The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) (13 page)

Agvan.
Something about that name was familiar, beyond the obvious “We need something original that starts with an A” marketing ploy. I set the thought aside for now.

I scanned the length of the side street, up and down. Still no activity, but the sky was growing lighter. Soon, early bird commuters and airport travelers would be hitting the road.

Once again, I balanced the wise versus the unwise. Wise? Get backup of some sort. Unwise … ?

I drew closer. There wasn’t any side access that I could see, only the wide, ridged, metal roll-up doors, firmly unrolled, and the front entrance with the sign on it. From what I could tell of the roof, it was flat, with only a single large, round ventilation fan occupying its surface.

The roof, then.

At least this was a one-story building. I skirted the shadows on the opposite side of the street, darting across at the last possible minute. At the far end of the building, a Dumpster unit was conveniently pushed up against the wall. I eyeballed its height and realized the Dumpster, plus me, wouldn’t be tall enough to reach the actual rooftop. Then I spotted a blue recycling bin.

Okay, now I was getting into really, really
bad idea
territory.

I wrestled the bin up onto the Dumpster and positioned the Dumpster so the pair of thick rear wheels was jammed against the warehouse wall. A chant of protection from my early training leapt into my brain:
Palden Lhamo, protectress who performs all pacifying deeds, pacify my illnesses, hindrances, and ghosts.

I shimmied onto the Dumpster and after a few awkward attempts successfully hauled myself onto the top of the bin. I slowly stood upright, my feet wide apart. For one terrifying moment the bin seemed to buckle and tip beneath my legs. I shifted my weight, as if I were surfing, and the bin miraculously steadied, hindrances pacified for now.

I vowed to call upon Palden Lhamo more often.

From there, it was a fairly easy jump-and-pull onto the roof. It was also the point at which I left behind the official sanctions of my private detective license and became either an ex-monk with unwise habits or a flat-out delinquent. If my Van Nuys buddies happened to find me, I had no doubt which one they’d pick.

I was curious, though. Curiosity—genuinely seeking to explore and understand the unknown—is in constant danger of suppression by the forces of dogma, fundamentalism, and force. Therefore, genuine inquiry must be encouraged. Or so my justifying mind insisted, as I started my illicit creep along the rough surface of the roof.

I headed straight for the ventilation unit, which offered the best options for snooping. About 20 feet away, I was hit with a pungent blast from the fan. My salivary glands instantly erupted into song, but it took a few minutes for my brain to catch up. Curry! Real, home-cooked, Indian curry accosted my nostrils. I zipped back across time and space to Jogibara Road, a narrow thoroughfare in Upper Dharamshala, lined on both sides with an amazing array of restaurants. Our monastery diet was uniformly and deliberately bland, so the occasional outing into town meant a gourmet feast for our noses and, on the rare instances when we had money, our bellies. Then, rupees clutched in our fists, Yeshe, Lobsang, and I would head for the Malabar and order the spiciest
biryani
on the menu.

I sniffed the air. Was I smelling actual Indian food, or just Indian spices? My nostrils sent back the report: real food, recently cooked, and from the intensity of the gusts pouring out of the fan, in large amounts. Next question—were they feeding a truckload of people or just cooking a truckload of food?

I squatted close to the fan to peer inside. I saw only spinning metal and darkness. The assembly was solid as a rock. I had met my dead end.

I backtracked to the end of the building. This time, I lowered myself until I could hang by my arms and drop onto the actual Dumpster lid, avoiding the treacherous blue bin. My gut told me any protection from hindrances had just about run out.

I stood next to the Dumpster, thinking. Fatigue crept up my shoulders and into my neck.

Probably a good idea to head home …

The impulse came out of nowhere, hijacking good sense and sending me sprinting like a prankster to the BMW sedan. I gave the trunk a hard shove, and ran like mad across the street and into the shadows of the alley. Car lights flashed and the horn emitted a series of rhythmic blares. I patted down my windbreaker and paused at my left-hand pocket.
Ha!
I still had the small binoculars I’d used to track down that ridiculous stolen hairless Chihuahua. At least that case was good for something. I lifted them and focused onto the front of the building.

The door of the office opened. A thickly built man stepped outside, aimed his keys at the BMW, and with one click silenced the alarm. A second man materialized behind him, slighter in build, but otherwise very similar in appearance. His left arm was bent, and the fingers of his left hand wriggled and plucked the area just below his ribs incessantly, as if strumming an invisible sitar.

The first man waved the other back inside. He made a cautious tour of his car, expanded his inspection to the rest of the lot, and then walked with a slight sway in my direction, all the way to the curb. I stayed perfectly still in the inky darkness, binoculars glued. He double-checked both ends of the street, affording me a close, clean view of his face. He had narrow eyes and a square block of a head topped with a bristly crew cut and set on an equally square, truncated neck. His black jacket was of soft, expensive leather; his watch was big and gold; and his jeans were several salary levels above Levi’s. He looked to be in his fifties.

He moved like a muscle-bound wrestler back toward the open door of the office. I spotted a desk inside and a dark-skinned woman, perhaps Hispanic, parked behind it, and little else. As he reached the door, he glanced up. I followed with my binoculars, and only then found the tiny surveillance video camera, just above the lintel.

Busted.

The door closed behind him. A smart man would go straight to the security monitor next, to double-check, see what he could see. I had to assume this guy wasn’t lacking in intelligence. I dashed back through the alleys and jumped into my car. I was out of practice speed-sprinting, and my breathing was ragged. I fired up the Dodge and aimed for the freeway entrance. This time, I took the on-ramp, and I was lucky I didn’t launch into space. I opened the driver’s side window. Wind buffeted my face. I opened my jaws wide and bellowed, letting the airstream carry off a metric buttload of nervous energy. Twenty minutes later I was home.

Tank’s food was untouched, and he didn’t so much as twitch a whisker when I entered the bedroom. I unloaded the Airlite, returned the bullets to their box, and locked both revolver and ammunition in the closet safe. Four hours had passed since I’d started on this wild hunt for Sasha.

What a complete waste of time.

Well, not completely complete. I did have a name,
Agvan Supply.

I made a proper pot of coffee, and got to work.

Agvan Supply had a website—rudimentary, but functioning.

They claimed to be distributors of fine gourmet foods, specializing in hard-to-find edibles. Color photographs of three such items dressed up the front page of their website: a sheep cheese from Bosnia, mangoes from India, and
medjool
dates from Algeria.

I remembered Julie telling me about these foodie websites. She, like other chefs, used them on occasion to purchase delicacies: once, an Israeli saffron for her bouillabaisse, and another time, for a private event, a pale-white mushroom found only in Japan.

I highly doubted Agvan Supply had chefs like Julie in mind as customers, but I resolved to keep my mind open for now.

The photographs of fresh produce were professionally done, and beautiful. That said, Bosnian sheep cheese and Algerian dates didn’t do it for me. A heaping basket of mangoes, on the other hand, lit up my taste buds, prompting yet another wave of childhood nostalgia.

In India, two events were greeted with almost equal celebration—the refreshing drops of the first monsoon rain, cool and life restoring, and the arrival of the first ripe mangoes, healing in an entirely different way. The former provided instant relief from the relentless, oppressive heat of May and early June. Children ran through the streets to greet the rain, romping and leaping, their mothers too happy to remonstrate. Businessmen spilled out of office high-rises to stand in the pouring rain, their suits and ties growing soaked.

But mango season? That brought joy to the soul. Word would spread, magically, invisibly:
Mangoes! The mangoes are back!
Within an hour throngs would be crowding the bazaar to pounce upon the biggest and best the fruit stalls had to offer.

We were not allowed mangoes in the monastery. My father, as disciplinarian, forbade them. He considered them too sinfully delicious, certain to inflame our passions and make us wobble in our devotion to the austere pursuit of spiritual perfection. But I had a secret weapon—my mother. On two separate occasions, she paid a surprise visit to Dorje Yidam, and they happened to coincide with mango season. I’ve always suspected the mangoes, not me, were the real draw.

Before I was even born, Valerie—as she insisted I call her—had soured on my father, as well as his particular brand of austerity. She moved to Paris to raise me and take up another spiritual pursuit: the ultimate glass of chilled chardonnay. By the time I was walking, she was already adhering to a fairly strict religious regimen: approximately one glass of wine an hour from the moment she arose, late in the morning, to the moment she drifted out of consciousness, around 11 at night. She ultimately stabilized her spiritual practice, or should I say her practice of imbibing spirits, to a steady two bottles a day. While I seldom saw her falling-down drunk, I never really saw her sober, either.

Maybe we could have been close. I don’t know. The alcohol was always there, between our hearts, like a wall of thick felt.

Valerie almost never talked about my father, but one day, in a wine-mellowed mood, she managed one confession: “Your father and I always had one foot in the bedroom, and one foot in the ring.” I was only six, too young to understand exactly what she meant, but I hoarded and stored that nugget of information like a precious jewel. Decades later, during the “She-who-hates-cats” year, I found myself recalling my mother’s description while repeating its pattern. Choosing to leave that contentious relationship with Charlotte proved surprisingly hard, but essential to my mental and emotional health.

Anyway, one March day, my mother arrived at the monastery doors in a flurry of silk and perfume and insisted on taking me on a driving tour of the villages surrounding Upper McLeod Ganj. I think I was around ten. Valerie didn’t drink that visit, perhaps because of the heat, or perhaps because she couldn’t find the right kind of alcohol anywhere close. But alcoholism is like a flea on a feral dog: it will not be deprived, and if scratched, merely jumps to another host. Normally noncommittal when it came to food—“Why bother?” seemed to be drunk Valerie’s attitude, “a full stomach only lessens the buzz”—on that day, dry Valerie latched onto food to treat her disease. She ploughed through dish after dish of hot curry, spicy enough to make her eyes water, shoveling bites into her mouth with puffy torn-off pieces of naan, to no avail. And then she found the cure, the pièce de résistance. Mangoes, the king of fruits. I’m not saying the withdrawal was pleasant for her—I remember her face as painted with pain, as if her world had suddenly turned vengeful on her. But even a discontent as prickly as hers was soothed by the juicy flesh.

“Ahh,” she’d said, standing by the fruit stall. The fruit monger had prepared a prize Alphonso for her, slicing and scoring each portion into squares before turning the skin inside out so the little blocks of fruit opened and spread into inviting, bite-size rows. He’d beamed as she scraped the sweet flesh off with her perfect teeth, the juice dripping down her perfect chin.

“Tenzing, you have to try this.”

I remember watching, with pleasure and relief, how all traces of misery had momentarily disappeared from her face. Then I, too, tasted the orange, juicy flesh, and I, too, experienced guilt-laced pleasure.

“Good! Good!” the fruit monger had said to my mother. “Make your boy smart! Make him handsome!” And I understood something in that shared moment of illicit gratification. Valerie had as many rebellious feelings against my father as I did. We weren’t just wallowing in the sensory sweetness. We were co-conspirators, using forbidden fruit as a weapon against my father’s oppression. The pain made the pleasure that much more intense.

One foot in the bedroom, one in the ring.

Tank leapt into my lap.

“Good timing, big guy.” I took several deep breaths, detaching myself from the memory. Like a kite, its departure trailed twisted, melancholy streamers of sorrow. More tangled evidence of the crazy, unconscious patterns that had marked my relationship with my parents, complicated every relationship since, and probably doomed my time with Julie.

Let them go.

I focused back on the Agvan Supply website, one hand absently stroking Tank’s back. I clicked around the site and found more descriptions of exotic products, such as Turkish halvah and Iranian pistachios.

On the “About Us” page was a single paragraph of text, no pictures:

Agvan Supply, Inc., formerly Tresinmerc, was founded by Yugoslavian brothers Milo and Jovan Stasic in 1945, and has remained a family business ever since. Following Jovan Stasic’s recent passing, the company’s ownership and operations have come under the direction of Mr. Stasic’s nephews, Zarko Stasic and Stojan Stasic. The business name has changed, but the company is and always will be dedicated to providing the same high-quality service our customers have come to expect. Mr. Zarko Stasic says, “My father and uncle dedicated their lives to supplying quality product from around the world. We aim to continue that tradition. Agvan Supply’s specialty is difficult-to-find foodstuffs; the rarer the item, the harder we will work to bring it to you.”