He reached the gate of the 404th just after breakfast, having endured several coughing fits that had been so severe he had had to pull his truck over. The heavily guarded prison crews were dispatched to their work sites. The two guards at the entrance were old veterans who recognized him, and despite their sour gazes they silently opened the gate for him. The deputy warden waited on the steps of the administrative building, hands on hips, resentment on his face.
“I called,” Shan observed.
“Do I care?” the officer snapped. “You of all people, comrade, know that we do not bend the rules.”
Shan nodded toward the line of heavy cargo trucks, where trustee prisoners were watching a mule cart approach with crates of the midday meals that would be eaten in the field. Somewhere another mule brayed. The teams that worked at the road building sites were being loaded into a truck at the end of the line. “I know better than most that if the meal crates and mules aren’t yet loaded, the prisoners won’t be boarded for at least a quarter hour.”
“I can’t spare guards to help some pathetic village constable.”
“Just five minutes in the exercise yard, in plain sight of the towers. If we get within ten feet of the wire you can shoot us.”
The officer seemed encouraged by the suggestion. “What do you suppose happens to your son, Comrade Shan, when the old man dies? I hear he’s been sick.”
“I pray daily for Colonel Tan’s long life.”
He heard the officer’s mocking laugh long after he had disappeared back inside the building.
Shan was in the exercise yard when Ko appeared five minutes later. His son understood they had very little time. “Seven new prisoners arrived,” he reported, “three from some camp in Qinghai and four from one of those damned camps in the Xinjiang desert.”
Shan had not dared ask Tan to separate the man whose registration was recorded on the drawings and therefore had no way to give the man a face.
“Surely Colonel Tan has a file that will reveal the name based on his number,” Ko suggested.
“It’s coming in the mail. Could be weeks. We can’t risk special treatment for him.” The prison service, well aware that Tibetans often refused to acknowledge the Chinese names officially assigned to them, dealt with numbers, not names. “How many are Tibetan?”
“Most, as usual. But there’s a Chinese murderer from Fujian with his death sentence commuted to life. And a rapist from Chungking. So five Tibetans.” Ko anticipated his father’s question. “Two of those are under fifty. Three oldsters, who might be the right age.” He shrugged. “They’re not in my barracks, so not much chance to speak with them. There’s a tall one, really old and thin as a stick, who mutters to himself a lot and eats weeds. A short, feisty one who has one of those long rectangular scars on his forehead.” Years earlier there had been an outbreak of Tibetans tattooing the Dalai Lama’s name on their foreheads. Public Security had rounded them up and sliced off the tattoos. “And one with a wispy beard who shouts out names to every beetle and butterfly he sees, like he knew them in another life. My money’s on him.”
Shan smiled, trying not to show his disappointment. He still had no proof that his theory was right. Glancing at the guards, he reached into his pocket and with a furtive motion dropped something into his son’s hand. Ko stared uncertainly at the little carved bird in his cupped hand. “I told her it was too dangerous, that a mere constable could never protect her if prison guards asked for her papers.”
Ko’s head jerked up and he stared over Shan’s shoulder. The joy that suddenly lit his face made the hours of driving worthwhile. Yara was a hundred yards away, sitting in a patch of wild flowers on the slope above the prison.
Ko dared not acknowledge her, for it was not a visitor’s day, but for a moment he and the outlawed Tibetan woman gazed silently at each other. A whistle blew and Ko turned away, tightly clutching the little bird. He halted after two steps and spoke over his shoulder. “There is that one thing. Even the guards laugh at him. The damnedest thing.”
“One of the new prisoners?”
“That really old, stick-thin one. He speaks to the mules and they seem to understand everything he asks them to do. No one has to touch them to get them to work anymore since he offered to handle them. Everywhere he goes at the work site all their ears are turned toward him.”
* * *
Shan raced over the mountain roads to Yangkar. He had stared dumbfounded as his son had walked away, had even trotted back to the gate to watch the trucks being loaded, against the impossible chance of seeing a tall, aged prisoner who spoke to mules.
Life in Tibet brought too many unexpected disappointments for him to accept what his heart so desperately wanted to believe. But just the possibility would change everything for Nyima and Jig, would give the American a way to quench her burning need for revenge, to let her focus on hope, not death, to pry her from her obsession with confronting Lau’s men. Before leaving for his meeting with Ko, he had gone to her camp at the old Taklha homestead to warn her that the killers might seek her out for the same reason they had taken her brother, but she had laughed. “I already took one of their hands,” she had quipped. “What other body parts do they want to lose?”
He almost forgot Yara was in the truck with him until the last hour, for she had just stared out the window, looking up at the mountain wilds above them.
“What is it like?” she suddenly asked. “I mean day to day, what is the routine?”
It took him a moment to understand. “Every prison is different,” he replied. “Some aim for rehabilitation and give the prisoners light work between reeducation sessions. But the 404th is just about punishment. Sometimes on Sundays they are herded onto the exercise ground and made to stand in ranks while Party scriptures are read to them. One time when I was there such a session went on for three months, with a chapter of one of Mao’s biographies read each week. Otherwise each day is much the same as the other. Breakfast of porridge. Off to work, usually making new roads in the mountains. A cold lunch at the site, then more work and back around sunset.”
“Not so bad, then,” she said.
Images flooded his mind’s eye, of prisoners choking on porridge composed mostly of sawdust, gentle old sages disappearing under avalanches, prisoners fighting over worms to eat, and the blood of defiant monks spattering him as they were shot in the head. He swallowed hard. “Not so bad,” he echoed.
“Sometimes visitors are allowed,” she suggested.
“Usually only to stand at the inner fence to talk. On special days like May Day or the New Year visitors are sometimes allowed to go inside the fence, into the exercise yard.” He glanced at the woman, so wise and savvy about the ways of their world but now seeming like an innocent teenager. “But I told you, Yara. You have to show papers, you have to sign in at the gate, with an identity card. They wouldn’t just turn you away, they would arrest you. It would destroy your family. It would devastate Ko.”
Yara’s deep eyes flared. “I told you! I will never register with a government that has raped my country!”
“Then write him letters. I can send them with mine, less chance of being opened. I wouldn’t read them,” he added with an awkward glance.
She answered only with a sad smile, then turned and looked out the window for several minutes. “It’s what we do,” she declared toward the mountains. “Live life at a distance.”
* * *
The sun was slipping behind the peaks as he hurried up the worn track that led up to the Taklha homestead. He saw with relief the smoke that rose from the other side of a ruined wall and slowed his pace. What would he tell Nyima and Jig? He could not promise they had found an old family member, but he had to at least offer them the encouragement that the survivor of Pure Water College had been located.
But as he rounded the ruined wall all thoughts of hope vanished. The little cooking fire in front of the lean-to shed where the women slept had been scattered across the ruins, its embers smoldering in the dry weeds. Nyima sat against the old stone wall, her arms crossed on her knees, her head buried as she wept, the young nun Rikyu at her side, trying to comfort her.
Shan kicked the embers back into the fire and looked for Jig Bartram. The American was gone. He lifted the tin cup from the water bucket and knelt by the nuns.
Nyima shrank back as she saw him, then accepted the cup with a nod and drank, pressing a rib as she swallowed. She had, as Dorchen expected, left his care too soon.
“She’s gone, Shan,” Nyima groaned. “They’re both gone now. Will this season of death never end?”
Shan grabbed Rikyu’s arm. “Where is she?” he demanded.
“Saving her mother,” the nun answered in a frightened whisper.
“We thought Pema would be safe, hidden there with all those charms around her,” Nyima scrubbed at tears as she spoke. “But they captured her, brought her here. Just an hour ago. They shouted out from the little hill above the house and held up the carved box.”
“Pema? What do you mean, Pema?” Shan shook Rikyu, fighting a desperate fear. “Who? Who shouted out?” He leapt up onto a pile of rubble to look in the direction the nun pointed.
“Two men in black clothes,” Rikyu explained. “There was someone else behind them. They said they were going to flush her down a Chinese sewer, where she belonged. Jig begged them to stop, asked what they wanted. They said they would trade her mother’s ashes for the location of the second treasure.”
“But she doesn’t know,” Shan said.
“That’s what she told them. The man with the box opened it up and lifted some ashes out in his fingers, letting them fly away in the wind. Jig took out that big knife of hers. I begged her not to use it.”
“But she doesn’t know,” Shan repeated as he surveyed the slope above the house.
“They will do it, Shan!” Nyima sobbed. “You don’t know their black hearts! But I do! I saw those demons carrying the bodies, poor Jake and those soldiers.”
Shan paused. She was speaking about the day of the murders. “You saw,” he suggested, “and then you told Jig. It’s why Shiva was working on the death chart even before we found her brother’s body. You took Jig to Shiva after you told her Jake was dead.”
Nyima seemed not to hear him. “She was going to do something terrible, Shan,” the old nun said. “I told her to let her mother go, just let the wind carry Pema’s ashes over the fields where she ran as a girl. But she was too angry.” A sob wracked the old nun’s body, and her hand went to her still-healing ribs.
Shan grew still. He knelt by Nyima again.
“She had to have her mother back, don’t you see?” Nyima cried. “Blessed Pema. She was the best of us. I made Jig promise to leave the knife here.”
Shan gently put a hand on the old nun’s damp cheek and eased her head toward him. “You knew, Nyima, because you have been protecting the secret all these years. It’s why you live in that cave and pay homage to the protector gods. You knew, and you told her.”
“They would have killed her. They have guns.”
“So she went up to them to trade the secret,” Shan said, “but they still didn’t give up the ashes.”
Nyima sobbed, then looked up and nodded. “They hit my niece, knocked her down, then took away Jig and the ashes too. They are going to kill her anyway, Shan!”