The Assassin Lotus Read online

  THE ASSASSIN LOTUS

  David Angsten

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE ASSASSIN LOTUS. Copyright © 2014

  by David Angsten. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

  www.davidangsten.com

  [email protected]

  Twitter: @DavidAngsten

  [email protected]

  To my brave and loving 90-year-old mom,

  against whom the enemies of Western civilization

  do not stand a chance.

  The Jewel is in the Lotus

  Nirvana is in Samsara

  The Buddha is in the World

  Map

  Table of Contents

  Map

  Part I: ROME

  1. I Awoke From a Dream

  2. Maya

  3. The Garden

  4. Rakshasas

  5. See Jack Run

  6. Rabbit Hole

  7. Loca

  8. Spider

  9. Polizia

  10. The Sayyid

  11. Queen of Hearts

  12. truth

  13. The Satyricon

  14. The Excelsior

  15. Knock-knock

  16. Porsche or Audi?

  17. Safari

  18. The Walled Garden

  19. Running Scared

  20. Fractured Fairy Tale

  21. Ashkhabad

  22. The Object

  23. Someplace Safe

  24. The Grip

  25. Gods and Beasts

  26. Istanbul

  27. Madness

  28. Hazel

  29. The Help of Allah

  Part II: THE CASPIAN

  30. Opera Buffa

  31. Beatrice

  32. Fake

  33. Tomb of Tomes

  34. Cowboy

  35. The Hidden Imam

  36. The Source of Happiness

  37. the Truth

  38. Mandala

  39. I am the Buddha

  Part III: THE KARAKUM

  40. Camel Crossing

  41. Saints & Sinners

  42. Diplomacy

  43. Call of Duty

  44. Three Deaths

  45. Black Coffin

  46. Lock and Load

  47. The Shot

  48. God is Great

  49. Cipher

  50. Vajra

  51. The Proof

  Part IV: BUKHARA

  52. Seven Good Reasons

  53. Borzoo Baghestani

  54. Woolsey

  55. The Old Man

  56. A Not-so-tall Tail

  57. Tower of Death

  58. I am the Assassin

  59. Silk Road Tea House

  60. Black Camel

  61. Heaven on Earth

  Part V: SAMARKAND

  62. Caravan on Wheels

  63. Kafirs

  64. Delhi Man

  65. The Flower Sermon

  66. In Your Dreams

  67. Conqueror of the World

  68. Moonbeam

  69. The Crypt

  70. Grave Robbers

  71. The Scientist

  72. Kukri

  73. The Observatory

  74. The Source

  75. The Empty “O”

  76. Invincible

  77. Xitoy

  Part VI: SAMSARA

  78. Kutana

  79. The Fifth Assassin

  80. Doubt and Uncertainty

  81. Death Chant

  82. Womb

  83. Fire in the Mind

  84. Dharma Road

  85. To Kill a Man

  86. What You Have to Do

  87. Go Deeper

  88. Now

  89. Nirvana

  90. Irresistible in Battle

  91. Like Water

  92. Home

  93. The Cry

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FINAL NOTE

  ROME

  1.

  I Awoke From a Dream

  I AWOKE FROM A DREAM in the dead of night, that hour when your fear lays bare the truth that you’ve been hiding. My dream was like that song they write a thousand different ways, the one about the love you lost, the girl that stole your heart, the face you can’t forget. In mine she’s sitting still as stone beneath an ancient oak, staring off inscrutably, unaware I’m there. Her beauty takes my breath away. Her glance would stop my heart. However hard I try it seems I cannot turn away from her. The woman has enthralled me. Longing is my fate.

  It’s a cynic’s dream, I realize, now that I’m awake. A jilted lover’s pity party. An alibi for apathy; no surrogates will do.

  Which only begged the question: Who was this unfortunate woman lying beside me now?

  Her snoring had woke me up. Open mouth gasping through the tangle of her hair, face half-buried in her pillow. What was it we’d been drinking? All I could remember was that first red carafe. A deep fatigue still dragged me down; I could not seem to shake it. Studying her face, I forced myself awake.

  She hadn’t been on the tour, that much I remembered; she’d joined up with my group of students later at the club. Half-Asian, half-Caucasian, an alluring blend of East and West, yet so gregariously American she fit right in among them. Something about the woman had reminded me of Phoebe. Her spirit, her “spark.” The immediate attraction. But I could not remember now the color of her eyes—always a bad sign. And then it occurred to me, lying there beside her in that crappy pensione, I couldn’t even remember her name. Glenda? Gwyneth? I know it started with a G. Gina? Ginny? Something like that. Gabby?

  She had been a talker. University of Miami, “the one in Ohio,” she said, a vital point of distinction. Her program was out of Luxembourg. With a few fellow students, she’d traveled by train to Rome. This was to be her last night on the town before heading back to the States. Final chance for that foreign fling with the dark and handsome stranger. After all, what is that glorious semester abroad but a closet romantic’s make-believe adventure? In reality, Europe is just one big museum, the display of a dead culture’s former greatness, everything God left behind before he finally died, all prettily preserved for the tourists.

  That’s where I came in. Guide to the Eternal Museum by day, escort to the underground clubs at night. No dark and seductive Italian, perhaps, but good enough in a pinch, and probably safer, too. I made certain of that. Both of us could rest assured that nothing we did mattered. Aside from a hangover, our night of blithe abandon would be free of consequences. STDs. Pregnancy. Or God forbid, love.

  Or even love-making, as it turned out. Yes, I had been that wasted. Waiting forever for her to return from the bathroom down the hall, I had fallen fast asleep.

  I got dressed now quietly in the dark, careful not to wake her. Why go through the embarrassment? Why bother with goodbye? Would she remember my name? Even if she did, she’d probably feign to forget, laughing it off with the other young scholars swapping tales on the way to the airport, flaunting the newfound sophistication they were transporting back to Ohio.

  But later, on the plane perhaps, sitting with her headphones on, gazing down at the sea, she might think of me a moment, conjure up my face, recall something I said—that joke about the gelded gladiator?—converting me into a reminiscence, an “experience” had in Europe, repeating my name one last time before filing me away for good.

  Jack Duran
. That derelict American I tried to hook up with in Rome.

  How quickly, I wondered, would he be forgotten?

  [IN PERSIAN:]

  “VANITAR. WAKE UP.”

  Arshan’s voice startled me awake. I instinctively grabbed the steering wheel, then remembered the car was parked.

  Arshan nodded out the windshield. “He’s leaving,” he said. “Alone.”

  Duran had stepped out the hotel door. He stopped under the streetlight and pulled out his cell.

  “Who do you think he’s calling?” I asked.

  “A taxi,” Arshan muttered.

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do you think?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Look. What’s he doing?”

  “Standing there. Dialing.”

  “And what is it he’s not doing?”

  A thousand things, I thought.

  “Walking and dialing,” he said.

  Duran held the phone up to his ear repeatedly.“There’s something wrong with his cell,” I said.

  “Yes. Something.”

  “Maybe the battery died.”

  Arshan watched in silence.

  At last Duran pocketed the phone and started up the street. “If he was calling for a cab,” I said, “looks like he’s given up.”

  “Take us back to the hotel,” Arshan said.

  I started the car. “Don’t you want to follow him?”

  “He’s going home,” he said.

  “How can you know that?”

  Arshan watched the American slowly disappear into the dark. “I just know,” he said.

  2.

  Maya

  “I CAN’T HEAR—ARE YOU THERE?”

  The clock showed half past noon. I pushed open the shutters and squinted into the sunlight. “I am. ...Aren’t I?” The grogginess still lingered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello...hello...pronto—”

  “There you are,” she said. “For a second there I lost you.”

  “Sorry, it’s my cell,” I said. “Been acting funny lately.”

  “Have you complained to your provider?”

  “No, why?”

  “I just...wonder who’s responsible.”

  “Responsible? Signora, this is Italy.”

  She laughed. In India, Maya is the goddess of illusion. In Rome, she was a tourist on the telephone.

  She told me she worked in the city of Mumbai as a rep for a clothing company. Visiting Rome on business, she was leaving the following day. “I’m looking to hire a guide,” she said. “I’d like a private tour of the Forum.” She had found my travel site online and was calling me from her hotel room.

  A professional woman, traveling alone, was not my typical client. Like my group of undergrads the previous day, my customers were usually students abroad, or American families on a budget. If they didn’t want to hire an Italian guide, tourists of means preferred to call my competition, like the retired Australian classics professor, or the lesbian British historian, native English speakers with credentials and a license and connections to the major travel packagers. Why had Maya Rakshasi picked me?

  After we hung up, I Googled her. No direct match turned up, but her surname drew a curious link. It turned out to be the name for the females of a race of Hindu-Buddhist demons known as the Rakshasas, warrior spirits that feed on human flesh and are shape-shifting masters of magic and illusion.

  I looked forward to meeting her.

  We rendezvoused at noon at the entry gate. She was easy to spot in the crowd. Striking, cinnamon-skinned, hair a lacquered black. On the phone her elegant voice had sounded smokily middle-aged, but in person she looked not much older than me, probably early thirties. She greeted me with a firm handshake and a penetrating gaze. While I might not describe her as a Bollywood beauty, she did have a provocative physicality about her, a barely veiled sexual presence. Something in her eyes seemed predatory, too—a dispassionate sort of cunning or curiosity. Definitely more cat than kitten, I thought. Her mother might have mated with a panther.

  Late that evening, after the tour, we met at a restaurant in Trastevere. It was just a few blocks from the rooms I rented and a stone’s throw away from the Tiber. An old man at the back played a violin, and the waiters spoke only Italian. I wore my weathered, ivory-colored jacket with its epaulet straps and button-flap pockets, playing up my image as “safari guide” to Rome. Maya sat across from me with her back against the wall, bare-shouldered in a gauzy summer sari. Her face looked dark in the candlelight, but her amber eyes shone bright. When she asked me to translate the menu, I slid into the seat beside her. Maya seemed to like the arrangement. After we ordered, I stayed.

  We talked about India and various sites I had visited there several years before. Then we talked about Italy, the Italians, and Rome. This led to my mentioning the novel I was reading, the ribald classic of debauchery, The Satyricon, written in the days of Nero. It turned out Maya had read Petronius’ tale, too, and we had both seen the film by Fellini. As so often occurs in that chronicle of excess, the two of us were soon swimming in wine. Wine was the point of our dinner, really, even if we didn’t acknowledge it. We knew we had only one night together. There wasn’t much time for romance.

  When she asked if I often took lady clients out to dinner, I told her she was the first. She didn’t even pretend to believe me.

  After the meal we strolled out onto the Ponte Sisto bridge, now thoroughly defaced with graffiti like every other structure in Rome. An African immigrant in a Ché T-shirt was hawking wilted flowers. “Rosone! Rosone!” Halfway out we paused to gaze at the rippling moon on the water.

  I asked Maya how she came to choose me out of all the tour guides in the city.

  She grinned. “I’d be embarrassed to tell you.” She spoke with a beguiling British accent, that enduring remnant of the Raj.

  “Tell me,” I insisted, nudging her.

  Laughter lit up her face—“I can’t!”

  “I need to know,” I told her. “For professional reasons.”

  Maya, smiling, looked away. “Well, if that’s the case…” Stretching her arms to the rim of the bridge, she coyly turned her eyes on me. “The truth is, Jack…I liked your picture.”

  “Ha!” I scoffed.

  But her eyes stayed with mine, and her smile faded away.

  It’s remarkable how willingly you can fall for an illusion, especially one that caters to your vanity and lust. I lifted Maya’s hand off the rail and gently pulled her toward me. “You’re beautiful,” I whispered.

  As I started to kiss her, she turned away, glancing shyly around us. “Didn’t you say you lived near here?”

  “I didn’t say. But I do.”

  [IN PERSIAN:]

  “THEY’RE LEAVING.”

  “Your powers of observation are improving by the day.”

  “Shall I follow?”I asked.

  “We know where they’re going. The question is why they’re going there.”

  “What do you imagine? Sex? Drugs?”

  “You’re the expert, Vanitar. I didn’t go to university.”

  “Sex and drugs, then, I suspect.”

  “Yes, he is an American.”

  “But the lady is a Hindi,” I said.

  “And to you this makes a difference? Must you constantly pick at that?”

  “Must you smoke in the car?” I licked the cut above my lip. “The scab is finally coming off.”

  “Little boys nurse little wounds. Learn to wear yours proudly.”

  “Why? Because you put it there?”

  “Because it improves your looks.”

  “We’re going to lose them if we don’t—”

  “Not just yet.”

  “What is it?”

  “How many times have I told you? Look more carefully. See.”

  “The cop?”I asked.

  “Open your eyes, brother.”

  “I don’t—”

  “The roach. With the flowers
.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was there. This afternoon.”

  “At the ruins?”

  “Look—now. What do you see?”

  “He’s…walking.”

  “And?”

  “He’s…turning down the next street.”

  “And?”

  “Same direction?”

  “And?”

  “And… The flowers—he left them on the bridge!”

  3.

  The Garden

  MY INTENTION WAS TO DELIVER Maya directly to my bedroom, but when she heard my landlord had a garden on the roof, she insisted I take her up there for a drink. I grabbed two glasses and a bottle of grappa and led her up the twisting stairwell.

  The townhouse, like so many habitations in the medieval neighborhood of Trastevere, was undergoing a seemingly perpetual renovation. The first two floors, vacated and barren, were occasionally visited by a seventy-year-old carpenter and his crew of Albanian plasterers, but my rooms on the third floor, behind the owner’s apartment, had not been touched by trowel or brush in probably fifty years. Gaps in cracking plaster revealed darkly rotting brick, the ancient floorboards sprouted deadly square-head iron nails, and the rickety staircase spiraled up the hall like an escape route out of Dante’s Inferno.

  The rooftop deck was another world entirely. My landlord’s urban Eden was an ersatz jungle of potted citrus, bougainvillea, hibiscus and bamboo. “Una parte piccolo di paradiso” he called it—a little piece of paradise. He had left me to care for it over the summer while he attended to his dying mother in Palermo.

  Maya’s eyes were soon drawn to a green-glazed pot of water with a floating lotus flower. Its red and gold petals appeared to burn beneath the moon.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.

  I uncorked the bottle of grappa. “Signore Moscato grew it from a seed.”

  She bent to caress the flower with her fingers. Her black hair shimmered as it fell around her face. “What is it called?” she asked.

  I told her I didn’t know.

  She tucked her hair behind an ear, turning her bronze eyes on me. “Do you know where he found the seed?”