The Breath of God (48 page)

Kinley drew in a deep breath, but instead of exhaling, tremors of deep coughs shook his body. He winced in pain. Kristin exchanged a worried look with Grant. “What can we do to make you more comfortable?” she asked, offering him another sip of water.

“Having my friends here is enough.” They both had to lean forward to hear the monk.

Grant's throat constricted. He knew that despite his desperate wishes, his friend did not have much time left.

“The books ...” Kinley said.

“Are they still here?” Grant asked.

“The tiger's lair.”

“Huh?” Grant and Kristin said in unison.

Kinley's eyes refocused. “You came here because of the mural in Sarnath?”

“Yes,” Kristin said. “We recognized the image of Padmasambhava flying on the back of a tiger to the cave on the side of this mountain.”

“The tiger's lair,” Jigme said, nodding his head. “Now I understand.” Grant turned to him. Jigme had been so quiet that Grant had forgotten that Kinley's longest student had been observing these exchanges in silence. The younger monk continued, “What better place to store the texts that describe Issa learning the teachings of the Buddha than the place where Padmasambhava meditated before spreading Buddhism to our country?”

“The cave exists?” Grant asked. “I assumed it was just a myth.”

Jigme shook his head. “We can get into it through a concealed door in one of the lower temples.”

Jigme spoke in Bhutanese to the oldest of the monks who stood by Kinley. The monk responded in an irritated tone, gesturing to Grant and Kristin. Jigme started to argue when Kinley lifted his head a few inches and spoke a few authoritative words that silenced both of them. The elder monk left the room. Jigme helped Kinley lower his head to the floor. The two spoke for a minute. Jigme concentrated on every word his master said, as if each held a little piece of magic.

When he finished speaking with Jigme, Kinley's breathing became more labored. Kristin leaned forward and kissed his forehead. Tears fell from her cheeks again. Grant opened his mouth to say something comforting, but he couldn't make any words come out.

“Thank you for believing in us,” Kristin said.

Kinley smiled at her and then shifted his eyes to Grant. His voice came out in a whisper. “I've always known the importance of these texts. I was just waiting for the right person to find them.” He closed his eyes and exhaled.

Kristin stroked the graying stubble on his head with her hand. “Save your energy, don't speak.”

But Grant knew that the energy had finally left his friend.

T
HE ROOM WAS STILL. As Grant watched the last breath escape from Kinley's lips, a word popped into his head.
Nephesh
. The breath of God. But the spark of the divine in Kinley was lit no more. The monk's face appeared relaxed, the corners of his mouth turned slightly upward, as if his last moment held a bit of humor for him.

Grant had just lost a friend and a teacher. Watching Kinley accept his own death with such a sense of peace brought Grant an unexpected comfort. Up to the moment of death, Kinley cared more about imparting a last bit of wisdom to his students than he worried about his own fate.

“Good-bye, my friend,” Grant said, giving Kinley's shoulder a final squeeze. He stood and then helped Kristin, whose body shook with quiet sobs, to her feet. He didn't bother to disguise or to wipe the tears from his own cheeks.

As the monks began to remove the arrows from Kinley's legs and wrap him in his robes, a sound rose from the circle of men. The monks began to chant. Each monk, including Jigme, sang. Their voices harmonized, until the vibrations of the chant filled every corner of the room, and every corner of Grant's body.

“I can't believe he's gone,” Kristin said, leaning on the wooden railing outside the dormitory.

“I know.” Grant put his arms around her from behind. “These last few weeks I've been thinking of the questions I wanted to ask him, and now—”
She straightened and leaned her head back against his chest. To Grant, the lights of the town of Paro in the valley far below reminded him of fireflies dancing through the warm air on a summer night. A strange comparison, he thought, considering that the temperature had dropped about thirty degrees since the afternoon, and the wailing wind blowing from the valley pierced his layers of clothing.

Shuffling from the steps above drew their attention. Someone was coming from the upper levels of the monastery. Grant realized that they hadn't yet heard from the two officers who were searching the temples. He felt Kristin tense.

The figure who emerged from the darkness, however, was the monk whom Kinley had spoken to a few minutes earlier. A leather lanyard swayed from his closed fist. The monk glared at the two Americans before he disappeared into the lit doorway.

A few moments later, Jigme emerged wearing the lanyard around his neck. A single skeleton key dangled from its end. “Come with me,” he said in a hushed voice.

They followed him up the staircase. Kristin stayed at Grant's side, allowing him to put a little weight on her arm. His leg had stiffened from the climb, and he was limping now.

“The texts?” she asked.

“We are about to enter the tiger's lair,” Jigme replied.

After everything they'd been through, they were finally here, Grant realized. Kinley had given up his life protecting the texts. Grant couldn't help but feel that his sacrifice was too big and that the texts weren't worth all the lives that had been lost. Following the beam cast by Jigme's flashlight, they navigated around granite boulders which rose in the center of the passage. The monastery walls around them appeared to grow from the cliff itself, an illusion dispelled only by the uniformity of the masonry work and the colorful murals painted from floor to ceiling.

Stopping on the second level, Jigme turned to his right and descended a separate narrow wooden staircase, rather than continuing up the main stairs to the higher levels above them.

Another memory came to Grant. “Kristin, in the Punakha library Kinley spoke of growth being like climbing a staircase.”

“That's right,” she said. “After some point, we reach a landing. Some choose to remain on the landing where they're comfortable. Kinley challenged us to keep climbing to the next level and the one above that.”

Jigme nodded. “That analogy was one of his favorites. Whenever I became too prideful of my progress, he would remind me that there was always another stairway to climb, another plateau to reach. Well, tonight”—he pointed to the stone landing at the foot of the stairs—“we must go down in order to go up.”

Then a beam of light hit Grant square in the face.

Blinded, he simultaneously grabbed for both Kristin and the wooden railing. A voice shouted from behind the white light.

Jigme answered from the step below. The light swung from Grant's face, but the starburst pattern remained in his vision for several moments. The voice responded in a friendlier tone of Bhutanese.

“Grant and Kristin, this is Sangay,” Jigme said, introducing them to the man with the intense flashlight who stood on a landing on the upper staircase. “He's the son of my mother's sister.”

“Ah, your cousin,” Kristin said, relief in her voice.

“That's right, cousin. He lives here in Paro. A policeman.”

When Grant's eyes adjusted, he saw that two men stood on the floor above them, dressed in the same blue and white garb as the officers in the dormitory hall.

“Did they find anything?” Grant asked, also relieved.

Jigme spoke to his cousin, and then translated. “The
goemba
is empty, but someone searched the temples, leaving a path of destruction behind.” He spoke again with his cousin. “Having Sangay here will help us. Come, we must be quick.”

While the two officers waited outside, Jigme led Grant and Kristin through a thick red door at the bottom of the stairs into a temple not too much bigger than their hotel room. The glow of Jigme's light illuminated a blue plaster statue that Grant recognized as Padmasambhava behind a stone altar at the far
end of the room. The floor was wooden and the walls were covered in silk, giving the temple a softer feel than the rest of the monastery. Jigme recited a short mantra and then prostrated himself on the ground before the statue. On rising, he went to the left wall and parted the silk fabric, exposing a heavy whitewashed door. While Jigme removed the skeleton key from his neck and worked it in the large padlock, Grant peered through the six-inch square opening crisscrossed with iron bars at eye level in the door.

“The cave?” he asked. The only interior detail he could make out in the darkness was a single candle flame, which flickered, as if suspended in midair. He thought that he could almost feel the warmth of this light, as if it burned inside him rather than in the cool air of the cave before them.

“Over twelve hundred years ago, Padmasambhava sat here for three months, alone and silent, deep in meditation,” Jigme said with reverence.

“Just as Muhammad did two hundred years before him on Mount Hira,” Kristin said softly.

Jigme removed the lock and swung open the heavy door. The temple walls were built flush into the rock. They stepped into a twenty-foot-deep cave in the side of the cliff. Surrounded by black granite, the air was dry and cool but not cold. Grant could now see that the candle, which had appeared to float in midair, actually sat on a small altar at the rear of the cave.

Jigme led them to the altar, which contained other unlit candles, incense burners, and a bowl for offerings. Grant examined the uneven stone floor beneath his feet. He imagined the guru sitting, legs crossed, eyes half closed, free from the distractions of life in the valley below.

Jigme disappeared behind the altar. “Here!” he cried. He bent over and lifted a wooden box.

“The box from the Punakha library!” Kristin said.

Jigme carried it to where they were standing, set it on the floor, and opened the latch.

“I can't believe it,” she said. She gently picked up a narrow, silk-wrapped book while Jigme shined his light over them.

Grant's eyes fixated on the book in Kristin's hands. After all the sacrifices, they had the texts. “Jigme, do you read Pali?” he asked.

“Not as well as Kinley, but I can manage.”

Grant consulted the mental checklist he'd reviewed countless times in anticipation of this moment. “We need to go through each book and confirm what we have,” he said.

“Not here.” Jigme closed the box and relatched it. “We need to move the texts quickly, without the other monks' knowledge.”

“But I thought Kinley spoke to them about helping us,” Kristin said. “The old guy even brought us the key to the cave.”

“Kinley is no longer with us. Last night at the Paro dzong, I learned that the Je Khenpo himself assigned Kinley to watch over Taktshang Goemba. The other monks do not know anything about the Issa texts or why we needed the key to the cave. In light of what's happened, I think it prudent to keep it that way.”

“What do you suggest?” Grant asked.

“My cousin and his partner will escort you down the mountain. They will carry the box. If anyone questions them, they'll say the box contains important evidence.”

“You're coming with us, aren't you?” Kristin asked.

“As Kinley's senior student, I must stay here and help prepare his body for cremation. I will meet you in the afternoon.”

“But the killer. He's still out there,” she said.

“I know. That's why I want you and the books to leave with these officers. Both are armed and will protect you. I trust my cousin with my life. The other police will remain here with the monks and me.”

“Where do we go?” Grant asked. “Somehow this guy knows our plans before we do. Our hotel isn't safe anymore.”

“Agreed. You'll stay at my cousin's house. The man won't know to look for you there.”

“Okay,” Kristin said, “but somehow after all that's happened, that's not too comforting.”