“That’s no plan,” Nathan complained.
“Yes it is. I do have a plan.” And really, it was coming to me even as I spoke. I put my arm around Sarah and gave her a hug back, and it all fell into place like a long string of dominos. “I just don’t know if it will work or not.”
XII
AND SO THAT EVENING, after one of Eva’s sumptuous Austro-Hungarian feasts, we found ourselves seated in one of the big booths at the back of the Old Vienna Inn, warm in the steamy sauerkraut-and-Strauss air, nibbling at the last of the apple strudel and sipping schnapps and/or cappuccino. I got out one of my yellow Lufthansa maps of Kathmandu, and a pencil, and carefully transferred the information from Nathan and Freds’s maps onto it. “See, look,” I said. “They only intersect in three places, and none of those places are really major parts of the tunnel system.”
“Yeah, but they connect the big rooms together,” Freds said. “Besides it’s all one—if you run into them, you discover the whole system.”
“I know that, I know that. But say you filled in your tunnels, in just those places.” I illustrated by erasing those sections of Freds’s system. “Then if they built the sewers, they’d find some strangely loose dirt, but that’s no big deal, the underside of a city is bound to be weird. So they lay the sewers and they never notice a thing.”
“But the different parts of the tunnel system would be cut off from each other!” Freds objected.
“Sure, sure, but you can always go deeper, see—after they’re done you can dig under the sewers, put in another nifty staircase system, and when it’s all over the sewers are laid, and your tunnel system is back in action, and no one’s the wiser!”
“That’s a lot of labor,” Sarah noted. “Where is Freds going to get the manpower for something like that?”
“Freds has got friends up north,” I said. “The very people who use this tunnel system, in fact. If they went to work on it, it could be a matter of days. Put Colonel John on it and it could be a matter of hours.”
Freds was nodding. Nathan was nodding. Sarah leaned over to give me a kiss on the cheek. We toasted the plan, and I agreed to go in and see exactly how old A. Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana was using this sewer project to further himself.
XIII
MY PREVIOUS ENCOUNTER WITH A.S.J.B.R. had ended on a bad note, and so when I entered his durbar one morning soon after our dinner I had a whole pile of baksheesh from the South Asian Development Agency ready to hand over to him, along with an elaborate apology for the little incident that had ended our last meeting; I planned to explain to him that I had been stressed out as a result of serious illness and a case of insanity in my immediate circle, figuring it is always best to use the truth when you can.
But when I approached A. Rana he turned in my direction, nodded shortly, and then waited to find out who I was, and what I wanted. He didn’t recognize me.
I had spent five billion hours in his office; and the last time we had seen each other we’d ended up screaming in each other’s faces; but he didn’t remember me. I stood that far outside his system.
This was such a shock that it took me a while to collect myself. Given the nature of our last meeting, it was of course a good thing he didn’t recognize me; but I couldn’t help feeling pissed off. That he would forget me, after all that pain … I choked off my irritation and went with it. I declared myself a representative of the South Asian Development Agency, which caught his interest immediately, no doubt because of the agency’s reputation for shoddy accounting practices. I told him about the sewer project, and he nodded and told me to come by his office during the afternoon.
I had seen this movie before. I did not care to see it again.
Nevertheless I gave it a try, and started the familiar round of visits and payments. Nothing came of it, although I was able to confirm some things about his new position in the Secretariat. It was true; somehow he had weaseled out of the whammy I had laid on him with the Great Border Incident, and more than that—he had gotten a promotion out of it. I couldn’t imagine how. “Oh, sir! It seems I am being responsible for a crisis that has nearly brought the Indians and Chinese down on our heads! Perhaps even begun World War Three!” “Good. You are promoted to head of the department controlling all foreign aid help.” Okay. Another Great Mystery of Nepal.
It increased my already healthy respect for A.S.J.B.R.’s Machiavellian ability to fall upward, and I dealt with him as cautiously as I could. But after only a week of the hold-and-extract routine I found that my patience for sitting around in his office had completely disappeared. I couldn’t stand it. I still harbored a lot of ill will—hatred, in fact—for him from the last time, and even though it was useful that he didn’t remember who I was, that still rankled bad. I just couldn’t stand waiting around for him.
So I arranged a meeting with Bahadim, and asked him whether his spy system included observation of A. Rana’s offices.
Bahadim nodded. “You know how it is in Nepal—the foreign aid community is one of the biggest centers of power we have. A. Rana is not the most important person in this area, but it appears that he is rising fast, and we had a tunnel built under his office. Would you like to join us in watching him?”
“Oh, man—” I put a hand over my heart. “I can’t tell you how good that sounds. It’s the best news I’ve heard in years!”
Bahadim regarded me oddly, and I refrained from kissing him. But I was awfully pleased by this news, and couldn’t have been happier the following day, when Bahadim and one of his cohorts took me through Yongten’s shop and down into the tunnels again. I followed them to their under-palace complex, and skinnied up one of the ladders with Bahadim ahead of me. There was scarcely room at the top of the ladder for both of us; it was a small low earthen cave, with a section of the roof that was higher than the rest, and made of wood. This was the corner of the floor of A. Rana’s office. A little mirror periscope and earhorn were inserted into cracks where the floor met the wall. I looked in the periscope, and after a while perceived a corner of a desk and a wall. No people on view. But when Bahadim took the plug out of the earhorn we could both hear voices above us, conversing in rapid, loud Nepalese.
I had arranged for Nathan to visit A. Rana’s offices, in the hope of stimulating some inner sanctum conversation on our case. After Bahadim and I had been settled in place for some time, I heard his name spoken in the midst of a burst of Nepalese: “Mr. Nathan Howe.” All the voices receded into the outer office, where I could just hear the sound of Nathan’s voice, in conversation with A. Rana—I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Finally A. Rana returned to his office and got on the phone. Bahadim shifted around so he could put his mouth to my ear, to whisper a partial translation. “He is speaking to a friend in the Department of Public Works … about the sewers, yes. He is planning to give the contract for this work to the friend.” Suddenly Bahadim stopped whispering and listened hard for a long time. I stared at his face in the gloom. A. Rana hung up the phone, and Bahadim whispered in my ear, “Actually the contract is already awarded, and the work will soon begin. They only delay telling Mr. Howe to obtain more money from the agency.”
“Did he say when they’re going to start?”
“No.”
I scurried down the ladder to the cavern, and we retreated to Bahadim’s little underground office chamber. While he cooked up a pot of tea I pounded fist into palm nervously. “What does it mean, what does it mean?”
“It means only that the project has been approved, and yet A. Rana has delayed informing the agency about this. It is a fairly common tactic with agencies like that one, to generate more baksheesh. The South Asian Development Agency is known to harbor loose accountants.”
“Damn,” I said. “That A. Rana is such a crook.”
“It is not likely it is just him doing it.”
“Who, then? Who makes the decisions up there?”
Bahadim poured our tea, shrugged. “No one can be sure. Anyone who
tells you that he knows how the Palace Secretariat makes its decisions is a liar. The palace is like what you call a black box. People go in—information, money, requests go in—decisions come out. What happens inside is secret. They do not want you to know, you see. No one from the outside. It is a habit we have in Nepal, a desire to be holding some secrets to ourselves. It is a big world, and we are small, and so we feel the need to have something of our own. Some secrets, if nothing else.”
“But the corruption it allows!”
“I know.”
“You need laws, Bahadim. You need some kind of legal system. A constitutional monarchy or whatever.”
Bahadim was sipping at his tea, but he waved a finger at me vigorously. “Oh my! Those are very bad words in the palace, you must believe me. Constitutional monarchy, oh! It has caused great trouble when other governments innocently use this phrase, because it is a code for us, you see. To the royal family it is a fright because it reminds them of the days when they were controlled by the Ranas, and could do nothing. And to the Ranas it is a fright because it suggests an open system, and an end to their power.”
“But I thought the Ranas were overthrown in the fifties! Isn’t that what you told me?”
He wiggled a hand ambiguously. “It was almost true. But in the years since they have slipped back into power. Because the Shahs are always marrying Ranas. The Queen is a Rana, you see. And the King’s two younger brothers, they married the Queen’s two younger sisters. And the heads of the Army are Ranas. And all over—” He waved his hand to indicate the palace above us. “Ranas. That family runs this country. We need desperately the constitutional monarchy you speak of, but the Ranas will stop it if they can.”
I shook my head. “It can’t be good for the country.”
“No, of course it is not good!” Bahadim’s mouth tightened. “In 1951 at the time of our revolution Nepal was the same size, economically speaking, as South Korea. And South Korea suffered their war, and yet only thirty-seven years later, South Korea is what it is—while here we are, still among the poorest nations on the earth. Now you can say Korea has a seacoast and we do not, but still, it is more than that. We simply cannot advance economically until we advance politically! A constitutional democracy, yes. It is what we work for down here!”
His eyes gleamed in the lantern light, and when he put down his teacup, his hand formed a fist. I could see he was dead serious, and I knew I had found the team I wanted to play on. “Can you keep a watch on A. Rana’s office for me?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. We will be keeping someone under it whenever it is occupied. We would like to know what is going on with this sewer project. It seems it is just as always; the contract is being given to a friend of the Ranas. It was probably not the lowest bid, if bids were entertained at all, and now it has not been announced yet, so that maximum amounts of baksheesh can be taken from the source of funds. Much of the money will no doubt be ending up in India, in Rana accounts and with subcontractors. And there is no telling what kind of horrible sewers we might get for this.”
I nodded. “We’ll need to know when they’re planning to begin.”
“I will let you know what we learn.”
When I got home to the Star, Nathan was already there. “My gosh, George, you must really be some operator. I talked to the foreign aid officer you made the appointment with, and damned if he didn’t tell me the project was approved!”
“I had nothing to do with it,” I said. “Did he say when they’re going to start?”
“Why, no. There’s a lot to be done, a bidding process and all—”
“They’ve already done that,” I told him sourly, and gave him a truncated version of the news. He was shocked.
A couple of days later Bahadim called me on the phone. His listeners had found out that the digging for the sewer was supposed to begin soon. The contractor had hired a Swiss technician to help, meaning everything would happen three times faster than it would have otherwise.
So it was time to go into overdrive. Freds took off for Shambhala, to recruit Colonel John and the Khampas for help in rearranging their tunnel system under the city. It would take them a while to get down to Kathmandu and get started; meanwhile there was little for me to do. I surveyed the tunnel system, and determined exactly where the sewers’ trenches would cut through it, and marked up the tunnel system to show where it should be filled; I spent hours lying under A. Rana’s floor, listening to him lying up above me, getting angrier and angrier at him; I even cleaned my room, something I hadn’t done in months.
While I was doing the cleaning I came across a little bag of junk from my first trek in Nepal. I had been hired to assist with that trekking group, even though I hadn’t known a thing about it; our Sherpa sirdar had taught me everything. Among the mementoes in the bag was a folded piece of paper, worn at the creases. Curiously, not recalling what it was, I unfolded it.
It was a letter, in a strange spiky handwriting that I found hard to read.
Date. 27/9/1981
Respected Sir,
Namaste.
Today I am writing a letter for you and I hope and saw you are living at school play ground so that I am very happyness to you and your guides. I want to tell you about this primary school poor condition excuse me sir here are not responsive person and rich man so that they can’t give a lot of money for school. In my school here aren’t enough furniture to sit student and I hope you help for this primary school by money. If you have money but I am very sad to writting this letter for you. Sir I have to much problem in school. What can I do? because I am also a poor teacher in this social. Now I stop my pen.
your credible teacher
Ramdas Shrestha
headmaster
I sat on my bed with the note on my knee, remembering. We had come in late one night to a teahouse and a school, straddling a steep ridge next to the trail. Sangbadanda, that was it. It had rained hard that night, and our group was exhausted, half of them sick already, and so we had spent the next day drying out and recovering. Sitting there in the morning sun I had been approached by a young guy from the school, who had handed me the note with a smile. After reading it I’d given the young man some rupees, and they had invited me into the school to talk to the headmaster and all the teachers. The headmaster was an old retired Gurkha, who ran the school on his pension. As we had noticed that morning, he drilled the kids like they were in boot camp. His teachers were young guys who all had a little English, and they were happy to talk to me about America and American schools, and about their own school. They had no books; they taught on blackboards. Coming out of the meeting with them I had yelled at one of my clients for peeing against the back wall of the school-house. But there’s shit all over the place, he had protested.
I folded the note slowly, and put it back in the bag. And I made my way through the streets and down to Bahadim’s underground headquarters still thinking about that headmaster and his school.
Bahadim joined me in the listening post under A. Rana’s office, and we lay there in the dark while A.S.J.B.R. operated just inches above our heads. During one of his interminable phone conversations Bahadim grabbed my hand and squeezed. “He is dealing with an Army friend,” Bahadim whispered in my ear. “They are selling rhinoceros horns to members of a Chinese trade group. It is poaching in Chitwan, for sure.”
I lay there and physically held myself back from punching A. Rana’s floor. Sleazy slimy son of a bitch, pocketing bribes in a country without school books, poaching in a country with hardly any rhinos left—failing to recognize me!—I wanted to scream, I wanted to kill him; he’d remember me then, just punch his floor so hard that the shock scared him to death! I could barely stop myself from doing it. It was the first obvious sign that I was losing my grip.
XIV
AFTER THAT SIGNS OF this problem came more frequently. In fact much of the following week is blurry in my memory. I ran around in the streets of the city and the tunnels below it, doing a very primitive an
d often clandestine surveying job to mark the spots in the tunnels that needed to be filled; and while doing that I fizzed over with plans, scenarios that I worked out in tremendous detail (except for certain critical moments). I brooded deeply over these plans, and jumped nervously whenever anyone asked me what I was so deep in thought about. “Nothing! Nothing! Get back to work!” I would yelp, and we’d be back to it. The Khampas arrived with Colonel John in the lead, shouting loud enough to be heard on the streets above, if life up there didn’t run at a constant hundred decibels. They brought with them a whole system of little mine carts like something the seven dwarfs would use, which apparently were standard equipment in the long-range tunnels they had traveled in to get down to us. These carts ran on permanent iron tracks in the long-range tunnels, Freds told me, and they could lay temporary tracks under the city as needed.
So we all started running back and forth in the tunnels, digging with picks, shoveling dirt onto carts, and staggering around in the dark as we pushed them back and forth along the new tracks. The digging for the sewer had already begun above, and they were going to break into the first of the ancient tunnels in a matter of days. They were closing off back streets and digging them up with Indian machinery, and with the Swiss engineer on the scene every day diving into the holes and running the backhoes and exhorting the workers in bad Nepalese, they were making remarkably good progress. Down below we had more to do and less to do it with, although every day additional Khampas arrived out of the dark tunnels to the west. And Colonel John was more than a match for the Swiss guy above us; he reverted to full dress Marine Corps mode, and screamed at us all so loudly that I was sure they’d hear us on the streets. If it weren’t for the fact that the extremely noisy festival of Dasain had begun, I’m sure they would have. But they didn’t and we pounded away, driven slavelike by the lash of the colonel’s tongue. “John Wayne meets Ben-Hur,” Freds muttered one time after the colonel had blown through. “Don’t take it personal, George, he doesn’t really mean it’s all your fault.”
Escape From Kathmandu Page 28
