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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Be a good lama
>> Liliha
They all looked alike in their shaved heads and orange mendicant robes as HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes scanned the couple hundred monks waiting outside with a few hundred more civilians as the second Lama Jey Tsong Khapa visited his boyhood home for the first time since realizing his Buddhahood here at the age of 2.
And Gomes would have missed him entirely if another monk hadn't stumbled and bumped into one of his brethren. The stumbler bowed with fingertips pressed to his nose. His fellow monk returned it with a sneer -- such clumsiness.
"We got another hard case," Gomes said to Officer Quinn Ah Sun as they waited beside Quinn's big BMW bike.
And now that he'd spotted him, Gomes could see this one was different. He had that same hard look he'd seen in three Chinese guys who'd identified themselves as employees of the Bank of Lhasa, and who he'd also seen last night at the event for the Dalai Lama and the young Hawaiian lama.
Let it be said here that the great Gomes was not super-human. He was so focused on these hard types who called themselves bankers, he missed identifying the stumbling monk. But in Gomes' defense, Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka looked very different from the disheveled bum Gomes busted for ice and pakalolo. He was, in fact, a very different man after three months as a Buddhist monk.
On the edge of the crowd, meanwhile, Bodhicita Guzman in her gray Sister Mary Miraculoso habit called Kamasami Khan in Kaneohe. "Put me on speaker, Jey needs to hear this too." She explained how Fon Du showed up to announce the Bank of Lhasa's new Tsong Khapa Fund.
"Can they do this without my permission?"
"Probably not, but it's a brilliant ploy, your holiness," Khan replied.
"Utterly duplicitous, which is the Communists' genius. And it forces you to make a decision."
"If I complain, demand they remove my name from this fund and call it a scam, they will say I do not have the well-being of Tibetan people in mind."
"Which would also establish you as an opponent of the Chinese government.
You would be an enemy of the state, and we know what happens to those, while the rest of the world let's 'em get away with it. You're already in their target sights, but that would give them legitimacy. Better to say nothing."
"Silence also speaks, and to the Chinese my silence would be received as a lack of support. I think they want me to openly endorse them."
"That would be one way to take the heat off, make you one of the good lamas."
"The 10th Panchen Lama was a 'good' lama -- and they still killed him."
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Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com