The Second Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (Dharma Detective: Tenzing Norbu Mystery) (17 page)

“Let’s meet at the parking lot across from Patrick’s Roadhouse, by Entrada Drive. I’ll pick up some food. Anything you don’t eat?”

“I don’t eat anything that has eyes,” she said. “Except potatoes.”

I laughed. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

I bought two large Greek salads and a side of hummus from the Urth Café, my go-to restaurant for eyeless foods. I parked next to Heather’s little Honda. She was sitting inside, headphones on, bopping her head to something on her iPad. I tapped on her window. She climbed out, and we gave each other a friendly SoCal half hug. She grabbed a blanket from her trunk, and we carried our matching eco-friendly bags down to the beach.

I unpacked our little picnic. Heather handed over a chilled bottle of wine and a corkscrew. Puligny-Montrachet. Nice. I worked the cork out of the bottle while she spread her blanket and set down the food.

“Oops,” she said. “No glasses.”

“No problem,” I said. I handed her the bottle, and she took a sip. She handed it back to me, and I did the same. The wine was crisp and dry; its flinty edge woke up my taste buds.

“To health and happiness,” I said.

“And everything else good,” she answered. Heather popped a kalamata olive into her mouth with long, slender fingers. Up close, they looked stronger than I’d remembered.

“Do you play an instrument?”

Her eyes widened. “Classical guitar. Ever since I started med school,” she said. “How did you know?”

“Your fingers. They’re the fingers of a musician.”

She studied them. “I started taking lessons to relax, you know, as a kind of stress-release. But one day I hit a chord—it was a big, open G chord—and it sounded so amazing, I must have strummed it a hundred times. Now I’m hooked. If I could, I’d play every day.”

“Do you have a favorite guitarist?”

“Andrés Segovia,” Heather sighed. “He’s the gold standard. I dream of sounding like him some day.” For once, instead of blurting out something trite like, “I’m sure you will,” I just smiled. I also refrained from discussing work, hers or mine. I just wasn’t in the mood. Neither, it seemed, was she. We ate in companionable silence, Heather matching me bite for bite, opting out of the usual flurry of first-date chitchat. What a relief. After we finished eating, I stood up and stretched.

“Walk?” I held out my hand.

“Sounds good.” I pulled her upright. We kicked off our shoes, stowed them in our bags, and strolled barefoot in the cool sand, serenaded by the crash and pull of the waves.

We stopped to watch the dark green water, the curls of foam almost phosphorescent. “Can I ask you something?” Heather asked. “Something personal?”

Here we go, I thought. “Sure,” I said, and braced for romantic commitment questions. But Heather had a different kind of commitment on her mind.

“Bill tells me you’re Tibetan. That you trained to be a monk.”

“Half Tibetan. And almost-monk.”

“But you’re a practicing Buddhist, right?”

“Yes. Well, kind of. Yes.”

“How does that work? I mean, how do you do what you do and stay true to what you believe?”

Chitchat suddenly wasn’t looking so bad. I dug my toes in the sand, a tiny postponement.

“I don’t, at least not all the time. I just do the best I can.”

“And how does that feel, inside I mean? To be committed to nonviolence, and working in a profession that concentrates on the opposite?”

I let the question settle, and soon, the answer floated up.

“Lonely,” I said. “It feels lonely.”

She nodded. “I sensed that.”

My iPhone pinged. Good timing. “Sorry, I have to check this,” I said. I opened the e-mail from
ilovechaotica.com
and quickly found the location details. I was heading downtown next, way downtown.

“You have to get going,” Heather said. I nodded. “To be continued?” she said.

“To be continued.”

As we strolled back, Heather slipped her hand into mine.

“Two Ten-sightings in one day,” she said. “This is nice.”

A jogger ran past us in the dark, and I flashed on the morning before, when I was the jogger and my crazy brain had concocted a very different Heather scenario.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”

We reached our cars. We faced each other. The awkward time was at hand.

“Thank you,” she said. “I like being with you.” She delivered a soft kiss to my cheek.

“Me, too,” I said. My pulse raced. “And, and if I were a cool California dude, I’d know what the next step should be.”

She cocked her head. “But?” she said.

“But I’m not. I’m a Tibetan transplant who hasn’t quite mastered the whole ‘cool’ thing.”

“Well thank God for small favors.”

We shared a smile. I touched her cheek.

“Heather . . . “ My voice trailed off.

“We’ll get there,” she said, still smiling. “These things take time,” and climbed in her car.

The e-mail instructions to the event on 11th and Main had been terse. Doors open at 10
P.M
.; park on the street; no cameras allowed;
Don’t Loiter!,
followed by a list of set times and performers. My eyes widened. The last set
started
at five
A.M.
What was wrong with these people?

I hit traffic on the Harbor Freeway and got off on Sixth. I took Main south, one way all the way, past a doggy day care that I wouldn’t put my worst enemy’s mutt in, past the Topshape Training Center, which looked anything but. As I neared the location, I skirted around a patrol car askew in the street, red and blue lights flashing. Two cops had a young banger cuffed, pressed against a warehouse wall. His baggy shorts reached almost to his ankles, and his body radiated defiance. Don’t loiter, indeed.

Finally I reached a squat concrete bunker of a building, ominously deserted. But then I noticed the small row of windows across the top: They flickered and flashed red and blue lights. Unless a cop car was inside, I’d found my event.

I was very glad I had come in the Toyota. My Mustang would have been stripped down to its bare chassis in minutes around here. I parked on a side street around the corner, grabbed my laptop, and walked into a small courtyard, where a cluster of smokers were talking and laughing.

“I pop-locked and broke it down!” one of them brayed. “Ridic!” another yelled, and they all bumped fists. I was entering Mike Koenigs–land, one more situation where I didn’t know the customs, and I didn’t speak the language.

A young woman with a slender ring through her right nostril and a red
bindi
marking her forehead guarded the door. I’ll bet she had no idea she and her bindi were telling the world she was married. I showed her the e-ticket on my phone, and she waved me inside.

The sound-assault was instant, and shocking: the loud, deep drone of a bass line, overlaid with multiple streams of electronic sound, reverberating between the exposed brick walls. About 20 couples writhed and swayed to the music, most of them reading their smart phone screens at the same time.

Another young woman—multiple piercings, a thatch of neon pink hair—was tending a well-stocked bar illuminated by a little pink lamp. I wasn’t expecting liquor—a vat full of powdered horse tranquilizer seemed more likely. A swarthy young man in a baseball cap crouched on the floor to the left, working a sound board. A single blinking spotlight roamed the room, bathing the swaying bodies in blue, green, red, and back to blue again, as a mechanical, sirenlike wail looped around the rhythmic pounding.

I located the nexus of sound. And found Mike, or “dj mk,” as the e-mail referred to him, headphones askew, traversing a long table of blinking orange lights and electronic equipment: laptops, turntables, iPods, iPhones, mouses, soundboards. Hunched over, his fingers flew over various keys and buttons, a tall skinny maestro. I caught his eye. He smiled, held up five fingers, tapped his watch, and returned to his rocket-ship dashboard. Five minutes was good. I can tolerate anything for five minutes. I leaned against one wall and closed my eyes. The blanket of sound began to separate into different tonal threads, some human, some not. Layers within layers, streams within streams, repetitive, meditative. A deep underlying chord of male voices began to vibrate, overtaking the other sounds.
Oooowahhhh
, the glottal texture amplified, vibrating with my insides like a tuning fork, and just like that, I was transported to Dorje Yidam. Twelve years old and experiencing for the first time the reverberating chants of a trio of Tibetan throat singers. Now, as then, the base notes throbbed, resonated, and probed directly into my chest. For a moment, suspended between two realities of time and place, I slipped into boundlessness, where neither one existed.

A dancer jostled my arm, and I startled back into the brick-lined warehouse. Mike transferred his headphones to another DJ, a shorter, stockier version of Mike, the transition seamless. The pulsing sound continued uninterrupted.

Mike grabbed a bottle of water and joined me.

“Wow,” I yelled. “I get why you like this music! It’s tantric! I may have just experienced techno-induced
samadhi!
”

Mike grinned and leaned close to my ear. “You sure you’re not riding some k-love down the rabbit hole, boss?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, “and for that, I am grateful.”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me to the outside courtyard. A sweet-faced, pretty girl with a shiny cap of chestnut hair and bright, blue-green eyes stepped to Mike’s side. A pair of red sparkly devil’s horns nested in her hair. She wore a miniscule black dress over red tights and red and black plaid high tops. The tip of her head barely reached the middle of Mike’s chest, not counting the horns. Bending slightly, he encircled her with one arm. “This is my girl, Tricia. Tricia, this is Ten.” I stuck out my hand. She darted under it to give me a hug.

“Happy almost-Halloween,” she said.

I liked her. She was unexpectedly normal. A communal whoop emerged from the doorway of the venue. She kissed Mike on the lips and danced back inside.

“Nice girl,” I said.

“I’m so lucky,” he replied, without a shred of irony. “So, what do you need, boss?”

I explained about Zigo and showed him the business card. He shook his head.

“This is about setting you up on Skype?” he said. “That’s the emergency?”

“Yes. Why?”

Mike grabbed me by the shoulders and leaned close to my face.

“Ten, you have got to get over this computer phobia. Dude, getting on Skype is like, like . . . I don’t even know what to say. Like learning how to count to one.”

He set up my laptop on a low wall surrounding the courtyard and opened the screen.

“I’m going to make you do this all by yourself,” he said.

Five minutes later, I had a Skype account. Note to self: next time, at least try learning something new before you take a drive in the dead of night to a sleazy no-loiter zone for help.

Following Mike’s directions, I then clicked on “Add a Contact” and typed “Helmut Zigo” into the box. I clicked on “Search” and his account name popped up right away.

“Now what?”

“Now, you send him a message,” Mike said.

I clicked open the chat-box and typed in “Are you available to talk?” I took a deep breath and sent the message. Ten seconds later I got a reply:

HELMUTZIGO: DON’T RECGNZE U. WHO R U
?

TENZINGNORBU: I REPRESENT JULIUS R.

HELMUTZIGO: OK. R U A LWYER
?

TENZINGNORBU: NO, THANK GOD.

HELMUTZIGO: HAHA. WHT THEN
?

TENZINGNORBU: PRIVATE DETECTIVE. YOU
?

HELMUTZIGO: BSNESS. I ND TO CHCK U OUT. LV SKYPE ON AND WLL SND U MSG ABT NXT MTG.

His icon disappeared from the screen. So that was Helmut Zigo. All I knew about him so far was he didn’t like to use vowels. I needed to check him out as well.

“See? Easy as pie,” Mike said.

“Could he see me?”

“Nah, but that’s easy to do, too.” Mike showed me how to click on the video icon. “It only works as a video-phone if you and the other person have webcams. I’m surprised you haven’t used this to contact your buddies in India, it being free and all.”

I smiled at the thought of Yeshe and Lobsang trying to find their way around a computer. I was Bill Gates compared to them, unless things had changed drastically.

“Okay,” Mike said. “You sticking around? The three
A.M
. set’s going to be huge.” He registered the look of horror on my face. “Right. Catch you later.” He ducked inside and was instantly enveloped by a wall of sound.

I staggered through my front door an hour later. Tank skated between my legs, rubbing against my shins and meowing. Tank never meowed. I scooped him into my arms.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea I’d be gone this long.” Cradling him with one arm, I scrounged around the pantry for a tin of chicken liver pâté I’d stored for just such an emergency. I set him down next to his dish. His tail broomed the floor as I emptied the tin. I sat cross-legged beside him, holding his feathery tail as he ate, telling him about my long, crazy day.

I checked my computer one last time, but Zigo remained silent. I was glad. I didn’t think I could take another interaction with another human being tonight.

I fell into bed. The last thing I experienced was the dense thud of cat landing beside me.

C
HAPTER
13

I slept so long and deep that Tank had to nudge me awake with his paws. I got out of bed a new man. Today was going to be Julius Rosen day. All day. I checked my Skype account first thing, but there was no word yet from Zigo. I tried Googling him, but the scant information there was came up in German. I bookmarked what was there. I fed Tank, made myself a yogurt and banana smoothie, and suited up for a good long run. My body was barking for exercise like a cooped-up rescue dog.

I jogged into Topanga State Park by way of Trippet Ranch and ran the Musch trail hard, working up a good sweat despite the cool, misty air. I stepped off the trail for some reps, mostly curls and push-ups, and then started jogging at a nice easy pace.