Prayer of the Dragon (11 page)

Shan pushed open the door to the large sitting room with a finger. He stepped into the empty room, then eyed the door that led outside. He returned to Thomas and leaned on the table beside him. “Where is your evidence? Your samples?”

“I sent them to Beijing, to a friend in a lab.”

Shan paced around the room. The adjoining office was empty. “Why did you cross to the other side of the mountain? Why go to the trouble, when you have all this?”

“This is my uncles’ stuff. I’m my own man. I do my own thing. They wouldn’t approve but I’ve made friends of some of the miners. They are always looking to trade things.”

“What do they have that you could want?”

“Gold, of course. I can get them little comforts. A can of peaches, a bag of raisins, a toothbrush, a razor. Vodka and brandy. The closest store is fifty miles away. Everyone is in business, right? Uncle Heinz says we all participate in the global economy, no matter where we live.”

Thomas’s particular home in the global economy, Shan realized, was a storehouse replenished regularly by the People’s Liberation Army. “How often do you go to Drango village?”

“That dump where the farmers live? Never.”

“Then how often do you see Chodron?”

“That old yak? He stays in his wallow on the far side.”

Shan considered the boy’s words. He said he never went to the village but he had admitted that he knew who Chodron was. Shan picked up the camera and asked Thomas to show him how to scroll through the photos, pausing at the last, a tiny one of the man sometimes called the saint, sitting between the blood-drawn images. He leaned over the boy, speaking in a low, urgent voice, Thomas nodding assent to his secret assignment. When they finished, Shan scolled through the photos one more time. “Did you look for identification on the bodies?”

“Everything was covered in blood. I brought plastic gloves when I returned but—”

His answer was cut off by an angry exclamation from the dining room. Kohler stood near the door, glaring. Thomas colored, then without another word trotted toward Kohler, who led him into the kitchen.

Shan darted toward the entry, then hesitated and slipped into Gao’s office instead. He spent a moment surveying the framed photos, ashamed at the quiver of fear that some of the familiar faces sent down his spine. Lingering at the back of several photos, looking like a tourist who had wandered into the scene, was a younger Kohler.

On the desk were recent letters, most sent by fax, from addresses in Beijing. He glanced at the small gray fax machine at the side of the desk that had received the letters. It meant there was a telephone wire strung from the base below, but it also might mean there was no reliable electronic mail connecting Gao’s little palace to the outside world. He quickly scanned the faxed messages for their originators. The Academy of Scientists, arranging a speaking date for a conference in January. The Special Science Section of the State Council, one of the unofficial, private little committees that advised Beijing’s top echelon. The director of civilian personnel for regional military bases, asking for staffing recommendations. The Party Council on Scientific Policy, seeking review of a secret research paper.

Beside the correspondence was a rolled-up newspaper. On closer examination Shan saw that it was not simply rolled but taped tightly to form a cylindrical package. One end had been sealed with tape, the other was cut open. Shan upended the tube, dumping out a hard object wrapped in the coarse toilet tissue used in most Tibetan homes. A second later he held it in his hand. Despite Gao’s assurance to the contrary, someone had come from the other side, from Drango. The gold beetle glistened more brightly in the sunlight shining through Gao’s office window than it had in the light of the butter lamps in the stable. He recalled Gendun’s punishment and Chodron’s obsession with sending the beetle back to where it belonged. Shan looked up at the nearest photo of Gao, a portrait in which his breast gleamed with the medals bestowed on civilians who performed vital services for the state. Shan had found the home of the mountain deity.

He pushed the golden beetle back into the tube and headed for the door to the outside. With a surge of relief he felt the knob turn. The door opened. But as he stepped outside Kohler looked up from a nearby rock where he sat smoking a cigarette.

“Do you have any notion how quickly our garbage disposal system works?” he asked. “One call, and a squad of soldiers appear. Then our garbage disappears forever.”

Shan looked longingly at the cliffs above, the route back to his world. “But you and Dr. Gao don’t like to reduce yourselves to that level.”

Kohler grinned. “Something like that. And you present such an interesting opportunity for us.”

“If you are looking for kitchen help, I am always dropping things.”

“Comrade, you are going to have Gao rolling on the floor,”

Kohler said and gestured Shan back into the house.

Four hours later he sat with Kohler on the square stone-walled roof of the high tower. The room under the roof in which Kohler had locked him was the most agreeable of prisons. Though a windowless chamber, it contained an actual bed and linens. Before locking him in, the German had explained that he and Thomas had similar rooms on the levels below.

Kohler had invited Shan to the roof to watch the sunset with a bottle and two glasses, and was now holding the fifth glass of pepper vodka he had consumed. Shan had sipped from the first glass of the pungent liquid when Kohler pressed it on him, then clandestinely tipped the contents over the side, only to have the glass refilled.

“We’re all outlaws of a sort,” Kohler said, his eyes reflecting the purple light of the dusk. “How could any sane man not be, in this world we have created?”

“Have you been away from home long?” Shan probed.

“Home? What’s home? My homeland was declared redundant. Mergers and acquisitions, they call it. Someone in Bonn or maybe Washington decided to make a takeover offer so good it couldn’t be refused. Presto, no country. Just a bunch of branch offices reporting to what had once been our biggest competitor. Entire towns were discontinued. I got a letter from my sister, who once headed a school. She scrubs floors in Frankfurt now. But she has her own car and a mountain of debt so she is happy as a pig in mud.” He saluted the sunset with his vodka glass. “Lha fucking gyal lo.

“I never really had a home there anyway. I came to Beijing as a doctoral student on a special exchange program for physicists. Dr. Gao took me on as a special assistant. The first year we communicated by drawing equations on chalkboards. By the time I understood Mandarin I was already living in a spare room of his house, though we spent damned little time sleeping in those days. I could go home and be a cog in a wheel of Moscow’s science machine or stay and live out every scientist’s fantasy. Unlimited resources. Billions and billions. Unlimited glory.”

“At least within certain bureaus in Beijing,” Shan submitted.

Kohler saluted him with a clumsy sweep of his glass. “Once wars were won by the side that could best afford to keep sending men to the slaughter, which for centuries made China the mightiest nation on earth. Every man with a beard who rode out of the West was smothered by a hundred Chinese. “Now it’s a game of cards. Small men at a big table play guessing games about what equations the other side’s big men have written on secret chalkboards.” Kohler burst into laughter, then drained his glass again.

“If you have a chalkboard,” Shan said, “I would guess it’s full of questions about two murders that took place on the western side of the mountain. You betray your concern by holding me.”

“What we worry about is the inexplicable. Death happens all the time on the other side of the mountain, it’s to be expected. It’s like the Wild West over there. You know, American cowboys,” he said, using the English words. “But you, Inspector Shan, are inexplicable. Why do you appear at this moment? That worries us. We had another escaped prisoner once. He was found looking in the windows. He begged us not to call the army. He offered to be our slave, offered to go back over to the other side and bring us gold. Thomas guessed you must be a secret agent of some kind. I laughed.” Kohler examined Shan for a moment. “What explains a man like you?”

Shan became aware of music rising from below, a confused mixture of sounds that he eventually distilled into muted rock and roll overlaying the more distant tones of Beethoven. “That other prisoner. What happened to him?”

“He was annoying. Too nervous. Too talkative. I arranged for him to disappear.” Kohler poured himself another glass of his medicine. “But you, you are like a monk. You are focused, quiet. You have secrets. We have learned to be very careful about gray men with secrets.”

“I am nothing but what you see before you. My gray clothes are rags.”

Kohler drained his glass again.

The sun had disappeared over the ridge. The purple sky became streaked with silver. The narrow cleft had long since disappeared into shadow but not before Shan had fixed in his mind’s eye its location and a line of outcroppings that led straight to it.

“This Rapaki you spoke of earlier. Does he live in a cave?” Shan asked abruptly.

“Who?”

“The hermit no one wishes to discuss.”

“He’s harmless. Forget him. He’s just a goat with a robe. You might glimpse him in the distance before he scampers away.”

“Forgetting things. That seems to be the house specialty here.”

Shan refilled the two glasses, toasted the German, stealthily dumped his over the side, and refilled Kohler’s again. Kohler held the glass under his nostrils for a moment. “A good retirement requires discarding the last moment and living in the next.”

“Sounds lonely.”

“Sounds painless,” Kohler retorted. His head began to roll. He had to exert himself to keep it upright.

“I’m sorry we won’t have more time to get better acquainted,” Shan said. Kohler did not protest when Shan took the glass from his hand and set it on the wall.

“I have hidden the fucking key,” the German mumbled, though he seemed unable to move. “You will stay until the dragon decides to eat you.” Then he passed out.

Shan arranged Kohler as comfortably as possible, taking the precaution of removing the man’s shoelaces and using them to tie his hands to the arms of his chair before Shan descended to his bedroom. Kohler had proudly pointed out the nearby linen closet. Shan did a quick calculation, then removed ten sheets from the closet, quickly returned to the roof, and began knotting them together. One of the many things his years in Tibet had cured him of was his fear of heights.

Chapter Four

SHAN WAS NEARLY in sight of Drango village the next morning when he heard an angry shout. He flattened against an outcropping, wondering if, against all odds, Kohler had had him followed by a squad of soldiers. He bore the bruises of a night passage through the ravine, having crossed the flimsy ladder bridge just before the moon hid behind clouds and then spent a restless few hours in a hole in the jumbled rocks, certain every tumbling stone was the sound of pursuing boots.

A string of curses in Mandarin erupted from the far side of the outcropping. He studied the trail behind him, then cautiously stepped around the rock, freezing momentarily before his foot came down on a freshly erected cairn. Eight inches high, it had been carefully constructed inside one of the pans used by miners for working streams, a sprig of fresh heather inserted in its center. It still smelled. It had been made of manure dropped from a mule or horse, and carefully placed in the middle of the trail above Drango. Peering around the rock Shan saw a middle-aged Chinese man berating a mule stacked high with cargo, trying to coerce it to turn down a fork in the trail. He grabbed a handful of the sweetgrass that grew in the cracks in the rocks at his feet and stepped around the far end of the outcropping. The animal’s head snapped up and the mule leaned toward the grass in Shan’s hand.

“It’s
my
beast,” the man growled. He raised his makeshift staff, a crooked but sturdy juniper limb, as if to hit Shan.

“But it’s Tibetan,” Shan said. “Tibetans have a custom of sharing part of the load when they travel.”

A pick and shovel were lashed to the top of the mule’s panniers. The man’s hand went to a knife in his belt. His grin was aimed past Shan’s shoulder. The hairs on the back of Shan’s neck rose as he slowly turned. A large dog sat on a slab of rock six feet away, fangs bared, ready to pounce.

“No bark,” the miner declared, showing his own yellowed teeth. “All bite.”

Shan let the mule eat the grass, then kneeled, facing the dog. “Why do you leave the mountain halfway through the season?” he asked the miner, who did not reply.

Shan spoke to the dog in Tibetan, as Lokesh did when meeting an unfamiliar animal, asking it how it felt, praising its obvious strength. A belief in reincarnation made for interesting relationships with animals. The dog’s fangs disappeared. It cocked its head and stepped forward, tentatively licking Shan’s hand.

“You’re no miner,” the stranger said. “And you’re not one of those damned farmers either.”

Shan pulled up his sleeve and displayed his tattoo. After so many years he had learned that though for many it was a cause for alarm, for others it was an icebreaker.

The tautness left the man’s face. He studied Shan, then extracted a small gleaming nugget from a pouch at his belt. “This is yours if you help me down the mountain to the road. Three days’ work. I’ve twisted my ankle.”

“I can’t,” Shan replied. “But I can wrap your ankle if you have some cloth so it will be easier for you to walk on it.”

“Under the shovel,” the miner said. “There’s an old piece of canvas.”

Shan did not miss the worried glance the man cast up the trail. Was he being followed? “Sit and unlace the boot,” Shan advised as he pointed to a nearby rock, then he retrieved the cloth. In five minutes he was expertly wrapping the swollen ankle. When he finished the man uttered a satisfied grunt and extracted a much smaller piece of gold.

Shan raised his palm to decline payment. “Just tell me what has frightened you.”

“I don’t fear a damned thing. It’s the way of things this summer. My old grandmother knew, after all the famines and wars she saw. Sometimes death stalks a land, she said, and there’s nothing man can do to stop it. If you aren’t smart enough to come in out of a hailstorm, don’t complain when your skull gets cracked. They closed my factory. Everyone says move to a big city to make money. I don’t want a big city.” The miner shrugged, watched a passing cloud for a moment. “I’ve got family I want to see again.”

The man lit a cigarette. “Two years ago an old friend from the army shows up. He asks me to hide him from the police for a few days while he waits for a ride to Hong Kong. In return he tells me the biggest secret in Tibet. After the snow melts, he says, load up a mule with supplies and follow this secret map to a place called Sleeping Dragon Mountain. Pick up gold from the ground and it’s yours. Last year I came, and it was good. I got enough to pay off my debts. This year started the same but then it got ugly. My camp was looted, half the gear stolen. A miner not far from me woke up in the night to find all the trees in his camp on fire. Another miner’s mule was killed by a painted stick stuffed down its throat.”

Shan looked up with sudden interest.

“Two weeks ago someone killed my other dog and stuffed a claim stick in its mouth.” The miner blew a plume of smoke toward the sky.

“Why? What do they want?”

“No one ever sees who does it. When it happens to you, you move your claim and they leave you alone.”

“Then they take over the claim?”

“No one takes it.”

Shan considered the reply a moment. “It’s as if you were just getting too close to something they don’t want you to see.”

“That’s what I thought. But they’ve all been in different places. Once up against the wall that divides the mountain. Once in a small grove of trees by an old painted rock. Once at the edge of a cliff. There’s enough gold, enough room, so it’s not worth it to try to oppose whoever is doing it.”

“But then those two men died.”

The man inhaled deeply on his cigarette, studying Shan. “A day after the murders I was on a high trail, walking along the top of a slope almost as steep as a cliff, when I saw two men above me, maybe three hundred yards higher up. I ducked into the shadows and didn’t think they noticed me. They were carrying heavy loads wrapped in cloth, on shoulder poles. One of them dropped something that rolled down the trail toward me. Round as a ball, in a burlap sack. It rolled almost to me before it fell off the trail and bounced into the gully far below. Some use twine to mark out their claims. I figured it was a ball of twine until it fell out of its sack. . . .”

“But it wasn’t twine,” Shan said as he gently eased the man’s foot back into his boot, lacing it loosely. He lifted the man’s staff and began working on it with his pocketknife.

“It wasn’t anything I ever want to see again. It had been pounded by the rocks, as if someone had played soccer with it. I looked up and one of the men was studying me with binoculars. I leaped up and ran down the slope like some damned fool. That’s when I twisted my foot.”

“The head in the bag,” Shan said. “Young or old?”

“It’s not like I had time to study it. But I saw some gray hair.”

So two men had been involved in the killings, and they had cut the bodies up to dispose of them. “Where would you go, if you had something like that to get rid of?”

“Right about where they were. There’s a crack in the cliff that goes down deeper than anyone can see.”

“The cliff where a miner was chased away from his claim?”

The man thought for a moment. “Now that you mention it, yes, it was the same place.”

“Did you recognize the men?”

“They were too far away. But they had binoculars. They saw me.”

Shan kept whittling on the staff. “Were you here last year when a man was killed?”

“That’s over and done with.”

“What do you mean?”

“The son of a bitch was a claim jumper. We found claim sticks taken from four of us at his camp. No one was sorry to see him disappear. But it spooked us.”

“You mean because of the way he died?”

“Because he was found in front of one of those paintings of demons, the one of the blue bull, and there was fresh blood on the painting, as if the demon had come to life. Because his hands were cut off. But that’s ancient history. Captain Bing proved who the killer was and chased him off.”

It was Shan’s turn to look up the trail in alarm. “Captain? You mean the army was involved?”

The miner offered a sour grin. “Call it the miners’ militia. Bing discovered that the man’s own partner had killed the claim-jumping bastard. Later, the dead man took care of things.”

“The dead man?”

“We buried him in a shallow grave under a mound of heavy rocks. Two weeks later a skeleton appeared, draped over the grave. Some said the dead man rose up from the grave, that he was too angry to stay buried before obtaining vengeance. But then we saw the skeleton’s fingers.”

“The fingers?”

“One of them held his partner’s ring,” the man said with a shudder. “The skeleton was that of the dead man’s partner, who’d killed him. I saw it with my own eyes. The dead man did rise up and take revenge. No one goes near there anymore. We know better than to interfere with the business of the dead.”

“Where exactly is this no-man’s-land?”

“The grave is on a long black ridge that juts out to the west. About a mile north of Little Moscow.” The man saw the confusion on Shan’s face. “And if you don’t know about that already, you don’t want to know. They don’t take to strangers. Captain Bing organized things last year after those killings.”

Little Moscow. Captain Bing. The lonely mountain was becoming more crowded all the time.

“Don’t mess with Bing. He’ll chew you up and spit out your bones.”

“So at least one man was killed last year. And two men were murdered last week. Was there anyone else?”

“Why do you care?”

“I collect stories about the dead. Something I started in prison.”

The miner contemplated the point for a moment, glanced at his expertly bound ankle, and nodded. “A young miner, a newcomer barely out of his teens, was killed in front of a painting of a blue bull demon. The body disappeared so fast no one knows for certain what happened. Only one other miner saw it before it was carried away. Ugly business. He said at first he thought the boy was just lying down, smoking a cigar.”

“A cigar?”

“But when he came close he saw it was a small stick, jammed into the boy’s dead mouth. Not a claim stick. It had eyes carved into it. It scared everyone, because of all the other things that happen on this mountain.”

“You mean the skeletons.”

“Skeletons. Ghosts. Those damned paintings. People say this is where all the old demons come, to hide from the rest of the world, that the demons in the paintings come to life at night.”

Shan handed the man the staff he had been working on. He had cut off some of the stubs protruding from the juniper limb and turned the top joint into a smooth, curving cradle. The staff had become a crutch.

The man accepted it with an approving nod, then rummaged among the packs on the mule. “If you don’t take something it’ll jinx me.” He extracted a small blue nylon pouch tied with a drawstring, hesitated, then tossed it to Shan. “Take it. Not my kind of trinkets.” He avoided Shan’s gaze now, tending to his packs, talking soothingly to his animals. He seemed grateful to be rid of the little blue sack.

“After this fork in the trail,” Shan said, “the quickest way down is straight, past Drango. It is why your mule stopped here. It knows the way.”

“Not today,” the man said, with a wary glance in the direction of the village. “If you see that prick Chodron, give him a message,” the miner said as he rose. “Tell him I left his payment on the trail.” He hobbled away, using more of the grass to coax his mule onto the side trail.

Shan waited until the man was fifty yards away before sitting and emptying the sack onto the ground. In it was a small plastic thermometer with a ring by which it could be attached to a lanyard and a small stack of papers bound with a rubber band. Each was covered with little round discs with adhesive backing, in half a dozen colors. A small pencil sharpener. Three identical screwtop brown plastic containers. The first contained matches, the second a variety of medicinal tablets, and the third was apparently empty.

He laid his discoveries on a rock, studying them, trying to understand what he saw. At last he picked up the thermometer and read it. The degrees were marked in Fahrenheit, only in Fahrenheit. It had belonged to someone from America.

NOTHING APPEARED TO have changed when he entered the village. But when the guard at the stable door hesitantly lifted the bar for Shan something seemed to be blocking the door from the inside. “One moment,” he heard Lokesh say, and seconds later the door opened and his old friend motioned him inside. The stranger lay flat. Gendun, at his head, looked frail. The lama’s arm trembled where the electrodes had been attached. But Gendun was steadily murmuring his prayers. Dolma, nearby, worked a small wooden churn.

At the sound of the bar dropping into place Dolma stopped and Lokesh bent to a cluster of butter lamps he was using to heat a tin kettle. Dolma extended a hand and the stranger grasped it, pulling himself up as he fixed Shan with bright, intelligent eyes.

“Tashi delay,”
Shan ventured, offering the traditional greeting.

“He doesn’t understand us,” Lokesh said. “He speaks one of the ancient tongues.”

“Ni hao,”
Shan tried, switching to Chinese.

“Ya’atay,”
the stranger said. It was neither Tibetan nor Chinese, nor any language Shan knew.