The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) (21 page)

Sasha looked me over, the same piercing gaze as Mila’s. I stood easily, breathing. Finally, he nodded.

“I’ve been working on a piece called ‘Extraction.’ That’s the term traffickers use for picking up the kids they’ve bought. Last week I followed these two kids, both boys, to Los Angeles.”

“To Van Nuys Airport?”

“Where? Van Nuys? No, LAX. Some traffickers flew the little boys over with a woman, a nurse I think. I got video of her using these tiny syringes to give them injections; they slept the whole way.”

Right. This jibed with what Stephanie had told me. I shuddered, as I realized the implication of what Sasha was saying.

“What happened when they got to LAX?”

He gave a weary shrug. “I lost them, outside the airport. Then I spent three futile days trying to track them down. I had a couple of possible addresses, but that city of yours, the freeways …” He trailed off, as if still in a state of disbelief. I understood. When I moved to Los Angeles, at Sasha’s age exactly, I was overwhelmed by the scale and high-speed intensity of the roadways. It took two years of practice on surface streets before I got up the nerve to attempt a freeway.

“And then?” Bill prodded.

“I have a friend working with me on the story. She called while I was still driving around somewhere south of Los Angeles like a crazy person.”

“Wait a minute,” I asked. “Driving around in what? You’re too young to rent a car.”

Sasha’s eyes turned shifty. “I might have used a fake ID.”

“And where you get money for this?” Mila hissed. “Flying everywhere, renting cars!”

Sasha again ignored her. “Anyway, my friend asked me to come back, meet her in Dubrovnik. She’d followed Belma and her sisters to the port and wanted to do something radical.”

Mila’s eyes narrowed. “What friend?”

Sasha hesitated. Seemed to make a decision. “Her name is Audrey. Audrey Thatcher, Mother. I want you to meet her. In fact …” He glanced at his phone. “Audrey’s arriving any minute. I already texted her to come straight here.”

Mila’s eyes became suspicious slits. “Where is this Audrey from?”

“Cambridge. In England.”

“England? My God, Sasha!” She lapsed into a rapid stream of throaty Bosnian.

“Not now,” Sasha said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

My eyes cut over to Bill, who was responding to this latest drama by acting completely paralyzed. He’d blithely parachuted into unknown territory. Now he was the third player in a two-person tug-of-war that had been going on for almost 20 years. He didn’t know which end of the rope to pull on.

“None of that matters. There’s something I want all of you to see,” Sasha said. “I shot this on the train today.” He touched the screen on his phone and a video of Belma began to play. He paused it. “I asked her to tell me something about her life. She speaks a dialect that I have trouble following sometimes, but I’ll translate as best I can.”

Belma’s voice was as devastating as her eyes, a childish lilt burdened with fatigue and despair.

“She says she has always been hungry, that when she goes to sleep, no, sorry, that she tries to hurry to go to sleep each night so she can escape her hunger. The only time she can remember being full was after the men pulled her and her sisters into the van. The men had sacks of hamburgers. She and her sisters ate so many they passed out. She says she loves very much her two younger sisters.” On the screen, Belma began to cry.

Sasha paused it. “Eight girls in the family. Her mother probably decided to sell off some of the younger ones. The gangsters gave the girls doped-up hamburgers to knock them out for the journey.”

“How did she get separated from the other two?” Bill asked.

Sasha met my eyes. “It was my fault. Audrey and I decided to perform an extraction of our own.”

“Jesus!” Bill said.

Sasha shot him a get-out-of-my-face look. “What do you care?”

Bill backpedaled. “Sorry, I just. It sounds a bit impulsive, rash, that’s all.”

Sasha’s eyes swung between Mila and Bill. “Maybe
rash
runs in the family.”

I intervened again. “So what happened?”

“Audrey tracked them to a little hotel with one of those ground-floor restaurants. The traffickers were having dinner downstairs. Putting away a lot of vodka, you know? They’d locked the girls in a second-floor apartment, a private one, over the restaurant. Audrey kept an eye on them and I went up the outside fire escape. I popped a window with a crowbar.

“I expected them to rush to my arms, but they were terrified of me, so I had to climb inside. Finally I got Belma calmed down enough to explain what we were doing, but the little ones refused to go down the fire escape. So I took Belma’s hand, she linked up with the two younger ones, and we headed for the stairs. I just prayed that the gangsters would be too drunk to notice.”

This was where the mission got harebrained. Bill and I met eyes. Madness.

“We were halfway down when Audrey saw us, and freaked out. One of the guys had left the table, and was headed right for us.”

“Jesus,” Bill said again.

“He ran for us. I got in a solid kick and squeezed past with Belma, but he was able to grab the two younger girls. Audrey was all over him, scratching and kicking, but he shoved her off. Then we heard the other guy yelling, so I just threw Belma over my shoulder and took off.”

“Wow,” I said.

“I was worried sick until Audrey called a few minutes later to say she was okay, she’d gotten away. She stayed on in Dubrovnik last night to enter everything, you know, update the information. I came here to meet you. End of story.”

“Quite a story,” I said. “Even for a journalist.”

“You took a lot of risks.” Bill kept his voice mild.

Mila muttered something, a criticism in any language.

“Yeah, well, I’m sick to death of writing about this stuff, pushing words around instead of actually doing something to change the situation.” He glared at Bill and me. “Forget it. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

C
HAPTER
19

Audrey was a surprise. For one thing, she was closer in age to me than to Sasha. Her shoulder-length, light-brown hair was cut for both elegance and easy upkeep. The rest of her was all woman, from the strong planes of her face to the small waist and the rich contours of her hips. Through no fault of her own, she looked a lot like a younger Mila.

Was father-son karma coming around once again? I wondered how it would play out this time.

She and her expensive leather duffel had arrived moments before, and she’d hugged Sasha long and hard. Extricating herself, she took in the rest of us, clustered in the bedroom area. No fear—just curiosity. Sasha put his finger to his lips and pointed to the sleeping Belma. Audrey smiled and nodded. He led her over to us, like a prize.

“Audrey, this is my mother, Mila Radovic.”

Mila’s handshake was perfunctory. “I am pleased to meet you, Audrey.” The flat tone of her voice suggested otherwise.

Audrey ignored the chill. “Sasha has told me so much about you. I look forward to getting to know you better.” Her clipped British accent was BBC proper. That, along with her tailored clothes and Omega Seamaster watch, spelled education and the moneyed class.

“And this is my … this is the man who fathered me, Bill Bohannon, and his friend, Ten Norbu.”

So Sasha wasn’t so uninformed, after all.

Audrey’s clear eyes lingered on each of us. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, shaking our hands.

“Okay, then.” Sasha seemed relieved to get the introductions over with. “Well?” He spread his hands. “What do we do now?”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Audrey said, “but I need a moment to catch up. I mean, a month ago, I didn’t know you even existed. Now? All this? It’s a little surreal. Kind of wonderful, but weird, too.”

She was right; I, too, was starting to feel spacey. Like a character in a time warp.

Mila’s brisk voice broke the spell. “All right. We know situation is unusual. We need fix mess.”

A thought prodded: Was Mila just highly practical? Or was she one of those Fun Cops who blew the whistle when people started feeling too good around her? Time would tell, but I had my suspicions.

A follow-up question muscled its way forward, irritating, but probably accurate: Was I assuming things about Mila to justify my need for Bill to be a good boy and come home?

My eyes strayed to Bill. He was pulling on his upper lip, where his mustache used to be. His jaw was set.

Foolish me. Bill was not going to be a good boy, not for me, not for Martha. He’d gotten hold of something here, like a dog with a bone, and he wasn’t going to let go until he had wrangled some kind of justice out of it.

I wasn’t talking about Mila. I was talking about Belma.

And I knew this, because I felt the same way.

Let go of expectations.

So I did. I let go of knowing what should happen next. Lama Sonam’s calm voice reached out to me, from long ago: “Don’t try to drive the bus from the backseat, Tenzing. Don’t attempt to control what you cannot.” Something released in my belly, that tight vise of obligations to Martha and expectations of Bill. I wasn’t clear just who was driving, but I was very sure it wasn’t me. I took a breath, and freed the bus to go where it needed to.

A scream pierced the room. Belma had bolted upright and was panting, her head twitching from side to side, her sight turned inward, on nightmare images. Audrey moved to her side and hugged her close. She stroked her hair, arms, and back, as if gentling a wild colt. Mila stared intently as Audrey soothed the girl.

Something in Mila softened as well, and I felt moved to put my arm around her shoulders.

Mila reared back, eyes again flashing, before she read my intent: I meant her no harm. She closed her eyes. All was still, except for the sound of Belma’s rough breath, slowly returning to normal. I looked around at this random, and yes, surreal collection of people, a makeshift family united by concern for the girl on the couch. The sad irony was that this gathering would not exist except for one of the cruelest ideas human beings had ever come up with: buying and selling each other for harm and for foul.

Belma had climbed out of the dark place. She said something to Audrey in Bosnian. Audrey’s answer was gentle enough to transform the guttural language into a kind of lullaby. Sasha stood quietly by, a comforting presence.

Audrey translated. “She asked why everybody was staring at her. I told her she was having a nightmare and we were loving her so she wouldn’t feel scared anymore.”

My job is pretty simple: to love and respect my clients until they learn to love and respect themselves.

I found myself on yet another memory spiral back through time, to a novice class at Dorje Yidam on “puzzle sayings,” the Tibetan version of Zen koans. Lama Jamyang would call out a puzzle saying, and we were expected to grapple with the ambiguity in our minds until he called out another one. We’d usually get through a dozen per class. I’d always looked forward to the exercise; it gave me a good mental stretch.

One day our ancient teacher called out a puzzle saying that made us all erupt in laughter: If we’re all here to help others, what are the others here for?

Watching Audrey love Belma out of her nightmare was an unambiguous, living reminder of what we were all here for.

C
HAPTER
20

A vast herd of faceless children. Thick. Boundless. They slog forward, their pace slow and strained, their arms outstretched as if striving to get somewhere that’s perpetually out of reach. They are compelled by yearning, by faint hope mixed with despair. At the back of the herd lag two terrified, vulnerable little boys, the easiest of prey.

I push through to the front. There is light ahead. I will lead them toward it.

A faint call to prayer stirred me to life. Dawn kissed the green-spired minaret outside my hotel window. In minutes, my shoe soles were traversing the rough cobbles of the Stari Grad, with its Ottoman-era sweeps and curves. Seven solid hours of sleep lay behind me. I was determined to spend the next few exploring, before the others woke up, and the next round of hard decision-making began.

Last night had not ended well. We’d all agreed that reuniting Belma with her two sisters was a priority, but deciding how to do so created a fresh round of bickering and jockeying for control, even with one of us no longer interested in taking the wheel.

“One thing I want to make clear,” Sasha had said at one point, glaring at Bill and me, “this is my problem to fix. If I want any help, I’ll ask for it.”

The logistics were nightmarish, the potential for failure huge. Dubrovnik was hours away, and the sisters might have already been shipped off to who knows where.

I’d left the others making lists of pros and cons, and returned to my room. Naturally, Martha called the moment I walked in the door.

“Ten! Finally!”

I wasn’t in the mood.

“Will you excuse me for a moment, Martha?”

I walked down the hotel corridor and knocked on Bill’s door. He opened it, eyebrows raised.

“Can you come out here for a moment?”

“What for?”

“Just do it.”

He stepped outside. I raised the phone to my ear. “Martha, I’ve got Bill here. Time to talk to each other. I’m officially resigning as middleman.”

I handed the phone, and my room key, to Bill. “Bring it back when you’re done. I’m going to bed.”

I must have been dead asleep by the time he was finished talking, because my phone and key were on the coffee table in the morning, and I hadn’t heard a sound.

Vendors were starting to unlock shops and set up their wares. I left the cobbled streets and silent clock towers of Stari Grad and headed east. Soon I was laboring up a narrow road, steep enough to live comfortably in San Francisco, until I reached my goal. A sharply sloped, well-tended lawn bristled with hundreds of pointed memorials. Narrow rectangular pillars carved out of white stone were planted in rows in the emerald grass like spears of grief. All bore the birth and death dates of Muslim boys, some too young to marry or drive a car, but not too young to die in the Bosnian War.