Dark Places

4. The Official Word

The police consisted of five men carrying rifles and one man with a uniform, a handgun, and a laminated cardboard identity card that said ROYAL NEPAL POLICE FORCE. His name was Laxman. He shook my hand and left me to stand next to Gavin as they investigated the crime scene. The investigation consisted of crouching down and looking at the body, going through its pockets, and then removing the Swiss Army knives and wrapping the corpse in a large sheet of opaque white plastic presumably brought expressly for this purpose.
   "If you had any faith in the Nepali police force," Gavin said, "I'm sorry to tell you that it has been badly misplaced. At first they wanted to arrest me. Even locked me up overnight. Eventually I talked them out of that. Then they decided it was the Maoists. Then they tried to call Kathmandu on the satellite phone. The satellite phone is broken. So they decided it wasn't the Maoists after all. It's a suicide."
   "Suicide," I said incredulously.
   "Right. Any kind of murder up here would be very bad for tourism, you understand. I'll bet once he gets in touch with Kathmandu they'll be very upset that he ever suggested the Maoists. You see, what happened was that he poked his own eyes out and was so maddened by the pain that he beat his head against the wall until it broke. Or something. They decided on this without even leaving their office, so they weren't inconvenienced by the realities of the crime scene. I insisted they come up here to look at him." He shrugged. "You can see how effective that was. Did you have any better luck?"
   "Good and bad," I said. "His name is Stanley Goebel." I took a deep breath. "And I think whoever killed him came after me this morning."
   Gavin turned and stared at me. "Izzit?"
   I told him the story as the Nepalese shouldered the body, wrapped in plastic like a carpet, and three of them carried it draped over their shoulders back towards the trail. Laxman crooked a finger at us and said "You must follow." We fell in line behind him and began the trek back to Manang. I wasn't sure if Gavin believed my pursuer was the murderer or not. I was beginning to doubt it myself. Maybe I had just panicked.
   "I doubt we're going to make it onto Laxman's Christmas-card list," Gavin said. "Troublemakers, that's us. How dare we report a murder to the police?" He shook his head. "If you're right he's just a few hours behind us, and here we are walking the other way. And just no point in trying to tell them otherwise, believe me. Like a brick fucking wall. They make the Old Rhodeys back home look like models of open-mindedness."
   We walked on in silence, following the body, as if part of a highly unconventional funeral procession. I wondered how many dead bodies had been carted up and down this trail. Thousands, probably. It was an old trail, hundreds of years old, once upon a time the trade route used to carry salt from Tibet down to India. At least that was what the Lonely Planet guidebook said. And if you couldn't trust Lonely Planet, who could you trust?

* * *

   Manang was the biggest town on this side of the Thorung La, with a population of maybe a thousand people. The townspeople lived in a maze of narrow uneven cobblestoned alleyways that wound their way around gray stone buildings three or four stories high. Yaks and mules and horses wandered the shit-strewn streets, mostly tethered but some free to wander. South of the old stone town was a cluster of large wooden trekking lodges, each capable of holding a hundred or more people. Manang got double the business of anywhere else on the trail because trekkers generally spent two nights here in order to acclimatize to the altitude.
   The Marsyangdi River ran right by Manang, spanned by a pair of wire-mesh bridges, and above it loomed an alpine glacier which seemed close enough to touch. Between the Marsyangdi and the town the ground was divided into farming lots by century-old walls of heaped rock. Potatoes grew here, and cabbage, and precious little else. There were trees, but they were low and misshapen. I had noticed that logs from pine trees that grew up here burned for ages, because pine grew so slowly at this height that it was dense as hardwood.
   There was a satellite dish, which had impressed me when I had first arrived, but I gathered from what Gavin had said that it did not actually work. Power lines were draped over much of the town, but the nearby microhydro plant had been out of commission for some weeks now, and even though there was an airstrip just an hour south of the city the repairman had not yet flown in from Kathmandu to fix it.  But each of the major lodges showed bootleg Chinese laserdisc copies of Kundun or Seven Years In Tibet every night on a generator-powered television. Progress, of a sort.
   Laxman took me to the police headquarters, an old stone-walled room containing a desk and several chairs, wood polished smooth by decades of use. He appeared to have had his fill of Gavin, who took it upon himself to follow the other police to see what happened to the body. Laxman sat down at his desk, withdrew an enormous leather-bound book, and opened it about halfway. The page he was on was half-filled with crabbed writing. He took up a pen and began to write, and I realized that the book was Laxman's official police journal. I sat down opposite him and waited. I was nervous. They had originally arrested Gavin, locked him up for a night — who was to say they wouldn't change the official story again and pin the crime on us? Not much we could do if they did.
   After some time Laxman put down his pen, looked at me, and said "Passport."
   I dug my travel wallet out and passed it to him. He flipped it open, glanced through it, then looked up at me sharply. "The South African says your name is Paul. But your passport says it is Balthazar."
   "Oh - but - yeah - it is," I stuttered. "I mean, Balthazar, that's my legal name. But everyone calls me Paul. It's a short form."
   He gave me a hard, unbelieving look, and I began to wonder if my parents' fondness for baroque names, which had already caused me untold grief in grade school, was about to land me in a Third World jail. But he simply nodded and made another note in his book.
   "I am sorry your friend is dead," he said abruptly.
   I was going to protest that he wasn't my friend, but decided not to confuse matters any more than necessary and simply nodded.
   "I am very sorry your friend chose to kill himself," he said, emphasizing the last four words.
   "He didn't kill himself," I said. "There's no way. That couldn't have happened. Somebody —"
   "I have to fill out an official report," he interrupted.
   I stared at him.
   "I write this official report, and I send it away. To my superior officers in Kathmandu. And at the bottom of this official report goes my signature. Mine. You don't sign it. The South African doesn't sign it. I sign it. Do you understand?"
   "Yes," I lied.
   "And what this official report will say is that your friend killed himself. Do you understand that?"
   "He didn't kill himself," I said again. "That's impossible."
   "Of course he didn't kill himself," he said. "I am not a complete idiot. But that is what the official report will say."
   I opened my mouth and closed it again and looked at him for a little while. Then I said, "I don't understand."
   "I am not stationed here to solve white man's murders," he said. "I am stationed here to help rescue trekkers who break their leg, to keep an eye on Tibet, and to kill anyone I know is a Maoist. Now if a Nepali killed your friend, that would be different. Then I would have to do something. I would have to find the man right away. If I could not find him, I would still have to find a man. And he would be arrested quickly and sent to rot in jail. But both of us know what happened here. One trekker kills another, what do I care? Do they live here? Do they care about my people? If I say, yes, this a murder, maybe there is a scandal. It gets in the newspapers. It gets in the Lonely Planet. People wonder, should I come to Nepal, should I go trekking? And I do not like trekkers. I think you can see that. I do not like you. But my people need your money. So to risk that, to find one trekker who kills another? What reason do I have? Soon he will be gone back to his own country. Let his own police find him when he kills again. If two Nepalese go to your country, and one kills the other, do your police rush to capture the other and put him in one of your jails? I do not think so."
   "They certainly do," I said hotly, though I was not near as convinced of this as I tried to sound. "Our police treat everyone the same, and they definitely never ignore a murder in their back yard."
   "I do not think that is so," Laxman said. "You are from Canada, yes? I have been to Canada. I was a Gurkha, you know. Do not think of me as some ignorant man who has never been away from Nepal. I served twelve years in the Indian Army, and I trained once in Canada. I do not believe what you say. I wonder if you believe it."
   "That's why you locked Gavin up," I said disbelievingly. "So the guy who killed him had time to get away."
   "Quite," Laxman said. "Now go away. Continue with your trek. Cross the Thorung La. Trek all the way back to Pokhara. And then, please, go back to your own country without making any more trouble in mine. We have quite enough trouble here without importing it. Thank you. You may go."
   After a little while I stood up. He wasn't incompetent. He certainly wasn't stupid. He just didn't want the hassle, and there was no way I could force it on him.
   "Naturally," he warned me, "if you repeat anything I said here I will deny it and find a reason to arrest you."
   "Naturally," I said sarcastically. And I went. What else could I do?

* * *

   I spent a little time looking for Gavin, but after a while I gave up. It was still early, and I could have gone back to Gunsang, but I decided to spend the night in Braka, a little village twenty minutes' walk towards the airfield. There was a lodge there called the Braka Bakery and Super Restaurant, and it lived up to its name. And I was in no mood to travel any more today. All I wanted to do was shower and eat and read and sleep and start anew tomorrow. And leave poor Stanley Goebel behind.
   I was another forty pages into War And Peace when Gavin joined me.
   "I got a double room again," I said.
   "Good," he said.
   "What happened to Mr. Goebel?"
   "I had his body inspected."
   I blinked. "Inspected? By who?"
   "By one of the good doctors of the Himalayan Rescue Association," he said, and paused to order mint tea from the lodge waitress.
   I had forgotten that there were three Western volunteer doctors in town, treating trekkers and locals alike. Just two days ago we had gone to their altitude-sickness lecture, held in a cabbage patch just outside the building they occupied.
   "What did they say?" I asked.
   "She told me that it couldn't have been suicide," he said dryly. "I'm ever so glad that we got that settled. And she confirmed that a Stanley Goebel had signed the attendance register at their altitude-sickness clinic two days ago."
   "That's it?"
   "Not entirely. She determined that he was killed by a stone. Fragments in his skull or something. And that the knives… that was done after he was already dead. And she agrees that he died within the last couple of days. She tried to look for fingerprints on the knives and jacket… " He shrugged. "Not exactly her area of expertise. But she thinks the knives were wiped clean."
   "Is she going to talk to Laxman?"
   "They don't have to," he said. "He came and talked to us. And made it very clear to all concerned that our opinion was as valuable as a fart in a hurricane, and that if he so desired he could have us expelled from Nepal or possibly jailed for interfering in a police investigation."
   "Pretty much what he said to me," I said.
   "To her credit Dr. Janssen didn't seem particularly intimidated. But I don't think it really matters whether she says anything or not. Whether we say anything or not."
   I nodded, slowly, thinking it over as he poured himself a glass of seabuckthorn juice, an intensely tangy drink made from a local berry. He was right. Even if Laxman suddenly morphed into a highly-motivated Sherlock Holmes, Stanley Goebel's killer was going to walk. No evidence of any kind. Even if it had been he on the trail behind me, an event which I was beginning to think of as an attack of paranoia rather than that of a murderer, that simply narrowed him down to one of the throng in Letdar or Thorung Phedi tonight. They could have locked down the villages and interrogated every traveler and it still wouldn't have helped.
   "So I reckon there's only one thing we can do," Gavin said.
   "What's that?" I asked.
   "Sweet fuck-all." He raised his glass in a mock toast. "To Stanley Goebel, unlamented and unavenged. There but for the grace of God go all of us."
   I clinked my lemon tea against his seabuckthorn juice and we drank to the dead man.