“What do you know about Tibetan culture?” he asks suddenly.

“Nothing.”

To my surprise he seems reluctant to pursue the subject. “Okay, you can go.”

When I stand up I say, “She didn’t talk, by the way.”

“Who?”

“The Australian, Rosie McCoy. She didn’t say a thing. I don’t think she knows anything. You run a tight operation, don’t you? There wouldn’t be anything to connect her to you or your people?”

“There wasn’t anything to connect her to your Tibetan either, until you busted her.”

“D’you want me to talk to Vikorn, see if we can persuade Immigration to drop the case-I mean as a kind of preliminary sweetener to your upcoming negotiations?”

He thinks about this, before saying, “No. This is something I want to deal with myself.” He gives a sudden phony smile. “I shan’t be troubling you.” As I’m leaving he surprises me with a final comment. “That whole thing up in Nepal, the crown prince massacring his family in June 2001, the collapse of the monarchy, the success of the Communists-you know what it was all about, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, now you do. They’ve been moving stuff from Tibet down into Nepal for twenty years. It’s a bigger operation than anything we have in Thailand. Whoever runs the government runs the trafficking. Actually, it’s a lot bigger than Colombia, but it’s Himalayan, so nobody knows, not even the Americans. The CIA have no real intelligence about Tibet at all, except what they get from the Dalai Lama’s people in Dharamsala and a few spies in Lhasa.” He looks at me. “And they know better than to talk about the Business.”

At the door I say, “How do you know?”

“A Tibetan told me.”

“Tietsin? He was here? He called you from Kathmandu?” Zinna jerks his chin to indicate that he doesn’t answer questions. “But why move it through Tibet? Why not through Pakistan and India? Mumbai, New Delhi, and Calcutta are notorious trafficking centers.”

“That’s why. Those places are notorious. All the big Western security agencies are in India in invasion numbers, not only the CIA and the DEA, but all the French and German and Dutch, too, along with the British MI6. But when the product disappears into Tibet there are no traces. No tip-offs. And apparently there are hundreds of routes from Tibet into Nepal, routes only Tibetans, Sherpas, and Gurkhas know about. It arrives by foot without a history. Nervous buyers prefer it that way.” He gives me a quizzical look.

In the cab on the way back to Krung Thep, Lek and I are silent for most of the journey. When we finally reach the outskirts, Lek says, “You want to know if they fucked me or not, don’t you?”

“No. I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell me.”

“There are so many ways to fuck someone like me, aren’t there? What does it matter how they did it?”

Ten minutes later when he’s getting out of the cab, he says, “I suppose there’s nothing for it but to go home and have a good cry. I expect I’ll be all right in the morning.”

If I know I’m crazy, does that mean I’m not? I ask this question because it’s three twenty-two a.m. This is the time I awake with a groan every night: three twenty-two exactly. And I know that the noise I just heard, the one which woke me up, although it sounded like someone moving in the yard outside, was a pure product of psychosis. Yes, my heart is thumping wildly, my head is sweating so much the pillow is wet, and I’m supine with terror. Surely I’m not yet insane enough to be able to hear imaginary noises in full, normal, daylight consciousness? Oh yes I am. There it goes again: not out in the yard, but inside my skull: a weird and terrifying chirping, like that of a trapped bird warning the others: Danger, don’t come here. It’s just like the nun said: I’m breathing deep into my solar plexus in which a loose nerve is causing havoc. I look down with fascination at my heaving chest and close my eyes. Now, I tell myself, now, choose this moment to face it, whatever it is. I swallow. Okay, now, I’m going to look this devil in the eye. I’m going to stare it down.

I’m afraid of having to see Pichai’s small body sliding into the oven all over again. I’m afraid of the depth of grief, how far down it might take me, like a subterranean river roaring all the way to hell. How impossible will it be to return? Like a diver slipping at night into a freezing sea, I force my breathing to steady, to slowly dominate my wildly jumping mind. Okay, I say to myself, okay, now: look!

Isn’t it always the way, that when you finally screw your courage to the sticking place, the phone rings? It’s a real ring, not an imaginary one; I can still tell the difference. Blinking rapidly, having been jerked so violently back into the mundane, I grope for the cell phone and manage to press the green glyph as I lay it on the pillow next to my ear.

The caller does not declare himself. He has no need. “What’s happening?”

I let a beat pass. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you forever.”

“When the seeker is ready, the master will come.”

“Have you spent a lot of time in California?”

He chuckles. “See, it’s not as bad as all that, or you wouldn’t be capable of sarcasm.”

“I was expressing disgust. I don’t need Spiritual Quest One-oh-one just now, thanks.”

Another chuckle. “Good, you’re getting stronger. Just tell me what you were doing just now. I’ll tell you what it felt like at my end. It felt like you were dressing up in a suit of armor to get ready to skewer a dragon.”

“I hate the way you’ve perfected telepathy. If it weren’t for that, I could dismiss you as a charlatan in a heartbeat.”

“You can do that if you like. Go ahead, dismiss me as a charlatan. It’s a basic early step. We might have to postpone your enlightenment for this lifetime, but that’s okay. Just make sure you rebirth in a decent body with the right cultural influences. That’s not so easy, of course. The best estimate is a few hundred more screwups in disastrous socioeconomic circumstances before your chance comes around again. And that’s only rebirths in the human form. For the rest, I would choose mammals with short life spans. It’ll save time.”

“Now you’re really sounding like a salesman,” I grumble.

“I told you, I once did my best to join corporate America.”

I sigh. “Just tell me why you called me.”

“Actually, you called me. I tried to contact you on the other side, but you were all closed up with fear. Clairvoyantly, if you must know, you looked like a fetus with its eyes sewn up.”

“I was just about to face my deepest fear.”

He clears his throat. “That’s what I called about. Your courage is noted, but this is not the moment.”

“Why?”

“You’re still too weak, there are too many holes in your subtle bodies-that demon would smash you if you attacked symmetrically. Just relax, let go.”

I exhale slowly. “Look, while you’re on the line, there’s business we need to discuss. A little matter of import and export.”

“This isn’t a business call.” His voice is suddenly smooth as silk, like that of an experienced mother soothing a disturbed child. “Are you still in bed? If so, turn onto your front and place the pillow across your shoulders. Have you done that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, now I’m going to repeat the mantra to you in a certain tone of voice. You will concentrate on the tone, not the words. Just relax. You may not know it, but you did well tonight. You summoned the courage to face the dragon. That’s good. Now all we need is to train you so you have a chance of winning the bout. Feeling sleepy yet?”

The next time I open my eyes it’s late morning. When I finally get to the station, I find a new e-mail from the FBI:

I got the nerds at Quantico to run a check on your victim, Frank Charles. I was wrong about him emerging unscathed from his divorces. The first two hit him pretty hard, but he was still young and had this amazing capacity to suck money out of the Hollywood system. The third, though, took most of what he had-feminism was in top gear and it was all his fault (it was the Filipina maid while the wife was visiting her mother), so he started looking around for sources of dough. Somebody persuaded him that Nepal had been underexposed in America, and maybe some kind of feature film, or documentary, might be an idea. He went up there for a preliminary reconnoiter, liked what he saw, went up a second time, then something happened that nobody can quite explain. Now, get this. He finds funding for his film. The press releases claim the film is to be about Tibetans fleeing over high passes to Nepal, third-world suffering, dying kids, menfolk tortured in jail, women with newborns having to fend for themselves, frostbite, et cetera-but he never shows it! It’s never released to the public, so it never makes any money, and strangest of all, this man who is such a show-off by nature never shows it privately, either. At least, not that I’ve been able to ascertain, and I’ve spoken to some real knowledgeable film buffs-you know, the kind who remember who was second grip in Gone With the Wind. That’s all for now. Next time you’re gonna Skype me. I can only go for so long in Virginia without needing to look at a genuine foreigner.