Mandarin Gate (28 page)

“Not until the killer is caught, no.”

“Damn it, Shan. My world is based on secrets.”

“So is the killer’s. Where is he?”

Lung glanced at Jigten, who waited by the truck. “Fine,” he spat. “Chamdo. He knew we run to Chamdo twice a week, to the warehouses where shipments arrive from the east. He was desperate to go, said he would help with the loading of the truck if need be. He borrowed some work clothes and rode in the back.”

Shan had somehow known. He pressed the badge of Yuan Yi, sewn back into its towels and tucked inside his shirt. “Then I am desperate too. When is your next truck to Chamdo?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

They were twenty miles up the highway when Jigten flipped his cigarette out the window and cursed. “They’re following us. I slow down, they slow down. I speed up, they speed up.”

Shan leaned to look out the side mirror and his heart sank. The grey Public Security vehicle was the only car on the empty road but it was hugging the rear of their big cargo truck. “Pull over,” he told Jigten.

“To hell I will. We’re going to Chamdo,” the shepherd spat with unexpected vehemence. Genghis had been scheduled to make the run to the remote city but at the last minute had been seized with terrible stomach pains. Jigten, lingering in the garage, had readily volunteered to replace him.

“I admire your spirit but I doubt they are here for you.”

Jigten frowned but began to downshift. The truck eased to a halt with a hiss of air brakes. As Shan opened his door to confront his tail, the top of his head felt as it were burning again.

But there was no team sent to retrieve him for Liang. A solitary figure in a rumpled uniform climbed out of the car.

“Lieutenant Meng, we left your district miles ago,” Shan declared.

“I recall that your registration papers don’t allow you out of the county,” she replied.

“We have already established my scofflaw tendencies. But what’s your excuse?”

Something like defiance burned in her eyes. “Three people were murdered in my district. One of the men assigned to Liang says the bullet we took from the murder scene is just sitting on his desk. You were right. He never sent it to the lab. And yesterday there was a general notice, an alert for all Tibetan offices, about an official German delegation arriving in Lhasa to recover the body of a victim in a climbing accident three hundred miles from here. They took Rutger and dropped him off a cliff. The only one who is doing anything about solving those murders is you.”

“Those are dangerous words, Lieutenant. Especially for someone who’s been broken in rank already. Take my advice and go home. You’re only a lieutenant this time. A sergeant’s pay is hard to live on.”

Meng shrugged. “Less paperwork. More time in the field. I enjoy the fresh air.”

“You’ve been in Tibet too long. I sense a perilous contamination.”

“What are you doing?”

“You said it before. I am the only one interested in finding out why Jamyang and the others died.” He studied Meng. Behind the weariness on her face was a glint of determination. “Go home,” he repeated. “Go back and do whatever it takes to get Major Liang out of your district.”

“The highway’s being shut down for twelve hours starting at noon. Prisoner convoys. There will be checkpoints and guards everywhere. You’ll never make it through without an escort.”

“I fear for you, Lieutenant. I sense you are dangerously close to an antisocialist act.”

Meng leaned against her car. Her gaze became distant, aimed toward the far horizon. “I have a confession. I was ordered to make sure a canvas was tied around that statue of the Helmsman after you smashed his face. But I went back last night and cut the ropes holding the canvas, let it blow away in the wind. And I didn’t even leave. I sat on a bench and stared at him. I remember a story I heard once about an emperor with no clothes. No one would ever call him naked. A dog came up and peed on the pedestal. I laughed out loud. I felt more free than I had in years.”

Shan stared at the woman, not understanding the flood of emotion her words released inside him.

“I checked what Liang said about that monk in Rutok,” she declared. “There was no report of an immolation in Rutok. He lied to us, like you said. He started asking me about that dead lama, Jamyang. About whether I could find his body, about where he had been living, who his friends were.” The wind tugged out a strand of her hair. She let it hang across her face, then turned away as she felt his gaze. “Who was he, Shan? Who was that lama?”

“I don’t know. I am following his ghost to Chamdo.”

She had no reply.

“What exactly are you proposing to do?” he asked.

“I am going to pull in front of you and escort you to Chamdo. We’re going to find his ghost together.”

*   *   *

The journey to the northeast was much slower than Shan would have liked but after an hour, when they encountered the first roadblock, he knew they would never have had a chance without Meng. With a knob officer as an escort they were able to crawl past several groups of heavily guarded trucks. In the middle of the afternoon they were forced to stop not for another checkpoint but for a disabled truck that had broken down in the center of the road, blocking both lanes. Two dozen men in threadbare denim had been off-loaded and allowed to sit on the bank at the edge of the road.

Shan’s heart lurched as he saw the prisoners. Most were emaciated veterans of years in the gulag, wearing the dull, battered expressions of those without hope. Scattered among them was fresh meat from the east, new prisoners whose faces were tight with fear, not of the guards but of their fellow prisoners, the gaunt reflections of the creatures they would become.

Shan had wondered why so many truckloads were on the move that day, but now he saw the smaller truck behind the first, its open cargo bay piled high with shovels and picks, and stacks of the baskets used for hauling dirt and stones. There were special hard-labor mines for such prisoners, opened only in the summer, some in deep treacherous tunnels prone to cave-ins. Others would go to uranium pits where the radiation would cause every prisoner’s hair to fall out by the end of the first month. They were considered the lucky ones, for they would work in the open air and the guards tended to keep their distance for fear of contaminating themselves.

“Buddha’s breath,” Jigten gasped. “Look at the bastards. Half of them are walking skeletons.” He pulled out a cigarette and tossed it to one of the rail-thin prisoners. Another prisoner jerked forward, grabbing it out of the air. With a victorious expression he stuffed it into his mouth and ate it.

*   *   *

The grounds of the former monastery used by the Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute had been lavishly restored. Through the open gate at its entrance, statues of Mao and Buddha stood at either side of the courtyard, staring at each other, an elegant, newly built chorten in between. Shan and Meng, dressed in hastily acquired civilian clothes, watched from an outside table at a café across the street. Monks entered the Institute carrying books. Chinese men and women in business suits moved in and out of the gate. Tibetan townspeople passed through the gate to stand before the Buddha, sometimes draping a traditional prayer scarf over its wrist. At times the compound seemed to convey the air of a traditional monastery, at others it seemed more like a busy government office complex.

They sat in silence, finishing their tea and then accepting a new pot from the waiter. Shan found his gaze drifting toward the street traffic and the flow of urban life. A woman hurried a young girl in pigtails across the street. Two boys teased a puppy with a feather tied to a string. A Tibetan woman hawked hot noodles and
momos,
meat dumplings, from plastic pails covered with towels. A tall Tibetan led a donkey down the street, the black sash woven in his hair marking him as a Khampa.

“You said you had a son,” Meng suddenly said. “So you are married?”

It was part of her cover, he told himself at first. They were supposed to be a man and a woman having tea together. Then he saw the shy way she looked at him.

“No,” he replied. “Not now. Not ever I guess.”

“You guess?”

“My wife had the marriage annulled.”

“But you have a son.”

“We never spent more than two weeks together. She was in the Party, got an assignment in another city. By the time I was sent to prison she was a vice mayor. After my son was arrested as a drug dealer it was better for her to deny her connections with us.”

“So she got a divorce, you mean.”

“No. Too messy. My son and I would still be on her record. More politically expedient to get a judge in the Party to issue a decree for the records to be erased. It was as if we never existed in her life.”

“That must have been painful.”

Shan shrugged. “I was busy building roads and trying to stay alive on corncobs and sawdust gruel. It was years before I even knew.”

They sipped tea in silence, forgetting the gate for a long moment.

“Surely you…” Shan was not sure how to finish his query.

“Surely I was married? Yes,” Meng said matter-of-factly. “He studied literature and drama. He wrote very well but couldn’t find a job so he took one in a faceless building where they wrote public scripts for the government. Eulogies for Eighth Route Army veterans. Tales of worker heroes, real and otherwise. He was good at it, good at finding words to tug at the heartstrings of the proletariat. He got noticed. They promoted him. He began writing speeches for officials and news releases for the Party.”

“Propaganda.” The word slipped out before Shan could stop it.

Meng gave an awkward nod. “I didn’t like it. He didn’t like it, not at first. He drank. They kept promoting him and he kept drinking. That was the first time I was a lieutenant. When they assigned him to Beijing, they made me a captain, arranging security for officials. I begged him to quit. I said he had sold his soul, that he was better than that. He hit me.”

Shan lifted his cup and stared at her over its lip, wondering what it might have been like if he had met Meng like this, not wearing a knob uniform.

“I asked to leave the job, leave Beijing. They broke me and sent me to a stable in Tibet.”

“A stable?”

“Public Security jargon. Where officers who have fallen out of favor are sent to be mere workhorses, to plod along without hope of advancement. The jobs no one else wants, in some god-forsaken backwater. Baiyun’s a stable, though they told me to consider it rehabilitation, that my record once had been so good I might still might find advancement in four or five years. A few months after I arrived I got the papers saying he had divorced me.”

Shan forced himself to look at the gate again, to avoid her eyes. “You didn’t have to tell me that,” he said. When he looked back she was staring at a pigeon. She looked like a young, lost girl. He looked at her hand on the table and realized he wanted to touch it.

Her face hardened as she felt his stare. “It’s an interrogation technique,” she said, wincing as if she had bitten something sour. “Let the subject know we are all comrades in the same difficult struggle.”

They fell silent again for several minutes, watching the gate again.

“People go in and don’t come out,” Shan observed.

“There’s a chapel. People go in and meditate. They may take an hour or two.”

“It’s an Institute,” Shan replied. “Those carrying briefcases are not going in to meditate.”

“There’s an official public description,” Meng observed, waving a brochure she had picked up in the guesthouse they had registered at, two blocks away. “And there are official private descriptions.”

“I don’t follow.”

The lieutenant unfolded the brochure and began reading. “The Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute is building bridges between the Han and Tibetan ethnic groups that reside in this region of the People’s Republic. By teaching the oneness of our great peoples we build happiness and socialist prosperity in every home.”

“Socialist prosperity,” Shan echoed. “It wasn’t written by a Tibetan. And the first Han seen here wore the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army. This is Chamdo, traditional capital of Kham province, where Tibetan warriors using muskets were mown down by Chinese machine guns.” He frowned, not understanding why he felt the need to goad her.

Meng ignored him. “There are places on the Internet reserved for the government. They require special passwords.” She touched her cell phone and the screen came to life.

Shan cast a nervous glance around the cafe´ and leaned forward. “You know passwords for the Institute?”

“Public Security has a new database, like a reference guide to organizations that officers may need to know about.” She lowered her voice and read from the little screen. “The Peace Institute in Chamdo is a unique facility,” Meng recited, “where Buddhist teachers acquire the perspectives needed to lead their cadres into the future. Those who graduate from the Institute are awarded provisional membership in the Party. Some go on to serve the Motherland in strategic and often heroic capacities.”

The words raised a cold knot in Shan’s stomach. “Do they have a list of graduates?”

Meng worked at her screen as Shan sipped his tea. “It’s classified,” she said uncertainly. “A secret even within the Bureau. The screen keeps going back to what the Institute calls its internal manifesto.” As she made a movement to turn off the phone Shan grabbed it.

The manifesto was short and to the point: “Tibetans are not born traitors, but taught to live the lie through the influence of ego and prejudice in the religious class. Our goal is to use proven socialist methods to correct the error of their ways, to help them overcome the tyranny of their tradition.” He pushed the phone back and looked away.

After a moment he drained his cup, then took off the lid of the little teapot, a sign that it needed refilling. When the waiter ignored it, Meng rose and carried the pot inside. The instant she entered the building he slipped into the crowd. He needed to be alone, needed to be away from Public Security. Jamyang had lived in this town. He needed to find his ghost. He needed to understand the terrible foreboding he felt about the Peace Institute.