Karma (3 page)

Four doors led from the room. Up a few steps behind me was a small, low door. I pulled it open and found myself facing the first row of the audience in the temple. I shut it before anyone noticed me.

At the rear of the room was a door to the outside. It was locked.

Still, anyone who had access to the key—or a credit card to load the lock—could have entered here and popped up through the trapdoor to kill Padmasvana.

Coming back down the steps I looked at the two remaining walls. One was blank; the other held two doors—one at the top of the stairs that led to the side of the stage, the one Braga had used; and a lacquered red door.

I pushed open the red door.

The room behind it might have been a well-appointed law office, with its rosewood desk and padded leather chair, its Oriental rug and, in the far corner, an antique safe. On top of the safe were piles of greenbacks—mostly fives—enough to make theft a very inviting prospect. I crossed the room toward it.

“Hold it!”

I spun to face a handgun and Rexford Braga.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, eyeing my jeans. He lowered the weapon and, glancing at it, added, “It’s okay. I have a permit.”

“Do you always carry a gun, Mr. Braga?”

“Of course not. I keep it here in my desk. You can ask anyone. They all know I keep it in the desk drawer. It’s for protection.”

“Protection. Were you afraid one of Padmasvana’s followers might hold you up?”

He strode past me, planting himself in front of the money-laden safe. Taking a breath, he stood up straighter and looked at me as he might have done with an audience. “Of course, Officer, I have no such worries about the devotees. Certainly none of them would consider theft, even though crime had become a way of life for many before they came under the light of Padmasvana. Some of the devotees were on drugs, many had stolen, but since they have been here at the ashram, they have come to understand the benefits of the spiritual life.

“No, Officer, it is not our devotees I worry about. But surely you, of all people, are aware of the crime rate in Berkeley. Anyone could break in the back door. I do keep the office locked when the donations are here. I make sure everyone knows that. You see, Officer”—he waited till I had nodded—“you see, I realize that precaution is the best protection.”

I felt as if he were expecting applause. “So, Mr. Braga, that means anyone could have come through the basement and you wouldn’t have noticed. And anyone familiar with your routine could have counted on that.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true. It’s a very uncomfortable idea, some stranger prowling here.”

“Less uncomfortable than the alternative.” Braga said nothing but instinctively moved closer to the piles of cash. In the silence I took time to observe him. Up close there was nothing outstanding about the man. He was shorter than average, about thirty pounds overweight—a factor that he had ignored when choosing his shirt. Braga had grown his hair long and sprayed it down; it hung in stiff clumps over his collar. His eyes were pale, his nose a line between the swells of his cheeks, his mustache mirrored the weak curve of his chin. Unquestionably, Braga was someone who looked better from a distance.

“About the receipts, Mr. Braga. How much do you have there?”

“Nearly six hundred. Could have had more. Every seat was filled. Padma was drawing better and better. Particularly tonight, he—” Braga looked away. “I didn’t mean—”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Well … I suppose…”

“What is it?”

“It’s just that, well, during the ceremony Padma spoke a few words of English.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, many of the devotees thought that he planned to atone for the evil they had done before they became his followers.”

“Are you saying that Padmasvana decided to die tonight? That he stabbed himself?”

Braga shook his head, a small motion that barely agitated the clumps of hair on his collar. “No, no, Officer, I am not saying anything definite. I’m merely telling you that this was a feeling among some of the devotees.”

“But stabbing? Wouldn’t that be a rather violent way of dying?”

“Perhaps. Padmasvana was a very advanced being. Who are we to question his methods?”

“Why would the devotees think that, Mr. Braga?”

“The words ‘I go.’ You see, he had said them before, during the last two ceremonies.”

“And what do
you
think he meant?”

Braga shrugged. “How can I say? Perhaps the words were merely sounds—his English was very sketchy. English is a very difficult language. It is entirely different from Bhutanese, you see. Learning English was a very ambitious undertaking for Padma.”

“Then how did Chupa-da come to speak so fluently? Isn’t he from Bhutan, too?”

Braga pushed a clump of hair from his forehead. “Yes, of course, but there was a difference in
dharma
—in vocation, that is. What I mean is that they were trained differently, for different callings. You see, Officer, when a great leader like Padma is born, it is not without warning. Prophecies are given telling when he will be reincarnated and where. When he is born, the spiritual leaders are waiting. He is not left to grow up like other children. He is taken to the monastery, brought up on a diet of Buddhist teachings, taught all the esoteric knowledge that he will need to be a great leader.”

Braga paced to the far side of the room and halfway back. “Padmasvana learned only spiritual things. Now, Chupa-da, Officer, also studied in the monastery, but he was raised to be a scribe. He was destined to be in charge of correspondence with people in India. Bhutan is right next to India. Anything that is shipped in must come from India. India is Bhutan’s pipeline to the rest of the world. So, it behooves each monastery to have a few monks trained to deal with the Indians.”

“But don’t Indians have languages closer to what they speak in Bhutan than English?”

Braga sighed. “Doubtless they do, but there are so many dialects in India, just as there are in Bhutan. Why, do you realize, Officer, that Bhutan, a Himalayan country of less than a million people, has eight major dialects? You can imagine how many there are in India. No one in either country could expect to travel a hundred miles and understand the local tongue. That is why India has made English a state language.”

“Mr. Braga, I still don’t understand about the ‘I go.’ I don’t—”

A rookie hurried into the office. “Are you Officer Smith?” He eyed my jeans and shirt.

“Yes. I was off duty when I came here.”

He nodded. “Pereira sent me. We’ve finished with the people in the audience. She wants to know if you need them for anything.”

“No. Tell her to let them go. Then round up the boys in the red robes. I’m going to check out the rest of this place. Tell Pereira to finish up upstairs.”

“Right.”

To Braga I said, “I want to see the rest of the complex.”

“The ashram?”

“Is that where Padmasvana lived?”

“Yes. … Okay, I’ll get Chupa-da to take you there. It’ll be better for him to keep occupied.”

Braga hurried upstairs, with undisguised relief.

In a moment Chupa-da followed Braga down the steps leading from the side stage door. He had used the time upstairs to pull himself together, and now his hands were under control. He merely looked pale and a bit dazed.

Without comment, he led me out the back door onto the lawn behind the temple. To my right, the grass flashed red, tinted by the lights of the patrol cars. Squeals from the radios mingled with the grumbles of devotees as they emerged in small groups from the temple.

Chupa-da led me across the lawn to a three-story brown-shingle building. It was in the corner of the lot away from either street and about thirty feet behind the temple. From the outside it was just a house, but inside it looked like a maze. Each room, except the kitchen and the dining room, had been broken up into cells approximately four by six feet. The better ones had windows. The rest had bare walls, a sleeping bag, a round pillow that I recognized as a meditation cushion and a small, framed copy of the picture of Padmasvana that hung behind the altar. I wasn’t totally familiar with the housing code, but this had to be breaking plenty of regulations.

“How many people live here?” I asked.

“Padmasvana has twenty-four Penlops.”

“And they live in these cells?”

Chupa-da turned to me, shaking his head slowly. “We are all in cells. Life is a cell. In Bhutan, we know this. Here in Berkeley people are ignorant. The Westerners, they decorate their ‘cells’ with music, with large houses, with theaters and parties. They think if they put enough things in them, the cells will not be cells anymore. But Padmasvana teaches the Penlops to see a cell as a cell and to work to get out of it.”

“The Penlops seem to have succeeded.” All the cells were empty.

Chupa-da headed up the central staircase. “The Penlops do not return—except at mealtimes—until two o’clock on any night,” he said. “Their days are totally devoted to Padmasvana.”

We turned left from the landing and were aced with more cells. “They put in long days,” I said.

“This life is short, and many of the Penlops have bad karma to overcome. Some have been very violent.”

We were at the end of the hallway, and I still hadn’t seen the guru’s room. Looking around for a door that could lead to a large comfortable room of the same ilk as Braga’s office, I asked, “Where is Padmasvana’s room?”

Chupa-da looked surprised. “Here.” He indicated the cell on his left. It was a copy of all the others except that it contained no picture of the guru. Instead, next to the sleeping bag was a pile of books.

I bent down. There were several volumes on Buddhism, plus an English-Bhutanese dictionary.

“Padmasvana was studying English so he could speak directly to his followers,” Chupa-da said quickly.

Picking up W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, I said, “This is a pretty difficult book to be learning from.”

“For most people, yes; for Padmasvana, no.”

Replacing the book, I glanced through the pile. Underneath the book was a newspaper clipping—“Felcher, Robert V., beloved son of Vernon Felcher and Elizabeth Grace Felcher of Visalia. Memorial services…” It was the obituary of the boy who had overdosed in the ashram.

I had heard about the incident when I had returned from vacation more than a year ago. There had been rumors that the ashram was a way station for Mexican drugs. When Bobby Felcher died, the department had turned the ashram inside out. Every possession of every resident had been checked. A handgun and two switchblades had been found, but no hint of drugs.

“Padmasvana was very distressed,” Chupa-da said.

“I can imagine.”

“No, I do not think so. He was not upset, because the young Penlop moved on to the next level of consciousness. Each of us has his karma. Padmasvana was concerned for the ashram. There was much publicity, in newspapers, on the television. That frightened people. It kept them away from the temple—people who would have been helped.” Apparently my skepticism showed, for Chupa-da hurried on. “Because of his actions, the young Penlop was guilty of denying this opportunity to others. Padma graciously chose to assume and expiate this guilt so the young Penlop would not carry it to his next incarnation.”

I said nothing. Suddenly, I felt very tired and sad. In those few minutes I had seen Padmasvana standing onstage I had been drawn to the man. His eyes, that caring expression, the sense that he was talking just to me, affected me as it had his followers. And I had seen the terror on his face as he clutched at the knife. I wanted more than a holy cover-up. I wanted to find the person who had come up though the trapdoor and coolly waited to stab Padmasvana.

Recalling that the altar was not at the center of the stage—where one would expect to find it—but at one side, directly over the trapdoor, I asked, “Who arranged the position of the altar?”

It took Chupa-da a moment to make the transition. He half smiled. “That is the task of the housemother, Leah deVeau,” he said, a bit too eagerly. “She is here in the ashram. I will take you to her.”

B
UT
L
EAH
D
EVEAU
was under sedation. No chance of a coherent word for at least twelve hours. I had an idea I knew who she was—the gray-haired, red-robed woman in the front row of the audience who’d had hysterics when Padmasvana died. It was frustrating not to be able to interview her now, but there were other things to attend to.

Even though I had been off duty when the murder happened, this case would be mine. In Berkeley, the beat officer first on the scene is responsible for any crime committed on that beat, be it littering or murder.

There were changes in the wind, however. A homicide squad was being formed and soon they would take charge, officially, of all murder investigations. So this might be my last chance to handle a homicide, and I was determined to make the most of it.

I would get assistance from my fellow beat officers, and there would be patrol officers too new to have beats of their own—like Connie Pereira—assigned to help me, but the responsibility would be mine.

The patrol officers had rounded up the Penlops and begun the tedious process of questioning.

The red-robed boys squatted along the walls of the dining room like boxes waiting for the movers. Most of them had their eyes shut, but even in repose their hard, drawn faces recalled the drugs and violence of their earlier lives. Was that violence gone or merely submerged by the lack of sleep?

I stepped outside a minute and took several deep breaths of the damp November air. The devotees had gone now, and only the squeals from the radios broke the silence.

Sometimes still, the world I worked in seemed unreal. Some of the male officers had dreamed of being cops for years, but not me. I had gone to college, bummed around Europe and met Nat. By the time Nat and I had married, he had been accepted in graduate school at Berkeley, and I had started looking for the perfect job.

The search had dragged on. My family offered money. Nat’s family wrote about his working part-time. Nat began to suggest I was too particular, and I started to wonder if I was capable of finding
any
job.