“An old woman called for you,” Jengtse announced when Shan arrived at the station in the morning. “Said your book is ready.” The deputy shrugged. “Something you ordered in Lhasa, I guess. Don’t know of a bookstore this side of the city.”
Shan shrugged with careful disinterest, waited until his deputy left to patrol the town, and dialed Lhadrung. Your book is ready. It was one of Amah Jiejie’s games. She had told him once she had always wanted to be a librarian. She answered on the first ring, reported that Colonel Tan was working late, and put him on the line.
“The two dead soldiers,” Tan said, “were signalmen, telemetry experts qualifying the Snow Tigers to use new equipment. Pinpoint sensors for radio and laser signals, to be deployed along the border. They would detect a transmission device that had been concealed for training purposes, then call the coordinates in to their base for confirmation. Except that day the one that was called in had not been planted by the army. They were dispatched in a utility truck to investigate.”
“The American was bouncing signals off the mountains,” Shan explained. “Making a map.”
“The fool. He thought no one would notice?”
“In the Ghost Mountains, with nothing but goats and yaks for miles? I doubt it occurred to him. The soldiers surprised him. They subdued him. The worst he would have expected was to be deported. They went back to the old Red Guard camp. None of them knew death waited for them there. I found the evidence, then two helicopters destroyed it.”
“They fired on you?” Shan could hear the fury igniting in Tan’s voice.
“They will call it a live fire training mission.”
Shan heard a whispered curse. “My driver goes out drinking with Lau’s security detail. He says the two signalmen were laid out in the open, dragged from their wrecked truck.”
“Someone wanted to hide the murders,” Shan observed, “disguise them as deaths from an accident.”
“Someone else wanted to display them,” Tan rejoined. “Stay out of the mountains, Shan. That’s an order. Find a big rock and crawl under it. General Lau will grow weary and soon find a game to play elsewhere.”
* * *
“Shan, no!” Marpa protested, leaning out the back door of the café as if to intercept them. Shan had met Ko and Yara at the carpet factory, where she had promised to show Ko the old looms and offered to buy them dinner. Marpa urgently motioned them off his steps.
“Just a quick bite.”
“The Committee of Leading Citizens is in my dining room. No!” Marpa cast a meaningful glance at Yara and lowered his voice. “They know her family. They know of the bounties. Mrs. Weng is still trying to find a way to pay for her broken windows. And she’s furious with you, says you caused all the town’s problems, says they are going to petition for a proper policeman.”
Shan glanced at his son. He had promised his son a good meal before the long drive back to the 404th. “Then have Lodi bring our food to the garage, to Tserung. He’ll know where to find us.”
Jig Bartram was already in the subterranean archives, making notes and studying rough drawings of the Pure Water College grounds that Tserung had located in the old manuscripts. She was, Shan realized, trying to pinpoint the location of the old herb gardens, where her mother wanted to be buried.
They pushed the small tables together in the corridor and hung lanterns above as Ko and Yara unpacked the meal. Shan laid out the secret drawings again.
“What are we missing?” he asked in frustration. “Why won’t the man who drew these show himself? Why flying horses? Why raven feathers over the stable?” He felt no closer to the murderers, and every hour his foreboding grew. The killers were growing impatient, even desperate. If they found the witness first, he would die. Shan found himself avoiding his son’s gaze, for fear he would sense that his father actually wanted him back in prison, where he would at least be safe from the Yangkar killers.
“You just sit,” Yara playfully chastised as Ko tried to help arrange the meal. Ati picked up the big thermos Marpa had sent but it proved too heavy, and as he tried to fill the little teacups, it slipped. As tea slopped out on the table Jig snatched up the nearest drawing, although not in time to avoid the upper corner soaking up some of the hot liquid. She paused, staring at the corner, then showed it to Shan. The tea had brought out a dim shadow of Chinese characters.
“Secret writing?” the American asked.
“I don’t think so,” Shan replied. “This was made by a Tibetan for Tibetans. He wouldn’t record secrets in Chinese.”
“A palimpsest, then,” Jig declared in English.
“I’m sorry?”
“I only know the English word. Palimpsest. My father was fascinated with ancient languages. He showed me one in a museum. Ages ago, when parchment or vellum was in short supply, scribes sometimes washed or scraped away the ink on old manuscripts so they could use them again, for new writing. There’s the Archimedes Palimpsest, and Roman books from Cicero and Seneca, overwritten by early Christian writings.” She saw the blank stares of her companions. “These pages were recycled! Whoever drew these didn’t have clean paper to work with.” She cocked her head at Shan, who hesitantly dripped more tea along the top of the drawing. “‘Mail,’” he read from the dim outlines. “‘First day’ … then it’s blurred. I can make out the word ‘penalties.’”
Ko lowered his chopsticks and snatched the paper away, studied it for a moment, and then fixed his father with a look that first showed excitement, then dismay. “Mail will be distributed on the first day of the month,” he stated, “available to those who have received no penalties during the preceding month.” He dripped tea along the top of the next drawing, scanned it and looked up. “Item One,” he recited without reading. “Night soil not placed on the barracks steps before breakfast must be kept inside until the next morning. Item Two. Singing in the barracks brings a penalty against the entire barracks.”
Jig looked in confusion from Ko to Shan. “I don’t understand.”
Ko dripped more tea along the top of the third drawing. “Your labor,” he whispered, then his words choked away. He glanced up at Yara then looked away, speaking into the shadows. “Your labor is how you express your love for the motherland. Respect the motherland and she will shelter you. Disrespect her and you will sleep outside, whatever the weather.”
Yara’s face twisted with pain as she watched Ko.
Suddenly Shan grabbed a pencil, pulled out his notebook, and wrote down the numbers at the bottom corner of each page, in sequence. He felt the blood drain from his face.
“Shan?” the American asked as she saw his stricken countenance. “What is it?”
He turned the notebook toward Jig, then slowly rolled up his sleeve. “I’ve been such a fool. It’s why the messenger fled, why the man who drew these must be anonymous. I should have seen it immediately. This,” he said, and placed his uncovered forearm by the numbers he had written down. “This is what I mean.” There were ten digits on the paper, just as there were on Shan’s arm. “The witness who drew these is a hard-labor prisoner.”
* * *
They drove in silence for the first two hours. Ko leaned against the door, his eyes shut, but Shan knew his son was not asleep. Nothing during his parole had been as Shan had planned. He had meant to spend nearly every hour with his son, to show him he was cherished and very much part of Shan’s life. Anyone can say such things, but such words meant nothing if they were not demonstrated, if they were not reflected in the hundreds of little acts and gestures that bound families together. Instead Shan had dumped him with strangers, taken him into harm’s way in Lhasa, and entangled him with a family of feral Tibetans. If the prison authorities caught wind of half the things Ko had done during his time with Shan, there would be no hope of further parole.
They paused at a tiny roadhouse on the pass that led down into the plain of Lhadrung, eating bowls of mutton stew beside two truck drivers who loudly spoke of the comfort girls along the road to Szechuan, spilling beer and belching, then snickering when Shan put his tunic back on.
He turned on the radio when they cleared the last pass and put on the rock-and-roll station from Lhasa. Ko turned it off. When they reached an overlook that surveyed the plain below, Shan pulled over. The sun was low in the sky. Lights, including security spotlights, were flickering on in half a dozen prison compounds. He turned off the engine, climbed out of the car, and stepped to the guardrail along the high cliff.
“I’m sorry, Ko,” he said when he heard his son’s steps behind him. “I guess it was a bad idea. You and I have never had time together like this. Your mother had you in the early years. Then I was in prison. You were in prison. I never learned how to be a father.”
“There are reasons I am in prison,” his son replied. “Lots of reasons. Drug dealing, gang leader. Destruction of government property. More brawls than I can remember. But not you.”
Shan was at a loss. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“No. You don’t understand. There isn’t a day when I don’t think of the courage it took, and the strength, to endure it. You were in prison because you were a good man, a man of integrity, because you stood up for the truth against corrupt officials. And you made your own justice. They still talk about it in the 404th, even some of the guards. Some of them hate you, but others talk about how you got Lokesh freed, how you beat the warden. It keeps me going, keeps me alive.” Ko turned to Shan. “Don’t you see? You have always been the father I needed.”
The mountains far to the east had been lost in a haze, but now the lowering sun struck their caps of snow. They glowed like a necklace of pearls along the purple horizon.
“I know we had talked about possible parole, but I never knew if it was going to happen,” his son continued. “Some of the younger prisoners who only knew you were a constable said I would be hosed down and de-liced before entering your house, said I would probably spend my time polishing the faces of whatever Mao statues were on the streets of your town. They said I would piss myself if I had to talk with a girl, that every night I would have to call the warden to check in and report the day’s activity.
“Then when the colonel came for me, I had no notion of what was to happen. I thought the parole was weeks away. No one told me. I was so damned scared I didn’t want to get out of that car.”
“Colonel Tan can be—” Shan searched for words. “—easily misunderstood.”
Ko seemed to find amusement in his words. A small chuckle became a deep laugh. “But instead he saved me. The two of you saved me from that General Lau.” Ko glanced down toward the prison camps and quickly looked away. In less than an hour he would be back in his cage. His hand went to something hanging from his neck, something he had left inside his shirt until now. It was a small frame of twigs and yarn, a demon catcher.
“You did find a girl to talk with,” Shan observed, knowing who must have given him the charm.
“She said she wants to take me to the old mineral spring next time, whatever that means.”
Shan grinned. “I expect you will find it thrilling. Unless her grandparents join you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
Ko smiled and tightened his grip on the charm.
“She’s a feral, Ko,” Shan reminded him. “She could run tomorrow. Even against her wishes she might run, to save her grandparents and son.” Shan had painfully watched as Ko and Yara had embraced each other when they departed, had seen the tears she tried to hold back. When he had turned away from her, Shan had seen something in his son’s eyes that had not been there five days before, a new strength, a calm determination that hinted of a purpose in his life.
“Is this now a fatherly talk about the wiles of beautiful women?”
Shan smiled. “On all the face of the planet you would find no one less wise about such things. It’s just that you’re not the only one in prison. She lives in her own kind of prison.”
Ko turned to the south, forcing himself to look at the razor-wired compounds now. “I told her. People like us can make no promises. She didn’t reply, just put this around my neck. You are protected from demons, she said. Only the bad kind of demons, she added, because I had to remember that in Tibet there are good demons too.”
Shan began unbuttoning his tunic. “In the glove box there’s a little sewing kit,” he told his son. Ko looked at him in confusion. “Just get it.”
When his son returned with the kit, Shan had his pocketknife out. “They won’t let you keep that. Too Tibetan. Too reactionary.” He began slicing through the threads of his shoulder patch, an embroidered circle featuring a stylized Chinese flag. He severed half a dozen threads and then ripped away the patch. “Let me see her charm.”
Ko lifted it from his neck and handed it to his father.
“Braided yak hair,” Shan observed. “She must have taken hours to make it.” He held up the patch to the front of the charm. It perfectly covered the twigs and yarn. “I will sew this over it. The guards will respect how you want to salute the motherland by wearing a flag and not touch it. They don’t have to know that the flag is only there as a disguise.”
Ko broke into a wide grin. “She said something else, at the very end, as she watched you get in the truck,” he added with an awkward glance at his father. “She said you were one of the good demons.”
They had no words at the gate of the 404th. The guards, rifles slung, silently opened the gate. Ko had asked Shan not to go inside.
Shan offered his hand. His son took it, then abruptly pulled his father into a tight embrace. “Lha gyal lo,” he whispered, then just as abruptly pushed Shan away, spun about, and marched back into his prison.
* * *
Shan parked his truck in an alley near the County Administration Center and watched as lights blinked out in the offices. The county seat had grown significantly in the years since he had first been released into the town. The nighttime streets then had been mostly dark and nearly devoid of activity. Now half a dozen streets had lights that cast a garish orange glow, and several restaurants were open for the evening meal. He got out and paced around the block, acquainting himself with the changed terrain, then entered the office building.
The surly guard at the desk, detailed from the military police, cast him a resentful glare but did not stop him from entering the elevator. Shan suspected he had known the man at the 404th, had probably known his boot on his back.
Little had changed in the offices on the top floor. The low table in the waiting area still had one of Amah Jiejie’s lace doilies on it. The decoration on the walls was 1980s proletarian style, with faded posters of joyful peasant girls that somehow seemed quaint. WORK IS REDEMPTION, instructed a banner that had hung on the wall for years, one of the few political slogans that Tan had ever embraced.
Amah Jiejie was at her desk, leaning toward a computer screen. “Xiao Shan!” she beamed. “What a coincidence! I was just on the phone with the 404th. Back safe in his barracks.” She was as gruff as Tan to most outsiders, but the ever-attentive aunt to those she had taken under her wing. She saw the glance he cast toward the door behind her. “Gone, not half an hour. Talked a while with the janitor then left.”
Shan was not sure he had heard correctly. Tan never even acknowledged Tibetan workers, let alone speak with them. “The janitor?”
“An old Tibetan. They’ve been doing it most nights for months, since he came back from his lung surgery. The colonel was out of cigarettes one night and the old man gave him one. Some nights he has me bring them beer.” The gray-haired woman hesitated. “A secret, Shan. He wouldn’t want anyone to know.”
“Of course he wouldn’t. Is he at dinner then?”
“Probably back to his quarters. He won’t admit it, but he has never fully recovered from his surgery. The long dinners far into the night are a thing of the past.”
“I was wondering, Amah. Do you see requests for reassignment of guards?”
“At the prisons? Usually. Elsewhere prison staff becomes a dumping ground for undesirables. In Lhadrung we are more particular.” She hesitated, then nodded and dove into a stack of papers. “Here. It already happened, this afternoon. He denied the request.”
Shan scanned the sheet she handed him. As always, she been able to read his mind. It was a form requesting transfer of a sergeant from the 34th Mountain Commandos to the staff of the 404th. Lau had moved fast. The general had wanted someone watching Ko.
“The general’s team took over a guesthouse at the east edge of town,” Amah Jiejie explained. “He’s keeping a suite in a hotel in Lhasa too, using army helicopters like his personal taxi service. The colonel uttered some unpleasant words about wasting army resources, but I reminded him that at least this way we know where the gentleman is.” She saw Shan look out the window toward the east side of the town. “I’ll draw you a map,” she offered.
Shan easily found the guesthouse, a two-story stucco structure built with red enameled posts at its corners to suggest the lacquered posts of imperial Chinese buildings. He circled it in the shadows, noting two cars with military plates, then leaned against a tree, studying it until a match flared in a sedan parked across the street.
Tan greeted him with a snarl as Shan opened the door and sat beside him.
“The idea of surveillance is to be inconspicuous,” Shan said. “This car has a county insignia on it.”
Tan shrugged. “I thought about taking the Red Flag, but I wasn’t sure what to do with my driver. Yintai checks with him every day and is told I spend all my time at the construction site.” His cigarette burned bright as he inhaled, and Shan saw a metallic reflection on the seat. Tan had a pistol beside him.
“This is a job best left for others, colonel.”
“He sent a messenger with an envelope this afternoon. Private. My eyes only.” Tan extracted a folded piece of paper from his pocket and extended it toward Shan.
Shan lifted the matches from the dashboard and lit one to read it. It was a scanned copy of a deposit slip for a Hong Kong bank. It showed that half a million American dollars had been deposited into an account in Tan’s name.
“The bastard thinks either I’ll accept it and be his puppet, or if I lift a hand against him, he will have it sent to one of those spotlight teams that prosecute corruption. It would be the end of me.”
“You have friends in Beijing.”
“Not many left. Most are dead or retired.”
Shan motioned toward the pistol. “This is no answer.”
“Or it’s the answer to everything. Your ways are too subtle. You play the fox. But I was always a lion. When I die, I will die as a lion.”
They watched the house in silence. There seemed to be some kind of party going on. They heard music and the laughter of women.
“Amah Jiejie found what she could on Sergeant Ma. No commando. Just a driver, an equipment operator who had been a cab driver before the army.”
“For all these years Lau assumed there was no evidence of what he had done,” Shan explained. “But somehow he learned that a witness was alive, an anonymous, faceless witness. That changed everything. That’s when the killing began, not just last month. First Constable Fen had to be eliminated, because he was going to share the news with Tibetans.”
“A witness? How could a witness survive for all these years without Lau knowing?”
“Because he’s been hiding in plain sight. Kept alive on a bowl of cold porridge and twelve ounces of rice a day.”
When Tan turned to Shan, the anger in his eyes had been replaced with inquiry. Shan lifted the gun, extracted its magazine, and tossed it on the dashboard before explaining what he knew about the drawings.
“If Lau knew about this prisoner he wouldn’t survive the week,” Shan stated.
“So he’s no use to us. He’s not dumb. He must know his silence has kept him alive all these years.”
“He’s very old and probably dying. That’s why he finally acted. We need him. You can hide him. Prisoner reassignments happen all the time. I have his registration number. Make an excuse for transferring several men from his prison to the 404th, including him. Get him back to Lhadrung. And no one is to know. If he is singled out, he’s dead.”
Tan seemed offended. “No one is murdered in my prisons, comrade.”
Shan found himself looking away, into the shadows, swallowing his reaction. It was not the time to debate the finer points of prison culture. “Accidents happen,” he said instead. “Lau wouldn’t kill him, not right away. He would find a way for him to suffer an accident, then have an ambulance standing by to whisk him away.”
“I’m not sure I follow. You said the man would be killed.”
“First Lau will interrogate him, torture him. The general isn’t so worried about someone publicizing what happened in the Ghost Mountains. He has people to take care of such things. This is China, where even reports of bad weather get censored. The story would never get out. Even if there was some leak on the Internet there would be a counter story issued, probably saying it is just the Tibetan resistance issuing false stories to embarrass the government. No, when Lau heard that secret drawings had surfaced in Yangkar, he assumed they were about the lost treasure, or that at least the one who made them would know about it.”
“Chasing a myth,” Tan said.
“I think he knows what I know now. In 1966 fifty mules arrived from Lhasa carrying secret cargo from the palace. Twenty of them were unloaded at the old medical college. Lau knows those twenty carried gold bars and gems because he took them all. Thirty mules of the treasure caravan were never accounted for. Say the missing mules carried only gold. Each mule could carry at least two hundred pounds. Lau’s done the math, probably runs the calculation every day based on the market. At least six thousand pounds. Three tons of gold. Ninety-six thousand ounces.”
Tan was silent long enough to light another cigarette and exhale out the window. “And he gave me a mere five hundred thousand? I should be insulted.”
Shan knew the money was of no more interest to Tan than it was to Shan himself. What mattered to Tan more than anything was the integrity of his precious army. “It’s why he won’t leave,” Shan said. “Returning Sergeant Ma was a distraction, not a finishing blow. It kept him from Ko but raised the stakes. And made us his enemy.”
Tan stared at the house. “I could have a team of my men here in a quarter hour, arrest the lot of them inside. I want that prick Yintai in a military prison. Shoveling phosphorus.”
“No. The killers I want aren’t in that house, they are in Yangkar. If they find the treasure for Lau, they win new lives, a new incarnation with wealth and power in Hong Kong. They can smell it. They are getting sloppy. Don’t make them shy away.”
“So what do you need?”
“Find that prisoner. And keep Lau interested. Don’t let him go back to Hong Kong just yet. I want his agents in Yangkar to know he’s waiting on them, impatiently standing by for them to take him to the Dalai Lama’s treasure.”