Free The Buddha of Brewer Street by Michael Dobbs Page A

weren’t allowed to touch. They lived almost entirely within the Embassy walls. They ate in the Embassy’s canteen, worked beneath the Embassy’s harsh lights and slept in the Embassy’s unwelcoming and lonely beds. The cockroaches here were almost as big as in their old university dorms. And their greatest excitement – oh revolutionary joy! – proved to be a communal bus trip to Brighton. Windy, rain-splattered Brighton. Next year they had been promised Bognor.
    Even as the secretaries fluttered at the prospect of Bognor, Mo felt sick with frustration. And his sickness grew. One day he had been permitted (after first reporting to Security) to walk to the Chinese pharmacy in Shaftesbury Avenue so that he might pick up some herbs for the Ambassador. Just down from the pharmacy he had found a young man and his dog, wrapped in a blanket in a doorway. A beggar in the midst of plenty. Proof before his eyes of the Western disease. Except that in his bowl the young man and his dog had made more money in a morning than Mo could spare in a week. A Chinese diplomat, yet he couldn’t even look an English beggar in the eye.
    It could have been worse, of course. Mo was already on the ladder of privilege which, as he climbed, would eventually bring him advantage and reward. Yes, eventually. He’d just decided it would make sense to short-circuit the system a little. To grab some of the benefits before he was too old to enjoy them. Certainly before he was as old as Madame Lin. But he wasn’t about to tell her that. So he said nothing, simply returning her stare defiantly. Why should he incriminate himself? But in spite of his silence, she knew.
    ‘I see. You had touched forbidden fruit and decided to taste it for yourself.’
    ‘What do you propose to do?’
    ‘The rules say I should send you back to Beijing.’
    He flinched. ‘Where the People’s Republic will show its gratitude by taking me to a football stadium, placing me on my knees in front of the crowd and blowing my brains out through my ears.’
    ‘You have broken the rules.’
    ‘As did your predecessor,’ he protested with vehemence. ‘But I doubt that he will be kneeling beside me. There are privileges that accompany rank, even in the People’s Republic.’
    ‘Perhaps particularly in the People’s Republic.’
    Mo started. The prospect of being done to death permitted a measure of cynicism. But he hadn’t expected Madame Lin to reciprocate.
    ‘Simply because I am an Ambassador does not make me blind, Mo. And simply because I am old does not make me forget.’
    ‘Forget what?’
    ‘That I too was once young. A Red Guard. We shot people too, during the terror of the Cultural Revolution. We shot people who had done much less than you. Some who had done nothing at all. We made mistakes far worse than yours.’ She paused. ‘There has been too much shooting.’
    His heart stuttered in hope and disbelief. An old woman, an old revolutionary, come to repentance? ‘What do you intend to do with me?’
    ‘Mo, you are no older than my own daughter. You are a fool in some matters, like politics. But you are adventurous. And adaptable. Such qualities will be necessary in the difficult times ahead.’
    ‘So … what do you intend?’ he repeated.
    She left him hanging for a few pain-filled moments, like a fish impaled on a hook. ‘I intend that you should notice the gap on my mantelpiece, Mo. Where there should be something very old.’ She reeled him in. ‘Perhaps your cousin can fill it for me.’
    They came together to remember him in many corners of the globe. Particularly in Tibet, before the baton charges and electric prods of the People’s Armed Police forced them to flee. Around the world they gathered in small groups, and in vast crowds, the high and the humble, monarchs and those who were merely mortal, to give thanks for the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama.
    On the mountainside in McLeod Ganj, in front of the steps that led to the