Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (25 page)

His father waited for him on the mountainside beside a small comfortable
bungalow of wood and stone, completing a painting of intricately
detailed bamboo in which a thrush sang. Sipping water from a wooden
ladle, the old scholar looked up and gazed expectantly down the misty
trail.

Shan reached into his pouch and withdrew a paper and pen.

We are journeying to your Sung house, Father
, he wrote.
Ko with
fresh brushes and I with a basket of lychee nuts. Not long now, until we slip
these chains. Keep the tea warm. Xiao Shan,
he signed it
. Little Shan.

Shan stared at the letter, fighting his recurring guilt over never having written to his father with the full details of his own imprisonment, for fear he would disappoint the old scholar. He lifted the pen again but instead of writing drew a small simple mandala in the margin then folded another sheet of paper as an envelope around the letter and wrote his father’s name. With overlapping sticks he built a small square tower in the fire and laid the letter on it. He watched it burn, watched the glowing ashes rise high up into an oddly gentle breeze and float toward Chomolungma.

After a long time he extracted more paper, this time addressing it with the names of the two Tibetans whose lives he cherished more than his own. He had been sending a letter every week to Gendun and Lokesh, in their hidden hermitage in Lhadrung, and now wrote without thinking, in the Tibetan script they had taught him, of the events of the past ten days, wrote of everything, explaining how first a sherpa, then an American woman, were dead and not dead, playing ongoing roles in the strangest of dramas. He had begun to believe that the mountain goddess was indeed using them, he wrote, though he could not discover her purpose.
I have lost the way of finding the truth
, he finally inscribed.
Teach me again
.

He held the letter in his hands, convinced more than ever that the old Tibetans would be aware that he was sending a message, asking them to help him discover the truth across the hundreds of miles that separated them.

But there was no truth, he could hear his friends say, at least none that could ever be spoken, there was only the particular goodness that resonated inside each man, and each man’s form of goodness was as unique as each cloud in the sky.

He sat long after he had burned the second letter, watching the fire dwindle to ashes, driving the world from his mind the way Gendun and Lokesh had taught him. Finally he went to the lip of the high ledge and folded his hands into the diamond of the mind mudra for focus, looking over the sleeping town and the snowcapped sentinels on the horizon. After an hour he found a quiet place within. After another hour he began to let each piece of evidence enter the place, turning it, twisting it, prodding it, looking for and finally finding the one little ember that was smoldering under it all.

SHAN WAS AT the entry to the Tingri County People’s Library when it opened, wearing his best clothes, respectfully greeting the Chinese matron who administered the collection, moving to a long row of shelves under the side window. It was a compact, sturdy building, freshly painted and containing a bigger collection than would seem justified by the size of the town, reflecting the largess of the local Party.

The books Shan focused on were all identically bound, all labeled in block gold ideograms
Annual Report of the Tingri County
Secretariat of the Communist Party of China
. He picked up the volumes for the early 1960s and began quickly leafing through them. They consisted almost entirely of pronouncements from Beijing, the only local content being commentary on the evolving campaign against the local landlord class, with lists of assets, down to the number of sheep and yaks. It was a familiar saga, in which local cooperatives, formed from what Beijing termed the peasant class, gradually increased their power over the social structure.

“May I be of assistance?” came an aggrieved voice over his shoulder.

Shan turned to the librarian with a smile. “This early period of socialist assimilation fascinates me. When I was younger I spent days and days in the archives in Beijing.” That much at least was true. “Each region has its own particular version to tell.”

The woman came closer. She smelled of strong soap and peanut oil. “You are supposed to sign in to use the reference materials,” she chided, extending a clipboard.

Shan apologized and quickly wrote his name at the bottom of a list of names.

“Beijing?” she asked in a more relaxed tone.

“My home.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “I am from Tianjin! Practically neighbors.”

“Practically neighbors,” Shan agreed. He fixed the woman with a meaningful gaze. “Surely there was much drama during this region’s transformation. So remote. So close to the border. So many locals mired in the old ways. I used to go to Tianjin,” he added. “I used to watch the ships.”

The woman gave an exclamation of excitement and Shan listened patiently for several minutes as she recounted tales of walking the docks with her parents when she was a child, of an uncle who used to sail on freighters that traveled all over Asia. At last she stood, retrieved a stool, and searched the shelf over the window, producing a dusty volume that she handed to Shan with a satisfied smile. “So many just want to come in to read about yeti, or all the foreigners who have died on our mountain. And until I arrived last year the collection was so incomplete, it took me months just to understand where she had left off.”

“Left off?”

“My predecessor. Poor woman had lived here for fifteen years without ever going up to the base of Chomolungma. And the one day she finally decides to drive up her car fails her.”

Shan leaned forward. “Are you saying she died?”

The librarian’s eyes widened as she gave a melodramatic sigh. “Brakes failed; off a cliff she flew.”

“And books were missing after she died? They were here once, and were stolen?”

The woman shrugged. “Stolen, misplaced. They were part of the overall collection she had been compiling on the local history of the People’s Republic. I had to make calls to Shigatse to get these, the only ones in the county I think. I can’t imagine why the most important book of all for those interested in local history should be missing.”

The book was a limited edition, published by the Party, entitled
Heroes of the Himalayan Revolution
. After passing over several pages of Party platitudes, Shan reached a dry chronicle, written in a clerical style, which opened by stating that the struggle to unlock the grip of the landlord classes in the region required more resources than elsewhere—the Party’s way of acknowledging that there had been genuine resistance from the local Tibetans. He passed over pages with more lists of the landlord class, expanded as the fervor of reform spread to include not only the large landowners but smaller and smaller farms. Those who owned fifty sheep, then those who owned ten sheep. Those who owned a yak and a dog. As the reform committees, led by ranking members of the peasant class guided by Chinese, began to redistribute the wealth, “hooligans in the mountains” sought to interfere. A company of infantry was brought in. A brigade. A battalion. It was the closest an official chronicler would come to admitting there was an ongoing armed rebellion against the Chinese. Campaigns to eliminate the hooligans were launched along the border with Nepal, in the hills above Shogo, in the valleys below Tumtok village.

But real reform had not started until Mao had dispatched his youth brigades, the Red Guard. Few members of Shan’s generation would speak openly of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s euphemistic caption for the years during which the Red Guard inflicted chaos and terror on the country. Youthful zealots, often no more than teenagers, had set themselves up as de facto rulers in many regions, even taking over units of the army. Only when the Red Guard had established itself in Tibet had the systematic destruction of monasteries and temples begun.

The book switched format to reprints of newspaper articles, complete with photographs. A description of the Red Guard moving against small monasteries came under the headline HEROES DEFEND HOMELAND
,
with a flowery passage about Mao’s Children, one of the Guard’s many labels, attacking members of the reactionary Dalai Lama gang in the fortresses they called monasteries. Coarse, grainy photographs followed of lamas being paraded through town wearing the conical dunce caps often placed on the subjects of political struggle sessions. THE LEADERS OF THE EXPLOITER CLASS AT LAST BROUGHT TO SUBMISSION BY THE 117TH YOUTH BRIGADE
,
read one of the captions. In another photo the flag of Beijing was crossed with another, its insignia blurred by the wind. Others showed mountain gompas in ruin, piles of weapons seized from remnants of the exploiters, smoking remains of the houses of suspected rebels. In one of the pictures members of the Brigade posed with weapons like warriors, wearing bandoliers, waving heavy automatic pistols over their heads. Finally he reached a large photo, carefully staged, of more old Tibetans in conical hats sitting in a struggle session before a raised table of revolutionary inquisitors in the courtyard of the old gompa. Hanging in front of the table was the flag of the youth brigade, consisting of a hammer crossed with a lightning bolt on a dark background. At the center of the table sat an attractive young girl with familiar features. The caption read TIRELESS COMMANDER WU LEADS ANOTHER STRUGGLE SESSION IN SHOGO
.

Reports of speeches followed, from National Day ceremonies, visits of Party dignitaries, followed by an article captioned
Final
Campaign Against Traitors in Mountains
, a brief description of how the Hammer and Lightning Brigade was finally scouring away the last vestiges of resistance by machine-gunning all herds and leveling most of the villages in the high ranges.

The book abruptly ended with no conclusion, no final chapter celebrating Beijing’s victory. Shan closed it and looked at the librarian, who was watching him with a satisfied expression. “The story ends rather suddenly,” he observed.

The woman sighed and pointed to a small legend at the base of the spine. Volume One.

“May I see the next?”

“I wish you could. After all the trouble I took to get it last year, it has now gone missing.”

Shan chewed on the words. “Missing since when?”

“A week ago, maybe two. Our reference works are not for circulation. Someone,” she declared in a pained voice, “stole it.”

“Stole it again, you mean.”

The woman frowned, then nodded.

“Surely you can determine who could have committed such a crime.”

“We are not crowded usually but during the season many people come and go.”

“During the season? You mean foreigners?”

“It is why we have fresh paint, a new roof, more funding than any other library our size in the county. When the weather doesn’t permit treks to the mountain, tourists need something else to do. We have a display of local artifacts in the adjoining room.”

“Would foreigners do research?” Shan asked, working to keep his tone casual.

“A few. Not many can read Chinese.”

“Surely you make them sign in? I work for Tsipon,” he added quickly in a confiding tone. “I could make inquiries of the foreign climbing parties.”

The woman studied him a moment then hurried away to the office at the back of the main chamber. The moment she disappeared he opened the book to the photograph with Commander Wu and, with a shamed glance toward the office, ripped it out and stuffed it inside his shirt. A moment later the woman reappeared, sifting through several sheets of paper as she walked that were identical to the one Shan had signed. The entries for the past four weeks included over three dozen names, several German, some Japanese, another French. Only one person had visited multiple times. Megan Ross had started doing research nearly a month earlier, and had been at the library the day before she died.

Chapter Twelve

AS HE HURRIED down the steep ladder stair into the dim old gompa rooms Shan nearly tripped on a limp form at the bottom. Gyalo lay in a heap, more dead than alive. Shan quickly lit more lamps from the one he carried and knelt at the old man’s side. The tips of his fingers were scratched and bloody. He had been clawing at the hatch above, Shan realized, like a wild animal trapped in a cage.

The old Tibetan did not acknowledge him, but did not resist as Shan half dragged, half carried him back to his pallet. His breath was harsh and raspy. His shirt clung to his body in patches of red where several wounds had reopened. Shan worked silently, stripping off the shirt, washing the wounds, gently pushing back the hand that now tried to stop him, ignoring the whispered curses in Chinese and Tibetan, gradually becoming aware that the curses had been replaced with a rambling soliloquy made up of snippets of drinking songs, lonely shepherds’ ballads, and mantras to the Tibetan gods.

When he finished and Gyalo was wearing one of Shan’s old shirts, Shan sat a few feet away on the floor and listened, watching the flame of the nearest lamp, until he himself slipped into a mantra, the prayer for the Compassionate Buddha. He did not know when the cadence of the old man’s words changed, but became aware that Gyalo was sitting upright against the wall, chanting in unison with him, staring at the same flame. Shan lowered his voice. Gyalo kept up the chant, pausing several times to look into the shadows and interject louder words of gratitude to Rinpoche. The old Tibetan, Shan realized, was back in a temple of his youth, chanting with the novice monks as they took lessons from a lama.

After several minutes Gyalo’s eyes flickered. As he looked up and focused on Shan his words faltered, his face flushed with embarassment and he grew silent.

Shan extended the photo he had taken from the library, holding it a few inches from the Tibetan’s face.

Gyalo seemed to take a long time to grasp what he was looking at. Then a shuddering moan rose from his throat. His shoulders sank, his chest sagged.

“They were here,” Shan said. “The Hammer and Lightning Brigade lived in your gompa before they destroyed it. But what did they do in the mountains?”

“They died.” Gyalo spoke in such a low whisper Shan was not sure he had heard correctly. “They whimpered like children and died.” The Tibetan pulled the photo from Shan’s hand and held it closer to the lamp, his eyes growing round.

“These were the ones,” Shan said, “the ones who—” he painfully searched for words—“who took away your robe.”

Before he could react Gyalo began ripping the photo. By the time Shan had seized it he had torn off a long strip, two inches down the left side. The Tibetan jerked free, then slowly turned and set the strip upright in a little chink in the rock wall that had been made to hold a small deity figure. Emotions filled the old man’s face as he gazed at the strip, emotions Shan had never seen there, emotions he could not name.

Shan lifted the lamp and held it close, seeing that a single figure was framed in the strip Gyalo had claimed, that of a sturdy, plain looking Chinese girl wearing a military tunic.

It took a moment for Shan to understand, then he looked away in shame. Gyalo had saved the image of the Chinese wife who had been forced upon him to break him as a monk.

CONSTABLE JIN HAD his feet up on his desk, staring so intently at a dog-eared Western travel magazine in his lap that he did not even notice Shan until he put his hand on Jin’s telephone. He muttered a quick curse, dropping his legs to the floor.

“I need to make a private call,” Shan declared.

“You can’t just—”

“Someone tried to kill Gyalo. His son is convinced it was Public Security.”

Jin shrugged. “Two officials have been murdered.”

“It wasn’t the knobs. Whoever did it never asked a question about the killings. They had no interest in detaining him. They left him for dead in the pit, then rifled through his old things. Things from the first uprising.”

The constable dropped the magazine onto his desk, opened to a photo of young men and women surfing along a white-sand beach lined with palm trees. “One of those Western climbers read this article to me at base camp,” Jin announced, gazing at the photo. “It says some of the experts imagine the water is snow and they are riding down a mountainside. I could do that,” Jin declared in an oddly dreamy tone. “I know how to sled.”

Shan closed the magazine.

Jin seemed not to notice. “I have a cousin who was able to get across the border without getting shot. He got a job in Thailand, in a restaurant. He says they do this there, this water riding.”

“Surfing.”

“This surfing. He says he could get me a job too if I ever got permission to leave the country.”

Shan covered the magazine with his hand. “Like you said, two officials have been murdered. Why aren’t you in the field?”

“I asked Tsipon about getting a visa to live in Thailand, or India maybe,” Jin continued in a hollow voice. “He just laughed. He said no one in law enforcement gets permission to emigrate, because we know too many secrets about the government. Tell me it isn’t true.”

“You collaborated with the American Megan Ross,” Shan declared, pushing the tone of a government prosecutor into his words. “You divulged that the mountain road was being closed for the minister, that she was going to drive alone in a car ahead of the prison bus. We could probably find a witness who will recall seeing you give her a ride to the hotel the night before.”

The blood seemed to be draining from Jin’s face.

“Revealing a secret vital to state security— to a foreigner no less.”

“It wasn’t exactly . . .” Jin murmured. “I didn’t . . .” He looked forlornly at the magazine.

“In this country,” Shan continued, “law enforcement officials who breach state security have been executed. When Megan Ross comes down off her mountain you’d better start running.” If he couldn’t use the American’s death to find the truth then maybe he too should start pretending she was alive.

“I can arrest you, Shan. I can ship you away.”

Shan smiled and stopped pressing. He didn’t want Jin paralyzed, just focused on their mutual problem.

“Gyalo was attacked by two men in black clothes. Hoods over their heads. Strangers. Who were they?”

“Public Security does things differently since the last uprising. They still don’t mind hauling off an entire village or gompa. But if they have to deal with an individual Tibetan, they do it in private, in the shadows.”

“Why would they want to punish Gyalo?”

Jin seemed to see an offer of hope in Shan’s words. “Last week, after Wu was murdered, he got really drunk, stinking drunk. I walked in to see him strutting along the top of the bar like a soldier, pretending to be shot, and dying, again and again as customers tossed coins. I tried to get him to stop, because I knew soldiers were coming into town soon. He laughed when I pulled him down, said he wouldn’t want to be a soldier in the mountains now, with all the ghosts coming out.”

“Ghosts?”

“He said the only demons that ever frightened the Chinese were the ones from forty years ago, the ones who had been dead all these years. He said soon they would be swarming down out of the mountains, riding on the backs of yetis.”

Shan caught the scent of smoke on Jin, saw for the first time soot stains on the shoulder of his tunic. “You haven’t said where you’ve been.”

“There was a fire. Nothing big. That cottage Tsipon loans to foreign climbers. We saved the structure, but most of the gear was lost.”

“Whose gear?”

“Tsipon’s new American customers used it when they stayed in town.”

Shan stepped to the window. He knew the little one-room cottage behind Tsipon’s depot, had helped clean it several times. He leaned toward the glass to glimpse the large building at the southern edge of town. There was indeed a thin column of smoke rising behind it.

“Who did it?”

“We are allowed to report only so many crimes, so we’re calling it an accident. Those climbers get sloppy, keeping matches and fuel canisters together.”

“Who did it?” Shan pressed.

“I told you. No one. But there’s one funny thing. When they saw it everyone came running out of the warehouse to help. Except Kypo. He ran to one of the cars and sped away.”

“Toward Tumkot?”

“Just being a good son.”

“What does this have to do with Ama Apte?”

“Nothing. Like I said, we’re calling it an accident.”

Shan leaned over the constable. “Why,” he said slowly, insistently, “would you connect it to the astrologer?”

“She has a thing about certain foreigners. An American writer was here a couple years ago, researching Western connections to the region over the past century. There are some great stories about the spies the British sent across the border dressed as monks or pilgrims.”

“And?”

“I caught her putting dirt in the writer’s gas tank.”

Shan considered Jin’s words a moment. “But you let her go.”

“Damned right. She threatened to tell my fortune.”

As Shan’s gaze fixed on a basket of shiny metallic objects on the desk Jin rose and looked anxiously toward the door. “You said you had a call to make.”

Shan lifted a steel carabiner, one of half a dozen in the basket. “What are you finding in the hills?”

“Nothing.”

“The snaplinks were supposed to lead you to the monks.”

Jin shrugged. “The American woman apparently hands them out to children like candy. Snaplinks with prayer beads attached.”

“Beads?”

“Every link she leaves has a bracelet of prayer beads strung through it. Like she’s some kind of itinerant nun.”

Jin took a hesitant step toward the door.

“Everything’s changed, Jin. Publicly they will call it a criminal conspiracy. Behind closed doors, where it counts, it will be termed another uprising. More gompas will be closed. Monks will be considered a threat to border security. You can’t suppose they will keep local Tibetans in law enforcement. You’ll be sweeping streets in Shogo. That’s assuming Cao doesn’t find out the entire crime hinged on your leaking a state secret to Ross.”

The constable’s desolate gaze told Shan that Jin understood perfectly. The Tibetan cast a longing glance toward the glossy image of surfers on the white-sand beach, then he shut the door. “I saw two men in dark sweatshirts that day, coming down the trail, hoods over their heads,” he said. “They were running down the trail, toward the murders. Big men, strong, smelling of onions. At first I thought they were Public Security,” he said with apology in his voice. “If I had seen them in the marketplace that’s what I would have thought.”

“But there was no need for undercover guards on the trail.”

“I couldn’t see their faces.”

“And they ran toward the murders. Which means that, if they weren’t knobs, they were probably accomplices.”

Jin winced, opened the door.

Shan picked up the phone receiver.

Jin’s face clouded. “There are other phones.”

“I am reasonably certain Public Security isn’t listening to this one.”

Jin cast Shan a sour look, and fled.

Shan lifted the phone and dialed. The satellite phones used by the trekking companies typically took a long time to connect. But after a few seconds there was a short ringing sound and Yates’s voice came through.

“You need to be more careful with your matches,” Shan began, speaking in English.

“I wasn’t anywhere near that cottage,” the American growled. “Now I’ve got nowhere to sleep but up here. It’s like someone wants to drive me away.”

“Did Megan Ross keep her gear there?”

“Sure, some of it. It’s where she was staying, until she went to the hotel the night before,” the American added.

“We need to move those extra porters,” Shan said. “Give them some heavy mountain clothes and meet me on the base camp road.”

The American took a moment to grasp Shan’s meaning. “They’re gone. They pushed the boxes out at the back and sneaked away. Like they were suddenly afraid of me. Whoever helped them wants me out of China.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re allowed to burn trash in a barrel behind the compound. As I was burning a Public Security officer came up, took pictures.”

“What exactly were you burning?”

“Nothing but trash I thought. But in a box I was about to burn they found a monk’s robe. They took me inside to search my room here. Under my cot they found a box of carabiners with a strand of prayer beads inside each one. One of the knobs fingered his baton.

If there hadn’t been a lot of foreign witnesses I’d probably have a broken skull now.”

“I need to see you.”

“I’ve got equipment being staged from base camp today. Tomorrow morning I could meet you in town.”

“Not tomorrow. Not in town. Tumkot village, in an hour.”

SHAN WAS CLIMBING into the old Jiefang truck at Tsipon’s depot when two of the warehouse workers rounded the corner, sootstained and carrying buckets. He paused, waited for them to enter the building, then slipped around the corner. Although the cottage was intact, smoke still wafted out of the gap in the open door. He glanced over his shoulder to confirm no one was watching then darted inside. Smoke hung heavy over the ceiling. The acrid scent of burned nylon and plastic mingled with the stench of singed down. The remains of what had been a bed under the window on the wall opposite the door was heaped with smoldering clothes, charred magazines and papers. Tsipon, always wary of strangers on his property, had probably sent away the fire crew prematurely. If given enough oxygen, the bed would probably burst into flame.