As Shan reached the uneven pavement of the town square, a walnut landed by his foot. He looked up to see Lodi waving to him from high in a walnut tree and absently waved back. Then, seeing that Jinhua’s car was still parked by the station, he walked a slow circuit of the square. The little chorten at the far end remained only half painted. Neither Rikyu nor any of the townspeople who helped her had been there since the day the prisoners arrived. The young nun had escorted Nyima into the doctor’s house but had hurried away once the doctor had confirmed the old woman would survive. Shan realized he had no idea where Rikyu lived and would have to wait to ask her more about the attack on Nyima.
He slowed as he completed the circuit. Raj the big mastiff sat at the base of the walnut tree, looking up at Lodi with a distinctly worried expression. The boy did not respond when Shan called up to him, just kept looking toward the eastern sky, and Shan realized he had not thrown the walnut in play but to summon Shan. He mounted one of the concrete gaming tables and followed the boy’s gaze. Seeing nothing at first, he cupped his hand above his eyes. He thought the black dot must be a vulture but then he realized it was not moving. It was a helicopter. The army was watching Yangkar.
Shan lowered himself to sit cross-legged on the little table, built in the Chinese style for chess and mahjong players. His hands seemed to move on their own, clasping together, his index fingers forming a steeple. It was a mudra, one of the hand gestures used in Buddhist meditation. This one was called Diamond of the Mind, meant for focusing the mind. He stared into it, trying to strip the facts to the bone. He could not understand any of the events of the past few days. Something terrible was unfolding in Yangkar and he was helpless to stop it.
A walnut hit his arm, another his knee. He looked up to see Lodi standing a few feet away now. “You look like some old statue up there on your pedestal,” the boy said. “Raj has challenged you to see who can hold stiller.”
The big dog sat beside the boy, staring at Shan. It spoke, with a long rattling sound that had the tone of a question.
“Sorry,” Shan said to the dog, “I don’t speak your—” He stopped, then jumped down from the table. “You win,” he said as he patted the dog’s head, then motioned the boy closer and whispered.
When he returned to the station he instructed Jengtse to take the truck out to the little crossroads inn a dozen miles to the south to make sure the inspection certificate at the fuel station was current.
“Now? I’ll miss lunch,” his deputy groused. “I could just call.”
Shan extracted a crumpled currency note from his pocket. “The innkeeper runs a kitchen for the truckers. Buy yourself some soup and dumplings.”
Jengtse sighed and took the keys off the desk. As he drove away Shan raced to the top of the stone tower at the edge of the square. He watched as the truck sped down the switchbacks that led to the highway. The helicopter broke from its hover and followed the truck of the Yangkar constable.
* * *
Lodi was waiting at the town’s garage when Shan arrived, wearing an uncertain grin. “What do you mean you need a car?” snapped the young mechanic. “You think you can just send a boy with instructions and I’ll kowtow? I don’t care if you wear a badge!”
“I only want to borrow it for the day,” Shan answered evenly. “Is your father here?”
“I don’t need my father to—” The youth’s reply was cut off as the door from the inner office opened and a middle-aged Tibetan in oil-stained coveralls emerged. He swatted the young mechanic with a rag.
“Constable,” the mechanic greeted Shan in a cheerful tone.
“Tserung,” Shan acknowledged with a nod. “I have a favor to ask.”
The younger man muttered under his breath, and Tserung cuffed him on the shoulder.
“This is Constable Shan, boy. He’s the one who located your brother. After all these years, we found him,” the man said with a smile aimed at Shan. “How rough are the roads you will travel? How long?”
“All paved. Back in the evening sometime.”
Tserung’s older son had been arrested years earlier, but no one in the government had ever responded to the family’s requests about the location of his prison. Shan had spent a morning on the computer and located the son’s name on a list of inmates at a prison in Gansu Province. With Shan’s help in affixing the proper address in Chinese, Tserung had been able to open a correspondence with his son, who had been told his family had all died.
The Tibetan garage owner pointed to an old Red Flag sedan, a mainstay on Beijing roads decades earlier. “I’ll put a can of water in the trunk. She tends to overheat, but she’s still a steady workhorse. And an extra can of gas.” He took a step toward a shelf of gas cans and paused to turn to his son. “Gyatso, make sure there’s no sheep droppings in the backseat,” he whispered, with an embarrassed glance at Shan.
Shan had just turned onto the connecting road to the north-south highway, fifteen miles above Yangkar, when he slammed on the brakes and pulled onto the shoulder. In a narrow turnout several portable trestle road barricades were stacked, each bearing a faded sign reading NO PASSAGE BY ORDER OF THE PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY. They were used to seal roads for the passage of military convoys or, just as often, the long convoys transporting Tibetans between prisons and internment camps. He knelt with the sun behind him and studied the soil around the barricades, then the tire marks leading up to them. A heavy truck had turned around recently, rolling over the narrower, lighter tire marks left by a sedan.
He paced along the edge of the turnout. The tracks had been made since the last rainfall five days earlier. The detainees had been diverted to Yangkar because the road to the highway had been closed. Before he returned to the driver’s seat he took off his tunic, placing it in the trunk—chicken feathers blew out as he opened it—and pulled on a sweater.
It was early afternoon when Shan finally reached Lhasa. He parked the car on a side street and looked for tour buses, mingling with the tourists. From a street vendor he bought a cheap plastic camera bag with an image of the Potala on its side and a visored cap imprinted with a cartoonish panda riding a yak. He found the Palace Hotel a few blocks away, but instead of entering immediately, he sat with a pot of tea in a café across from it, studying the building, the cars parked around it, and the cameras on the utility poles aimed at its doors. There was always surveillance on hotels that accommodated foreigners, but when there was no special cause for concern Public Security would likely just rely on the cameras, and then only monitor them from time to time. He waited until a bus arrived, disgorging Chinese tourists into the hotel, then pulled his cap low, crossed the street, and pushed into the throng of noisy tourists as they entered the lobby. He entered the elevator with a half a dozen of them, riding up to the sixth floor. Room 619 was at the end of the hall, with a DO NOT DISTURB sign on it. He waited until the last of those in the hall entered their rooms, then inserted the key.
The chamber was comfortable, though far from luxurious. Its thin beige carpet was in need of replacement, the heavy drapes over the window in need of washing. The Palace was a mid-tier hotel that catered to affluent domestic travelers and low-end Western tour groups, with many Tibetans on its staff, the kind of place where foreigners and locals could meet inconspicuously. Two black nylon duffel bags were under the bed. A garment bag hung in the small closet. Half a dozen books were stacked beside the small television. There was no dirty laundry, no cigarette butts in the ashtray, no crumpled linens or any other sign that the room had recently been used.
He examined the books, all with Chinese covers. A history of the Eighth Route Army, as told from the perspective of liberated peasants. A report on the successes of collectivism in agriculture, and one of the lesser biographies of the Great Helmsman. But the books inside the covers were not as advertised. None were in Chinese. Sky Burial, a tale of the death of Tibet, read the first title page. In the Service of My Country read the second, then In Exile from the Land of the Snows. They were books about the suffering of Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese, books that were banned by Beijing. They had been glued inside the covers of Chinese propaganda volumes. The remaining books were a Tibetan-English dictionary, a book on mountain climbing, and a dog-eared book on Tibetan Buddhism published by an American university. Beside them on the table was a sheet of paper on which had been written Potala 12523, 1.3.
He searched the duffel bags, stacking their contents on the bed. Clothes of a size that would fit the big American. Two dress shirts, bearing the same Pittsburgh label as that of the shirt the man called Jacob Taklha had been wearing when he died. At the bottom of the first duffel was a cardboard carton, a cube eight inches to a side. Inside were pieces of bubble wrap and several rubber bands. Whatever had been in the box had been valuable or fragile, or both, and the American had taken it north with him.
The second bag was nearly empty except for a sweatshirt labeled Steel City Rowers and two heavy plastic bags. One contained a pair of needle-nosed pliers, a set of small screwdrivers, and a roll of black electrician’s tape. The second contained what had been a small, cheap Chinese radio receiver. It was not a complete receiver, he saw as he turned it over and peeled away the black tape that held it together, but rather the case for a receiver. The American had used it to conceal something inside.
He lifted the garment bag and searched its pockets, then the tweed sports coat and trousers inside it, finding only chewing gum, matches, and receipts for taxis in Hong Kong from two weeks earlier. He ran his hand along the high shelf at the top of the closet beside a stack of folded towels and pulled away a flat cloth pouch embroidered with Buddhist signs. Inside were two plastic sheets and a notebook. The sheets each held pockets for half a dozen photographs, two of which remained. The first was a black-and-white image of a stone house with a large stone barn behind it, with a big American sedan from the 1960s parked under a spreading tree to the left of the barn. A young man wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and a graceful woman, both with dark hair, stood before the house with a dog sitting between them. The couple was too far away for him to make out details of their faces, but the woman looked Asian. Only the dog was clearly recognizable. It was a Tibetan mastiff.
He pulled out the photo he had taken from Nyima’s hiding place, in which a woman with two children stood in front of a stone wall. Stone walls were like fingerprints, no two were alike. It was the same woman, a few years older, and they stood before the same stone house in the United States.
The second photo was more recent and in color, of a smiling family group by the same barn, of five adults and three children. In the center was the same bespectacled man, his hair graying, beside a man of about thirty years with his arm around a red-haired woman, standing behind three blond and red-haired children, none older than nine or ten. At one end stood a tall man of about forty wearing a military uniform, and at the opposite end an athletic-looking woman, a few years younger, with brunette hair and wearing what appeared to be a dark blue uniform. Along the white border at the top of the photograph, names had been penciled in over the heads. The row of adults was listed as Jake, Dad, Ben, Susan, and Jig, then for the children, Samuel, Madison, and Caleb. Shan held the photo closer to the light to study the man in the uniform, recalling the anchor tattooed on his shoulder. The jacket was double breasted and had two narrow gold stripes at the base of each sleeve. Shiva had said one of the American’s passions had been ships. Jake was Jacob. The dead man had been in the American navy.
His gaze shifted to the black-and-white image, considering the paths that might have taken a young Tibetan woman to America so many decades earlier. The man and wife stood proudly in front of their stone home. Shan tried to recall the American history his father had secretly taught him decades earlier. Pennsylvania was one of the original colonies, where the founders of the United States had met. It would have old houses made of stone. The second image had to be of children and grandchildren, but the mother was missing. She was likely the one behind the camera.
The spiral notebook had pages torn out at the back, and the rest of the pages were filled with drawings, numbers, and efforts at writing Tibetan script. The Tibetan writing at the front was rough and clumsy, sometimes illegible, but toward the back the strokes became more fluid and the words perfectly clear. He gazed at it in surprise.
Jade green pool, spring water clear, it said. The writing exercise was repeated again and again. It was in Tibetan, but the text was from the eighth-century Chinese poet Han Shan.
Some of the drawings were of buildings, groups of chortens and clusters of structures that called to mind gompas, the traditional monasteries of Tibet. Others appeared to be hand-drawn maps, some of them of broad regions with mountain ranges marked, others close-in depictions of building compounds. One had four chortens on four separate peaks surrounding what he guessed to be a gompa on the side of a mountain. The chortens would be dedicated to demons who protected the residents of the monastery. Another showed a ring of twenty chortens, inside of which was a cluster of elegant buildings, framed by several high peaks in the background. He leafed back and forth, gradually recognizing that the drawings were in two different hands. Some had a bold, measured style, made with a thick pencil lead, like the work of an engineer, while the others, on paper slightly yellowed from age, were softer, crafted with a firmer hand, and included shadows adeptly shaded in with the side of the pencil lead.
The numbers in the notebook seemed to be variations of the same sets, pairings of six and six, with differences only in the last two or three digits, followed by question marks. He considered them for several minutes, trying to imagine them as phone numbers, then alphabet codes, before realizing they were latitudes and longitudes, done by someone who was speculating, who was not certain of the exact location of what he sought, though knowing it was in the vicinity of Yangkar. He looked back at the drawings. With a good map the American could have lined up known geologic features, like the peaks in the first sketch of the chortens, to ascertain an exact location, but good maps were not available in China except to the military. The government’s public maps distorted features and provided only rough approximations of entire regions. If he had descriptions, even sketches of several peaks as seen from a given location, the American could have constructed a map by pinpointing such landmarks. Shan looked back at the sketch of the gompa. Jacob had died with a GPS device in his pocket. It seemed a laborious, unlikely way to locate a set of buildings. Suddenly Shan understood. The buildings no longer existed. The American had been trying to find the site of buildings that had been destroyed by the Chinese.
On the last page was a different map of sorts, of a road or perhaps river intersected by a perpendicular line drawn with a straight edge. At the point where the line cut across the road was a sketch of what looked like a tall tree, with an arrow pointing to the top beside the single English word “Red.” Along the bottom were numbers: 700, 1300, 1900.
Shan closed the notebook in frustration. It did not seem possible that the dead man could be so anonymous. He picked up the duffels, searching the straps now, at last finding a small tag integrated into the strap itself. JACOB T. BARTRAM, it stated in block letters, US NAVY RETIRED, then UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH. Shan stared at the name. Jacob Taklha was the name Shiva had been given for her death chart. The dead man was Jacob Taklha Bartram.
He sat on the bed, pulled the phone directory from the nightstand, and a moment later lifted the phone. “China Travel Service, Lhasa office” came the brisk female voice at the other end. He identified himself as a police officer from Shigatse, since it was one of the few towns where foreigners were permitted. As provider and coordinator of tourist visas, CTS was charged with knowing the whereabouts of all foreigners in China. After a hold of less than a minute the woman confirmed that Jacob Bartram of the United States had arrived in China on a tourist visa over two weeks earlier. He had spent four days in Hong Kong, where he had booked the agency’s seven-day Wonders of Tibet tour, then joined at the Beijing airport for the flight to Lhasa. The clerk was interrupted by someone at her end, then quickly amended her report to explain that on arrival Mr. Bartram had canceled his tour, citing altitude sickness, even though he had been warned his prepaid fee was not refundable. If Mr. Bartram was now in Shigatse, he should be reminded that private unescorted travel was not permitted outside the approved localities. Shan thanked her and hung up.
Shan paced in silence, studying the room, then launched a new search, checking the window drapes, inside the pillow cases, under the mattress and seat cushions, finally lifting the towels off the closet shelf one at a time. Inside the folds of the bottom towel he found a small packet of letters tied up with green silk ribbon, like a gift. He untied the ribbon and counted out a dozen letters, arranging them on the little desk by date of postmark. All were in the same hand, not Bartram’s, all with the same return address in Pennsylvania, and all were addressed to simply Taklha in Yangkar, Tibet, in English and Tibetan. The early letters were dated a year apart, starting in 1969. Then they became more sporadic, the last ending in 2010. The envelopes of the first six, all on the onion skin paper once favored for international air mail, bore multiple legends affixed with official rubber stamps. DELIVERY DENIED, read the largest, in Mandarin and English, then COUNTRY DESTINATION INVALID. The addresses all defiantly read “Tibet” with no reference to the People’s Republic of China. The last six bore no official rejections, because they had never been mailed. Not one of the letters had ever been opened. Inside would be the answers to at least some of his questions about the dead American.
He lifted the first, feeling a stab of guilt for even thinking of breaching their confidences, then glanced at his watch. It was late and the drive up over the mountains during the last leg of his trip would be treacherous in the dark. He straightened the room to leave no sign of his presence, stuffed the letters into his tourist bag, and left. It took him nearly an hour to escape the Lhasa traffic. He was held up not by the emaciated Tibetan man who was progressing along the pilgrim path to the Jokhang Temple in slow prostrations, lying on the ground before each step, but by the crowds of laughing Chinese tourists who were snapping photographs of the solitary, determined pilgrim.
* * *
By the time Shan cleared the pass that led down into Yangkar Township, a large gibbous moon had risen. The rugged landscape was washed in pale silvery light, the summer snow on the peaks glowing against the night sky. On his visit to Yangkar, Lokesh had spent much of his time locating old pilgrim trails that led to forgotten shrines in the mountains. Pick up the thread in the passes, Lokesh always explained, and indeed they had found the traces of a trail along a high ledge only a hundred yards from this very road. He parked the car on the shoulder and by the light of the moon climbed to the cairn they had built at one of the small flats where pilgrims would have once stopped to pray.
He began gathering some dried heather and brush for a small fire, then abruptly stopped. Facing west, framed by the pass, he could see a blinking red light. The north-south line on the crude map on the last page of Bartram’s notebook had been the Lhasa highway, and it had not been a tree beside the perpendicular line, it had been a tower capped by a red light. He turned and studied the shadowed landscape. The line had been drawn to the east and the marks on it had been the high points on certain ridges of the Ghost Mountains. The numbers had been times, expressed in military format. 700, 1300, and 1900. Six-hour intervals, like a military check-in. 7 A.M., 1 P.M., and 7 P.M. Back in his office he would draw the line on his own map, but he already guessed it would intersect the tomb of the gilded saint. The crude map marked a line of sight from the cell tower. Yangkar had no cell service, but Bartram had discovered that a cell signal could be found along that line. The Tibetans had heard the Hallelujah prayer slightly after midday. Someone had been following his instructions and calling the dead man’s phone.
Shan lit the fire and sat, cross-legged, beside it, then scooped soil into a mound. He extracted a small cone of incense from a pocket, lit it in the flames, and set it reverently on the mound. As the fragrant smoke rose toward the moon, he raised a hand to the north, for Lokesh, and then to the south, for Ko, and took out the letters.
“Forgive me, Jacob Bartram,” he said in the direction of the ice cave, then opened the first letter. September 1969. The message had been sealed away for decades, crossing the Pacific unopened three times. It was all in Tibetan, and loving hands had turned it into a work of art. Little images were skillfully drawn along the edges, in the fashion of illuminated prayer books. Some were auspicious signs like a lotus and conch shell, but there were also songbirds, a deer, an acorn, and a pumpkin with a carved face. Cherished family, it began,
I have taken up my pen many times these past years to write you but it always felt as though I could speak of only an incomplete journey, of a story without a real ending or at least a meaningful stopping place. But I have at last found my place, in a beautiful and fertile land called Pennsylvania, in America. I have a husband who is a professor at a great university and a home with enough room for you and all our cousins if the troubles find their way to Yangkar.
The letter went on for five pages. He flipped to the back and read the closing: May Mother Tara watch over you. It was signed Pema Taklha Bartram.
He turned back to the front pages and leaned over the candle, reading the rest, piecing together the tale of a woman who had escaped across the Himalayas with five friends to obtain a blessing from the Dalai Lama for their struggling families. Three of the party had died on the journey, but Pema and one other had survived, only to be rounded up with other Tibetans and sent to one refugee camp after another, first in Nepal, then in India. After several months she had made it to Dharamsala, home of the exiled Tibetan government, where she had at last received the blessing of the Dalai Lama but was then asked by him to take on a job teaching in a school for Tibetan children. She had worked alongside an American volunteer, a young professor named Daniel Bartram, and there, in the shadows of the Himalayas, they had fallen in love. She had grown despondent over his inevitable departure, knowing how difficult it would be to visit him in America, but then he had explained that the answer was for them to marry. They had done so before an old lama, then, after they had arrived in America, a second ceremony had been performed in the church of Daniel’s parents. After a year in a city apartment they had moved to an old stone farmhouse on the side of a mountain.
The last page comprised a list of questions. How many calves had Pema’s favorite old dre birthed since she left? Has the abbot finally had his cataracts remedied? Has Father finally repainted the old stable? Has brother Kolsang received his yak hair whisk? Did Dolma finish her rainbow carpet? If the Chinese ever found Yangkar, she advised, tell my brother to be respectful and patient. She was sure they would not stay for long.
Shan returned the letter to its envelope and stared at the dying fire, then gazed out over the vast shadowed landscape. He hated himself for playing the voyeur to the family’s secrets. He hated the killers for forcing him to do so. He wanted to shout out across the ocean, across the years, to beg this gentle, loving woman to hide her eyes, to stop looking toward Tibet so she might think of it only as she remembered. Most of all he wanted her never to know the son she had sent to Tibet had been murdered.
* * *
He slept fitfully that night, awaking to a nightmare vision of the gilded saint chasing him with a ritual dagger, then gave up sleep and spent the early morning hours cleaning his house for Ko’s visit, only three days away now.
The breaking of the day was sometimes quite literal in Tibet. He had dozed off, leaning against the plastered wall of his house as he watched the stars. A terrible cracking sound abruptly woke him. The air seemed to be splitting over his head. As he shook off the fog of sleep he realized that a small, intense storm was passing over the mountain, pressing down patches of the long grass in its passage as if with giant footsteps. It grabbed the land with claws of lightning as it traveled down the valley. As was often the case in the high, dry air, there was more thunder and lightning than rain, although for a few seconds the ground around his house was pelted with half-inch stones of hail. In less than five minutes the sky overhead was clear and the sun was edging over the horizon in a blaze of gold and purple. To the southwest he could still see the pocket of black cloud, touching the earth with its fire. He lifted the hail stone and rolled it in his fingers, looking up at the violent sky. It was no wonder so many Tibetans still believed in the earth deities.
He filled a bucket from the hand pump outside his door, washed, then made a mug of tea and opened the second letter from America. Pema had again illuminated the margins, this time with more images of her new home, including a small rendering of the stone house he had seen in the photographs, a tractor, a dove, and a cat. Every day she said prayers for each of the family in Yangkar, Pema reported. She wondered if she sent American money whether Dolma could use it to get a new loom. Were Mother and Father’s old coats, she asked, still warm enough for the winter?
Her husband was very successful at his university post teaching eastern religions and Asian literature, she reported, beloved by his classes, and they often entertained his students on weekends. A German woman down the road was teaching her knitting, and she was making them all scarves. She told them the American post office used special codes and suggested that their letters must not be getting through because no one in Tibet would know such codes. She wrote the five numbers out and underlined them to be sure they would know for their next letters. She had started a garden, and they would be amazed at the unusual vegetables that could be grown in Pennsylvania. She would try to send some melon seeds. She was making Aunt Nyima a new felt hat embroidered with one of the protector dragons.
* * *
Nyima and the dead American were of the same family. The news haunted Shan as he drove into town. Pema had sent her son, the sturdy former military man, to reconnect with their family, to find his lost relatives, but, he suspected that, except for the old nun, they were alive now only in her heart. With the frailest of hope, he went to the office of the town clerk at the end of the square. Mr. Wu enthusiastically pulled out ledgers of registrations and tax rolls. He handed one of the heavy books to Shan and then opened one himself. “Annual lists,” Wu explained, “back for twenty-five years.” The clerk hesitated, then darted to his desk. “This came for you, Comrade Constable, in a package from Lhasa.” He handed Shan an envelope marked MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR. Shan quickly pushed it into his pocket and opened the ledger.
He started with the oldest entries, and the two men bent over the books in intense examination for a quarter hour. “Nothing, Comrade Constable,” Wu finally said. “No mention of a family named Taklha. But then I guess we wouldn’t find it, would we? Anyone who agreed to move back to the restored town was assigned a Chinese name. And there are those damned ferals. They wouldn’t be anywhere on the books, unless for arrest warrants.”
Shan considered the clerk’s words and realized the horrible truth. Pema, who had bravely left her beloved home to bring her family a blessing from the Dalai Lama, had been writing for decades to dead people.
Over a late breakfast he asked Marpa about a young woman named Pema who had left to meet the Dalai Lama many years earlier, but his friend only shrugged. “It was one of those dreams that gave people hope in the dark years. A blessing would come back from the Dalai Lama and our lives would change. But no one ever came back.”
Shan asked about the family name. “Taklha?” Marpa repeated the name and stroked his bristly chin, then stepped back into the kitchen to confer with the old Tibetan who washed dishes. The old man dried his hands and bent to write something. “One of those families who were landowners here above town,” Marpa reported. “One of the big farms that kept the monks fed. But … you know how it was.… It didn’t go well for landowners when the Red Guard came through.”
“Where did they live?” Shan pressed.
Marpa brought out the dishwasher, whose nervous smile revealed several missing teeth. When Shan repeated the question the old man grunted and pointed toward the hills above town, then flattened his hand and made a sharp cutting gesture.
“I don’t understand,” Shan said.
“I thought you knew,” Marpa explained. “He’s mute, but makes himself understood well enough. I think he means the places are gone.” The old man pointed to Shan, then put his hands together and rested his head on them.
“My house?” Shan asked.
The old man nodded, then held up two more fingers and pointed once to the east and once to the west.
Shan drew a rough map on a napkin, showing the town and the ridges above it, then handed the old man his pencil. “Show me the others.” The aged Tibetan chewed on the pencil a moment, then quickly made two X marks and pushed the napkin back to Shan.
“One branch of the family had the little burnt-out house in the valley,” Marpa said, pointing to the first mark. “And the bigger one, the manor house as it were,” he began, shaking his head as he examined the map. “No good.”
“No good?” Shan asked.
The old man took the napkin back and used the pencil again, then returned the map with an apologetic expression. He had drawn two tiny skeletons on the ridge above the larger house.
“The ghosts,” Marpa explained in a tight voice. “The demons. That’s where they live. They’re real, Shan. I’ve seen them myself.”
“Surely you haven’t seen demons walking the hills, Marpa.”
“On my sacred soul, yes!” his friend insisted. “In the light of the full moon the skeletons dance, shaking old rattles and waving human bones. The old ones say it’s always been like that. Just stay away and no one gets hurt.”
Shan studied the Tibetan. Marpa was a steadfast man, not particularly superstitious, and not prone to flights of fancy. “You never told me.”
“Last time was long before you came. I told Constable Fen. He wrote it all up, like a crime report, as if he were determined to catch the demons and put them in jail.”
“How close did you get?”
“Fifty paces. Close enough. I got away fast. Stay away, Shan. It’s the gate to the Plain of Ghosts, people say. You need to understand, Shan. It is forbidden by the demons to go past that old farm. Fen went up, and Fen died.”
Shan stared at the map as Marpa cleared the table. He didn’t realize the old mute was still there until the man thrust another napkin in front of Shan. The scorpion he had drawn was surprisingly detailed. It had eyes on each of its extended claws and its tail. Flames rose out of its mouth. It was a very old thing, a scorpion charm, a protection against demons. When he looked up, the old man gestured to Shan’s gau, which was visible under his shirt. Shan opened the gau and placed the charm inside.
* * *
Shiva was asleep when he returned to her house, with her gerbil curled up on her belly. The death chart was nearly complete, with a rendering of a ship surrounded by clouds. He looked through her box of paints and brushes and found a small notepad of green paper tucked into one side.
“I drew the ship for him,” came the astrologer’s dry, sleepy voice. “I could only visualize the ocean as a sky,” she added as if in apology.
“It’s perfect,” Shan assured her. “The sky is where he sails now.” He lifted the pad. “You must have been busy that day, making so many protective charms.”
Shiva turned her eyes away and began stroking her uncle’s head.
“I saw the people riding hard up over that ridge. They were coming from the direction of town, but most of them lived elsewhere. It’s because they had to go into the forbidden land. They had to get a special charm first, to protect them. Was it Nyima who first heard the sound from the tomb? No one else was up there.”
“Some shepherds tried to use the pastures there a few years ago but their sheep always got sick,” Shiva said in a distant voice, then shrugged. “She rode her donkey to the nearest farm with the news and said she would tell others when she came to the market.”
“She didn’t make it to the market,” Shan finished. “But she had already told the green-eyed woman that the American was dead and they came for the death chart.” He hesitated, seeing in his mind’s eye Nyima’s cavern home. The American had been there. She was his great aunt. She had known he had died, because she had asked for his death chart, yet she had not known he had been placed in the tomb near her home, meaning she had not been on the Plain of Ghosts the day the killers had hidden the body. Where had she been? What had she seen? “She didn’t make it to the market but she had already been to town,” Shan suggested to the astrologer. “She was the one who came with the green-eyed woman. Nuns don’t have a family name. Just Nyima, or Ani Nyima, or Sister Nyima. But she was of the Taklha clan. Aunt Nyima.”
Shiva said nothing.
“They came down for the chart and went back up into the mountains. The next day Nyima was attacked and the green-eyed woman was snared by the army.”
“I was going to ask Nyima at the market,” Shiva murmured, her voice brittle with pain. “If the gods are speaking out at last, does that mean the curse is finally lifted? Otherwise I will need a lot more paper.”
* * *
He drove up an unfamiliar, overgrown track until he reached a washout that had left a deep rut across the road, then he leapt across the gap and followed the track on foot. In a few minutes he crested a low rise and discovered the ruins of the house. The Taklha clan had lived in a surprisingly large structure, or rather, he saw as he approached, two houses that had been joined as one by construction of walls between them, framing a large barnyard. The family had expanded, and prospered, through the years.
The compound had been ruined by fire, and explosives. In half a dozen places the walls had been shattered, stones ripped apart, and in front of the entry there was a small crater. Decades earlier the house had been shelled by a mortar or small howitzer. Most of the beams and posts, except those of the main doorway, had been salvaged for reuse elsewhere. Those few that remained had been propped in a corner to form a small lean-to shed. He knelt at the circle of stones beside the shed, running his fingers through the ashes in the ring. The ring showed signs of long use, but the ashes on top were not compacted by rain, meaning the fire had been made recently.
Shan ducked his head and entered the lean-to, which made a surprisingly effective shelter against the wind. Snagged in the wall were clumps of wool, and along one side dried grass had been piled and slept on. In one corner was a stack of dried dung for fuel. The lean-to had been used not just by sheep but by humans as well, despite the taboo.
Back in the old farmyard, he sat on a squared stone, a mounting block, imagining the life of the extended family that had once lived here. Had Father repainted the stable? Pema had asked. He looked at the remains of a building across from the bigger house. It had once held stalls, and scorched, shattered planks on the ground before it bore faded paint. Was Mother’s coat still warm enough?
Thinking he should light some incense in memory of the inhabitants, he found only an envelope in his pocket. His drifting mind abruptly returned to the present and he eagerly opened the envelope from the Ministry of the Interior. With a flash of excitement he spilled the contents onto his open hand.
He had stayed awake many nights fretting over the safety of Lokesh. The old Tibetan had destroyed his identity card and dedicated himself to secretly working for the exiled Tibetan government. If arrested for not having a card, he had told Shan, he would declare himself subject only to the authority of the true government in Dharamsala, which would guarantee that he would spend the rest of his life in prison, or worse. Shan smiled at the new laminated card in his hand. The only chance Lokesh would have would be if Shan could intercede, showing this new identity card as evidence of Lokesh’s loyal citizenship and apologizing for any misunderstanding caused by his aged friend’s mental infirmities.
With a satisfied nod Shan returned the card to his pocket and surveyed the compound again. He was not sure what he hoped to find. Land records, like Buddhist church records, had been destroyed wherever the early occupation government found them, insisting on a clean break with the past. There would be no family photos here, no sign saying TAKLHA HOMESTEAD. But then he turned and found one.
Leaning on a tiny ledge made by an oversized wall stone was a small drawing. It showed the structure before the destruction, a lovingly drawn rendering in pencil of the double house, with yaks grazing on the rising slope behind it. It was torn from the notebook he had seen in Jacob Bartram’s hotel room, in the hand that he now knew as Pema’s.
He paced along the crumbling walls. In the shadows of another corner he found a flagstone leaning against the wall. Behind it was a sleeping bag in a blue nylon bag and a nylon stuff bag holding a dozen energy bars with labels in English.
Bartram had been here, and slept here, then gone into the mountains expecting to return here, to the home of his ancestors. He had been found only in a thin shirt. A veteran of the American military would not have gone up to the higher elevations without more equipment, more clothing. Where had he been? Where had his killers found him? What was his solitary mission in the high country? What secret had caused him to become another ghost of the haunted mountains?
* * *
Shan felt the need to go back to the American’s body, to explain to Bartram why he had to open the old letters. He was lost in thought as he drove, recalling the notebook drawings Pema had made of the old shrines, when suddenly an army truck pulled out from behind an outcropping to block his passage. Two soldiers darted from the shadows, waving him out with their submachine guns. When he hesitated, the nearest soldier emphasized the request by leveling his gun at Shan.
A loud whine filled the air as Shan followed them around the rocks, into a sudden cyclone that churned up a blinding cloud of dust. One of the soldiers shoved him forward, pushing his head down, and a helicopter appeared in the cloud. The soldier helped him into the machine, buckled his seat belt, slammed the door shut, and tapped on the cockpit glass. With an abrupt lurch the helicopter rose.
They had flown toward the east for perhaps ten miles when a second, waiting helicopter appeared, which led them southward. Shan struggled with his fear. He was given no headset, so he had no way of speaking with his captors. The army hated people like him, Chinese who had become too Tibetan. The resistance groups told stories of people who proved too great a nuisance sometimes being taken up into the sky and simply thrown out. Old soldiers mockingly referred to it as sky burial. There were also special, invisible prisons on military bases from which no one ever emerged.
Shan attempted in vain to see who might be in the lead helicopter. They went fast, as if charging into battle, and as they progressed into the central region of the county he began to recognize the landscape. A complex of buildings enclosed with high fences appeared below them, then another, and another. Some counties in the People’s Republic boasted of bumper rice crops or famous peaches. Lhadrung’s leading crop was prisoners. In another five minutes he saw the familiar rows of run-down barracks and sheds that was the 404th People’s Construction Brigade, where he had spent five years of his life. So far his son Ko, drug dealer and leader of what Beijing called a hooligan gang, had spent nearly four.
On the northern edge of the town of Lhadrung, new buildings were being constructed and bulldozers were scraping out a long runway. The county seat was becoming a major depot for the prisons and army bases. An asphalt apron by three new hangars was already completed. They landed by the hangar closest to the road, where several utility vehicles were parked.
Shan sat motionless as he watched a man in a stylish black flight suit climb out of the first helicopter. The dark lenses of his aviator glasses and black-visored cap set off his silvery hair. Shan had seen him before, staring at Shan after his attack helicopter had nearly taken the roof off Shan’s truck.
But it wasn’t the man in the flight suit who caused Shan to shrink back in his seat, it was the tall, gaunt man standing at the front of the hangar. Officially Colonel Tan was the governor of the county, but Shan had come to think of him more as the last of the fierce warlords who had controlled vast regions of China a century earlier. Lhadrung County was Tan’s kingdom, and he was given all the latitude he needed to run it because he kept his prisons secure and well hidden. Lhadrung had become a model county as far as Beijing was concerned, because Tan stomped down every problem before it spilled over Lhadrung’s borders. He controlled over three thousand prisoners, and although fatalities were common among them, especially at the hard-labor camps like the 404th, there were never escapes, never a scream heard outside the county. Tan may have taken Shan out of his prison years earlier, but Shan still considered himself Tan’s prisoner.
The colonel raised his head toward Shan. Shan obediently unbuckled his safety belt and climbed out.
“Not even three months yet!” Tan spat as Shan approached. He didn’t finish the sentence before turning to shake hands with the silver-haired visitor. Barely three months and you’ve already put a stick up my ass, he meant. Shan hesitated. Surely Tan could not yet know about the bodies hidden in the mountains.
“General Lau Lujou of the 34th Mountain Division,” he heard Tan say, and Shan realized he was being introduced. “Constable Shan is responsible for police administration in Buzhou Township. An old soldier in the motherland’s battle for justice.”
Lau took off his glasses and grabbed Shan’s hand with an approving nod. “I never trust a soldier without scars,” he observed in a smooth, refined voice. His accent was that of Shanghai. “Your watcher in the mountains,” he said to Tan, his eyes fixed on Shan in a cool, assessing gaze. “It takes a hero to serve in such a forbidding landscape. Like the men I used to leave in Himalayan bunkers for weeks at a time.”
“I’ve grown fond of the mountains,” Shan replied impassively. “Highest land in Lhadrung County. Closest to the gods, the Tibetans say.”
Lau gestured toward the sky. “There are no more gods up there,” he declared with a gloating grin. “I shot them all down.” He put a hand on Shan’s arm and steered him into the hangar. Once out of the bright sunlight Shan saw that the building contained no aircraft, only a table in the center, laid with linen and set for four. One orderly was arranging covered dishes on the table, another opening a bottle of wine. Lau pulled out a chair for Shan.
“Like the American Wild West up in those ranges,” the general observed as the food was served. “You must have your hands full.”
Shan shrugged and put his hand over his glass as the orderly tried to pour wine. “A missing yak, a stolen road sign. The Wild West was tamed before I arrived,” he said pointedly.
Lau’s face lit with amusement. “I like him, Tan!” he exclaimed to the colonel. “A good soldier never commits until he knows the landscape.” He dipped his glass at Shan before draining it. “Or is it just until he knows the mind of his master?” he asked Tan, his very white, very straight teeth shining through his smile. He lifted his chopsticks and studied Shan again. “The colonel and I go way back, comrade. War games. His mechanized infantry against my commandos, my Snow Tigers. Sometimes he won, sometimes I won. I know his moves. He would insist on deploying a wily old tiger to guard his northern border.”
Shan glanced at Tan, not certain how to take the colonel’s silence. “I feel old,” he admitted.
Lau laughed. As he raised his glass to be filled again, his black jacket folded back, exposing a pistol on his belt. A Russian Makarov. It had been a favorite of army officers two generations earlier, although the general’s had been retrofitted with pearl handles.
“Ah, Captain Yintai,” Lau announced as a sinewy man in combat fatigues appeared out of the shadows. “My aide de camp,” he said in introduction. Yintai turned his shallow eyes to Shan and nodded. His neck was ravaged by a thick, jagged scar that ran down into his shirt. As he sat, a thin grin grew on his face, as if Shan reminded him of a private joke. There had been two men in the helicopter that had buzzed his truck. One of them had pretended to shoot Shan.
They ate to a guarded banter about the weather, always too cold and too dry, and the progress of Tan’s new military depot, as impressive as anything Lau had seen in Tibet. In his new, slower life in Hong Kong, Lau had taken up golf and suggested Tan should add a golf course for officers. The colonel replied that he would enjoy shooting the balls with his pistol. Lau’s laughs were as short and well-manicured as his fingernails.
Tan very deliberately avoided Shan’s gaze, staying focused on Lau as they exchanged tales of military life on the frontier. Shan began to see subtle lines around Lau’s eyes and the slight puffiness around his lips. He was older than Tan and had taken up semiretirement in Hong Kong, where golf courses and plastic surgeons were abundant. Shan realized he had seen his face before, in Beijing newspapers. Think about a move, Lau urged Tan. “An old horse should not die in harness, but prancing about sweet pastures. I could make you a director of one of my companies, even give you a small apartment building to boost your pension.”
Tan gestured toward the airfield construction. “I have responsibilities to the army.”
“And the motherland kneels before you,” Lau declared in an imperial tone.
Finished with his meal, the general lit a cigarette, an American Marlboro, and tossed the pack to Tan. Without hesitation the colonel lit a cigarette, exhaling the smoke toward Shan as if to cut off any reminder that he had lost a lung to cancer the year before. Lau’s pilot, who had been pacing along the front of the hangar as they ate, caught Lau’s attention and motioned toward clouds building in the west. Yintai rose and jogged toward the helicopters.
The general snuffed his cigarette out on his plate and rose, gesturing Shan and Tan in the direction of a side door. He led them into a squat, heavily guarded building behind the hangar, around the corner of which Shan saw the heavy transport helicopter he had seen in the mountains above the gilded saint’s grave. Had the general brought cargo to Lhadrung?
The building was an arsenal. Lau paused at one of the weapon racks that lined the walls and lifted out a semiautomatic rifle. He worked the mechanism with a satisfied smile, then looked up at Shan and abruptly tossed the weapon to him. Shan awkwardly caught it by the barrel, pushing down his loathing of the cold, deadly metal. He had never carried a weapon as an inspector in Beijing and kept those in the constable’s office under lock and key.
Tan stepped closer as Shan gripped the stock and leveled the gun, as if he worried about Shan’s reaction.
“Do you have any idea what a good AK-47 costs?” Lau asked Shan. “More than a damned Tibetan makes in a year. Then there are the machine guns, grenades, artillery, battle tanks, troop carriers, barracks, aircraft, and airfields, not to mention the costs of transportation and maintenance. Tibet is the most expensive operating theater in the country.” He relieved Shan of the gun and mocked a series of aiming motions, toward the door, toward a poster depicting a charging soldier, then, for an instant, at Shan. He laughed and returned the rifle to the rack, then led them toward a rear corner of the chamber, where a temporary partition of hinged panels blocked the view from the entrance.
“But you know the most expensive thing of all?” the general asked, not waiting for an answer. “Our glorious soldiers. The motherland makes an investment of years in every man, worth hundreds of thousands.” He pushed the partition aside. “I despise wasting resources.”
The two metal tables in the corner each contained the body of a soldier. Tan clamped a warning hand around Shan’s arm and stepped past him. “This is my county, Lau!” he growled. “I should have been told!”
Lau shrugged. “Not your men.”
“Nor yours!” Tan shot back.
“From a signal company attached to my Snow Tigers. One of our patrols found them, stretched out on a trail as if waiting to be found. I devoted thirty years to the Snow Tiger brigade,” Lau declared. “Once a Tiger, always a Tiger.” When he turned to Shan his expression was icy cold.
“Where exactly was that trail?” Shan asked. “My township has no military reservation.”
“You tell me, constable. All of Tibet is a military reservation.”
“When?” Shan asked.
“You tell me.”
Shan ignored Tan’s furious gaze. Puddles were forming under each table. The bodies had been frozen and were thawing out. They both wore black-and-gray camouflage uniforms, the kind used in the mountains above the tree line. “Dead three or four days, though if you kept them in a refrigerator the timeline may be longer. Each has cuts and blows on their heads that never bled. Meaning they occurred after these men died.”
The general stepped aside, as if to invite Shan to continue.
Shan did not move. “I have no authority to act in military matters.” He was certain he was being led into a trap. But was he the bait or the prey? Tan paced around the tables, his countenance as inscrutable as stone.
“Of course you don’t,” Lau agreed. “I confess that we do lose men in training exercises. Real soldiers need real adversity to keep the edge on their skills. Maybe one or two a year in all of Tibet. But two together? In your township,” Lau reminded Shan.
“On a military assignment,” Shan ventured.
Lau shrugged. “The nature and location of training missions is classified.”
“I think you have me confused with Public Security or the army investigation office. I’m in charge of broken fences and traffic accidents.”
“Colonel Tan says you are a man who can pierce through impossibilities. I don’t want Public Security or military inspectors. They will want to tell Beijing it was an act of the Tibetan resistance, and Yangkar Township will become home again to a brigade of troops. No. I want a man who is not afraid of impossibilities.”
Shan hesitated. The general had said Yangkar, not Buzhou, as if he had been familiar with the township in the past. “As in it is impossible that a conscientious general would record two deaths as accidents,” he asked, “when he privately believes otherwise?” Why, Shan asked himself, would Lau care whether a brigade of troops camped in Yangkar?
“We are taught to adapt, are we not, Comrade Constable? We are taught to learn the truth in the way it best serves the people. The truth is that soldiers are not murdered in Tibet. Impossible.”
Shan weighed his words. “Meaning you suspect murder but don’t want the murders solved in the real world, only in your world.”
Lau gave an exaggerated smile. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Someone who understands the opera of modern China!” He rolled his hand toward Shan, encouraging him to continue.
The older victim had a tangle of blood-matted hair on his crown, angled toward the back. A loose bandage, brown with dried blood, hung over a wound, inflicted not long before his death, on his shoulder. The second man’s right hand had been frozen in an unnatural position, folded back against the arm. His wrist was broken. His still-open eyes were red from burst capillaries. Shan probed his skull, then his neck, with his fingers. “The first suffered a concussion, struck from behind with force enough to leave him unconscious, perhaps enough to kill him, though I doubt it. Not a fall, or he would have had broken limbs and scrapes.” He pointed to the younger soldier. “This one suffered from asphyxia.”
“Suffocated?” Lau asked. “There’s no marks on his neck.”
“Something soft, like a rolled-up cloth. The thyroid cartilage is fractured. If he had fallen onto rocks hard enough to do that his neck would have been broken as well.” He looked up. “These were not climbing accidents.” Shan realized he had had a similar conversation with Jinhua in the ice cave. “The injuries to the front of their skulls might have killed them. Except they were already dead.” He leaned over one of the soldiers and with the tip of a pencil pried out a squarish shard of glass from his forehead. “Shatterproof glass from a windscreen,” he announced. He turned to General Lau. “Someone staged them in a vehicle accident.” He paused, considering the gleam in Lau’s eyes. “But you already knew that. And you knew any forensic examiner would say the same thing.” Lau wasn’t looking for forensic advice; he was looking for Chinese opera.
Shan folded the dead men’s hands over their bellies. “You said they were on exercises, general. You mean like war games?”
Lau glanced at Tan. “Theoretically.”
“That must be the answer,” Shan declared. “Theoretical murders by a theoretical enemy. Write it up like something from a training manual.”
Lau silently stared at Shan before speaking. Shan was well aware that the general had not really explained why Shan had been summoned. “I’m not sure I follow, Comrade Constable.”
“Seize the initiative, don’t give anyone a chance to challenge your report. Surely you can find an army doctor to say they were indeed climbing accidents, brought on by altitude sickness. Look at their features. They were from the lowlands of southern China, Fujian or Guangzhou perhaps. Their bodies would not adapt well to the altitudes. No need to be bound by what we actually know, not if they are cremated soon. Like you said, general, the truth should be what the people need.
“Make them a statistic,” Shan continued as he paced around the bodies. “Beijing has made an art of depersonalizing murder.” Shan felt Tan’s hot glare but did not look at the colonel. “No one worries about justice for a statistic. They were the stars of a war game, well aware of the risks of playing their parts too aggressively, but knowing that was how younger troops learned. They died for the sake of their beloved army, the latest martyrs for the motherland. Send medals back to their families.” Shan fixed Lau with a level gaze. Surely the general did not need help in disguising inconvenient deaths.
As Lau returned the stare, a smile grew again on his refined features. He turned to the colonel. “Only a constable, Tan? This one should be running your entire police force.”
As he realized Tan was actually contemplating an answer, Shan interrupted by pointing to the pilot, who was trying to get the general’s attention. The whirl of helicopter rotors could be heard. “If we don’t lift off in two minutes we’ll be spending the night here,” the pilot shouted over the rising noise.
Lau threw a casual salute toward Tan and trotted toward the runway, leaving the colonel staring after him. Shan quickly lifted each corpse and examined the back of their necks, then saw his own pilot urgently waving and darted toward their helicopter.
As they rose into the air, Shan saw Colonel Tan standing at the hangar entrance, staring at Lau’s departing helicopter. He too would have thought of the other impossibility Shan had not mentioned. It was impossible that a retired general would leave his life of luxury in Hong Kong to trifle with two deaths in forgotten Yangkar.