Kingdom (9 page)

‘But what was he working on?’

‘Lots of things. To do with Tibet and India. I was never sure . . . He wouldn’t discuss them with me.’ Krishna shrugged. ‘He got all his work done. He was my boss. It wasn’t appropriate to ask, and he didn’t volunteer the information.’

As Nancy listened to Krishna, for the first time since the police had questioned her she began to wonder if Anton Herzog had actually been engaged in illicit activities in Tibet. It was beginning to sound as though he had the absolutely perfect profile. Paranoia gripped her for a second: perhaps even Dan Fischer was involved.

‘Krishna, do you think Anton could have been a spy? Could he have been recruited by some agency that recognized his sympathies and talents?’

Krishna snorted in derision.

‘I think that’s completely impossible. He loathed the American government for its failure to act on Tibet, and you should have heard him speak about politicians in general. He thought the whole world was guilty of selling the Tibetan people down the river. Everyone was to blame: the Americans, the British, the French, the Germans, the Italians, even the Indians . . . The Tibetan culture that was destroyed in 1959 was probably the world’s first government of peace. As far as Anton was concerned, by letting it get trampled on by its militaristic neighbour, the whole world was guilty, the whole world could go and hang . . .’

Nancy sank into her thoughts. It was true, who would Herzog have wanted to work for? He must have regarded all the governments of the world as complicit in Tibet’s tragedy. But then what was he doing all those years, beavering away? And what was he really doing in Tibet?

There was no path through the jungle to the Cave of the Magicians – just the endless forest, seething with life and noise.

The Abbot’s deputy, staff in hand, led the way, passing methodically over fallen branches and ducking under the overhanging limbs of the tropical vegetation. He knew the route. Colourful birds darted from branch to branch in the tree cover far above the long line of rain-soaked monks. The line moved slowly between the dripping vines and massive tree trunks of the ancient forest.

Occasionally, a monk would stop in his tracks and reach up and take hold of a large paddle-like leaf, common in this part of Pemako. He would angle the tip of the leaf into his mouth and quench his thirst with rainwater before wiping his brow and beginning again to labour up the incline of the jungle floor.

And every few minutes the Abbot’s deputy paused and looked back at the extended line weaving its way through the trees behind him. In the middle of the procession was the stranger, tied to the stretcher, carried along by four monks. The mere sight of the strange cargo filled him with dread. Ever the question tormented him: could this ruined man actually have been to Shangri-La? He would tell himself it was not possible. Shangri-La was like the land of death itself: no one who had been there had returned to tell the tale. He must have wandered off course, been somewhere else – there were many other strange places in the mountains, many ways in which a man’s life could come undone. He was trying to convince himself, but the question dogged him all the same.

With an anxious look on his face, the deputy willed them to increase their speed. He was a bad omen, this stranger; a harbinger of doom. He would dearly like more time to interrogate him, to find out who he was. But that luxury was not available.

The soldiers would be coming. That was certain. The Abbot’s deputy imagined that they had already departed. Under normal circumstances his monks would have had the advantage; their native knowledge of the jungle would have made their progress faster than the lumbering military men. But progress with the stretcher was painstakingly slow – they were travelling at a fraction of their normal speed.

And there was another fear at the back of his mind – another danger, of which he did not even want to think. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the jungle. Somewhere out there, beyond the monkey calls and the relentless seething of the insects, another enemy was stirring. Silently the old man prayed.

Nancy was scanning Herzog’s CV, which she had just found on the
Trib
intranet.

‘Interesting,’ she said, and Krishna turned to face her. ‘It seems from this that, after winning the Pulitzer journalism prize for a piece on the Dalai Lama and Macleod Ganj, he’s turned down no less than nine offers of promotion, including the top jobs in London and Tokyo.’

She looked up at Krishna.

‘I know that he liked his job, but refusing those big posts is quite extraordinary. He doesn’t even have a family to slow him down.’

Her forehead was wrinkled by a frown. Almost to herself, she formed the question: ‘So what’s the reason?’

Krishna smiled and shrugged.

‘I’m not really the person to ask. I’ve turned down promotions as well. I guess he wanted to stay in Delhi, to stay near his beloved Tibet . . . I don’t know . . .’

Nancy scrolled through the CV again. A man’s life, condensed into professional achievements. Despite the neat diligence of the
Tribune
’s scrupulous record-keeping, what did it really tell her about Herzog?

‘There’s simply nothing here that helps explain anything . . . I mean I’m not expecting him to put “spy” under work experience, but this résumé doesn’t really give us any leads at all. There has to be some reason the Chinese and Indians have gone completely mad. And he is, after all, still AWOL.’

Krishna leant back in his chair.

‘Well, for what it’s worth, my theory is that he must have accidentally wandered too close to a military base. That sort of thing always sets the Chinese off . . .’

‘Surely it can’t be as simple as that. I know that in places like China they always go crazy if you accidentally photograph an airport or something, but this seems much bigger. I mean, as far as I could gather from my experience this morning, the Indians seem to agree that he was up to something and they also believe that he is on the run in the Pemako region of Tibet and that the Chinese are hunting him. That is quite different from him being arrested for photographing a military site and getting expelled from the country – that is quite routine, isn’t it?’

Krishna nodded and answered quietly: ‘Yes – it is – that’s true . . .’

Nancy fell silent for a moment and then turned to look directly at Krishna, who was deep in thought.

‘Did you do the regular database searches as well?’

Krishna nodded without making eye contact.

‘Yes. Nothing much of interest came up.’

Then he glanced at her in a way that made her feel that he wasn’t at all comfortable with what she had asked him to do. He looked down at his desk. ‘I must say it feels funny investigating our own colleague.’

‘Krishna, I’m sorry to keep asking questions about Anton like this. And I’m sure Dan Fischer has given you strict instructions not to encourage me in any way. And I know what you mean, it does feel funny. But I’m sure we are doing the right thing. We are trying to help him. Judging from my experience in the police station, he is in real trouble, and HQ don’t seem to be doing very much to help him, to put it mildly. We’ve got to try to do something, no one else is going to.’

They fell into silence. Nancy didn’t feel that she was making any headway at all into the mystery of Anton Herzog. She stood up and suddenly felt utterly exhausted; a wave of almost unmanageable jetlag rolled over her. If she had rested her head on the desk she would have fallen straight asleep.

But she didn’t want to go back to the apartment to sleep – in fact she didn’t really want to go back there at all. What if the police came back and took her away for a second time? Maybe this time they would just chuck her in a cell and forget about her for good. She could suddenly see why the threat of the four a.m. knock on the door, the secret police coming to drag you forcibly away, was such a potent way to control people. It was a terrible burden to carry around in the daylight hours and then at night: instead of thinking that your bed was the safest place in the world to be, you became afraid to go to sleep. She wanted to call Dan Fischer and get some sort of reassurance that the paper would protect her, but she didn’t want to reveal her thoughts to him.

And worst of all, she speculated, it was quite possible that the day’s events were all beginning to affect her judgement: the fatigue, the unpleasant trip to the police station, the oppressive heat. She kept wondering whether, if she had slept properly and not had the threat of a jail sentence upon her, she would be pursuing her inquiries at all.

She was beginning to wonder if it might just be best to go back to the apartment and get some rest, when her eyes fell on the package containing the gruesome bone trumpet lying discarded on the sofa. She thought for a second of showing it to Krishna, asking if it meant anything to him, or if he could read the script. But it would be pointless; it needed an expert – someone like Herzog, she reminded herself, aware of the irony.

‘Krishna,’ she said slowly, ‘is there anyone else in Delhi that Anton would have spoken to about his work on Tibetan antiquities?’

This remark seemed to dismay Krishna, and at first he stayed silent, and merely furrowed his brow as if she was prying too far. But Nancy had no choice; she had to pry, and Krishna was the best lead she had at that moment. So she persisted. ‘Is there anyone you know who has even been to Pemako?’

Reluctantly, Krishna began to speak. ‘To my knowledge, apart from Anton only a handful of foreigners have ever been there.’

He paused and then quite casually, as if he did not think the information would be of any use, he added:

‘There is one man. His name is Jack Adams. He’s an American. Anton knew him quite well – but I don’t think they got on.’

Nancy studied his anxious face. She could see that he was beginning to wonder where this was all going. His life has been terribly disrupted, she thought. Twice in fact: first Herzog disappeared, and now she had turned up and started nosing around into the private affairs of his colleague and friend. It made her feel sorry for him. She could see that he was a good man, a well-meaning man, and she suspected part of the reason he never wanted promotion was because he found the responsibilities of management slightly sordid and the Herzog affair was precisely the kind of thing that he hoped never to be drawn into. It was a breach of his contract with life. He had chosen a humble station; he had refused all offers of passing glory on the understanding that he would never have to get involved in the politics of the newspaper. She watched him shift position in his seat. He was uncomfortable and it upset her.

‘Krishna, I am sorry if I just seem crass and over-inquisitive but it really is because I want to do something for our colleague. I want Anton to come back alive – if it was you or me out there I’d like to think someone would be trying to work out what had happened to us.’

That sounded hollow; it was hard for her to explain how compelled she felt to act; how she was beginning to feel that something was driving her, some force beyond her control. So then she didn’t know how to proceed. She was being inquisitive. She would have to continue to be so, if she were to discover anything else. So she waited, feeling a little awkward, and eventually Krishna shrugged and said, ‘Nancy, I don’t really know Jack Adams. He’s an American antiques dealer and anthropologist. I only know that he’s been into Pemako because he once left a message for Anton here at the office that said that he had just come back from there.’

For the first time since he had welcomed her into the office, he was looking completely despairing. He slumped back in his chair.

‘I can’t answer all these questions. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry Anton has gone. It’s so awful. I want to help find him, but Dan Fischer says the best thing we can do is do nothing and leave it to the police. I just don’t know what to do . . .’

‘Why have so few foreigners ever been to Pemako?’ Nancy asked.

It was a question that she knew Krishna would be more comfortable with – she had to get off the subject of Anton’s private life or he would withdraw altogether into his shell. She was sure he didn’t mind talking in the abstract, sharing his knowledge of places and things. She suspected he just had a fear of being drawn into other people’s lives, other people’s problems.

‘It has been off-limits to foreigners for decades. Very occasionally, people manage to sneak in: botanists or mountaineers. But most of the time the PSB refuse the permits, and if you do get a permit it is only for the peripheral areas, never for the interior . . .’

‘Who are the PSB?’

‘The Public Security Bureau. The Chinese Intelligence Service – or one branch of it. The PSB are very active in Tibet. If it’s true that Anton is still there and that he is being hunted, then it will be the PSB who are looking for him. They are not a very nice bunch of people – to put it mildly.’

‘I see. It sounds like an interesting place.’

‘It is. It would get more visitors, many more, if it weren’t for its location. It’s fantastically beautiful, lots of rare orchids and strange animals, but it shares a disputed border with India and it’s cut off from the rest of Tibet, in fact it’s another country really. It’s also the home of the Bon religion.’

He was warming to the task, she thought. He was relaxing again. She asked another harmless question:

‘I didn’t realize they practised other religions in Tibet. I thought the whole point about it was that it was an ancient theocracy.’

Krishna nodded thoughtfully.

‘Tibet is more complicated than that. Bon is old. Older than Buddhism. It’s been around long before the lamas. They persecuted it and tried to stamp it out and called it black magic, but it clings on in places like Pemako. Anton knew a lot about it. To hear him speak about Tibet was an unforgettable experience – he’s such an eloquent man.’

‘So there are no Buddhists in Pemako then?’

‘I don’t know about that. Pemako is certainly a sacred area in Tibetan Buddhism. Anton has joined lamas on their pilgrimages there. It is one of the most important “beyuls” or hidden paradise lands. The beyuls are supposed to serve as refuges when the world succumbs to darkness. But I don’t know if they have any lamaseries there.