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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Nobody likes it, but...
>> Kaneohe
Kamasami Khan didn't like it.
Quinn Ah Sun didn't like it.
Bodhicita Guzman didn't like it.
But when the second Lama Jey Tsong Khapa said he was frustrated because in hiding he was unable to fulfill the work of Tsong Khapa -- the whole reason for his reincarnation -- well, what're you gonna do?
So their plan was for the young lama to ride to the Waikiki hotel with Lily Ah Sun, her maid/friend Rosalita Resurreccion and Rosalita's 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth, who moments ago had attained her Buddhahood on the accelerated path virtual reality program the lama and his brother Joe Kharma created.
At the hotel, the lama would become himself, trading places again with Michael Tenzing Campbell, his stand-in since that night at the Blaisdell Arena with the Dalai Lama.
He would also introduce Elizabeth to his teachers, to confirm that her enlightenment was real. And then Rosalita needed to speak with them about the child's future education.
Lily's husband Quinn, meanwhile, would follow most of the way on the red replica of the BMW motorcycle he rode as an HPD solo bike officer. Bodhicita, the lama's eternal consort, would ride with Quinn to HPD headquarters. He'd change into his blues and help provide the lama's official escort from the hotel to meet with Hawaii's religious leaders at the East-West Center's Jefferson Hall. She'd change into her Sister Mary Miraculoso costume and take TheBus to the East-West Center.
When Quinn peeled off, a van driven by a member of the Free Tibet Warrior Society would follow Lily's teal BMW, and be joined on Kalakaua Avenue by two others on a mo-peds.
Khan, who had been volunteering in the garden/koi pond behind the East-West Center's Jefferson Hall since his days as a UH landscape engineering student, would be there, tending to the garden. How ironic, he thought as he headed over Likelike in his red Ram 1500, that the two lions outside Jefferson Hall were gifts from Taiwan in 1971, a gift requested by the center's Taiwanese students. Today, as Communist Chinese agents came to kill the lama, Taiwanese lions would stand guard.
At that moment, responding to a call from Quinn to his buddy Charlie at the FBI about Te-Wu's plot, on a hunch agents visited a radical leftist student from Iowa who espoused Chinese communism and had recently moved into a room on an upper floor of Manoa Hall, mauka-ewa corner. There they found him with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, sighting it toward the Jefferson Hall plaza. Quinn got a call just as he was mounting up.
"That's one," Quinn said. "There'll be others, Charlie."
"We'll be there."
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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