The infirmary for Zhongje, made for Chinese government workers, was the most modern medical facility Shan had seen in Tibet. White tile floors and stainless steel equipment gleamed under banks of fluorescent lights. Chinese nurses and Tibetan orderlies in neatly pressed uniforms formed two lines flanking the double glass doors as the members of the Commission were escorted inside. A stern, middle-aged Chinese woman who wore her hair tightly pinned at the nape of her neck introduced herself as Dr. Lam, chief medical officer. Clutching a clipboard to her chest, the weary-looking physician led them past a ward with several patients to the glass observation wall beside an intensive care chamber. The limbs of the patient inside were swathed in bandages, one arm punctured by an intravenous tube. Along the left side of his head, the skin and hair had been burned away, though his Tibetan features were still obvious. The skin elsewhere on his head was red and peeling.
“Kai Cho Fang,” the doctor read from her clipboard. “Third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body. Apart from the damage to his lungs, no vital organs affected.” She looked up but kept speaking as if in recitation. “Thanks to the prompt response of our trauma team, he will survive. His family expresses their shame for his irresponsible act, and their gratitude to the people’s government for providing compassionate care.”
Judson asked the question that leapt to Shan’s tongue. “May we speak with him?”
The doctor stiffened. “Due to the risk of infection, the patient is permitted no visitors for at least two weeks.”
Shan inched toward the back of the group and scanned a second clipboard that hung outside the door, then ventured down the corridor, noting the suite of offices where the patient rooms ended. A Tibetan woman in a lab jacket stepped out of an alcove, holding a file, and hastily moved away, as if to avoid him. He was about to quicken his pace to follow when he saw Sung staring at him. The major gestured him back with a casual roll of his hand, the way he might summon a straying dog. As Shan rejoined the group, the doctor darted past him into Kai’s chamber, scolding a nurse who was holding a syringe uncertainly over the patient’s ravaged arm. The doctor took the syringe and emptied it into a port in the intravenous tube. As she did so she snapped at an orderly, who pulled drapes across the observation window. Choi herded them back to the elevator.
The Commission spent the remainder of the day reviewing the files of four more monks and two Tibetan women who had immolated themselves, following what Shan now realized was its steadfast pattern. Choi or Vogel would read a brief official statement aloud, always concluding with a forensic report from Public Security. Miss Zhu then offered praise for the hardworking investigators who were able to distill the truth under difficult, often gruesome, circumstances. The Commissioners would ask questions about the location of each incident, with Vogel always inquiring about the family of the subject, triggering a presentation by Zhu or Choi of a background report that provided no details, only statements that the family had been from the reviled landlord class or, worse, the ranks of religious reactionaries. Madam Choi would then drop the file onto her stacks for psychotics or terrorists.
By the end of the day Shan felt strangely weak, sapped not by the drudgery but the torment of becoming part of Emperor Pao’s machine. As the sun was setting, he found Judson sitting alone in the cafeteria and joined him with his bowl of rice and vegetables.
“Consider me a pika,” he said to the American.
“Sorry?”
“I’m not a weasel or a vulture. And if I sang, I would not have survived five years in the most notorious death camp in China. There are birds enough on the Commission staff. A pika is a meek creature that hides in the rocks. They sometimes come out to watch the strange antics of humans. They collect shiny objects, like prayer beads. Tibetans say they don’t hibernate, they just meditate underground all winter.” He took a bite of his dinner, returning the American’s gaze. “Miss Lin provides support for all the Commissioners, but she seems very focused on you and Miss Oglesby.”
Judson nodded his agreement. “Runs errands. Makes arrangements. Tends to the tea. Always wears her clothes too tight, so nothing is hidden. She flirted with me for a whole week before giving up.”
“It is likely she works for Public Security.”
“One of the birds. She wasn’t trying to bed me because of my rugged good looks. I smile every time I give her my dirty laundry.”
“Ask her for a favor.”
Judson’s brow wrinkled in curiosity.
Shan pushed a slip of paper across the table. “This is the birthdate and registration number listed on the clipboard outside Kai’s room. It’s easy to change a name, but altering his vitals is more troublesome, not worth doing for a quick visit by unsuspecting foreigners.”
Judson’s eyes narrowed as he read the name. “Kai Cho Fang? There’s no mystery about that poor devil.” He frowned and studied Shan in silence, then sighed and turned his gaze toward the darkness outside. “Dammit. Are we really such fools?”
“The Tibetan with the Chinese name we saw this morning,” Shan explained, “was not the man we saw burning on the hillside. We saw a man whose torso and head were engulfed in flame, whose arms burned as if they had been soaked in gas. That man could not have survived. This Kai was burned in some accident recently. Public Security can change the records here, but if it was a traffic accident or industrial accident there would be other records. They are very arrogant. They would never expect someone to second-guess them, never expect the Commissioners to doubt their word.”
Judson fixed Shan with a noncommittal stare. “Sung ran out of the conference room while that man was still burning,” the American observed. “He appeared down by the gate, shouting commands. One of those constables was looking at the flames with binoculars. Sung seized them and looked himself. For a long time, as if he was not sure what he was seeing. When he finished, another officer put his hand out as if asking for them. Instead Sung slammed them on the pavement and broke them. Then he had his knobs seize the cell phones from all the onlookers.”
Shan slowly nodded. “As I said, the man he saw burning was not Kai. Ask her to check that registration number. Be sure to tell Lin not to speak to anyone about this.”
“Which guarantees she will run to Major Sung.”
Shan nodded again. “His burns were recent—otherwise, they could not have pulled off their charade. Hospital databases for all facilities within two hundred miles report only three Tibetan men with severe burns in the past week. By tomorrow night, one of those accident reports will have been deleted. That will be our man.”
“Major Sung will be unhappy.”
“There’s a favorite slogan about joint ventures between Chinese and foreign partners: ‘Building trust for mutual benefit.’” For the first time, Judson’s grin held warmth. “You can tell Sung it was me who asked and give him one more reason to resent me. Or you can say it was your idea and let him realize you are not to be dismissed as another spineless foreign diplomat.”
Judson raised the paper, suspending it between them for a moment. “I may be spineless, but I’m no diplomat,” he quipped, and stuffed it into one pocket before extracting another paper from a second. “Hannah found this pinned to a bulletin board in the main lobby. We can’t read it, but the original it was copied from had scorch marks.”
Shan’s gut tightened as he saw the words. “‘Soldiers, tanks, bullets, bombs,’” he read. “‘Can never defeat the weapon of my prayer.’”
Judson clenched his jaw and looked into the shadows again. “I’m no virgin in Tibet, Shan. I know about the dissidents. They call themselves purbas, after the ritual daggers. Why are they posting these in a Chinese fortress town?”
“The government means to discourage the purbas by using the Commission. This is the dissidents’ way of responding. The poems complicate everything by showing the people the heroic dimension of the suicides. They’re raising the stakes.”
“This is right in Sung’s face.” The American nodded at the paper. “That’s not so much an epitaph as a rallying cry. Beijing has tanks. The Tibetans have martyrs.”
“The rules are changing, on both sides. People grow reckless. For years, I heard only lamas and old monks talk about the approach of the end of time. Now it is spoken of on the streets of every town.”
“The Tibetans have no chance in a direct confrontation.”
Shan pushed away his dinner. He had no appetite. “History has a way of repeating itself.”
“Fifty years ago,” Judson said in a near whisper, “thousands of monks stood holding their prayer beads and waited for the machine guns to mow them down. What’s the twenty-first century version of that?”
His words hung in the air as they watched the headlights of a truck winding its way up toward Longtou with another load of inmates.
When the American finally spoke, he seemed to have found an answer to his own question. “Nothing’s changed. They just convene international commissions to bless every bullet.”
* * *
Shan touched his Commissioner’s armband as he reached the double doors that led to the infirmary. The uniformed guard glanced uncertainly at it but hesitated only a moment before nodding him through. Inside, the day’s work was winding down. Only two nurses and a janitor were visible in the hallway. They seemed to take no notice as he walked toward the wards.
He slowed as he passed the intensive care room. Kai lay motionless, the only sign of life the subtle movement in the tubes that ran into his body and the blinking lights on his monitors. Feeling eyes on his back, Shan turned to see a Tibetan janitor on one knee by a bucket, watching him. It was, he realized, the same old man with the grizzled jaw and deep eyes who had been watching him on the day he arrived at Zhongje. Shan offered a nod to the Tibetan, who quickly looked away.
The offices at the end of the hallway were vacant. Only the last office, on the corner of the building, had its lights on. The weary doctor who had presented Kai to them was bent over a desk. Dr. Lam started as Shan pushed the door shut behind him.
“You have no clearance to—,” she said as she reached for the phone, then paused when she saw his armband.
“My name is Shan, if you want to report me.”
Lam’s grimace brought out the wrinkles around her eyes. “The replacement Commissioner.”
“I enjoyed your performance today, Dr. Lam. Such sincerity. I must admit I suspected you were in fact a Public Security officer in a doctor’s suit, but then I saw you scold that nurse and use the syringe. You gave me a glimmer of hope. You seemed genuinely interested in your Tibetan patient.”
The doctor eyed the telephone on her desk. Sung could still throw him into one of the dungeonlike cells of Longtou, and he would lose any chance of helping Lokesh. But he glimpsed the nervousness in Lam’s eyes.
“Go ahead. I will wait for the guards. They will send for Sung and Madam Choi, who will explain to the major that they can’t possibly arrange for a second replacement on the Commission in less than a week. They will have to let me attend the official session tomorrow morning. We are still formulating the body of our report. Conspiracy theories are in fashion, suggesting the immolations are all part of a plot by hooligans and traitors. The Westerners aren’t convinced. Things won’t go well if they have reason to believe they were lied to about the latest immolation, the only one they themselves witnessed. You really need to pay attention, Doctor. This isn’t some minor local charade you can just bluster your way through. This is an international charade.”
The doctor’s face tightened. Her gaze drifted toward a little porcelain yak on her desk. “I never supported the idea of bringing the Commission to Zhongje,” she said toward the yak. “But the Deputy Secretary insisted. Pao runs Tibet. No one argues with Emperor Pao.”
“Does Pao run your infirmary?”
Lam winced. “I recall that I prescribed drugs on your arrival, Comrade Shan. Apparently the dosage needs adjusting.”
“I broke the capsules up in my slop pot. You knowingly lied to the Commission. Lied to international diplomats about a patient under your care. Arranged a deception in your own intensive care unit. That immolation took place on the slope, no more than half a mile from here. How many hours afterwards was it before your burn victim arrived? The ambulance must have taken a route through Szechuan.”
“He could have been taken to Lhasa for triage.”
“Did you bother to check?”
When she did not respond, he paced along the wall, noting the plate of uneaten food beside a tea thermos. Above them hung certificates from universities in Chengdu and Shanghai, and a commendation from the Party for special services to the people of China. For Lam, Zhongje would feel like exile. “Where does a doctor draw the line? I suppose you can lie about a dire long-term prognosis for a patient but not about the broken bone that is causing him agony right now? Do you lie to patients about their death only if they have no hope of survival? Or is it never lie to Chinese, only to Tibetans and foreigners?”
“A severely burned patient was brought to me,” she said with a chill. “It is my job to treat the injured.”
“You know that man’s burns have been healing for days. He was not injured yesterday, and not anywhere near here. Did they send the details of his accident? The government overestimates its ability to control secrets. You’re going to be very embarrassed when the Westerners on the Commission hear the truth about your patient. You will be blamed. It is the only way Sung and Choi can save face. There’s a shortage of doctors in the Gobi desert, along the border with Mongolia. Half your patients will be camels.”
Lam gazed forlornly at him, then extracted a key from a drawer, unlocked a filing cabinet, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. Her hand shook as she lit one. “What do you want, Commissioner Shan?”
“I want to know where the body is.”
“It was a Public Security ambulance that took it off the slope.”
“Get a copy of the report.”
“Don’t be a fool. I can’t interfere with a felony investigation.”
“I’ve been in the Gobi. Your teeth will wear out prematurely because there’s so much sand in your food. You can tell the ones who have been there for years because of all the steel caps in their mouths.”
Dr. Lam picked up the porcelain yak, seeming to suddenly find it fascinating.
Shan considered her words. “I said nothing about a crime. But you mentioned a felony investigation.”
She kept speaking toward the little yak. “You know. They investigate all the immolations.”
“No. You said ‘felony.’ Meaning they knew for certain a crime had been committed.” He slowly approached her. “Did you go up there? Did you see the wound on the body before it was driven away?”
She did not respond.
“There was a trail of blood leading into the scorched earth,” Shan said. “The man had been stabbed. You would have noticed the wound. Skin doesn’t melt when it burns—it contracts, it shrivels, it curls up around holes in the flesh. The wound would have been obvious. It wasn’t a suicide we watched. It was a murder.” He suddenly realized he had been asking the wrong question. “Who was he?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“You didn’t see the body that didn’t exist.” There was worry in her eyes now. “Sung saw. Sung knew who it was,” Shan ventured, “and he panicked. He overreacted, confiscating cell phones, not letting his own men look up at the slope with binoculars.”
The doctor dropped back into her desk chair as Shan reached into his pocket and dropped the foil-wrapped pin in front of her. “This has the victim’s blood on it. Test it. Type the blood. It won’t match that of your patient.” He saw a flash of defiance in her eyes. “If things go badly, do you want to be just another of Sung’s sheep, or do you want to have some leverage against him? The man who burned was Chinese.”
“Ridiculous. It was a monk. We all saw the robe.”
“A Tibetan monk doesn’t wear a dragon waving a Chinese flag. This man wore expensive shoes, dressed for an office. A robe was wrapped around him just before the burning.”
Lam cast a worried glance at him. “A dragon with a flag,” she repeated in a whisper. Her hand trembled as she opened the foil. When she saw the pin, the color drained from her face.
“Ai yi!” Shan gasped. “You recognize it.”
She seemed not to be breathing. He stepped to the side table and poured two cups of tea from the thermos, then set one teacup in front of the doctor before sitting in the chair across from her like a respectful visitor.
He stared at the little dragon with the flag for a few breaths, then realization struck. “The missing Administrator, Deng. The man Sung replaced.”
“You can probably buy these at souvenir shops all over China.”
“Was it Deng?”
“Administrator Deng wore one of those. He disappeared very abruptly, yesterday morning.”
“Who was closest to him?”
“He had four staff. Except for Miss Lin, Sung reassigned them all yesterday, sent them back east.” Her face was dark with foreboding. “You want me to do an autopsy on a little dragon.”
“I want you to use your talents in pursuit of the truth.”
They stared at each other in silence for several heartbeats, then Shan stepped to the window and gazed out into the night. A vise seemed to be closing around his chest. In the span of a few days, a Commissioner had died and the Commission Administrator had been murdered. The Commission not only studied death, it attracted death. It stank of death. He changed the topic. “There must be dozens of Tibetans who work in the prison, more doing menial jobs here,” he said. “Where do they live?”
Her words came out as a whisper. “Just a maze of run-down buildings past the wind fangs.” Then she looked up at Shan, straightened, and corrected her tone. “It’s an old indigenous community on the far side of the hill. They say it’s haunted by dead monks. Yamdrok, they call it.” She reached for the blood-covered pin and dropped it into a drawer.
“Why wind fangs?”
“After the jagged rocks below the cliff on which the village sits. Where the road curves around the cliff at the edge of the village, a narrow gully empties onto it. A terrible wind blows down the gully from the top of the mountain—a killer wind, people say. Years ago, before Zhongje was here, the government sent in a series of officials to tame the town. The winter can be brutal. Several officials lost their footing on the icy road, and a terrible, sudden gust swept them over the edge onto the rocks below. They say it’s how the mountain gods protect the village.” She seemed grateful to be speaking about something else. “The town plays a useful role in providing laborers for the prison and our compound, a place where former prisoners can be left without disturbing society. There is something of an understanding. We don’t go there, they come here only to work, or for the open market outside the wall.”
“You’ve never been there?”
“Once, with a military escort. We handed out food and medicine on the Chairman’s birthday.”
“When Tibetans get sick, where do they go?”
“There is a people’s clinic there.”
“But this is the most modern medical facility I have seen in Tibet. Surely you provide assistance to them.”
“I have never been asked to do so.”
“And the prison?”
“It has its own infirmary.” She hesitated, nursing her cigarette now. “It would be a severe lapse of security to bring prisoners here. Some of the most important officials in the entire province work in this compound, or come for conferences. They plan things here, for the prison system and the relocation programs. It takes a lot of organizing.”
For a moment, Shan’s mind drifted. Memories from prison of skeletal, starving lamas, of monks dying of typhus and imprisoned farmers left with unset broken bones flooded over him. He struggled to keep his voice steady. “Did you treat Commissioner Xie before he died? Perhaps he had a medical complaint?”
“Your predecessor? He was a very sick man.”
“You must have an idea what caused his death.”
She took another cigarette. “His heart stopped beating.”
Shan sipped his tea. It was better this way. He didn’t believe information he didn’t fight for. “Tibetan prisoners have a saying: Life is their sickness and death is the cure. If they believed in burial in the earth, the words would be chiseled on thousands of tombstones. What was his cure?”
“There was nothing that could be done for him. He had a very weak heart.”
“But you had to list a cause on the official report.”
Lam drew deep on her cigarette, then let the smoke curl back out of her mouth. “You’ve been in the meetings. He was bored to death.”
“I’ve seen the photographs, Doctor. He drank some tea—then he stopped breathing. I think if I am sitting in his chair, I should be allowed to see the report. What was in his stomach?”
“It would have been an intriguing report. Xie was very weak. I found him one day gasping in the stairwell from climbing three flights. I knew he had had several government jobs, so I asked for his detailed medical file to be sent from Lhasa. He had severe muscle damage in his heart, two heart attacks in the past five years. He was prescribed digitalis to control the rhythm. I could have listed heart disease as the cause and not been challenged. But there is no report. The only file I had was taken by Major Sung.”
Shan put down his cup. “You mean Public Security took the body because it is still investigating.”
“I had to endure an hour of shouting from Major Sung and then two dozen of his brutes combing every inch of my facility. I would tend to think it was not Public Security.”
Shan straightened. “Not Public Security that did what exactly?”
“I foolishly called a meeting of my staff. One of my damned orderlies declared to everyone that our building is constructed over a mass grave for Tibetan monks.”
He stared at the doctor. This was not the conversation he’d been expecting. “You’re saying dead monks were here?”
“My Tibetan assistant announced that you can still smell their incense down around the foundations, reminding us that the dead do not forget. I told them don’t be silly, we all know Tibetans believe in reincarnation, that their spirits move on to the next life. But she corrected me in front of all my staff. She said that was not true for those who die violently, without preparation, and that hundreds died that way here. They roam as ghosts, confused and often angry. More and more of my staff are insisting on leaving before dark. Some are showing up with charms they buy from that Tibetan market along the town wall.”
She saw the impatience in Shan’s eyes. “Xie’s body was wheeled in here at the end of the shift. We confirmed he was dead and called for the body to be picked up in the morning for a detailed exam in Lhasa. But when I arrived just after dawn, there was nothing but an elaborate chalk drawing on the wall. Tibetan ghosts had taken the body away.”
* * *
Shan watched from a darkened office near the utility stairwell as the janitors swept the hall, then swiftly followed as they descended the stairs, blocking the shutting door with his foot. He waited until they had disappeared onto the floor below to enter the stairwell.
The stairs narrowed after passing the ground floor. The bottom landing opened into a dim, musty corridor of unpainted cinder block. From somewhere came the muted whine of elevator motors. A pipe dripped into a bucket. He moved warily along a row of mops and pails reeking of ammonia toward the only lit doorway and paused at the half-open door. He waited, then, hearing nothing, slipped inside.
Benches lined two walls, below tattered coats hanging on pegs. Under the benches were wire baskets holding shoes that were as worn as the coats. Here was where the custodians started and ended their shifts. On pegs by the entry hung a clipboard with work assignments and several rings of keys. He studied the clipboard, trying to make sense of what was written. All the names were Tibetan, and the assignments seemed to cover multiple buildings.
Slipping one of the key rings into his pocket, he ventured farther down the hall, testing doors, finding mostly storage rooms holding office furniture and cleaning supplies, though one held medical equipment. He stood in the hall with his eyes closed, trying to decide what it was he sought. Lam’s assistant said she could still smell the incense of the dead monks.
At the end of the corridor, he opened the heavy metal door onto an outside landing, where stairs led up to ground level. Holding the door open, he tested the keys to confirm that one of them operated the lock, then ascended the stairs.
Standing by the bike rack at the top of the stairs, Shan visualized the landscape as he had first seen it years earlier. Barley fields and pastures had extended to the horizon, ending in the first of the low, fresh-packed mounds, which was indeed where this building, closest to the old abbey, now stood. The sublevel had been dug deep into the earth. Bulldozers probably just swept the old bones aside.
A great sadness suddenly welled up inside Shan, and he found himself gripping the metal rail around the stairwell for support. It was a new thing, these terrible attacks of despair that seized him like a physical illness, leaving him weak and unsteady. The first time, Lokesh found him on the ground, weeping before an ancient stone Buddha, a favorite shrine in the mountains, whose body had been riddled with bullets by a passing army patrol. Now a dark foreboding gripped him. He needed Lokesh. Lokesh was his anchor, Lokesh was his hope, Lokesh was the one who’d made him understand he was more than a pathetic ex-convict whose life consisted of pitching mud and begging to see his imprisoned son.
He shook his head violently, trying to dispel the self-pity. Zhongje and the Commission were like poisons in his blood, and he had to fight to keep them out of his heart. At last, gazing at the stars, he calmed, took several deep breaths, and stepped back inside.
Lam’s assistant would have gone to the sublevel on infirmary business. He moved back to the room with the medical supplies, discovering that it was not so deep as the others. Along the rear wall were upended hospital beds stored on dollies, and the wheels of the center one had repeatedly scored the floor. He tugged at the unit, swinging it outward to reveal a narrow, locked door with a sign marked MEDICAL SUPPLIES UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY PROHIBITED. He lifted the ring of keys and began trying them.
When he finally opened the door, the faint smell of incense wafted out. He gazed in mute surprise for a moment, then stepped in and shut the door behind him. The cement floor had been covered with cedar planks, in the fashion of an old country chapel. Along the rear wall was an altar made of packing crates topped with a length of white silk on which a twelve-inch-high bronze Buddha sat, flanked by a flickering butter lamp and an incense holder. Over the altar, on a shelf near the ceiling, half a dozen human skulls looked down. The dead monks of Sungpa Abbey were watching him.
Shan did not know how long he sat before the little Buddha, but when he finally climbed the outside stairs, it was long past midnight. All the way across the courtyard, he clutched the ring of keys, praying the custodians would not suffer if they were found to be missing. He unlocked the sublevel door of the building where his sleeping quarters were and climbed the inner stairway, hesitating for only a moment at his floor before continuing up to the top landing.
For a moment as he stepped into the chill autumn air, he forgot himself, forgot everything. Miles of rolling hills and mountains were washed in silver moonlight, the distant peaks glistening with fresh snowfall. On the highway to the south, the lights of a solitary truck glided over the landscape. Overhead, thousands of stars glittered. It was the kind of night Lokesh savored—a beckoning night, he would call it. The old Tibetan would invite Shan to join him by a small brazier where they would keep their tea warm while counting meteors.
Why was he here? he asked himself for the hundredth time. Who had arranged for him to be snatched from his ditches and thrown into this swamp of politics and violence? Sung had hinted at an answer. I told them the old dinosaur was crazy, Sung had said when speaking of Shan’s appointment.
He absently paced along the rooftop, watching with a melancholy grin as a falling star shot across the horizon. Then he turned toward the north, and a cold hand gripped his heart. Longtou Prison too was washed in moonlight, but its searchlights slashed into the night, battling the stars.
Lokesh had spent more than half his life in prisons. He knew how to survive, though his instincts often had little to do with survival. In their hard labor camp, he had organized inmates into chanting groups, driving away despair with old mantras and invocations of the earth deities who watched over the dangerous mountain roads where they were forced to work. In those days, when the guards discovered him breaking the rules, they would drag him away to solitary confinement for a month. Today, at a place like Longtou, guards would respond with batons and tasers. Shan had met an old Tibetan who had been repeatedly tortured with electric cattle prods. The man had forgotten his own name, forgotten how to put sentences together, and just sat in a corner, drooling and staring at his beads.
He picked a window at the corner of the largest prison building and pretended Lokesh was behind it, then directed soft mantras toward it. Lokesh had taught him that such mantras should focus him, should calm him, should banish anxiety. But as he chanted, he found his fists clenching. He was angry, he was frightened, he was tormented by the certainty that Lokesh was suffering because of him.
After several minutes, his voice cracked and he fell silent.
At first he thought he had heard a murmuring echo, but when the sound continued, he turned and ventured in its direction.
The two dim shapes wrapped in blankets might have been lost in the shadows were they not silhouetted against the adjoining building. The woman was singing in a low, almost whispering voice. The man was playing a harmonica. Their song became vaguely familiar as Shan approached, but he did not recognize it until he was a dozen feet away.
“Beautiful dreamer, beckon to me,” the American woman sang softly toward the night sky, then suddenly gasped as she saw Shan.
Judson hesitated only a moment. “Rest easy, Hannah, it’s only Comrade Shan. Have a sit, brother, and try some of my bourbon. We can teach you the words of our song.”
Shan declined the extended bottle but stepped to Judson’s side. “The songs of Stephen Foster are well known in China. You slipped your handlers.”
“You slipped your handler,” Judson repeated back to Shan, slightly slurring the words.
Shan shrugged. “Ex-convicts are the ghosts of modern Tibet. We are creatures of air and shadow. Once other Chinese know who you are, they tend to look right through you, like they don’t even see you. We are not of any substance, and we never last long. We appear and disappear all the time, just a mirage of a person, which can evaporate with the slightest breeze. But when Americans disappear,” he added after a moment, “the entire iceberg can collapse.”
“Iceberg?” the American woman asked. Her voice was hoarse, as if she had been crying, and before she turned to Shan, she dabbed at her eyes.
“I helped organize watcher teams for foreigner visitors in the early days of Westernization,” Shan explained. “We usually had teams of six agents on surveillance for every American. Now it’s done only for special cases. Americans serving on a Chinese commission would be very special cases. When your affable hosts go off duty, they report back to a bigger team, who will debrief with them for an hour or two every day. For every one you can see, there will be three or four below the surface.”
Judson seemed unconcerned. “Comrade Tuan is with Religious Affairs, Major Sung wears a Public Security uniform, Madam Choi likes to speak nostalgically about her reeducation in the rice paddies but she got drunk one night and boasted that she had graduated from the special Public Security academy reserved for those expected to become senior diplomats. Kolsang is one of the rare Tibetans with Party membership. Herr Vogel is desperately trying to impress his hosts because he thinks they are going to persuade his bosses back home to make him the next ambassador in Beijing.”
Shan gazed at the American in surprise. “You too have much below the surface, Mr. Judson.”
Judson shrugged. “In China, you learn a whole new way of watching people.”
“What are you doing up here?” Shan asked.
“Taking the air. Watching the sky. We used to watch for the aurora back in the Colorado mountains, but the night sky has a different quality here. We were marveling at how even a gulag prison can become a temple under a Tibetan moon.”
Shan stared at the couple in surprise. “You knew each other before coming here?”
Judson grimaced and stared at the bottle, as if blaming the bourbon for speaking too freely. “We did,” he admitted. “Professional colleagues at the UN.”
“Who went to see the northern lights in Colorado.”
Hannah Oglesby looked up at Shan. “A long time ago,” she said, as if her relationship with Judson had changed. She gestured toward the prison. “What was it like? I mean, before it was Longtou.”
“It was a temple, or more like twenty or thirty temples in one compound,” Shan explained. “Sungpa Abbey was one of the largest in Tibet. Two or three thousand monks. It hosted a school of medicine. Its printing press was renowned for its illuminated manuscripts. There was a prisoner in my barracks who had saved a few pages from a book printed there. He had secretly sewn them inside his shirt. On festival days, he would take them out to show us. To the old lamas, they may as well have been relics from one of the ancient saints.”
“Tell us,” the American woman asked in the tone of an eager novice. “Tell us what the pages looked like, what they said.”
Shan considered the two, not for the first time wondering why they had agreed to join the Commission, then he stepped to the edge of the roof, facing the prison for a few heartbeats before he turned and knelt in front of them. “The pages of a peche, a Tibetan manuscript, are long and narrow, each printed with a hand-carved wooden block on parchment pages. They are often very simple, with nothing but script, but those from Sungpa were illuminated with beautiful images around the margins. Little yaks playing with tigers, dakini goddesses, ritual symbols. The pages we had were all poems of ancient lamas. ‘Who thinks of death,’ the first line of one said, ‘until it arrives like thunder.’ There was another that spoke of the importance of even the most insignificant lives. ‘The smallest spark can burn down a mountain.’”
Strangely, the American woman reacted with a contented smile and Judson extended the bottle to her. She refused it, just drew her knees up against her chest and gestured for more from Shan. He searched his memory and offered half a dozen other examples, then spoke further about the artwork on the pages and the halls of monks who produced them.
When he finished, they remained silent. Hannah pointed out a falling star that left a long trail over the mountains. Judson lifted his harmonica and began playing a song that was often heard on sound systems of Chinese trains and buses, Red River Valley.
“Why there?” the American woman asked when Judson had finished.
“There?” Shan asked.
“Why did this Tibetan monk who miraculously survived his self-immolation climb halfway up the hill?” She was asking the same question that had nagged at Shan. “If he wanted the whole town to see, he should have gone up higher. If he wanted to obstruct the daily business of the government, he should have done it at the front gate. But he did it there.” She pointed to where the scorched earth lay. “And why graze sheep where the grass is so sparse?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The day before, Mr. Shan—”
“Just Shan.”
“The day before, Tibetan shepherds were at that very spot. Slopes all around, rich with grass, but they chose that spot.”
“Surely not the exact patch where the scorched soil is?”
“Exactly that patch. I have a hard time sleeping here. I watched them from my room just after dawn. They were just to the left of that white boulder where the immolation occurred. They made a little tent out of some blankets. They pounded a stake in the ground and tied a dog to it.”
“Herders don’t tie their dogs, Miss Oglesby.”
“Hannah. These did. I grew up on a farm in Virginia. I know what I saw. They pounded in a stake and left it there.”
“There was no stake when we were there today,” Judson interjected.
Shan remembered that Sung had crushed a little mound. “There was a pile of grey ash that did not match the rest. In the center, as if the man had been tied to it.” Suddenly he saw them staring at him in alarm and realized he had spoken his thoughts out loud.
“You mean the man named Kai,” the American woman said. “But surely he did not tie himself to a stake.”
“Comrade Shan is the rarest of creatures, Hannah,” Judson said. “A former Chinese investigator prone to perverse fantasies. He imagines a world in which his government may have switched the victims.”
The American woman looked in alarm at Judson. “You told me Shan thought the man rose up from the dead. I thought you meant Kai should have died but by some miracle survived.”
“It’s only a theory of his. The night is too peaceful. We talk enough about death in the daytime.”
Shan studied the two Americans in confusion. He could understand if the two were lovers, but they did not have the intimate mannerisms of lovers. They had gone to Colorado a long time ago. Former lovers, then. Now Judson acted more like an older brother, as if protecting her, though Shan could not believe the spirited woman needed protection.
“But why there?” Hannah asked again. “Even if the shepherds marked the spot, why that spot?”
No one had answers. As Hannah rose and stepped to the half wall at the roof’s edge, the breeze freshened, lifting her long hair. “What you mean,” she said after a long moment, “is that we watched a murder. Tied to a stake to die,” she said in a hollow voice.
* * *
The sun was rising as Shan reached the patch of blackened earth on the hill. Loudspeakers on the prison walls crackled to life with The East Is Red, the Party’s favorite anthem. A squad of guards marched around the outer wall, rifles on their shoulders. The engine of the Zhongje garbage truck, an aging hand-me-down from some eastern city, rattled from the streets below.
He circled the scorched patch again. The crime scene barrier had been removed. In fact, every indication of the incident was gone. A pile of old wood beams and boxes now smoldered within the original scorched patch. The scene had been disguised as a trash fire.
Shan stood at the rear of the patch, faced the window of the Commission conference room, then slowly turned. The landscape fell rapidly away from the spine of land he stood on, one of several that reached out like roots from the main mountain. At the bottom of the next spine, nearly half a mile away, sat a large two-story stone structure that had the appearance of an old farm building, probably a granary. The abbey once would have had many farm dependencies in the surrounding countryside.
He paced along the high ground, then knelt as he saw color among the dark rocky soil. He picked up a light brown kernel, rolled it between his fingers before dropping it on his tongue. Barley. He saw another kernel, and another. Tibetan herders had been there. Except Tibetan herders didn’t tie their dogs and didn’t scatter precious barley when good grazing was available nearby. These had been Tibetans masquerading as herders. He walked several steps down the steep slope, then paused again, this time to study the prison. He had descended far enough to be out of sight of the guard patrols, and for most of the day, the little depression would be in shadow, obscured to the guard towers. From this side of the narrow ridge, access to the immolation site was along a blind spot. Not just a blind spot, he decided as he studied the high cliffs that otherwise surrounded the stone building, but the only point where the stone building could easily be observed or approached without being seen by the prison or using the Zhongje road. He climbed down to the bottom of the gully and descended along its shadows.
After following the first long trough between ridges, he began to cross over into the next, then froze at the sound of heavy engines. He dropped behind an outcropping as an army truck appeared on a gravel track, then another, followed by a black utility vehicle. Two military transport trucks were being escorted by Public Security.
Shan waited several minutes after the vehicles disappeared behind the ridge before climbing onto an outcropping that gave a view of the granary, now barely a hundred paces away. From a distance, it appeared abandoned, and the exterior of the large stone building had indeed been kept in disrepair. But the high razor-wire fence around it was new. It had been cleverly built along shadows cast by the ridge so as to be nearly invisible from a distance.
Suddenly the stillness was broken by an angry shout, then the trill of a whistle. A Tibetan man wearing the fleece vest of a herder ran around the corner of the building, followed by two uniformed knobs. As Shan watched, one of the knobs expertly threw a baton at the man, striking his head. The herder stumbled to his knees and his pursuers were instantly on him, knocking him flat before kicking him with their heavy boots.