Shan slept most of the way back to Zhongje. The hike to the truck was no more than ten miles, but it had been an exhausting ordeal. Sergeant Gingri and his men had accompanied Shan, Lokesh, and Tuan, and from the way the khampa stared at the Religious Affairs officer, Shan had been half convinced that indeed the sergeant was going to shoot Tuan. Gingri carried one of the old rifles in his hand the entire time, and more than once the khampa had conspicuously worked the bolt and gestured with the gun toward Tuan. Shan had nervously walked close to Tuan, trying to keep between him and Gingri. Even when their escort had turned back as their truck came into view, Tuan still nervously watched the outcroppings above them.
“You’re skittish as birds,” Lokesh had chided them when they reached the truck. “Stop looking up the slope. Public Security is down below.”
“You saw the way the khampas looked at me,” Tuan groused. The Religious Affairs officer opened a door of the truck and stood behind it as if for protection.
Lokesh gave one of his hoarse laughs. “Dawa told me about those rifles. The khampas feel better carrying them. But she never lets them put any bullets in them. That would be offensive to the gods of the valley. They are just ritual rifles, like ritual daggers.”
Tuan somehow seemed offended. He climbed behind the wheel of the truck and slammed the door.
Shan reached for the door handle, then paused, noticing how Lokesh stared into the shadows of a nearby outcropping. Suddenly the old Tibetan ran to the rock. By the time Shan caught up with him, Lokesh had joined Judson in helping Hannah Oglesby to her feet. Another of the khampas was at her side, holding not a gun but a heavy backpack.
“She’s feeling low,” Judson said. “You know. Altitude sickness. We pushed too hard these past few days. Started before dawn to be sure we could catch a ride.”
Hannah gave Shan a weak smile. “Too close to the heavens,” she whispered. He had witnessed the debilitating effects of mountain sickness, had watched a friend die of it. He darted to the car and retrieved a water bottle from his pack.
“Just needs rest and hydration,” Judson said as he opened the bottle for Hannah.
Two hours later, they entered Zhongje through the utility gate and left the truck at the municipal equipment lot. The rubble of the fire station had been cleared away. A large bulldozer sat on a trailer. The American woman, having slept for the entire return journey, seem much recovered, and she hurried away with Judson at her side.
Shan wearily shouldered his pack and headed for his quarters. He and Lokesh would wash up and have a meal before Shan took Lokesh to Yamdrok to stay with Dolma and Tserung. He was nearly at the street when he realized Lokesh was not at his side. The old Tibetan stood at the front of the bulldozer, strangely paralyzed.
When Shan reached him, he was on the trailer pulling debris from the teeth of the blade. A shard of plaster was stuck on a tooth. On it was painted the eye of a god looking up as if in surprise. Lokesh pulled away the plaster, then a torn piece of cloth from another tooth. It bore the image of a dancing dakini.
Lokesh dropped to his knees and began a mantra. Shan lowered his pack and ran. When he reached the street, he grabbed a bicycle leaning on a lamppost and sped back out of the compound and up the road to Yamdrok. When he reached the wind fangs, he tossed the bike down and ran up the slope toward the little orchard.
He passed a sobbing woman sitting on a rock, then an old man carrying a basket filled with shards of carved stone and crushed metal cylinders. Then he was out of the trees and facing the knoll with the ring of junipers.
The ancient chapel of Yamdrok, the vessel of the town’s spirit, was gone. The elegant arching entry with its joyful dancers, the painted chronicle of long-ago pilgrims, were dust. Where the little chapel had stood, there was nothing but the track marks of the bulldozer. All that remained was a pile of rubble pushed against the roots of one of the ancient junipers, which had also been toppled.
The sight slammed into Shan like a physical blow. He found himself on his knees. The little chapel had stood for centuries like a gem in the corroded landscape. It had withstood wars, ancient and modern alike, storms of ice and snow, and the battering winds of the mountain. But it had not withstood Emperor Pao.
Several villagers sat before the rubble, chanting the mani mantra. A solitary, big-boned woman in black sorted through the debris that had not made it to the rubble pile. Shan joined Dolma and began to help her. Neither spoke for several minutes. As he picked up each stone, each shard of plaster, he looked for signs of paint. Every piece of a broken god, every faded symbol, would still be sacred to the villagers. On planks raised on square rocks, Dolma was arranging pieces. Painted clouds were in one group, lotus flowers in another, graceful fingers and feet in still others. Shan paused by the old woman as she stared at a painted mouth in her hand, seemingly locked in a scream. Tracks of tears stained her soiled cheeks.
“Sometimes big trucks come and just dump things over the cliff,” she said in an unsteady voice. “When we heard the heavy engine that’s what we thought. A boy ran shouting from the orchard, but by then it was already too late.”
Shan set a chip of plaster with an ear on the plank before them. Many of the shards would probably be taken home to the personal altars of the villagers.
“Tserung and I were praying when it happened. We both felt it. We weren’t the only ones.”
“You mean the ground shook.”
“Not that. Something twisted inside us. Like a blade piercing us at the moment the first wall collapsed. I’ve never known a pain like it. We were already running to the square when we heard that boy.” She lifted the small head of a dakini dancer and stroked it, as if to comfort the goddess. “This place was woven into our souls. Now,” she said with a sob, “the gods won’t know what to do with us. They have no home. It may be years before they return. Maybe never.”
Shan struggled to keep despair from his voice. “No,” he said. “They are in you, and Tserung, and the others here. You are the vessels of the Yamdrok gods.”
Dolma offered a melancholy smile and turned back to her work.
In the hands of his uncle, the rake on the gravel no longer uttered a prayer. It trembled in his hands and shrieked against stones. For months after the temple was destroyed, the old man had still taken ten-year-old Shan there, telling his father they were just going to the park to watch kites. The priests were gone—some killed by a mob of young communists, others shipped to labor camps. The temple had been annihilated. Only the stone garden remained, and a handful of old men and women did what they could to maintain it. His uncle no longer spoke of the communists as children who would soon exhaust themselves. He no longer spoke much at all, just solemnly raked the gravel until the sound grated on Shan’s nerves. Sometimes groups of Young Pioneers, fledgling Party members, would throw rotten vegetables at them. Shan would then lead the old man into a grove of trees, where he would brace him against a tree and recite verses of the Tao Te Ching for him. It was the only thing that could summon a spark into the vacant eyes of the tormented former professor. They had burned all his books and roasted his precious pigeons in front of him.
“I was wrong, Shan,” he confessed one day. “They are not going to leave. They just cast us adrift in an ocean of sorrow. You have to remember the old ways, boy. You are our only hope.”
Suddenly a stone struck Shan’s shoulder.
“You did this!” one of the men by the rubble pile shouted at Shan. “Interfering with our lives!” He threw another stone that bit into Shan’s knee. “No one asked you here!”
“Bastard!” screeched a woman standing by one of the surviving junipers.
Another stone came, and another. Shan froze, letting the stones hit him as the truth of their terrible words sank in. Pao had learned of Shan’s prying into his affairs, discovered that he caused the adjournment of the Commission’s urgent business, and knew of his fierce loyalty to the old Tibetans. The chapel was gone because of Shan’s defiance.
Suddenly an old man in a tattered felt vest leapt in front of another flying stone.
“Lokesh!” Shan cried as his friend blocked another stone, then another, letting them hit him instead of Shan. A second man with a grizzled chin appeared, holding a broomstick, and deftly hit the next rock back at the angry woman who had thrown it. It glanced off her arm, and one of the other women laughed. A stone flew in another direction, and Shan saw Tuan, standing by one of the junipers now, duck and then retreat into the orchard.
Shan seemed to watch from a distance as Lokesh and Tserung defused the tension. He found himself short of breath. The despair that had seized him was crushing him. If he had kept away, Yamdrok would still have its precious, irreplaceable chapel. The scar inflicted by Pao would always be on the ground before him. The scar would always be on Shan’s heart.
He let himself be led away by Dolma and became vaguely aware that they were approaching the couple’s farmhouse. He found himself before the altar, and after several minutes, realized Lokesh and Tserung were at his side. The two old men lifted him, half carrying him to a pallet where Dolma waited with a cup of her special tea.
He awoke in the evening, lying along the wall, a blanket thrown over him. Through a warm haze, he saw the three old Tibetans in the kitchen alcove, drinking tea and energetically chatting. He lay still for several more minutes, relishing the domestic warmth and the anticipation of joining them, knowing that at least here, he would be welcomed. Finally he braced himself up on his elbows and was about to rise when he noticed an out-of-place object that had rolled up against the wall near his head. He reached out and lifted it, confused. It was a battery cell. A battery cell, though Dolma and Tserung had nothing electric in their house. He dropped it behind the pallet, then stretched and sat up, the aches in his arms and legs reminding him of how Lokesh and Tserung had taken blows themselves to protect him.
As he stood, Dolma gestured him toward a fourth cup on the low table. Shan was halfway across the room when someone struck the door. It was not a knock, but a frantic hammering. Dolma inched the door open, then stepped back in alarm, letting it swing open.
“You have to come!” Tuan said to Shan in a frightened voice. “You have to come now.” Beyond the Religious Affairs officer, waiting in the street, was a uniformed knob. “He is here.”
The three black utility vehicles seemed to take up all of Yamdrok’s central square. A squad of knobs was photographing the buildings and people, forcing the terrified inhabitants to hold up their identity cards below their chins as they were captured on Public Security cameras. Tuan offered no explanation, just opened the door of the center vehicle, which was longer and more luxurious than the other two.
The interior was thick with cigarette smoke. Deputy Secretary Pao motioned Shan to the broad leather seat as Tuan shut the door and climbed into the front.
“Comrade Commissioner, I like you,” Pao began. A folding tray had been built into the back of the driver’s seat, and on it was a laptop computer, a pack of cigarettes, and a satellite phone. “An independent thinker like myself. A man of action like myself.” He closed the computer and leaned closer. “You return from a mysterious trip to the north, and suddenly Sung has a video of my embarrassing behavior last spring. The bastard wants to play the game. I admire him for that. And you gave it to him. You played him like a puppet. Do you deny it?”
Shan glanced at the door beside him, trying to see if it was locked.
“No denial?” Pao flashed a smile, showing his perfect teeth. “Good. You encourage me. You’re a man who knows that the most important messages are sent without words, again like myself.” To emphasize his point, he gestured to the soldiers in the square.
“Surely tearing down their chapel was enough.”
Pao’s smile did not change. “That decrepit thing? As soon as I heard about it, I was terrified it would collapse on some poor old Tibetan woman.” He gazed pointedly at Shan. “Just last week, I gave a speech about how we have to redouble our efforts to address the crumbling infrastructure in the province. We’re doing a rough count of people and buildings to see what other precautions might be needed.”
Shan’s shudder did not go unnoticed.
“Excellent. I have your attention. Now, tell me how you are going to bring me this damned woman Dawa.”
“A common name. Must be thousands in Tibet.”
Pao gave a disappointed shrug. “You yourself infiltrated my man into her nest. You kept him protected, made sure he got out to report to me. You are practically one of us already. We just haven’t established your final price.”
“A member of the Commission has to maintain independence from the Party.”
“The appearance of independence, you mean. Why do you think I approved Tan’s recommendation for you to join? By all outward appearances, you are as far as anyone can be from the Party. At least anyone outside of prison,” he added. “I’ve seen few operatives more effective.”
“Operatives?”
“You. You maintain this humble appearance of a man of the people when you are in fact the shrewdest of manipulators. You could be one of my greatest assets. I have a whole world to offer you: A house. A car. A job in Lhasa. A post on my personal staff.”
“I already have a job,” Shan replied.
Pao’s frigid smile returned. “It’s just a matter of time, comrade. Everyone always cooperates in the end. How many times do you have to learn that particular lesson?” He turned back to the street, where the villagers were being lined up along the walls of the buildings and began counting them off. “One, two, three—” He indicated a woman with an adolescent boy. “—four. Look at her, silly thing has flour on her face. “Five, six—” He lingered over a teenaged girl. “Slim and athletic. Clean her up, and I could use her at my parties. Seven—” He pointed to a farmer with a basket of apples. “There’s a chemical worker if I ever saw one. Eight, nine, ten.” He indicated three elderly women. “We have a new complex of barracks for the aged. Very efficient. We pack them in twelve to a room.”
“She keeps her movements secret from all.”
The Deputy Secretary settled back into his leather seat. “They’re so naïve. That video of me was taken by the dissidents, of course. And thank you for teaching Sung how to play it for us.” Pao opened his laptop, and with a few keystrokes called up the video. He seemed highly entertained, raising his finger in the air like a pistol and snapping it in the air as the Pao on the screen fired to scare the Tibetans before aiming a shot into Captain Lu’s head. When the video ended, Pao turned to Shan with a smug grin. “The fools don’t understand that videos from phones have embedded codes, and this code identifies the exact phone she uses. Whenever she enters an area with cell coverage, we can track her. It showed up ten miles from here late this afternoon. Exactly the breakthrough we have been waiting for. We have been listening to all her calls.”
Shan stared into his hands. He was not going to tell Pao the phone had been Gingri’s. He recalled the sophisticated electronic equipment at the Taktsang library. Surely Dawa would have understood about the codes. The purbas’ strength lay in subtlety and deception.
“I am pleased to say your visit emboldened them. We know from her calls, confirmed by our faithful Tuan”—Pao patted Tuan on the back—“that they are planning some kind of rally in two days. If we have to arrest her there, we will. But we would prefer a quieter place. Fewer people to get hurt, fewer witnesses. She has such damned charisma, this Dawa. If we’re forced to move on the rally, I’ll have to open a whole new internment camp just to fit all the new prisoners. Do you have any idea how expensive that is, feeding and sheltering a few hundred Tibetans for months at a time?”
A knob officer appeared and handed Tuan a slip of paper, which Tuan read and extended to Pao.
“You are saying you want me to help set a trap for Dawa,” Shan said.
“What I am saying is help me save all this.” He gestured out the window, then glanced at the slip of paper again. “Seventy-one Tibetans and forty-three buildings. Help me, or Yamdrok and your old Tibetan friend disappear forever.”
* * *
Shan walked as if in a dream up to his quarters. He stood in a hot shower for long minutes, but the grime of the Deputy Secretary and Shan’s fear for Lokesh and Yamdrok would not be washed away. At least Yosen and Pema were free, he finally told himself. He could cling to that one small victory despite knowing all else would fail. The Commission, with his name attached to it, would proceed with its mission of criminalizing the protesters. Dawa would be captured, sooner or later. Pao would win. Pao would always win.
He dressed and made his way to the kitchens, where he cajoled the staff into giving him a plate of cold leftovers. As he carried it into the nearly empty dining hall, he discovered a solitary figure working at a window table, a thermos of tea beside him as he wrote in a notebook. Judson silently nodded and continued writing as Shan joined him.
“How many manuscripts would you say were in that library?” the American suddenly asked.
Shan cast an alarmed glance around the hall. “You’re writing about Taktsang?”
“Its story needs to be told, to be preserved. As far as anyone knows, I am just a Commissioner diligently writing up case notes.”
Shan chewed on his cold vegetables and considered the answer. “Eight thousand at least.”
“More like ten. I was thinking we should start an official depository for Tibetan peches in America. That will have them howling in Beijing.”
“I hope Hannah is sleeping. She worried me.”
“She’s much better,” Judson quickly said. “Eight hours, and she’ll be a new person.” The American lifted his pen. “How well would such manuscripts endure travel? Digital photos are helpful, but a peche was never meant to be read on a screen. You have to sit and experience it, you have to—” Judson abruptly closed his notebook.
Tuan sat down beside them, carrying a steaming mug. “The Deputy Secretary has gone,” Tuan announced. “Back to Lhasa. Already preparing his victory speech.”
Judson gave an exaggerated stretch and rose. “Gents. See you at the next glorious Commission meeting.”
Shan waited until the American left the hall before turning back to Tuan. “You knew about that chapel being destroyed.”
“Not really. I told him about it after that first time you took me to Yamdrok. Like I said, he always expects something to be reported. The old fools thought their gods would protect it.”
“Like the old fools who revere your mother’s poetry.”
Tuan looked into his mug. “I didn’t give him details about Taktsang. I said there was just a cave with a bunch of exhausted fugitives living hand to mouth. Nothing about the Americans being there. Pao would throw them out of the country if he knew.” Shan stared at him, weighing his words. Without the Americans, there could be no Commission.
Tuan glanced up. At least there was a shadow of guilt in his eyes. “Yamdrok is an anomaly. They can’t expect to go on like that. They have to acknowledge their new gods.”
“Pao is no god.”
“Define ‘god.’ He has the power of life and death over hundreds of thousands of people. Bestower of blessings. Punisher of sins.” As Tuan sipped his tea, he felt Shan’s smoldering expression. “It was just a building.”
“It wasn’t just a building. You know that, Tuan. Will you let the rest of the town be destroyed?”
“Not up to me. I told you before. I don’t make decisions—I just watch and report.”
“Pao didn’t even know that chapel existed. You told him about it, and days later he flattened it. You don’t truly share Pao’s beliefs. I saw the way you listened to the nuns, the way you read your mother’s lost poetry.”
“What I believe doesn’t matter.”
“What you believe matters most of all, Tuan. Otherwise, you are nothing, what the lamas call an empty vessel. If you truly thought that, you would have told Pao everything about Taktsang.”
“Maybe I did. Maybe I just lied to you.”
“No. From the first, I could see that in you. You don’t lie. You tell partial truths. You have bound yourself to terrible people. But you don’t lie and you never offer the secrets that would inflict the most damage on Tibetans. It’s like Lokesh said, the seed of realization is trying to take root in you. You didn’t want to leave that monastery all those years ago. You feel responsible for your friend’s suicide.”
Tuan smirked. “Listen to you. Like some old lama. Next I’ll have to call you Rinpoche.”
“What is the trap he is going to spring on Dawa?”
“Not hard to figure. Rallies can’t be secret. When her followers start gathering, Pao will know. He’ll be monitoring that phone so he can keep men within striking distance. He’ll intercept her before it starts. Too embarrassing to let such gatherings proceed with foreigners nearby. You can warn them, but I doubt they will change their plans.”
“Is that what you want? For Dawa to be taken and executed?”
“Like I said, not my decision. I am not trusted with guns or decisions about where to aim them.” Tuan looked out into the night. “I wish she would just go away. Hide in some other province. I don’t want her to be hurt.”
“It could be your decision,” Shan said.
Tuan frowned but did not look at Shan.
“You always have a choice. Just thinking about choices can tell a lot about someone.” Shan studied the Religious Affairs officer. “What will it be? Will you help Pao destroy Dawa, or will you help your mother, the famous poet nun?”
Tuan’s face clouded. “She’s dead.”
“No. That’s the seed Lokesh speaks of. She lives inside you.”
He left Tuan staring into his tea and sought the night air, finding a bench in the dimly lit grove of bushes the town planners called a park. The small grey dog approached, sniffing warily. “Tonte,” he said, trying out the name. The terrier cocked its head at him, then curled up at Shan’s feet. Shan had an uneasy feeling of being watched, of an intruder nearby, and he rose to discover a bust of Mao in a little alcove on the other side of the shrubs. He left and wandered onto the perimeter street that followed the town wall.
Except for the sound of the nightly garbage collection several blocks away, Zhongje seemed deserted. He walked alone in the orange glow of the sulfur streetlights. The town was not even three years old, but its cheaply constructed buildings showed the crumbling and decay of a city decades older. Shan knew Tibetans who shunned anything not made of wood, forged metal, wool, or leather, saying that everything that was plastic or stamped out in some factory was in fact not a real object. Zhongje was not a real town.
He heard steps behind him and nervously spun about to see Tonte padding along behind him. He let the dog catch up then continued, taking to the center of the empty street, letting his feet decide his route as he tried to focus on the impossible knot of mysteries. Something dark and terrible was coming, and his inability to grasp it gnawed like a worm at his heart. Everything he learned seemed to be a half truth, a piece of a larger secret. Deng may have been killed on Pao’s orders, but the killing hands had been in Zhongje, they were not Sung’s. Dawa was every bit the charismatic leader, but she cloaked herself in intrigue with foreigners. Dolma and Tserung let the world believe they were simple-minded old janitors while engaging in their own intrigue with the purbas which they would not share with Shan.
Shan paused by the municipal equipment lot, looking in despair at the bulldozer. He pressed on, lost in his forlorn musings, and found himself in the small warehouse district, where alleys littered with trash intersected the street between long storage buildings. A cold drizzle began to fall. He turned up his collar and kept walking.
The dog reacted first, uttering a low growl that caused Shan to turn in time to see the first of the hooded figures as it leapt out of the alley, swinging a club at his head. He twisted, and the club slammed into his shoulder. A second, larger figure, also in a hooded sweatshirt, aimed another blow, but Shan grabbed the club, a shovel handle, and rammed it backwards, striking the man’s jaw so hard, it threw him off balance. He fell heavily, gasping, onto the pavement. The smaller assailant redoubled his efforts, gripping his own shovel handle in the center like a martial arts staff, pummeling Shan’s chest and shoulders before landing a powerful blow behind his ear that dropped Shan to his knees.
The world began spinning. Shan grabbed the club and pulled, bringing his attacker closer. Suddenly the dog lunged, wrapping his jaw around a thin wrist. “Cao!” came the furious, high-pitched cry. “Fuck!” The figure ripped the club away and hammered the dog, which squealed in pain and limped away.
Both assailants towered over him, aiming their clubs as if for killing blows. Suddenly the wet buildings began to pulse. A flashing light was coming down the street, accompanied by a sputtering engine. The two figures in black were caught in the headlights for an instant, then disappeared into the alley. Shan was saved by the municipal garbage truck.