Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (5 page)

“Why would he still think I am involved?”

“Because of the paper in your pocket with the telephone number of our new hotel, where the minister stayed.”

Shan lowered himself onto one of the crates. Cao had never asked about the paper, but of course he would not have forgotten it.

“I can go to Lhasa,” Tsipon added in a speculative tone, “and come back with a bus full of workers. More Tibetans are being put out of work every day. That new train to Lhasa brings a hundred Chinese immigrants a day, each one poised to take a Tibetan’s job.” Tsipon fixed Shan with a meaningful stare.

It was a threat. Tsipon would prefer to use seasoned mountain tribesmen but he could always sweep up two dozen desperate Tibetans in one of the cities who would leap at the chance of earning wages. Such men would be hopelessly unprepared for dealing with the dangers of the upper slopes. Some, perhaps a fourth or more, would die. It wasn’t simply that Tsipon would blame him, but that he would also send Shan to retrieve the bodies.

“Why did you have that paper with the hotel number?” Tsipon demanded, anger abruptly entering his voice.

“There’s a chance,” Shan said, not sure why his voice had grown hoarse, “that I can get my son out of the yeti factory, get him back to the prison in Lhadrung County where he came from, with lamas and monks, where he will stand a chance of surviving. He’s going to die if he stays where he is.”

“That doesn’t explain the paper.”

“Someone I know from Lhadrung is staying there for the conference— the colonel who administers Lhadrung county, who is responsible for the prison camp where Ko came from.”

An odd expression appeared on Tsipon’s face, a mixture of confusion and glee. “His name?”

“Tan. Colonel Tan. He’s the only real chance I have for saving my son.”

The laugh that erupted from Tsipon’s throat grew so deep he had to hold his belly.

“I don’t understand.”

“Tan is the one. He’s not in the hotel, he’s in Cao’s jail. Colonel Tan is the one who murdered Minister Wu.”

Chapter Three

THEY SAILED IN a smoking junk over the mountains. Jomo, the mechanic who accompanied Shan from Tsipon’s compound, believed in the reincarnation of machines. The ancient, sputtering Jiefang cargo truck he was now teaching Shan to drive had, the wiry Tibetan insisted, centuries earlier been a junk in the emperor’s battle fleet. Half its forward gears were missing, its rear window was gone, and its seat had so many gaps in the vinyl they had to sit on burlap sacks. Shan did not ask what kind of wretched life the ship had led to justify such a rebirth.

On the opposite side of Shan, Kypo gazed out the window with a dour expression. Tsipon had sent Jomo to show Shan how to drive the battered blue truck, but Kypo, Shan suspected, was there to watch over Shan.

“Soldiers like ants crawling over the rocks,” Jomo explained when Shan asked about the day of the killing. “More soldiers than anyone has seen in years. Border commandos, knobs, military police. Everyone ran into holes, some so deep they probably are still buried.”

“There were monks,” Shan reminded him, “from a monastery in one of the side valleys.”

Jomo was silent so long Shan did not think he had heard. “It was like old times,” the Tibetan said in a tight voice. “Hunting red robes like they were wild game. The soldiers were angry, they had rifles with scopes like they use when they see people in the high border passes. One monk was brought back dead.”

Shan found he could not speak for a long time. “Did any . . . did they find all the others?” he finally asked.

“Who knows? The government won’t even officially say they raided the gompa in the first place. Once,” Jomo added after a moment, with a gesture to the high peaks, “there were hermits living in hidden caves above here.”

The decrepit truck groaned and shuddered as Shan took over the wheel to climb the next slope, the gears slipping, the engine backfiring with each shift. He began to think of it not so much as a truck as a conveyance to some peculiar new form of hell. He couldn’t save his son without saving Colonel Tan, a man he reviled, a man who had overseen Shan’s prison camp, where so many old lamas had died.

THE CRIME SCENE had been reincarnated as a dump site. Tire tracks and boot prints crisscrossed the clearing. Cigarette butts were scattered everywhere. Empty water bottles had been tossed on the side of the road. Candy wrappers and crumpled cigarette packs had been trapped by the wind under stones. There was no trace of where the bodies, the blood, or the car had been.

Shan crouched at the edge of the clearing, trying to recall the terrible few minutes he had spent here, his gaze settling on the two rocks where the women had been leaning. He rose, then knelt by the rocks, sifting the oddly sandy soil in his fingers before surveying the murder scene in his mind again. There had been blood near the car, and shallow ruts scraped in the soil ending at their heels. The women had been dragged from beside the car and propped up. Before fleeing the killer had arranged them against the rocks, as if to make them comfortable. The Western woman had gazed at Everest with longing as she died.

“You’re supposed to be getting Tenzin’s body back,” Kypo declared from over his shoulder. “I could have told you it wasn’t here.”

Shan turned to meet the Tibetan’s challenging stare.

“In the village people won’t talk with me,” Kypo said. “They blame me, because I helped persuade them that you should be the corpse carrier. It was a sacred trust, they say, and you broke it.”

The words hit Shan hard. It was true. He had failed the sturdy, honest people of Tumkot village, had failed Tenzin himself. Of all the mysteries before him, the one he would have no time to address was why the old astrologer of the village had, after the first fatality of the season, abruptly declared that Shan was to be the carrier of corpses that year.

“If Tenzin cannot be found,” Shan ventured, “it must mean the villagers tried to search for him after I was arrested.”

“Up the trail, down the trail, along every side trail for a radius of two miles or more.”

“Not the road.”

“Not the road,” Kypo confirmed. The trails belonged to the Tibetans, the road to the government. “After a few hours there were too many uniforms on the mountain to continue.”

“The body was lost during the confusion here,” Shan explained in a patient tone. “Because of what happened here.”

The lean, athletic Tibetan, something of a local hero for having twice ascended Chomolungma, winced. “They raked it,” he announced. The sullen expression behind his sunglasses had not changed.

“Raked it?”

“It’s the road the tourists come up. All that blood was bad for business. They brought in a load of dirt and raked it.” Kypo turned and paced once around the small clearing, then wandered around the high outcropping that concealed it from the road below.

Shan stared in disbelief at the fresh soil at his feet. Once an investigation had been turned into a melodrama scripted for the Party, nothing could be relied upon. Even here, all he could do was grab at shadows. The knobs had buried the crime scene.

He shook his head then stepped to the rocks where he had found the women and with his heel dug two outlines, the shapes of the bodies as he had seen them. When he looked up the mechanic was standing in the middle of the raked dirt, gazing fearfully at the outlines. It was as if Shan had brought back the dead.

“Who did it, Jomo?” he asked. “Who was the killer?”

The Tibetan cast a longing glance toward the truck, as if thinking of bolting. “I never thought it was you,” he offered.

For a moment Shan considered the mechanic, who was such a wizard at coaxing life back into old engines that he was in demand at every garage in town. “What does your father say?” he asked, seeing the expected wince. Jomo’s father, the tavern keeper who was more often drunk than not, often professed publicly that he hated his son, had even named his son the Tibetan word for princess. But Jomo, well into his forties, had kept the name, and dutifully cared for his father, the town jester, often conveying him home at night in a wheelbarrow.

Jomo looked up apologetically. His father, Gyalo, occupied the rundown house closest to Shan’s stable, and more than once had entertained himself by throwing empty beer bottles at Shan’s door. “Some men in the tavern said they should drag you out of the jail and give you what you deserve, because killing the minister was going to ruin the season for everyone. My father said we pay taxes so Public Security could have bullets, and he wanted his money’s worth.” Jomo shrugged and looked away. “He was drunk.” Several times Shan had found Jomo in the dawn outside his door, sweeping up shards of glass. Suddenly Shan realized that if it had not been Tsipon or Kypo who had made the little altar by his pallet there was only one other possibility.

“I didn’t thank you, Jomo, for the prayers when I was injured, for summoning the Medicine Buddha.”

The mechanic glanced up nervously, not at Shan but toward the road, as if worried Kypo might have heard. “There aren’t any good doctors in town,” he muttered.

“What do they say in the market about the killing?” Shan asked. In such a place, in such a case, Public Security would have operatives, disguised as merchants or even truck drivers, not just to pay for secrets but to plant rumors.

“Someone from away. A private grudge. The minister was a great hero in Beijing. Someone said she was fighting corruption back in the capital and paid with her life when she was about to expose it.”

Not particularly original, Shan thought, but effective enough for one of the morality tales that always accompanied assassinations.

“It’s not the killing most talk about,” Jomo added in a conspiratorial tone. “It’s the monks in hiding, who refused to kowtow to Beijing. People who haven’t flown them for years are stringing up new prayer flags.” He stopped, grimacing as if frightened of his own words, then turned back to the truck and busied himself examining the tires.

Shan planted himself on a low rock where he could study the outlines of the bodies and the terrain. He had come from below that day, from the wrecked bus beyond the rise in the road, around the large outcropping that had obscured the car. The killer had done his work after the bus had been stopped, out of sight of the knob guards below. Out of sight, yet close enough for the pistol discharges to be masked by the firing of the knobs’ own guns. Monks had been wounded and beaten; one had later been killed. The thought chilled Shan to the bone. If the killings had been timed to coincide with the ambush on the bus, it meant the killer had used the monks, had played with their lives to accomplish his own crime. But the ambush below seemed to have been planned so the monks could get away, not merely as a diversion. It did not seem possible that a person who would take such risks to free monks would also fire bullets into two defenseless women.

He paced along the clearing, spotting Kypo leaning against a boulder at the side of the road, cleaning his sunglasses, staring at Jomo, his face drawn tight. One of the mysteries of Tsipon’s company was why these two men, Tsipon’s two trusted deputies, did not like each other, barely spoke to each other, seemed to go out of their way to avoid each other. Certainly the two men could not be more different in personality—Jomo the nervous, efficient mechanic always flitting about the garage and warehouse, Kypo the silent, contemplative climber and guide, always hiding behind sunglasses who, Tsipon insisted, knew the upper slopes of the Himalayas better than any man in China. But there was something else, Shan sensed, a wedge between them that neither seemed interested in removing.

As Kypo turned and moved down the road, Shan followed, pausing to study the scattered shell casings from knob rifles and the four large DANGER! NO STOPPING! signs that had been leaned against rocks at the eastern side of the road. Public Security might have balked at putting up crime scene tape, for fear of its effects on tourists, but had still made it clear the site was off limits. He halted at the stump of rock where the column had broken away to block the bus, seeing now the chisel marks along the side opposite the roadway. He lay on a small ledge behind the stump, exploring the shadow at its base with an outstretched hand, pulling up first one heavy wooden wedge, then two more before scrambling up the rock debris to lift the end of a red rope trapped under large boulders. It was as thick as his thumb, the heavy nylon rope brought in by Westerners for their expeditions. Kernmantle, they called it in English, the term for braided nylon filaments encased in an outer woven shell. This one had been ruined, crushed by boulders.

He tried in vain to recreate in his mind the pattern of ropes he had seen that day on the rocks, then spotted another remnant of red rope still wrapped around the broken column of rock that had stopped the bus, now pushed along the edge of the road. The rope had been used to ease the column forward as the wedges were inserted. But it made no sense. The strength of several men would have been required to topple the rock, but they would have been conspicuous to anyone coming up the road.

Kypo sat at the edge of the road examining a section of the red rope that he had cut away from the debris. It was, they both knew, some of the rope included in the inventory they had done a week earlier.

“How do I set up an avalanche to trigger when a bus passes?” he asked the Tibetan.

Kypo considered the terrain a moment. “These rocks get rearranged all the time,” he said, as if the mountain itself had willed their release. “It wouldn’t take much persuasion.” He pointed to the slope above the road. “Undermine a few of the biggest boulders until they begin to roll, then brace them. Chip away the support of the column so that when it is hit by the boulders it snaps.”

Shan realized the rope had not been used to pull the column down, but to stabilize the loose rocks above. “How would I know how far to chip into the base of the column?”

Kypo shrugged. “Luck, I guess,” he said with an uneasy glance toward Shan. They both knew it had taken consummate skill with chisel and wedge to loosen the column just enough to be toppled by a rolling boulder at the right moment.

“But the timing of the avalanche wasn’t just luck.”

Kypo adjusted his glasses, his gaze shifting back and forth from the road to the slope. “If you knew how to work with ropes and harnesses, you could fashion a tether, like a cradle, and roll the stones into it, putting pressure on it so the stones would roll away when the tether was released.” He pointed to another large outcropping that shadowed the slope. “I would do it behind there, so no one in a vehicle coming up from the valley could see me. Stay in the shadow, release the ropes, and run away into the maze of rocks above.”

“It might take only one person to trigger such a rockslide, but more than one to rig it.”

Kypo shrugged again. “Two, four, ten, who cares? When the wind blows your house down, you don’t care about how many clouds were pushing it.”

It was a particularly Tibetan perspective. Violence was like a storm, seizing both those committing it and their victims. It was a waste of time to try to explain, it was only necessary to burrow into a safe place and let it blow itself out.

“How many people in the base camp knew about the bus?”

“No one. It was a Public Security secret. Why?”

“Because someone planned all this very carefully. Stole the ropes and rigged the avalanche in advance. The ropes were taken from the base camp days ago, and the camp is full of people who know how to rig ropes. How long do you think it will be before Public Security realizes that?”