Deshi (14 page)
“So your assistant has been followed? But just to and from the post office? And he’s never stopped?” The lama nodded in agreement. “Does he also make bank deposits for you?” Again, the nod. “But he hasn’t been followed there? To the bank?” I made a face. I suppose Micky has rubbed off on me: I was hoping that the easiest angle—money—might be at work here.
“No. Immediately following the break-in, we alerted the bank in case any attempts at fraud were made. But nothing has happened.”
“Is your assistant…”
“Dogyam,” he supplied.
“… Dogyam still being followed? Does whoever’s trailing him ever do anything? What do the police say?”
His secretary returned with a tea tray, as if our discussion had summoned him. We moved to sit around a small coffee table. Changpa gestured to his secretary to join us with a nod and a smile and poured for both of us. He used the small actions of hospitality as a way to avoid responding immediately. Then he sat back with his own cup and the steam from the tea fogged his glasses for a moment, making his eyes hard to see.
“The police have not been informed of this ongoing situation…” he started.
“What!” I protested.
Changpa nodded. “You must understand, Dr. Burke, that they were not particularly encouraging about their ability to catch the people who broke in…”
“A thousand stories in the Naked City,” I commented, but the reference was lost on him.
“And subsequently we were… warned… that involving the authorities in issues regarding Tibet would not help matters…”
“I don’t get it,” I told him.
The Rinpoche sighed as if thinking about something unpleasant. For the first time, his assistant spoke. He had a heavier accent than his master, and his voice was soft and hesitant. “Changpa Rinpoche is a voice for our imprisoned brothers in our home country, Dr. Burke,” he began. “To the extent that he can keep the issue in the public eye, he benefits the cause of a free Tibet…”
“But I am also caught in a dilemma,” Changpa added. “I seek both freedom for my people and mercy for my brother monks in custody. And publicity sometimes can help the one cause while harming the other.” He smiled bitterly. “Or so we have been told.”
I nodded. It was the oldest, truest form of leverage: find out who someone cares about and threaten them.
“
Do you have any idea who’s making the threats?”
For once, the lama looked helpless, a man out of his element. “I suspect elements of the Chinese government…”
“The
Guoanbu
,” Dogyam murmured.
I looked at Changpa.
“He refers to the Chinese Ministry of State Security, Dr. Burke.
Guojia Anquan Bu.
”
“You’re being threatened by the Chinese Secret Service?” I asked incredulously.
The monk looked at me in complete stillness for a moment. “The skepticism is shared by your police force. Whoever it is, they have threatened harm to good men if my protests continue. And, I must confess, I am unsure how to proceed.”
Dogyam looked at his teacher with a combination of deep affection and complete understanding. He was a younger man than the Rinpoche and, while his look didn’t have that unnerving, piercing aspect to it yet, you could see its beginnings stirring way back in his eyes. “We struggle, all of us, with the seeming contradiction between mercy and wisdom.” He made the comment quietly, hesitantly. He was a man devoted to the clarity of silence who was afraid that the sound of his voice would shatter his World.
The lama sat back and regarded us quietly. He shook his head ruefully.
“It is only the illusion of this life that makes us see any duality, any difference between the two things…”
The two monks nodded in satisfaction, and I understood the philosophy, but this was not getting us anywhere. I set my tea down and looked carefully at him. “What would you like me to do for you, Rinpoche?”
The phone rang and Dogyam left us to answer it. Changpa watched him leave as he said, “Official avenues are not open to us, Dr. Burke, but I would very much like to know with certainty who it is who watches us. And who threatens my brother monks.”
There was a reception room in the front of the Dharma Center with large windows that opened onto the street. I sat there and listened to the faint patter of light rain on the glass. The phone rang occasionally. Hanging around, watching the street, comparing every passerby to the vague description Dogyam gave me: it was probably the most boring thing I’ve ever done.
I talked to Dogyam and learned what I could. His eyesight was not the best, and his tail always stayed far enough away to make it difficult to see him. But he was often there, drifting along the avenue as Dogyam made his way back and forth from the post office. It wouldn’t have been too hard to do. The Rinpoche’s assistant picked up mail at eleven every morning and returned at three to post the day’s correspondence. He took the same route every time, heading west down the street to 8th Avenue and then north to the post office. He’d be easy enough to spot: New York is a melting pot, but how many fully robed Buddhist monks in bad glasses would be on the street like that?
I left a little earlier than eleven and took the long way around the block to 8th Avenue. Then I waited right near the post office and watched. Eventually Dogyam scuttled into view under a big black umbrella and went into the post office. I loitered around and watched the crowd—but not too intently. There’s a trick to it: you try to get a sense of the flow of the movement of people and wait for something to stick out in the pattern.
But this is New York. There is more weirdness here per square mile than almost anyplace else. And the volume of pedestrian and motorized traffic makes it hard to pick things out right away. I figured it would take me a few times just to get a feel for the flow of the area. But you can never tell.
Dogyam informed me that he thought his tail was an Asian man, and fairly big. But he wasn’t really sure. The tail’s hair, he thought, was black. “That’s it?” I had said in exasperation. “He’s big and maybe Asian, and probably with dark hair?” But monks don’t detect sarcasm well. He just nodded and blinked in agreement. So I sighed and left to watch the crowd, not sure what I was looking for. Maybe if a homicidal-looking Samoan tiptoed along after the monk, I could spot him. Otherwise, I could look forward to standing in the rain and listening to my stomach announce the imminence of lunch.
I didn’t notice anything much. After tailing Dogyam back, I got some Chinese takeout, hoping no one would be offended, and sat some more in the front room of the Dharma House. I thought about Sakura and wondered what the import of his last message was. It was a clue, but it was meant to be hidden. But from whom? The murderer? What did that suggest? I itched to be moving, doing something.
I could feel the muscles in my legs getting tight with all the inactivity, so I got up and paced around. Then I drifted down the hall and looked at the notices on the bulletin board. There was a poster there for the kyudo classes, and I thought of Sarah Klein. It wasn’t the first time that day. Then I wondered whether she was thinking of me. Which was pretty goofy. Probably the MSG talking.
The weather wasn’t getting any better, but it wasn’t getting any worse: a light, persistent drizzle that made it seem later than it really was. I shifted in my seat and leaned back, opening my eyes periodically to look at the street as three o’clock got closer. Nothing.
Dogyam came out and offered me tea. I got up and followed him to the kitchen. Tibetans put butter in their tea and I wanted mine black. I got back to my seat and sipped the hot, bitter drink. Scanned the street. Nothing.
I set the tea on the table next to me and leaned back again. My eyes closed.
A phone rang and I looked around the room. I sipped at the tea, but it had gone cold. Looked at the street.
Near the corner just in view of the window, someone stood by a public phone. I looked at my watch. Almost three.
I stood up and got a little closer to the glass, but was hesitant about being seen from the outside. The man stood there, but he wasn’t using the phone. He was wearing some sort of hooded sweatshirt, so his face was hard to see. Dark clothes. But he looked big.
I told Dogyam to head out and that I would follow him. I wanted to watch and see what the man at the phone would do. Part of me thought the whole thing was coincidence, but that was thinking with my brain alone. Yamashita wanted something a bit more complex from me, and right now I had that visceral sense, deep down, that something was up.
The monk went down the steps of the Dharma Center, awkward with his packet of mail and the shaking out of his umbrella. But once he headed down the block, the man at the phone drifted along with him. I watched intently, but the rain blurred the image, and all I got was the sense of someone very powerful, very contained and yet intent, moving down the street in the monk’s wake.
The nice thing about following someone in the city is that the surrounding noise swallows the sound of your steps and doesn’t give you away. And I thought the general foot traffic would give me enough cover as well. But I was, after all, an amateur, and somewhere, somehow, he must have become aware of me.
I didn’t realize that until it was too late, of course.
We walked along the avenue in an extended line. Dogyam’s bright robes flashed occasionally through the crowd as I tried to keep him in sight. And the broad-shouldered, hooded form of his follower threaded a way through the crowds, brushing by cars as he made his way through moving traffic. I tried to stay close, but not too close.
The tail was talking into a cell phone. Then he began to move faster, getting closer to the monk and leaving me far behind. I sped up to keep them in sight. They were a block ahead of me, at least, and I got a little nervous. When I saw the hooded man take a sudden quick turn down a side street, I figured Dogyam was safe for the day and I took off at a run to see if I could catch the tail.
I rounded the corner and turned down the side street. No sign of him. Could he have gotten that far ahead? I began to move down the sidewalk, looking down the block for any sign of him, when a huge hand grabbed me and jerked me into an alley.
You could feel the strength of the man concentrated in the hand that yanked me by my jacket collar. He was whipping me around in an arc that was meant to slam me into the brick wall of a building. And he did, but it didn’t have quite the impact he had hoped for. I’d like to say that it was my cat-like reflexes that saved me. Years of highly developed martial arts technique.
In point of fact, my collar ripped. I was saved by a bad sewing job. It bled just a little of the force out of things for me. But I still hit the wall pretty hard. You could taste the masonry. I’d gotten one arm up to try to absorb the shock, but it wasn’t enough. And I had to keep the other hand free for whatever was going to come next.
He gave me a few hard, jabbing shots, trying to work the kidney. But I wasn’t going to let him pin me there. I couldn’t see much of him, but what there was looked big, and if he got the chance to work me against a hard surface I’d be spitting blood for a week. So I slid along the wall, parrying for all I was worth, trying to twist out of the trap.
He swept my legs and I went down. But not as hard as he wanted. I’ve had a lot of experience getting knocked down. I stayed on the ground, spun on my side and gave him a quick, snapping kick to the lower leg. It wasn’t much, but sometimes if you catch things right you can damage the Achilles tendon.
I must have tagged him a bit—you could see it in the slight hitch in his movement. It wasn’t a knockdown blow, but it was enough of a complication to make him break the attack off. He left because things were already taking too long. He had wanted to immobilize me. And the best way to do that is with as much force and as quickly as possible. But I wasn’t quite as easy a mark as he expected. So he cut his losses. He gave me one hard look—a young Asian face, flat and expressionless in the depths of the hood, except for eyes that burned out at you. Then he was gone, headed back in the direction of the avenue.
“Shit,” I gasped. I scrambled to my feet and shrugged my shoulders to check on things. I got back out to the street, but he was nowhere in sight. People looked at me strangely and I realized that my face must have been scraped up a bit. My left eye was swelling and I closed it in the vain hope that it would make me feel better.
“He get you, too?” a voice asked.
I was still staring stupidly down the block and hadn’t really noticed the bike messenger. He was brushing himself off and checking his bike. “Huh?”
The messenger gestured down the avenue. “That big asshole. Came tearin’ out from the side street and wiped me out.” He was wearing bicycle shorts and a helmet that looked like the carapace of an over-intelligent alien life-form. A whistle hung from a cord around his neck. The messenger was long and wiry-looking, with a big bushy beard and fierce eyes. Lance Armstrong channeling John Brown.
“Big Asian guy?” I asked, finally putting things together. “Hooded sweatshirt? D’you see where he went?”
The messenger adjusted the shoulder strap on his dirty satchel and straddled his bike. “Car picked him up,” he snorted.
“Get the plate?”
He whipped a pen out of a pocket on his bag and wrote the number on the back of my hand. “Knock yourself out, dude. Not that it’ll do you any good.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He jerked his chin in acknowledgment, then launched himself back into traffic, the whistle clenched between his teeth. His spinning tires had shot a line of dark brown crud in a stripe up his back. I heard his whistle going long after he was swallowed up in the swelling press of another nascent rush hour.
I used to think mastery was revealed only in motion. I’ve gradually admitted that it can be seen in stillness as well. That evening, the Dharma Center was quiet, as befits a place devoted to meditation. There was no hint of intrigue, and the report I had given to the Rinpoche was accepted with silence. Tonight the faint scent of incense filled the air. Smoke rises, of course, toward Heaven. Yamashita and I were directed to the lower level, where the kyudo classes were held. I hoped Sarah Klein was there.