She freaked. Her life about to come to an abrupt end at age twenty-seven, a scream started from the bottom of her lungs and emerged from her mouth without any act of will on her part. The Immigration officer slapped her face very hard, which put a stop to the scream. Now she started feeling in her pockets for her cell phone and fished it out with shaking hands.

“No,” the officer said, and grabbed it.

“Oh please, oh please, look, this is all the money I have, I’ll give it to you if you let me make just one call. Please? I’m begging you.”

The officer stared at her for a moment, then at the open money belt, then at the other officers. “Put your money away. I don’t care if you make one call, but don’t try to delete anything. If you do, you’ll regret it, big time.”

Rosie made the call. Apparently for weapons she had nothing but an extensive stock of Australian expletives.

“You slime bucket, you dag, you fuckwit, you fucked-up piece of dog shit, you motherfucker, d’you know what I’m going to do to you? I’m going to dob you in it so fucking deep you’ll swing for this, you asshole, I’m not going down alone, you lump of green vomit, you string of colon plaque, I’m taking you with me, you said this was safe, this was the A-stream, no one working this one ever got caught in the last twenty years, they had customs under control, you stupid, fucked-up, lying asshole. YOU’RE GOING DOWN, YOU’RE GETTING THE INJECTION, NUMB NUTS.”

Exhausted, she closed the phone and burst into tears. Calming her down the best they could, the officers led her to a female toilet, where she was given the choice of extracting the condom in her vagina herself or leaving the job to one of the officers.

They told me afterward that Rosie claimed she could manage it, but terror and despair had caused her vulva to shrivel like a walnut and her hands to shake violently. When they sat her on a chair with a rubber sheet, she urinated involuntarily. In the end one of the officers donned a pair of plastic gloves and, using K-Y Jelly to ensure the condom didn’t break and spill its contents into her body, pulled it out with the gentleness, kindness, and compassion a Buddhist woman ought to show a fellow female. After that it was simply a matter of accompanying Rosie to a nearby hospital, where nurses experienced in these things would administer a laxative: with that much poison in her gut the officers were not taking any chances. In the meantime, I checked Rosie’s cell phone in order to find the last number she dialed.

Which turned out to be the cell phone number of one Mark Whiteman, an Englishman who I happened to know was a minor player in a large and successful trafficking ring run by none other than General Zinna of the Royal Thai Army. I had the information I had come for. I fished out my own mobile to call Vikorn.

“The source is straight,” I said. “His information is good. Zinna is hurt.”

“Get a ticket to Kathmandu while you’re there.”

“I’m traveling first-class. I’m consigliere.”

“Go business. First-class attracts attention.”

“I’ll get the first flight tomorrow, there aren’t any tonight.”

When I closed the phone I strolled over to one of the airport bookshops to buy a guidebook to Nepal.

Did I forget to mention that when I was finally given a glance at Rosie McCoy’s passport I discovered a full-page visa for the Kingdom of Nepal, together with entry and exit stamps? She had flown to Thailand after three months in that Himalayan country. What a coincidence.

I am still in the men’s room at the Rose Garden, but I’ve finished the joint and stopped sniveling. No one in my state of mind should fool with this stuff, I explain to myself as I roll another joint. The thing is, you get addicted to the emotional roller coaster. It becomes a fascination to see how the great Ferris wheel of Self gets stuck with you strapped into the top seat with your legs dangling over the void.

How different would life have been if I had not flown to Nepal that morning? Totally, totally different, I mutter as I take a toke. Would you do it any differently today? I ask the haggard face in the mirror with the funnel-shaped joint hanging from its lips. No, I tell the poor distraught fellow staring back at me, for then I would never have met Tietsin. With the detachment of the truly psychotic I start to cackle, then double over, whether in genuine hilarity or some caricature thereof is hard to say: I wouldn’t have missed him for the world, I say, cackling and shaking my head, not for the world, damn him. And all of a sudden he is there, large as life, in the men’s room with me, in his old parka jacket unzipped at the front, his long gray hair in a ponytail, his straggly beard somehow comic, his eyes rolled back, revealing only the whites. “Your problem is you’re not remembering in enough detail,” he explains. “Your Western blood makes you superficial-go deeper in. What have you got to lose?”

“Oh, nothing,” I say with theatrical emphasis. “Only my mind, and there’s not much left of that, is there?” But of course he was a hallucination and has disappeared like mist.

• • •

In Nepal we don’t fly through clouds, because the clouds have rocks in them.

The guidebook used this quote from a Royal Nepal Airlines pilot to open the section on Nepalese geography. The poorest country on earth is also the most vertical. Anyway, why would you worry about national resources when you have Everest? Overachievers from developed countries pay tens of thousands of dollars to get frostbite, lose limbs, and die at twenty-nine thousand feet, so they can call themselves summiteers. I also learned, for the first time, that Mr. Everest was a humble surveyor of the British Empire who really did not want the biggest rock on earth named after him, and neither did anyone else within a radius of ten thousand miles, since they had had their own names for the mountain for a good five thousand years before the ever-ready Everest turned up with his theodolite: Chomolungma (Mother of the Universe) in Tibetan; Sagar-martha (Goddess of the Sky) in Nepali.

Take a tip from me: if you’re approaching Nepal from East Asia, try to get a window seat on the right. I’d never seen the Himalayas before, and they come up on you disguised as clouds, delicate white wispy things at first, you think, until it dawns on you: it’s not a cloud, it’s not a mountain, it’s fifteen hundred miles of wall many miles high built by gods as a six-star dwelling place (there is no other rational explanation). As we landed I felt Vikorn’s genius and influence evaporate after holding my spirit prisoner for more than a decade. He was vicariously out of his depth too.

But as a cop, I could not help falling in love with the airport. It’s the only one I’ve found that insists on throwing your luggage through a security machine after landing; but the good news is the machine doesn’t work, probably never has, and anyway the guy with the knitted topi on his head sitting behind it chatting to a friend probably wouldn’t know what to do with a sizzling little electronic device if he found one. Outside, there was the usual collection of hustlers, hotel runners, half-legal taxis, and ragged people who like to watch planes land and take off. On a whim I grabbed a taxi hustler with a rag tied around his head and such an array of astrological charms and charts all over the windows and roof of his cab he put your average Bangkok cabbie to shame. His eyes were black oil wells with insane flecks of red. His name was Shiva, of course.

Shiva wanted to know where I was staying. After studying the guidebook I narrowed the short list down to two: the five-star Yak & Yeti (I was most tempted by the name), which used to be someone’s palace, or the downmarket but internationally loved Kathmandu Guest House. To make a decision I really needed to think about the psychology of my business partners. I mean, in your line of work, farang, everything depends on projecting the right image, correct? Which was exactly my dilemma. On one hand, I was here to arrange a high-value supply-side contract, which would normally mandate the Yak & Yeti as the only joint in the whole Himalayas qualified to provide the appropriate ambience; on the other hand, it was not exactly my style and I was dealing, if my information was correct, with a mind master of considerable skill and insight-didn’t he just destroy the life of Rosie McCoy and put one huge crimp in General Zinna’s operation, without, apparently, leaving his cave? No, I didn’t think the Yak & Yeti was a smart decision; with guys like Tietsin, you better go naked or not at all.