The Buddha of Brewer Street (32 page)

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘We must ask the old folk.’

‘It must be done quickly.’

‘Tonight.’

‘Could it be that simple?’

‘The truth is often a straight line.’

‘But where? Where could the child be?’

As they inspected their new hopes, Kunga had prostrated himself before the gilded statue of Shakyamuni, where he remained for many moments, his arms outstretched, withered hands pointing towards the Buddha figure. When eventually and with some difficulty he rose, he stared fiercely, almost wildly, at Goodfellowe. ‘I believe you are correct. This is the answer. This is why you were sent to us.’ He was rubbing his scarred palm. It had begun to burn again, not the whole scar, simply the small part of it that seemed to indicate the position of the capital city, London. ‘He is very close. We must hurry.’

And they did, with new fire in their bellies, enthusiasm on their lips, departing quickly into the night to make contact with their community. Even Phuntsog had spirit in his face.

It was as Kunga was leaving that he turned to Goodfellowe and took hold of him. Goodfellowe felt an astonishing heat-filled, almost burning, sensation coming from the old monk’s broken hands.

‘The Chinese searchers have been distracted, but they are still looking,’ Goodfellowe warned. ‘The child has a Chinese face. He is still their target. We may not have much time left.’

‘I know. But thanks to you we can at least join in their game. Numbers don’t always decide. We may yet win.’

Goodfellowe said nothing. In spite of everything, he didn’t believe the monk, couldn’t share the optimism he himself had generated in the others. He wasn’t an optimist. It was simply that he was congenitally stubborn. Elizabeth was right, he liked a fight. He turned to go but still the monk clung to his hand.

‘I have one more thing to ask of you, Tummo.’

‘Ask away.’

‘How can it be that you know what moonlight is like in the Tibetan mountains?’

And, for the first time that evening, Goodfellowe had no answer.

‘Chaos! All is chaos! And it is your fault, Mo.’

‘There are rumours everywhere. Ambassador. They are not my fault.’

‘Yet it is your neck. Mo. Never forget that. We fail and we are dead, both of us. But you first.’

‘What am I to do? What can I do?’

‘Forget Jiang. Tell everyone, tell them all yourself.’

‘Tell them what?’

‘That the reward has doubled. And if it is the right child there will be no questions asked about where he came from. Or what condition he’s in.’

‘Dead or alive?’

‘Mo, why do you think it matters? What do you think will happen to him when they get him back to Beijing?’

‘I had preferred not to think.’

‘So start to think, Mo. About the child. About a football stadium and a bullet in the back of the neck. Think about it hard. Then double the reward, triple it if necessary. Just find that child!’

A sudden splinter of fear passed through the mother. She had lost him. As soon as they had reached the park he had begun to run, as he always did, as though he had too much to see and not enough time to fit everything into one life. She had lost sight of him. And now he was gone. She cast around in anxiety then she, too, began to run, short distances, first one way then another. Surely he couldn’t have gone far? Unless something had happened. Every mother’s unspoken nightmare …

She was on the point of crying for help when she heard a familiar gurgle of pleasure. She spun round and found him less than five feet away, sitting, almost obscured by a thick bush of lavatera that was alive with butterflies. His hands were raised in front of his face and on each sat a butterfly with blood red wings shot through with streaks of buttercup yellow.

‘Gelug, gelug,’ he warbled in delight.

And he was right. They were the colours of the Gelugpa, like monks meditating on the mountain top, their robes being blown by the gentle wind. It was one of her earliest childhood memories, before the great storm of exile. Yet somehow, in a manner she didn’t fully understand, this two-year-old who had never lived anywhere other than above a dry-cleaners in the heart of Soho seemed to share it.

So it came to pass. They unearthed faded memories of her. A young girl who had arrived in this country in the early years, a Pestalozzi child who had been brought up and educated at that great school for orphans in Surrey.

She had been made an orphan on the march across the mountains. They had encountered the most terrible storm. Her mother had simply frozen, her face a mask of ice that eventually sealed her eyes and blocked the airways, her tears sparkling like jewels of ice in the moonlight. And when it became clear that the food would run out long before they reached safety, that they were all going to starve to death, her father had sat in the snow and refused to move, insisting that it was enough that he should die facing freedom and that his share be given to the child. So she had survived, with two others out of the ten that had set out, and her last view of her father was as a stone Buddha sitting in the distant snow.

There was no lingering bitterness. Such things happened in the mountains. In her new country she had grown and flourished and when as an eighteen-year-old she had fallen in love, it did not matter to her that he was Chinese. Yet it had mattered to some of the elderly members of her community, and to many in his own, so the lovers had followed their own path, honouring their different ancestries but submitting to neither. And when she had failed to become pregnant and the old wives had muttered about punishment and bad
joss
they had moved away, deliberately distancing themselves from the competing cultures that for others could never be fully reconciled.

But she had left a fragment that had stuck in someone’s memory. One word. Her married name. Wong.

‘It’s enough!’ cried Goodfellowe in exaltation when they heard.

‘There must be thousands of Wongs,’ Phuntsog pronounced with characteristic caution.

‘But if she was married and she had a child two years ago, one name is enough!’

His enthusiasm had taken him on the charge to the Family Records Centre in the City. Here were gathered census returns, wills, electoral registers – and a record of every birth, marriage and death dating back to 1837. The anatomy of the nation. Along the shelves in this place could be found every sinew and fibre of the populace – and many of its sins and sorrows. Here you might search forever for your grandparents’ marriage certificate, and never find it – not because it was lost, but because it had never existed. And the many fathers who clearly existed but who were not recorded, either because they were not known or no longer required on life’s long voyage. Every entry told a tale. It was all here, a comprehensive catalogue of life’s miracles and muck-ups.

Which is why, when Goodfellowe arrived with perspiration on his brow and renewed hope in his heart, he discovered it had been taken over by Americans. The package tours were in town and every second inhabitant of the state of New York seemed to have forgathered with the ambition of climbing their family tree. The place was packed, patience on short ration and the air-conditioning all but overwhelmed. It was a battle, standing shoulder to shoulder with the crowd, fighting for every inch of desk space. All around came the clatter of heavy registers being pushed and pulled across metal shelves like horses being hauled through trench mud. But at least Goodfellowe didn’t have to fight across a broad front. His target was specific. Wong. A boy. Last two or three years.

His heart sank. As he joined the fray and examined the first volume he discovered there were, if not Phuntsog’s thousands, then many hundreds. Wongs were everywhere. It surely had to be the most common name in the country, he thought, gazing down the endless lists. And a heavy proportion of them in London. Which one? A needle in a noodle factory. Yet there was help, the maiden names of the mothers were also listed. The Chous, the Hos, the Lams, the Lees, the Yips and the Yaus. He found another name, too, and felt the nape of his neck begin to bristle in exhilaration …

With a mounting sense of urgency he checked the rest of the quarterly registers, he couldn’t afford to miss any possibility. But there was only one. Maternal maiden name of Rinchen. Unmistakably Tibetan. Registered in the district of Westminster.

Oh, but where in Westminster? The register didn’t say and there would be a listing of Wongs a foot long in the phone book. He was still no closer. He needed a copy of the full birth certificate with its ‘usual address’ entry. And he couldn’t afford to wait days while it was coughed up by the system.

The line in front of the enquiry desk appeared endless. Earnest Americans sought help in establishing their ancestral link to Richard the Lionheart or John Lennon, it didn’t seem to matter which. And they all wanted the answer in the next five minutes, because the bus was leaving for the airport in twenty … This was not a time suited to diplomacy. Heedless of the damage he might inflict on transatlantic relations Goodfellowe thrust himself to the front of the queue and pulled shameless rank.

‘Help me. Please,’ he asked, ignoring the shouts of protest that came from all around. ‘I’m a Member of Parliament.’

‘Dammit, all the more reason for you to wait,’ came a voice from within the queue, a sentiment which drew immediate and general approval. The enquiry clerk, a large lady with a floral frock and sensitive disposition who had taken the job solely to protect her nervous well-being, let forth a plaintive cry for assistance. From within the small Supervisor’s office to the rear emerged a middle-aged woman who brought with her no-nonsense eyes and lips of bitter lemons. Goodfellowe explained his purpose.

‘You’re a Member of Parliament?’ the Supervisor sniffed, viewing her uninvited guest sceptically. It seemed improbable. He was perspiring and wild-eyed, and looked as if he’d just come from riding a bike.

‘Not for much longer if he goes on pushing his weight around like this,’ the voice in the queue opined.

‘Please, this is a matter of life and death,’ Goodfellowe implored.

‘So’s mine,’ the voice added, waving a certificate.

Goodfellowe produced his House of Commons ID card, which got him away from the firing line and admitted into the glass-walled cubicle that passed as the Supervisor’s office, but it took a phone call to the Palace of Westminster switchboard before she was convinced. It was with evident reluctance that she agreed to foreshorten the procedures, her distaste for disorder overcome by the fact that the departmental budgets were due for review again, downwards, and as improbable as he looked this man might have some sway.

‘How quickly do you require the certificate?’ she asked.

‘How quick is quickest?’ he replied.

‘Well, I’d have to send a fax. Off to our archives. In Southport. On Merseyside,’ she added, making it sound like the back side of the Moon. ‘They’d have to find the original reference. Then fax us back.’ She sucked in her lips.

‘Please, how long?’

‘About ten minutes.’

Ten minutes that seemed to twist his bladder into savage knots. He hopped. He sat. Fidgeted. Got up. Hopped again. Prayed that the family might still be at the same address, that the Wongs hadn’t moved. Well, nobody else had. The housing market was shot to hell. For the first time in three years Goodfellowe praised the Chancellor and all his recessionary works.

And all the while the Supervisor eyed him as though he was about to run off with her pencils. Then the fax machine began to zip and chatter. The certificate. It was coming through. He hunched over the machine, devouring every detail as it emerged.

It all fitted. So superbly well.

Goodfellowe could scarcely believe it. He wondered for a moment whether someone was playing a sick joke. It couldn’t be. This wasn’t credible. How in the name of bloody Buddha could they have been searching all that time for a family who lived at that address?

Brewer Street.

In Soho.

Less than three hundred yards from his own doorstep.

The Supervisor resolved in future always to trust her instincts rather than the Palace of Westminster switchboard when, without another word, her uninvited and obviously unbalanced guest fled through the door.

Brewer Street! Goodfellowe screamed to himself. It couldn’t be that simple.

And it wasn’t.

He felt as though he had a hand on his back, skirting Smithfields, pushing him on through Holborn. Every turn of the pedals sent his heart racing faster, heedless of traffic signals and the other dangers of the road. Much of Covent Garden was a pedestrian precinct; he hurtled through regardless, coat tails flying and bell jangling in alarm as shoppers turned to shout curses after his fleeting form. Disaster almost struck as he tried to negotiate a tight turn while using his mobile phone; a waste bin went tumbling, leaving behind him a turbulent wake of drink cans and fast food wrappers. And it was fortunate that the traffic in Charing Cross Road had been brought to its habitual standstill, backed up all the way from Trafalgar Square, because he gave it no heed as he hurtled out of the side street and charged into the precincts of Chinatown. Pedals flying, wrenching at the handlebars, shouting for passage, he pounded on, his legs like pistons, down Gerrard Street and onto Wardour. At the point where it crossed Shaftesbury Avenue he had no choice but to dismount and push his bike across the intersection, but he was now only fifty yards from the entrance to Brewer Street and the traffic here was quiet. Too quiet. At the corner, in front of the Ann Summers sex shop and ‘Peeperama’, he tried to jump the kerb, but something on his machine bent or came loose because now there was a distinct wobble to his progress. And as he rounded the corner he could see why the traffic wasn’t moving. Blue and white security tape had been stretched across the road. Two police cars with lights flashing were parked across the road, a third was arriving from the other direction. He knew what it meant. He was too late.