The Buddha of Brewer Street (16 page)

And he and Sam had hugged themselves so tightly he thought he would burst. Happy days. Another world.

Now there was a small but exceedingly painful silence. The words had been used, the thought expressed. Elinor was never coming home.

‘That’s possible,’ he agreed at last, as though pleading guilty in a small voice to the most unspeakable of crimes.

‘No point living in the past, Daddy.’

He took a deep breath. ‘It means we might have to sell the house. I can’t afford the nursing-home fees otherwise. Would you mind?’

‘Would she notice?’

‘Would who notice?’

‘Would Mummy notice if she were in a less expensive home? She seems not to notice anything much nowadays. She wouldn’t mind.’

He clenched his fists in frustration. She was right, of course. So down-to-earth. The sort of girl who without complaint worked through her holidays rather than dreaming idly about skiing or surfing trips with her schoolfriends that her father couldn’t afford. ‘That can come later. Daddy.’ Sam deserved better. But Elinor deserved the best, the very best he could possibly afford. How dare Sam be so bloody practical, particularly at seventeen. Couldn’t she at least show a little hurt? Or share some of his?

‘Mummy might not mind. But I would.’

‘Your choice, Daddy.’

So they had set to work on the wardrobes. His approach was to take out each item, and fold it carefully, tenderly, guiltily. But he was not seventeen. She gave each item a cursory examination then threw it in the Oxfam bag.

She was growing, changing. It was particularly noticeable this weekend. She had come home on
exeat
from her boarding school with her hair in tight braids and many of those braids embroidered with brightly coloured beads.

‘Your hair. It’s …’

‘Egyptian,’ she had offered, filling in the gap.

The effect was magnificent, but it wasn’t Sam.

‘Cleopatra,’ she had explained. ‘It’s this year’s Shakespeare at school. And I’ve got the leading role. And special permission to leave my hair like this for a month – so I can feel the part.’ She giggled as she threw one of Elinor’s favourite coats, a birthday gift from him, into the bag. ‘The other girls are just dying over it.’

The boys, too, he didn’t doubt. And Bryan? He studied her carefully, this young woman, this part-time stranger, the thing he loved most in the world. A year ago she had offered little but problems – introspection, rebellion, premeditated deafness, still suffering from the loss of her brother and mother, and, he had no doubt, from the inevitable absence of her politician father. But through her painting she had succeeded in finding confidence and a form of expression other than outburst or silence. That damned school had been worth every penny he’d been able to scrape together. They’d even given her a small scholarship in recognition of her artistic talent – and also, he suspected, in recognition of his unflagging inability to pay the fees on time. Now, the headmistress had suggested, she might be in line to be head girl next term. Oh, God, if she were still at school next term …

As he looked he couldn’t help but try to search for any little bulge at the abdomen, any tell-tale sign that would signify the end of the scholarship. Of her hopes for university. Of being a teenager. Yet Elizabeth had been adamant in her advice. Let her come to you. Don’t force the issue. Don’t let it all end up in a shouting match that may make you say and Sam do something stupid. But it had been three weeks since he had found the pregnancy advertisement. She must be at least – what, eight weeks pregnant, perhaps more? Time was not on his side. Nor on Sam’s.

Perhaps if he made the first move, shared something deeply personal with her, it would give her the confidence to do the same. What had he got to lose? In any event the subject of Elizabeth was going to have to come up sometime.

He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Can we talk? You know, man to woman?’

Her eyes teased. ‘So you’re growing up at last. What do you want to know, Daddy?’

He licked his dry lips. ‘Mummy isn’t coming home. May never come home. It’s made life very difficult for me …’

‘I know.’ She sat on the duvet beside him, sharing, and held his hand.

‘I’ve been very lonely at times. Particularly now you’re away at school.’

‘You need some new friends.’

‘I’ve found some. Well, one at least.’

‘Who, Daddy? Tell.’

‘You’ve met her before. Elizabeth. The lady at The Kremlin. We’ve become … close.’

‘How close?’

‘Very.’

‘You mean you’re sleeping with her?’ she asked slowly, very earnest.

He thanked the gods she was so direct and practical, so understanding. He nodded. ‘Yes.’

Goodfellowe might understand public finances and the finer details of arms control treaties, but he wasn’t close to understanding women. Certainly not teenagers. Sam shot to her feet.

‘You’re cheating on Mummy? I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Mummy’s in a hospital bed and you’re …’ She couldn’t find the words. She looked around the room despairingly as though she might find the words hiding in the corner, or Elizabeth lurking in the back of the wardrobe. ‘Is that why you want me to clear out Mummy’s clothes? So you can move another woman in? To her bedroom?’

‘No …’

‘That’s why you want to sell the house, isn’t it? To buy a new one for another woman.’ The complete inconsistency between her two accusations seemed not to bother her. But the anger came bubbling through. The veneer of maturity and almost ruthless practicality was stripped away to reveal the frightened teenager that still lay beneath. ‘Are you going to divorce Mummy?’ She seemed on the edge of panic.

‘No, no, no, darling …’

‘I can’t believe you could do such a thing! It’s disgusting!’ she screamed, heedless. She fled from the room in tears.

There was no point in chasing her, not yet at least. He had tried to share, to bring them closer together. Instead he had split them still further apart. He wanted to help her. Instead it would have been kinder if he had hit her over the head with a lump of wood. Then used it on himself.

There were two. And after the discovery of Osel on the mountainside and death of Yeshe in the gutters of the Street of Sorrows, each of them knew they were in great peril.

Gompo was a Tibetan of considerable worldly experience. Born in India, he had served the Dalai Lama in New York and Europe. He drank whisky, preferring a single malt, loved Baskin Robbins (anything but Rocky Road) and was an accomplished guitar player and ten-pin bowler. But above all else he was Tibetan. As a child he had been recognized as the incarnation of Lama Thubten Sonam Norbu, an incarnated teacher of great seniority. Lama Thubten had, until his death at a considerable age in 1953, been one of the young Dalai Lama’s personal tutors and closest confidants. Gompo had followed in similar footsteps.

Gompo was a man of unconventional outlooks and rarely met the expectations of the rest of the world. So, when he grew to appreciate just how much danger he faced in McLeod Ganj, and at a point when most men would have flown as far away from Tibet and the Chinese as their resources would allow, he did precisely the opposite. He travelled to Tibet. Where he would be amongst friends. And the last place on earth the Chinese would think of searching for him.

Yet his homeland could be no more than a brief stopping place. From Lhasa he travelled by bus and lorry to the Chinese city of Lanzhou, amongst the Han themselves, and then by train to Mongolia, where once again he found himself in the company of those he could trust. Fellow Buddhists. More than seven centuries earlier, in the days when the great Mongol warlord Kublai Khan had ruled over China and most of Asia, the Khan had ordained that his empire would follow the Tibetan faith. While the empire had long since been hacked to pieces by a hundred thousand swords, in Mongolia the faith remained. Here Gompo found shelter. And new identity papers. And days later, just across the border near Lake Baykal in Russia, he also found the Trans-Siberian Railway that had borne him many thousands of miles westward, to the Buddhist Temple in St Petersburg.

The temple was an anachronism. It had been built at the time when the authority of the Tsars was falling apart, before the Bolsheviks arrived, a small outpost of Oriental culture in the most Western of Russian cities. Then Stalin had happened. And with him came intolerance. Inquisition. One night his secret police, the NKVD, had burst through the door and dragged all the monks off to their headquarters in Litenyi Prospekt, where they had been tried, convicted, sentenced. That same evening they had been taken down to the soundproof cellars and shot. Not one survived.

The granite temple with its tapering tower and vivid red porch had been confiscated by the state and afterwards used for dismembering animals in the name of experimental vivisection. It had taken almost fifty years and the collapse of Communism before the building, now dilapidated and stripped of all its religious artefacts, had been handed back and the presence of incense and prayer was once again felt within its walls.

The temple was both an accident and a victim of history and still displayed many of its scars, but it served Gompo’s purpose well. Here he could rest while his friends obtained for him the necessary visa to continue his journey to Britain. The temple in St Petersburg was another place the Chinese would never think of finding him.

But somehow they did.

Gompo, although worldly, was yet highly spiritual, and while he waited for his documents and the chance to travel onward he spent much of his time in prayer. Every day he took himself to the prayer room with its dark wooden walls and heavy atmosphere. It held a tall gilded statue of the Prince Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, with lotus stems growing from each hand, but on this image there were no precious stones and few inlays. This was a temple that lived on optimism rather than ostentation. Alongside Shakyamuni they had placed an effigy of Je Tsong-khapa, which literally translated meant Lord of Onion Land, the founder of the Gelug school. Then, in another corner, there stood representations of what was called the Tibetan Trinity, the great Buddhas of Wisdom, of Compassion and of Enlightened Energy. Tibetans love their images and before each of these in turn Gompo would prostrate himself. The floor was wooden and polished smooth by the knees and mittened hands of those who had been there before him, prostrating themselves full length while they paid their respects to the Buddhas.

It was a Monday morning, early, while the mists still clung to the rivers of the great city, that Gompo began his devotions. Focusing. Cleansing his thoughts. He fell to his knees, then extended his hands on the floor in front of him until his body lay at full stretch. In the words of his ritual text, he took refuge in the Buddha. And, slowly, he withdrew his body and pulled himself back to his feet. Then he started all over again.

Three times he repeated the series of devotions before each image while the monks engaged in their hypnotic chants and beat rhythmically on their drums and cymbals. It was tiring. As he prayed, Gompo would stay stretched out on the floor, prostrated, while he gathered his thoughts and spiritual strength. So no one thought it unusual when he did not move for a moment, indeed several moments. By the time other worshippers had begun to grow curious at his stillness, the two young men in the gallery had already disappeared. Even before the monks had discovered Gompo was dead, the two were weaving their motorbike through the heavy traffic of Primorsky Prospekt. And by the time the police surgeon discovered the tiny biochemical pellet embedded in Gompo’s neck, the two were a thousand miles away on the other side of the Urals, getting drunk on imported whisky with four under-aged and youthfully inventive hookers.

Gompo had evaded his pursuers’ attentions for too long. He would not be given the chance to evade them again.

My enemy’s enemy is my friend. The Chinese had never cared for their Russian neighbours. Even when both had been Communist, they had grown to be bitter rivals. Race before religion. And when the Russians had finally discarded Marxism, they had in effect stripped away Beijing’s last remaining ideological fig leaf, leaving them cruelly exposed. So the Chinese gained more than a little satisfaction when the new Russia began to be comprehensively gutted by the robber barons of organized crime. And when they wanted a favour, some small act of brutality performed on Russian soil, informally and in an untraceable manner, the Chinese never had much trouble in finding willing hands to assist. Often those hands had been trained by the KGB or now-decrepit Soviet military. Feed off the enemy, as Sun Tzu would say. Money rarely changed hands, it was usually explosives or weapons or occasionally opium and, in one case, irradiated cobalt dust with which disgruntled and unpaid officers of the Murmansk Fleet planned an attack on their old headquarters. By comparison, the assassination of a man in St Petersburg had been little more than a training run.

And then there was but one …

Goodfellowe had done with democracy for the day. He’d voted at ten p.m. on a matter of great public sensitivity – at least, that’s what the Whips had told him, which is why they had commanded his presence in the Division Lobby, although the details of the measure almost totally eluded him. Something to do with drains? That was it! Measures to renew the crumbling Victorian sewer system beneath London while finding various exotic ways of getting others to pay for it. And about time. In Disraeli’s day they’d had to hang perfumed curtains over the windows to block out the foul smell of the river. All the fault of the infamous Thomas Crapper and his devilish invention, the flushing toilet. When such systems had been installed in the households of the rich, who lived in the hills overlooking London, they had washed all the effluent down towards the river. The result was that the working classes huddled along its banks were repeatedly ravaged by lethal outbreaks of typhoid and militant socialism. Whole communities were wiped out as a result. Thomas Crapper had a lot to answer for.

Goodfellowe had given his name to the Clerk who marked it on the voting list and he had re-emerged into the Chamber, which was beginning to empty rapidly as the day’s business was all but dispensed. At the door he found Baader.