Mandarin Gate (8 page)

“You knew who they were,” he said. It was not a question. “Just like you knew who that other man was. The one labeled south. His tattoo was like the banner of a gang.”

Meng fished a napkin from a pocket and held it to her nose. “They describe themselves as more of a social club. The Jade Crows they call themselves, a group of undesirables from Yunnan. Someone there decided to give them transportation to Tibet instead of prison.”

“You mean they bribed some court official.”

Meng acted as if she had not heard. “It’s part of the model for pioneer towns. Mix the populations. Don’t let one group take over the town.”

“They show every sign of having taken over the town, Lieutenant. Your town.” He turned at the sound of footsteps in the alley. The Tibetan constables were running toward them.

Meng seemed about to argue, then looked at her bloody napkin. “It’s late. I have a long drive to headquarters,” she said, then turned and disappeared around the corner of the building.

Headquarters. She meant the district Public Security headquarters, twenty miles north of the Lhadrung County line. Shan reminded himself that she did not report to Liang but to other officials, officers who had set pacification as her primary duty. He was tempted to follow her, but outside the county Shan’s meager protection would not exist. Outside Lhadrung he was no one, a former gulag inmate who had ignored the rules requiring former prisoners to remain in the county of their registration.

He looked back at the square. The checker players had all disappeared.

*   *   *

The responsibilities of the Irrigation Inspector for the northern townships of Lhadrung County were far-reaching. Shan’s district encompassed nearly a thousand square miles. His first annual reckoning to the county seat had reported two hundred and twenty-five road culverts, twenty earthen dams, and three hundred and fifty miles of ditches used for drainage. In a lighter moment he had once mentioned to Lokesh that his was an honored post, an office that had existed in the old Chinese empires, and for the next week the old Tibetan had addressed him with imperial honorifics. In reality it was a job that kept Shan covered in mud much of the time. His assignment had been the clever, and cruel, inspiration of the county governor, Colonel Tan, who had grudgingly accepted the obligation to protect Shan after he had saved Tan from a false accusation of murder the year before. But Tan had wanted Shan as far away as possible, and so humiliated he might be tempted to flee. The appointment, and moving Shan’s son Ko to Shan’s former prison camp in Lhadrung were, Tan had sternly warned, the last favors he would ever do for Shan.

The silver lining to Shan’s cloud was that he had no direct supervisor, and could travel anywhere he wished within his district in the battered old truck that came with the job. He leaned on his shovel now, watching the convent ruins below. A police barricade, manned by two officers, still blocked the road into the murder scene but there was no sign of activity inside the convent compound itself. He lifted his shovel like a badge of office and set off down the path that led to the ruins.

There had been only one vehicle at the gate when he had looked with Jamyang. The nun, the foreigner, the Chinese man, and their killer had been there, and surely they had not all arrived together. Above the convent there were several old pilgrim paths but as they approached it they converged, so there was one main path from each direction that reached the old walls.

Half a mile from the compound he stopped at an intersection with another path, looking up the trail that arrived from a narrow hanging valley above him. It was the route to Thousand Steps, the nuns’ hermitage. The murdered nun had no doubt come to the convent down that path. It had been a beautiful early summer day. The birds would have been singing, her step would have been light. Once at the ruins she had taken up her restoration work on one of the old prayer wheels. Once one or two of the wheels were done and being spun by the devout, Lokesh had told him, the convent would be invincible, as if the wheels would defend it as surely as great guns.

He slowly turned in a circle, surveying the landscape. The nun had come from above, the Chinese man had driven, but what of the foreigner, what of the killer? The convent had once been the hub of the upper valley. Other trails converged from the shepherds’ homes high in the mountains, still others from the farms and even Chegar
gompa,
the monastery at the mouth of the valley miles away. Keeping out of sight of the police at the roadblock, he found the other trails that led into the ruins of the gates along the side and rear walls. They were all intersected by a line of heavy boot prints where police had circuited the building, but all the tracks leading up to the walls were those of the soft, worn footwear of Tibetans. At the rear wall, where the trail was soon lost in a tangle of brush, Shan discovered the track of a single bicycle. It had been ridden to the convent and hidden among the boulders, then later ridden away.

Bicycles were becoming more common among the people of the valley floor, who were being pushed away from using yaks and donkeys, but he never recalled seeing one anywhere but on the roads. Few paths were in good enough condition to allow any kind of wheeled passage. He studied the rocky landscape where the trail disappeared. The path might lead to the trails of the upper slopes but he doubted a bicycle could be used on those trails. Much more forgiving would be the large path that ran along the lower part of the ridge, the more heavily used pilgrim path that connected the convent and Chegar monastery.

As he began to climb over the crumbling wall he heard a sharp cracking sound. He spun about to see a robed figure standing fifty yards away, frozen, staring at Shan.

Shan ran, but the monk was faster, weaving around boulders before disappearing into the field of outcroppings. Finally halting, panting for breath, Shan watched the rocks, hoping for another glimpse of the stranger. He saw him only for an instant, a close-cropped head wearing a pair of sunglasses that peered out from behind a rock, then disappeared. The monk had not been there for the restoration project. Shan ventured to the point where the man had first appeared, starting for a moment at another cracking sound under his own foot. He bent and picked up a black piece of plastic, then saw another, and another, then small shards of thick glass. Behind a boulder the ground was strewn with more, dozens of pieces. Gathering several of the biggest, he laid them on a rock and tried to reassemble them. A camera. Someone had smashed a camera against the rocks. A very expensive camera, judging from the pieces he saw. It had not been done by the monk, who had inadvertently stepped on the plastic. Had this too been the work of the killer?

He returned to the compound, hugging the shadows now, moving from one building to the next, pausing often to watch behind him. Yellow tape had been hung near the chorten, cordoning off where the rectangle of red paint, still faintly visible, showed where the bodies had lain. Shan paced around the tape, oddly loath to step over it, then headed to the prayer wheel station where the nun had been killed. Without conscious thought he pushed the wheel, then paused, watching it. It was a reflex he had acquired during his years with Lokesh, something most Tibetans would do whenever they were near such a wheel.

The nun had probably been the last to push the wheel. Now, as Lokesh would say, Shan had picked up the chain of prayer, adding his link to the dead woman’s, as nuns and pilgrims had done at this spot, with this very wheel, for centuries.

He kept the wheel moving, the low grinding sound his accompaniment as he pictured the nun at work. She had been shot in the back, though at an angle. There had been a separate pool of blood. The Westerner had been with her, helping. The killer had shot him in the neck, then quickly shot the nun as she had begun to turn.

Shan spun the wheel again, watching it with a forlorn expression before facing the courtyard, forgetting for the moment that it was a murder scene. He had visited many such places with Lokesh, and the old Tibetan always somehow gave him a sense of their former grandeur, of the elegant reverence that had dwelt there for so many years. But today, alone, Shan felt small and empty, just another wandering pilgrim who had lost his path.

He hesitantly stepped toward the chorten. Only a few weeks earlier there had been much laughter in the dawn as Shan had helped Lokesh and Jamyang whitewash the shrine. Its loose stones had been relaid, and a fresh coat of stucco applied, and as they prepared their brushes the two Tibetans had described to Shan the many types of chortens in the old teachings. Marking in the sand with sticks they had drawn images, naming each for him. The enlightenment chorten, the lotus chorten, the wheel chorten, the miracle chorten, the descent from heaven chorten, the victory chorten, the nirvana chorten. Shan recalled now how Lokesh had paused as he had discovered a stone at the base that had pushed through the new stucco, as if something had forced its way out from inside. The old Tibetan had not said anything then, simply jammed the stone back and painted over it, but Shan had seen the worry on his face. He knew there were other chortens that were constructed to trap and subdue demons.

Shan stepped now to the far side. The new stucco was cracked. The stone had fallen out again.

He found himself backing away, staring uneasily at the dislodged stone, then turned and moved to the front gate. The smudge of color marking another pool of blood was clearly visible at a corner of the building closest to the gate, where the third victim had been nearly decapitated. He looked inside the little alcove near the front gate where the Tibetans had been storing tools. Meng had reported that a woodcutter’s ax had been discovered there and was being held as the likely butcher’s tool. But surely such a long-handled tool was too clumsy. It seemed unlikely to Shan that an ax had been responsible for the broad, clean slices that had cleaved away the flesh from the foreigner’s skull, but the meager inventory of tools presented few alternatives. A crude spade. Two hoes. A rake. A small and very dull sickle. He paused, remembering now a crew of farmers who had begun clearing brush from along the back wall.

It took him several minutes to locate the farmers’ store of equipment, inside the little chapel where he had first encountered Meng. Under a piece of tattered felt lay a chain, a rope, a small pry bar, and a heavy brush hook with a long curving blade mounted on a rough handle as long as his forearm. Carrying the hook into the sunlight, he ran a finger along the edge of the blade, recalling now that he had seen the farmers at work, using the blade to slice through branches as thick as his thumb. He held the blade close, examining it in the sunlight. Its pockmarked surface held rust but flecks of something darker also stained the metal. He tore off a piece of the felt, wrapped it around the blade, and leaned the hook inside the doorway of the chapel before studying again the tracks outside the building. Meng had been studying the ground when he had first seen her there. There were now at least half a dozen other tracks. Two or three sets were from police boots, two sets were his own, but two more sets were of soft rope-sole shoes, leading back over the wall. One of them led to where the bicycle tracks began, which led in the direction the monk had fled, in the direction of Chegar gompa, the monastery, at the head of the valley. He paused for a moment, debating whether to follow the tire marks, then picked up his shovel where he had left it and turned back to the trail he had arrived on. He could not risk having his unattended truck discovered by the police.

Half an hour later he stood at his truck, gazing in frustration at the ruins below, as he endeavored once more to piece together the movements of those who had been in the convent the day of the murders.

“Maybe it doesn’t want to come back to life yet.”

Shan turned slowly to face the stranger, gripping his shovel tightly. It took a moment for him to discern the young woman, for the brown robe she wore blended with the hillside. She sat, legs crossed under her, by a clump of heather.

“There was an old lama who used to come to our tents when I was a girl,” she continued. “He said at such places ancient spirits are slumbering. You can’t force them awake, he said. They will wake at their chosen time. He said when they do they could walk among us and look just like another man.”

She was barely out of her teens, but the girl’s face, half of which was heavily scarred, the other half fixed in melancholy, said she had seen much of life. Her robe marked her as a lay nun, an unofficial companion to, and a student of, ordained nuns. It had become one of the ways that Tibetans evaded the ever-more onerous restrictions on donning a maroon robe.

“I have learned to trust a lot of what old lamas say,” Shan replied, and loosened his grip on the shovel.

“Abbess Tomo isn’t coming back, is she?”

“Abbess?” Shan asked in surprise.

“The head of our hermitage.”

The woman had not been just a nun, she had been the senior nun of the valley. He shook his head slowly. “She’s not coming back.”

“No one wants to talk about her. They act like maybe she just went on a retreat somewhere.”

“I saw her body.”

The woman bit her lip. “She raised me since I was ten. Since—” she pointed to the ruin of her face. “My father borrowed a truck to take our sheep to market. It was going to be like a holiday, my mother and grandmother were going with us. No one told him the brakes were bad. We went off a mountain road. There was an explosion and fire when the truck crashed at the bottom. Only a lamb and I survived. Not even all of me,” she added, gesturing again to her face.

“My name is Shan,” he said.

“I am Chenmo. Some of the older nuns are reciting death rites in secret, in one of the old hermit huts. I thought they were for Jamyang so I went last night to sit behind the hut and join in. When I heard them say her name the grief seized me so hard I could barely breathe.”

“There are many ways to say good-bye.”

Chenmo offered a small, sad nod. “They started the death rites for Jamyang after Uncle Lokesh stopped to speak with the nuns. He carried the body of the lama hermit on a mule. Now they say rites for two. I do not understand the day of blood.” She paused and scrubbed at the tears on her cheeks. “He said to watch for a Chinese with eyes like deep wells and mud in his fingernails. He said that the man would wear purple numbers on his skin. Uncle Lokesh said we could trust him.”