The Dalai Lama's Cat (The Dalai Lama's Cat 1)

“You said.”

“Thing is, not everyone was laid off. A few were kept on and redeployed.” Sam hung his head in shame.

“And you’re thinking—?”

“If I’d been any good at my job, I would have been kept on, too.”

“They kept the top performers, did they?” Franc’s voice was tight. “What other reason? The cost of laying them off? Were they long-term employees?”

Sam shrugged. “I guess. Most of them. But you can see how … bad I am with people. I’d be no good at it, Franc.” He finally managed the very briefest glance in Franc’s direction. “At school, I was always the last kid left when the others picked sports teams. At college, I could never get a date. I’m just not a people person. I’d be a disaster.”

As Franc regarded the pitiable figure in front of him, a knowing, impish expression played on his lips. Silently, he gestured to Kusali to bring him an espresso.

“Yeah, I agree,” he responded after a while. “Imagine how disastrous it would be having someone who knew the category backward doing all our ordering. Or if customers asked you about a subject, and you offered them half a dozen alternatives. That could be catastrophic!”

“It’s not that—”

“Say someone came in here wanting to pick a sports team and the first person they saw was you.”

“You know I didn’t mean—”

“Or, God help us, a single woman turned up on the prowl for a date!”

“It’s about talking to people,” Sam retorted, almost fiercely. “I’m no good at it.”

“You talk to me.”

“You’re not a customer.”

“I’ve never pressured anyone into ordering a cappuccino, and I wouldn’t expect you to lay on the hard sell, if that’s what you mean,” said Franc.

The two of them looked at each other evenly before Franc said, “Either the bookstore idea is going to work, or it’s not. I believe you’re the right man for the job, even if you don’t believe it yourself.”

That conversation took place late last week, and despite Franc’s best efforts, it had ended without Sam committing to anything. He had been in the café every day since, but nothing more on the subject was said. I wondered how long Franc would be able to hold off. Because I had no doubt he would be bringing up the subject again.

Since the conversation with Sam, Franc had called in several tradesmen to measure the space he was considering for a bookshop and to discuss shelving and display options. But could he get Sam to budge?

As it happened, Franc’s powers of persuasion were irrelevant. Not long after I arrived that morning and found Sam engrossed on the subject of cellular biology and epigenetics, who should appear in the café but Geshe Wangpo.

As Franc had quickly discovered, having a teacher was a double-edged sword. The benefits were extraordinary, but so were the demands. And when your teacher was as uncompromising a lama as Geshe Wangpo, the edges of that sword were razor sharp. Every Tuesday evening, Franc attended classes on the Path to Enlightenment up at the temple, but at other moments, Geshe Wangpo would burst into his world unexpectedly, with life-changing results.

On one occasion, serious problems with his waitstaff had left Franc bamboozled and despairing. Geshe Wangpo phoned him, unprecedented and unprompted, ordering him, in the shortest of calls, to recite Green Tara mantras for two hours every day. By the end of that week, Franc’s human resource problems had mysteriously resolved themselves.

On a different occasion, Franc had just put the phone down from talking to his father, who had made a long-distance call from his sickbed in San Francisco. Franc had spent the previous ten minutes explaining why he couldn’t possibly go home to visit when he turned and discovered his lama standing right behind him. Geshe Wangpo had ordered him, in no uncertain terms, to make visiting his father a priority. What sort of son did he think he was, telling a frail and elderly old man that he was too busy to see him? Who did he think he owed his life to? What kind of parents did he want in future lifetimes—those as offhanded and disregarding as Franc was planning to be, or parents who would genuinely care about his well-being? And, by the way, he should make sure to buy his father good-quality gifts from Duty Free.

Half an hour later, Franc had booked his ticket home.

Today, when Geshe Wangpo arrived at the café during the midmorning lull, he glanced around at the sea of unoccupied tables before making his way directly toward where Sam Goldberg sat alone reading. There was a powerful energy in the way he moved across the room, as though he weren’t a maroon-clad monk making an appearance but an altogether more commanding being—a large, blue-black, fire-breathing monster like the ones portrayed in the temple thangkas, perhaps.

“May I sit here?” he asked, pulling out the chair opposite Sam.

“Y-yes. Sure.” Almost all of the tables around them were unoccupied, but if Sam found the request strange, he betrayed no sign of it. Instead, he returned to his book.

Having made himself comfortable, Geshe Wangpo had no intention of keeping to himself. “What are you reading?”

Sam looked up. “A book on, er, epigenetics.”

The lama glanced at three paperbacks stacked beside Sam’s empty coffee cup. “You like to read?”