SCREAMS MINGLED WITH Shan’s nightmare of Gendun in tamzing again, growing louder and louder, until he became aware that Lokesh was shaking him. The desperate shouts came from outside, spreading from one house to the next as Drango’s inhabitants caught sight of the flames. The barley fields were on fire.
Few things are drier than a field of barley ripe for harvest. The flames swept inward as if famished, gorging on the paper-crisp stalks. Within minutes every man, woman, and child in the village were in the fields, battling with brooms, buckets, and shovels. Soon some collapsed onto their knees, breaking into helpless sobs. The barley was their life, their food supply for the brutal winter ahead. The tsampa, the gruel, the kernel-laden soup, the fodder that would keep them and their animals alive was disappearing in a wind-driven inferno. Chodron shouted furious orders for more buckets, for a trench to be dug from the stream, but no one seemed to hear him. Another voice rose, younger and surprisingly calm. Yangke was wielding a sickle. Soon a dozen men were following his example, cutting a swath to deprive the advancing fire of its fuel, sealing off a small quadrant of the crop with a fire break.
Shan paused at the edge of the field, surveying the grim scene. The fire had started at the top of the field, feeding on the predawn downdraft from higher elevations, ignited at half a dozen places, probably by someone running with a torch. As he gazed at the devastated village he caught snippets of frantic conversations. Someone said it must have been lightning. Someone else said he had seen a flame suspended in the air, magically moving along the top of the fields, faster than any man could run. Someone, pointing, said Chodron had received an invitation from a demon. Shan followed the gesture, walking toward the granaries, stopping in the shadows when he discovered the village headman standing in the circle of pressed earth, staring at a dead sheep. The animal had had its throat cut and was propped on its haunches with sticks so that its lifeless eyes seemed to be watching the house of the headman. Stuffed in its mouth was an ornate silver pen case. A case Shan had seen before. Tashi’s pen case. He watched Chodron hesitantly open the case. It was empty.
Shan spotted Hostene and jogged to his side. The forlorn cries of the villagers rose in volume. They worked beside Yangke, pulling away the stalks as he cut them, stomping out embers as they landed on the cleared swath of earth. Shan watched as Chodron appeared, running upward. A new field caught with a sudden terrible swoosh of hot air as Shan darted behind the nearest structure.
Chodron’s house was empty, the back door open. The office was still padlocked, but using a stone and a heavy nail he had taken from the stable the night before, Shan began working on the hinges. He quickly popped the pins and swung the door aside.
Inside, he lit one of the candles on the desk. Wiping his hands clean of soot on his trouser legs, he began sifting through the papers on top of the compact desk, then searched the drawers and folders stacked on the table along the wall. This is what Shan had done best in his previous incarnation, finding and interpreting the secrets of the corrupt. He had once been feted as a Hero Worker for deciphering the code in a ledger used by a Ministry of Energy deputy minister to send millions to bank accounts in Hong Kong. Chodron’s files held reports about the harvest, medical care, party meetings, expenses for quarters in Tashtul town, everything but what Shan sought. He puzzled over how Chodron had managed to keep the village official for some purposes, like enrolling its children in government boarding schools, but unofficial for others, like keeping out watchful administrators, census takers, and tax collectors. He eyed the books on the high shelf over the table—Party scriptures, a collection of essays on socialist thought for agrarian communities, even a book dealing with the treatment of fungus in barley. Only one book showed any sign of use.
Chodron was not subtle, though Shan had to admire his daring. The headman had removed the contents of a hardcover copy of The Quotations of Chairman Mao and glued a ledger within the boards. He had hidden his secrets in plain sight. The sinner had disguised his transgressions with his bible.
It was an impressive volume, Shan had to admit. For over ten years, Chodron had recorded payments from miners, collected in early September as they passed through his makeshift tollgate on the trail above town. Each year’s entry listed miners’, changing slightly year to year, gradually lengthening until the past year showed payments from forty different names. Two names had been scratched out at the end of the past season, another a month earlier.
He leafed back and forth among the most recent annual accounts. Only the current year and the prior one had any names removed. All the previous years’ entries appeared to have been completed on the same day, with the same pen and same ink, listing name and payment as received. But the last two lists were different. The names had been prepared in advance of the payment date, pursuant to a more organized system, utilizing a list of names provided in advance with payments registered on the payment date. Chodron had become Bing’s partner.
Shan remounted the door on its hinges, tapped in the pins, and stepped outside into a swirl of smoke. He went toward Chodron’s generator, unscrewed the gas cap, and dropped a handful of dirt into the tank. The smoke thickened, conveniently concealing his return to the fields. He located Hostene and took up a position beside him, pulling back the stalks as the men in front swung their sickles.
Shan did not notice when Hostene departed. He became aware that Yangke had paused. Shan followed the young Tibetan’s gaze toward the nearest granary, where a smoke-stained figure stood with two packs in his hands. Shan realized the Navajo was right. They could ill afford to be within reach of Chodron’s fury when the flames had run their course.
Yangke put a hand on Shan’s shoulder. “I will try to find you,” he said in a bone-weary voice. “Lha gyal lo.”
By the time they reached the path above the village the sun had risen above the ridge, and they could see the full extent of the devastation. No more than a tenth of the crop survived. It was the end of life as the villagers had known it. They could not survive without appealing to the township authorities. Then the authorities would arrive to assess their plight. The end would come quickly.
“Who would do such a thing?” Hostene asked.
“Someone who wants Chodron to lose,” Shan said.
“The murderer?”
Shan pointed to a set of bicycle tracks that veered off the trail along the top of the fields. The flame that ignited the barley had moved faster than a man could run.
“Murder,” Shan replied, “is only part of the war being waged on this mountain.” But in the short term, he knew murder would be Chodron’s sole obsession. For if Chodron the harvest manager was deprived of his victory, then Chodron the village magistrate would need an even more spectacular success. Shan tightened the straps of his pack and with grim determination headed up the mountain.
Lightning began to strike an hour later, a single bolt at first, starting at the distant summit, then a dozen more, approaching in rapid succession, shaking the ground, singeing the air, emitting a metallic scent of ozone. A huge dark cloud, nearly black, settled over the mountain, creating an eerie twilight. Now the lighting began in earnest. Most of the bolts were concentrated near the summit but some struck much closer, one less than a hundred yards away. It was as if some angry deity had awakened and begun hammering the mountain.
Shan and Hostene ran for shelter under an overhanging ledge. Hail fell, marble-sized balls that were blown sideways by a sudden gust, slashing at them so hard they had to turn and face the stone, their backs to the onslaught. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had started. Except for the hail it had been a dry storm, the kind that made Tibetans believe in mountain gods.
As the sun emerged, they surveyed the now deceptively tranquil mountainside.
“Why does she lead her killer?” Shan was not even certain he had given tongue to his thought until he saw the old Navajo stare at him in alarm.
“Why do you say such a thing?”
“Each of them has a destination, up the mountain somewhere. They have discovered it is the same one. I think she knows more about how to find it than the killer does. And the killer knows it.”
“You said her killer.”
“I am sorry, Hostene, but whoever is doing this won’t release her when they reach their goal. And I think she realizes this. Now I understand why she acts as if she has little to lose. If she’s convinced she’s dying,” Shan continued, “if she truly believes she will be gone soon, then completing her work is everything.”
“Her work,” Hostene repeated. “It’s not work anymore. It’s all part of the same thing now. The guilt she feels toward her dead parents. The need to put things in balance. She came to me that night at Gao’s, in tears. She said something that kept me awake for hours. It was wrong that Tashi and Ma had died too, she told me. The more I thought about it, the more it alarmed me. She was saying she was the one who was meant to die.”
In his mind Shan had been revisiting the videos of Abigail he had watched with Hostene, viewing them not as the work of a brilliant professor but of a troubled woman who knew she was dying. “That’s what she’s been doing all along,” he said softly. “Connecting with lost gods.” A minute passed before he spoke again. “The words she wrote you at Gao’s house. ‘In Beauty before me I walk.’ What is their origin?”
“They’re from our Blessing Way. Our chant to open dialogue with our holy ones.” He gazed out over the tortuous terrain ahead of them and nodded. “She’s become more of a Navajo in Tibet than she ever was as a girl in New Mexico. But no one kills for the old gods,” Hostene observed in confusion.
This was a leap Shan was not prepared to make.
They turned onto the track that led to Little Moscow. The trail was blocked with lashed poles, tied together and jammed against rocks to form a gate. The poles bore patterns of colored stripes at the top, in different orders, as if the miners were sending a unified warning to all trespassers. Beyond the poles, on the trail, was the headless carcass of a sheep.
Shan followed Hostene’s worried gaze back toward Drango village, where the smoke still spiraled high. Fire behind, vengeful miners ahead. It was time, as the Tao te Ching said, to block the passages and close the door. He turned back to Hostene. “I think we should pick some flowers,” he announced.
MANAGING DIRECTOR BING was perched on a boulder at the mouth of the ravine watching the column of smoke from Drango when they approached Little Moscow.
“You have the balls of a water buffalo, Shan,” he muttered as they arrived at his side. “Two days ago every miner on this mountain wanted both of you dead.”
“Two days ago Thomas had not been murdered. That changes everything. With Dr. Gao watching, who will dare try to eliminate his investigators?”
“Dr. Gao can’t tell the fox from the hens,” Bing shot back. Then he gestured toward the smoke. “How bad?”
“The village stands. The crop is all but destroyed.”
Bing ran his hand through his thick hair, muttered a low curse.
“Not particularly well planned,” Shan suggested. “How will Chodron keep the village fed without calling on the government for assistance? But why should a village need grants of food supplies when it never did before? That alone will set off an investigation. You and Chodron better forget the gold and start planting peas.”
Bing glared at him. “You can’t think we had anything to do with it.”
“As you said,” Shan observed, “Little Moscow exists in a bold new world. Where every man can live up to his full potential.”
There was something different about the miners’ town, Shan thought as he followed Bing into it. The photographs of family were stowed away, the little signs setting forth mileage to hometowns gone. The men had eradicated any evidence of who they were when off the mountain. They were growing suspicious of one another. A rooster stood tied to a pole by one lean-to, as vigilant as a dog. The birdcage he had seen on his former visit was gone, replaced by a plank upon which someone had inscribed an old-style charm against evil ghosts. The few miners who showed themselves glanced warily at Shan and Hostene. Shan walked along the perimeter of the town’s central square, pausing for a moment to study the crumbling fresco, noting the small oval shapes that had outlined some of the sacred objects depicted in the painting, squatting for a moment to examine the section that had fallen out and been placed by the entrance to Bing’s quarters, a fragment showing the head of a fanged creature that appeared half human, half lion.
Bing directed them to the central fire, where he poured tea into metal mugs. “We are honored to entertain the ambassadors from the great court of Gao,” he said mockingly. “But there’s nothing more to find here about the murders.”
“Murders?” Shan asked. “I have recognized my assumptions were faulty. I am now doing research into the creativity of entrepreneurs in the socialist market economy.”
Bing raised his cup in salute, gesturing toward his community of miners who were assembling, forming a circle around them. “Here you see the future of China at its birthing.”
Shan swallowed half the contents of his cup. Hostene began extracting items from his pack.
“The miner who was killed last year,” Shan said abruptly. “What happened to him? Were there witnesses? Why did you conclude that his partner had killed him?”
“You said you weren’t interested in murders anymore.”
“On this particular mountain, corpses are but another resource determined by supply and demand. So much so that when you run out of murders you borrow a body and call it a murder.”
Bing glared in silence at Shan, then glanced sharply at the Navajo. He made a small gesture to Hubei, his wiry, bulldog lieutenant, who fetched one of the shovel handles. “We don’t believe in digging up old ghosts.”
“But that’s my job,” Shan said. “Reviving old ghosts. Making them speak, tapping their wisdom.”
Bing was disturbed. “Talk like that scares people. Every day they’re more superstitious here. Look what they’ve done. Some hang charms outside their quarters. One man bought an old prayer box from a farmer, because he says the only gods here are Tibetan. Another put his rooster outside because his grandmother once told him they frighten off evil spirits.”
Shan nodded at Hostene, who had now arranged certain of the contents of his pack on his brightly colored blanket—his feathered spirit stick, a bag of pollen they had collected from flowers picked on the trail, the leg bone of a yak they had found near the path.
A worried murmur swept through the onlookers. Each miner represented a separate mystery to Shan. The only thing he knew for certain was that they were all superstitious.
“What the hell is he doing?” demanded Bing.
“Hostene is frightened of ghosts too,” Shan declared in a voice loud enough for all to hear. “He is going to perform a ceremony to speak with them, to ask them why they are so upset with Little Moscow, why they think someone is lying to them.”
Bing’s mouth opened in protest. “He’s an American” was all he could manage.
“He’s an American Indian. A shaman among his people. A ghost speaker.”
“Sorcerer!” someone barked.
Shan studied the men. Half a dozen had lowered themselves to the ground, forming a wide circle around Hostene. Others had stepped out of their dug-out homes and anxiously watched from the shadows. The Navajo began murmuring in his native tongue, arms flying toward the heavens. Hubei backed away several steps, then hurried off.
“I want him stopped,” Bing muttered to Shan.
“He is speaking to the ghosts, asking them to tell us the truth.
Surely the citizens of your bold new world have nothing to fear from old world ghosts. Or is it you who are scared of ghosts, Captain Bing?”
“What do you want?”
“The man who died last year. What exactly happened?”
“He was found with a chisel in his back and a bloody patch on his head where he had fallen against some rocks. A shopkeeper from Guangzhou had come here with him, his partner. But they were always arguing with each other, and with the rest of us. We confirmed it was his partner’s chisel.”
“We?”
“Hubei and I.”
“And the killer?”
“No one knows how he died. All we found was his skeleton.”
“Wearing his old ring. A skeleton with jewelry. Even the dead adapt here.”
“That’s when we organized ourselves. Signed articles governing Little Moscow, so it would be a safe harbor, a place to keep supplies.”
“And that’s when they elected you to lead them,” Shan pointed out.
“The murder made it clear that someone had to do it. I had government experience. It was my duty to accept the nomination.”
“Supply and demand again,” Shan pointed out. “After all these years, a need for protection arose, and the perfect candidate was there to fill it.”
Outside, Hostene was speaking in his tribal tongue, holding the bag of pollen up to the sky. “There are still some who consider him a killer,” Bing ventured.
“Where’s the body of the man who was killed last year?”
“I don’t know. We left him under some rocks. But when the wolves get hungry enough—” Bing finished with a shrug.
“You’re saying you haven’t been back to the grave?”
“I had no reason to go there.”
Shan considered Bing’s calculated lack of interest. He decided not to ask the question that leapt to his tongue. Instead he said, “When I go to Tashtul town, where will I find the gold agency?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Where does one go to sell gold? Officially, only the government buys gold.”
Bing replied, “You’re not actually going to Tashtul.”
“A fascinating idea, though. The miners disperse all over China come autumn, they have black markets all over China to go to. But you and Chodron, you need to convert the share of gold paid to you by the miners somewhere much closer. It’s against the law to exchange it without involving the government. The Ministry of Mines is the flaw in your business model. It restricts the upside potential of your enterprise. The worst possible partner in a conspiracy is a bureaucrat. You’d be surprised how quickly such officials can be made to sing. Investigators love to start with bureaucrats because they harbor no delusions about the criminal justice system. And this year,” he added, “some of the miners have already converted some of their gold into cash, in the middle of the summer. As if there were a new gold dealer nearby. Or a bank.”
Bing glared at him, then shrugged. “You have no way off this mountain. If you try to go to Tashtul, Chodron will make sure you’re never seen again.” He pushed the canvas flap aside, his anger building, as Hostene began sprinkling pollen on the miners’ heads. Bing cursed under his breath and hastened back to the square.
Shan found Hubei packing a sack with mining equipment near his lean-to.
“That last day Thomas was here, before I arrived, what was he speaking about? Who was he speaking with?”
“Everyone.” Hubei did not stop his packing, but did not hesitate to answer. “Anyone who came along. One moment he was hawking his wares, the next bragging that he knew how to catch criminals.”
“What did he say about catching criminals?”
“Forensics, he called it. He claimed he could tell what made a wound by examining the blood spatter, could tell if a man was dead or alive when he was stabbed or shot by whether blood had flowed out of the body. Bones. Bullets. Fingerprints.”
“What about bones?”
The miner tied off the top of the pack. “Fractures. A skull fracture from a fall made a long crack. A skull fracture from a hammer might knock out a circle of bone. A leg fracture from a car accident was different from one where the leg was held down and smashed.” The miner raised the pack onto his back.
Thomas had spoken of how a victim’s bones could betray a murderer, and then Abigail had seen Bing tossing old bones from a cliff.
“Did you help bury the man who died last year?” When the man did not reply Shan blocked his exit from the shelter. “Did he still have his hands?”
Hubei lowered the pack and rubbed a hand over his face. “There was no need for the others to know about that. We rolled the body in a blanket before they could look.”
“Which means you know his partner was not the murderer.”
Hubei glanced toward the square, where Bing was putting Hostene’s ritual instruments back into his pack even as Hostene continued dispensing pollen. “Maybe there are different murderers. New people came to the mountain this year. Last year, we softened the man’s partner up with a couple of shovel handles, enough to scare him off the mountain. We borrowed his ring before he left,” he admitted.
Shan nodded at the confirmation of his suspicion. “By my count that makes ten hands that have been severed and taken away. How many do you suppose this killer needs? An even dozen? A score? You’re a brave man, going back to your claim alone. Be sure to get some of that pollen sprinkled on your head before you leave.”
Hubei winced, rubbing at the tattooed numbers on his forearm, the nervous reaction of a former prisoner. Hubei was wise in the ways of the world. He, at least, understood that they were on the brink of disaster. His hand went to his belt. For the first time Shan saw an old military knife tucked in his waist.
“You aren’t going mining,” Shan observed.
“No one is to get past the claim Bing posted down the trail. Between patrols I’ll push some rocks around and pan the streams.”
“The problem with being in the middle of a war, Hubei, is that everyone eventually has to choose a side.”
“I’m on the side of my family,” Hubei said. “You should get out of the way. Leave the mountain, Shan, and the war ends.”
Shan said, “I’m not leaving until the murderer is caught.”
For a moment Hubei looked as if he meant to argue with Shan. Then his attention focused on the town square of Little Moscow, which had gone very quiet except for a voice chanting in Navajo. “He’s had a message.”
“Bing?”
Hubei nodded once more. “From that damned woman. He says she came to him yesterday when he was alone working his claim, asking him to give a note to her uncle. We should’ve stopped her the first day she arrived, and sent her away from the mountain. She’s nothing but bad luck.”
“He knows we are looking for her. Why didn’t he give the message to me?”
“A man like Bing doesn’t share secrets. He uses secrets.”
“He told you. He told Chodron.”
“Me, because he doesn’t read English. Only me,” the miner added pointedly.
Shan didn’t wait for Bing to return to his makeshift house. He quickly slipped inside the shelter of rock and canvas, and began searching, starting at the entry from which he surveyed the entire chamber before examining each chink in the rock wall. When he finished with the wall, he searched under the pallet on the floor, then moved to the jacket hanging on a peg. The note was there, in an inside pocket sealed with a zipper. It was written on a page torn out of a journal, the same thick unlined paper she’d used for her note at Gao’s house. It was the same handwriting. “I am safe, Abigail had written, and on the way to Tashtul town. After what happened to Thomas I cannot bear to stay here. I have research to do in Lhasa and will wait for you there at the hotel we stayed at before.”
He put the paper into his own pocket and walked down the nearest of the little alley ravines to the square. Hostene was pacing around the circle of men still, blowing pollen onto them. No one was ridiculing the Navajo now. These were men who would take a blessing any way they could. Even Bing stood and let Hostene scatter the yellow spores on him, as did a new arrival who stood at the rear, watching with a curious, uneasy expression. Yangke had found them.
Shan retreated to consider Abigail’s note. Bing was keeping her departure a secret even from his patron and partner, Chodron.
A sound came from behind him, a soft, summoning whistle from the shadows. He glanced back to confirm no one in the square had noticed. He did not see the heavy loading boom over his head or the flicker of movement until it was too late. The loop of rope, expertly thrown, cleared his shoulders and was tightened around his waist, pulling him off his feet as it was raised by the overhead pulley, suspending him six feet in the air, his arms pinned to his sides. A man came out of the shadows holding a pole. He wore a hooded black sweatshirt, the hood drawn so low that the man’s face was obscured, even when he began to beat Shan.
By the time Shan tried to call out, he had no breath left with which to speak. His assailant concentrated on his ribs and abdomen, delivering no bone-breaking blows but inflicting maximum pain. The pole, Shan noted, was of juniper. A sacred wood should not be used for such a profane task, he thought.
And then he must have lost consciousness. He was aware only that he was in a storm, with the wind howling, men shouting in fear, deafening thunder and darkness directly overhead. With painful effort he twisted to look upward. If lightning was going to strike him he wanted to see it coming. Despite his pain and the swirling dust, he could see the great black thing. The dragon deity, the thunder maker, the mountain shaker? Then a pebble stung his cheek, awakening him. The dust was scoured away by a downdraft, the shape of the thing outlined by daylight. It was a different breed of demon entirely. It was an army helicopter.
Hands reached up. Knife blades cut the rope that bound him. Orders were shouted, by Bing, by someone in a uniform. Shan was on Hostene’s blanket. Someone was washing his face with a wet cloth, a man with a yellow-streaked face was handing him tea. His shirt was being unbuttoned. Fingers pressed against the pulse in his wrist. He passed out.
SHAN LAY IN a swirling, confused place of memory and fear, in a bed of a remote Public Security ward. The hospital was in the desert, and sand crept into everything, even the cold rice they served him three times a day. He was in a special section reserved for Party luminaries, staffed with special doctors trained in interrogation. They experimented on him, using sodium barbitol, injections of iodine solution, and electric wires and small needles.
“I can’t find a pulse. Just like him, the son of a bitch.”
“Look, he’s vomiting.”
“Excellent. Better than a pulse.”
They tied him naked to a chair and two bald men entered, one with a single long syringe, the other holding a short piece of bamboo.
“No ribs broken,” they confirmed before starting in again.
His handlers were artists. They took pride in never breaking a bone. He could feel the needle that went into his bicep but could not raise his arm to react to it, could only sense the heat oozing up into his shoulder.
ALL AT ONCE he was awake, heart pounding, no longer in his prison of five years earlier but propped against a rock in the central square of Little Moscow. Gao was loading a syringe from a small clear bottle. Over the professor’s shoulder stood a soldier holding a medical kit, nervously eyeing the miners.
“Who was it?” Hostene asked. “Could you see them?”
Shan, unable to speak, shook his head. He leaned and retched, emptying his stomach, then retched again, and again, until nothing came up.
Gao hovered over him with the syringe. Shan held up his hand. “What is it?”
“A painkiller.”
“No,” Shan groaned and, with Hostene’s help, he sat and surveyed the assembly. Bing was calm but the miners looked terrified.
From the lip of the ravine a ladder of small chain links and steel bars hung from the door of the helicopter that had landed. “You’re late,” he said to Gao.
“I’m sorry. The storm delayed me.”
“For the first time in years I was actually happy to see a helicopter.”
Shan pulled Abigail’s note out of his pocket, handed it to Hostene, and fixed Bing with a level stare. “When did she leave?”
Bing’s eyes flashed as he recognized the paper in Hostene’s hand. Before answering he snapped at the gathered miners, ordering them to disperse. Then he said, “I found her wandering, lost, that morning when Thomas was killed. I sent her on her way with a map on a fast mule. She was hysterical. She said she had been knocked unconscious and awakened to find Thomas lying dead beside her.”
“You didn’t try to stop her?”
“Good riddance as far as I could see. I told her how to find the herders’ camps at the base of the first range. They will set her on the right trail to town. She could reach town by this afternoon.”
“And from there?”
“There’s a bus to Lhasa from Tashtul twice a day.”
Shan turned to Gao. “Who else came with you?”
“The pilot, who’s an old friend, and his mechanic, who knows better than to ask questions.”
Shan stood up and took a step, fighting dizziness, then faced Bing again. “I want four gold nuggets. Say half an ounce each.”
“Fuck you.”
“For two men who need to be given a big incentive not to talk.”
Bing eyed Gao, who listened with a curious expression. “It’s a crime to bribe a soldier.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Shan asked. “In the new world order there are no bribes, only business expenses. A reasonable item for your municipal budget. Call it emergency repairs.”
Bing cursed and stepped into the shadows of his shelter. Shan took a step toward the ladder but doubled over in pain. Hostene dropped the gear he was gathering and rushed to Shan’s side. Shan’s raised palm stopped him.
“Go,” Shan said, “climb the ladder. We’ll bring the packs.”
“We?” Gao asked. “You’re in no condition to travel.”
Shan found a familiar face watching uncertainly from the edge of the clearing and gestured toward him. “Yangke will come with us.”
The young Tibetan glanced nervously around the clearing, drawing an unhappy glare from Bing, then gathered up the remainder of the gear and went to the ladder. Shan took three steps before he had to stop, his head swimming.
Bing blocked his way. “No way,” he said.
“There is a way,” Shan said. “Send Hubei with us. You don’t need him to watch the trails once we’ve left.”
Bing stared without expression at his deputy, then slowly nodded. Hubei began retreating into the shadows, then froze as Bing beckoned him. Hubei came forward reluctantly and Bing bent to murmur in his ear, then extracted a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to him. His deputy brightened as he stuffed the pages into his own pocket.
Shan waited for Hubei to climb the ladder, then followed shakily. Gao leaned forward, syringe at the ready. But Shan grabbed the syringe and with an unsteady hand emptied out half its contents before jabbing it into his own arm. Then he headed to the ladder and began climbing.
Once they were on their way Gao asked for the gold nuggets Bing had surrendered to Shan.
“A bribe from you?” Shan said. “Not credible. It needs to come from an unrepentant criminal.” He palmed the nuggets and went forward into the cockpit.
Five minutes later he settled into a small nest of military blankets built for him by Hostene as the machine roared to life and began to rise. Hubei had already found another pile of blankets at the rear of the hold and appeared to be sleeping.
“Where is the pain?” Hostene asked.
With a forced grin Shan pointed to the bottom of a foot.
“There is the only place it doesn’t hurt. He was no expert. Professionals go for the soles of the feet.”
The landscape began to roll past the narrow portholes.
Yangke rose to sit beside Shan. “I have no papers,” he said anxiously. It was a crime in itself to be without citizen registration papers. They were the first thing police asked for when they encountered strangers.
“Nor do I. Nor does Hostene for that matter, not for this region. We won’t stay in town long. Just overnight.”
“It will take us days to make our way back on foot.”
“I gave the pilots two nuggets today, one for each of them. They get the second installment when they pick us up in the morning.” Together, the little yellow rocks represented at least half a year’s pay for the officer, far more for the soldier.
“Why do you think I can help with—”
“You know Chodron,” Shan interjected. “We need to find Abigail. But we also need to track Chodron’s connections in town.” He glanced at their companions. Gao had put on a set of headphones that allowed him to speak to the pilot. Hostene was looking out a window on the opposite side of the ship, as if searching for a woman on a mule. “But first we need to talk about your partnership with Tashi.”
Yangke’s face clouded. He began fidgeting with a cargo strap that hung along the side of the fuselage. “Tashi is dead.”
“If you don’t wish to speak of Tashi, then how about the explosion at the old mine?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Chodron keeps very thorough records. Careful records of the miners, careful records of his village administration. But there is no record of your stealing anything from him. By my calculations, the day he locked the canque around your neck was the day after the old mine blew up. Tashi and you were friends. Tashi knew the miners.”
Yangke absently ran his finger around the rim of the porthole. “He said he could get me to India, to start a new life. He knows . . . he knew a monastery in the south I could join. Otherwise, without his help, it takes a lot of money to cross the border when you have neither papers nor passport. I’m an outcast monk. What do I know about making money?”
“Why didn’t you join the miners?”
“The gold on this mountain is not meant to be taken away. What Tashi was doing was different. He told me about the professors seeking old deities. I figured they could make better sense of the past than I could. He offered me a bargain. He knew I had a secret I had kept since I was a boy, even from him.”
“You mean they didn’t discover the old mine,” Shan said after a moment. “You told them where it was.”
“I told Tashi where it was. Tashi told the professors. None of the gold had ever been taken down the mountain. In exchange, Tashi promised to get me across to India. He said he had a foolproof way, that I could ride with gods all the way.”
Shan closed his eyes a moment. He had been so blind. “It had never been taken down the mountain,” he repeated in a hollow voice.
“I had searched when I was a boy, spoken with all the old ones, considered how poor our village had always been. They never used it in the temple, except for a couple small statues. Abigail and Professor Ma made rough calculations based on what they saw at the mine. Tashi told me they thought maybe two tons of gold had been mined. Two tons.”
“But someone else found out about it?”
“Tashi got drunk. Sometimes with Bing. Thomas had started selling liquor. That boy had everything he could want but he had to come across and throw alcohol on our smoldering fires.”
They gazed out at the landscape in silence.
“So Tashi told Bing, and then the mine blew up,” Shan said. “Then Chodron put the canque on you. Because,” he suggested after a long moment, “he was furious that you kept the secret from him all these years.”
“No,” Yangke said in a slow voice, “it wasn’t like that. The explosion was huge. It shook the ground all the way to the village. Chodron came up the slope immediately, demanding an explanation. Bing was already on a bike, riding down to explain. He said that some of the miners’ works had been blown up, had been sabotaged. And there was only one person who hated the miners and Chodron enough to destroy their claims. He told Chodron that someone had stolen explosives out of the stores at Little Moscow the night before. Chodron never goes to Little Moscow. He stays away from the miners, and only speaks with Bing. So, of course, he believed Bing.”
Shan let the words sink in a moment. “Bing didn’t want Chodron to know there were two tons of gold waiting to be found somewhere higher on the mountain. And he couldn’t take the chance of someone finding the old mine and reaching the same conclusion.” He looked at Yangke. “But didn’t you deny blowing up the mine?”
More mountains sped by their window.
“You didn’t,” Shan concluded. “You didn’t contradict Bing.”
Why would Yangke protect Bing, he almost asked, then realized that for Yangke there was perhaps a more important question. “Why did you let Chodron put the canque on you and condemn you wrongly as a thief in front of the whole village? Why did you keep it on? You could have run, you could have hidden, you could have gone to Tashi or even Rapaki.”
“At first, it was to protect Tashi and our plan. Because if I had run then, Chodron would have tried to find me and he would have discovered Tashi’s secret camp,” came Yangke’s simple reply. “But later . . . I realized I deserved it. I should have understood that the only possible way to save the old things is to keep them away from the new world. I knew that, but when Tashi said he could get me to India, where I could be a real monk, I was tempted and I succumbed,” Yangke added.
Shan closed his eyes, letting the painkiller do its work. But he did not sleep. He had learned in the gulag that there was a part of the brain that drugs never reached, the part that kept repeating Yangke’s words until, as the helicopter began to descend, he found himself looking at the young man again, understanding the full depth of his pain. Yangke had accepted the canque because he had betrayed the secret of the mine. He had worn it because he believed, as Shan now did, that the secret he had disclosed to Tashi was the reason his friend had been murdered.
LIKE MOST OLDER communities in Tibet, Tashtul was two towns, the efficient concrete-and-steel construction Beijing had erected and the traditional Tibetan market town that survived. As they walked from the weed-thatched, crumbling soccer stadium where the helicopter deposited them, Shan found his eyes drawn not to the two- and three-story block structures that dominated the low skyline but to the diminutive, decaying buildings that dated from earlier centuries, a wooden stable here, a crumbling chorten there, a stone tower where Buddhist banners would have been displayed during festivals that had been banned decades earlier.
They stood for several minutes at a rusting war memorial by the entrance to the stadium, Beijing’s monument to the fierce battles that had taken place in the region, Chinese divisions pitted against small brigades of Tibetan resistance fighters.
“I take it,” Gao said reluctantly to Shan, “you are about to propose that I lead this fragile expedition.” As he spoke he cocked his head toward the street. Hubei was running away.
“It would be suspicious for a man of your renown not to be,” Shan suggested. “Not to mention that we have neither money nor friends here. Not even a street map.”
“A street map,” Gao replied, “is one thing you don’t require in Tashtul.” He pointed to the squat block structure two hundred yards away, in front of which a tire was being changed on a decrepit bus by means of a cable slung over a tree limb, pulled by a tractor. “The transportation center.” He pointed to an open-air pavilion beside a row of buildings with glass storefront windows, then to a four-story building, the highest in town, that sported a Chinese flag and a dozen antennae. “The center for food and the center for authority.”
They walked past half a dozen barracks that had been converted to school rooms, behind which were five or six blocks of residences, a mix of old wooden structures and stucco bungalows. Shan did not miss the way Gao, finished with his orientation lesson, gazed back at the flagpole on the government center. Below the flag waved a long red-and-black banner, an unfamiliar ornament, the kind traveling armies used to fly.
“Where should we—,” Yangke began. Then Hostene decided the question for them. Without a word he began jogging toward the bus station. Shan clenched his jaw against the pain in his ribs and followed as quickly as he could. By the time he caught up, the Navajo was already in the station, extracting a photo of his niece from his wallet, gesturing toward it as he approached people waiting on benches, the sleepy vendor at the news kiosk, a wide-eyed girl selling dumplings from a steaming bucket.
As Shan reached his friend he caught several wary glances in his own direction. He had not changed his clothes since he’d been attacked. His pants were torn at the knee, his shirt mottled with dried blood. He drew Hostene into the shadows, calming him, hoping none of the Tibetans had paid attention to his urgent words in Chinese about an American woman.
Gao went out into the sparse crowd now, passing out small-denomination notes, asking softly about a woman who had become separated from a mountain-climbing party after an accident and might be seeking transport to Lhasa.
Too late Shan saw the gray uniforms among the throng of men at the disabled bus. The Public Security officers, often called knobs for the ornaments on their shoulders, were led by a man who, though middle-aged and overweight, had the sharp predatory eyes of every knob Shan had ever known. The officer’s steely gaze fell on Yangke and Shan. With a hand on the radio at his belt he approached. Yangke sank helplessly onto a bench.
Suddenly, Gao was at Shan’s side, thrusting a dark brown souvenir sweatshirt into his hands. XIZANG, it said in gold letters— Western Storehouse, the Chinese name for Tibet—arranged in an arc over overlapping images of a mountain, a yak, and a truck. Shan turned it inside out and pulled it over his soiled, torn shirt. He was heading for Yangke when he froze, every instinct sounding alarms. The station had nearly emptied. The dumpling vendor sat as if paralyzed, knuckles white on the rim of her bucket. The wall behind her began changing colors—dirty brown, then dirty blue, then brown, then blue. He overcame his paralysis to take another step as Hostene was guided by a knob to Yangke’s side, then he felt a firm grip on his lower arm. He did not speak, could not speak, as another knob led him to a bench and pushed him down.
“You can’t take them!” The words, meant as a shout, emerged from Shan’s throat like a moan. With a patient, businesslike air the knob at his side withdrew a baton from his belt. The sight of the weapon sent a new ripple along Shan’s ribs. He could not take another beating, not now, not without the risk of injuries that could force him off his feet for days.
Yangke and Hostene offered no resistance as they were manacled together and led into the prisoner wagon that waited, blue lights flashing, at the front of the station. Shan struggled to his feet, his wrists in front of him, to accept manacles. Then, when none were presented, he staggered toward the wagon. He had caused this. He had to be with them. But the knob at his side grabbed him again, pulling him back, as the doors of the van closed. The last thing Shan saw inside was Hostene, pressing his sacred feather against his forehead.