Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (30 page)

“A village?”

“Tumkot. We were not to touch it, just march through without a word. The next morning we took truckloads of food up to it, and in the afternoon lined up howitzers and began leveling the gompa here in town.”

“As if there had been a trade,” Shan suggested after a moment. “The village for the gompa.”

“As if there had been a trade,” Tan agreed.

“Wu was going to order all the monks inside, to trap them there when the shells fell. But the bastards beat us to it. She was furious.”

“You mean,” Shan guessed, “that they didn’t have to be ordered inside.”

“Right. Most of them went inside as soon as they saw us getting the guns ready. Later I realized they had been expecting it for months. They locked the doors from the inside and a monk went up the wall over the gate to throw the key down as the shells starting landing. We probably killed them all in the first half hour but she kept the barrage up for half a day.”

They sat in silence, watching the stars over the town.

“A crow picking at the bones of starved, scrawny eagles,” Tan said in a near whisper.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s not what I set out to be.”

It was the most extraordinary thing Tan had ever said to him. A dozen replies occurred to Shan. It was the opening for the kind of conversation Shan had with lamas, in the night. But then he studied Tan and reconsidered. “Where were you, Colonel, the day the minister died?”

“I came here, to town. I walked around the old barracks and the infirmary building. That was where Wu held her struggle sessions when the weather was cold. I went and sat by that pit we pushed the old gompa into.”

“And the bodies of the monks.”

Tan did not reply.

Shan rose and piled the empty food cartons on the plate.

“What would you have me do, Colonel, if I am able to retrieve your body?”

“Put me behind the town.”

“You mean on the ridge, where you can see Everest?”

“No.” Tan’s level tone chilled Shan. “You can get out into the pit by climbing up from that old stable at its mouth. I want you to go out there in the middle of the night. I want you to dig in the pit until you strike bones. Then drop me in.”

Chapter Fifteen

“YOU AND I both know that no matter what is stated publicly about the murders, you will be expected to return to Beijing with the truth.” Shan returned Madame Zheng’s unblinking gaze as he spoke. He had watched as the guards took Tan away, his chains reattached, before walking down the corridor. The commissar from Beijing had been waiting for him in the last office in front of a receiver. She had, as Shan had expected, been listening.

“We are beginning to glimpse the truth,” he continued. “The minister took Tan’s gun. There were not two murders but four.”

“Those large bullets fascinate me,” Zheng interjected. Though she seldom spoke, it was always in the low precise tone of an accountant. “They are not Chinese.” She had taken Shan’s advice and obtained the unofficial autopsy report for Tenzin. “If your American friend is involved then you will be the next to die.”

“A chance I am willing to take. Give me four days,” Shan said. “And I will bring back the proof. I need to have my son protected until then.”

Silence was Madame Zheng’s medium. She offered a tiny nod then held up two fingers.

GYALO WA S I N the corner of the buried chamber when Shan arrived, picking with a splinter of wood at a dirt-encrusted figurine, a little bronze Buddha. Shan looked at a small pile of fresh earth at the back of the room. The former lama had been digging at the blocked passage.

“I hadn’t realized,” Shan said abruptly, “that nearly all the monks were killed inside the gompa when the Youth Brigade destroyed it. Why was it different for you?”

Gyalo turned his back on Shan. Shan stepped around him and sat directly in front of him.

The Tibetan frowned but resisted no longer. “By then it was well understood that it was what all of us preferred, dying in the temples. We weren’t allowed to resist, we would have no purpose when the temples were gone. With such a death, praying in the temple, at one with the Buddha, reincarnation was nothing to fear.”

“But it was for you,” Shan said, shamed at his words but knowing he had to press the old man.

Emotion flooded Gyalo’s face. It was a long time before he spoke. “Some were singled out for special punishment. By then that Commander Wu understood our ways. For some a quick death wasn’t enough. She learned ways to destroy a monk, in this life and the next.”

“Singled out because they had offended the Hammer and Lightning Brigade,” Shan suggested. When Gyalo did not contradict him he ventured further. “Because they were suspected of being sympathizers with the rebels.”

Gyalo began picking at the little statue again. “I need a drink.” His hands were shaking, the tremors of an alcoholic in desperate need.

“If you were one of the old rebels it would be reason enough to kill her.”

“She was smart enough to keep out of town. If she had ventured into Shogo there’s still a handful who might recognize her. I keep an iron pipe behind the bar,” Gyalo said without emotion. “If she had walked in I would have gladly beaten her brains out.”

“Or shot her?”

Gyalo murmured a mantra to the deity, then looked up distractedly. “You ever see those protector demons in the old tangkas, with human skins draped around their necks? I think they would have used the pipe.”

“How many rebels survived?”

“No one ever knew how many made it across the border.”

“I mean how many stayed alive, staying here, in the county?”

Gyalo looked as if he bitten something sour. “People moved on, started new lives.” He spoke to the Buddha, as if it were listening. “If one happened into my bar we would not acknowledge one another, never say a word about it. We were different people then, with different lives. Everyone finds their own way to survive, eh?”

“As tavernkeepers? As fortunetellers?”

“You don’t know how it was. I worked for the abbot, taking messages and sometimes supplies to the hermitages and small gompas in the mountains. I saw what that Youth Brigade did. The Dalai Lama said not to fight. But how could a Tibetan
not
fight, I said to my abbot. He said I had to resist my emotions, he made me do penance, ten thousand mantras at a shrine out in the snow.”

“When’s the last time you went into the mountains?”

A spasm of pain shook the Tibetan. “I need a drink,” Gyalo pleaded to the Buddha.

“Why are you so frightened of leaving town?”

“You don’t know her. She was like a tigress, one of the best of the fighters. She vowed she would kill me if she ever saw me again. She told everyone I had betrayed them, to save my life.”

“She helped you, grandfather. Ama Apte set your arm.”

The former lama gazed in horror at the splint on his broken bones. For a moment he looked as if he would rip it away. Gyalo seemed to be in real agony now, clutching his abdomen, his head bobbing up and down. “Any fool could see who the traitor was. It was my home, my life, that was destroyed. Her village was never touched.” He grew very still, his face clenched like a fist.

Shan coaxed the coals in the brazier by the entry back to life, and made black tea. He pushed the hot mug to Gyalo’s lips, forcing him to drink. “Did you ever go up to their stronghold, their last hiding place?”

Gyalo took the mug from Shan and nodded. “They had weapons there, many still in their crates as if they had magically appeared. Grenades, machine guns, mortars.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. They would take me there in the night, from an old cave hermitage, to help with the wounded, to help with the dead. I remember walking along a cliff face. I remember a hole in the trail, by a high ledge, where they took me by the hand and said if I did not follow exactly in their footsteps I would die. Once you got to the top, it was broad and flat and glowed all white, opened toward the mother mountain. An old place.”

“Old?”

“The rebels weren’t the first to use it. There were cairns covered with lichen, with shreds of very old prayer flags. It was one of the ancient shrines to the mother mountain, to keep her placated, one of those that helped keep her anchored to our world. No one cares about her anymore.” The Tibetan shrugged. “Trash and bodies all over her slopes. No wonder she does these things to us.”

“How long was the climb from the hermitage?”

“Two hours, maybe three.”

Shan weighed Gyalo’s words as he poured him another cup of tea. “What do you mean you helped with the dead? You performed the death rites?”

“They always carried away the bodies of their dead. I would be asked to perform death rites, to call out the spirits, to ask for forgiveness so they would not be offended.”

“Offended?”

“The rebels could not risk pyres to burn the bodies, or to go to fleshcutters. They had a place, a deep gully they rolled the bodies into, like a burial at sea.”

YATES WA I T E D FOR him in the shadows by Tsipon’s warehouse.

“We need ropes,” Shan said. “We need climbing equipment.” He tried the door. It was locked.

“It’s the middle of the night, Shan,” the American protested.

“There is no time. The answers are all at the last drop zone, at the last hiding place of the rebels,” he said, and explained what he had learned from Tan and Gyalo.

When he had finished Yates studied the two-story building. “Is there a maintenance hatch on the roof?”

Shan had barely nodded before the American launched himself onto the wall in front of the building. He found a protruding nail, a narrow lintel, a tiny ledge for footholds as he climbed. He was up and over in less than two minutes, and took even less time to open the door from the inside.

They selected their equipment by the light of the lanterns, nearly filling two backpacks before Shan stopped and ran the beam of his light along the wall shelving. “Look for canvas ground cloths,” he said. “Two, with rope to lash them together.”

Yates began scanning the shelves then froze and looked at Shan as if reconsidering his words. “God, no. I can’t do that. Don’t ask me to bring her body back,” he said in a haunted voice.

“It’s the last chance we have,” Shan said. “A real exam, by a real scientist, will show that she died from bullets fired by the same gun as Wu, at the same time. The blood on the shirt I wore that day will match hers. They won’t be able to deny the truth.”

“I’ve seen the bodies on the upper slopes. I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t touch her.”

Shan reached onto an upper shelf and pulled away two ground cloths.

“You’ll never find her,” Yates said, as if arguing with himself.

“I can’t do it alone, Yates,” Shan said. “If I don’t bring the truth out of the mountains, the monks in this region are finished. An innocent man will be executed.”

“And your son . . .” the American whispered.

A tremor of fear shook Shan. He had fought for hours to keep the image of his son on a surgeon’s table from his consciousness and now as it returned it seemed to paralyze him. The American pulled the canvas sheets from his hands and began packing them.

A yellow-gray hint of dawn rimmed the eastern horizon by the time they began moving up the mountain road in the battered old Jiefang, starting the long steady climb toward the spine of the Himalayas. They passed the site of the minister’s murder, stopping more than once to consult the American map in the light of the rising sun.

“Forget the map,” Shan said at last. “Look for a small mound of rocks twenty feet off the road.”

“I thought you said the trail to Tumkot was hidden, not marked.”

“It isn’t. Not exactly.” Shan stopped the laboring truck, climbed out, and walked along the road, studying first the terrain to the west, where the massive flank of Tumkot’s mountain dominated the skyline, then the road behind them, where a cloud of dust ominously approached. He was about to ask for the American’s binoculars when with a low angry mutter Yates darted past him and sprang into the cargo bay of the truck. He leaped onto a pile of canvas cargo covers and cursed as half the pile unfolded itself, and stood.

“Jomo!” Shan called in surprise. The Tibetan mechanic met Shan’s gaze with an odd hint of defiance. “What are you—” Shan began then changed his question. “Why are you dressed like that?” Jomo was wearing a tattered ankle-length raincoat.

“They are coming, you know,” the Tibetan said. “The knobs. You thought you could make some kind of deal, but they can never be trusted.”

“I saw them.”

“No,” Jomo said. “That group below is all bounty hunters. The knobs are behind them.”

“Then they will stop the bounty hunters.”

“No. I was working on a truck in the military garage. Cao came in to give his orders personally. He didn’t know I was working in the back. They assume I don’t understand Chinese. That Cao, he is furious at you. He told them you would be with the monks somewhere high. He said you would help them escape, and that they all knew how to deal with traitors. I think,” Jomo added with an uneasy glance at Shan, “he cares more about destroying you than solving his case.”

“Surely they wouldn’t just shoot Shan,” Yates interjected.

“Of course they would,” Jomo said impatiently, gesturing them up the road. “They will shoot you both and rejoice to be rid of outsider pests.” He seemed eager for Shan and Yates to leave.

Shan let the America pull him away as he studied the Tibetan in confusion. After a long moment he grabbed Yates’s binoculars and studied the roadway ahead, spotting the fresh mound of rocks he had piled over the dog’s grave less than a hundred yards away. He was looking for a place to hide the truck when a frantic cry from Yates caused him to spin around. Jomo was standing on a ledge above the road. He had taken off his coat. Under it he was wearing a maroon robe, no doubt one of those Shan had found in the old underground chapel. Yates threw off his pack and ran.

Jomo was doing a little jig by the time Yates reached him, first toward the descending road, to get the attention of those below, then toward the American to evade Yates’s desperate efforts to pull him down. As Shan reached the Tibetan, shards of rock exploded from boulders at either side.

“The fool!” Yates shouted in English as he grabbed Jomo’s arm. “He wants them to think he’s one of the monks!” When Jomo squirmed out of the American’s grip Yates lowered his shoulder and slammed into the Tibetan, knocking him down, pinning him as Shan lifted the binoculars and ventured a glance over the ledge. Less than half a mile away two of the heavy highway trucks, shed of their trailers, blocked the road. At least two of the men beside them held rifles. Their attention was riveted on the rocks where Jomo had appeared. They had not noticed the second cloud of dust behind them. Even if the knobs had orders to find Shan, they could not ignore men with illegal firearms.