previous signals. And it was signed with the code-name “Zima”. That’s Russian for “Winter”.

  It’s the official code-name for Nikolai Zamyatin.”

  Winterpole paused again. Christopher sensed that he was reluctant to get to the point.

  “Exactly what did this message say?” he asked.

  “You understand, Christopher,” Winterpole said in a quiet voice, ‘that there can be no going back. Once I have told you, you won’t be able to leave it alone. I can still spare you, I can still keep silent.

  It’s your decision.”

  “Tell me. I have to know.” He felt the tension in his stomach tighten into a knotted cord. Outside, the snowflakes danced and fell.

  “He asked for information,” Winterpole said.

  “Information about an Englishman called Christopher John Wylam, who had worked for British intelligence in India. And about his son. A boy called William.”

  The undertow had him firmly in its grip at last, and he could feel himself going under. Thin hands flailing, tearing the sunlight out of the sky. He said nothing.

  “Three weeks after that,” the other man went on, inexorable now he had begun, ‘we got hold of a signal from Calcutta to Mishig. It said they had tracked you down in a place called Hexham in England. There was a request for further instructions.”

  He paused.

  “I’m afraid that’s where things went a bit wrong,” he said.

  “We thought Mishig would send another message to Calcutta later the same day. He was due to despatch one of his routine signals. But he never made the broadcast. He took the next train from Siliguri to Calcutta. We’re certain he carried the instructions to his control in person either orally or in writing, it doesn’t matter. That was six days ago.”

  Christopher looked at Winterpole.

  “You knew about this and you didn’t notify me. You knew something might happen, but you kept quiet.”

  “Try to understand, Christopher. We needed to know what Zamyatin is up to. We had to let them show their hand. I was afraid you might do something to prevent them if you knew. I’m sorry.”

  “They might have killed him. For all I know, he’s dead now.

  And they did kill Father Middleton. For what?”

  “We still need to know, Christopher. What Zamyatin is doing in Tibet. What he wants with your son. I’d like you to go to India, to Kalimpong. And if it’s necessary, to Tibet. I think that’s where they’re taking your son.”

  “I know,” Christopher replied. He looked away from Winterpole.

  Outside, the shadows of night were descending on grey and mottled wings that troubled the snow-filled air.

  “I know,” he said. And the snow stopped falling and there was only darkness.

  Nedong Pass, southern Tibet, January 1921 He was cold. There had been more snow that morning, white, blinding snow that had whipped at his face and hands. It had blotted out everything: the road, the rocks, the footprints they left behind. It was impossible to tell whether they were still in the pass or not; he thought they might have lost their way. Tobchen was frightened, he could tell. Once, the pony had almost slipped on a ledge over a steep precipice. Since then, Tobchen had made him walk, holding the animal’s bridle, stiff with frost. The old man went in front, repeating mantras endlessly, spinning his prayer wheel like a madman.

  Since early afternoon, the snow had given way to a fierce wind, a wind so sharp it threatened to tear the skin from a man’s bones.

  It rose to gale force like this every afternoon. The day before, they had passed a group of travellers wearing masks, dark masks of leather painted with the features of demons. He had been frightened and had called out.

  “Tobchen, Tobchen who are those men? Why are they dressed like that?”

  The old man had looked up and shouted back. The wind snatched his words away and he waited until the boy came alongside him.

  “Don’t worry, my lord. They are only travellers. They wear the masks to protect their faces from the wind. And they paint them to frighten the demons.”

  The men had gone past without a word, silent and incurious, harried by the wind, dark figures driven remorselessly into the void. He and Tobchen had been left alone again to battle on against the elements.

  They stopped just after sunset. The old man found dried yak dung

  somewhere and lit a fire
. There was tea and tsampa as always, but

  Samdup did not complain. And if he had, Tobchen would not have

  listened to him. He was a trulku, but he was still a child, and

  Tobchen treated him with a mixture of awe and sternness that allowed for no lapses in discipline. He was worried that the old man was growing tired. He wondered how much longer the journey would last.

  “How much farther to Gharoling?” he asked.

  The old monk looked up, his tea cup clasped in frost-bitten fingers.

  “Soon, my lord, soon.”

  “But how soon, Tobchen? Tomorrow?”

  The lama shook his head.

  “No, not tomorrow,” he said.

  “But with the help of your prayers and the grace of Lord Chenrezi, it will not be long.”

  “Will it be the day after tomorrow, Tobchen?” the boy insisted.

  “Drink your tea, khushog, and don’t ask so many questions. When you have finished, I will light a lamp and we will study the Kangyur together. Your education must not be neglected just because you are travelling.”

  The boy fell silent and sipped his tea, lifting out from time to time the balls of tsampa that provided the only real nourishment in his meal. The wind was still high, but they sat in the shelter of an outcrop of rocks, listening to it pass. The heavens were invisible behind acres of heavy cloud.

  “Why are we going to Gharoling, Tobchen?” Samdup asked.

  “I have told you before. To visit Geshe Khyongla Rinpoche. The Rinpoche is a great teacher, greater than I. It is time for you to study the Sutras. Then you will be ready to undertake the study of the Tantras. You must know both to fulfill your destiny.”

  “But there are teachers at Dorje-la Gompa.”

  “Yes, there are good teachers there. But none as great as Khyongla Rinpoche. Do you remember when we studied the Lama Nachupa together, how it described the duty of a disciple towards his guru?”