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

After meditating for close to an hour, I executed a double set of yoga asana postures, ate a toasted corn muffin with a generous smear of almond butter, and downed two mugs of French-roasted Sumatra. Propelled by caffeine, I ploughed through a mountain of domestic chores, scouring kitchen counters, wet- and dry-mopping my hardwood floor, dusting my bookshelves. Anything to distract me from fretting about Bill and Martha.

Why hadn’t he called?

I was starting to seriously contemplate washing my windows when exhaustion walloped me like a fist to the head.

The advantage to starting your day before dawn? Things get accomplished.

The disadvantage? By 10
A.M.
you’re cooked.

I was three steps from bed when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out.

I stared at the familiar number, as innocent as a grenade.

Maybe he and Martha have kissed and made up. Maybe it was all a bad dream.

I answered.

“Hey, Bill. How’s it going?”

He groaned. “I’m up to my eyeballs in a shitstorm of my own making, thanks, but I don’t want to talk about that right now. I need to come over.”

“Of course. You want to come now?”

“Yeah. Actually, I might need to bunk at your house for a day or two.”

My insides went still. So much for them making up.

“Martha says she ‘needs some space.’” Bill’s voice took on an edge I couldn’t at first identify. “Translation? ‘Park your sorry ass someplace else tonight.’”

Defiant. He sounded defiant.

“Okay, sure. You’re welcome to stay for as long as you need. You know that.”

“Thanks. I could probably use a nap before I go in to the office. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

You and me both.

I made a fresh pot of coffee and took a steaming mug onto the deck to wait. Tank was below, stalking a small lizard lying in a patch of sunlight near the scrub oak. Tank pounced, but the lizard darted away and he came up empty-pawed. Unfazed, my cat claimed the square of sunlight for himself, settling on his right side. He looked like a trussed calf, his outstretched legs meeting at the ankles. His green eyes gleamed with pleasure as he soaked in the warmth. Maybe that was the plan all along.

A crunch of tires on gravel signaled Bill’s arrival. He must have been close by when he called. I met him at the kitchen door. He looked haggard, with the bloodshot eyes and slumped shoulders of a beaten man. But his mouth was staked with stubborn lines, as if rebellion was poised to push through the exhaustion.

“Don’t bother telling me I look like shit,” he said. “I already know.”

I pointed toward the carafe on the counter. “It’s fresh.”

In ten years of friendship, I’d never seen Bill turn down coffee, but he shook his head and sat across from me with a grunt. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, also a first.

I probed the gap between us carefully.

“You in the mood for some conversation,” I said, “or do you want to get some rest first?”

“Fuck if I know what I want,” he said. “Ah, the hell with it.” He got up and poured himself a cup of coffee, and my universe righted itself. “Might as well get this over with.” He sat and squared his shoulders. “Fire away, detective.”

My brain was a whirlpool of confusion and doubt. I started with the first question to escape to the surface. “How long have you known about Sasha?”

His answer was prompt. “Twenty-two days”—he checked his watch to do the math—“minus three hours. I found out I had another kid exactly three weeks ago yesterday. I’d just gotten back from lunch. My phone rang, and it was Mila, out of the fucking blue. She was worried, she said. Her son, she said,
our
son Sasha was getting threats.” He shook his head, remembering.

“You must have been … stunned.”

“I almost blacked out. I’ll never forget that call, not as long as I live. I was sitting at my desk, thinking I had one kind of life, and suddenly the phone rings and I’m in a parallel universe.”

“But you hadn’t actually seen Mila before she showed up yesterday? Recently, I mean?”

“Seen. Talked to. Nothing. Not since I left Bosnia.”

“Bill, I have to ask. Are you sure Sasha is yours? Could Mila be lying to you?”

“I wondered the same thing,” he said, “but she sent me a picture. He looks just like me. And he was conceived exactly when we were together.” He spread his hands. “Look, I’m not trying to justify what I did, but … but, I was lonely as hell, scared out of my wits, smack in the middle of a war zone, and she was—well, you’ve seen her, so you know what she’s like, how she is. And Martha and I, we weren’t even married yet, barely engaged, not that that’s an excuse, but … Ten, I’d never felt anything like that in my life. I was sucker-punched. It was crazy, like being hijacked by a tornado.”

Coup de foudre,
I thought. The thunderbolt of love.

“Then she dumped me, and it was over, just as quick.” Bill stared into his mug, as if it held secrets of its own. “I’d be lying if I said I never thought about her again. I’ve thought about her a lot. She was the road not taken, the me I never became.”

The twist of grief in my chest caught me by surprise.

Julie.

The last time I’d seen her, she was driving away from my home here in Topanga, from a relationship with me, because I couldn’t give her what she wanted: intimacy, honesty, trust.

Exactly what I now wanted from a relationship.

The road not taken.

“But you didn’t stay in touch with Mila?”

His exhale was heavy with regret. “I tried. Back then, I mean. More than once. Like she says, I’m stubborn. But she never responded. Anyway, then I came home to Martha and tried to make myself forget it ever happened. The breakup was bad, you know?”

“How bad?”

“Really bad.” Bill closed his eyes for a moment, remembering. “I was pretty much responsible for the torture and death of Mila’s brother.”

“Oof.”

“I mean, I didn’t know it was her brother, obviously.”

I just nodded.

“I was stationed at a checkpoint between zones. We’d stopped these seven guys, Bosnian Muslims, just inside the border of the Serb Republic. Routine, but it turned out they were heavily armed and had illegally crossed the zone of separation, so we did what we’d been told to do—disarmed them and transferred them to the Serb police.”

Bill finished off his coffee. I refilled his mug.

“Thanks. Yeah, so, they were escorted into the local station, but the bastards transferred them the next day to another station thirty miles south, you know, away from prying eyes. After that, nothing, until a report came back that all seven had died. Of natural causes, the Serbs said.”

“Natural causes?”

“I guess they considered hours of severe torture
natural
. The International Red Cross screamed foul, of course, but according to the Serbs, these men were stone zealots, the kind that these days fly airplanes into buildings. The Serbs insisted the Muslims had murdered a bunch of unarmed Bosnian Christians a few days earlier. Good riddance, right?”

I said nothing.

“Except one of the Muslims was Mila’s brother. Fucking terrible luck, you know? And according to Mila, her brother said the Bosnian Christians were actually Croatians, armed and aggressive, and it was self-defense. It was all one big holy mess by then, so who knows? Meanwhile, Mila’s father—he was some sort of Muslim intellectual—had disappeared, though at the time Mila was sure he’d been sent to one of the prison camps.”

I thought his words over.

“Mila doesn’t strike me as an extremist type.”

“She isn’t. Wasn’t. Her brothers were a different story, though.”

“Brothers? She’s got more of them?”

Bill nodded. “Two more, I think, though who knows if they’re even alive? Then there’s Mila’s mother. You saw her, she’s another piece of work. Always marched to her own drum. Irena’s first husband, along with all his family, was Croatian, a whole other kind of Christian.”

“Mila’s still a Muslim?”

“I think so. She’s always been more about peace and tolerance than anything else, or at least she was when I knew her. Bosnian Muslims in general were moderate—no burkas and veils, at least not back then. She was halfway through medical school when the Serbs got seduced by that madman and fucked everything up.”

“Medical school?”

“Yeah. She was way more into healing than harming. She hated war, any war, but especially that one. She was vocal about it, too. That made her unpopular with all three sides of the conflict, and both branches of her family.”

Do you run from bullies? Or do you face them, try to help?

He said, “The tragedy is, for centuries that whole area, Bosnia in particular, was the poster child for religious tolerance. Catholic Croats, Muslims, Orthodox Serbs—all of them married each other, practiced their own beliefs, accepted each other’s differences, you name it. Then Milošević made his power grab, and before you could blink you had mass slaughter, neighbors killing neighbors, brothers and sisters turning on each other. Politics and religion, run amuck. Mila’s family wasn’t the exception, it was the rule. After six months I fled, beyond grateful for the separation of church and state here in the good old U.S. of A.”

“I can relate,” I said. “Don’t forget, I grew up in an exiled Tibetan community surrounded by hostile Hindus.”

In truth, I didn’t even have to leave the walls of Dorje Yidam to experience the cutthroat side of belief. At my monastery, even senior lamas wrangled constantly over the pettiest of issues. Everything had the capacity to devolve into a power play. Who gets to choose the topic for our nightly dharma talk? Who gets to lead the procession when His Holiness comes for a visit? Who collects the most
dana
at the Saga Dawa festival? Egos battled for power and prestige on a daily basis, on and off the meditation cushions. And this, in a community dedicated to the practice of loving-kindness.

I’ve since learned that it’s the same in the Pentagon, the Vatican, the politburo, and every other organization created and run by the most aggressive members of the species. The bullies, in other words. I’ve often wondered if the world would work better if women ran it instead.

“Ten,” Bill said, “Mila and I … we need your help. But I’ve got to ask. How does all this affect you and me?”

Uh-oh. So now he and Mila were a “we.” I wondered if Martha knew.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I mean I can’t really fault you for having an affair with Mila back then. There was a war going on, you were away from home, you did what you did. I get that.”

“Yeah, well, there’s plenty to find fault with, believe me. I could have—”

“Bill, stop,” I said. “How many times have you told me that you can’t go back and change the past?”

His voice was low. “Part of me still can’t believe I slept with her. I broke every rule.”

“I hear you,” I said. “Got a few of those in my own past, as you know. But what I don’t get is why you didn’t tell Martha, right away, I mean. You let this affair fester in the back of your head for close to twenty years, man!” I felt myself getting a little heated in the face.

“You’ve never been married,” he said. “You don’t understand how it works. And who said anything about festering? It was over!”

“I may not be married, but I know what happens if you keep secrets like that caged up inside you. Believe me, they always come back to bite you, one way or another. I’ve got the scars to prove it.”

“I didn’t want to destroy the trust we had between us. Is that a crime?”

My mouth twisted. I exhaled, puffing my lips to loosen the irritation. “You ran a con on yourself, partner,” I said. “I mean, sure, you damaged that trust when you had the affair with Mila. But you totally trashed it by not telling Martha when you got home. And then you married Martha, gave her your trust, knowing you weren’t worth trusting.”

“What I
knew
was the affair would hurt her. I didn’t want her to feel bad.”

“Sorry. More bullshit. You didn’t want
you
to feel bad. You didn’t want
you
to have to deal with her reaction.”

He squirmed but he didn’t disagree. “Whatever. The guy who had that affair’s a stranger to me now. That guy? He figured if he just pretended the whole thing didn’t happen, it would go away. And you know what? For a while, it did.”

“Yeah, well, how’s that working for you now?”

His eyes narrowed. “What the hell’s going on with you, Ten? I feel bad I hurt my wife, okay? I fucked up. What else do you want from me?”

My belly muscles clenched tight in defense. What else
did
I want? I tried to parse the sour mixture in my gut: resentment, helplessness, hurt. And then I realized.
Valerie. Ma mère.
Once again, I was displacing hurt and aiming anger at an innocent party for wounds caused by one of my parents. My mother’s constant affairs—her denial, withholding, and secrecy—took a huge toll on my childhood.

What childhood? You never even got to have one. Never got to feel safe because of her carelessness.

And now my best friend was doing the same thing to Martha, not to mention Maude and Lola.

Bill studied my face, waiting for me to say something.

“Okay, well, this might be bringing up some old stuff,” I said.

He waited.

“I’m still mad at my mother for some things, okay? And I’m taking it out on you. All she did with her life was have affairs and lie about them.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’m up to my ass in affairs.”

“I’m not saying you are.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

What
was
the problem? I could feel something else, something hard and hot burning in my gut, but as soon as I got close, it darted away, like Tank’s lizard.

I felt into the space.
Allow.
The release of energy was telling. Hurt and anger bubbled up.

What an asshole.

“How could you keep this from me?” I said, my voice tight and high. “We’re partners! How many times have I confided in you about my love life, all my mistakes, my messes? You know everything about me, and, and now suddenly here’s this big
thing
you never even told me about. What else are you hiding?”