Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (14 page)

The Tibetan woman turned back to the goat. “She is on some high peak, laughing into the wind. And Tenzin will not be found until he is ready. The dead of the mountain will keep coming back if they have unfinished business,” she declared to the animal. “That has always been the way of the mountain.”

Reality is nothing but a shared perception, a lama had once told him. It didn’t seem to matter that Shan had been stained with the blood of the dead woman, for the reality that everyone perceived was that she had not died. Shan had never encountered a murder where the dead kept moving, where the dead were still players in events even after they stopped breathing.

“Tell me how you met her,” he said softly.

“It was up high,” she said after a long silence. “Two years ago. There are secret places, little shrines only my people know about, shrines where words must be spoken every spring. I was hiding because some climbers were passing close by. I waited a long time before I emerged, but there she was, waiting for me at the shrine. She asked me why I was afraid of climbers.”

“Afraid?”

“I told her I wasn’t afraid of who they were, but of what they did. I told her that if the shrines were ignored, more and more climbers would die. I said dead foreigners were accumulating all over the upper slopes, with no one to pray for them, no one to help them make the passage to the next life. She helped me clean up the shrine, and when she saw that the prayer flags were old and tattered she said she would give me money for some new ones. I explained it wasn’t money that made flags valuable, that these scraps of cloth were holy for having sent out a million prayers, one with each flutter. It was only when she helped me tighten the line and straighten the flags that she really understood. Half the line was empty.”

“Because foreigners had been taking the flags for souvenirs.”

Ama Apte nodded. “She asked Kypo about me, not knowing then that I was his mother, and she found me here the next week, to tell me she arranged for the climbing groups to delete that particular trail from their route maps. That’s when she began asking me how Tibetans went up the mountains in the old days.”

“Did you know she was trying to meet with the minister?”

“She comes every week or two during the climbing season. Last time she told me she was going to attend the conference at that new hotel. She said they needed what she called a dose of reality, as if she would give it to them like a pill.”

“You mean she was going to stop the minister from doing something?”

The fortuneteller decided to change the subject. “Have you found the answer for my mule?” she asked abruptly. “If he is not settled, things could go badly,” she added, as if she were now telling the fortunes of ghosts.

“To find your uncle’s killer,” Shan explained, “I need to know more about your way to the mother goddess. When I needed to carry bodies, Kypo always met me with the mule below Rongphu gompa, on the trail that parallels the road from the base camp. The mule knew the trail instinctively.”

“He walked it for over eighty years, in both his lives.”

“But that is a trail that winds down toward the highway. The way from the village to that trail is cut off by the steepness of Tumkot mountain and the glacier on top of the mountain. But Kypo and the mule seemed to know a way across.”

“Ridiculous. We go around, on a trail that circuits the base of the high ridge.”

“To go around to the road means walking at least fifteen miles. To go over the top would be no more than five.”

“Fifteen miles is a morning stroll for one of us.”

“But suppose there was a secret trail,” Shan suggested. “Your mule would know it as the way home, would lead anyone to it who cared to follow, because he would make fresh tracks that would highlight the trail. If the murderer also used such a secret trail to do his work he would want the mule dead.”

“There were many cars and trucks going up and down the road that day after the killing. So many army trucks they had no room for an ambulance,” she said in a pointed tone.

“But there was an injured man,” Shan observed. “That bus driver.”

Ama Apte cast him a disappointed glance. Shan thought again of the photo of the young Dalai Lama with soldiers. It hadn’t been ripped from a book or newspaper. It had been an original photograph. Every time he peeled one layer of the woman’s secrets he found one more.

“I thought you were going to tell me how that Chinese colonel killed my uncle, like the minister.”

“I came to find out the truth.”

“It’s a strange way you have with the truth.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You act as though someone from Tumkot was the killer.”

“Your uncle was shot less than a mile from here. Maybe he was scared away by the bullets, and was coming home.”

“My uncle knew bullets. He would have told me, and told Tenzin.”

“Tenzin?” he asked with rising foreboding. “Tenzin was dead.”

“I thought you would better understand the dead here,” she said in a tone that sent chills down Shan’s spine.

“Is that why I am the corpse carrier? Dakpo saw what I did with a dog and the two of you assumed I knew the dead?”

Ama Apte fixed him with a sober stare. “Dakpo spoke with me, yes. But I had to meet you first. Right away, I saw it in your eyes. You are one of those the dead speak through. The threads of your life become entwined with the dead you touch.”

It took a long time for Shan to respond. “But Tenzin was dead,” he tried once more.

“I told you. The mountain needed him again, so Tenzin rose up and rode my mule away.”

Ama Apte cut off any response from Shan with a challenging gaze, then reached into the sleeve of her dress and extracted her Mo dice. Oblivious to Shan now, she closed her eyes, her lips moving in the short mantra that evoked the wisdom of the Mo, then tossed the dice onto the packed earth. She studied them a moment, then scooped them up and turned to Shan with an apologetic expression. “Only sorrow can come of it,” she declared, then stood, straightening her apron, signaling that her hospitality had been exhausted. Shan watched as she climbed the ladder stair to the upper story. Again she had told him the answer, but she had not told him the question.

Chapter Seven

THE SHOGO TOWN infirmary was mostly an aid station used more often than not for tourists who needed relief from an attack of altitude sickness or mending of sprains and minor broken bones after tumbling off a rock. It was a small, shabby affair, housed in a rundown former army barracks at the edge of town, its only remotely new adornments the bright metal sign on the door marked EMERGENCY in Chinese, English, German and Japanese and a banner reading EMBRACE POLITICAL STABILITY, a favorite of Party sloganeers since the 2008 uprisings. After watching the street behind him in the mirror for nearly a minute, Shan parked the old blue truck at the curb, then climbed the crumbling concrete steps and took a tentative step inside.

At a reception counter a plump woman sat on a stool, her head cradled on her folded arms, fast asleep. Beside her on the counter were racks of faded brochures in half a dozen languages about the symptoms and treatment of altitude sickness. Behind her were wooden shelves with more than a score of small oxygen bottles fitted with breathing masks, under a sign that proclaimed the bottles to be the property of Tingri County. Past the counter were two cots with folded blankets, for those who had to take their oxygen lying down. Beyond them a single wooden door with peeling red paint was flanked by glossy posters advertising the Chinese International Travel Service. Shan went to the door, glanced at the sleeping woman as she emitted a loud snore, and pushed it open.

Only one of the six beds in the dusty, poorly lit chamber was occupied. At first, from the patient’s strange jerking motions, Shan suspected the young Chinese man lying on it, knees folded up, had suffered some sort of nerve damage. But by the time he reached the bed he could see the little black box in the man’s hands, could hear the dim pinging noises as he feverishly worked the buttons. Shan studied him in silence a moment, taking in the bandage on his crown, the short line of incisions on his temple, then noticed the uniform hanging on a peg by the bed.

Not until Shan had pulled a stool close to the bed and sat down did the patient take notice. His fingers stopped in midair. The color drained from his face. The game box dropped onto his blanket.

Shan gestured to the bandage on his head. “There seems to be no permanent damage.”

The soldier took a long time to find his tongue. “I didn’t . . . ” he stammered. “I wasn’t . . .”

“There was a lot of confusion that day,” Shan suggested.

The young Chinese straightened up against the metal headboard, nervously examining Shan, noticeably relaxing as he saw his worn pants, his tattered hiking boots.

“I’m not an officer, Sergeant,” Shan assured him. “Is it sergeant?”

“Corporal.”

Shan nodded. “All the officers from that day are gone, Corporal, disappeared deep into China.” He poured the soldier a glass of water from a pitcher on his bedstand. “It’s why no one has missed you yet. There are a lot of distractions right now. The new officers must assume you were reassigned too. All the ones who would know for sure are gone.”

“I wrote a note to my lieutenant but it came back saying he was gone,” the corporal ventured uneasily. “I’ll be back by payday.”

“I have no doubt,” Shan said. “And until then, who could deny that you needed some protracted sick leave?”

The soldier drained the glass. “I still get headaches. I have cuts in my scalp. The bandages need changing.”

“Your first bandage was from a lama’s robe. Do you remember?”

The soldier slowly nodded. “The old fool. He could have run, could have saved himself five years of misery. But he settled down beside me like some old yak. When I came to my senses and stood he didn’t even notice, just kept up that chant of his.”

“Before you stood, did you see anything?”

“My vision came and went. People were running. The guards ran down the road, shooting pistols. Something ran in and out of the bus.”

“You mean somebody.”

“A yeti,” the soldier offered in a tentative voice.

Shan leaned closer. “You saw a yeti jump into the bus?”

The corporal shrugged. “In the barracks some of the old sergeants say yetis throw stones at our trucks when they drive in the mountains. When things go missing at the barracks the men say a yeti took them, kind of a joke. Whatever it was moved fast, without fear of our guns. My vision was blurred. I saw something dark, the size of a man. I thought I smelled spices for a moment, and heard tiny bells.” He shrugged again. “They say strange things happen with concussions.”

Someone, Shan reminded himself, had taken the files from the prison bus, someone wise enough to know the files represented the primary connection the government had to the monks, someone brave—or foolhardy—enough to chance being shot by a guard.

“And then,” Shan asked, “after the lama tended your wounds you went up the road? Not to go search for the others in your squad?”

“That’s where they all were by then, around the bodies, shouting, calling on radios, all frantic, scared to death. They weren’t worried about the monks anymore. They barely noticed when I got there so I sat against a rock and watched. I was still bleeding. I was fading in and out of consciousness.”

“What did you see of the dead?”

The soldier shrugged. “Two corpses. Bloody down the front, propped against the rocks.”

“You’re sure it was two?”

“Of course it was two. I saw them. The lieutenant was on the radio, shouting that there were two dead people. Both women.”

Shan took a deep, relieved breath. At last someone else shared his perception of reality. “How do you know?”

“One was that minister. We had seen her the day before at a rally. The lieutenant started looking for identity papers on the other. Someone said it was one of those men from the climbing conference.”

Shan recalled Megan’s Ross’s closed-cropped hair, the blood on her sturdy, weathered face. It was a simple human reaction, that he had often had to fight early in his career. No one liked to look into dead, bloody faces.

“What happened?”

“The lieutenant opened the jacket, searched the pockets, found nothing, became frantic, and pulled open the shirt. He cried out and jerked backward like he had been bitten by a snake. The body had
breasts
.”

“Then what?”

“There was another problem, a man lying on the ground by the road. A tough bastard, he kept trying to get up. They used those electric sticks on him. I passed out.”

Involuntarily Shan’s hand grasped his own upper arm, which still twitched from the many sticks that had touched him that day, and the days after. He had not remembered resisting the knobs, but he had no doubt who was the bastard the soldier spoke about.

“I remember watching the lieutenant open the trunk of the car and pull out a quart of oil. He used it to outline the bodies.”

Shan’s head snapped up. “He what?”

“Those other fools didn’t know anything about investigations. He understood. I watch murder shows too. First thing you do, he told the soldiers, you mark where the bodies were found. Usually they use chalk or white tape or something. But he couldn’t find anything else to use.”

Shan nodded solemnly. “Excellent. And then you looked for evidence?”

The soldier frowned. “Who are you exactly? I don’t know if—”

“I am someone who so far has no particular reason to report your whereabouts to the garrison. It would be a shame to disturb your hard-earned vacation.”

The corporal swallowed hard. “I kept passing out, in and out of consciousness. I remember seeing that someone had closed the shirt and jacket of the younger corpse, and someone had pulled a blue cap low over her head. Someone was shouting to the lieutenant, pointing to a man standing on the road above at that sharp switchback curve, a hundred yards away. He had gotten out of his car and was looking down. When I came to again, the lieutenant was there, arguing with another officer, pointing at the man on the ground, who was covered in blood. Then my head exploded in pain and I blacked out again, for a long time. Next thing I knew, I was in a car bringing me here. The lieutenant had flagged it down, and ordered it to transport me here since all available military transport was being used to bring in teams to search for those damned monks. I passed out again. I woke up here. A doctor came in the next day, on his rounds out of Shigatse.”

“The bodies. What were they saying about them? Who carried them away?”

The young Chinese gazed thoughtfully at a stain on the opposite wall. “My memories jump around, like those movies where the camera keeps changing. There was an army truck. People were eating peaches. The bodies were on planks being lifted into the truck, the minister and the one in the blue cap. They have a place they keep bodies on ice at the spa in the mountains. The last thing I remember is the lieutenant sitting with his head in his hands, looking like his world had ended. That new officer was kicking dirt over the blood, saying all foreigners had to be kept away. Then he lit the oil that showed where the bodies were.”

“He burned it?”

The soldier nodded slowly. His eyelids seemed to be getting heavy, his head was sinking deeper into his pillow. “He had his own chant, like that old monk. Except he kept saying
Ta ma de,
ta ma de, ta ma de
.
” Damn, damn, damn.
“I remember seeing the shapes of the bodies in flames. It was as if he were cremating their spirits.”

Shan watched as the corporal slept, replaying their conversation. There had been a witness, in the distance, who had seen two bodies. The knobs had carried away two corpses. But on the slope that particular day, at that particular hour, there had been three dead bodies.

THE GOVERNMENT OF the People’s Republic often boasted of its achievements in bridging the gaps between disparate peoples, and discovering ways to push old traditions into the cause of modern socialism. Here, in this high, hidden corner of Tibet, at the gate of the People’s Institute for the Treatment of Criminal Disorders, the knobs’ infamous yeti factory, Shan encountered proof of this miracle. Half a dozen solemn Tibetans, four men and two women, slipped on frayed and faded laboratory coats, on the backs of which large black X’s had been marked. Two young knob guards nervously watched, hands on their rifles, as if expecting to be attacked. The six were ragyapa, fleshcutters, the peculiar, often shunned breed who traditionally disposed of bodies by cutting them up and feeding them to vultures. Public Security had reincarnated them for the twenty-first century, had reversed the polarity of their existence, had decided to supply them pieces of bodies out of which to make something whole. This particular clan of ragyapa was assigned to removal of infectious waste and body parts from the knobs’ special clinic.

Shan pulled his hat low, turned his face away as he donned one of the coats, not daring to look back toward the entry road, half expecting Tsipon to appear and pull him away from the gatehouse.

“By my count you have less than a day left. I need those porters,” the Tibetan had growled when Shan found him in his office late the day before.

“I know where the body is.” Shan had then produced a ragged sheet of paper from his pocket then scribbled something and handed it to the Tibetan.

Tsipon’s face sagged as he read Shan’s words. “You have suffered a complete mental breakdown. I hear it is common among former prisoners.”

“And I hear you want to buy an apartment in Macau. You won’t be able to afford a broom closet without those American dollars.”

Tsipon frowned. “My little bird Kypo sings too much,” he snapped, then stood, lit a cigarette, and gazed out his window. “I promised you I’d get you inside the spa. If I grant your request, this is it. Your one and only chance inside. I’m done bending rules for you. You can go in for that damned colonel now or for your son later.”

Shan had expected it would be the bargain Tsipon offered, but now, hearing the words, something inside frantically urged him to reject it. He spoke looking down at his feet. “They go in before dawn, every other day.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen them,” Shan said. He was not about to tell Tsipon that at least once a week he found a way to steal onto the remote ridge by the yeti factory and watch, praying for a glimpse of his son at a window or exercising on the grounds.

“If you are discovered,” Tsipon declared in a tentative tone, “I won’t even return the call when Public Security tries to reach me.”

“If they arrest me there,” Shan rejoined, “they won’t bother to make any calls.”

The thought seemed to encourage Tsipon. He waved the paper toward Shan. “These people you want to use for cover,” he added with a perverse grin, “they are like animals. They even scare the knobs.”

SHAN HAD INDEED been counting on the guards’ discomfort with the fleshcutters. The soldiers who handed out the lab coats seemed not nearly as interested in screening the workers as quickly getting rid of the shabbily dressed, low-caste Tibetans.

Moments later they were inside, retrieving stainless steel buckets and two large laundry tubs on wheels from a janitor’s closet before disappearing down a dimly lit corridor.

The Tibetans did their accustomed chore with silent determination, moving from one surgical room to another, emptying several sacks of bloody towels into one of the laundry tubs, then tossing in stained cloth bundles from canisters marked CONTAMINATED before looking to Shan with an air of anticipation. He had known several ragyapa before. They were people of few words and fewer fears. He had met them before dawn to explain his goal that morning, and had listened and agreed to their rules about touching even the smallest of mortal remains. Unknown to the knobs, the ragyapa did not burn the body parts as they were instructed to do, but took them to consecrated grounds for dispersal to the birds. Touching the dead was not taboo to them; it was a sacred duty.