The Buddha of Brewer Street Read online

  She had heard so much about it. In hushed tones, when the refugees had reached the safety of McLeod Ganj. The Devil’s Chisel, she had once heard it called. He brushed it almost casually across the damp, perspiring skin of her middle thigh. Less than a second. But time enough for her entire body to arch upwards as though trying to break free and fly through the ceiling. Except, of course, she was manacled, with wire, which was already slicing through the flesh to the bone.

  ‘Impatience is a fault, I know. Please don’t encourage it,’ her tormentor requested.

  She could manage no more than a whimper. Her body sagged back, the rusting springs complained as they lacerated her back. She thought she might have fouled herself but could not tell through the noise of battle that was still being waged throughout her body.

  The chisel fell again. This time she managed to scream.

  ‘I don’t wish to hurt you,’ the officer encouraged, touching the chisel to her nipple. ‘All I want is three names.’ Now the other nipple, as though it were being scorched in a flame. She began to mumble, her words faint and incoherent, and he bent low over her. He could see terror in the pulp of her eyes, yet he could hear only defiance as her lips tried to form the words of a prayer. He shook his head, now visibly angry. ‘When will you Tibetans learn that your religion is nothing more than superstition? Sorcery! A spell cast upon you by that serpent Lama. He can’t help you now, can he?’

  She continued to form the words of the prayer, with difficulty but with unmistakable deliberation. His response was to stick the chisel inside her mouth.

  She tried to focus on her most powerful images. On the children. On the running waters at Machchrial. On butterflies, whose colourful wings beat in front of her mind with such force that they grew blurred like a spinning top. Before she passed into unconsciousness she could smell the burning of her own tongue.

  She had no idea how long she remained in darkness. But when she awoke, the guards were still beside her. And the pain was worse.

  ‘Have I managed to change your mind?’ the officer asked.

  It was all she could do to turn her head stiffly from side to side.

  ‘Please let me explain, Sherab. I ask only for three simple names. But if I cannot persuade you to co-operate, I shall have to hand you over to my colleagues. That would bring me sorrow, loss of face. Compared with them I am a man of unlimited serenity. No more gentle encouragement. They will simply cut off your tits.’

  As she turned to look at the other two, she could see one was gripping a pair of shears, not rusted like the bed but gleaming in the lamplight like rats’ teeth. He moved closer. Her breasts were not large and they were covered in perspiration; he had some difficulty in gaining a firm purchase, but then he brought the mouth of the shears up to just below the dark nipple until she could feel the challenge of the steel.

  She had fought hard, with all the courage she could summon, but this … this was impossible. Death, yes, that she could contemplate, but to live with the pain and the mutilation of her womanhood was simply beyond her.

  She mumbled her assent.

  Yet still the soldier cut.

  She arched her back and then her head in disbelief, too numbed as yet to feel the physical pain.

  The guard fumbled at her other nipple. With every fibre of power that was within her, Sherab screamed the three names, over and over and over again, until the guard let her remaining breast fall from his fingers.

  ‘My congratulations, Sherab,’ the officer said. The other two laughed coarsely.

  Sherab began to sob, with guilt, with excruciating pain, with relief. At least it was over.

  Then he pushed the chisel between her thighs, deep, and the light bulb began to waver and flicker as it fought for its share of the current.

  Her body continued to twitch long after she had lost consciousness, and possibly for a while even after her death as the electricity continued its assault upon the nerves. Only when the last of them had been burnt away and Sherab lay motionless upon the bed did the soldiers switch off the light and go for tea.

  Another bed. But not really a bed at all. Nothing more than the back seat of an open-top tour bus cruising down Unter den Linden. But it would do, he thought. In the circumstances it would do really rather well.

  Patrick Baader’s day had to this point been filled with the inescapable tedium of duty. Perusing official papers. Pursuing the official ‘Line to Take’. Being nice to foreigners. Even over breakfast he’d had to listen patiently to the exhortations of the Ambassador when all he truly wanted to think about was shagging the man’s wife. Baader was easily distracted like that. He was Tom Goodfellowe’s successor as Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and in the early days he’d found the job had attractions in abundance. It was, after all, one of the most glittering waiting rooms at the fringes of the Cabinet. Sadly for Baader, however, he’d been waiting too long. Nearly four years. Stuck. Too new in his job to be moved before the last election, yet afterwards too long in the job to be a fresh face. Baader was marooned, stuck on the shelf. Not his fault. Nothing wrong with his talent, only his timing. By day he was adroit enough to be philosophical about his fate, but sometimes by night he prayed that they might all rot in hell.

  The combination of power and disappointment had made him incautious. Generally he bore his disappointment with good grace yet increasingly he had come to realize that, no matter how lustrous his job at the Foreign Office might seem to others, this was all he was going to get. At the tender age of fifty-four he was left under full brake in the great parking lot of Westminster, waiting for the time when the Prime Minister required his space for another, more recent model. But that was the game. No point in getting bitter. Others in his position might begin to plot and connive, to play Cassius to the great Caesar in the hope of a better ending than that crafted by Shakespeare, but Baader didn’t overestimate his talents as either scriptwriter or assassin.

  His talents lay in other areas. Sharp-witted, a former university lecturer – economics and an established red brick, not one of these new concrete academic abattoirs – he was well suited to the role of talking up his country and selling it to foreign investors. The hair may have lost its original colour but it had settled to a fine silver sheen, there was humour in his smile and just a hint of the razor up his sleeve. Men respected that. Yet there was more. Within Baader the pageantry of the diplomatic world was interwoven with the lustre of late nights and just a hint of licence in his pale eyes. Many women found that irresistible. There was never any suggestion of deceit, no idle talk of a misunderstanding wife and certainly no insinuation of loneliness, just the discreet offer of a meander beneath Aphrodite’s arch with no threat of complications and without the husband ever knowing. For many Westminster wives it proved a potent and irresistible combination.

  But he wasn’t in Westminster. His private secretary had prevailed and he was in Berlin. ‘You’ve turned down the invitation for the last three years, Minister; it’s really time to put in an appearance.’ So for the last two days Baader had been an official UK representative at a European seminar of parliamentarians and assorted advisers, researchers and assistants, shackled within a conference room where he was forced to listen to overstuffed Germans lecturing him, an Englishman, about the mechanics of democracy in Europe. Typical bloody Germans, always thinking they had the solution to ‘the problem in the East’ and the inherited right to implement it. He’d felt obliged to mention Winston Churchill three times during his own remarks simply to keep himself awake.

  The official dinners had been gruesome. Bavarian wine as thin as their sauces were thick. A collective sense of humour as subtle as a trench shovel. And this evening an impromptu lecture from his neighbour at the dining table about the technical standards proposed by the European Commission to curb the explosion of telephonic sex chat services. What was particularly exhausting was that the bloody man was so patently sincere. Wearied, Baader called for an Armagnac and quietly resolved t
o find himself a new private secretary.

  The telephonies expert had paused in order for others to express their moral approval when a voice intervened from further down the table. ‘I’m not so sure,’ it said brightly. This could ruin my relationship with Martin.’

  ‘Martin?’ Baader enquired, attracted to any source of dissent.

  ‘My bank manager.’

  ‘I don’t understand. He talks dirty down the phone to you?’

  ‘Not poor Martin! He’s a telephone banker, the one who has to approve my overdraft. So I have to make sure he understands precisely what I need the overdraft for. Like why I need a new dress. And how it fits. Or where it fits, at least.’

  ‘Martin is a progressive bank manager, then?’

  ‘Good grief, no. He hasn’t any idea how a girl has to get through life. So I have to educate him. On the phone. And that’s where I might fall foul of the Government’s guidelines.’

  Mickey Ross had brushed across his life, and Baader’s world suddenly began to brighten. Up to that point the entire weekend had been as exhilarating as a correspondence course in bookbinding. Boredom stirred him to excess – which was why he had grown overly interested in the Ambassador’s wife and had been fantasizing about a late-night liaison with her in the Embassy lift. Boredom also bred mischief. And impatience. He had now spent two days in this place, two days of the rest of his life. Beyond the age of fifty, these things had begun to matter to him. Time was running out. And the more they crammed his official diary with duty the more he began to think about the things he was missing. Those things that had not yet been done, by him at least. In Baader’s judgement the errors of commission were far more excusable than the sins of omission. You learnt more. And had more fun. And after two days of bookbinding Baader was in a mind to commit. He didn’t feel like going to bed yet.

  The dinner had drawn to its lifeless close and they were huddled together waiting to collect their coats. His official car would be loitering outside, waiting to take him back to the Embassy. To the Ambassador. To his small talk. And to his lissom wife. It was as his mind roved over the appalling trouble he might just get into if he went back to the Embassy in this mood that Baader found himself next to the young woman with the overdraft. He came to an instant decision.

  ‘Fancy a bus ride?’

  The bus in question turned out to be of the sightseeing variety, double decked, open topped, touring the sights of Berlin. It was dark, one of the last tours of the evening, and they sat alone on the top deck, the warm wind in their faces and their spirits like birds released from their cage.

  He kissed her just as the bus passed the Opera House. A lingering, thirsty kiss. Forceful, almost aggressive.

  ‘You don’t object?’ he enquired.

  ‘You hear me shouting for help?’

  He was about to reach for her again when she interrupted, almost teasing. ‘Actually I prefer a Porsche to a bus.’

  ‘Why a Porsche?’

  ‘Has very special vibrational harmonies, totally in tune with my own. Turns me on something rotten. The top of a Number 53 from Clapham has much the same effect, but the other passengers do have a habit of staring so.’

  ‘No passengers tonight.’

  ‘Funny you should notice that.’

  By the time the bus had passed the Brandenburg Gate their fingers were exploring, and as they passed into the darkness of the Tiergarten their mutual lack of inhibition had become clear. Zips, buttons, clasps, gasps. Clumsily he helped her remove her tights, which were grabbed by the breeze and flew away into the night, accompanied by their laughter.

  Of course it was ridiculous. As a Minister of the Crown what he was doing was extraordinarily dangerous. But as a man – and bugger the Crown – this was nothing less than magnificent.

  Utterly Bloody Magnificent. And mastering the geometry of the back seat of a swaying sightseeing bus proved to be an inspiring new challenge. He enjoyed new challenges.

  Her nipples appeared exaggeratedly dark under the light of the passing street lamps. Everything flickered in the harsh shadows, a little like one of those three-dimensional penny peep shows on Brighton pier he remembered from his childhood. The first time he’d been on a church outing with the choir and had received a good slap when the vicar had caught him. Not now, though, although there were other perils. As she nestled across his lap, both of them contorting to master the awkward shape of the seat, Baader gasped. His back was in knots. He’d have to spend all week on the chiropractor’s table. But somehow he didn’t give a damn.

  ‘Do you think this could be a big mistake?’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh I do hope so,’ he replied. ‘I do hope so.’

  The final bed was little more than a stone shelf built out from the wall. Uneven, cold, and covered with nothing more than a blanket. It was the middle of the night and the temperature in Kunga Tashi’s room had fallen below freezing, but a lifetime of meditation had enabled him to sleep in such conditions without discomfort. For a Tibetan Buddhist, the body can be turned into something that is detached, almost disposable. Kunga often taught such meditation techniques to the younger monks, encouraging them to lift their consciousness to a higher plane of spirituality and disembodiment. And if it helped them to sleep through the icy blasts of a Himalayan winter, so much the better.

  It had been a winding road that had led Kunga to the monastery at Rapang. There had been other monasteries in the last ten years, each one offering no more than a brief interlude in his flight from persecution. Or what might alternatively be described as stopping places along the road to enlightenment – it all depended on your outlook. To a Tibetan Buddhist the body is a vehicle for the soul; to those like the Han, the soul is nothing more than deceit, an excuse for the body to sit around a monastery living like a pickpocket off the rest of the community. So the Chinese arrived at each monastery with their political commissars who dismissed the abbot and installed one of their own choice. The monks would then be forced to sign a ‘confession’ giving up all allegiance to the Dalai Lama, and all pictures of their leader would be smashed. Some monks signed the confession, then hid pictures of the Lama in private places. Others resisted, and in those cases the normal Beijing response was to send in bulldozers and raze the monastery to the ground. Many, like Kunga, fled to other monasteries. But always the Chinese and their commissars followed.

  So, many years ago, Kunga had written to the Dalai Lama for his advice. To stay and sign? To lie and deceive? To fight? Or to fly? The monk’s dilemma. The Lama’s response had been characteristically blunt.

  ‘To Rapang!’ his reply had instructed, naming a monastery in the remotest part of north-western Tibet. ‘Where there is no electricity. No vegetables. There you will find safety. For where there is no electricity and no vegetables, there you will find no Chinese!’

  As Kunga had read the advice he could almost hear the Lama laughing. And how right he had been. The Chinese had no liking for the rigours of Tibetan life and everywhere tried to recreate a miniature version of the Han homeland. Han food. Han fashions. Han laws, of course. Even the language – only Chinese was permitted to be used in the schools. The Han claimed they were a civilizing influence in this feudal land. But they also opened bars and brothels. And gaols. And lost interest in their civilizing role with each mile that led them away from the nearest power station.

  Rapang was a very long way from any power station, or serviceable road, or supply of beer. And it was here that Kunga had come several years before to be the chant master and to give himself time for meditation. If that in Chinese eyes made him a parasite, it was a remarkably ill-chosen spot. Not a place to grow fat. But a place of peace, a place where, in normal circumstances, he was able to sleep. Although tonight was different. Kunga lay restless in his cell, unable to push away his thoughts, listening to the complaints of the mountain wind through the shutters and distracted by the scampering of mice as they sought out the offering of rice he had placed before his small shrine.

&n
bsp; There was no light. What moon there was lay obscured behind the shutters, closed against the howling wind. The darkness embraced him and once more he tried to open his mind to his dreams, to practise the dream yoga that enabled him to search into the corners of his consciousness. Perhaps that would help him understand why he was so unsettled tonight, why indeed he had been growing increasingly restless for several days. Dreams might help, but only if he could sleep.

  He tried to relax his limbs, to drag himself through to sleep, but to no avail. It was as though spirits from another world were prodding his mind with a stick. And gradually that world became clearer. It was a world much like his own. Of mountains and bottomless lakes and air filled with the tang of wood fires and dew on meadows. Of colours as clear as if they had been freshly painted in enamel. And the sun beating down, warming his bones. Suddenly across the fields he could see a man approaching, carrying a small bundle. A man without a face. And as he approached, Kunga could see that the bundle the man was holding was the size and shape of a small child, wrapped in swaddling clothes. But as they drew nearer Kunga could see he had made a mistake. They were not swaddling clothes. They were funeral robes. A voice whispered in his ear that the child had been brought home; one last look, before they buried him. And with a sense of overwhelming terror that all but choked him, Kunga realized that this child, this bundle of rags, was the incarnation. The Lama. Dead. His world destroyed. And the bundle was being brought closer to him, mocking, accusing him, for Kunga had failed. Closer and closer they came until Kunga couldn’t breathe and knew that he, too, was going to die. And a shadow fell across the scene that turned the sweat on his body to ice. Now the man was upon him, reaching out to show Kunga the child, announcing the end of all hope. And the man looked up. Kunga at last could see his face. It was smiling. Taunting. It was Chinese.