CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ani Ama refused to cooperate with Shan’s plan. She raised a hand, cutting him off. “My place is here,” the nun said. “There are the sick. Now wounded are being brought in, from riots somewhere.” It was the middle of the night. She sat beside a dead woman as two other women worked a canvas shroud around the body.

“What if you could do more for them on the outside?” Shan asked. “What if there was a way to make the world see what was going on here? Once there was even a hint that international representatives may visit you know there would be real medical care, real food.”

“No,” she insisted. “Do not pretend that I have such power.”

“The American and German governments have such power. They will show it, when Cora arrives home with stories of the camp, and the story of a murdered German and a murdered abbess.”

The old nun stood up and placed a hand on the dead woman’s brow, murmuring a blessing before the shroud was pulled over her head. “Nothing to do with me,” she said to Shan.

“The abbess has been calling out to Cora,” Shan said to her back. “There is only one way for the abbess to move on to what she deserves.”

Ani Ama halted. “You don’t think I pray for that every night?”

“One of the young monks of Chegar said he hears her moaning, echoing across the hills in the darkest hours. The abbess is wandering lost, unable to understand what has happened to them.” The nun slowly turned toward Shan as he spoke. “A terrible shadow is falling on all those who wear robes in the valley. Help me find the truth. The American was there, at the convent. Leave with us and we will find the killer together.”

“The truth about the murders is with those who died.”

“If we know how to listen we can still hear it. You have part of it already.”

“Nonsense. I wasn’t there.”

“Jamyang died that day too. It was no coincidence. You went with the abbess to prepare the body of the Lung boy. Jamyang was there. What happened? Why was he frightened by the body?”

“I don’t think it was death that frightened him.”

“Then tell me, Ani Ama. Why did he flee that day?”

Ani Ama sighed and looked out over the camp. “I didn’t want to be abbess. I wanted to spend my last years in some quiet place at a loom. My mother was a weaver, and her mother before.” She watched the body as it was carried away, then began explaining. When Lung Tso had arrived to ask the abbess to help, Jamyang had been with her. He had asked questions of Lung Tso, shown great concern that one so young had died. He accepted the invitation of the abbess to join them. “The lama knew about the old ways,” Ani Ama explained, “and knew how to receive deities. As soon as we arrived at that old stable he began cleaning it, murmuring the right words, then lit incense for the gods before turning to the body. He was so reverent, so patient in cleansing the boy,” the nun said. “But then as he got to the neck he gasped, then frantically worked the skin, pushing it one way and another. The abbess asked what was wrong but he seemed not to hear.”

“What was it?” Shan asked. “What was on his neck?”

“Just a mark. A long straight mark like a deep bruise over the throat. The boy had died when his truck went off the road and crashed down a steep hill. His father said the mark was where the steering wheel had smashed against the boy’s neck before crushing his ribs. But Jamyang wouldn’t listen. It was like he was suddenly possessed. He left without another word to us. We didn’t see him for more than a week.”

“When was that?”

“He came back one night and sat with the abbess, alone. There were strong words, which was unlike either of them. Voices were raised. A day later she sent messages to the monastery.”

“Messages? What messages?”

The nun slowly shook her head. “I didn’t understand. She first sent Chenmo, who told me later. Only one word, Dharmasala, to be left on the desk of the monastery office. Later that day she sent another, with a shepherd who was passing through. A day after that she left by herself, saying no one was to follow. But I watched. At the bottom of the stairs the foreigners joined her.”

“To the convent,” Shan suggested.

“To go to die, yes,” Ani Ama said in an anguished voice.

It had begun with the Lung boy, Shan was certain now. But what had happened afterward? What had Jamyang been doing in the days before he returned to the abbess? Why would he have summoned Lung Tso to go to the convent at the same time, but not gone himself?

“That night Jamyang and the abbess spoke,” the nun said, “I dream about it. I understand now. The words they spoke were the ending. They didn’t know then but they were tying off the knots of the tapestry that had been their lives.”

“Only the beginning of the end,” Shan said. “Those knots are still untied.”

Ani Ama replied with a somber nod. She studied the hills for a long moment as if searching for a sign of the dead abbess. “We can’t just walk out of this place,” she said, a hint of invitation in her voice.

“No,” Shan agreed. He looked back at the shrouded body. “First you have to die.”

*   *   *

The guards escorting the burial detail wanted nothing to do with the bodies. They kept their distance, watching with revulsion as Shan and half a dozen others loaded the dead onto the wheelbarrows, then opening the back gate and quickly stepping aside. The dead were infected with disease.

Lokesh had explained that sometimes as many as half a dozen were dying each night. Shan, pushing the last handcart, gave silent thanks that there had been only two deaths that particular night, so that adding three more bodies had not attracted notice. He nervously watched the pair of guards pause to light cigarettes and looked back toward the little warehouse where Lung’s trucks were due. He breathed a sigh of relief as one of the guards split away toward the tractor that was used to push earth into the trench. Shan saw the blur of dust that signaled the arrival of Lung’s trucks. Then suddenly the second guard lifted his baton and thumped it down on the first body. Shan’s heart leapt as the guard approached the second.

“The organs of state must practice democratic centralism!” Shan suddenly shouted as the guard took a step toward the second cart, then darted forward with his cart toward the pit. “Today is chapter seventeen! Quickly! We forgot there is an early review session of Chairman Mao’s Quotations! We cannot shame the Great Helmsman!” He mouthed a prayer, then hastily pitched his barrow sideways, letting the body he carried roll into the pit. He expected the guard to aim his baton at him, but the few moments of hesitation caused by Shan’s outcry had been enough. The man cocked his head toward the road. Lung’s trucks were at the warehouse, and someone was frantically shouting from the loading dock. Then suddenly Shan saw the movement on the road. A grey utility vehicle was speeding toward the camp, its red lights flashing. The knobs were coming, the knobs who hated to dirty their hands with the business of the People’s Armed Police.

With a sinking heart he watched the knob’s car slide to a stop at the front gate. In desperation his gaze shifted back and forth from the knobs climbing out of the vehicle to the warehouse. Dark smoke began pouring out of the engine compartment of the nearest truck. The men at the warehouse shouted, even louder, pointing at the truck, and were running away from it as it suddenly burst into flames.

The guard near Shan shouted for the other prisoners to dump their shrouded loads as the second guard, on the tractor, leapt off the vehicle and ran toward the fire. Shan gestured urgently to his companions, who emptied their carts, dumping the shrouds containing Cora, Ani Ama, and Lokesh onto the ground by sheltering rocks. The three rolled quickly away, pushing off the shrouds, and disappearing into the rocks as Shan threw the shrouds into the pit. The Tibetan who had carried the bucket of lime emptied it into the pit, then took Shan’s cart as planned and headed back toward the gate. But Shan stood frozen, watching as the three scrambled out around the nearby outcroppings. He heard Lokesh’s urgent whisper, calling him to join them as they had planned. Shan looked back at the knobs. He knew why they were there, knew that if he were missing when they searched for him in the camp that the hills would soon be crawling with troops.

“Lha gyal lo,” he called in a low voice to the three who watched from the rocks, pointing toward the high ground, then he turned and marched back to the gate.

*   *   *

Major Liang was standing at the window in the interrogation room at the Public Security district headquarters when Shan was shoved inside. He glared at Shan, crushed out his cigarette, took two steps, and slapped Shan in the face with the back of his hand.

“You think you can mock me!” he shouted. “You think you can interfere with my investigation without my knowing! By the time I am done with you, you will be begging for the bullet I will put in your head!”

Shan lowered himself into a chair at the table and stared out the window.

“You have a hard-labor tattoo on your arm,” Liang said to his back. “Do you know how few of those are seen in the reeducation camps? Those who survive hard labor are usually model citizens. If a number shows up in the camps a message is sent to Public Security for follow-up. Except no one can follow up your number. Impossible, I said, there has to be a record. I searched the data myself. It’s a Lhadrung registration number but Lhadrung has no record of you. An empty file. When I did a broader search I came up with a famous investigator from Beijing with the same name who disappeared years ago. The only real entry shows you as a ditch inspector for Lhadrung County. A ditch inspector who impersonates a senior investigator. Did you kill the real Shan, the one from Beijing?”

When Shan did not reply Liang stepped to the opposite side of the table and slammed his fist on it. “You’re not a mere criminal! You showed your true colors when you attacked that statue in the park. You are a traitor. You mock the motherland! You shame the motherland!”

Shan kept staring at the unfamiliar landscape out the window. The headquarters complex was in a crossroads village miles north of Lhadrung County. “There are three hundred forty miles of ditches in my district,” he declared as Liang paced around the table. “I keep the water flowing by removing mud and trash. You’d be surprised how big a job it is.”

His only warning was a blur of movement at the corner of his eye. The blow slammed into his cheek with a sharp stinging pain. Liang reappeared at the other side of the table, holding a wooden ruler.

“Who took the bodies?” Liang demanded.

“They did you a favor, Major. The political construct of murder can raise so many dilemmas. With no bodies there can be no murders.”

Liang slammed the ruler down again, this time on the back of Shan’s hand. “Who took the bodies?” he repeated, his voice shrill now.

Shan blinked away the pain. “I forgot. You have the third body still, the most troublesome one. But you have a plan for that one. A climbing accident. Or is it to be an unfortunate car crash in the mountains? Better have the car explode so you can report the body was destroyed. It might seem negligent to lose a foreigner’s face.”

Liang’s anger was like an evil creature twisting inside him. The knob officer seemed to squirm, his mouth twisting into a snarl, his hands folding and unfolding into fists. He dropped into the chair opposite Shan and opened a shallow drawer. “Do you have any idea what this is?” he growled as he extracted a printed sheet of paper.

A shudder passed through Shan as he recognized the form. An order for imprisonment. He did not reply.

“As a senior Public Security officer I can send you away for a year without any further authority. No messy hearings. No appeal. I have a favorite prison in the Taklamakan Desert where they keep a few bunks reserved for me to fill. So cold in the winter a man can lose an entire foot to frostbite in one night. The sand gets so hot in the summer you can get blisters through your shoes. Last year’s mortality rate was nearly twenty-five percent. It will be months before anyone even knows where you are. When your year is up the warden will tell me and I will destroy the original order and I will issue a new one for another prison. And the year after that and the year after that. Every year my new signature. Until I retire. But you won’t last that long.”

Liang lit a cigarette as he let his words sink in. “You have one night to think it over. I’ll instruct them to give you a notepad. Write down everything you know and we can forget the desert. You’ll have to be punished for what you did to that statue but I’ll just turn you over to the Armed Police for that. You know the system. Have a political epiphany. Confess your sins. Lead a Tibetan choir that sings Party anthems. You could be out in a few months.”

As he was led to the cinder block cells at the rear of the compound Shan passed a small storage building. He recognized it from Meng’s description as the place where the German’s body had been taken, and broken with a hammer. He glanced back at Liang, gloating in the window of the headquarters. Shan began to wonder if Liang’s brutal beating of the corpse had just been in spite.

Like every cell block Shan had ever entered, the air was acrid with the scent of urine, vomit, and bleach. His escort led him silently past a table with a chalkboard at its side, and shoved him into the center cell of a row of three empty cells.

It was just another of Liang’s lies, Shan tried to tell himself as he stared at the imprisonment order the major had stuffed inside his shirt, one of the tactics Liang used to bully possible informers. But he had seen the hate burning in the major’s eyes. There had been no pretense in them. He despised Shan for having deceived him and wanted him to die a slow death in the desert. He sank onto the cell’s flimsy cot, elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. He tried to think only of Lokesh, of his friend wandering down one of his beloved pilgrim paths but Liang’s threats kept echoing in his mind. The Taklamakan. He had spent weeks in one of the desert’s prisons before being sent to Tibet. The buildings, and the prisoners, had been etched with the hot blowing sand so that even the newest and youngest had an aged, corroded appearance. Sandstorms kept shifting the dunes, exposing ruins and turning barracks into sand-bound bunkers overnight. In his nightmares he still saw one of the common graves from years past that been gouged out by the wind. Protruding from a wall of sand had been the skeletal feet of a hundred prisoners.

He paced the cell with a prisoner’s eye, counting the steps in a circuit, noting a mouse hole under the cot, gleaning a piece of chalk that had rolled across the floor and lodged against the iron bars. Finally he lifted the pad and pencil left on the stool by the cot, staring at the blank paper for a long time. Xiao Ko, he wrote at last. Young Ko. His son. He was due for a visit with Ko in two days, a visit he knew now he would never make. They were both to be in the gulag now, in what the prisoners often called the belly of the dragon. He traced his son’s name with trembling fingertips. The wrenching sentences formed in his mind but his hand was unable to move the pencil.

I am going away to the Taklamakan. The next time you see me I will be in the row of skeletons emerging from the dune. It wasn’t supposed to end this way, Ko. We were going to build a little cabin in the mountains with Lokesh and forget all the miseries of the world below. But the dragon ate me after all.

A hard black thing seemed to grow inside, until he felt only a cold emptiness. A Tibetan prisoner, a middle-aged man, was shoved into the cell beside him. The man began weeping.

*   *   *

The Tibetan prisoner cried until the middle of the night, then he sat in the center of his cell and stared at the round drain plate in the cement floor.

“Om mani padme hum,” the man intoned in a sorrowful voice.

Shan stepped to the bars and extended his prayer beads toward the man. The Tibetan gazed at him in surprise then silently rose and accepted the mala. He returned to his place on the floor, sat down, and slowly began reciting the beads. As he spoke a new strength entered his voice.

Shan watched for a long moment, then turned to the little stool where he had left the paper and began writing.

I saw a hawk today flying high overhead, rising in the wind until he was a speck in the southwest sky. I realized at that moment that he could see both where I sat and where you sat. Maybe you saw him too.

Ko, it will be a long time before you hear from me again. It could be that they will move you to punish me. But know that as soon as I am able I will start searching for you and I will not stop until I find you. Meanwhile listen to the guards. But first, always, listen to the lamas.

He wrote on only half the sheet, so he could fold it twice, making its own envelope. Shan Ko, he wrote on the outside. 404th People’s Construction Brigade.

In the early morning hours he awoke. There was no light but the dim reflection cast from the entryway light. A silent shape sat at the interrogation table, masked in shadow, facing Shan. The silhouette, a figure in a stiff uniform with a high-brimmed cap, told him it was one of Liang’s lackeys, no doubt there to underscore Liang’s message. Shan took the stool to the front of the cell and sat, facing the knob. It was a prisoner’s game, and he was alarmed at how readily it came back to him. The fear may ravage your gut, may hollow you out, but you can never let them see it.

He lost track of how long he stared at the shadow figure. Moonlight moved across the floor. The Tibetan prisoner murmured on, his mantra sometimes coming out in sobs. Shan wasn’t staring at another knob, he was staring at a wraith, at the dark soulless phantom that was his government.

He was so fatigued, so caught in the spell, that he gasped when he suddenly realized the wraith had risen and was moving toward him. The light was so dim its face was unclear until it stopped in front of him. It was no wraith, it was Lieutenant Meng, a pale and brittle Meng in a starched uniform with her hair tightly tied behind her head.

Meng opened her mouth but her tongue found no words. Shan pulled the folded letter from his pocket and shoved it through the bars. She hesitated, as if scared of the paper, then with a quick motion grabbed it and stuffed it inside her tunic. She did not look at him, but spun about and marched back to the table, where she made a show of opening the drawer and pulling out another paper. She crushed his letter, threw the wad into the trash can, and then walked back, tossing the new paper into his cell before leaving. Another prisoner assignment form.

Shan stared in confusion as Meng disappeared into the compound. He sighed, then turned back to sit on the cot. After a long time he rose, picked up the piece of chalk and whispered to the Tibetan.

He was asleep on the cot when the surprised shout of a guard awakened him. Early morning light filtered through the window. The Tibetan still sat on the floor, though he was singing a quiet song now. The guard ran out of the building and returned moments later with two more guards. All three men began shouting angrily, pointing at Shan, then the Tibetan, then the little creatures placed around their cells and the circle on the Tibetan’s floor. Using Shan’s chalk and his careful instructions, the Tibetan had created a mandala around the round drain plate in the floor. Using the entire pad of paper meant for his confession Shan had created origami birds. Small flocks roosted on the windowsills of the two cells, others were scattered around the cells. One guard ran back to the doorway, to warn his comrades of any approaching officer as the others opened the cell doors, cursing the two grinning prisoners as they quickly gathered up the birds and scuffed away the prayer circle with their boots.

With angry taps of their batons they pushed Shan against a wall, then fastened manacles to his feet before dragging him to the interrogation table. They disappeared and returned with a tepid cup of tea, which he slowly sipped. He made a show of stretching, ignoring his watchers to better survey the area around the table. His gaze lingered on the chair where Meng had sat for so long, watching him, then he scanned the walls and ceiling.

The small black instrument blended into the shadows of the corner where walls and ceiling met. A camera. Meng had sat in the only chair that was invisible to the camera that monitored the room, had kept her back to it and her head bent so she would not have been identified when she had stepped to his cell.

He drained the cup, then clutched his stomach and convulsed, spitting up the brown liquid, looking about desperately before leaping toward the trash basket to spit up more. One of the guards laughed, the other barked a curse and stepped away from Shan. As he leaned into the basket he grabbed the wad of paper at the bottom and stuffed it down his shirt.

A moment later the door opened and Liang marched in. The guards darted to Shan and heaved him back into the chair. As Liang silently stepped behind him, his neck exploded in pain. Shan’s body was wracked in a convulsion that slammed his back into the metal chair, leaving him gasping.

“Excellent,” Liang declared as he paused at the opposite side of the table. “I have your attention.” In his hand was a small electronic taser device. The knobs had once preferred electronic cattle prods. They were keeping up with technical advances.

A guard dropped one of Shan’s little paper cranes in front of Liang. The major sighed. He picked up the crane, then carefully tore its wings and head off. A cool grin grew on his face as he tossed the remains of the bird at Shan, then made a show of increasing the intensity of the taser.

“You got yourself thrown into that reeducation camp to see someone,” Liang stated. “I think it was some of those nuns who knew the dead abbess. What do they know of the murders? Tell me now and we can be more gentle with them.”

Shan spoke first in Tibetan, watching the anger build in Liang’s face, then translated into Chinese. “Nuns are the messengers of the gods. Be careful what you ask them.”

Liang lifted the taser and paced along the table again. “In India I hear there used to be huge, unnaturally strong men who were kept by the rajas to conduct torture. They could twist a man’s head off. I read once how they would drive a spike into a man’s skull with their bare fists.” He lifted the little electronic box in his hand. “When I trained for this device,” he explained with a mock fascination in this voice, “they said it sent a spike of lightning into the flesh, said to be sure to only use it on muscle tissue.” Shan gripped the arms of the chair as Liang moved back around the table. “But I’ve always wondered if the skull could block lightning.”

The pain was like none Shan had ever known. His back arced, his eyes saw nothing but explosions of light. His body moved involuntarily, convulsing, slamming against the chair, then slamming his head against the table, pounding the table again and again. Tea and stomach acid dribbled down his chin. Liang laughed and pressed the instrument into his scalp again. The spike was in Shan’s brain, driving deeper and deeper.

Shan was surely dying. Surely no one could feel such pain and live. His hands on the arms of the chair jerked up and down. His skull was going to explode. The white-hot fire in his head ebbed and flared, ebbed and flared, as if someone kept blowing on its coals. His head slumped onto his chest. He was aware of nothing but the roar of his pain.

He jerked upright, moaning, as cold water was poured over him.

“We will talk about those nuns,” Liang growled.

Shan’s eyes had difficulty focusing. He made out Liang’s hand, adjusting the taser again. He thought of his son, and of Lokesh. This was the end. He was always going to die at the hands of some knob, he had just not known when.

“Anyone who aids that American bitch is a traitor to the motherland!” Liang snarled. “Anyone who—” His words choked away as the door was wrenched open.

A tall thin man with a hatchet face appeared, wearing the field uniform of a senior army officer, flanked by two rock-hard men in the fatigues of mountain commandos. The tall man grabbed the taser and threw it against the wall so hard it shattered.

As a guard moved to protect Liang, the officer gestured and one of his escorts flattened the man with a short, swift chop.

“My name is Colonel Tan,” the officer announced. “I am governor of Lhadrung County.” His voice was the low growl of a predator ready to spring.

Liang’s mouth moved but no one words came out.

Tan pointed to Shan. “That man is mine!”