Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (20 page)

“How long have you lived in Tibet, Shan? An American working with Tibetans on a project that shows how Tibetan culture came from over the mountains and not from China? They would deport me in a second, and do much worse to any Tibetan who helped me.”

That much, Shan knew, was the absolute truth. But Yates had done nothing to close the biggest hole in his story: Why, if he was studying the metal of religious statues, was he only taking those of the Lord of Death?

Shan stood. It was late in the day. He still had a long drive back to Shogo. Yates followed him into the pool of sunlight by the entry, the worry on his face proof enough that he had finally grasped Shan’s point. He and Megan Ross had unleashed a chain of events that were endangering every Tibetan in the shadow of the mountains.

“When she comes back,” Yates said, “Megan will know how to patch things up. She’ll know where to take the monks.”

“She’s not coming back,” Shan said.

“Nonsense. I told you. I saw the bodies. No Megan.”

“She died in my arms,” Shan tried again.

Yates shook his head in disagreement, then turned his back on Shan.

“ ‘The raven,’ she said at first, then ‘is it me?’” Shan told him.

The American froze for a moment, but did not look back before disappearing into the shadows.

Chapter Ten

HE STOPPED THE truck at the crossroads where Xie had waited that morning, looking in the dusk for signs of the director’s watchers. The local people would descend on the ruins after Xie and his men departed. There would be prayer stones to retrieve. Even smashed prayer wheels would still be considered sacred. The Tibetans would know that the government tended to return to such sites, with excavators, to remove every stone, to scour the site to bare earth and salt it so nothing would grow. But that would be in the daytime, and in Tibet, everywhere but the cities, the night belonged to the Tibetans. He waited for five minutes, seeking signs of watchers, then turned onto the valley road.

The weathered, compact structures of the gompa were gone. Three thick stone walls alone remained standing, their soot-stained murals exposed to the elements. Everything else was leveled, reduced to a rubble of stone, plaster, and wood. Chairs and tables lay in splinters, smashed not only by the bulldozer but by what looked like sledgehammers. Shreds of old
tangka
paintings trapped in the rocks fluttered in the wind. There was no sign of any Tibetans. Then he paused, seeing why no one was salvaging anything. In the shadow of the trees at the far side he could see the low, dark shape of the director’s sedan.

He wandered into the rubble without conscious thought, numbed again by the devastation, vaguely aware of a rhythmic, metallic rumble, the sound of an engine straining, revving then ebbing. He walked past a patch of whitewashed stones that marked where the old
chorten
shrine had stood, passing a futile moment searching for the bronze or wooden box with relics that would have been secreted inside. Then he stepped toward the sound of the engine, past the three standing walls that had been too thick to topple, to the rock face that defined the back of the compound.

The small bulldozer had been aimed at the Buddha painted on the rock face. Driverless, its engine was on, but something in its drive gears had broken so that it was pushing forward several inches, hitting the rock face, revving and falling back, repeating the process over and over. With new foreboding, Shan looked about the compound for any sign of the driver, then approached the machine, intending to switch off the ignition. Two steps away he froze. The levers that controlled the steering had been fastened in place, tied with old
khatas
, white prayer scarves. As he reached for the ignition a splash of color by the blade caught his eye. He looked at the scrap of red fur with a vague sense of recognition, not seeing the blood and fragments of expensive overcoat until he was inches away. He staggered, bracing himself against the rock wall, fighting a spasm of nausea. Caught between the rock and the heavy metal blade was a different, bloody rubble, the remains of Director Xie of the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

He did not know how long he stood against the wall, gripped by horror, but eventually he turned and switched off the ignition, using his knuckles on the key so as not to leave prints. He covered what was left of Xie’s head with a scrap of tangka. The Radiant Light of Pure Reality, said a prayer on the scrap, from the beginning of the Bardo death ritual. The words stopped him. Xie might have been a wheelsmasher, might have come to the county to enhance his reputation at the expense of the Tibetans, but no one deserved such a fate. “Recognize the radiant light that is your death,” he murmured, continuing the rite, “recognize that your consciousness is without birth or death.”

He searched the grounds in the dusk, trying to understand how Xie could possibly have let himself be alone with his killer, half expecting to find the bodies of one or more of his deputies. But there were no other bodies. As darkness fell he found a hand lantern in his truck and searched Xie’s car, finding nothing but a box of ritual tools that he removed to the hidden trail at the rear of the gompa. Then he methodically paced along the packed earth.

It was crisscrossed with tire and boot tracks, probably of more than two dozen different people and half a dozen vehicles. He wandered a few paces up the pilgrim trail, where he knew many Tibetans had traveled that day. If they had seen anything they would be burrowing deep into the hills by now.

Shan did not hear the approaching vehicle until it was too late to hide. It came rolling into the compound with its lights out, coasting the last hundred feet with its engine off. He switched off his own light and took refuge in the deeper shadow of one of the standing walls.

“
Lao
Shan?” came a nervous voice from the dark, a respectful call in Chinese, as lanterns were lit from the road. Shan stepped toward them to find a small pickup truck overflowing with Tibetans, most of them porters from the base camp. In the back of the truck were shovels and a wheelbarrow.

They would not be dissuaded from their salvage efforts, not by Shan’s warnings, not by being shown the grisly remains in front of the bulldozer. These were men who had been hardened by the mountains, who were no strangers to death, and their reverence for the objects that might be buried in the rubble overcame all fear. This was how they preserved their faith.

“Quickly,” Shan urged at last, “let us move the trucks so the headlights light the rubble. If you have canvas, cover the murals. Those walls may yet survive.” Giving up all hope of finding evidence of Xie’s killer, he worked with them for an hour, uncovering many more ritual implements, intact robes, even some costumes used in religious festivals. Some were tied into larger bundles and set on pack frames that several men carried up the moonlit trail. Others were piled on the trucks.

They were sorting through the rubble, retrieving every stone inscribed with prayer, when the man left to watch the road whistled. The lights were extinguished and they watched with rising fear as a single headlight wound its way up the road. The Tibetan on the battered motorcycle had barely dismounted when he was told the news of Xie’s murder.

“The death demons are out this night,” the newcomer said in a hollow voice. “In the mountains. In the town. It will mean the end of us.”

“The town?” Shan asked.

“The knobs attacked Gyalo. When they finished they threw him in the gully with all the other ghosts.”

NEARLY AN HOUR later Shan climbed off the back of the motorcycle a block from Gyalo’s compound. The shutters of every house on the street were closed, every gate and door shut fast. Shogo town was bracing for a storm.

The storm had already struck at the old farmhouse of the drunken lama. Half the contents of the household were strewn about the courtyard. The house itself had been attacked. Something heavy, a sledgehammer perhaps, had slammed into the plastered walls, the window sashes, the door. The brittle plaster had shattered and fallen, some hanging loose on the horsehair that had been mixed with it in another century. The windows were nothing but splinters of wood and shards of glass. The door dangled on its bottom hinge. Inside, the two wooden chests that Gyalo had kept his clothes in had been reduced to fragments of painted wood, their contents scattered across the stone flags of the floor. The acrid scent of sorghum whiskey hung in the air from a jug smashed against the wall.

He retreated slowly, watching the street for any movement, then approached the shed at the edge of the dump pit. He had nearly reached the decrepit little structure when the sound of voices caused him to dart into the shadows behind it. He edged along the walls until he could glimpse the speakers.

Kypo and Jomo stood at the lip of the low cliff where trucks dumped their loads of garbage, studying the shadows below, speaking in low, worried tones as the odor of decay wafted up from the pit. Shan glanced inside the shed before approaching the two men. The inside walls were bare, the packed earth floor empty. The artifacts Gyalo had secretly hoarded there were gone.

The two men greeted him with silent nods, and the three stood wordlessly, staring into the shadows below.

It was Jomo who finally broke the silence. “It’s how you destroy infestations of insects, my father used to say,” Gyalo’s son said in a mournful voice. “First dig into the heart of the colony. Destroy them by the thousands at the heart, collapse every chamber they live in. Expect it to take a long time because you will find colonies hidden in the most unexpected places. But eventually there will be only a few left, surviving alone, and when you find them smash them hard, leaving only little greasy stains on the floor.”

“We have to get him out,” Shan interjected. “We can’t just. . . .”

“They beat him before they threw him over the side,” Jomo said in a desolate voice. “Hard to tell, though, how many of the broken bones and cuts were from the beating, and how many from the rocks they threw him on.” He glanced at Shan with a grim expression. “Being drunk probably saved him, kept his muscles relaxed, kept him from fighting back, from trying to move and making his injuries worse.”

“He still lives?” Shan’s question came out in a hoarse whisper. “Where?”

“He lives for now,” replied Jomo. “Gone from town. Where no one will ever expect him to be,” he added with a glance at Kypo.

Shan looked back at the shed, noticing for the first time the three bulging burlap sacks near the gully’s edge. Jomo seemed about to block Shan as he stepped toward the sacks, but Kypo restrained him with a hand on his arm.

The first of the sacks was stuffed with prayer wheels, all of which were damaged, some crushed nearly flat, like tin cans being sent to a dump. The second ritual implements, many bent and disfigured. The third held old barley hooks, many of the sickle-like blades corroded and pitted. Shan rubbed his fingertips over the blade of one, then extended it into the moonlight. He could barely make out the crude outlines of mountains, Tibetan script scrawled underneath, too dim to read. “What are these marks?” he asked. “Why do they scare everyone?”

“What does it matter now?” Jomo shot back. He was growing more nervous, casting worried glances toward the street. “If Public Security comes back it will just infuriate them more to find these.”

“Because it could be why he was attacked,” Shan quickly explained what he had learned about the barley hook at the bus ambush.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gyalo’s son replied, lifting the sack with the hooks. “We just know it won’t happen again.” He began to swing it, to throw it deep into the darkness below.

Shan touched his arm. “No. I have a better place.”

“There is no better place,” the Tibetan said in a bitter tone.

“For your father’s sake. He wanted them preserved.”

“So I should trust you?” Jomo snapped. “It was your kind who did this to him.”

Shan did not reply but hoisted one of the bags to his shoulder and turned to the short trail to the stable.

At first the two Tibetans did not want to enter the old stable at the mouth of the gully. They had climbed down the trail in silence, each carrying one of the heavy sacks over his shoulder but Kypo and Jomo set theirs down at the door when Shan stepped inside to light a lamp. Though they had both been there before, it had never been at night.

“They say this place is haunted,” Kypo said hesitantly. “They never did recover all the bodies from the old gompa.”

“One thing I can tell you for certain, Kypo,” Shan said as he began to drag the sacks inside. “All the dead are on our side.”

Kypo muttered something that sounded like a prayer and picked up one of the sacks, followed by Jomo. Shan lifted his lamp and led them past the stall with his sleeping pallet, through the decrepit stable into the adjoining storage room, its roof hanging by only a few beams, roof tiles littering the ground where they had fallen through. He handed the lamp to a confused Kypo, then knelt, running his fingers through the layer of loose earth on the floor until he found what he was looking for, the buried edge of a canvas sheet. He gripped one edge of the sheet, hands on two corners, and slowly flipped it, exposing a hatch of wooden planks bound with heavy iron straps, a recessed iron ring near one edge.

A gasp of surprise escaped Jomo’s throat. Kypo silently bent to help Shan lift the hatch. “The gompa was here for centuries,” Shan explained, “giving them lots of time to construct tunnels and secret escape routes and passages to secret shrines.” He carried the lamp down the steep stone steps, set it on the workbench built along the wall, then reached up to help the Tibetans lower the sacks into the chamber.

“Ai yi!” Kypo exclaimed as he stepped down the stairs. The demons painted on the facing wall centuries earlier were still vivid enough even through the layers of soot to have their intended effect.

“They thought they had pushed all of the gompa into the gully,” Shan explained as he lit another lamp. “This was just an old stable, and the bulldozers couldn’t get down the steep slope to touch it. The stable was used as a granary when the army had a garrison here, then abandoned when they moved on. I wouldn’t have even known about this chamber if I hadn’t dropped a piece of firewood on the floor one night and heard the hollow sound of the hatch.”

Shan held the lamp near the wall, exposing a savage head with horns and fangs. “Like many of the old gompas, its first chambers were underground, built into the wall of the gully. This was a
gonkhang
, a chapel for protector demons. They often built them in hidden places, using them only for special rituals or for testing the fortitude of novices.”

When he turned Gyalo’s son had the second sack in his hand and was staring at the workbench, which held artifacts in various states of repair. “You’re digging these up,” he said in a spiteful voice. “Every Tibetan for fifty miles is scared to go into the gully so you just go in and help yourself.” He lifted a figure of a deity mounted on a tiger. “These make a big profit on the international market, I hear.” He lifted one of the sacks over his shoulder as if to take it back outside. “You must think us such fools, bringing you more inventory to get rich on. You Chinese always want to just have your way with us!” He took a step toward the stairs, then paused, looking at Kypo, who was stroking the head of the Buddha Shan had been working on when he was not cleaning the printing blocks in the stable above.