But I didn't do that. Instead I closed my eyes and opened them again well after dawn.
My legs were fine the next day. Unless I tried to go even the slightest bit downhill, in which case bolts of agony shot through my knees and quadriceps with every step. I knew within moments of getting out of bed that I wasn't trekking out of Muktinath that day. That, and the soon-discovered fact that this side of the Thorung La was the easy half of the Annapurna Circuit and thus overpopulated with groups of twenty or thirty pudgy German package tourists, explained why it was hard to find a room in Muktinath. I wondered what happened to those who came late over the pass. I didn't envy them, finally arriving at what they thought was their destination after one of the most physically gruelling days of their life, only to find out that there was no room at the inn, and they had another hour to go before reaching the next group of lodges.
I could walk around town, albeit slowly and stiffly, and I looked for Gavin but he was gone. And maybe that was for the best. Why rehash it? Yes, the appearance of the name Goebel in the Muktinath ledger was mysterious; and yes, in the back of my mind I'd had the idea that I could send my picture of it to the HRA doctor who had examined the body, whose name Gavin could tell me, to compare to the handwriting used when Stanley Goebel had signed in to the Manang ledger; but really, what was the point? Regardless of the name, a man had been murdered and his murderer had gotten off scot-free. There was no point in sifting through the ashes of those two cold facts.
And yet. It was all the whys that bothered me. Why was there a murder in the first place? Why the knives? Why was the body not hidden? Why had the masked man followed me on the trail? And now why this confusion over the name? And the most fundamental question; why was it all so much like the murder of Laura Mason in Limbe, Cameroon, more than two years ago?
It had been a typical night on the truck. No, scratch that; it had been a good night. There had been no rain. Chong and Kristin and Nicole had cooked and cleaned. There was plenty of firewood for once and we had a big bonfire, and Steven and Hallam and I had passed the guitar back and forth and sung songs. A few curious locals had squatted and stared at us, but not the huge crowds we had sometimes drawn in the desert and in Nigeria. Limbe was a pretty regular stop for overland trucks and its inhabitants fairly cosmopolitan.
After dinner Laura and Carmel and Emma and Michael went swimming on the black-sand beach. I wasn't in the mood to swim, so I stayed with the rest. We played guitar and passed joints around and everyone got a little high. We reminisced fondly about the epic meal we had had in Nigeria, the spacecakes in Dixcove, the FanIce in Ghana. Food was always a popular topic on the truck. We talked about whether we would find a way across to Kenya by land. At that point we were still hopeful. There was talk of going through Chad.
Eventually it got late. Carmel and Emma and Michael had returned. I assumed Laura had come back to our tent and gone to sleep. I decided to accompany Hallam and Nicole for a midnight swim before joining Laura in the tent. Hallam took his mid-sized Maglite to light our way, even though the moon was bright and it hardly seemed necessary. When I first saw her I thought it was a dead animal, a big dog or something, lying in a puddle. It wasn't until five or ten seconds of Hallam aiming the light at her that my mind finally clicked and identified her. I think it was the same for Hallam and Nicole. Whoever had killed Laura had stripped her naked and gutted her like an animal, and she had died with her hands on her belly, pathetically trying to keep her insides from spilling out. She had been gagged with a black rag. And there were knives in her eyes.
The next day I could walk and I trekked through the Arizonian desert landscape, in the shadow of Dhaulagiri, the world's seventh highest mountain, to the medieval village of Kagbeni at the end of the remote Mustang Valley. The following day I walked along the nearly-dry bed of the Kali Gandaki River to the town of Jomsom, even bigger than Manang. I did not want to trek any more, and Jomsom had an airstrip. I bought a plane ticket with Buddha Air. The next morning I made my way through the Kafkaesque chaos of the Jomsom airport, where they had demolished the old building and not really gotten around yet to constructing another. I boarded a prop plane, overloaded with bags of the apples grown around Jomsom. The engines were so loud they gave us cotton wads to stick in our ears. The plane carried me from the Wild West desert of Jomsom, over conifer forests, and deciduous forests, and hills terraced into rice paddies, and subtropical jungle, and back to the city of Pokhara, five days' worth of trekking compressed to twenty-five minutes. My Annapurna Circuit was complete.
Chapter 6 Life On A Lonely Planet
Trekking is wonderful but it was good to be back in civilization. Pokhara's Lakeside district was like Disneyland for backpackers; nothing but restaurants, bars, bookstores, souvenir shops, supermarkets, pharmacies, trekking outfitters, massage parlors, music stores, banks, camera shops, travel agencies, Internet cafes, and about a hundred lodges armed with running water and reliable electricity. I could have parachuted into Lakeside naked but for my passport and ATM card and been fully outfitted for travel within 24 hours.
I went to the Sacred Valley Inn, took a room, repossessed the gear I had deemed inessential-for-trekking from their locker, and had a long hot shower. I ate pepper steak and drank wine and read a two-day-old International Herald Tribune at the Moondance Cafe, which wouldn't have looked out of place in any First World country, except for its affordable prices. I traded my copy of War And Peace and a hundred rupees for a bootleg copy of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. I took my trekking pictures in to a camera shop to be developed.
And then I continued my investigation.
I began with the police, and as I expected, they were no help. They had not heard that a man had died on the trail. They would not contact their compatriots in Manang to see if there were any new developments. I had best wait for the official report to be filed in Kathmandu before doing anything. It wouldn't be more than a few months.
After that I called the Canadian Embassy in Kathmandu.
'Welcome to Canada, bienvenue au Canada,' a disembodied voice said. 'For service in English, press one. Pour service en francais, appuyez sur le deux. '
I pushed nothing, having learned long ago the best way to avoid voice-mail mazes. After a little while a telephone began to ring and a real live woman answered it.
'Hello?' she said.
'Hello,' I said. 'My name is Paul Wood. I'm a Canadian citizen. I'm calling from Pokhara. I'm calling because I want to know if you've been told that a Canadian man named Stanley Goebel was found dead while trekking in the Annapurna district.'
'One moment please,' she said, as if she got this kind of call all the time and was going to transfer me to an extension specifically reserved for death confirmations. I went into the limbo of hold.
'Hello?' a man said eventually. 'Can I help you?'
I repeated my spiel and went into hold one more time.
'Hello?' a different man said. 'Are you calling about Stanley Goebel?'
'Yes I am,' I said.
'And who are you?'
'My name is Paul Wood, I'm a Canadian citizen.'
'And what is your interest in the matter?'
'I found the body.'
There was a pause as the man absorbed that. Then he said 'Well, thank you for calling in, but the Nepali government has already informed us about Mr. Goebel. His family has been notified and his body is on its way home.'
'What exactly did the Nepali government inform you of?' I asked.
I think he could hear the edge in my voice, and he began to erect a bureaucratic wall to hide behind. 'Their final report has not yet been filed,' he said cautiously, 'but they have informed us on an informal basis that Mr. Goebel regrettably committed suicide.'
'Is that so. Well, I'm calling to inform you that that is regrettably not the case. Mr. Goebel was
