Don Winslow: The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

He must have talked to my professor already, Neal thought. Joe Graham rarely asked a question to which he didn’t already know the answer.

“You’ve talked with Dr. Boskin?” Neal asked.

Graham nodded cheerfully.

“And?”

“And he says the same thing we do. ‘Come home, darling, everything is forgiven.’”

Forgiven?! Neal thought. I only did what they asked me to do. For my troubles I got a bundle of money and a stretch in exile. Well, exile’s fine with me, thank you. It only cost me the love of my life and a year of my education. But Diane would have left me anyway, and I needed the time for research.

Graham didn’t want to give him too much time to think, so he said, “You can’t live like a monkey forever, right?”

“You mean a monk.”

“I know what I mean.”

Actually, Graham, Neal thought, I could live like a monk forever and be very happy.

It was true. It had taken some getting used to, but Neal was happy pumping his own water, heating it on the stove, and taking lukewarm baths in the tub outside. He was happy with his twice-weekly hikes down to the village to do the shopping, have a quick pint and maybe lose a game of darts, then lug his supplies back up the hill.

His routine rarely varied, and he liked that. He got up at dawn, put the coffee on, and bathed while it perked. Then he would sit down outside with his first cup and watch the sun rise. He’d go inside and make his breakfast-toast and two eggs over hard-and then read until lunch, which was usually cheese, bread, and fruit. He’d go for a walk over the other side of the moor after lunch, and then settle back in for more studying. Hardin and his dog would usually turn up about four, and the three of them would have a sip of whiskey, the shepherd and the sheepdog each having a touch of arthritis, don’t you know. After an hour or so, Hardin would finish telling his fishing lies, and Neal would look over the notes he had made during the day and then crank up the generator. He’d fix himself some canned soup or stew for dinner, read for a while, and go to bed.

It was a lonely life, but it suited him. He was making progress on his long-delayed master’s thesis, and he actually liked being alone. Maybe it was a monk’s life, but maybe he was a monk.

Sure, Graham, I could do this forever, he thought.

Instead, he asked, “What’s the job?”

“It’s chickenshit.”

“Right. You didn’t come all the way over here from New York for a chickenshit job.”

Graham was loving it. His filthy little harp face shone like the visage of a cherub whom God had just patted on the back.

“No, son, it really is about chickenshit.”

That’s when Neal made his next major mistake: he believed him.

Graham opened his suitcase and took out a thick file folder. He handed it to Neal.

“Meet Dr. Robert Pendleton.”

Pendleton’s photo looked as if it had been taken for a company newsletter, one of those head-and-shoulders shots that sit above a caption reading, MEET OUR NEW VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF DEVELOPMENT. He had a face you could cut yourself on: sharp nose, sharp chin, and sharp eyes. His short black hair was thinning on top. His gallant effort at smiling looked like an unnatural act. His necktie could have landed airplanes on a foggy night.

“Dr. Pendleton is a research scientist at a company called AgriTech in Raleigh, North Carolina,” Graham said. “Six weeks ago, Pendleton packed up his research notes, computer disks, and toothbrush, and left to attend some sort of dork conference at Stanford University, which is near-”

“I know.”

“-San Francisco, where he stayed at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The conference lasted a week. Pendleton never came back.”

“What do the police have to say?”

“Haven’t talked to them.”

“Isn’t that sort of SOP in a missing-person case?”

Graham grinned a grin custom-made to hack Neal off. “Who said he was missing?”

“You did.”

“No, I didn’t. I said he didn’t come back. There’s a difference. We know where he is. He just won’t come home.”

All right, Neal thought, I’ll play.

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why won’t he come home?”

“I’m pleased to see that you’re asking some better questions, son.”

“So answer it.”

“He’s got himself a China doll.”

“By which you mean,” Neal asked, “that he’s in the company of an Oriental lady of hired affections?”

“A China doll.”

“So what’s the problem and why are we involved?”

“Another good question.”

Graham got up from the chair and walked into the kitchen. He opened the middle cabinet of three, reached to the top shelf, and pulled down Neal’s bottle of scotch.

“A place for everything, and everything in its place,” he said cheerfully. “Another thing I taught you.”

He came back into the sitting room, reached into his case, and came out with a small plastic travel cup, the kind that telescopes out from a disk into a regular old drinking vessel. He poured three fingers of whiskey and then offered Neal the bottle.

“Damp in here,” Graham said.

Neal took the bottle and set it on the table. He didn’t want to end up half in the bag and take this job out of sentiment.

Graham lifted his cup and said, “To the queen and all his family.”

He knocked back two fingers of the scotch and let the warmth spread through him. If he had been a cat he would have purred, but being a cretin, he just leered. Braced against the chill, he continued, “Pendleton is the world’s greatest authority on chickenshit. AgriTech has millions of dollars sunk into chickenshit.”

“Let me guess,” Neal said. “Does the Bank have millions of dollars sunk into AgriTech?”

Graham’s sudden appearance was starting to make sense to Neal.

“That’s my boy,” Graham said.

That says it, too, Neal thought. I’m Graham’s boy, I’m Levine’s boy, but most of all, I’m the Bank’s boy.

The Bank was a quiet little financial institute in Providence, Rhode Island, that promised its wealthy clients two things: absolute privacy from the prying eyes of the press, the public, and the prosecutors; and discreet help on the side with those little problems of life that couldn’t be settled with just plain cash.

That was where Neal came in. He and Graham worked for a secret branch of the bank called “Friends of the Family.” There was no sign on the door, but anybody who had the necessary portfolio knew that he could come into the back office if he had a problem and talk to Ethan Kitteredge, and that Ethan Kitteredge would find a way to work things out, free of charge.

Usually Kitteredge, known to his employees as “the Man,” would work things out by buzzing for Ed Levine, who would phone down to New York for Joe Graham, who would fetch Neal Carey. Neal would then trundle off to find somebody’s daughter, or take a picture of somebody’s wife playing Hide-the-Hot-Dog in the Plaza Hotel, or break into somebody’s apartment to find that all-important second set of books.

In exchange, Friends had sent him to a toney private school, paid his rent, and picked up his college bills.

“So,” Neal said, “The Bank has a humongous loan out to AgriTech, and one of its star scientists has taken a sabbatical. So what?”

“Chickenshit.”

“Yeah, right. What’s the big deal about chickenshit?”

“Not any chickenshit. Pendleton’s chickenshit. Chickenshit is fertilizer, right? You spread it on stuff to make it grow, which sounds pretty fucking gross to me, but hey… Anyway, Pendleton’s been working for umptedy-zumptedy years on a way to squeeze more growing juice out of chickenshit by mixing it with water treated with certain bacteria. This, by the way, is called an ‘enhancing process.’