Captain Zhu looked René up and down in disgust. His eyes took in the checked shirt that had been hastily pulled on before he answered the door, displaying stains from the previous evening’s festivities. Above its collar, René’s jowly cheeks were blurred by a couple of days’ worth of stubble and his hair was still flattened by his pillow.
Zhu pulled a chair out from under a table and seated himself. Across the room, the two other soldiers were standing to attention. One of them, the massive one with the thickset neck and shoulders, moved a step closer. René recognised them from the other night. He’d sent them the wrong food.
Swallowing a couple of times, René tried to get some moisture back into his mouth.
‘Foreign Office visa and permits,’ demanded Chen in his broken English.
‘For Christ’s sake, I’ve been in Lhasa for eight years,’ René protested, folding his arms across his barrel chest.
‘Foreign Office visa and permits,’ Chen repeated tonelessly.
‘OK, OK. Keep your shirt on.’
René backed away towards the stairs, and, bracing himself for the pain he was about to inflict on his own head, shouted up for one of his staff to come down with the necessary paperwork. A moment or two later a Tibetan girl came cautiously down the wooden steps. She was tall and gangly and, like most teenagers who have only recently developed out of childhood, awkward with her height. Her brown eyes darted nervous glances at the restaurant’s unwelcome visitors as she handed over a file to her employer.
‘Thanks, Anu,’ René said quietly, noticing that the seated soldier was following her every move. ‘Why don’t you go back up to the office and wait for me there?’
He turned to Chen.
‘You’ll find all the necessary permits in here. Knock yourself out.’
Chen frowned as he tried to understand what was meant by this last phrase. René smiled. Using slang was one of his favourite ways of confusing officials. Chen skimmed through the paperwork, then laid the file down on the table.
‘We need all paperwork,’ he said, tripping over the pronunciation. ‘All permit issued.’
‘You’re investigating me? Why?’ René said, surprise outweighing his annoyance. There was silence and he stared past Chen’s sizeable frame, directing his question to the seated officer beyond. Despite his silence, there was air of authority about him. From the sidelong glances this huge brute in front of René was directing at the man, it seemed that even he was scared of him. One thing René knew about living in Lhasa was that you always had to speak to the man in charge.
‘Look, I had a full investigation by the CMA only four months ago,’ he said to Zhu, in a more reasonable tone. ‘All the permits I issue are above board. You can just get the report off them.’
Zhu slowly raised himself to his feet and lit a cigarette with his left hand.
‘But we are not the CMA,’ he said in his precise English. ‘And from the dossier we already have on you, Mr Falkus, it would appear that you would do well to give us your full co-operation. You wouldn’t want to be deported over something so trivial as a wrongly issued permit, now would you?’
‘Deported?’ René challenged him. ‘What the hell are you talking about? No one’s deporting me.’
Zhu gave the briefest of smiles, it flickered on and off like a lighter running low on fuel.
‘Well, let us start by reviewing the permits for the two Westerners who were recently travelling to Nepal.’
He motioned to Chen who opened a file he had been holding and read out the names,
‘Luca Matthews. Bill Taylor.’
‘How do you say in your country?’ Zhu said, glancing back at René. ‘Ring any bells?’
For a moment René was caught by surprise, then his expression darkened and he glowered at the other man with undisguised hatred. He was just about to shout a protest, trying to bluff his way out of the situation, when he suddenly stopped, catching himself before a word had escaped his lips. He’d suddenly realised what the epaulettes on the officer’s jacket actually signified.
René quickly glanced away and stared down at the floor, his mind reeling.
How the hell had he missed them when the soldiers first walked in? Everyone knew that gold and black insignia. This man was PSB. And a full captain at that.
‘I’m sure there’s just been some confusion here,’ he said eventually. ‘They were just standard tourist permits. Nothing more than that.’
‘Well, your “standard” tourists have not yet reached Shigatse. In fact, they seem to have disappeared completely. They even left without their interpreter,’ Zhu said, inhaling on his cigarette and blowing the smoke across the table. Then, without looking at René, he spoke again, his voice soft, almost conversational.
‘Where are they?’
‘I’m not sure…’
‘Where are they?’ he repeated, his tone unwavering.
René stood in the centre of the room, staring down at his bare feet. His toes were balled up against the cold flooring. For some reason, having no shoes on was making him feel horribly exposed. Why the hell was a full captain of the secret police asking him questions about something so banal as a permit? Had the boys been telling him the truth or were they up to something more than just climbing Makalu?
‘Maybe their truck broke down and they’ve been held up a few days. These things happen.’
‘That could be the case,’ Zhu replied, unblinking. ‘Yes, maybe that’s it. The truck.’
There was another silence and René tried to work out what to say next, but found his mind struggling to keep up. If only he weren’t so damn’ hung over.
‘So why are these two particular foreigners back in Tibet after only a month?’
The change of direction in his questioning caught René completely off-guard. Christ, they had been fast. The amount of paperwork these guys had to wade through, it normally took them weeks to put all the pieces together.
‘I don’t know why they came back,’ he said, shrugging his bear-like shoulders. ‘Maybe they like it here.’
Zhu stared at him, their eyes meeting. A split second later René broke the gaze, looking away to the window.
This seedy expat was holding something back, Zhu was sure of it. Two foreigner climbers back within a month to the same godforsaken area, and now they had suddenly disappeared. The monk at Drapchi had said that it was climbers from Nepal who had come to rescue the Panchen Lama, and the Westerners had arrived from Kathmandu and were last seen heading south-east. That would put them near Tingkye.
Even if the location were a coincidence, the timing could not be. Back now, at the very same time that the boy had been spirited away.
Zhu stood up from his chair, and addressed Chen.
‘Have him dress properly and take him into the station for questioning.’
René glared at the slight, precise figure before him, rage finally triumphing over his hangover.
‘I am a Foreign National. I have rights,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘We both know it. You can’t touch me.’
‘I think you might be surprised what we can do,’ Zhu said, and with the tip of his shoe delicately stubbed out his cigarette on the wooden floor, leaving a small circular burn mark.
‘By the way, nice place you’ve got here.’
Chapter 25
The chill of the night drew in quickly and a multitude of stars appeared across the black sky. Bill and Luca lay close to the campfire, away from the direction in which the wind was blowing its smoke. Their feet were right up against the embers, almost burning the soles of their boots, as they watched the boil-in-the-bag rations begin to simmer in the small aluminium cooking pot.
‘You go back to the village and ask if you want to,’ Bill said again. ‘She must think I’m a complete idiot for handing out the antibiotics.’