The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) (24 page)

With heavy-lidded eyes, I watched the magnificent, monument-studded settlement recede behind us. Dubrovnik was spectacular, but I wondered if the tourists understood that deep within its turquoise-bayed beauty a different tale was told; even the clearest-looking water can hide a flourishing infestation of bacteria.

When I opened my eyes four hours later, I thought I was having a recurring nightmare. We were back outside the ugliest facade in Sarajevo.

“Really, Petar?”

“I wait here,” he said. “Your old partner not so happy to meet me, I think.”

Bill was sitting at a table in the circus-tent bar, my roller-bag at his feet. He didn’t look that thrilled to see me, but I chalked it up to jealousy. Only one of us had gotten to play the hero in front of Bill’s son.

“You’re staying here again?”

He grunted.

I looked around. “Where are the others?”

“I called that number you gave me. That friend of yours, Stephanie? Nice lady. She connected me with some collective here that runs a shelter for victims like Belma. The shelter agreed to accept all three girls. Audrey’s taking them there now.”

I allowed the relief to sink in. A waitress set two cold beers in front of us, and for a moment it felt like old times.

“What about the others?”

“No idea. I’m out of the Sasha loop at the moment. But I’m meeting Mila later.”

“And Martha?” I hadn’t talked to Bill alone since I’d handed him my phone with his wife on the other end.

He set his half-empty bottle down. “No comment.”

“I take it you’re not flying home with me.”

“No. Not yet.”

“So what do I tell the girls?”

“Ten …” Bill shook his head. “Tell them I’ll be home soon, okay?”

His voice still had the faintest trace of stubbornness, but I knew he was feeling remorse.

Bill glanced at me before looking away. “Thanks for coming, Ten. Thanks for helping. Thanks for keeping Sasha safe. And thank Petar for me, too.” I knew how much these words cost him.

“I’d better get going,” I said, standing. There was only one Lufthansa flight out of Sarajevo daily, and it wouldn’t wait for an ex-monk or an ex-cop. I pulled Bill into an approximation of a hug.

“Be safe,” I said. “Be well.”

As Petar drove me to the airport, a chant from my past rose up from some forgotten corner inside. I called upon the Goddess Tara to watch over Belma and her two sisters, to protect them from fear, injury, and suffering.
Om tare tuttare ture svaha.
“To you, O Tara, embodiment of all the enlightened ones’ actions, I bow—in happy or unhappy times—with body, speech, and mind.” I invited into my heart Tara’s immense compassion, and offered the humble hope that these young girls soon experience inner safety, inner peace. I wanted to send them every gift I could before they left my world forever and entered into their new one.

I gave Petar a couple of my business cards and a very big tip.

“You find me job in Hollywood, Monkevic! I come for sure!”

I slept through the first flight and most of the second Munich-to-New York leg. No pills necessary. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, I jerked awake. I had been dreaming about Tara, the many-armed goddess. She sat upon a throne, one leg bent at the knee, the other straight. Her hair was jet-black, and her skin color cycled through many hues: white, green, bloodred, and finally an angry mustard yellow. Her waving limbs reached for me like a sea creature, first with love, but then with a kind of avid hunger.

Why am I thinking about Tara again?

Now a small feral cat, black with yellow-green eyes, darted across my memory field. I’d named her Lhamo, after a goddess as fierce as Tara was kind. I had rescued Lhamo during one especially long stay at Dorje Yidam. Or maybe the cat had rescued me. I was 12, and suffering the early banishment after my ill-fated visit to the Louvre with Didier.

I tried not to think about that fateful time in the monastery, when a stray cat felt like my only friend. That brief glimpse into the dark mysteries of tantric practices. The shock of my body’s first urges.

I especially tried not to think about the brilliant Lama Nawang, who took me under his wing—Yeshe would say bullied me—and who might or might not be my half-brother. Like a fiery comet, Nawang had scorched a brief trail across my life, introducing me to esoteric and forbidden spiritual practices, inviting me to break every rule, deny every vow I’d taken. He’d disappeared from the monastery, and my life, as suddenly as he’d entered it, leaving me to shoulder all the consequences.

I’d never dared ask my father if Lama Nawang was telling the truth about our connection, not even on Appa’s deathbed. I didn’t want to know.

So why, Tenzing? Why Tara? Why Nawang?

Why now?

Miles aloft, in the rarified atmosphere above the earth’s surface, I let go of conceptual ideas. My mind loosened its hold on analysis, on expectation. The space filled with nothingness.

I let go of nothing.

Agvan. Agvan Dorzhiev.

Thought returned, and with it, the solution to one small mystery, why I thought I knew the name Agvan, of Agvan Supply. We’d studied the life of Agvan Dorzhiev in our History of Buddhism class, that same terrible year, 1993. The year of Lama Nawang. Of my mother’s death. Of an atrocity called the Bosnian War. The year Sasha was conceived.

The year I discovered the world of Sherlock Holmes and vowed to change my life.

I scoured my memory and dredged up what I could about Dorzhiev.

He was a Mongol, I remembered that, born in the 1800s. He grew very close to the 13th Dalai Lama, the one before His Holiness, close enough to bathe him, to serve as his debating partner and spiritual advisor. From what I could recall, Agvan had trained as a monk in Tibet and was initiated into the powerful, ancient art of Tantric Buddhism. But mainly he was interesting because of his connection to Russia.

More started coming back to me about this strange man. He would shuttle back and forth between the Russian courts and the monasteries of Tibet, trying to ally the two, exposing Russian royalty to Buddhist teachings, and the Buddhists to Russian ways. At one point, he even believed the White Tsar might be a reincarnation of White Tara, though later he dropped that idea.

We studied his life as a cautionary tale, a reminder to keep spiritual matters separate from political maneuvering, at least where our most sacred, confidential practices were concerned.

Agvan Dorzhiev. Agvan Supply. The pieces didn’t fit together, no matter how I turned them.

It had to be a coincidence.

But I spent the rest of that flight, and all of the next, clouded by unease as I shifted and moved the events of the past week around—Agvan Supply, with its mysterious deliveries; Sasha Radovic, and his sudden shift from journalist to activist; the reappearance of Mila into Bill’s life; and her strange mother Irena’s first husband, Jovan Stasic. Yugoslavian industrialist, descendant of a stealer of sheep.

I couldn’t make sense of any of it, and so I dozed, restless and dreamless, until I landed in Los Angeles, after crossing ten time zones in three different airplanes, and spending 18 and a half hours disobeying gravity. I’d made two of these insane four-day time-defying trips over the past three years. The wreckage to the body was immense.

It was almost midnight, and I was longing for a home-cooked meal and the dense, furry welcome of a certain Persian Blue.

I called Martha from inside the airport shuttle to long-term parking. The gods spared me: I got her voice mail.

“Sorry it’s so late, Martha. I just got back. Call me in the morning, and I’ll fill you in as best I can.”

It was after one when the Dodge and I crunched up the gravel road to my house. The lights were blazing inside and out. Kim waited in the kitchen, packed and ready to go home.

“Thank you,” I began, when a mass of silver-blue fur shot across the living-room floor. I scooped Tank into my arms.

“I missed you, Tank,” I said.

“I am worried,” Kim said. “Tank did not eat his dinner.”

Tank struggled from my arms and stalked a few feet away. Now that he knew I was okay, he needed to regain his position of superiority.

“He looks fine,” I said. In fact, Tank’s belly was even bulging a bit, and swung lower to the ground than usual. I paid Kim with a check, and watched her drive away, grateful beyond words for her help, but still with that deep sense of relief. I’d been with too many people, for too many days in a row.

I rolled my bag into the bedroom. I would deal with its well-traveled contents later. I stepped into my bathroom to rinse my face.

“Whoa. Tank, buddy!”

At first, I thought he’d left me a passive-aggressive message, directly from his bowels. Then I registered the details, and realized that the parts added up to a suspiciously ratlike whole.

Tank slalomed between my ankles, purring and proud. No wonder he looked fat. He’d eaten the better part of a rodent sometime today before depositing the discards on my bathroom floor as a welcome-home present.

What could I do? Tank was a predator, prone, like all of us, to primitive impulse. He was just doing his job.

By the time I’d cleaned up his mess, I’d lost my appetite, but I forced down an omelet and toast. It was two in the morning, and I was wide-awake.

I moved to my computer, with the conscious plan to clean up my e-mails, but my conscious mind wasn’t in charge. The home page of Agvan Supply’s website had changed yet again. My breath caught: two photographs dominated the page. The first photo captured an idyllic meadow of sheep. The second was a close-up of a long wooden table, piled high with rough sacks of some kind of animal hide that were stuffed with a white, curd-like cheese. Wooden scoops, each a different color, jutted out of the sacks—green, red, yellow, like the Taras in my dream. A message bannered over both photos:
BOSNIAN SHEEP CHEESE. JUST ARRIVED
!

Time to go shopping. This time I knew enough to bring along my weapons, as well as my best binoculars—Barska Gladiator zooms I’d purchased new a few years back.

My little Dodge, thinking it was done for the day, coughed a couple of times in protest before reluctantly ferrying me back to the warehouse in Van Nuys. I parked a block away, out of immediate sight.

I trained the magnifying lenses on the office area, noting the same BMW sedan, along with two other cars of unremarkable make and model. I zoomed in on the front door and prepared to wait.

Just after 4
A.M.
, my patience paid off.

A pair of identical, unmarked, white delivery vans, these clean and almost brand new, pulled into Agvan Supply. The drivers backed the vans to the metal roll-up door and climbed out. The first driver was tall and bulky, and wore a black leather cap pulled low. The second was wiry and short, and could have been the long-lost brother of the Sarajevo train station spy. He even had the same greasy ponytail hanging down his back.

He banged on the metal door. Moments later it clattered open.

The man I assumed was Zarko Stasic ambled out. He clapped Ponytail on the back. Then both drivers opened the back doors of their vans and followed Zarko inside.

I stayed put.

The two drivers reappeared. They stationed themselves next to the opened van doors. A line of people filed out of the warehouse. The drivers helped them inside the vans. I counted twelve into one, ten into the other.

White. Male. No children, and no women. One old man wore a black beret and bore a striking physical resemblance to the old men playing chess in the Sarajevo marketplace.

I knew what I was seeing—a fresh supply of Bosnian sheep cheese being loaded up for market.

The drivers slammed shut the rear doors of the vans. Zarko again stepped outside, accompanied this time by a second man, also familiar. He could have been Zarko’s slighter twin, but for the oddly bent arm. I was certain I was looking at Stojan Stasic, Zarko’s younger brother. Like Zarko, Stojan kept watch, fingers nervously twitching and strumming, as the vans pulled onto the street and headed in my direction. I wasn’t worried about the drivers—I was worried their bosses might spot me if I followed.

Go back in. Go on.

They did.

The streets were mostly empty, and I kept several blocks between us as I followed the vans onto the 101 North. We were heading in the direction of Ventura.

The traffic was sparse, mostly comprised of truckers driving the late shift in their 18-wheelers. The huge trucks provided a nice draft for me to ride and gave me plenty of cover. I was able to keep both vans in sight without hugging their tails.

They exited onto the 23, known as the Moorpark Freeway, and headed east toward Simi Valley. Three lanes in both directions, but no more trucks to hide behind. I fell back several car lengths.

Where were these guys headed?

After a long stretch, the road shrank, turning into what my GPS called Los Angeles Avenue. Up ahead lay State Route 118 to Simi Valley.

But for now, we were down to two lanes, one coming, one going. We passed through a few orange groves. I stayed well back, which gave me enough time to plot my next move when the vans suddenly braked sharply and exited onto a gravel road. They appeared to be headed for some farmland, maybe a mile away.

Following them onto that open gravel drive was not an option. I continued to the nearest turnaround, waited until both lanes were clear, and executed the turn, a move my Neon was made for. Back I drove, found another turnoff, and U-turned again. By the time I was on the gravel drive, the vans were long gone, but I knew they must be up there somewhere. I watched my speed. I didn’t want to run up behind them unexpectedly.

About a mile in, the road split. To my left, a dirt lane climbed steeply upward to a copse of trees. The gravel road continued right, a flatter route. I opted left, for higher elevation and more cover. I bumped my way to the trees and pulled off to park. I opened the glove compartment. What to carry, besides the binoculars? I’d brought along both weapons. I opted for the Airlite reluctantly. My plan was to continue uphill by foot, take a sighting, and return to the car once I’d hopefully located the vans.