Beautiful Ghosts (44 page)

After a moment there were two rings and a woman answered, speaking in crisp, refined tones. “Croft Antiquities.”

Corbett lifted the phone to his mouth. “Is Mr. Croft there?”

“Mr. Croft has departed,” the woman said after a moment’s hesitation. “Who’s calling please?”

Corbett looked at Yao as he spoke. “Tell him it’s Investigator Yao of the Chinese Council of Ministers. Tell him the Chinese government has some questions for him. Tell him he just changed everything.”

Yao did not protest, did nothing but stare at the little phone, a sad, defeated look in his eyes.

Corbett pushed the disconnect button. “We’ll get the phone records,” he vowed. “In a couple days we’ll know everything there is to know about Croft Antiquities.”

“But what you won’t have is its connection to Beijing, to Ming,” Yao said, gazing into the chasm. “The answer is in what happened that day at the Forbidden City, what the police didn’t report. We have only the letters from the amban. We don’t know what was finally communicated about the treasure. How can we stop them without knowing what happened between the amban and his uncle? The amban’s missing treasure connects them all. That’s where they will be.”

“We know the emperor kept copies of his correspondence,” Shan said. “But I don’t think Ming had it all.”

“What do you mean?” Yao asked in a distant voice.

“It’s still there, in the Forbidden City.”

“You can’t know that.”

“The amban told us. He thanked the emperor for using the words of the sutras. The emperor Tibetan. He meant the emperor was writing in Tibetan. Major McDowell’s confirmed it, that the emperor spoke Tibetan. It would have been the perfect language for keeping secrets from his mandarins. Even if he found them Ming would never have thought a letter in Tibetan to be important. He speaks no Tibetan.”

A glint was in Yao’s eyes as he looked at Shan. He stepped to Corbett, who was still staring at the little telephone.

Liya was standing at the edge of the cliff, tearfully looking into the chasm when Shan stepped to her side. He squatted and drew in the bare soil: an oval with a circle inside, a square inside the circle. “Earth door inside the circle of heaven.”

Liya’s hand went to her mouth. “The tunnel. He was trying to tell me that Lu and Khan had cut a tunnel through the earth, into the mandala temple.”

Shan nodded and remembered the pattern of bones he had seen below the drawing, pointing upward. As he lay dying Lodi had tried to find a way to tell Liya, only Liya, what he had discovered that day in the tunnels. “And he wrote of the Mountain Buddha. Where is it, Liya?”

“Sleeping,” she said, warning back in her eyes.

Shan glanced about to be sure no one else was in earshot. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Ming knows about it from one of the old books. He thinks the golden Buddha should be his. Even if he can’t find the emperor’s treasure he intends to finish with new political power and the golden likeness of the Buddha.”

“There are some things that must be left to Tibetans, Shan,” Liya said. “That is between the people of the hills and Colonel Tan. Nothing you can do will change it. Gendun himself has given his blessing.” She added the last words like an apology. Liya knew Shan would not oppose the old lama.

“But Gendun probably thinks Surya is among the prisoners,” Shan protested. He searched her face as she shook her head from side to side, pleading with his eyes.

Liya offered a thin, sad smile. “It is the only chance in fifty years our people have had.”

“Hide it at least.”

“It was hidden, for fifty years. But Lodi found it. It was his last gift to us.”

“Lodi?”

“You forget I was there too, after he died. I didn’t understand his drawing of the dzi. But I saw the bones. They were pointing to something else.”

“On the ledge?” Shan tried to recall the scene. The barrels on the ledge may well have hidden the tunnel but what else had been there? Heavy yak ropes. Pulleys. Long chisels.

Liya put a finger on her lips as if to quiet him, then extended it toward Shan’s temple. “You’re hurt.”

When Shan touched the spot where the rifle had hit him three fingers came away bloody.

“In the food pack,” Corbett said, “there is a medical kit.”

But when Liya reached into the pack she froze, then looked up in confusion. She slowly extracted a long white cotton pouch, the one they had seen in the major’s chambers.

“The thangka!” Lokesh exclaimed.

Liya opened the pouch and pulled out the top of the old painting. Punji had had her final word, had tricked Lu, putting the torn thangka in Shan’s pack instead of her own.

“With that we have a chance of trapping the bastards,” Corbett said. His voice had a new edge, a sound of vengeance. “Ming and this man Croft.”

As Lokesh straightened the ragged-edged eighteen-inch square of cloth onto the ground Yao quickly produced the folded image of the upper half of the death deity they had printed from Tan’s computer, placing it on the ground above the cloth. The amban’s puzzle for the emperor was to be solved by having both halves. But they could make no sense of it. The combined image seemed no different from the one Shan had seen in the mourning hut at the ragyapa village. Lokesh dropped to his knees, bending over the artwork, the others squatting beside him. They looked for patterns in the colors, anomalies in the images of the great bull deity and the lesser deities that surrounded it, convinced the message they so desperately sought must be hidden in the art like the messages so cleverly disguised in the temple. Lokesh murmured a mantra as if to entice the gods to speak to them.

But they found nothing, nothing except five small claw-like marks at the bottom of the torn cloth, five more showing at the top of the printed image. The amban had made his mark on each.

“Speak to us,” Yao moaned, and made a hurrying gesture toward Lokesh, as if to encourage the mantras.

Finally Corbett rose, warning them that Khan and Lu might have another weapon secreted in the caves. As Shan rolled up the thangka he glanced at the pair of painted handprints on the reverse, then explained that they could reach Fiona’s house by dusk.

They moved quickly, running when they could, Dawa riding on Corbett’s back, then Shan’s, then Liya’s. It was late afternoon, the sun shining brilliantly, a warm wind on their backs, and as they left Zhoka behind the darkness slowly lifted from their faces. There was little speaking, even when they paused to drink from springs, but Shan saw something new in the eyes of his companions. Not fear anymore, but a calm detached resolve, the kind Shan often saw in Tibetans when they faced insurmountable odds.

Ko alone seemed unable to leave his torment behind.

“Thank you for what you did,” Shan said as they knelt by a stream. “You saved us.”

“I had never known a woman like Punji,” Ko said in an uncertain voice. “I mean … we didn’t really know each other. But she made jokes with me in the tunnels. Me being a prisoner, that didn’t matter to her. I remember her eyes. She was so beautiful. For a few minutes she and I were partners, and we were going to flee to the West, and I forgot everything else.…” He glanced at Shan, suddenly seeming to remember to whom he was speaking. “Forget it,” he snapped, and seemed to make an effort at anger. After a moment he just rose and offered to carry Dawa on his back.

“If we cannot catch them for what they did,” Corbett said as they watched Ko step away with the girl, “then we must take them for what they are going to do. Then they’ll talk, then they’ll tell us where to find what they stole.”

Yao offered a stern nod. “The amban’s treasure belongs to the government of China. But to find it we have to make the old thankga speak to us.”

“The key,” Shan observed, turning to Yao, “is knowing what was said in those last letters between the Qian Long and his nephew, the ones Ming has not seen. The amban said he was going to explain the rest of death. I thought he was speaking of Buddhist teaching.”

“He meant the thankga!” Liya exclaimed. “He meant the rest of the death deity, the other half of the torn thankga. He was going to explain the puzzle of the torn thangka to the emperor so there would be no mistake!”

“Like the sutras,” Shan said as he recalled exactly what he had seen on the computer screen. “Kwan Li said, like the sutras, he would explain the rest of death. He meant in Tibetan. He would write a letter in Tibetan to explain the secret.”

“But the letters are still in Beijing,” Corbett said. “We have to go.”

“I have no one in Beijing,” Yao said with a frown. “No one who can read Tibetan, no one I can trust.” He fixed Shan with a sober stare. “If you want to help the Tibetans here you must go with us there.”

P
ART
T
HREE

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

Shan drifted in and out of a dark grey haze that was sometimes like sleep, sometimes like the edge of a deep meditation. He could find no calmness. Everywhere his mind turned he encountered something like the dark turmoil of clouds that he saw whenever he looked out the window. Part of him hated Yao and Corbett for forcing him onto the plane, for forcing him away from Surya and Gendun and the other Tibetans who so desperately needed help. Part of him hated himself for being unable to communicate with Ko, for being unable to crack the hard shell that had grown around the boy. He wondered with cold fear whether he would ever see Tibet, or his son, again.

Once Yao finished with him in Beijing the inspector would have no reason to return Shan. Except to be rid of him. Once in Beijing Shan would be near those who had first sent him to the gulag. Some had died of old age, but not all.

Even when he was able to force such doubts from his consciousness, even when he tried to sleep, he could not close his eyes for long, because of the images that haunted him. The confused, childlike expression of Punji, her brain destroyed by the blow of the rock, her killer cradling her as he carried her to the abyss. Surya, carrying night soil, speaking of his days as a lama as though they belonged to someone else. Gendun, speaking with deities in Zhoka’s dark labyrinth. Sometimes through a fog there was another image, from some dim corridor, a serene Chinese man in a dragon robe playing checkers with a jocular British officer, their hands without flesh, the hands of skeletons.

Eventually sleep must have overtaken him, for suddenly the plane lurched and they were on the ground, taxiing toward a low grey building under a low brown sky, the dust-laden atmosphere of a Beijing summer.

Yao cautioned Shan to stay seated, and they did not move until the plane was emptied of other passengers. Even Corbett left with only a quick nod in their direction. Two young men appeared in the grey uniforms of Public Security, pistols on their belts, nodding deferentially to Yao, casting suspicious glances at Shan as they escorted him out a door in the side of the jet ramp into a black car waiting beside the plane. Yao did not introduce Shan, did not speak, but simply stared out the window as they drove into the city, staring at the skyline.

It was a different skyline than Shan remembered, a different city in many ways, he realized with an odd pain in his heart. New highways had appeared in every direction, choked by new automobiles, tens of thousands of new automobiles. Unfamiliar buildings towered over the highway, Western-style buildings with empty faces, some with the names of Western companies affixed to their sides. Advertising signs sprouted like weeds over the landscape.

Some things had not changed. A sea of humanity still flowed down the sidewalks, overflowing into the streets, cascading into subway stations, rippling around street vendors. Familiar smells of fried pork, chilis, noodles, garlic, cardamom, ginger, and steamed rice wafted into the car, cut with the acrid fumes of diesel and gasoline. He stared at the window. He wasn’t there, he couldn’t be in Beijing, it was another of his strange, empty dreams.

They drove directly to the ancient complex, parked along the huge outer wall of the Forbidden City, entering through the massive arches of the Meridian Gate. The grounds were not open to tourists for another three hours, and as they walked across the vast empty courtyards memories pressed on Shan, recollections of his first visits with his father and mother, even of walking the grounds with Ko on one of the boy’s rare visits with Shan, as a youth of four or five. There, in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Shan’s father had pointed to the emperors’ dragon-legged throne and explained how officials had approached the ruler with the ritual of three kneelings and nine kowtows. Beyond, in the Gate of the Great Ancestors, his mother had read him a poem written by an emperor a thousand years before.

Suddenly something stirred inside Shan, a new excitement of discovery. They were in a small quiet courtyard before the simple elegant cottage of the Qian Long’s retirement. Not until now, until the moment of stepping across the threshold of the private home of the emperor, did Shan feel the weight of the history entwined in their mystery. The fate of so many seemed inextricably linked to what had transpired between the powerful emperor and his nephew over two hundred years before.

Yao spoke quietly with the police guard at the cottage entrance, who unlocked the door and stood aside. The interior of the cottage had none of the grandeur of the imperial halls. It seemed the comfortable living quarters of a genteel scholar, full of scrolls and paintings, its furniture and rooms designed not for formal audiences but for relaxed reading and conversation. Its centerpiece was a dining chamber, an interior room with three cedar walls, red lacquered pillars flanking each of its two entries, a magnificent scroll painting of an early emperor on one side of the table. Shan studied the chamber a moment, then stood facing a long section of exposed lathwork opposite the painting, the plaster still open, still dropping its particles onto the wooden floor, where the fresco had been taken. On the elegant mahogany table, its legs carved like those of dragons, sat a stack of manila folders.

“It’s all there is on the theft,” Yao explained. “The police reports, interviews with the staff here, background on the stolen fresco, even reports by art experts on how the fresco was removed and the precautions needed to transport it. You’ve got two, maybe three hours.”