French Kiss, page 61
Just as the sun, a majestic red oblate disk, was rising, Mun led him onto a small rock promontory. Over the edge it was a long way down to the jungle floor.
Here, the earth was blackened, filled with powdered ash, as if a bonfire of prodigious size had been burning for months on end.
“You came to discover the truth about your brother,” Mun said. “Here it is. Terry was coerced into joining the Magician’s organization, but at least he did so somewhat on his own terms. He insisted on having complete and autonomous control over the opium pipeline they had wrested from Monsieur Vosges.
“That was agreed upon, but when the Magician discovered that Terry was pulling merely intelligence rather than profits from the pipeline, he threatened to take the network away.
“Terry gave the Magician copies of the diaries he had made on the organization’s work—the originals of which he entrusted to me to disseminate in the event of his death.”
“But why didn’t you bring them to light when Terry was killed?” Chris asked.
“Because,” Mun said, “I no longer had them. Trangh had stolen them.” A wind was rising, and Mun braced himself against the bole of a weather-stunted tree. “When Terry left the organization, he came to me. He was determined to continue running the pipeline, and I decided to help him.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Mun said, “I believed in what he was doing.”
Chris stared incredulously at him. “In feeding poison to kids?”
Mun shook his head. “I told you that I wanted to make certain you would come here, that merely telling you would not have been sufficient. You would have disbelieved me or, at the very least, doubted my word.” He spread his hands. “Now you see the truth with your own eyes.”
Chris looked around him at the scorched earth. Everywhere was ashes. “I don’t understand.”
Mun bent, scooped a handful of ash, let it pour through his fingers like sand through an hourglass. “This is what happened to the opium we purchased from Admiral Jumbo. This is the end of the pipeline.”
Chris was in shock. “You burned it?”
“Yes. We took CIA funds, bought the opium, and destroyed it.”
Chris was looking at him quizzically.
“The other half of the scheme was pure genius. Terry made a deal with the Communist Chinese. In return for destroying a set amount of opium per year they provided him with strategic and military intelligence concerning Russia that they had gleaned from their sources both in the north, at the border, and in Hong Kong.
“When Terry was with the CIA, he provided them with the intelligence. Later, when we were independent, we continued the arrangement, only on our terms. We made they pay through the nose.”
Chris sat down on a part of the outcropping. This, then, was the secret, the end of his quest. Perhaps. He carefully unwrapped the Prey Dauw, in preparation for what? he wondered. He looked up at Mun. “But something happened.”
Mun nodded. “For a long time we were in a position of great power. I suspect that it finally got to Terry. Suddenly, doing what we were doing wasn’t enough for him. He wanted the Forest of Swords. He wanted to use it to control all the opium warlords, to unite them under one man: himself. And, in the process, he seemed determined to destroy the Magician.”
“But why, after all that time? They seemed to have lived in an uneasy truce for so long.”
“About two years ago the Magician became aware of you, who you were. In you he saw a way to get back the pipeline he felt
Terry had stolen from him. He threatened Terry, and that set everything in motion.”
“I can’t believe that Terry was really going to sell the Doorway to Night to Monsieur Vosges.”
“No,” Mun said. “He wasn’t. That’s why he had the duplicate made up. I knew nothing about this, and would have fought him had I found out. Terry knew this, and did it secretly. We needed money. The CIA had reneged on their last payments. Budgetary problems, they said. Terry didn’t believe them. Anyway, we needed the cash.”
Chris turned away. He stared out into the nothingness suspended beyond the rock outcropping. All this had happened because Terry had wanted to protect him from Marcus Gable. My God, between them they managed to turn the world upside down.
For the first time Chris saw a glimmering, an intimation of the extent of the power at work here. He did not know whether to be terrified or exhilarated. And then, with a shivery start, he realized that this mixture of emotions was precisely what Terry must have once felt.
He got up, approached Mun. “Before he died, Trangh told me everything he knew about the Magician’s setup. He knew all the keys but one: who the Magician was working for. But Seve’s people found out who that is: Jason Craig, chairman of the board of International Communications Conglomerate. Trangh compiled records, taped conversations. They have enough evidence, with what I gave them, to indict him.”
Mun looked at him. “An indictment is a long way from a conviction,” he said. “Guys like Craig employ armies of lawyers full-time who are prepared for anything.”
Chris was already shaking his head. “Who better than I would know that?” He grinned. “I used to be one of those lawyers. But I’m on the side of the angels now, Mun. I’ll make sure Craig won’t get off.”
He turned into the sunlight. The toe of his boot stirred the ash, like black sand on the shores of oblivion. Here, at last, in the elemental jungle of Burma, Chris could feel Terry close beside him like an abiding presence. “You know,” he said slowly, “before all this, I though I’d had it with the legal profession. Now I realized that it was the kind of lawyer I had become that I couldn’t stand.
“I was all ego, Mun, eager to take on the impossible cases other lawyers wouldn’t touch for fear of failure. I craved notoriety as if
I were an addict. You know what Terry called me? Le monstre sacré. The superstar. And that’s exactly what I was. I burned with an impossible brightness. I burned with ambition, and blinded myself to the kinds of people I took on as clients, telling myself that everyone is entitled to legal counsel and a proper defense. But really what I was doing was playing a game, a game where I outwitted the prosecution. This game had nothing to do with my clients, which was why it was so easy to blind myself to their evil. It had to do with me.”
He saw, then, the terrible illusion of freedom. When most people spoke of freedom, they did so with the insular consciousness of “I.” Freedom, though Chris like a child was just learning it, was pure ego, rampant selfishness. That was not what he wanted for himself.
It was a matter of choice. Chris’s choice. He remembered reading somewhere that in Eden, Adam and Eve’s choice had been that of self over God, arrogance over faith. Their choice was not as was normally supposed about blind obedience or righteous piety. His choice was very much the same because he had glimpsed the truth, that all choice was created at the same source.
At the end Trangh had spoken of faith, that faith was synonymous with an absence of desire—as it were, a pure spirit, as Mun wished now to be. Chris knew that he would never be a pure spirit; he was far too human to dream such godlike dreams. But he could be a better human being.
Tour brother was like me: a primitive, Trangh had said. He lived his life according to a strict inner code of honor, one that he upheld all his life. Now Chris saw that it had been a stricter code of honor than he himself—the righteous brother!—had been able to muster. It was both a humbling and an exalting experience, for in this one moment of recognition, Chris had at last found his brother and himself. The circle was completed, and the first beginning tendrils of a kind of contentment began to steal over him like the onset of the sunrise.
All at once Chris realized that all this time he had been holding the Prey Dauw. The leaf-green jade blades seemed to glow with an inner light, but when he turned the talisman into the sunlight, the jade turned opaque, as black as night. Between his palms, the dark, shining river, pulling at him. It was like a drug: alluring, fascinating, multiplying its power to seduce like a skein twined by an unseen weaver. But he also recognized in its depths an alarming, inchoate danger, a path that, if not adeptly sidestepped, could strip him of all humanity.
“Mun, is the Prey Dauw’s power real?”
Mun smiled. His face, free of care and worry lines, was burnished like the jade by the oblique early-morning light. “I suppose,” he said, “it depends who you speak to. Belief is an odd and complex region which has yet to be fully explored.”
Chris cocked his head. “Is that a yes or a no?”
Mun looked at him. “I am surprised you are asking. It is both, of course. The power of the Prey Dauw lies in the mind.”
Chris stared at the talisman, feeling—or supposing he felt—its limitless power. “What will become of it now?”
“That is entirely up to you. It belongs to you. Yours is the power to wield, if you choose to.”
Chris was already shaking his head. “No. Not me. It belongs to someone pure of spirit. I hardly qualify.” He looked into Mun’s open face. “What should I do? I can’t just bury it somewhere, that would be irresponsible. Won’t you help me?”
Mun smiled. “You must know, Chris, that you are not alone. You have Terry.” He pressed his palm to the center of Chris’s chest. “Just here. In your heart. Perhaps he speaks to you.” He gestured. “Perhaps this place speaks to you. I can see that you have responded to the spirit of the Shan.”
His chest was warm where Mun had touched him, and he was very aware of his heartbeat. It was not only Terry he held inside him, but Alix as well. He had understood that the moment he came upon the ridge bathed in the sunshine of a new day.
What of Soutane? Mun had said, I had hoped, when you came back into her life, that her pain would end. But now Chris saw that it was not up to him to end Soutane’s inner torment. Neither was it up to Mun. That kind of healing could only come from Soutane herself.
Soutane was part of his past. Her essence was encysted there beside the figure of himself as a youth, the two like images in a sepia-toned photograph. It was Alix who belonged to his present, whom this modern-day Christopher Haye missed and longed for.
“That was the other reason you brought me here, isn’t it?” he said. “So I could have a chance to feel the world as Terry did.”
“I have accomplished what I wanted,” Mun said. “You have your answers, you have seen the truth. Now I must return to Sagaing. The Buddha calls me.”
Chris held out the Forest of Swords. “I think, in the end, he knew you would be its guardian.”
“Who?” But it was clear that Mun already knew.
“Trangh.” Chris felt a great weight at the thought of the power he held in his hands. “To be free from desire, he said. If you know that, you know everything.”
Mun had taken his eyes from Chris’s. “The Prey Dauw is a great transmitter of power. In this land people would call you God or Lord or Master with it in your hand. The opium generals would prostrate themselves before you. You could have anything. Are you certain you want to give that up?”
Chris grinned as he placed the talisman in Mun’s hands, the mesmerizing lapping of the dark, shining river fading. “I never had it,” he said.
In a moment the two of them turned and, walking through the ashes, climbed down off the bare peak.
Up here, as elsewhere in the world, Chris knew, it was not in gaining the power that the danger lay. It was in allowing the power to destroy you.
He knew that from this day forward, he would never forget that. The old Christopher Haye never even would have dreamed of the concept, let alone have been on guard against it.
But this person who walked the Shan with such assurance was someone new. Chris was looking forward to getting to know him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Van Lustbader is the author of Zero, Shan, Jian, Black Heart, and The Ninja, all bestsellers. He lives in New York City and in Southampton, Long Island, with his wife, editor Victoria Schochet Lustbader.
Eric Van Lustbader, French Kiss
