Beautiful Ghosts (21 page)

“What happened?”

“He was sent to prison and died in three months.” He fixed Corbett with a hard stare. “The government had all its facts right. He did say he killed his wife. He did pay money because of the death. He did feel like a thief with the statue.” Shan pointed to a small ledge cut in the rocks above the stone columns. It held several small weathered statues of saints. “There is the truth of this place. People here live by truths, not by facts.”

“And what is the truth I should be following?” the American asked as he stared at the little statues.

“Godkillers,” Shan said, and quickly explained what had happened to the shrines in the mountains.

An hour later as they climbed down a steep ridge Yao stepped in front of Shan and threw a hand up to block him. “Enough,” the inspector growled. “Are you seeking to trap us, maybe lose us in the wilderness? You will give me directions I can transmit to the helicopter now.” The midsummer days were long, but they had no more than two hours of daylight left.

“Before you learn to solve a mystery in Tibet,” Shan said, “you must learn how to learn.”

Yao grimaced and turned to Corbett. “We are being held hostage by a convict. It is well known that most convicts suffer from some form of mental disorder.”

“Right,” the American said with an amused grin. “Almost as bad as those suffered by investigators.”

Shan shrugged, not understanding what was passing between the two men. Something burned intensely inside each of them, but it was clearly not the same thing. “I had a teacher in my prison barracks. He said that to truly learn, turn your back on what you know, leave it all behind. He said to know the world you must immerse yourself in what is not your knowledge.”

Yao pulled out the army map he had been consulting most of the afternoon, turning it one way, then another. Shan was certain Yao had no clue where they were.

“I read a book about that once,” Corbett said, mischief in his tone. “It’s called having a beginner’s mind.”

Yao frowned at the American then waved the radio in front of him. “You said you knew where to go,” he said to Shan in an accusing voice, “but I think you have never been in this land.”

“I have not,” Shan admitted. “But the place we are going to is right there,” he said, and pointed to the crest of the next ridge, half a mile away, where a dozen large birds spiraled above an outcropping that had the appearance of a huge rock nest.

Halfway up the ridge Shan paused. “It would be safer if I went ahead,” he warned his companions.

Corbett seemed to be looking for a place to sit among the boulders when Yao stepped in front of Shan. “Not a chance. If you say ‘stay’ I know I must go. You will wait here. I will not have you warning them, laying a trap for us.”

Four wispy columns of smoke could be seen from the far side of the ridge, beyond the birds, a sign of habitation. Yao motioned Corbett forward, and set off up the trail toward the crest.

Shan leaned against a rock wall, wiping his brow as he watched the two men advance toward the crest. They had gone less than three hundred yards when he saw the American jump back. Four small figures, mere children, materialized out of the rocks, waving clubs, leaping at the two men, hitting them.

By the time Shan reached them Corbett was curled up against a boulder, hands clasped around his neck, taking blows from two young girls, cursing each time one of the clubs hit him but offering no resistance. Yao was futilely trying to fight back as two boys pinned him against a ledge. The inspector wrenched one of the clubs from a young boy’s hand, then abruptly stopped, stared at the thing in his hand, then threw it onto the ground in revulsion. The weapon was a human thigh bone, and not one of the old yellowed ones they had seen at Zhoka.

Shan leapt to Yao’s side as the children closed around him. The inspector’s discovery of the bone had seemed to paralyze him. Fear entered his eyes. Shan stepped in front of him, muscles tensing, ready to take a blow himself. But one of the children, a boy of no more than eight, called out and pointed to Shan’s chest, then lowered his club. The others, eyes round, did likewise. As a group they retreated a few feet then spun about and ran up the trail.

Shan looked down. The boy had pointed to his gau, the silver Tibetan amulet box that hung from his neck. In his frantic run up the slope the gau had slipped out of Shan’s shirt. When he looked up the children had disappeared.

“Like phantoms,” Corbett said as he straightened, rubbing his arm where he had been hit. “They were just there, out of thin air. Who—why would they…” His words drifted away as he watched the children appear near the crest and run toward the nest of rocks.

“What these people do, they prefer to do in secret,” Shan said. “Even among Tibetans the
ragyapa
are a people apart. For centuries it has been like this. In a way they are outcasts, but they accept it because they are performing a sacred duty. It is not for outsiders, not for tourists. Even Tibetans just deliver the body to the village and leave a payment.”

Corbett looked at the birds that flew over the circular outcropping. “Christ. I’ve read about it,” he said in a haunted tone. “I never thought … this is the twenty-first century. It’s from another time.”

“It’s called a
durtro,
” Shan said, pointing to the outcropping, the charnel ground where the ragyapa dismembered the dead, stripping away the flesh, even pulverizing the bones so the vultures could eat them.

“If someone wanted to kill someone this is how the evidence would be destroyed,” Yao said, anger in his voice now. “Which makes Tibet a murderer’s paradise,” he added. He was holding his radio again.

“A durtro is a place of great reverence,” Shan warned. “No helicopters.”

“Crushing bones to feed to birds,” Yao shot back with a sour tone. “Butchery. Tan said the people up here had one foot in the Stone Age.”

“They are returning bodies to the earth,” Shan said as he watched figures running from the circle of rocks over the crest, away from them. The people of the village were fleeing.

The cluster of houses on the far side of the durtro appeared to be abandoned when they reached it. They silently walked past the stone and wood structures toward the ring of rocks where the birds waited above several lines of prayer flags. Yao stepped past Shan and was the first to enter into the ring of huge boulders. He stood speechless as Shan and the American reached him.

“Bloody Christ,” Corbett muttered, then turned, his face pale, his hand over his nostrils and mouth as he retreated outside the ring.

A lean boney man squatted in the center of the small clearing, staring angrily at them, a long heavy blade in one hand, an intact human arm in the other. Beyond him, atop the tallest rock on the opposite side of the clearing, three vultures gazed at them with the same expression as the man. Shan struggled to keep his eyes fixed on the squatting man but his gaze kept drifting, snaring images of the gruesome scene. A human knee, the femur and tibia still attached. A hand, flesh on the palm but not on the fingers. A column of vertebrae, bloody tissue clinging between the discs.

“Who has come from Zhoka?” Yao called out. “We demand the body from Zhoka!”

The man’s only response was to lower the arm to his cutting block and swing his blade, splitting the arm at the elbow.

“I doubt he speaks Chinese,” Shan said.

“Then you ask,” Yao snapped.

Shan fixed his gaze above the man, on the vultures. “I knew a ragyapa in prison. He had killed a Chinese tourist who came to take photographs of his father cutting bodies.”

“You brought us here,” Yao growled. “You’re not going to scare us away now.”

“The man said that for many of his people cutting bodies was like a meditation. He said sometimes he could sense a deity in the hand that stripped the flesh, that even if a Tibetan had walked away from Buddhism in life, that visiting the durtro in death was a return to it, that sometimes when he cut flesh his father spoke with Buddha himself.”

Yao winced. “These people are no priests.”

“I don’t know,” Shan said after watching the ragyapa for a long moment. “There are old stories, even in China, of people who would collect the pain and sorrow of others, to bear it so others could live in peace.” Shan looked back at the squatting man with the cleaver. “These people are like that. Like the priests who sit with the dying. But they do this all day, with reverence, every day of their lives. How could any man bear such a burden?”

Yao cursed as Shan left him alone, joining Corbett outside the rocks. A moment later Yao was beside him, glancing back nervously toward the clearing.

“These people did nothing. They just stay here and do the job they have always done,” Shan said, although he could not understand how the village could sustain itself on the offerings of the slim population of the southern hills. He gazed back at the durtro. There may have been two bodies brought from Zhoka. The Tibetans had not told where they were taking old Atso.

“Barbarians,” Yao said. “How can we allow such a thing in China?”

“Let me ask you something, Inspector,” Shan said after a moment. “Of all the things you know in the world, how many have stayed unchanged for a thousand years? I think to do what they do, all their lives, all their generations, takes something that is probably very different from barbaric.”

Yao gave an impatient snort and moved back toward the village.

Corbett lingered, staring at Shan with a new intensity. “Prayer,” the American said in a low, uncertain voice. He surveyed the village with a respectful, inquiring gaze. “Like on that rock today. That never changes, does it?”

Shan found himself looking at Corbett with the same curiosity, as if they were just meeting. “Like art maybe,” Shan said. The mysteries of Zhoka were still weighing on him. “The act of translating your deity onto cloth or paper.”

Strangely, Corbett smiled and nodded, as if it were exactly what he had expected Shan to say.

Yao was hovering near the rough plank door of the nearest of the buildings when Shan and Corbett reached the village. He was examining implements leaned against the front walls: a hoe with a crooked handle, an ax, a leather bucket.

“Obviously a den of international art thieves,” the American observed.

More vultures appeared, flying low over the village, as if they sensed the visitors and expected a new meal. From the distance, in the rocks below the houses, someone called out. Shan could not make out the words but the tone of warning was unmistakable.

A solitary goat appeared and began walking from house to house, pausing several times to study the intruders. At the fourth house it pushed its nose into a pile of blankets by the front door. The blankets began moving, and a gaunt hand reached out to stroke the animal’s neck.

Shan raised his arm, cautioning his companions, and slowly approached the house. The goat looked up, cocking its head at Shan for a moment before burying it in the blankets. A dry rattling laugh erupted and another bony hand emerged, the two hands embracing the animal’s head.

The old woman who rose out of the blankets wore a tattered grey felt dress, the same color and material as the blankets. Heavy silver earrings dangled from her lobes, a necklace of thick turquoise beads framing a silver gau hung from her neck. Her hair was streaked with grey, her face spotted with age. Her eyes, which did not follow them as they approached, were milky. She was blind.

“Two Chinese,” she declared in an amused tone, then hesitated, lifting her head as if to smell. “And another outsider, but not Chinese.” The goat turned and pressed close to her side as if to defend the woman. Shan put an arm around its neck. The woman’s head shifted back and forth a moment, settled in Shan’s direction, and she abruptly reached out, grabbing his arm. “Are you prepared?” she asked in Chinese.

“For what?” Corbett blurted out in English.

The woman paused. The bright smile that appeared on her face revealed nearly toothless gums. “Give you joy,” she called in a thin, dry voice, in English.

The three men looked at each other in confusion.

“Do you speak English?” Corbett asked.

“Inchi?” the woman asked with a flush of excitement.

“She wants to know if you are an Englishman,” Shan explained to Corbett.

“Close enough,” Corbett said in Chinese. “How could she speak English?” he whispered to Shan.

“Give you joy,” the woman declared again in English, more loudly. She cast a smile in Shan’s direction. “Mostly we speak goat,” she said in Chinese again.

“A man died in Zhoka,” Shan said. “He could have been brought here. We need to know about his death.”

“It is a season for death,” the woman sighed. “Uncle Yama has come to live in the hills this summer,” she said. Shan felt something cold travel down his spine. She was referring to the Lord of Death. She embraced the goat’s head again. “We must be very careful when speaking about the dead,” the woman added, addressing the animal now. She reached to her belt to clutch a string of prayer beads and dropped her head, as if she had abruptly fallen asleep.

Yao continued his investigation of the compound, lifting the lids of the clay jars that lined the front of the next house, the largest in the village. Shan knelt closer to the woman, whispering. “Grandmother, I am seeking an old man and a girl, and a woman named Liya.” The goat pushed Shan’s shoulder with its head as though warning him away now.

“Liya,” the woman said, not raising her head. “Trying to keep a leg in both worlds stretches her too thin. I pray for Liya.”

“The Englishman,” Corbett interjected, in Chinese. “Have you seen him? He calls himself Lodi.”

A dry crackling sound came out of the woman’s throat. “Too thin to see at all,” she said with a sad smile and began working her mala, whispering the mantra in the goat’s ear. The goat settled onto its back haunches with a contented expression, as if welcoming the prayer.

Yao was standing now, staring into the last of the large clay jars, that nearest the door of the house. Shan slowly stepped toward him, carefully replacing each of the lids Yao had dropped onto the ground in front of the jars. Barley was in the first two jars, some kind of white tuber in the third, then small shriveled apples and bricks of black tea. By the time he reached the inspector’s side, Yao had his pad out, writing feverishly. Corbett reached the last jar a step ahead of Shan and gasped.