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That’s better. I’m not encouraging you to break the law, farang, but if on your next trip to Amsterdam and those wonderful smoking cafés (fu
I am investigating the most colorful and photogenic murder of my career under the name of my most serious professional rival, who will get all the credit when I solve it-which I will do because I’m drearily good at that sort of thing-while trying to arrange a huge smack shipment with a rogue Tibetan yogin, who happens also to be my meditation guru at my own insistence, despite a life-threatening conflict of interest with regard to my boss, Colonel Vikorn, who is most interested not in selling smack but in ruining General Zi
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Just because it’s dawn doesn’t mean I’m sober. My assisted meditation got a little off track toward five o’clock this morning and I started to develop this question for you, farang, which I’m having trouble getting out of my head. This hand-started universe of yours, this Big Bang-for Buddha’s sake, what kind of cosmology is that? Was the guy who invented it also responsible for the Virgin birth? And now there are strings attached. Did you know that according to Wikipedia (which is never wrong), the relationship of one string, in terms of mass, to one atom is roughly the same as the ratio of an apple to the sun? Frankly, I prefer the original Sanskrit.
Okay, I’m in my bathroom staring at the unshaven guy in the mirror and watching my image of him, which is really his image of me, getting fleshed out as memory floods back. I am becoming more recognizable to myself by the second. Did you ever observe that there are two quite different forms of waking up available to the human species? One when you’re happy, the other when you’re not; there’s no comparison, right? These days Guilt and Horror stand guard at my bedside every morning. Their karmic sources seem interchangeable: Pichai’s death can fill me with guilt or horror, depending on which demon happens to prevail. Similarly, the heroin: I can be crippled with guilt or crippled with horror, according to the way my mood is ru
It seems I have to moderate a meeting between Vikorn and Zi
This is deep consigliere stuff, and not without a certain dignity of office. I imagine the chairman of the World Bank often has to tackle this kind of thing, though with less visible threat to his health. Vikorn conceded the venue, which will be Zi
No doubt bearing in mind Vikorn’s extravagance at the last summit meeting ten years ago-when, you will recall, my Colonel showed up with thirteen black helicopters, which he hired for the day from someone close to the government of Cambodia -Zi
General Zi