Patrick Woodhead - The Cloud Maker (2010)

‘Look, we didn’t mean any harm,’ Bill protested, his hands raised defensively.

‘That’s what you all say . . .’ she began, then drifted into silence, shaking her head in disgust. She let the empty bottle fall from her hand and Luca and Bill watched as it rolled a few centimetres on the ground before sticking on a patch of mud. Pulling the scarf back across her mouth, she gave them a final, withering glance before heading back towards the far end of the village. As she left, the crowd started to disperse, a few people staring down at the empty bottle before retreating to the wooden stoops of their homes.

‘Jesus,’ Luca said, his eyes wide. ‘Where the hell did she come from?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Bill, ‘but now I really do feel like an idiot.’

Luca turned to see his friend staring down at the empty bottle, his shoulders slumped.

‘You were only trying to help. Don’t take it to heart. At least a couple of them will be saved by the antibiotics.’

‘Yeah, but . . .’

As Bill raised his head, the beginnings of a smile crept across Luca’s face.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, though. We’re sure as shit not getting a dinner date out of this.’

Slowly Bill’s expression eased, the tension starting to drain from his face. He glanced back at the hut the woman had entered.

‘Who do you think she is? I mean, she barely even had an accent.’

‘Beats me,’ said Luca. ‘Maybe she’s an aid worker or something. She looked more Nepalese than Tibetan to me. Wherever she’s from, I get the feeling she wasn’t too impressed.’

‘Yeah, well, I was only trying to help,’ Bill muttered. Straightening his shoulders, he turned back towards their campsite.

After a final, curious glance towards the woman’s hut, Luca followed.

Chapter 24

‘Who is it?’

There was no reply, only repeated knocking, mechanical and incessant.

‘For the love of God, stop that infernal racket!’

With more than his characteristic lack of agility, René lumbered across the empty restaurant in the direction of the front door. He winced as he blundered through a shaft of sunlight, breaking through from the curtains, and gingerly rubbed his temples.

With years of experiencing biblically proportioned hangovers, he knew that an ice pack and a stiff dose of Paracetamol should just about see him through the day. Both, however, were kept in the kitchen which lay in the opposite direction from which he was currently headed. Reason enough for him to ignore the interruption altogether. Only the interminable knocking had galvanised him into any sort of action.

As he unbolted and swung open the door, René mustered what remained of his strength.

‘What the hell do you think . . . ?’

He stopped abruptly, eyes slowly focussing on the silent figures in front of him. Three silhouettes stood in line on his doorstep, haloed by the harsh morning light. René squinted at them, feeling his headache double in size. Without a word, the leading two soldiers pushed past him and into the restaurant.

‘An unexpected pleasure,’ René said, stumbling back a couple of paces.

A third man stepped over the threshold. He was smaller than the other two. As he walked further into the room, René could see his face was delicate, almost feminine, with no trace of stubble. Only the harsh line of his thin lips offset the fragility of his features.

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.