“This is my county!” Tan roared. “I sent no tank, no soldiers at all!” He spoke to Shan’s back as his constable looked out the window of his office. Tan, stating he had business with Shan, had asked Amah Jiejie to escort Ko to the noodle shop.
“He wasn’t due until tomorrow,” Shan said, his voice strangely hoarse. “I thought I would have to go get him.”
“I was coming up,” Tan shot back impatiently. “It seemed more efficient. It was her idea. Then she asked to come, said I wouldn’t know how to speak with the boy.”
Shan fought down a wave of emotion and turned to face the colonel. He struggled with his words. “I didn’t know if you were still going to let him—”
“Where did the soldiers come from?” Tan interrupted. “What unit?”
“The general’s aide, Yintai, was in charge. They must have come from the commando training base north of the county. Lau probably just called it night maneuvers. The Tibetans were terrified. Everyone was terrified.”
“Why?” Tan demanded. “This town is nothing to him. You are nothing to him. Why bother with Yangkar?”
Shan had been asking himself the same question ever since the army paraded out of the town. He had no reply, just returned Tan’s intense gaze.
A sound like an angry growl rolled out of the colonel’s throat. “In the hangar just before you left, you lifted up the heads of those dead soldiers.”
The colonel had just answered his own question. “Who else saw?” Shan asked Tan.
“The pilot from that transport helicopter was on a cot in the far corner, in the shadows. I thought he was asleep, but as soon as you left he sprang up and followed you outside. What was it you found so interesting?”
Shan lowered himself into his chair. His heart seemed to shrivel. The fear and chaos of the night before, the terror that had driven Tibetans into the hills, had all been caused by him. “It’s all about what is not there,” he said in an absent tone. “What’s useful about a window is what is not there. The hole. There’s a chapter of the Tao Te Ching about the importance of holes.”
“I’m not so clear on the Tao philosophers,” Tan declared in a simmering tone. “Humor me.”
“Lau doesn’t care about two dead soldiers, even if they were murdered. What concerns him is the little hole at the base of each neck.”
“Meaning?”
Shan found himself looking back out the window, toward the noodle shop. “My son looked like he was in shock. He could barely speak.” Shan’s son had mumbled a greeting to his father but kept his eyes on the colonel. Amah Jiejie had patted Ko’s shoulder and led him away with a motherly air.
“The fools at the prison had forgotten to tell him,” Tan explained. “Amah Jiejie said he probably thought he was being dragged out for another trial.”
Shan turned toward the colonel. “By you? More likely he thought he was going to be shot.”
“We gave him civilian clothes,” Tan said, as if that should explain everything. He shrugged. “She insisted on the second car so she could ride with him, steady him. She checked his record. He hasn’t been outside a prison in years.” Tan seemed to check himself. Expressions of sympathy were a foreign tongue to him. He clenched his jaw. “If he’s not back on the fifth day, Shan, he will be considered an escapee.”
Shan nodded. It was Tan’s way of saying their bargain still held.
“We were talking about holes in soldiers,” Tan pressed.
“Knife wounds. A single expert thrust, directed down the spine at the base of the neck.”
Tan lit a cigarette and took several long draws before speaking. “Like you told Lau, it’s a military matter.”
Shan emptied the little stone bowl he used for paper clips and pushed it across the desk for Tan to dump his ashes in. “Except I have two more bodies, killed exactly the same way. A helicopter has been watching the place where they were found, which I suspect is close to where Lau’s dead soldiers were found. The only reason Lau would be concerned is because he knows something about those bodies. A connection with his own bodies.”
A rumbling sound rose from Tan’s throat. “You were at Lhadrung and said nothing! When you were going to tell me?”
“You would have had me tell you in front of Lau? He didn’t exactly give us time alone.”
His response took the fire out of Tan’s eyes.
“And Public Security was here,” Shan pointed out. “Surely it should have been for them to make any official report.”
“The knobs? They’ve said nothing. No report has been filed.”
The skin over Tan’s already thin face drew so tight he looked almost skeletal. He hated Public Security almost as much as Shan did. The colonel inhaled a last time on his cigarette and crushed it in the bowl. “I have to come all the way up here for the pleasure of hearing that my county is being fucked in the ass by Public Security?” he hissed.
“You had already decided to come to Yangkar,” Shan reminded him. “And not to bring my son,” he suggested as he studied the colonel’s rigid countenance. “You came to find a way to get a Hero of the Motherland out of your county.”
Tan lit another cigarette and exhaled twin plumes from his nostrils. “You were always quick to grasp the subtleties. Maybe that’s why I put up with you. Everything is a game for Lau. He’s been a pampered pet of the Politburo for decades. If he sees a new gun he has to fire it. Put him by a new helicopter and he jumps in the cockpit like a teenage boy with a motorcycle. Leaves wrecks in his wake. Sports cars. A state minister’s young wife. He filled a fountain at a casino in Macau with whiskey and lit it on fire. Used to be a squad of old sergeants who would follow him around just to clean up his messes.”
“He offered you a fat retirement,” Shan recalled.
Tan hesitated, then nodded. “Now I understand why. A bribe on account.”
“Meaning he anticipated a mess the governor of Lhadrung County might have to clean up.”
Tan’s eyes narrowed. “What bodies?”
“A man like Lau will never be defeated in a frontal assault,” Shan said in a wary tone.
“Defeat? Who said anything about defeating him? He is a general, an exalted hero. I am a lowly colonel.”
“My mistake. More like teaching one wolf to respect another wolf’s territory.”
Tan did not argue. He rose and paced along the wall, silently studying the large map pinned there. The old campaigner quickly focused on the pencil lines Shan had drawn, converging toward the Plain of Ghosts. “What bodies?” he asked again, still facing the map.
“Two men dead in the mountains. One was an American. Both left in the same Tibetan tomb.”
Tan did not turn. Shan saw the veins bulging on the side of his neck. The colonel’s hand reached down blindly to the little table by the wall and closed around Jengtse’s prized panda mug. With a quick violent motion he slammed it against the far wall. It shattered into a dozen pieces, leaving a blot of tea that dripped toward the floor.
“You!” Tan whispered. “It’s always you.”
This was a new Tan. His fury, which could burn like a bonfire for hours, had flashed white hot and was gone. The colonel sat back in the chair in front of Shan’s desk. “What’s that word the Buddhists use? Karma. Is that what this is, Shan? The disgraced investigator only gets the investigations that ensure more disgrace. Allowing criminal elements to run wild in your mountains and commit four murders, including a foreigner? How can you not be blamed? I gave you the quietest post in my county, so remote no one would ever hear your howls of desperation.”
They stared at each other, two old fighters tired of the world.
“Karma,” Shan said at last. “It’s like divine justice. That’s the only kind that will ever reach General Lau.”
Tan cocked his head. “Surely Lau is not implicated. Don’t even bother to suggest it. Lau would never kill soldiers. He just sees some kind of opportunity in this. He’s bored in retirement. He found a diversion.”
Shan looked longingly out the window toward the café where his son sat. He wanted so to be there eating with him, to take him home, to walk with him on a quiet mountain path, to rejoice with him in his temporary freedom and begin the list of activities he had planned for his visit. He glanced at his watch. “Give me a couple hours of your time,” he said instead.
* * *
Tan, who had followed Shan’s truck to the little flat below the ice cave, left his driver with his car and walked in silence up the path. As they reached the ledge with the caves, the colonel turned to look back down at the car. “Lau’s man Yintai bribed the sergeant who drives me. The sergeant told me immediately, saying he wanted to throw the money in Yintai’s face, but he couldn’t offend the famous general. I told him to keep the money and to demand more next time because he was going to earn it.” Tan replied to the question in Shan’s eyes. “He won’t say a word to Lau’s men except those he and I agree on. Lau will not be denied his spies. Better to know who they are than not.”
“Then you were never here,” Shan said.
“Persuade me,” Tan shot back.
Shan first took him up to the Plain of Ghosts and showed him the tomb where the bodies had been found. The tomb had been sealed again, the slab not only pushed back in place but also covered with little cairns and khatas anchored with stones. Tan paced about it once, surveyed the plain with the eye of a battlefield commander, and turned expectantly to Shan. “The bodies?”
Shan did not have to warn away the shepherd who now guarded the ice cave, for the instant the young Tibetan saw Tan’s uniform he bolted up the slope. Tan pretended not to see him and said nothing as they passed the cave with the crude door where Nyima lived.
Shan picked up one of the lanterns by the entrance to the cave, lit it, and led the colonel inside.
“Like the breath of some cold hell,” Tan muttered as the frigid breeze hit them in the tunnel. Shan looked up in surprise. Did he sense a contemplative tone in the words? Although the colonel would never admit it, his long years in Tibet were changing him.
Half a dozen flickering butter lamps lit the chamber with the bodies, which were still covered with blankets. Someone had laid flowers beside Bartram’s head. It was not a Tibetan custom. Shan pulled the cover from the American. “His name is Jacob Bartram. He had Tibetan relatives. I think he came to look for them.”
Tan put an inquisitive hand on the ice of the far wall, then turned and pointed to Bartram’s feet. “Climbing boots. Another foray up a forbidden mountain.” They both knew that when Westerners were found in remote, prohibited parts of Tibet, it was usually because they had been trying to furtively climb a mountain to add to their lists of conquests. “They never learn. Shortness of breath, dizziness, then they black out. Down they go.” He was already postulating the logical cover-up.
Shan lifted the man’s head and held his lantern close. “The blade was wide and razor sharp. One slice downward, precisely positioned.” The colonel leaned toward the wound, froze, then slowly straightened. The impatience in his eyes faded.
“If it were one body I’d say maybe just a lucky stab in a fight. But with so many…”
“But what?”
Shan shrugged. “It’s professional. A precise kill by a professional who is proud of his work.”
Tan walked around the dead man. When he halted he was staring at the images that flanked the entry. “Who did those?”
“Tibetans, a very long time ago.”
“Monsters?”
“Minor deities. Deputies to the monsters,” Shan replied, then aimed his lantern toward the top row of images. “Those are the monsters.”
Tan made a sound like a snort. He studied each of the savage heads with great interest. “What are they called?”
“Protector demons. Savage deities. They defend the Buddhist faithful. Some of the old Tibetans say they sometimes sleep for centuries, but when they wake up the unpure will tremble.”
“What’s that he’s holding in his other hand?” Tan asked, pointing to a fanged, black-faced figure with a raised sword in one hand.
“A skull filled with blood. He is one of the gods called blood drinkers.”
Tan’s mouth curled up in a lightless grin. “Demon gods,” he said in an approving tone. “Looks like he’s proposing a toast.” He turned to the second body. “One was American, you said. The other?”
“Not American. Not Tibetan,” Shan confirmed. He pulled away the blanket.
Never in all the years Shan had known him had he ever seen Tan exhibit surprise, until now. He was many things, but above all he was an old soldier now, looking at the remains of a fallen comrade.
“He’s been dead fifty years as far as I can tell,” Shan explained. “Sergeant Ma Chu, from Anhui Province.”
Tan stared, transfixed, into the desiccated face with the sunken eyes and twisted grin, as hideous as those of the demons. “Not a police matter,” he said at last. “He’s a damned archaeological project.”
Shan pointed to the pocket of the dead soldier’s uniform. “His unit badge was a star inside a wheel.”
“An engineer,” Tan observed.
“But assigned to a mountain commando unit, Lau’s I think, although no emblem of the Snow Tigers.”
“That came later,” Tan said in a near whisper. “First time I saw one of those Snow Tiger badges was in a funeral procession for Chairman Mao. 1976.” He reached out and touched the dried, dead hand, as if to reassure Sergeant Ma, then bent over and gazed into the hideous face for several long breaths. “Sergeant Ma,” he repeated, then saluted the dead man before turning back to Shan.
“The men in the monasteries usually surrendered peacefully,” the colonel observed. “But there were others, Tibetans in the hills, who fought like crazed warriors. Of course there were casualties. Who but Tibetans would put him in a Tibetan grave?”
When Shan lifted the shoulders of the corpse he heard a brittle bone snap. “Hold the lantern,” he instructed Tan and pulled back the collar at the nape of the neck.
A slow hiss escaped Tan’s throat as he saw the stab wound at the base of the sergeant’s neck. “Impossible!” He retreated, nearly to the wall of ice at the rear of the chamber. “You!” he uttered for the second time that morning. It had the tone of an accusation.
Shan silently covered the dead with the blankets. He lit one of the sticks of incense left by the Tibetans and jammed it into the little cairn of pebbles that held several burned-out sticks before facing Tan.
“Take them, colonel. Put them in your trunk and dispose of the bodies on the way back to Lhadrung. You and I can only lose.”
“Me?”
“Mention this dead soldier and you embarrass the army, and worse, you embarrass General Lau. No one likes those who open old wounds. If word leaks outside the army you will be accused of disloyalty, even of encouraging the resistance. You know better than any that Tibet is a powder keg. The fuse is long and slow-burning, but it is still a powder keg, ready for the final spark. That might be the death of the Dalai Lama. Or perhaps just a new spotlight on the atrocities committed in the 1960s.”
Tan extracted a cigarette but then looked up at the savage demons and put it back in his pocket. “Why do you have them here, together?”
“They were together in death, in that old tomb. That slab was laid down hundreds of years ago but lifted fifty years ago to bury Sergeant Ma, then again a few days ago.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning the killers knew about the tomb. They went out of their way to put the American there, then they covered it up with dirt and weeds. Killers, because one man could never move that slab.”
“You mean the ones who killed the American knew about Sergeant Ma.”
Shan nodded. “There is a connection I am trying to understand.”
Tan gazed at the mummified soldier. “The sergeant should have an honorable burial,” he declared.
“There are twenty-three more.”
“More?”
“A company of Lau’s men went missing. Twenty-four men. Lost in an avalanche in Kham, Lau reported. One of those missing was Sergeant Ma.”
“So it was a massacre by Tibetan guerrillas in these hills,” Tan said and cocked his head. “That’s why Lau’s so upset. The only smear on his perfect record. Now one of those guerrillas has surfaced, and he threatens to expose Lau’s lie.”
“Maybe. That doesn’t explain the dead soldiers in the hangar.”
Tan grimaced. “Then what?”
“Lau came into Tibet a poor soldier and left a wealthy man.”
Tan shrugged. “Officers took things, sure. Times were different. A gold figurine, a few jewels pried off an altar. It was just going to be recycled by Religious Affairs, so why not let those who did the real work get the benefit.”
“Lau had forty million in a Hong Kong account by the time he was reassigned.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
Shan gazed up at the deities as if for help. He would never have shared what he had learned from Jinhua with the Tan he had met years earlier. Could he take the risk? he silently asked them. He looked back at Tan, seeing again the intense way he stared at the protector gods, and began to explain. Tan was not frightened of the demons. He had recognized some of his own kind.
* * *
Shan drove toward Lhasa in something of a daze, reliving his brief moments with Ko and thinking again of how they would spend the few days they had together. They would take a lunch up to the waterfall on the slope above Shan’s house. They would have long, slow meals, just the two of them, and Shan would tell Ko about the wonderful grandparents, uncles, and aunts his son had never known, as they used ink and new brushes Shan had bought to write out ancient poems the way his own father had taught Shan. He would have Ko write a long letter to Lokesh, the closest thing to a grandfather Ko would ever know. Shan would translate into Tibetan and send both versions to his old friend. Each time the anticipation put a smile on his face, a shadow quickly crossed it, a blurred image of a killer with a heavy knife. He had brought his son home as a murderer was roaming the hills.
He switched on his radio, listening to a Chinese opera and then a local newscast. A hailstorm had wiped out barley crops south of Shigatse. Two German climbers had died on Mount Everest. The famous General Lau, Hero of the Motherland and personal friend of the Chairman, had graciously led the opening ceremony for a new school in Lhasa.
* * *
CAMP NEW AWAKENING, announced the brightly colored sign at the gate of the huge internment facility. On the high walls that lined the road to the compound offices were painted murals of smiling steelworkers, soldiers waving rifles, parading schoolchildren, even beaming parents holding babies aloft toward Chinese spaceships. Along the front of the headquarters building hung a banner that declared WITH ARMS UPRAISED WE CONQUER THE WORLD.
Inside the headquarters office the fashionably dressed Chinese receptionist acknowledged Shan with the same smile he had seen on the propaganda wall outside. She directed him to an empty conference room in the rear of the building, left him a thermos of tea, and closed the door behind her. He stood at the window, staring out at the compound, so huge that its razor-wire fence, enclosing over fifty barracks-like buildings, disappeared over a hill in the distance. Trucks and buses disgorged Tibetans in tattered clothing along one side road lined with armed guards, and more waited at a gate on the other side to receive reclothed, renamed graduates for the long relocation ride into the bowels of China. The steel mills of Manchuria awaited, and the endless miles of chemical and textile factories in Guangzhou. The farther the relocation, recited Party planners, the more Chinese the subjects would become. Nomadic shepherds by the thousands were being dragged from their centuries-old way of life on the wildly free plains of Tibet to work in huge, suffocating factories where orders would be shouted to them in a language they couldn’t speak. Once, Africans had been bound with chains and dragged into forced labor far from the land they loved. At least that had been honest. Those slave drivers never pretended to have the interests of their slaves in mind. Tibetans too were dragged away and forced into labor, but they were told it was because the motherland loved them.
He had expected a long wait, even hours of tedious argument with camp administrators, but after only half an hour the door opened to admit a well-fed matron holding a clipboard and leading the young nun, Rikyu, clad in what looked like brown pajamas. She seemed a pale shadow of herself. Her eyes, always so full of defiant energy, were sunken and filled only with fear. Her uniform was stained and had the unmistakable stench of prison, a smell that still shadowed Shan in nightmares of his own confinement.
The gasp that escaped her when she recognized Shan seemed to confirm to the matron that she had brought her charge to the right man. The woman nodded with a cool grin, had Shan sign a form on her clipboard, and quickly departed.
“We need to go,” Shan told the nun. “No questions for now.”
Rikyu kept her eyes fixed on the floor.
“Shiva and Nyima were going to come, but I told them I had a better chance,” Shan tried.
She did not reply.
“Please,” he said and pulled a set of manacles from his pocket.
She looked up, a dim spark now in her eyes. “I am already in prison.”
He poured her a cup of tea. “You are not under arrest, we just have to make it seem so. I told them you were a suspect in a criminal case.” She seemed not to listen. “And this place is a resort compared to a real Chinese prison,” he declared. “You are going back to Yangkar. Nyima needs you.”
The nun grabbed the cup and drained it.
“The little chorten on the square needs to be finished,” Shan added. “And Lodi looks for you every day in the alleys.”
“The Chairman is not my god,” she declared. “And my name is Rikyu.” She was frail, but her defiance was returning.
Shan paused, confused, then glanced outside and understood. He took a pad of paper and a pen from the sideboard and set them before her. “Write it down. Write the Chinese name they gave you here. Don’t speak it.”
She hesitated, not understanding, but followed his instructions. He pushed an ashtray toward her and extracted a box of matches from his pocket. “Burn it,” he instructed. “Burn it and it will be dead. The woman going back to Yangkar is Rikyu the nun. Ani Rikyu.”
She solemnly obeyed. They watched the paper shrivel to ash, then she let him fasten the manacles on her wrists and escort her out of the building.
Five minutes after they left the gate of the internment camp he pulled over at a crossroads. “We are going to Yangkar,” he promised, “but not with you like this. The smell of your clothes brings overpowering memories, hard for me to bear.”
“Memories?” the nun asked.
“Never mind. You don’t want to go back to Yangkar like this. I know a place,” he added before she could react, and turned toward Lhasa. He had intended to somehow get her to the hotel, to discover her reaction to the photographs, but his words were no subterfuge. The fetor of the internment camp was on her, and it was opening long-shut doors in his mind, resurrecting painful images of lamas dying of slow starvation and monks being beaten for praying.
As the city streets came into view she grew more nervous. “In the glove box,” he said, “I brought them for you. Just plastic, but it’s the full one hundred eight, not the pretend ones they sell to tourists.”
Rikyu opened the box and pulled out a strand of prayer beads, which she instantly pressed to her heart. “Tuchachay,” she whispered in a voice tight with emotion, then began to urgently recite a mantra.
He parked a block away from the hotel and at a tourist kiosk bought two cheap windbreakers and a cap for Rikyu, then a skewer of roasted crab apples, which the nun ravenously consumed. She saw the wink the doorman cast at Shan when they entered the hotel, then boldly put her arm through his and walked across the lobby.
The American’s room was darkened when Shan opened the door. Rikyu pushed past him as he hesitated, trying to remember if the drapes had been closed on his first visit, then groped for the light switch. He sensed a sudden motion from behind the door, then a shadow swung through the air and slammed into his skull. He dropped to the floor.
* * *
When he came to, the drapes had been opened a few inches, casting a dim light over the room. The shower was running in the bathroom. He was bound to the chair with the bungee straps that had been in Bartram’s duffel bag, one tightly fastened around his chest and arms, another pinning his legs to the frame of the chair.
“I saw you before,” came a voice speaking in English from the shadows beside him. “You’re the policeman who put me in that damned jail.” He twisted to see a woman sitting on the bed, her back against the headboard. She was swinging a sock that appeared to be half filled with sand. She turned on the bedside lamp to study Shan. He looked up into her green eyes.
A dull pain throbbed in Shan’s temple. “I guess I should be glad you didn’t fill that with stones,” he observed. She seemed surprised, as if not expecting him to understand English. “Improvised weapons are the best when you travel. Airport security is so damned inconvenient, even when you have the correct paperwork.”
It wasn’t her anger that surprised Shan, it was her air of confidence. “You attacked a Chinese law enforcement officer.”
“Who had concealed his uniform and forced his way into the room of an innocent American tourist. What do you expect a girl to do?”
Shan tried to shake away the pain in his head, then studied the woman. He had not connected the young woman in Bartram’s photographs to the frightened countenance he had briefly seen in his cell, but now, in better light, he saw the strong jaw and bright, intelligent eyes of the woman at the end of the row of adults in the group shot. She even wore her hair in the same braid over one shoulder.
“Jig,” he said. “What kind of name is that?” he asked in English.
The woman frowned, then lowered the sock. “Jacqueline. When I was born my brother couldn’t pronounce it, always just said Jig. It stuck.”
“Brother,” Shan repeated. “I thought maybe husband. You left a wedding band with Shiva.”
The American woman grimaced. “Just an experiment that failed. I should have taken it off a long time ago.”
“You wore a uniform once yourself. Your brother was in the navy. Yours looked more like a policeman’s.”
The American sighed. “That photo was more than ten years ago. Now I carry a federal badge. U.S. Marshal. I go after fugitives. People who don’t want to be found.” She swung her legs onto the floor and leaned toward him. In the photograph the younger woman had been pretty and had somehow seemed joyful. The face before him was older—she was in her late thirties, he guessed, stronger and more sober. The joy had been replaced with a grim determination. “I want my brother’s body,” Jig Bartram declared.
“I want his killers.”
She fixed him with a lightless smile. “No. You’re the uncertain new constable that nobody trusts. You don’t have a chance. The killers are mine.”
“And you’ll catch them by hiding in a comfortable hotel room three hours away?”
“I came down on a bus, hoping to blend in and find a way to rescue Rikyu.” She hesitated, glancing toward the bathroom. “I should thank you for that at least. Now I can get back to battle.”
Shan weighed her words. “You sound like the killers are waiting for you.”
“I hope so. I gave them my calling card. And discouraged one up on the mountain.”
“Calling card?”
“They know I moved those dead soldiers so they would be found. You wouldn’t have had the balls to do that.”
The words silenced Shan. It had been part of the test Lau had put him to in Lhadrung. When were they found? Shan had asked. You tell me, Lau had replied. Where had they been found? You tell me.
“You have no authority,” he pointed out.
“You have no power,” the American shot back.
Suddenly Rikyu was beside him, rolling up his sleeve. She turned his arm into the light to read the serial number tattooed there, then stepped back in surprise. “It’s true,” she whispered. “A former prisoner.”
After a moment Shan felt the cord around his chest loosen. “I guess that makes you two perfect partners,” the nun observed as she stepped around the chair. She was wearing a new shirt and denim jeans, no doubt borrowed from the American woman. Her hair was still dripping from the shower. “When do we leave for Yangkar?” she asked, holding up the bungee cord.
* * *
The city had disappeared behind them before Shan pressed the American woman, who sat beside him as Rikyu slept in the backseat. “Your mother Pema is from Yangkar,” he ventured. “You and your brother were trying to connect with your relatives there and deliver some letters she’s been writing. Pema,” he repeated when she did not reply, “who lives in a stone house in Pennsylvania.”
The American looked out the window. “It was her blessing for us, she said, to experience Tibet for ourselves. Ever since we were young, she always wanted us to visit Tibet, said it couldn’t be as bad here as people said. She hadn’t heard from her relatives for decades, but she fervently believed they weren’t dead, just silenced. Jake had been in the navy and I was with the federal police. If anyone could find them, she insisted, it would be us.”
“Why didn’t she come herself?” Shan asked.
Jig Bartram grew silent. “You misunderstand everything,” she said at last. “My mother died. Last year, of cancer. We came to bring her ashes home.”
Shan felt a flush of shame. The kind, passionate Tibetan woman whom he had grown to admire through her letters was dead. He stared straight down the highway and asked no more questions.
It was half an hour before the American spoke again. “My mother would tell us bedtime stories about Yangkar and the mountains she grew up in. It seemed a magical place. The beautiful monastery where wise old men debated the mysteries of the human spirit and artisans brought the amazing Tibetan gods to life. The home of the great doctors in the sanctuary in the hills. There were archery contests at the summer festival and for years my grandmother always won. Great caravans of sheep and yaks carrying packs of salt would pass through, and little statues of the gods were carved in salt blocks at a shrine where they prayed for safe passage. Her aunt was one of the nuns who helped at the medical college. They were our heroes when we were growing up. Her great uncle often corresponded with the Dalai Lama, who had promised to visit on his eighteenth birthday. My mother’s older brother Kolsang was the pride of the family, famed for his knowledge of scriptures and ability to communicate with animals. He loved mules, and as a boy put on shows at festivals with them. He was going to be the abbot of Pure Water College when the old one died.”
Has brother Kolsang received his yak tail whisk yet? Pema had asked in a letter. A whisk was a sign of office for an abbot.
“Jake and I were going to travel together to bring her ashes home but I had a delay. So Jake went ahead, two weeks earlier than me. He called me before I left the U.S. He said I shouldn’t come, that everything was different than mother described. Nothing fit her descriptions, it was like the earth had shifted, he said. No one had even heard of a medical college. He said he would just spread the ashes in the mountains. He said he had brought a Chinese cell phone, and he would call when he was free of Tibet. That’s what he said, like Tibet scared him somehow.”
Shan remembered the small square box in the hotel room, just the size for a container of human ashes. “But you came anyway.”
“Of course I did. He knew I wasn’t going to stay away. I called him from Hong Kong. He had left a key for me at this hotel and told me to buy a signal booster for my cell before leaving for Lhasa, that there would be a map in the room showing where I might be able to use my phone to reach him, and when to call.”
“7 A.M., 1 P.M., and 7 P.M.,” Shan said and saw her nod. “On a line from the highway cell tower.”
“He was more excited that last time we spoke. He said he made some amazing discoveries, that we still had family in Yangkar after all. There were things I needed to know, things he didn’t dare talk about on the phone. I got to the first point on his map as fast as I could and called. He never answered. Not then, not six hours later, not the next day.”
Hallelujah. It had been a call from the murdered American’s sister that had excited the old Tibetans, not a summon from the gods.
“But how could you have been on that truck that came to the jail?”
“I was sloppy. I knew foreigners were prohibited in Lhadrung so I traded clothes with a woman in the first town I came to outside of Lhasa. That old dress and a beat-up old wool cap. But I had no papers. After having no luck reaching him the first day I went back up to that mountain pass, closer to the tower, and tried again. I was sitting on a rock, studying that map Jake left me to see if I had done anything wrong when that damned lieutenant came up behind me. I can’t speak Mandarin, only Tibetan and English, so I couldn’t answer his questions. I didn’t dare speak English to him. He gestured to my pockets and when I could produce no papers he pulled out his gun and took me to a wide place in the road where he made me help him put barriers up. Then that truck came up full of Tibetans guarded by soldiers and they shoved me inside. He must have passed them earlier, because he was expecting it.”
Shan had already discovered that Jinhua had used subterfuge to arrive at Yangkar with an escort of soldiers, but he had not fully understood the scale of the lieutenant’s subterfuge. Jinhua had seized a Tibetan, or a woman he had thought to be Tibetan, as part of his cover. Shan chewed on her words. “But you had already come to Yangkar. You didn’t find those dead soldiers by accident. You were trying to find your brother.” Someone else had discovered the dead soldiers, Shan suspected, someone in her family.
“You and I may be the only people interested in finding the truth,” he said when she did not reply. “I know things you do not. You know things I do not. But if you lie to me I can just take you back to my cell.”
The American turned her head back toward the side window as if to avoid answering.
“I could always just call Public Security,” he stated. “An American law enforcement agent in disguise in Tibet. They will have a field day.”
She looked out the window a long time, then back at the sleeping nun. “I told you,” she said. “My mother’s sister was a nun. I never cry. But I was weeping like a little girl when she spread her arms out to embrace me, before I had a chance to introduce myself. She said she would recognize my mother’s eyes anywhere.”
“Nyima,” Shan said. Jig Bartram glanced at him in surprise, then nodded. “She became a solitary nun after … after everything. But she was not exactly a hermit, for she was the spiritual shepherd to all the farmers and shepherds who lived in the mountains, especially the ones without registrations, the ferals. We stayed awake all night in her cavern home, with her telling tales of her youth with my mother. They were only ten years apart in age, and the two of them had been best friends when young. She had tales of the two of them frolicking with lambs, the two of them stealing butter to make a lamp so they could explore the caves, the two of them carrying incense at my Uncle Kolsang’s side when he first joined the monks. She said one of my mother’s favorite things was going to his classes when he became a teacher and turning the peche leaves for him as he read scripture to the novices and questioned them on its meaning. Later he would take her out to the mules to speak with them. Every mule had a name and would come when he called.”
“Your brother was there that night?”
“No. He had met Nyima a few days before but had gone out to explore the mountains, said there was something he had to understand. I think he was still trying to find the location of the old medical college. My mother wanted her ashes spread in the herb garden of the medical school. All her life she never asked us for anything. Just the one thing. Bury my ashes at Pure Water College, in the Medicine Mountains, she said, and the most amazing people mother had ever known were the lamas and nuns who worked there, healing the sick. ‘Plant me with the medicine herbs my brother Kolsang uses to heal people,’ she told us. But no one, not even Nyima, will talk about it, not even acknowledge the existence of Pure Water College. And they say there is no such thing as the Medicine Mountains. Something’s wrong in Yangkar, something disjointed, dark secrets that haunt everyone. They are deeply scared of something, and think speaking of it will bring it back. I think there was something terrible about the destruction of the medical college, something more than the routine destruction of other temples.”
Jig looked out the window for several breaths before speaking again. “Nyima said Jake must have gone too far, and decided to sleep in a cave for the night. The next morning she showed me where to hide my car, in a grove of trees off the road, then I climbed up to a cairn he had built, a cairn Nyima told me about, to reach the cell phone signal, to make the call at 1300.”
“Where a skeleton stalked you.” She did not respond. She did not trust him enough, he realized. “He didn’t answer,” Shan tried.
“No. Never again.”
* * *
They found her car still in the grove of trees, behind a thicket of juniper. “Your brother’s body is not being kept for me,” he said as she extracted the keys from a hollow in a tree. “It is for him, for the Buddhist rites to be spoken.”
The American woman studied Shan a moment and then looked away. “Bardo,” Jig whispered.
“Yes. The rites for passage to the next life. Those who are murdered often have trouble finding the path.”
“Shiva says it has to be done in the next six days.”
Shan realized they were not talking about the rites now. “The Taklha clan would have used the services of the ragyapa, the traditional way.”
The American wiped a tear away. “The flesh cutters, yes. That’s what the clan wants. Feed my brother to the vultures.”
“It should be your decision, Jig. Taking an American body out of the country or even cremating here would prove—” Shan searched for words. “—problematic.”
“They break him into pieces like butchers with a cow.” She scrubbed at an eye.
“They reverently give what he left behind back to the circle of life. I once heard a Tibetan say the vultures are reincarnated monks.”
She offered a small, bitter smile.
“You should follow me to town. We can leave your car at the garage and cover it. A late model rental is too conspicuous.”
She started the engine, opened the window, and handed Shan a long object wrapped in cloth. “Are you scared of demons, Constable Shan?” the American asked, then sped away. He flipped open the top fold of the cloth and almost dropped it in his shock. It was the hand of a skeleton. The American had given him the hand of a skeleton god, missing two finger bones.
* * *
Numbed with fatigue, Shan opened the door of the station and collapsed into his chair. He was painfully aware that he had been absent for most of his son’s first day of parole. If Marpa was still in his café he would gather some food, he decided, and was about to wearily rise when he heard the metallic click of the door lock.
Mr. Hui, the dentist, stood silently at the entry, looking at Shan with an earnest, almost apologetic expression. He pointed to the cell chamber. Shan considered ignoring the usually taciturn Chinese dentist, but instead followed him into the inner chamber. Hui closed the door behind him.
Five chairs had been arranged in a circle between the empty cells. Mrs. Weng, Mr. Wu the town clerk, and the town’s Chinese barber sat beside her, joined a moment later by Hui. Shan was looking at the Committee of Leading Citizens.
“I didn’t realize we had an appointment,” Shan stated, glancing at his watch.
Mrs. Weng took a deep breath. “Affairs of state do not wait on the calendar.” She gestured Shan toward the remaining chair.
“We have affairs of state in Yangkar?” Shan asked and motioned toward the phone. “I should call Beijing.”
“Affairs of Yangkar Township,” the town clerk inserted and rose to pull the empty chair out for Shan.
“The army invades our town and you disappear,” Mrs. Weng impatiently declared. “The town totters on disaster and its constable disappears.”
“I have been conducting an investigation in the field with Colonel Tan. Perhaps you want to speak with him?” Shan suggested.
“The colonel left before noon.”
“Investigation in the field,” Shan said again.
“A lie. You brought back that nun and set her free.”
Shan choked down his reply. He had let Rikyu out by the tower on the square. The committee had been watching him.
“The constable was specifically appointed by Colonel Tan, Comrade Chairman,” Mr. Hui reminded Mrs. Weng.
She seemed not to hear him. “A score of Tibetans left today, fleeing to the hills. A score of customers for my store. A score of patients for Dr. Hui.”
“Is that what this is about?” Shan asked. “Selling socks and tooth fillings?”
“If the army comes again, it could be fifty, even a hundred. A third of the town even. Our economy would collapse.”
“The army is entitled to conduct maneuvers where it sees fit. Our citizens understand that. If you are truly concerned, I can find a form for complaints.”
“Investigations involving violent felonies are to be led by Public Security.”
“Public Security is here,” Shan observed.
Mrs. Weng made a dismissive wave of her hand. “That young pup? He acts more like a frightened tourist.”
“You’ve never heard of undercover work?” Shan shot back. “The whole point is to appear to be someone you’re not.”
Weng seemed to stumble on her words. “Undercover?” she whispered, as if to herself.
Hui leaned forward. “Comrade Constable, do you actually know the army was on maneuvers?”
“Unequivocally. Perhaps the committee can prepare a handbill to explain that. Claims for damages can be submitted to my office.”
Hui seemed relieved. He smacked his knee. “Exactly the thing!” He looked at his fellow committee members. “We can all sign it, offer to help the Tibetans fill out the proper papers.”
Weng, a new determination on her face, was unimpressed. “We have the right to know what you are doing.”
“No, you don’t,” Shan insisted. “Pending investigations are strictly confidential.”
“We are the Committee of Leading Citizens,” Weng countered.
The committee of pompous busybodies, Shan almost said. “When the results are about to be released I would be happy to brief you before the story is published.”
Weng was not satisfied. “You don’t fit with this town, Shan.”
“If you have a complaint, write to Colonel Tan,” he replied in a level voice.
“I am not convinced you embrace the ways of democratic socialism,” Weng declared.
Shan hesitated. She was pushing him onto treacherous ground. “I am ever a humble servant of the law,” Shan said. “I strive eternally to become more skilled in the political dialectic, Madame Chairman.”
“They say people died up in those mountains,” she observed.
“They were called the Ghost Mountains long before I arrived.”
Weng sneered. “Next you’ll say you’re scared of all that taboo mumbo jumbo.”
“There are things in Yangkar that frighten me,” Shan admitted.
“You fool! I don’t know what Tan sees in you. He only hires puppets and bullies,” she added, as if to answer her own question. “And you don’t have the balls to be a bully.”
“Just a simple servant of the motherland.”
Weng shook her head. “We’re going to need to take an elevated role in this town,” she announced to her colleagues.
Wu looked uneasy. “The constable had a constructive suggestion about a handbill. It shows proper respect for the collective consciousness, as the chairman in Beijing encourages. I can make up a form for damage claims.”
Weng winced and threw up her hands. “Public order disintegrates and you talk of handbills. A town of sheep without any shepherds.”
* * *
Shan drove carefully up the hill to his house, wary of spilling the contents of the containers with the supper he had brought to share with Ko. He could not understand the strange anxiety he felt as he approached the house. It wasn’t happiness or gratitude or paternal love he felt, it was fear. Never in their troubled lives had Shan and Ko been together like this, just the two of them, away from razor wire and guards with guns at the ready, alone with time to openly talk. How much did he really know of his son? When Tan had first brought Ko to Lhadrung from a prison outside Tibet, his son had been a sullen, insolent young hooligan who mocked his father and the Tibetans. Had he really changed that much? How could two people ever get to know each other in the short, worried conversations on prison visitation days? Ko had been kept in solitary confinement for weeks at a time, sometimes just to punish Shan. No prisoner came out of solitary unaffected by it. Shan had seen men shrivel up inside after frequent visits to the harsh cells used for solitary.
The images of his son that often came to him at night flooded his mind’s eye. Ko the foul-mouthed gang leader who had been dragged into the 404th Construction Brigade compound. The angry, desperate Ko who had tried to escape more than once, and been beaten until bones had been broken for the attempts. The mute Ko with drug-glazed eyes whom Shan had rescued from a hospital for the criminally insane, hours before a lobotomy was to have been performed. More recently there was the Ko Shan sometimes watched from outside the wire, unknown by his son, supporting an old lama on his shoulder as they stumbled together toward a meal.
He called his son’s name as he entered the little farmhouse, then, thinking him asleep, set down their dinner on the small rough-hewn table and pushed aside the curtain that led into the sleeping quarters. The two pallets inside were empty. The little brazier he used in his kitchen was cold. Replacing his tunic with an old tattered coat that hung on the peg at the back of the door, he stepped outside, fighting an unnatural fear. Ko was not in the woodshed, not at the little shrine Lokesh had built of flat rocks by the stream.
Shan’s heart wrenched as he heard a scream from the outcroppings on the slope above. He ran. The sound came again, a high-pitched shriek from behind high rock formations along the stream. He slowed to grab a piece of wood to use as a weapon and circled the last of the big boulders, club raised, his heart pounding.
He made out Ko in the shadow of an old juniper, moving at an odd hopping gait. The cry came again, and Shan stared in confusion as he saw now that there was a boy on his son’s back. He lowered the club, not understanding. It had not been a scream, but peals of laughter he had heard. The smell of cigar smoke wafted toward him, and he turned to see old Lhamo sitting on a ledge, watching Ati as Yara laid out laundry on the stone fence of the old stable. Shan had forgotten that he had invited the family of feral Tibetans to use the building.
“He’s a good yak, your son,” the old woman explained with a grin as Shan approached. “If he keeps it up I may ask him for a ride,” she chuckled. Shan declined the cigar as she offered him a puff.
The old images of Ko fell away. Here was a new Ko, an impossible Ko, a happy Ko. As his son spotted him he straightened. The Tibetan boy slid off his back and ran to his mother.
“I brought dinner but I couldn’t find you,” Shan began, and self-consciously dropped the club. The embarrassment in his son’s eyes somehow hurt him, and he looked away. “You’ve met,” he said, with a gesture to Yara and her son.
“They told me how you helped them when their yak got stuck in the mud,” Ko explained in an awkward tone.
“It wasn’t the mud I was worried about,” Yara put in, “it was the soldiers and the knob who arrived. Your father kept us out of their grip.” She hesitated and looked at Shan with a question in her eyes. “But there were more soldiers in town last night. We ran up here from the carpet factory.”
“You’re safe enough here,” Shan assured her. He saw that Ati was wearing the new T-shirt he had left in the house for Ko.
“You said something about dinner?” Ko asked. There was a tentative, almost adolescent quality to his voice. Everything, from the ability to walk about without guards, to the laughter of the boy, and the notion of eating when he wanted, was new to him.
Shan smiled. “We’ll have to stretch it. Soup and momos from Marpa. I have some rice we can add.”
The Tibetans heartily agreed to join the meal, though only if the grandparents took turns watching the road. It was the way they lived, he realized, always watchful, always ready to run.
As Yara and Ko lit the brazier, Shan went into his sleeping quarters and came out with a wooden box that he set down on the bench outside beside Trinle. The old man was watching Shan more than the road, with his gaze sometimes drifting toward the truck with the constable’s insignia on it.
From the box Shan extracted four small sculptures, the first a small Buddha carved of jade with a silver-inlaid necklace, then a four-armed dakini encrusted with dirt, and two corroded demons cast in bronze. “My friend Lokesh and I find these, or I take them from the storerooms of Religious Affairs when I can.” The old man’s confused gaze shifted from the figurines to Shan. “We clean them, restore them the best we can. Then we get them to Tibetans who know safe places, hidden shrines. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“I understand it is against the law.”
“And you could turn me in.”
The old man scratched his head. His tongue worked against his dry lips and twice he seemed about to speak but didn’t. Slowly, like the sputtering of a stubborn wick, his leathery face lit and the shadow of worry fell away. He lifted one of the corroded demons. “Best thing for this,” he suggested in an earnest voice, “is to soak it overnight in a bucket of yak urine.”
“I haven’t tried that,” Shan confessed.
“I’ll bring our big yak for you, the lama yak we call him,” Trinle said, staring without expression at Shan. “I saw him drink for near ten minutes straight, not two hours ago.”
Shan returned the stare for a moment, then quite unexpectedly burst into laughter.
The old man grinned, exposing his missing teeth, and pounded Shan on the back.
As the tension broke, Trinle enthusiastically lifted each of the figurines, studying them with great interest. When he was done Shan extracted the little gold Buddha Jinhua had given him and placed it on the bench. Trinle did not touch it, only stared at it with a distant, forlorn look. “That one,” he said, “cannot be restored,” and he gestured for Shan to take it away.
It was not the meal Shan had hoped for, but perhaps it was the one he and his son needed. The old woman took over the cramped corner that served as a kitchen, ordering Shan to retrieve a bucket of water and the old man to bring onions from Shan’s meager garden, while Ko and Yara prepared the table with Shan’s mismatched utensils and bowls. Shan was too exhausted and Ko still too stunned by his abrupt freedom to join in much of the dinner conversation, and they were halfway through when Shan realized his son must not be able to follow the Tibetans’ discussion. When Yara warily asked about Ko’s life in prison, Shan was about to translate when to his surprise his son replied in Tibetan. “I break rocks and I haul rocks from when the sun is low in the east until it is low in the west.” His pronunciation was rough but quite understandable. He had been learning from the old monks. “They put me right at the back of the truck where the road dust always coats me, thinking it is punishment, but they don’t know I like it. The morning ride is the best part of my day. I can watch the birds. There are always birds. If it has rained they show us where the worms are.”
“You catch worms?” Ati asked. “Why?”
Ko glanced at his father. “You know, so we can say a little prayer, help them on their spiritual journey.” Two years before, Ko had lost a tooth to malnutrition. Shan had himself often seen prisoners fight over worms, a favorite source of protein.
“The farmer on the next hill has horses,” Yara said, sensing the need to shift the conversation. “Do you ride horses?” she asked Ko.
Ko smiled. “I think these days are about trying things I have never tried before.”
“I found a special mani stone,” Ati interjected. “Very heavy. Grandfather says it may be sky metal—you know, a meteorite. It sings when you hit it just right.” He stepped to the pouch his mother had left by the door and heaved the heavy stone onto the table. It was a flat block almost a foot long, with sharply defined, squared edges, with one side notched at the corners, the opposite side having two pieces that extended from each corner. It was covered with lichen, into which someone had scratched the mani mantra. Shan lifted it. It had the heft of iron. He balanced it in his hand a moment, then congratulated the boy on his discovery. “Where did you find such a treasure?”
Ati extended an arm toward the back window. “Along the trail from the north, two ridges above here, along a long row of junipers,” the boy explained. “There’s more. We could show you.”
“I would like that,” Shan said.
Yara’s countenance stiffened. “I’m sure you have more important things to do, constable.” She was a feral, Shan reminded himself, and instinctively not inclined to spend time with officials, however minor.
Shan smiled at the boy and tossed him an apricot. “Like Ko says, these days are about trying things we’ve never done. I’ve never seen a shrine of singing mani stones.”
Ati clapped his hands in excitement. His mother told him to help with the clean-up, and soon the family slipped away into the shadows, back to the old stable.
Shan and his son sat in the dark, on the bench outside his front door. “I haven’t seen the whole sky at night for years,” Ko observed. “Just patches of it, out the window, sometimes through a hole in the roof.”
“When I was in the 404th,” Shan explained, “an old lama had loosened a section of the metal roof and would slide it off at night to speak with the stars. But after a few weeks the guards found out and nailed it shut, saying it could be a means of escape. The old lama laughed and said that the guards didn’t understand, that we had already done that, that we escaped every night into the stars.”
“I was trying to get Lokesh to come,” Shan said after a few more minutes of silence. “But I had to send a message not to come now, because of the problems here.”
“You said he tore up his registration card. So he’s feral like Yara and her family.”
“It was his choice to make.”
“I couldn’t bear his being arrested on my account,” Ko stated. “If he were sent back to prison he would never get out again. I will write him a letter. I have been practicing my Tibetan script.”
“It would be a wonderful surprise, for him to get a letter from you in Tibetan.”
“I will tell him you have found new ways to help Tibetans.”
“Just let him know you are well, and getting a taste of normal life.”
Ko made a sound that may have been a laugh, and looked back up at the stars. “My life is all guards and prisoners. Before today I can’t even remember the last time I spoke with a woman other than Amah Jiejie. When Yara started talking to me I just stared like some fool. I came here with Colonel Tan. I spent the day with a family of ferals. I have no idea what normal life is. Can you tell me what normal is?”
Shan had no reply.
“My mother left you by getting the marriage annulled on the grounds it was never consummated. Technically I don’t exist. By definition I can’t be normal.”
The knowledge of Ko’s wretched childhood with his unloving, Party-zealot mother was a scar on Shan’s heart. The greatest happiness, Lokesh had taught him, was unconscious, spontaneous happiness, the kind most humans experienced only in childhood. Ko had never been given a chance for such happiness. “Ko, never think—”
His son held up a hand. “I understand. It’s just that they make us take courses on Sundays about life after release. The classroom walls are covered with those banners and posters. The teacher made me stand and she pointed to a steelworker—you know, with a red helmet and a raised hammer. She said that could be me. I wanted to say if that was me then take off the helmet and hammer my brains in.”
“Does she still make that clucking noise when she paces around the room?” Shan asked. “We called her the old hen.”
“Cluck, cluck, cluck,” Ko imitated, with a laugh. “The motherland is our happy nest.”
Shan joined in the laughter. “I don’t know what normal is, Ko,” he said, “but you and I were never destined to join it.”
“Lha gyal lo,” was his son’s reply.
* * *
They made a strange procession the next morning, Yara and Ati leading them up a steep track above his house that Shan had never used before. Lhamo and Trinle lingered behind, as if reluctant to join them. They were moving into the mountains along the edge of the zone the Tibetans feared.
After nearly an hour they reached a high ridge that ran east and west, connecting the Ghost Mountains with the peaks to the northeast. They passed an outcropping and suddenly were on a path that was defined by more of the oblong lichen-covered stones, identical to the one Ati had shown Shan. Shan turned to the east and studied the landscape. The shadows cast by the low sun outlined a path that might have been otherwise invisible, a track much wider than the typical pilgrim’s path. It had not seen heavy use for many years, but its packed earth inhibited the growth enough for him to make out its course toward the eastern horizon. He bent to examine a drying stem, broken several days earlier, then saw another, and another, all apparently broken along a line at the same time. He moved back and forth until, finally, in the slanting morning light he could make out two parallel trails of broken stems extending along the top of the ridge. The old road may not have seen heavy use for decades, but a light vehicle had driven down it recently. He paused, studying the stems again. They were all broken in the same direction. He saw no evidence that the vehicle had returned.
Yara saw the intense way he studied the landscape. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Are you here as a pilgrim or a constable?”
Shan bent and lifted one of the oblong mani rocks, identical to thirty or forty more he could see along the track. “I would prefer as a pilgrim,” he replied, “but this is not a pilgrim’s path.” He tossed the block against another. Their thin coating of lichen only slightly muffled the ringing sound. “It’s an invasion path.”
As Ko bent to lift the block, Shan opened his pocketknife and extended it to him. Ko shrank back and Shan quickly knelt, clumsily pretending that he had meant to use the blade himself. Prisoners were forbidden anything that could be used as a weapon.
He scraped at the block with the flat of the blade, peeling away the encrusted lichen to expose a steel surface, with squares cut away at the top corners and square extensions at each of the bottom corners. When he saw the confusion that remained on his companions’ faces, he cleaned off another block and fit them together, the notches on the bottom block fitting neatly into the extensions of the top. The ridge was flat, Sergeant Ma had written in his notebook, the progress from the northern base faster than expected, except we lost a tread and had to stop for repairs. “A tank tread!” Ko exclaimed.
“Pieces of a tread. Not a tank, I think. A bulldozer. This terrain was tough even on the heaviest vehicles. A tread was lost near here, its pieces scattered.”
“But there’s nothing here,” Ko observed.
“Nothing here,” Shan agreed, then pointed ahead and began walking up the track.
In another mile they reached a sharp rise where the ledge rock had been blasted to create a more gradual gradient for heavy vehicles to climb. A cluster of crumbling buildings sat where the sharp rise began. For the first time in Tibet the ruins Shan was looking at were Chinese.
Ko suddenly pulled at his arm. A solitary figure had appeared on the opposite ridge, above the old structures. Shan pulled out his binoculars and watched as Jig Bartram descended toward the buildings.
As Ko took a step toward the ruins Lhamo grabbed his arm. “We don’t go there. Not ever,” the old woman said. “The worst of demons, insatiable blood eaters, live there.” She held her hand out to warn young Ati away.
Shan studied the buildings, then pointed to a sturdy stone structure set away from the others, higher up the slope. “That does not belong with them.”
“A pilgrim shed. When I was a girl my mother would bring me there to pray sometimes, by its beautiful juniper trees. There was a grove of rhododendron beside it, a meadow of poppies beyond,” she said, pointing to where a bulldozer had sliced into the earth. “It was once a place full of birdsong and butterflies in the summer. But after those children came, the flowers never grew again.”
Ko seemed very interested in the old woman’s words. “Children?” he asked.
“That’s all they were,” Lhamo replied. “Chinese children playing with guns. Playing with lives. They needed a good thrashing, but if you even looked at them funny they shot you. They lined people up in the town and made them repeat Chinese slogans. Of course none of us understood a word.”
“You mean this was their base,” Shan suggested and studied the windswept, barren landscape. “Why here?”
“The main military road from the north was only twenty miles to the east, with no ravines or chasms blocking the way. No one had ever driven vehicles into Yangkar before then. This was the best way into Yangkar. Otherwise you had to take the old salt caravan routes over the high passes. None of those new macadam roads existed. They held their meetings here, with the communist bosses, out of sight of the town. They were here only three or four months, then the army took over.” As Lhamo spoke Jig Bartram reached the buildings and began climbing up to join them.
Shan studied the ruins, where rusted corrugated roofs lay in pieces over poorly constructed timber buildings. Other ruins would have been stripped of usable materials, but these had not been touched for all the long decades. “Where did they go?”
“Everyone in town was rounded up by then. The rest of us fled deep into the mountains. Didn’t come back for five winters. When we did come back it was a new land. Everything had changed. People said the land demons had been released when so many temples in Tibet were destroyed.” She pointed to the road that had been sliced into the ridge. “They severed the land. They took away the buildings in the town. The gompa, the old storehouses. Our famous Buddha Shakyamuni statute, the giant in the courtyard who blessed all the people of the mountains. The grove of apple trees where we sang to call in the butterflies.”
The American reached them and, to Shan’s surprise, embraced the two old Tibetans. She gestured toward the ugly slice up the ridge. “The road continues to the Plain of Ghosts. Why would the Chinese army have built a road to the gilded saint?”
Lhamo grimaced but did not answer. “Don’t go,” she warned, nodding toward the camp. “They can snatch a word right out of the air and jam it back down your throat so hard you can no longer breathe.”
Jig gazed in mute alarm at the old Tibetan.
“There is evil in this world, girl. There is evil so great you may not speak of it. People die for speaking of it. It’s done. It’s gone. That was another world.”
“But my aunt,” Jig said. “Nyima lives at the tombs. She lives in that world.”
Lhamo shrugged. “Some demons embraced her. Some demons hated her.” The herder woman cast a melancholy glance at the ruined camp. “Don’t go in, I beg you. Come with us to the pilgrim’s hut. Your mother and I used to go there and make little cairns. Come with me and we can make cairns together.”
“We have to go, grandmother,” Shan said. “We have to know the truth of those who lived there.”
“Then may mother Tara protect you,” the old woman said. “We will go around,” she added after a moment, making a circular motion that indicated she would take her family to the hut near the top.
Most of the buildings had no roofs left, and the elements had ravaged them, leaving only a few rusty metal cots, corroded pails, and irregular piles covered with lichen that proved to be rotting blankets. Only two buildings had their roofs intact, though they were riddled with holes. Jig, Shan, and Ko walked into the nearest, which, judging by its benches and tables, had apparently been a hall used for meals and assemblies. Several of the tables and benches were upturned, old and covered with the same layers of dust, as if there had been a fight in the chamber long ago. Bowls and tin mugs sat on several tables, and a long platform along the wall held several large pots beside a rusting brazier.
“They left in a hurry,” Ko said as he examined one of the pots. He held it up. “This crust on the bottom was once porridge, enough to feed twenty or thirty. They left their breakfast uneaten, but they packed up their personal equipment? There’s no sign anywhere of personal possessions.”
Half a dozen bowls on the tables still held traces of food, some with spoons cemented into the hardened contents. Jig paced slowly along the walls, uncovering nothing but more pots and dishes. She paused at a dust-caked photo on the wall and blew on it, revealing a group picture of Chinese teenagers clad in green uniforms, some with fists raised high, several clutching hammers. Those in front held a banner that read HAMMER OF FREEDOM.
Shan found Ko outside, behind the building, where the flat face of a ledge still showed the scorch marks of a bonfire. His son dragged his heel in the earth, exposing a layer of burnt soil and a half-burnt shoe, then he knelt and with a flat rock began scraping away more dirt. The ground quickly yielded the charred remnant of a belt, a moldy green cap, and the burnt remains of Mao’s Little Red Book.
“I don’t understand,” Jig said, then knelt with another scraping rock and exposed two half-melted, dirt-encrusted toothbrushes.
“They ran away from their breakfast and their personal possessions,” Shan said. “But later someone burnt those possessions.”
“The way a fugitive burns everything so he can’t be traced,” the American marshal suggested.
“What fugitive leaves his toothbrush?” Shan asked. Jig had no answer. He kicked up a melted pair of eyeglasses. “Or his spectacles?”
The American silently followed him to the most intact of the buildings as Ko continued to search the patch of burnt soil. With shelves on the walls and a long table bearing dusty file folders, it had the air of an office. A door to what appeared to be a closet was closed, its knob broken off, the door stuck in the jamb. Around the table were several chairs and upended crates. At one end stood a high stool.
The folders were all empty, although several bore neat, handwritten labels. Yangkar Landowners said one, Yangkar Peasant Farmers said another, Dispositions a third. The shelves held a few volumes, mostly compilations of Mao’s speeches but also, oddly, a book on world geography and another on algebra. Not all the students who formed the Hammer of Freedom brigade had abandoned their studies.
On the wall was a large piece of sheeting on which, written in thick brush strokes that mimicked the Esteemed Chairman’s famed hand, was a list that read like a manifesto:
– Revolutionaries embrace Mao Tse-tung’s invincible thought for the purpose of turning the old world upside-down
– Mao Tse-tung thought is a demon-exposing spotlight
– To rebel is always justified
– We will make China and Tibet red from the inside out
– Our Revolutionary State shall last 10,000 generations
Along the ceiling over the shelves hung a faded banner that declared OUR HEARTS ARE RED LIKE FIRE. A lump of ice rose in Shan’s heart. He reached to the back of one of the shelves and pulled out a lump of cloth, then snapped it against the edge of the shelf to break its crust of dust. It was an armband with Zaofan! printed on it. Rebellion! He paced along the wall, then lifted another encrusted object from the floor. With a lurch of his heart he recognized it as a tall conical cap.
He did not know how long he stared at the cap, his hand shaking, but finally Ko touched his arm and stirred him from his trance. His son pointed to Jig Bartram. She was on her knees under the table, staring at a length of brown cord joined by knots.
“He was here,” the American woman said. “His bootlaces were tied around his wrists.” She pushed the frayed ends together. “You saw his body. It matches the marks on his wrists,” she said as she slowly sank into a chair.
“Perhaps,” Shan said as he saw now how the dust at the end of the table had been recently disturbed. “We can’t be certain.”
“It’s certain,” Jig declared in an anguished voice and pointed to two marks on the rough table, then placed an outstretched palm beside each.
Confused, Shan bent over her hands. A chill ran down his spine. Two freshly made nail holes were framed by the thumb and index finger of each hand.
“There had to have been more than one of them.” Moisture filled her eyes. “Jake broke away, but they overpowered him. Then they nailed his hands to the table. It would have taken a gun to his head to make him sit for it. Who has guns in Tibet?”
“Soldiers. It could have just been a knife to his throat.”
“No. He won awards in personal combat training. He would not have stopped for a knife unless it was cutting into his throat. There were no marks on his throat. And those two soldiers died. Jake wouldn’t kill soldiers.” As she stared at the table a tear spilled down her cheek. “Why? Why here?” she asked.
“Maybe it’s the same question,” Shan said. “This place is a mystery in itself, tied to the mystery of the tomb and the Plain of Ghosts. For all these years someone had made sure it was taboo for Tibetans to come here. I think your brother discovered answers from fifty years ago, the reason this land has been forbidden all these years.”
“My mother’s favor to us, she said,” Jig whispered, her voice cracking.
A groan of wood scraping wood broke the silence, and Shan turned to see Ko standing in what appeared to be a storage room on the other side of the jammed door, which he had pried open.
Shan did not understand the stricken expression on Ko’s face until he reached his son’s side and followed his gaze toward the wall. In the light cast by a hole in the roof he could see dozens of nails that had been driven into the rough wood of the wall. From each hung two or three gaus. Every prayer amulet was different, every one worn from years of devout use. Some hung on the braids of yak hair used by shepherds, others on straps braided of leather or red thread, greased string, and even silver chains. The Hammer of Freedom had a trophy room.
“The gaus would have had prayers and relics inside,” Jig said over his shoulder, as if she needed to explain to Shan.
“Probably still do,” Shan whispered. The owners of the gaus would have clung to them with their last breaths.
The American reached out and with a tentative stroke of her finger brushed away the dust on a gau, exposing an ornate cross-hatching of silver and copper. “You can’t tell,” she said.
“The Party zealots scream about the poison of religion,” Shan explained, “and they are eager to confiscate gaus and prayer wheels. But I have never known one to actually open them because of all the tales of the deities that protect such things. They are a superstitious lot. Always hedging their bets.”
Jig shook the gau. Something rattled inside. She stared at it in surprise, then a look of reverence rose on her face. “We should do something with them. For them. Maybe some of the owners are in the town.”
Shan had no heart to correct the American. The gaus were souvenirs of the Red Guard’s savage, short-lived war. There would have been mock trials of landlords, merchants, officials, well-off farmers, and senior nuns and lamas, all charged with the crime of supporting the notorious Four Olds—old habits, old customs, old ideas, old culture—making them reviled reactionaries. In Tibet the punishment had almost always been a bullet, and often a child of the accused had been forced to pull the trigger as their baptism into the new order. “We should do something,” Shan agreed.
Jig took out her cell phone and photographed the wall.
“Why would they leave them if these were trophies?” Ko asked, then lifted a piece of canvas that been nailed to a beam and gasped. The canvas had served as a cover to a cache of more trophies. On a narrow makeshift shelf behind the canvas sat over a dozen little golden Buddhas, identical to the one Jinhua had been given by the despairing survivor of the Hammer of Freedom.
Shan lifted one, took the American’s hand, and set it in her palm, then closed her fingers around it. “They were given to the monks and nuns who successfully completed their studies. Like your Uncle Kolsang. They would have been handed down to their families.”
Jig stared at the little figure, then solemnly nodded as she extracted a wool cap from a pocket and scooped the remaining Buddhas into it. As she did so a new sound arose, a low, hurried chant from the outside door. Lhamo was standing there, her face pale, taking mincing steps forward as she clutched her gau. After all these decades the old Tibetan was braving the place of demons.
Lhamo visibly shuddered as she saw the banners on the wall, then with clenched jaw marched to the cloth painted with the manifesto, ripped it off the wall, and stomped on it. When she reached Shan’s side and saw the wall of gaus she froze, then raised a trembling hand and began pointing to individual amulets. “Nagri Tawun, Dolma Puntsok, Rabten Denpa,” she intoned, grief thick in her voice. “Tsewang Rigzah, fat Tarpa, Kola the runner.” She pointed to a gau with a tuft of wool woven into its cord. “Gyatso Lomo, the herder who refused to let them take his goats.” Tears streamed down her face.
Lhamo was paralyzed with grief. Shan and Jig each took an arm and led the old Tibetan out of the building. Ko had already reached the rest of her family, fifty paces up the slope, and was sharing out some of the food they had packed that morning. Clear of the compound, Shan released Lhamo’s arm to return his son’s wave, then heard Ko shout something that was lost in the wind. As Yara ran down the track toward them, Ko shouted more loudly. Lhamo halted and turned back toward the compound.
“The abbot!” the old woman cried and broke into a run toward the building they had just left.
“No!” Yara screamed. “PLA!”
Shan stared at the frantic young woman, then followed her pointing arm back toward the east and froze. Jig Bartram, several steps above Shan, broke into a desperate run to intercept Lhamo. As the American passed Shan, he grabbed her arm and threw her down, protesting, behind a boulder.
The two helicopters of the People’s Liberation Army flew low and incredibly fast. Shan was prepared for the soldiers to buzz them, to frighten them away as they laughed in their cockpit seats, but not for the blaze that erupted from each. The ruined buildings began to explode as the rockets found them. Lhamo seemed unaware of the explosions or the debris that rained down around her as she reentered the long building. The helicopters veered away and then turned and hovered, aiming and firing their weapons more precisely. The rock face above the patch of scorched soil erupted into flame, then the site of the old bonfire itself exploded.
“Nooooo!” Yara shrieked as she ran to save her grandmother. Shan leapt up but Ko was faster, and in a long flying tackle brought the young Tibetan woman to the ground.
They watched in horror as the far end of the headquarters building exploded and machine guns began to rip the ground beside it. Incredibly, Lhamo dashed out of the door, seemingly unscathed, clutching something to her breast. She was thirty feet away when a final rocket penetrated the open doorway and exploded. The old woman’s body jerked as shrapnel struck her. She was thrown through the air like a limp rag doll.