The figure should have been close enough for Shan to hear its feet on the gravel at the base of the rock, but there was no sound except the crickets. The thing bent over on all fours and moved closer to the outcropping, only fifty feet from Shan now. Suddenly a brilliant light flashed from the shape, followed by a sound of glee, then the light disappeared and the grey thing hurried back toward the compound.
Shan launched himself from his perch and ran down the path, jumping onto the sand and darting to the shadows at the rear of Osman's inn just as the figure disappeared around a hut at the far side of the corral.
The horses trotted away from him as Shan approached. They had not been frightened by the figure who had gone before, only by Shan. The big camel, so silvery in the moonlight that it too seemed like an apparition, made a sound that started as a snort and ended in a low, throaty grumbling sound, as if first it were alarmed and then just angry at being disturbed.
The hut had no window. As he approached it Shan saw that its plank door was ajar, and he gently pushed it open a few inches. A thick rug had been hung over the inside frame, concealing a dim light from within. He slipped inside and saw to his surprise a wall of neatly trimmed boards that had been expertly fitted into the structure only three feet inside the entrance. A narrow plank door with a hasp for a lock hung open enough to leak the brilliant white light of an incandescent bulb along its edge.
Shan waited in silence for several minutes, then laid a finger against the wooden door. It swung inward a few inches, enough for him to see a table nailed together of rough planks, stacked with books.
"It's open," someone said in Mandarin.
Shan pushed the door and stepped inside. Deacon, the American, was standing at a workbench under a naked lightbulb, examining something under a large magnifying lens that was suspended by a swinging arm clamped to the table. Without turning around, he gestured toward a bottle on the table. "Help yourself to the vodka."
Shan silently surveyed the room. The electric line for the bulb ran to a wooden box in the corner, containing a series of heavy batteries. The books, in English, German, and Chinese, appeared to be textbooks on anthropology and archaeology. Another volume, thicker than the others and leaning open at the back of the table, seemed to be on a different topic. It was held open by a heavy spring clip to a diagram of a human skeleton.
"If you've grown particular, there's a clean glass on the shelf above the door," Deacon said, then glanced over his shoulder. He paused and raised an eyebrow, then returned to his work. "It's you," he said impassively. "Expected a Russian."
Shan did not immediately reply, for, an instant after Deacon had noticed him, his own eyes had found a shelf hung above the bench where Deacon worked. It held half a dozen small cages, all different but each one constructed of finely worked wood. They all glowed with the patina of great age. The largest, perhaps six inches long and four in height and depth, was made of thin slats of sandalwood. The smallest appeared to have been crafted out of a solid piece of fruitwood, hollowed out and carved into the shape of a temple.
The cruelest thing they had done to him in the gulag was to steal his memories. The pain from his repeated interrogations, from batons sometimes, and drugs, and electric prods, had dulled his memory, had made certain parts of his brain seem inaccessible. It was part of the Party's master plan, a cellmate had said, to cauterize the brain so it could not remember that once things had been better. But on seeing the cages something vague had jarred loose in the back of his mind.
At least three of the cages appeared occupied.
Deacon had followed Shan's gaze. "Marco laughs at me, but I tell him every proper town needs its own orchestra."
"You were outside," Shan said, then added with sudden realization, "you were gathering singers."
Deacon looked at the cages with a satisfied grin. "Got him, finally. Old Ironlegs, we call him. Makes a rasping sort of song, like his leg is made of metal." He turned to Shan. "You know crickets?" he asked in English.
Shan looked at the American in silence and slowly grinned. It seemed a wonderful question. "When I was young," he said, awed that the memory should have leapt out and found his tongue after being lost for so many years, "my father would take me to an old Taoist priest who had avoided all the suffering in the cities by fleeing to the mountains. He lived alone and spent most of his time weaving baskets and meditating on the Taoist scriptures. The only other thing I remember about him is that he collected singers. He taught me about them." How remarkable, Shan thought, to be in the desert, with a strange American, looking for a killer, and suddenly have one of the darkened doors of his memory opened.
Deacon smiled. "My first trip to China, I went to a market and saw a vendor selling insect singers. Had maybe fifteen species. A horse bell. A stove chicken, with the big antennae. Some of the black ones, ink bells they're called. And a weaving lady."
Somewhere deep inside Shan, something warmed as he heard the names, names he had first heard with his father, decades earlier. "I remember one called a
cao zhong
," he said. The words came unexpectedly, on a flood of recollection. "A beautiful one, loud but perfectly pitched. I don't know the English."
"A grass katydid," Deacon said. "God, I'd love to have a katydid. Too dry here." The American's eyes filled with pleasure as he gazed at his cages. "That street vendor, I sat with him for two hours as he explained how each had different songs, how their diet could affect their song, how the emperors used to have tiny furniture made for their favorite crickets. Next trip, I took my son Micah to see him again. All Micah did was grin, the biggest, most beautiful grin I ever saw on his face. We were hooked." Deacon looked with pride at his collection of cages. "The vendor told us they bring good fortune."
Shan nodded. "Because their song is so alive and bright. Living music, the old priest called it. Because you can't control them. If a cricket chooses to bring his living music to your home, then nature has indeed blessed you." Shan pried the door of his memory open further. "I remember one called a blue bell, and a painted mirror." He rushed the words out, as if scared of losing them again. "And a bamboo bell."
"With Ironlegs my chorus is complete. He's a watchman.
Pang t'ou
, they call it. Watchman's rattle. Full moon in ten days. My son and I will take them out into the dark at midnight and listen to their chorus. We'll watch for shooting stars. One of the old Kazakhs told my son that some crickets can do that, call in shooting stars."
"Your son?" Shan asked. "Your son is here?"
"Not here, but in Xinjiang."
For an agonizing moment Shan's mind raced. No. Deacon couldn't be old enough to be the father of the dead American at Glory Camp. "How old is he?"
"Ten." The American pushed the lens away and surveyed his cages again. "They'll attack each other if you don't keep them separate," he said, as if eager to shift the conversation from the boy called Micah.
"The old priest had a lot of antique cages, like yours, and some made of gourds," Shan recalled. "Others he made of bamboo splints or reeds."
"They're hard to find, the old cages. What happened to his?"
Shan smiled sadly as that part of the memory flooded over him. His father had left him with the old man one night, and they had stayed up until the crickets stopped singing in the early hours of the morning. "One of the few people who knew about him was a shepherd boy who brought rice cakes to him on festival days. But the boy joined the Red Guard and had a quota of reactionaries to arrest."
"Christ," Deacon muttered, as if he recognized the story.
"One day the boy came and told the old man that he would have to tell his platoon leader about him, that they would come the next day to take him away."
"Jesus. What did the old man do to the boy?"
"He thanked the boy for showing him respect," Shan said with a sigh. "That night, because the cages were from imperial China and he knew they would be crushed by the Guard, he freed all his singers. Then he waited until the moon rose and he burned all the cages. I know because my school class was required to go to the trial. The Guard was furious, because he refused to condemn the Taoists, and he only talked about that perfect moment, in a serene voice, about how the crickets had stayed and watched the fire and sung their most beautiful song ever as the cages burned. We were forced to leave, because the old man didn't follow the script." There had been another trial later, he recalled, when the Red Guard had begun to exhaust the supply of ready victims. They had arrested a vendor of crickets and put the insects on trial for contributing to the reactionary tradition. In the end they had roasted all the crickets on tiny spits and made the man eat them.
The laptop computer beeped and the screen went blank. Deacon took a step toward the workbench and closed the cover.
"I didn't know there was electricity," Shan said. "There wasn't any at Osman's."
"Only here. A portable solar rig. Charges the batteries enough for four or five hours' use."
Solar cells and crickets. A computer in an ancient Silk Road hut. An American hiding in a Chinese desert, drinking vodka with a Russian renegade. Jakli had taken him to another world, or several other worlds, none of which seemed connected to Lau or Gendun or the dead boys.
Shan could see the back table now, where Deacon had been working. The lens had been over a piece of cloth, an old faded textile with a crosshatch pattern of threads colored in shades of brown, yellow, and red. Deacon stepped forward, blocking his view of the table.
"Why are you here, Mr. Deacon?" Shan asked.
"Deacon. Just Deacon. I told you. Collecting crickets."
"I mean here, in Karachuk. In the Taklamakan. In Xinjiang."
Deacon smiled thinly and looked up at his crickets. "Maybe because of that grin on my boy's face. Hard to come by, back home." He looked at Shan. "Or maybe for the same reason as Marco, and Osman, and Jakli, and Nikki."
"You mean to hide?"
The American shook his head solemnly. "To the contrary. We came here to stop hiding. Here is where no one can hide."
"We?" Shan asked. "You and your son?"
Deacon frowned. "My wife and I."
"I thought that hiding was the point of Karachuk. Smugglers. Outcasts. They come here to hide."
"Then you don't get it. I've been everywhere, on every continent, even the Antarctic. This is the only place I know on earth where you're totally responsible for yourself. No police. No soldiers. No goddamned government to tell you what to think or to make it easy for people not to think. You have to be somebody here. You have to trust and be trusted."
Shan stepped closer to Deacon's worktable. Deacon moved to block him. "You have to trust," Shan said, repeating the American's words.
Deacon frowned. "You didn't say what happened to that old priest with the crickets."
Shan looked at the cages once more. "They beat him at the end of the trial. Then they forced other priests to beat him. He died and they burned his body, all on the same day they took him from the mountain." Shan sighed and looked at the cricket cages again. "My father got some ashes from where the fire was and he took me back there, to where the priest had lived. We made a secret shrine for the ashes. When we left at dusk the crickets were singing for him."
The American stood still and let Shan push past.
It was indeed an ancient textile Deacon had been studying, a piece of thickly woven reddish-brown fabric. The cloth was wrapped around something cylindrical, covered at one end with a bit of canvas. To the right was a small binocular microscope.
"Textbooks say you can only dye white wool, wool without natural pigment," Deacon said over his shoulder. "But in the Taklamakan they never read those books. This is wool from a brown sheep, with most of its threads colored with a red-purple dye through some process we don't understand yet." Deacon pointed to the crosshatch pattern. "Here, they wove with strands of undyed white wool and white wool dyed red."
Shan looked at him in confusion. Surely the American hadn't come halfway around the world to secretly study cloth.
Voices suddenly broke through the silence outside. Multiple voices, a commotion of running and shouting. Someone called for Marco. Deacon looked back at his door but seemed reluctant to leave Shan alone.
Someone shouted the American's name. The door swung open, but no one was behind it. As Deacon stepped toward the opening, Shan quickly pulled away the canvas at the end of the textile.
He stared in disbelief, fighting a sudden nausea. The fabric had been a pants leg. Extending from it was a human foot, small and shriveled, but unmistakably a foot.
"Shit," the American muttered, his eyes moving from Shan to the door.
Somebody shouted again and Marco's huge frame filled the doorway. He gestured for them to come out and retreated far enough for Shan to see Akzu behind him, looking so exhausted he could barely stand. Jakli ran up, holding a blanket around her shoulders.
