Shan pounded on the locked door of the infirmary, then leaned against the wall, fighting another spell of dizziness before knocking again. When the door finally cracked open, Dr. Lam blocked it with her foot. “No! Not again!” she snapped. “I have half a dozen patients trying to sleep! You have to come back.…” Her words faded. Shan followed her gaze to the right shoulder of his shirt, which was soaked with blood. She opened the door and began reaching for his shoulder.
“Not me,” he said as he stepped inside, extending the dog. “I think his leg is broken.”
She took the dog but quickly laid it on the bed as they reached the examination room, then pulled at his shirt. Blood was trickling down his neck.
“Not me,” he repeated, pushing her hand away. “Him.”
She looked at Tonte and frowned. “Call the constables. They usually carry pistols. What he needs is a bullet.”
“Not this dog.”
“This is a sanitary facility. I have patients.”
“He saved my life.”
“I hate him already.”
“Please. I will pay.” As Shan took a step forward, the world began to spin. “I call him Tonte. I can…” He collapsed onto the floor.
He awoke in an infirmary bed, a hospital gown draped over his bare chest. His head throbbed. As he reached toward his ear, a firm hand pushed his arm down.
“Best not,” Lam said, and pried Shan’s eyes wider, studying the pupils with her exam light. “Five sutures. No serious concussion, which only proves my theory that your head is solid granite. How much pain are you in?”
“Nothing except the drum pounding inside my skull.”
Lam gestured to two tablets and a glass of water on the bedside table. “You need to rest at least eight hours.”
As he swallowed the pills, Shan looked around the room.
“He’s fine,” Lam reported. “Resting. A simple fracture. You’re lucky my staff wasn’t here, or I would have had to send him back to the street. Sleep. I’ll wake you in the morning.”
“I didn’t know if you would be here.”
“My staff is so nervous about the night shift, I agreed to cover for them. Sleep,” Lam said more insistently.
“Someone tried to kill me.”
“Just our luck,” Lam said as she pushed him back on the pillow and pulled up his blanket. “All the professionals in this town, and you draw the only amateurs.”
Shan stared after her, considering her words. If the knobs or purbas wanted him dead, they had had many chances to take him. Tan was attacked because Pao had decided not to move directly against Shan. He put his legs over the edge of the bed and slowly stood, steadying himself against the wall. When his head cleared, he stepped barefoot into the dimly lit hallway, passing a ward of sleeping patients before reaching a second ward where a single patient lay connected to an intravenous bag. On the far side of the bed was a wheeled table bearing a chess game in progress. The only movement was a grey tail wagging from the covers. He bent over Tonte, rubbing his head as he admired the tidy splint of tongue depressors on his front leg.
The long graceful hand of the patient was stretched out behind the dog. Her head was lost among the blankets but Shan recognized the bracelet of dzi beads on the wrist. Hannah Oglesby, a tube in her arm, had fallen asleep petting the dog.
His pain had subsided to a quiet throbbing by the time he returned to his quarters. He collapsed into the soft chair in the little sitting alcove, kicked his shoes into the shadows where his bed lay, and surrendered to his exhaustion.
Shan awoke abruptly, oddly short of breath, drained a bottle of water he had left on the table, and stumbled toward his bed. Something tangled around his foot. He reached for it, confused, then returned to the light and stared dumbly at it until suddenly his heart hammered him awake. He had tripped on a woman’s bra.
He reached for the table lamp, but it wouldn’t switch on, then he stepped backward to switch on the overhead light.
Miss Lin seemed more relaxed that he had ever seen her. Stretched out on his bed, mostly naked, she had a small, disbelieving grin frozen on her face. One hand was touching the necklace on her neck, the other extended over the sheet as if in invitation. The wrist was bloody, showing tooth marks. Her eyes were wide open and bulging. It wasn’t a necklace. It was the electric cord torn from the lamp, wound so tightly around her neck it had cut into the flesh.
* * *
Major Sung was furious at being awakened at 3 A.M., even more so when Shan would say nothing other than “You have to come.”
They walked in silence up the stairs and down the corridor to Shan’s quarters. He led Sung inside and told him to wait by the entry as he switched on the light over the bed.
The color drained from Sung’s face as he saw Lin. “Fuck me!” he groaned. “What have you done?” He stepped forward, extending a hand toward the woman as if to take her pulse, then reconsidered as he saw her lifeless eyes.
“I was with Pao, then in the dining room with Tuan and Judson. Afterwards, I went for a walk. Somewhere near the warehouses, two people wearing hoods tried to kill me. There was a dog with me who bit the smaller one on the wrist,” he said, pointing to Lin’s hand. “I went to the infirmary, where Dr. Lam stitched my head. All those witnesses and the street cameras will confirm it. Look at her. Her neck and shoulders are in rigor mortis. Turn her and you’ll see the lividity on her side. She’s been dead at least four hours. I was in the infirmary then. When they couldn’t stop me on the street, they came back here to finish the job. But her accomplice panicked, or decided he had a better way of getting rid of me.” Shan studied the bed with a steadier eye. A black sweatshirt lay in a heap against the wall. Two small athletic shoes lay where they had been tossed in the corner, beside a pale yellow blouse. “Perhaps encouraged,” Shan whispered, more to himself than to Sung, “by some urge to kill attractive young women.”
Sung lifted Lin’s outstretched hand and grimaced as it limply fell to the bed. “You’re not dragging me into this,” he said in a hollow voice.
“I could have called Tuan. I could have called Choi. You fail to recognize the favor I am doing you.”
“A favor like a bullet in the head.”
“Lin worked for Public Security. If she didn’t, then go use the phone by the elevator. Call the local police and have them arrest me.”
Sung winced but did not argue. The major took a step closer to the body. “She was too young for undercover work. But in Lhasa, she slept with every Party official still capable of getting an erection. This was a test. Pao told her she was destined for glory at embassies in the West, that the Party would rejoice when foreign officials were trapped in bed with a young Chinese diplomat.”
Pao’s little girl. The Deputy Secretary threatened to send a little girl to deal with Xie. He had meant Lin. “You recognized her in that photo at Tan’s hospital.”
“It seemed possible, yes. She had been in nurses’ school when a Public Security talent scout discovered her.”
Shan bent and lifted the sweatshirt. “We shouldn’t leave her like that,” he said in a tight voice.
“But the investigators—,” Sung began.
“We both know there will be no investigation.”
They didn’t speak as they awkwardly lifted Lin up and pulled the sweatshirt over her naked torso.
“You are not going to drag me into your conspiracies.”
“I can call the constables myself,” Shan offered. “When they interrogate me, I will explain that Lin tried to kill me earlier in the evening. The bite on her wrist proves it. I would have them go to her room, where they would find her Public Security credentials. A Public Security officer attempting the murder of a Commission member. It would upset everything, in a very public way.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to upset everything in a private way. Disband the Commission. Immediately. Get the foreigners out.”
A small growling noise came from Sung’s throat. “You’ve become Xie. You’re delusional. What you ask is impossible. Pao would never allow it. He nearly has Dawa in his grasp already.”
“Do it or all the evidence goes to Dawa. Deng’s murder.”
“And Pao will produce evidence that Deng was killed by the purbas.”
Shan ignored him. “Xie’s murder. The attempt on Colonel Tan’s life. Those alone will put a rift between the army and the Party that will take years to repair. With that evidence in her hands, Dawa will change her plans.”
“There is no real evidence.”
“Odd, coming from someone whose job it is to systematically fabricate evidence. You’ve been doing it so long, you can’t recognize the truth when you see it. There will be no real investigations. But the truth will stick. Think it over, Major. There’s never been a dissident like Dawa. Too attractive. Too articulate. They call it charisma. With all that evidence, she would become unstoppable, a hero not just in Tibet but in all China. In all the world.”
“Pao doesn’t trust me anymore. He may not even listen.”
Shan stared at the dead woman. “He’ll listen. Just start by saying I know now that the man who killed Lin is the same man who killed that woman in Macau.”
* * *
The German Vice-Chairman wasn’t at the Commission meeting the next morning. Shan quietly sat through the review of more case files, his gaze drifting toward Hannah Oglesby, who acknowledged him with a weak smile. As the other Commissioners turned toward Madam Choi for the introduction of a new case, Shan pulled out the notes he had taken about the murder in Macau and read them, then read them again. The best investigators, he had been taught in his first assignment, knew their job wasn’t about assembling facts but about acquiring the right perspective on the facts.
As the attendants interrupted to serve more tea, he slipped out of the conference room and found an empty office at the back of the Commission’s administrative suite. Detective Neto was obligingly prompt in answering his phone.
“This is Shan.”
Neto hesitated. “The invisible inspector from the nonexistent country. Things must be awfully dull in Tibet for you to waste time calling strangers in Macau.”
“The records say the Thai woman died of asphyxiation but nothing more.”
“Nothing more,” Neto agreed.
“How exactly?”
“That was never entered into the file.”
“You mean because someone shut down the file before you could complete it. Fine. We’ll play our game again. You can call me a liar if you can. She was strangled with a wire from a lamp.”
Neto said nothing.
“And there was a name from the hotel. Cabral, another Portuguese. If you had stayed on the case, you would have entered your notes about the man. I think he was a maintenance worker who was asked to replace a cord on a lamp.”
“The next week, he bought a new car.”
“Seems extravagant. I bet a new bicycle would have bought his silence. And now the only question that really matters: Which room had the broken lamp?”
“Nothing in the file.”
“You mean the file that doesn’t exist. Good. Let me tell you. He looked at his notes again. Room 914 was Lu’s. Room 916 was Vogel. Room 918 was Pao. He had wanted so much to believe it was Pao. “Nine sixteen,” he stated.
“I have so enjoyed our conversations, comrade. Please don’t call again.” The line went dead.
Shan pulled Judson away as they broke for lunch, leading him into the stairwell, where he spoke for several minutes, beginning with his discovery of Lin’s body. The American shook his head repeatedly, first in disbelief, then in refusal, but eventually he let Shan lead him to the entrance to the Public Security offices. Shan left him staring at Sung’s door.
Minutes later, Shan stood at one of the large visitor suites, trying his ring of passkeys. The Deputy Chairman’s quarters consisted of a large suite no doubt designed for senior Party officials, with a kitchen, dining room, and sitting area. At first Shan thought the rooms were empty, then he heard the clink of glass near the bed. He pulled open the heavy drapes over the windows to find Vogel sprawled against the wall, filling a drinking glass from a bottle of Scotch. His shirt was stained with liquor and vomit. The teetotaler had rediscovered his alcohol.
“You?” Vogel muttered. “I thought it would be Pao,” he said, slurring his words. “Get me Pao!” he growled, then broke into a drunkard’s laughter. “I’ve caught Lin’s killer!”
Shan sat on the edge of the bed. “I can’t understand how you managed with Deng. He was a big man. You must have had more help than just Lin.”
“She was something. My God. A wildcat in bed.”
Shan heard footsteps behind him but did not turn. “No doubt he misunderstood your intentions. My guess is you got some drugs in him before you went up the slope.”
Vogel tipped his glass toward Shan before replying. “One syringe at the bottom of the hill, one at the top. Lin was training as a nurse, very quick with a needle.” As he took a long swallow of whiskey, Shan saw the bruise on his jaw. “I had met her in Macau. Pao saw I had my eye on her. That first night in Lhasa before the Commission started, Pao said he had a reward for me, hardship pay for coming to Tibet. And there she was, waiting in my bathtub. God!”
“Someone had to carry the gas,” Shan suggested. “She wasn’t very strong.”
“The knob carried the gas, but he was dressed like one of the maintenance workers in town. Instructions were clear. No uniform. No guns. A reenactment, I kept telling Deng. We would take pictures for the Commission, just like Western policemen on television. What a fool he was.” Vogel looked up toward the bathroom. “Lin?” he called out, then cursed. “I keep thinking I hear her in the shower.”
“But the knob had a knife.”
“Even with the drugs, Deng realized what we intended when he saw that stake in the ground and Lin pulled out the rope. The fool was complaining to Pao about being forced to help kill Xie, said he must be allowed to resign or he would tell the foreigners. He wet himself. He tried to resist. Lin sank in the second syringe. That knob sank in the knife. It was easy after that. I told them to give me a quarter hour to get back to the Commission meeting.” Vogel drained his glass and gazed vacantly as Shan stepped past him to the windows to gaze out at the immolation site.
“We thought that monk was pointing to heaven as he burned,” he said as he turned back to the German. “But it was just Deng pointing here, to your apartment.”
Vogel’s head rolled. “Where’s my pipe? What I need is a good smoke.” He looked back up at Shan. “Did Choi send you? Tell the old battle-axe I saved her Commission for her. You can’t do a thing, Shan, or you’ll be taken in for murder. I am allowed to miss one session, to bask in my glory,” he added, and his head slumped onto his chest.
Shan turned toward the bedroom door, where Judson stood with an ashen-faced Sung. Suddenly Tuan was pushing past them, rushing to Vogel. He set the bottle and glass on the bed table, then lifted the German. “Here we go,” he said in the comforting tone of a servant as he leaned Vogel upright against the wall. “Time to clean up.” It was not the first time Tuan had tended to the German. When Tuan glanced at Shan, there was shame in his eyes.
Vogel stirred, recognized Tuan, and patted him on the shoulder. “That’s my boy,” he said. “You always understand.”
Tuan began unbuttoning his shirt.
As Vogel’s head lolled back and forth, he took notice again of Shan. “Pao needs me,” he stated with an impressive attempt to sound sober. “I can do things no one else would dare do. I showed him last night,” he said in a lower, conspiratorial tone. Suddenly he saw Sung and Judson and straightened, stretching out his syllables as he spoke. “Dip-lo-ma-tic fuck-ing im-mun-i-ty,” he declared as he saluted them.
* * *
By the time the Commission took its midafternoon break Shan had difficulty staying awake. Judson had taken the chair beside him after lunch and kept kicking him as he dozed off. Tuan took no notice, for all his attention was on the big German. Vogel had made his appearance after lunch, washed and shaved, leaning on Tuan every few steps until he settled into his chair by Choi.
“Take an hour or two,” Judson urged Shan as the others left the conference room. “You need sleep.”
“I don’t think I can sleep again in my quarters.”
Judson extracted a key from his pocket. “There’s a sofa in my rooms. Help yourself to the food. I bought a box of tea.”
Tuan, who knew Shan never took the elevator, waited for him, sitting in the stairwell. He glanced up at Shan and quickly looked away. “It’s what I do for Pao,” he began in a forlorn tone. “Help his helpers. Pick up the trash. I didn’t know anything about Lin or about them trying to kill you. You have to believe me.”
Shan sat beside him. “Vogel couldn’t have been trusted to be alone. Someone had to help him clean up. That’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is how I missed so many obvious signs. You were in Macau too.”
When Tuan finally spoke, his voice was tiny. “A reward for faithful service, Pao called it.”
“Did you help carry that body out of Vogel’s room there?”
“I do what the Deputy Secretary tells me. Vogel was too drunk to help.”
“So Pao got you and Captain Lu to clean up the mess. What did Lu think about it?”
“At first he seemed grateful to be trusted by Pao. But by the end of the night, he was frightened. A detective showed up, started asking questions. A bartender saw the girl go into an elevator with Vogel.”
“There’s a video of Pao killing Lu in the mountains. When he was done, he got in the back of his car and drove away. He never drives himself. You must have been at the wheel. There was someone else in the shadows. Who drove away with Lu’s body, then faked the accident. Was that Lin?”
“Pao called it a field exercise. Her first one was Macau. I saw Vogel before he attacked you. He had begun to drink again. You terrified him. You thought you were just shaking up Pao through him, but Pao wasn’t the killer. Lin was a witness to what Vogel did in Macau. Killing her must have suddenly seemed a convenient way to solve his problem. Like they say, two birds with one stone.”
“Lin died,” Shan said. “Lu died. Deng died. Xie died. But you never get frightened of him.”
“Why kill a monkey after training him for so many years?”
“No. You are not a monkey. You are a monk who never had a chance to take the robe. That’s why you are sitting here. That’s why you can’t look me in the face.”
When Tuan finally did look up, his face was desolate. “He loathes you, Shan. He went on a tirade for a quarter hour about how people like you are ruining this country. You have to run. He will send you to prison when it is over.”
“I can’t run. I won’t run.”
“I’m begging you. Are you really so dense, you don’t know to be terrified?”
“It’s a lesson it took me five years in prison to learn. The umbrella of the spirit, one of the old lamas called it. Stay focused on the true things, and everything else will bounce off like raindrops.”
Tuan looked down again, clenching his fists. “I told him about her, Shan. What Lokesh said. That she would be the mother of the next leader. I don’t know why. It was like something inside me needed to goad him. He was like a rabid dog when he heard. He began throwing things.” When Tuan looked up once more, there was pleading in his eyes. Shan finally understood why he’d waited in the dank stairwell.
“It is not for me to forgive you, Tuan.”
Tuan opened his palm to reveal the little clay tsa tsas given to him by Lokesh on their journey to Taktsang. When he saw that he had crushed it, he seemed about to weep. “There are good demons and bad demons. Are there secret monk demons?” he asked the broken god.
Shan left Tuan behind and found Judson’s spacious quarters, another of the suites reserved for Party members, let himself in, and collapsed onto the sofa. It was late afternoon when he woke. He stepped to the kitchen alcove and splashed water on his face, then stood at the window. The prison loomed on the slope above. Below, the Tibetan market stretched along the wall. Threads of smoke rose beyond the ridge, marking the braziers and hearths of Yamdrok. It wasn’t more rest he needed. He needed Lokesh.
As he stepped to the door, he noticed a stuffed pillowcase on a nearby chair. At first glance, he thought it was laundry, then he saw something angular stretching the cloth. Remembering Judson’s mention of a box of tea, Shan opened it. Inside was one of the T-shirts with the Commission logo that had apparently been distributed at the launch of the Commission, which itself was wrapped around several objects. Shan hesitated, then unrolled the shirt. Inside was a box of gauze, medical tape, scissors, women’s makeup, and a set of the small dark pearl earrings he had seen the American woman wear. He puzzled over the items, then decided Hannah must have come back to Judson’s quarters after her night at the infirmary. He rolled up the contents, returned the bundle to the chair, and left the apartment.
Only a single nurse appeared to be on duty when Shan entered the infirmary, and she quickly looked away as if hoping he would disappear. He found the bed where the American woman had been sleeping. The bedding was cleaned and neatly folded in the center of the bed. Tonte lay sleeping on the pillow. Shan sat on the bed, stroking the dog, who woke and looked up with the melancholy contentment he often saw on Tibetans’ faces. Tonte licked his hand and laid its head on Shan’s palm as he studied the room.
Something about the American woman nagged at him, a secret that was always just out of his reach. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the room the way he had seen it the night before. A bag had hung from a scaffold on wheels, feeding her intravenous tube. Foreigners not used to high altitudes often let themselves get dangerously dehydrated. The chemical smell of a cleanser had not quite masked the smell of vomit. There had been a little Buddhist tsa tsa charm on the night table. In the corner had been a rolling tray table bearing a chessboard.
Someone called out in pain from the adjoining ward. The nurse ran down the corridor. Shan gently pulled his hand from under the head of the now sleeping dog and slipped away.
Outside, some of the Tibetan vendors were beginning to pack up under the watchful eye of two uniformed knobs, stationed to keep the Tibetans from entering Zhongje. Shan wandered along the row of goods laid out on blankets and small tables, nodding at the weary but cheerful vendors. He bought a stick of roasted crabapples and was nibbling them when he saw the Americans at the far end, examining the small rugs of a bearded vendor. Hannah unexpectedly turned and pointed toward the prison as if explaining something to the confused vendor.
Shan’s heart sank as he saw that the knobs had noticed her, and were marching hastily toward the American. She bent and threw a stone toward the prison. The knobs quickened their pace. Shan let them pass him, then moved along the row in the same direction. As the knobs reached Hannah, she threw another stone and, to Shan’s horror, shouted “Long live the Dalai Lama!” The frustration and hypocrisy of being a Commissioner that were gnawing at her had finally reached their limit. The words were in English, but the knobs seemed to understand. They pulled out their batons and shouted at her. Hannah threw another rock. The rug vendor backed away in fear.
The knobs waved their batons and shouted in Chinese. Shan quickened his pace. Hannah called out her words again, and the batons went closer, warning strokes that sliced the air, inches from her shoulders. Shan broke into a run. “Just a mistake!” he cried out. “She’s an American—” Suddenly he tripped and was on the ground. A baton slashed out and Hannah ducked in the wrong direction. The baton glanced off her head.
The knobs froze, horrified, as blood began flowing down the American’s temple. Shan knew they would never have intended to actually hit a foreigner. Judson appeared from behind Shan and ran to Hannah’s side. One of the knobs helped support her while the other ran ahead to the infirmary.
Neither of the Americans looked at Shan as they passed him. He moved on toward Yamdrok, pausing to look back as he topped the rise in the road. The vendors, shaken by the incident, were hurriedly packing up. Hannah and her frantic escort had disappeared behind the town wall. He replayed the scene in his mind. She knew better than to cause such a disturbance. Judson had worked his way behind Shan. When the knobs were swinging their batons, Shan had fallen on something. Had Judson tripped him to prevent Shan from reaching his companion? It was as if the Americans had planned for Hannah to be struck by the knobs. Something was happening before his eyes that he could not understand. Everyone in the drama before him was desperate and reckless, and his every instinct screamed that tragedy was about to strike again.
He sat against a boulder on the Yamdrok road, looking back at the gate where the Americans had disappeared. He found himself drawing in the loose soil, a block consisting of a line of three short segments, over a line of two segments, then repeating the pattern of three and two. It had been too long since he had consulted the Tao Te Ching. Without conscious effort, he had drawn a tetragram. It denoted Verse Seventy-one, one of his father’s favorites: “To know that you do not know is best. To not know of knowing is a disease.”
* * *
Lokesh was sitting outside by the bright red door of the old farmhouse, reciting a mantra as a goat watched him intently. He greeted Shan with a bright smile and quickly put away his beads to embrace Shan, pulling him tightly into his chest as if they had not seen each other for a long time. “Look!” he exclaimed, and gestured to the goat’s head. Shan saw now the red yarn that had been tied around a bundle of long hair on its neck. “Tserung and Dolma ransomed a goat in my honor!”
It was an old custom that, like so many others, had been banned by Beijing. As a way of showing compassion and celebrating an event, Tibetans would tie yarn or ribbon on a domestic animal, buying the animal if it did not belong to them. Once an animal was so marked, it could never be slaughtered.
“It’s a fine goat,” Shan offered.
Lokesh laughed. “It’s a happy goat!” He gestured at Shan to follow him up the path around the back of the house. They did not stop until they reached the top of the first small knoll.
“I discovered this vantage point last night,” he said, nodding toward the upper slope above Yamdrok. “This is the way it was meant to be seen. The buildings remember.”
Shan turned to see that Longtou was visible, washed by the setting sun. From their perspective, with the sun’s low angle, the prison fences and nearly all the guard towers were lost in shadow. Even the dirty smokestacks blended into the darkness. But the tile roofs and whitewashed walls of the tall central buildings of the old abbey glowed.
“If you know how to look, you don’t have to see the prison at all,” Lokesh explained. The essential elements of Tibet hadn’t disappeared, his old friend was fond of saying, you just had to know how to look for them.
They silently watched the old abbey as it faded into the shadows, then wandered back to the house. The door opened as they approached. “You will stay,” Dolma announced to Shan. “I made noodle soup.”
Through the back window, Shan saw Tserung completing the final evening chores, carrying a little pail of milk from the back shed, pausing to check the prayer flag on the tall tarchen pole.
It was a magical evening. There was no talk of the Commission, Pao, dissidents, or Beijing. Over bowls of steaming soup seasoned with coriander, the old Tibetans offered tales of their youth, stories of aged uncles who had known the thirteenth Dalai Lama, and anecdotes of the mischief practiced by novice monks and nuns. Dolma recounted the great horse festivals that lasted for days in which her uncle had often won races and her mother had won archery contests. Tserung told a solemn story of meeting one of the state oracles, Lokesh shared tales of attending daylong folk operas in the summer palace below the Potala.
“These are things you must remember, Shan,” Lokesh said with a smile as he sipped salted tea at the end of the meal. Shan hesitated for a moment over the hint of parting in the words, but decided his friend referred just to Shan being a generation younger, so he nodded good-naturedly. As Dolma brought a bowl of apricots and walnuts, Tserung began to speak about how they used to train for the riderless horse races so popular in his youth.
“There is a little dog,” Shan said during a break in the conversation. “A Tibetan terrier named Tonte who is out of place in Zhongje. It needs a home.” The old Tibetans just smiled patiently at him, as if not grasping his suggestion. Dolma began to speak of the winter their abbess woke them up each night to contemplate a comet, then was interrupted by a sudden knock on the door.
Tserung sprang up. “Pavri!” he exclaimed, “I almost forgot.” He opened the door, and a well-dressed Tibetan woman stepped inside.
It took a moment for Shan to recognize Lam’s assistant, who was glancing at her wristwatch. “It’s almost—,” Pavri began, then saw Shan. Her surprise turned to fear, and she backed toward the door.
“It’s just Shan!” Dolma called out, and rose to comfort the woman. But Pavri would not be persuaded to stay. She lifted a hand in farewell and closed the door behind her.
The three Tibetans stared at Shan. He felt somehow he had disappointed them. Dolma reached into her apron, pulled out an old pocket watch, and frowned as she looked at it.
The battery. Suddenly Shan remembered the battery he had seen on the floor. He glanced about the room, then his gaze settled on the high pole beside the goat shed. “The tarchen,” he observed. “Only the tarchen is new.”
Dolma sighed but did not look up. Tserung tightly gripped his gau. Lokesh grinned.
“I can speak English,” Shan announced.
“Lha gyal lo,” Lokesh replied, then stood and urged Dolma and Tserung to their feet.
Moments later, they waited by the goat shed as Tserung opened the padlock on its door. Shan stepped to the nearby tarchen and grabbed the fluttering flag. The wire was tiny, barely visible in the moonlight. It had been expertly sewn into the hem of the flag, then twisted into the cord that secured it to the pole before joining with the strand of smaller prayer flags that ran to the goat shed.
In the light of a kerosene lantern held by Tserung, Shan could see where the wire entered through the wall and disappeared behind a wooden crate covered with a fleece. Dolma uncovered the crate and lifted it to reveal a large radio receiver. Lokesh gave a boyish laugh. Tserung switched on the device and it hummed to life.
“And now for our personal message board,” came the British-sounding voice from Dharamsala.
Shan did not know what they sought, and would not ask. He translated everything. Name day greetings, news of births, tidings of death, names of monks in India who had passed their advanced exams to join the ranks of geshe. He did not know when they started smiling, but at some point, he realized Dolma and Tserung had joy on their faces. As he helped Dolma conceal the radio again, he recalled how they had described the loss of their son. “Your son did not come back from a pilgrimage,” he recalled. “It was a pilgrimage to India.”
Dolma smiled. “Perhaps the greatest pilgrimage of all is to go meet with the Dalai Lama. Our son is in Dharamsala, yes. He works for all Tibetans now.”
Afterwards, Lokesh walked with him to the edge of the village. “I saw a meteor shower last night. A sign of momentous events.”
“The most momentous will be when you and I return to the hills of Lhadrung,” Shan said.
“You understand that above all, Dawa must be saved,” Lokesh replied. “I told you my dream of her. She is a bodhisattva, Shan. She may not understand, but I am convinced of it.”
Shan paused and looked at his friend. Never before had he had heard Lokesh speak of another person this way. A bodhisattva was an enlightened being who chose to stay among humans to help them rather than moving on to a higher plane of existence.
“She is flesh and blood,” Shan ventured awkwardly, not wanting to argue. “She brings hope to thousands.”
“She must be saved,” Lokesh said again. “Do not interfere with their plans. Do not let the sacrifices be in vain.”
“She must be saved,” Shan echoed, not understanding, and struggling not to read foreboding into the old man’s words. They walked on. Shan spoke about the dog. Lokesh said he had been praying for Shan’s son, Ko. They stopped when they reached the wind fangs.
“I was scared when those knobs arrested us that day in the ditches,” Lokesh confessed. “But now I see it was my destiny. You can go for years looking for meaning—then it just falls on you like a nut from a tree.” He made a gesture toward the shimmering stars. “They look different now, like they are waiting,” he said, then turned and embraced Shan. “You have always understood, my friend. You have always understood the importance of realizing our destinies.” He handed Shan an envelope, then turned back to the village.
Shan watched Lokesh with a confused smile on his face. He was not sure he could make sense of their conversation, but it was not the first time that had happened, and it was blessing enough just to be with the old man. He leaned into the wind and traversed the fangs.
Back in his room, he discovered that someone had arranged for his bed to be removed. No new bed replaced it, but there was a pile of blankets by the door. Shan arranged them on the floor and set his little Buddha on the footstool, lit a cone of incense beside it, and tried to pray. After several minutes, he rose and found a box of sugar in the little kitchen cabinet. He poured the sugar onto the counter, spread it out, and drew another tetragram, a repeating pattern of a solid line over a line broken into two segments. It signified Verse Eleven of the Tao Te Ching. He whispered the words to himself:
Clay is shaped to form a vessel
What is not there makes the vessel useful.
Doors and windows are cut to form a room.
What is not there makes the room useful.
Take advantage of what is there by making use of what is not.
The one certainty he had was that he was missing something, the piece of the puzzle that bound all the others together. He had thought Xie’s murder was the beginning, then the murder of the woman in Macau. But his instinct now told him he was wrong. It had started when the Americans met Dawa in Colorado.
He settled back before the little Buddha and stared at it. He had learned in Tibet not to trust the investigator inside him. Facts were too often misleading. The truth lay elsewhere, in the clouded countenance of Tuan, the sidelong glances between Dawa and Judson, in Pao’s lust for manipulation and the staging of a purification ritual for Hannah Oglesby.
He had no idea of the time when he finally stood, but was yawning and folding a blanket for a pillow when he remembered the envelope, which he had dropped on the table. On long winter nights, he had taught Lokesh the verses of the Tao Te Ching, and his old friend had written the tetragram for his own favorite verse, Number Twenty-nine. The world is a mysterious instrument, it said, not made to be handled. Those who act on it spoil it. Those who seize it, lose it.
With a yawn, he opened the envelope, smiling to find a handwritten note from Lokesh. Attaining final fulfillment, the words said, is not a mere blowing out of the candle. / It is the last flame that marks the arrival of dawn. He hesitated a moment, recognizing the parchment from Shetok, then felt something else in the envelope and upended it on his palm.
The world went dark. A terrible racking sob shook Shan. He stopped breathing. In his palm was one of the severed halves of Lokesh’s identity card. The words were a death poem. The old Tibetan was going to immolate himself.