Shan was so fatigued, he did not realize he had a visitor until the man kicked his slop bucket. He groggily sat up on the cold metal slab hanging on chains that served as his bed. The dark figure loomed over him, silhouetted by the corridor light, then suddenly the naked bulb overhead switched on.
“We haven’t become sufficiently acquainted, Comrade Shan,” Tuan said. “Things moved too quickly yesterday. Your truck was late. Major Sung insisted we had to meet to make up the disrupted schedule. If you understood our expectations more fully this—” He searched for a word. “—this embarassment could have been avoided. A bad start. We will make a new one today.”
Shan swung his legs over the side of the cot and shook the fog from his head. Before drifting off to sleep he had lain awake for hours, replaying the prior day’s events in his mind, haunted by the image of the burning monk. Even when he finally shut his eyes, the strange verses had echoed in his head. “I couldn’t understand why the Commission was reviewing those files. I thought it must just be another campaign to explain crime in political terms. But it’s about the suicides,” he said. It took me this long to learn / How frightened they are of flames, one of the verses had said. “It’s about the self-immolations.” Shan wasn’t shamed or frightened. He was angry. “Tibetans are dying, and you want to make a political charade of it.”
Tuan seemed confused. “The Deputy Secretary gave a speech at the Commission’s opening banquet. We need to ensure that our policies are rooted in international consensus.”
Shan followed Tuan’s gaze to the little shelf by the holding cell’s door that held a bottle of water and a paper cup turned upside down. He was wondering if Shan had taken the capsules they left in the cup. “Deputy Secretary?” Shan asked. He had broken the capsules apart and buried them in the bucket.
“Pao Xilang. The General Secretary is old and sickly, a figurehead. Pao runs the Party in Tibet. Which means he runs Tibet. Surely you know about Pao.”
“Emperor Pao,” Shan said. His voice was hollow. The young star of the Party was known not just for his imperious manner but also for the merciless way he dealt with Tibetans. “And what about the immolation we witnessed yesterday? Has the Deputy Secretary decided? An industrial accident? More drugs? A faulty cigarette lighter might work, except monks don’t smoke. Anything but a protest.”
Shan was ready for a slap, a punch to the belly, a threat of torture. Instead Tuan shrugged and gestured toward the door. “Put on your shoes,” he suggested, then grimaced when he noticed Shan’s tattered work boots. “You came in those?”
“Ditch inspectors work in mud. I was on my official duties when I was summoned.”
“The motherland makes unexpected demands of us,” Tuan said in a strangely apologetic tone. He waited for Shan to tie his boots, then knelt with the air of a servant and straightened his pants legs so they hid the boots before leading him out of the cell. The corridor had no windows, and as they walked along the dimly lit passage Shan realized he had no idea of the hour. The building seemed empty. The freshly mopped floor stank of cleanser. A Tibetan janitor with a jaw of grey stubble paused in his work to stare out at them from a darkened doorway.
“It snowed last night,” Tuan said conversationally. “Just flurries. People think Tibet should have lots of snow, but it’s too dry. Only at higher elevations.”
Shan eyed Tuan suspiciously. He seemed too easy to please Shan. There were operatives all over China trained to do nothing but probe and test those deemed politically unreliable. “I worked on prison crews that cleared the high roads in the winter. There could be twenty feet in some passes, with drifts along cliffs so wide you couldn’t tell where the mountain ended. The guards would send old Tibetans out to test them. Half of them didn’t come back. The snow would give way and they would just disappear. No one even bothered to look for their bodies.”
His tale silenced Tuan, who just stared at the floor until they reached a set of double doors near the end of the corridor. Shan hesitated, looking back to see the old janitor in the hall now, leaning on his mop, still staring at them.
They entered a cavernous chamber with dining tables at one end and sofas arranged in squares at the other. Through swinging doors beyond the tables came the clatter of a busy kitchen. The far wall was lined with windows. Fingers of grey and purple reached across the night sky, with a blush of pink on the horizon. Shan resisted the urge to dart to the windows to gaze on the darker shadow on the hillside that was Longtou Prison. Lokesh was there, beaten and in pain, lying in a cold stonewalled cell.
Instead, Shan studied the hall with the eye of a prisoner as he followed Tuan. The windows slid sideways on metal tracks. In seconds, he could open one and drop to the ground one story below. The hallway behind them was dark. He could spin about, race out the door, and lose Tuan in the labyrinth of corridors. Cooks and food workers began milling through the kitchen doors. The workers and their carts would provide cover if he darted through the kitchens.
He glanced back at Tuan, who was pulling out a chair for him as a woman in an apron arrived with a tray holding two bowls of porridge, two cups, and a pot of tea. “The Commission is a wonderful opportunity for a man like you,” Tuan declared as he poured the tea.
Shan silently sipped at his steaming cup, confused by the nervousness in the young officer’s voice. “I want to know exactly where my friend is. I want to see him.”
Tuan’s brow furrowed. “I have no idea what you are speaking of.”
“He’s in the prison. Longtou.”
“You misunderstand certain things.”
“I misunderstand everything,” Shan shot back. “Have him released.”
“I told you, I am not Public Security. I am just BRA.”
Shan lowered his cup. “Tibetans hate the Bureau of Religious Affairs more than they hate Public Security. Public Security just wants to take away their freedom. You want to take away their gods.”
Tuan gave an exaggerated grimace. “I’ve heard it all before. We mock the traditional deities. We disrupt the old ways that define the common people. What we want is to pull them out of the muck of disease and poverty they’ve lived in for centuries. Orphans who need to embrace their motherland,” he added, repeating a slogan from a new Religious Affairs poster campaign.
Shan studied Tuan more carefully, noticing now his long features and aquiline nose. “One of your parents was Tibetan,” he ventured.
Tuan offered a reluctant nod. “My mother. Sure, I’m a goat,” he quipped, using one of the less pejorative labels applied by Chinese to those of mixed Tibetan and Chinese blood.
“How does your job make her feel?”
Tuan seemed to find the question humorous. “She tried to make me Tibetan when I was young. Forced me to eat roasted barley and buttered tea and sit before images of long-dead men,” he replied with a grin. “But she died a long time ago.”
“And religion became the opiate of the masses,” Shan said, reciting one of Mao’s favorite maxims, “the barrier that prevents them from achieving the socialist paradise.”
Tuan’s smile widened. “They can call it what they want, so long as they keep paying my salary. I am not your enemy, comrade. I want to make your visit with us as—” He searched for a word.
“Productive?”
“Exactly. As productive as possible.”
Shan eyed the figures who had begun to stream into the hall singly and in pairs. Most of the early risers wore Public Security uniforms. “Your Commission is never going to succeed,” he declared. “It’s only a question of how spectacular its failure is. Such failures are measured by how far up the Party apparatus the reports are read. I’d say after yesterday’s suicide, they are on the way to a Deputy Premier’s desk in Beijing.”
“We had nothing to do with that immolation.”
“Of course you did. The Commission was its primary audience. For the first time, there are Western witnesses to an immolation. The Western reporters will be unstoppable when they finally connect everything. The Commission that is supposed to stop self-immolations is causing more. Beijing labors to dampen the interest of the global community in the suicides. Yesterday that trajectory reversed.”
“I don’t know about such things.”
“But you know where Lokesh is.”
“Lokesh?”
“The old man. My friend.”
Tuan frowned. “That’s the major’s business.” He gestured toward the prison, now glowing in the early rays of dawn. “It was a huge abbey once, you know, home to college and a printing press and honeycombed with meditation cells. Thousands of inmates now. Hundreds of cells. Prisoners can be lost, paperwork mislaid.”
Shan cocked his head, trying to decide whether to read warning into Tuan’s words.
Tuan spooned his porridge, avoiding Shan’s eyes. “The Commission was the Deputy Secretary’s idea,” he said into his bowl. “Pao is the youngest ever to reach his rank, only a few years older than me. The ruler of all China held that job once, and made his reputation in Tibet. They speak of him as a candidate to fill those shoes in another twenty years. His suggestion of an international commission was cited at Party meetings as the perfect example of socialist thinking for the new era, the kind of leadership the motherland needs to achieve its global destiny. Party leaders call him a prodigy, a true revolutionary.”
True revolutionary. The words sent a shudder down Shan’s spine. It was more Party code, an accolade reserved for overachieving Party members. He had seen photographs of Pao Xilang in the Lhasa Times, an athletic-looking man who kept his hair so close-cropped, it sometimes appeared to be shaved. Pao giving speeches. Pao opening new schools and highways. “For Pao Xilang,” Tuan said, “the Commission has to be an unequivocal success. We are ordered to make it so.”
“Why are we having breakfast?”
“You need to embrace that success. Let me show you the Commission offices and get the key to your quarters. Your own little apartment.”
“You’ve been assigned to watch over me.”
“To assist. To facilitate. It must be a difficult transition for you.”
“To report every unpatriotic breath to Major Sung.”
Tuan shrugged once more. “You are unfamiliar to us.”
“Who put me on this Commission?”
“I have no reason to know that. Your name came in unexpectedly. The Deputy Secretary gets a hundred requests for political favors a week. He laughed when he read the request and approved it on the spot. That is irrelevant. You need to embrace the success,” Tuan repeated.
“Comrade,” Shan chided, “you make it sound like a business proposition. You must learn the syntax of Beijing. Better to say that in the name of the motherland I must embrace the truth of our mission. Make it chiding but patriotic at the same time.”
“Perfect!” Tuan exclaimed. “What an excellent team we shall make!”
Shan ate his porridge, considering his companion. Tuan clearly knew how to act the part of party zealot. Yet he did it with a strange detachment, as if it were a role he were playing, wearing a skin that did not perfectly fit. “But Commissioners are not without certain powers,” Shan suggested. “Otherwise, they might suspect they are mere puppets.”
“Of course,” Tuan agreed, then his face clouded. “What do you have in mind?”
“The Commission wants to demonstrate that the immolations are mere crimes. Let us confront the ugly truth, witness the grim reality. Get some vehicles ready. I will propose when we convene the meeting this morning that the Commission be taken to the scene of the latest crime.”
* * *
The scorched earth of the immolation site was in the center of a square, five paces to the side, defined by red tape strung on wooden stakes. Shan climbed out of the lead utility vehicle and quickly stepped over the tape, ignoring the guard who tried to motion him away, then squatted before the blackened soil. The guard cursed and advanced toward him, but was abruptly halted by a sharp syllable from Major Sung, standing by the second vehicle.
A shred of maroon, the remains of a robe, survived among the ruin. He ran his fingers lightly over the ash, around it, then lifted them to his nose. The ash had a sharp, acrid smell.
“You smell the accelerant. And there’s no container.”
Shan turned to see the major standing behind him.
“Another conspiracy,” Sung explained, not bothering to hide his impatience. He had fixed Shan with a smoldering stare when Shan made his proposal to the Commission, but his protest had been preempted by Madam Choi’s enthusiastic endorsement of the suggestion. She welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate to the foreigners the openness of China’s criminal investigation process.
“A gang of political hooligans,” Sung continued. “This monk did not act alone. They soaked him with the accelerant and left with the container, since it would betray their fingerprints.”
Shan’s eyes rested on a small patch of brown at the opposite side of the square. At the edge of the stain was something small and metallic. He slowly stood and inserted a hand into his pocket, where his fingers found an old foil gum wrapper. The other members of the Commission continued to stand by the vehicles as if too frightened to move. Madam Choi seemed to take his glance as a challenge, and she stepped forward with a determined expression, chiding the others to join her, then pulled the sullen Miss Zhu with her. As Major Sung turned toward them, Shan stepped to the other side, then stooped as if to tie one of the new shoes Tuan had brought for him. He deftly snapped up the little piece of metal, covering it in the foil before burying it in his pocket. The rusty stain he took it from was connected to the scorched earth by a thin line of the same color.
“You can see the footprints,” Major Sung observed to Madam Choi, pointing to the tracks of boots around the square. “Obviously there were several conspirators involved.” Miss Lin joined them, pacing with a studious air.
“Did an ambulance crew respond?” Shan asked the major. “Firefighters? Public Security troops?”
“Of course.”
“Did they have feet?”
Lin grinned. Major Sung spat a curse under his breath and turned away to bark at a squad of knobs arriving from the compound below.
Choi inched closer to Shan. “Your credentials say you have extensive experience with Tibetan affairs,” she ventured.
“Five years working alongside Tibetans in a hard labor camp. It felt extensive.”
Choi seemed puzzled. “You sound almost proud of it.”
Shan realized her surprise was not from his announcement, for she had seen his file, but from his tone. He had no idea who she really was. His desperation to save Lokesh was making him reckless. “My rehabilitation was not in vain,” he stated in the voice of an earnest cadre.
She offered a knowing nod. “I had advanced degrees in foreign relations. I was sent for four years of reeducation in an agricultural collective. The soil of the people is now in my blood.” It was one of the proverbs taught to those who graduated from Party farms.
Shan studied the sturdy, well-fed woman, not sure if he was being tested. “And here we are,” he said. Shan had already grown accustomed to the patient, chiding frown that so frequently appeared on Choi’s countenance. It was that of a disappointed aunt.
“Here I am,” Choi replied sharply. “Responsible for a prestigious international commission.” She turned and motioned for Miss Zhu, who was nervously brushing the sleeves of her fashionable suit as if fearful of the ash. Shan did not miss the sneer on her face as she passed Kolsang. The Tibetan Commissioner stood staring solemnly at the burnt patch. His hand was moving in his jacket pocket. Kolsang, the thoroughly modern Tibetan, was secretly working a rosary.
He glanced at the two Americans, who were walking along the perimeter of red tape. Judson had enthusiastically supported Shan’s suggestion of visiting the site, but now that he was there, he seemed to have changed his mind. He was arguing with Hannah Oglesby, urging her back to the car, but the American woman ignored him. She stared at the blackened earth with a haunted expression.
“Do you have a cell phone?” he asked when Tuan returned to his side. “Take pictures of all of this,” he said when Tuan nodded, gesturing around the square. “Then of what he was looking at.”
“Looking at?”
“He had a prison full of monks and lamas above him, many with windows in their cells. He could have chosen an act of inspiration to them, committing suicide closer to their windows. He could have directed his message to one of the Tibetan villages near here. Or he could have chosen to face one of the mounds, as a tribute to all those hundreds.”
“Mounds?” Choi asked.
Shan still was not sure if he was being tested. “These are not terraces, comrade. They are mass graves for Tibetans.”
Choi visibly shuddered. Miss Zhu paled, backing away, then turned and ran back to the vehicle, where she frantically pulled the door open and leapt inside.
“Lha gyal lo,” Judson whispered at Shan’s shoulder. He returned Shan’s inquiring gaze with a sad, narrow grin. The American was not surprised by his announcement. He had known about the graves.
“He chose this spot, this isolated shelf of land, for a reason,” Shan continued. “He was looking toward the compound of officials, toward the offices at the edge of the compound. The Commission was there, with a broad window overlooking the slope.”
“Ridiculous,” Choi shot back. “The Commission’s ultimate work product will be public, but its meetings are secret.”
“In the People’s Republic, Madam Chairman, weather reports are secret. Road maps are secret. We have rendered the concept of secrecy meaningless. I would guess at least two dozen people knew where and when the Commission was meeting. All of us. The attendants. The office staff.”
As he stepped out of the square, Tuan began snapping photos. Of the boot prints. Of the blackened earth. Of Miss Lin. Of the buildings below.
Shan walked a wider circuit over the mound, pretending to study the trampled ground as he descended the mound on the far side, then paused when he was out of sight to study the small piece of metal he had retrieved from the ground. It was a lapel pin, a lacquer image of a dragon clutching a Chinese flag in its claws. He carefully rewrapped it in the foil and pushed it back into his pocket, then pressed his hands together over his heart and murmured a prayer in the direction of the prison. When he glanced back, the major was staring at him, shaking his head. Sung raised his own cell phone as if Shan needed reminding of Lokesh’s suffering.
Shan returned to the scarred earth and saw now a pile of silver ash amid the black, a tiny mound barely two inches in diameter. He turned to look for Tuan to photograph it, and when he looked back, Sung was walking inside the tape. The major’s boot precisely covered the mound, crushing it. With his next step, Sung released a black shard from the encrusted soil.
Shan paused and lifted it, touching a finger to his tongue to moisten it. It was a piece of high-grade vinyl, the kind used in China as imitation leather for dress shoes. As he laid it on his palm in the sunlight, a hand reached out to snap it away.
“Thank you, comrade,” Sung offered. He dropped it into a plastic evidence bag.
“Where is he?” Shan asked. “Where is the body?”
“Body? We have no report this man died. Commissioners must look to the Commission’s business.” As Shan stared at him, Sung’s expression hardened. The Commission was to focus on immolation suicides. If there was no death, there would be no Commission jurisdiction.
“If we are to demonstrate that the immolations are crimes,” Shan suggested, “then surely we must analyze an immolation scene. Should I write up my report in English so the foreigners can read it as well?”
Sung fixed him with a withering stare. “I will take that as an affirmation of your commitment to the Commission’s work, comrade. And you should be glad no one else is in earshot. We are trying to be tolerant of you. You were hardly an obvious candidate. Need I take more direct measures to correct your thinking? A comfortable guest apartment awaits you. But last night’s cell is also available. Or I could just have a special team visit the old man in Longtou.”
The words quieted Shan for several breaths, but then he gestured toward the square of red tape. “I was an investigator, Major. Maybe whoever wanted me on the Commission wanted an investigator more than a former prisoner. This was different, not like those in the files.”
“Different?”
“Immolations are protests. They need an audience close by to hear them shout out their last words. This was more like a copy of an immolation.”
Sung grimaced. “I don’t hear an investigator. I hear a man bitter over a lost career engaged in disruption and interference. The recommendation to have you serve may have come from a high level, but I can reach out to higher levels if necessary.”
Shan hesitated. The Commission was mired in a series of mysteries, not the least of which was the reason for him being on it. For a fleeting moment he considered pressing Sung harder, making the officer so angry he would accept his resignation. Then his gaze shifted toward the prison again. If he abandoned his position, he would lose all hope of getting Lokesh released.
“The accelerant,” he said. “It had a biting scent. More volatile than kerosene. Not lamp oil. Not diesel fuel. Have you characterized it?”
“They can roll in lard, as far as I care.”
“The Commission files always emphasize the diligence of Public Security investigation teams, leaving no stone unturned to uncover the truth. You have to at least go through the motions.”
Sung extracted another cigarette and lit it from the first. “The Commission must respect the separation of duties. The Commissioners are not investigators. Leave it to the experts, comrade.” He drew deeply on the tobacco and watched Tuan take more photos, now of Miss Lin posing arms akimbo, with the prison in the background.
“In Beijing, the Commission must have seemed an inspired idea,” Shan observed. “Fodder for Party speeches for years to come. I could write the headlines right now. The Peace Commission Strikes the Anvil of Truth. The People’s Representatives Vindicate the Motherland. The outcome was written long ago. Our issues here are just operating details. It won’t bother them in the least if a life, or a career, is destroyed in the process. We’re so far back in their dust trail, they can’t even see us.”
Sung blew a long plume of smoke into Shan’s face. “You are correct about one thing. There is nothing you could possibly do that will affect the outcome. You are nothing but an irritating gnat buzzing around my face. Once we celebrate our success, comrade, you will be free to leave us. Whether with or without that worn-out old Tibetan will be up to you. Back to your ditches. Just like your labor camp, except you have to provide your own meals. I should be furious with you, but all I feel is pity.”
Shan saw now a little puddle with a shimmering surface, just an indentation of a boot heel with something oily in it. As he bent to examine it, Sung flung his butt into the puddle. With a small whooshing sound, the liquid burst into flame. The guards laughed.
He sat through a long meeting of the Commission, jointly presided over by Madam Choi and Commissioner Vogel, during which another half dozen files were reviewed. Shan carefully studied each of the reports, probing the forensic results, asking about the fuel or accelerant used and the unusually detailed records of each victim’s childhood. “I am confused, Madam Chairman,” he said midway through the session. “We call these events of either individual psychosis or criminal conspiracies, yet you treat them as connected. Where are they joined?”
Choi seemed strangely puzzled by his inquiry.
The silence was broken by two words. “The poems.”
Choi’s head snapped toward Kolsang. The words were the only ones Shan had heard from the Tibetan Commissioner since the first meeting. The Chairman’s eyes smoldered but she did not acknowledge him. “That, Comrade Shan, is the essence of our responsibility, is it not? All crimes have a social context. We have been given the honor of explaining that context for the people.”
The poems. The verses still echoed in his head. How frightened they are of flames. “How many poems were found at immolation sites?” he asked. He had seen only two.
Choi glanced at Zhu, who seemed responsible for all the Chairman’s details.
“How many?” Shan pressed.
“Not at all of them,” Choi replied.
Shan looked to Zhu. “How many were written by the suicides?”
Zhu shot him a petulant glare. “Nineteen that we know of.”
The announcement took even Choi by surprise. Judson muttered something under his breath and recorded the number on his notepad. Hannah Oglesby locked her arms around her chest as if she had suddenly grown cold. Kolsang lowered his head, his eyes closed.
Choi noisily cleared her throat and began the next file.
When the Commission broke for lunch, the corridors were filling with bureaucrats filing toward the dining hall. Shan stepped into the hallway, losing himself in the crowd, then slipped into the stairwell at the end of the hall. He climbed to the now-empty top floor, the administrative floor, and found a large group office. He moved from desk to desk, tapping computer keyboards until he found a terminal whose user had not signed off. He sat down and began typing, searching for personnel records, and then, warily watching the doorway, tapped out several Internet inquiries.
A quarter hour later, he understood much more about the peculiar membership of the Commission. Madam Choi had been swiftly reassigned from a senior position in Beijing when a criminal investigation into her husband’s finances was initiated. The German Vogel, from Leipzig, had been a senior commercial attaché, running investment programs in his embassy in Beijing, but was hastily sent to work at the United Nations when a million dollars had gone missing somewhere between his embassy and a mayor’s office in Szechuan Province. Miss Zhu, the daughter of a senior Party official, had recently graduated from the prestigious Foreign Relations Academy in Beijing after four years of studying law. Kolsang served as the director of a large agricultural collective in northern Tibet and was head of the Party in his county. Xie, once married to a Tibetan woman who died prematurely, had been imprisoned for theft nearly thirty years earlier, but was rehabilitated sufficiently to earn a post in Religious Affairs. Hannah Oglesby, the American woman, had received awards for teaching modern agrarian techniques to impoverished farmers in Indonesia and Africa, then led a UN project for clean drinking water in central Tibet the year before. The American Judson had headed up UN-funded public health projects in Nepal and Tibet years earlier, then left to teach Asian religion at a university in Michigan.
He nervously glanced at the corridor, then quickly located a listing of hospitals within two hundred miles. Only four had trauma units, only two were equipped for patients with severe burns.
* * *
Shan sat by a window in the dining hall and poked at his dinner of steamed vegetables and rice. He was restless. He had tried to settle into the little studio apartment that was his assigned quarters, but he could not get comfortable. He wanted to be outdoors, on the mountainside, but his prison instincts told him he could not slip away without knowing the routine of the security patrols. He watched as constables, always in pairs, paced along the road that ran inside the perimeter of the wall. Every few seconds, he glanced at the prison glowing in the setting sun, hating himself for sitting in comfort while Lokesh suffered. The greatest torture of all was being forced to join the machine that was grinding Tibet into dust.
“Rehabilitated prisoner,” someone said over his shoulder.
He turned to see the American Judson taking a seat across from him, a cup of tea in his hand. “Back home, it brings to mind a valiant struggle to fit back into society. The stories are all tales of great personal sacrifice. The tarnished knight painfully restores his honor.”
Shan glanced at the man uncertainly. The American was the most easygoing of the foreigners, and though he did seem to enjoy goading Choi, Shan was not certain of his motives. “I have never considered myself in those terms.”
“Meaning what? No honor?” The American’s lips were curled in a grin, but his penetrating blue eyes were not smiling. “Or just no interest in fitting back into society?”
Shan busied himself with his meal, hoping the American would go away. Finally he looked up. “Tell me something, Mr. Judson. How did the foreign Commissioners get chosen?”
The American sipped his tea before answering. “Beijing set the rules. We all had to be current or former officials with the United Nations. Beijing had to verify we had never breathed a word of support for the Tibetan independence movement. We had to speak Chinese and English, pass a medical exam, and be able to spend three months in Tibet.”
“You applied for the position?”
Judson shook his head. “Didn’t know anything about it, but I got a phone call that persuaded me. I had worked in the American foreign service, then administered UN relief programs before leaving to teach at a university in the Midwest. Apparently, not many candidates came forward when they heard the posting was in Tibet. They thought I would be politically acceptable to Beijing. The university gave me a leave of absence.”
“But you had spent time in Tibet.”
Judson eyed him warily.
“You understood when I spoke in Tibetan,” Shan offered.
“One of my postings had been in Tibet. It made an excellent credential. I had diligently obeyed all the instructions of my host government,” Judson explained with a mock salute.
Shan weighed his words. “The foreign Commissioners are here as employees of the United Nations?”
Judson reached into his shirt pocket and extended a laminated card with his photo below the emblem of the United Nations. “Citizens of the world.”
“Meaning you all have diplomatic immunity.”
Judson looked down at his lunch. “Never thought about it.”
Shan did not miss the flicker of hesitation on Judson’s face. The American had indeed thought about it. “Politically acceptable. And why has our government put such great faith in Hannah Oglesby?”
Shan did not understand the sudden hardness in the American’s expression. Judson stared out into the darkness before answering. “Her parents were members of the American Communist Party when they were young. Jailed for protesting the war and the poisons of capitalism. She never would have made it in the U.S. Foreign Service, but folks in the UN love her. Anti-American Americans are all the vogue. In Beijing’s history books, her parents fall under the heading of international cadres enlisted in the struggle against imperialists.”
“The two of you seem close.”
Judson shrugged. “The only two Americans in Zhongje. I brought some movies on discs, but we finished those in the first two weeks. So the new pastime is talking about home and taking morning nature walks.”
Shan laid his chopsticks on his plate, finished with his meal. “You know they mean to use the Commission to whitewash the immolations. Deputy Secretary Pao means to give Beijing reason to treat immolations in the future as crimes or acts of terrorism. That way Public Security can just shoot anyone they find on fire. You would put your name to such a report?”
Judson pushed the question back. “The government would assume a former prisoner would always sign whatever it put before him. No one gets out of prison here without being broken.”
“Commissioner Xie was a former convict. Madam Choi and Vogel both fled Beijing just ahead of corruption scandals. They are holding my closest friend in prison. I assume being broken or beholden to Emperor Pao was the most important job qualification for this Commission. What leverage do they have over you?”
Judson looked like he had bitten something sour. He gave one of his lightless grins. “In the mornings, Hannah and I like to go on walks, watching the wildlife. Tibet offers so many fascinating specimens. There are weasels and vultures and little birds that only live to sing.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Comrade, I know China well enough to know I don’t know you,” the American replied, then stood and lifted his tray.
Shan spoke to his back. “You won’t see the jewel of my faith. Just the gems that are my gleaming bones.”
The American slowly turned. “It’s one of those death poems, isn’t it?” he asked.
“If Zhu says there were nineteen, there’s probably a lot more.”
The hardness left the tall American’s face, and he reached into his pocket to produce a folded page. “This was left under my door.” It was a photocopy of another verse. “I can’t read Tibetan, only speak it. But it looks like the original was charred around the edges.”
Shan translated. “‘A cold night fifty years long,’ it says. ‘Forgotten in one warm prayer.’”