CHAPTER TWELVE

Tan ordered their car to stop when they crested the ridge that meant they were back in Lhadrung County. He gestured Shan out, then ordered his men to stay with the vehicle as they walked to a ledge that overlooked the valley.

Tan said nothing until he had lit a cigarette. “You’re a fucking mess. What did he do to you?”

Shan couldn’t stop the tremors in his hand. He stared at it a moment, then gripped it tightly with his other hand. “An experiment. He called it driving lightning into my skull.”

The colonel exhaled two sharp columns of smoke from his nostrils. “It has to do with the murders up here.”

“I don’t think they’ve been officially recognized as such.”

Tan ignored him. “With your unofficial meddling in these unofficial murders. Damn you, you can never leave things alone. It’s a Public Security matter. You know I have no authority.”

Shan recognized the ice in the colonel’s voice, knew the heat of his temper could burn hotter than any taser. He took an unsteady step and lowered himself onto a boulder. “A dead German. A missing American. If you are lucky you have maybe two or three weeks before foreigners are all over your county. First the embassies. Then the reporters.”

Tan inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “How many years does he have left?”

Shan’s heart sagged. Tan knew ways to torture him that Liang could never dream of. “Ten years. Ko has ten years left.”

“With one short message I could have him shipped to another prison. Manchuria. The Gobi. The jungle. If you started right away, you probably wouldn’t even locate him in ten years. But then you have no papers so you’d probably be picked up too.”

“I have the work papers you gave me.”

“Exactly. They would call my office. Everytime I hear your name I will have your son transferred again. When he’s released he will have no idea where you are. The two of you will grow old trying to find each other, wandering around China. Like one of those old tragic operas.”

Shan struggled to control his pain, and his despair. Liang would invent threats, just to intimidate those he questioned. Tan never made idle threats. He would do it. He would consider it his duty to do so. “The murders happened in Lhadrung County,” Shan said. “When the foreigners arrive, they will start with you.”

“We will not permit them to come.”

“You know those foreign reporters. They will just get in a car and start driving. Refuse them and they just get more persistent. You can’t imprison them. Turn one away and two come back. Someone will ask why the locals call the districts in the northern county Tan’s Hellhole. How many prisons do you have now? Ten? A dozen? They will discover your penal colony. Better hope some American politician is caught with a mistress that day, or you’ll be on every front page in the West.”

“Public Security knows how to deal with such things.”

“You of all people expect Public Security to find the truth?”

Tan frowned. “I said they would deal with it.”

“Liang is one of those who searches for the most convenient solution. You are familiar with the type if I am not mistaken.” The year before Shan had saved Tan from another overzealous knob who had jailed him for murder. Tan owed Shan his life, and hated Shan for it.

Tan gazed at him in silence, took a long draw on his cigarette, and flung the butt over the ledge. “I will leave you at the clinic in Baiyun. If you trouble me again I won’t even give you a chance to say good-bye to your son.”

*   *   *

The nurse who managed the clinic shook her head as she studied Shan’s hand. Every time she straightened his fingers they curled back, digging into his palm.

“There’s nerve damage,” she declared. “You should go to Lhasa for a scan. Who knows what damage there is to your brain.” She had cleaned the oozing burn on his scalp where Liang had pressed the taser.

“I thought perhaps a couple of aspirin,” Shan said.

“Does it hurt?”

“Like a blade is in my skull, twisting back and forth.”

The Chinese woman frowned. “You must rest. Take a week off. You could kill yourself if you push hard.”

He heard the door open behind him. The assistant in the office had been furious when Tan’s guards had shoved Shan in ahead of the half-dozen patients waiting there.

The nurse frowned and handed him an unlabeled bottle of red pills. “Go home. Let your family nurse you.”

“An excellent suggestion,” came a voice behind him.

Shan turned to see Professor Yuan at his shoulder. “Shall we go, Xiao Shan?” the professor asked with a sweep of his hand toward the door. Xiao Shan. It was how an uncle might address the younger members of his family.

“I can’t…” Shan murmured.

“You can,” Yuan insisted, and pulled him up from the exam table. “You will. We have a dilemma we need you to resolve.”

Shan followed in a fog of pain and fatigue. A quarter hour later he collapsed on a bed in the professor’s house, having swallowed a bowl of broth and two of the red pills.

When he awoke it was dark. A candle burned by his bed. He looked out at the moon. He had slept for at least ten hours. The scalding pain in his head was gone, replaced with a dull ache. He extended his fingers. On one hand they stayed straight, on the other they instantly curled back up. He tried to stand, and fell back on the bed. For a long time he stared at the floor as memories of his imprisonment returned, then he reached inside his shirt and straightened the wad of paper he had retrieved from the wastebasket. It was a blank prisoner assignment form. Meng had not thrown out his letter. She had performed a charade for the surveillance camera to save his letter to Ko.

From the sitting room he heard gentle laughter and the sound of several voices speaking in Chinese. With a strange awkwardness he approached the door, then hesitated, looking about the room as if for the first time. There was a dresser with framed photos of a much younger Yuan with his wife and daughter Sansan, several of Sansan alone. There were three sheets of graceful calligraphy pinned to the wall, lines from ancient poems, beside pegs hung with clothing.

He steadied himself on the back of a chair, fighting a new wave of emotion. This was how the home of a family looked. Never in Shan’s life had he had such a place, such a home, and he knew that he probably never would. He forced himself to look away, then opened the door, stepped out, and froze.

Four men and a woman, all in their late sixties or seventies, sat around the table. A pall of tobacco smoke hung over the candlelit room. A bottle of cheap rice wine and glasses were on the table, in the center of which were several dice and a bundle of sticks. It was a scene of his youth, when the older inhabitants of his block stayed up into the small hours of the morning, tossing numbers to consult the I Ching. It was a timeless scene, a fixture of Chinese villages for centuries.

Professor Yuan looked up from the table. “Xiao Shan! Please come sit with us! We are eager for your advice.”

As the professor introduced Shan to his companions Shan realized he had seen most of them before, playing chess or checkers in the town square.

“The hero of the hammer,” proclaimed the oldest of the men, a nearly bald man with thick horn-rimmed glasses. “You know, they wrapped a white canvas around the statue afterwards. In the moonlight he is the ghost of Baiyun.” He lifted his glass of wine to Shan. “They will replace him eventually. But because of you we will always see it as just another ghost. A noseless ghost,” he said with a wheezing laugh. “We salute you for being brave enough to do what each of us has dreamed of doing ever since they put that damned statue up.”

Shan silently accepted a glass of wine and sat beside the professor. “You mentioned a dilemma?”

“Our little society strives to better understand the old ways. I know you are well versed in tradition.” Yuan gestured to a long scroll of paper opened and weighed down with books at each end. The elderly woman was painting with watercolors on the thick parchment. The images progressed from skyscrapers and city blocks shaded with trees to trains and mountains, then yaks and donkeys. With a flash of excitement he realized she was recording the story of the Harbin exiles in the scroll painting style that had been used to chronicle events during the imperial reigns. He had seen the scroll before, when Yuan had hidden it behind his back to keep the knobs from discovering it. “We have been debating a point of court ceremony,” Yuan explained.

Shan looked uncertainly around the table. All of those present were older than him, some of them by decades. He reminded himself that the emigrants forced to move to the village had all been retired professors. “Society?” he asked.

“We call ourselves the Vermilion Society after the color of the ink reserved for the old imperial courts. Keeping old ways alive. Professor Wu,” he said, indicating the bald man, “prints up Sung poems and leaves them on doorsteps. Professor Chou,” he said, with a gesture to the woman, “organized a production of an old play from the Ming dynasty. We’d sweep old graves if there were any here. We try to remember things from old China and record them. There’re so few good history books left, and it’s been decades since a true history of China was written. There are wonderful things from the dynasties, things that need to be remembered.”

“The truest history,” interjected Professor Wu, “is that built on a thousand tales of the common man.”

From the kitchen came the sound of low coughing. Sansan stood in the shadows. Shan offered a hesitant nod to Wu. “In the People’s Republic that can be dangerous ground.”

The old professor’s eyes gleamed. “Don’t you know we are all here because we are dangerous people? What are they going to do to us? Exile us to Tibet?” Another raspy laugh escaped his throat.

Despite his pain, Shan couldn’t suppress the grin that tugged at his mouth.

The woman at the table held up a large sheet of paper bearing small sketches, the first of which was a bird with three legs, a hen in a circle, and a dragon.

Shan cocked his head. “Symbols of the emperor.”

Professor Chou’s face lit with satisfaction. “Yuan said you knew your history! We are making a collaborative painting of an emperor’s robe, then we hope to make an exact replica if we can find the silk. But we can’t agree.” She pointed to two more symbols, one of three dots connected by lines, one of seven connected dots. “Professor Yuan says there are three and I say seven.”

There was something inside Shan that rejoiced at the absurdity of their sitting here in the remote exile community of Tibet debating imperial customs. He paused, venturing into a musty corridor of his memory. “Professor Yuan is from Manchuria, home of the Qing dynasty,” he quietly explained. “The Ming emperors used a full seven stars to show the constellation of the Great Bear, though they called it the Bushel then. But when Qing emperors arrived from the north they abbreviated it to three. Apologies, Hsien Sheng,” he said to Yuan with a slight bow of his head. “Elder born,” it meant, a homage paid to teachers.

Yuan silently smiled, and urged Shan to drink his wine. The woman clapped her hands in triumph.

“You’ll have to decide about the beads always worn with such a robe,” Shan continued after draining his glass. “They were traditionally red coral beads but late in his reign the Qianlong emperor declared that white Manchurian pearls would henceforth be worn.”

The group gave a collective murmur of respect, then quickly followed with a energetic discussion of court ritual. When Shan volunteered that for years he had spent much of his spare time in Beijing exploring every nook of the Forbidden City, they filled his wine cup again and with great enthusiasm fired new queries at him about the proper order of ranks in imperial processions, ceremonies for erecting new temples, archery competitions, and a dozen other aspects of imperial life.

As Sansan brought in fresh tea the talk turned to ancient poetry and the old tales of heroes. “My favorite of all was Sung Chiang,” she offered.

Professor Chou, who explained she was a retired professor of literature, nodded. “The Water Margin,” she added, referring to the Ming dynasty novel about the rebel Sung Chiang, who forayed out of his marshland lair to defend peasants against injustice.

“History and heroes repeat themselves,” Professor Yuan observed.

Shan suddenly realized that everyone was looking at him, grinning. He flushed with color, then, mumbling an excuse, stood and fled out the kitchen door.

He sat on a bench set against the rear wall of the house, watching the moon rise over parched, spindly trees. His mind wandered, toward the mountains, toward the little cottage where he prayed Lokesh and Cora Michener were safely hiding.

“The most enduring myths are all based on fact.”

He started at the sudden words and looked up to see the professor’s daughter standing beside the bench.

Sansan continued without waiting for his reply. “My father says if you look hard enough in Tibet you can see the myths come to life.”

Shan said nothing, just moved to make room for her as she sat beside him.

“Robin Hood, bandit of the forest,” she said. “He was the Western equivalent of Sung Chiang, bandit of the marshes. They dared to defy the government, they brought justice when no one else knew how to find it.”

“I am no Sung Chiang,” Shan whispered.

Sansan seemed not to hear him. “In the city there is so much noise and clutter. Everything moves so quickly. It is easy to miss the important things. Here we have learned to cultivate the quiet, as the old Confucians would say, so there is always time for the important things. Here people speak of deities like they are next-door neighbors. They talk of myths as if they were just family histories.”

Shan turned to look at the girl. She had been the ringleader of the dissidents, the reason all the families had been exiled to Tibet. She looked like a young schoolgirl but spoke with the weary wisdom of one far older.

She met his gaze. “You make the people of this valley believe in heroes.”

“You confuse me with someone else.”

Sansan shrugged. “Then let’s just say you inspire them to action. You make me worry for my father.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He says we can’t stand by and do nothing.” She looked up at the moon with an odd longing. “We have very little money. He’s been eating only rice and putting money aside to buy books and ink and brushes for his calligraphy. He offered some of it, enough for a dozen books, to that lame shepherd, Jigten.”

A chill ran down Shan’s back. “For what purpose?”

“To translate a little journal Jamyang left with my father for safekeeping. It was like a trade. Jamyang kept our artifacts safe and we kept his writings safe. But it’s almost all in Tibetan. Jamyang was a complex man. My father says those murders must have had something to do with Jamyang, that he knows you must think so too.” When she turned to Shan there was pleading in her eyes. “He says the journal was meant for Tibetans but if they act on it they will be punished. He says he must understand it, to use the answers it provides. We will not sit back and do nothing when there are wrongs being committed among us. He says you have shown us.”

Shan sighed. “I am an example for no one.” His throat was dry, his voice hoarse. “He can’t…” His words drifted away as he recalled the tranquil bedroom he had been in. “He has too much to lose.”

“We have nothing to lose. The government liberated us by sending us here.”

Shan’s heart seemed to sag. “Surely he must understand. He has you. You have each other. You have a home.” He could not bear the thought of being responsible for the professor and his daughter being separated and sent into the gulag.

In the silence that followed he could hear the voices from inside, softly reading old verses by candlelight. He did not even realize the girl had left the bench until she stepped back out of the door, holding her laptop computer. She gestured him toward the little toolshed at the back of the yard.

Inside, she unfolded the computer on the workbench. The screen burst to life and she began tapping on the keyboard. A moment later, a scanned document appeared, in Jamyang’s familiar handwriting.

“Two dozen pages in all,” the woman said, showing him how to scan through the pages. “Some pinned together, some pages of different sizes, like he was just writing on whatever paper was available.”

It was not really a journal, Shan saw as he skimmed through the pages, but notes, random entries of life in the valley, of work on his shrine and the deities they uncovered with their cleaning brushes. One page was just a list of Tibetan gods and their protector demons. He pointed to a smudge of color in the top-left corner of the page. “What is this?”

Sansan ran the cursor over the page and tapped another key, magnifying the image. A Tibetan chorten was revealed in pale red ink, with a heavy hammer imposed over it.

A grim silence descended over them.

Shan rubbed the ache at his forehead. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he whispered uneasily “He was using whatever paper he could find.”

“A sacred Tibetan sign under a symbol of the Communist Party. Where would he find such paper?”

Shan did not answer. “What did Jamyang say when he gave this to your father?” he asked.

“Only that it was important. Or more exactly,” she said, as if correcting herself, “that one day it might become important. Later he told me I should scan it into my computer, just in case. I wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except—”

Shan completed her sentence. “Except he died.” He scrolled to the final page. It was a list of artifacts. A ritual dagger with a ruby in its pommel. A bronze trumpet. Three ritual masks with a detailed description of the demons they represented. He knew them. They were from the convent ruins, the very artifacts he and Lokesh had shown to Jamyang, artifacts Jamyang had helped clean and hide.

He slowly searched through the other pages. There were lists of ceremonies conducted by monks and nuns in the valley, with dates for each, as well as lists of shrines, most of them publicly known but some secret. There was a sketch of four young Tibetans blowing a long duncheng horn, with the caption “Sound of Freedom.” One page, obviously written in ink and pencil at different times, listed the names of monks and lamas under the heading “Chegar gompa.” Years had been written by many of the names, some as far back as three decades, some as recent as the year before. At the bottom of the page were three names with a circle around them. Abbot Norbu and his two attendants Dakpo and Trinle.

One day these pages would become important. “What was it your father and Jamyang spoke of when they were together?” he asked.

“History. Literature. Jamyang would translate some of the old Tibetan poems into Chinese. Sometimes they would speak of their own histories. My father’s teaching career. How we were accused and sent here. Jamyang liked to speak of his boyhood on a farm in the mountains north of here.”

“Did he ever speak of his recent past?”

“Not that I ever heard. We always understood he was a lama, a senior teacher. So he would have started as a monk at an early age, my father said.” She hesitated. “There was one night when a truck filled with Tibetans bound for one of the camps passed by the little grove of trees where we sat. Jamyang was sitting with us outside. He grew very sad. After a long silence he asked my father if he thought a man would be punished in this life for sins of his past life. My father just laughed and said Jamyang was confusing him for another lama.”

Shan paused at the last page. It read like a prayer, or a eulogy. “So young to pass,” it said, “so confused a spirit that is brought up with violence. You grew up in forests of bamboo and die among trees of flags. One hand on the knife, the other searching for your heart. Beware the prayer that brings poison. Beware the color you see.” Shan read it again, and again, each time growing more disturbed. It was about the Lung boy, whose body had scared Jamyang so. Beware the prayer that brings poison. Beware the color you see. Jamyang had known the killer was a monk.

They were not the last words on the page. At the very bottom, in a different ink, written later, were four more words. “Kaliyuga,” it said. “It has arrived.” The grief that surged within Shan as he read them was as real as that he had felt when he had held the lama’s dead body. Kaliyuga was the Tibetan word for the end of time. Jamyang had known that at least the end of his time had come.

“When was it?” he asked after a long moment, “when did he bring this to you?”

“Two or three weeks ago. He always came in the night. He brought incense sometimes.”

“Incense?”

Sansan gave a sad smile. “He knew I was often sick. Sometimes I cough and can’t stop for several minutes. He brought things, some from the old convent. I said we couldn’t take such things, but he said they were safer with us than in the ruins, that I needed them more.”

“Sansan, I don’t understand.”

She glanced at the door of the little shed, then stepped to the side wall and began lifting away planks. A double wall had been erected, a second row of planks that would be enough for a casual searcher to miss the narrow space they concealed. “Father at first kept his special things here, before entrusting them to Jamyang. The first time Jamyang gave us artifacts we just set them on the little shelf inside the compartment. Later he said he had a better idea. He worked in here alone one night, then brought me in holding a candle, and had me sit on the old rug.” She indicated a tattered piece of carpet, that looked like an artifact itself, then pulled away the final planks and held up her light.

Jamyang had built Sansan a shrine. On the lower shelf were offering bowls, several deity figures, and an incense burner. Above them was a faded, but still elegant thangka, a painting of the lapis god Menlha, the deity invoked for healing. In his left hand the blue deity held a bowl of nectar, the universal cure.

“He knew I was having a hard time getting my medicine,” Sansan whispered. She wiped a tear from her cheek. “He said this belonged to his uncle, who was a healer and who was known for making special cures out of gemstones and herbs. He said he wished he had such skills but that he did at least know no medicine would work unless the spirit was ready to accept it. He said I should light incense here each day and gaze at the lapis god. He said not to be shy about breathing in the incense, that in smoke and mist were where humans and god meet, that if I could awake the god then some of the nectar would enter my body.”

They stood silently in front of the altar. Shan realized he was meditating not so much on the deity as on Jamyang. The only time he had ever heard of the lama speaking of family was to this quiet, spirited Chinese girl. The words he had used echoed of regret. Shan looked back at the workbench. “He told you to scan that journal? He used those words?”

Sansan slowly broke her gaze from the altar. “Yes. It surprised me. I didn’t expect him to understand about computers. But that night he showed me differently.”

“What else happened?”

“He asked where I could get access to the Internet in town, if there was any place other than my house. I explained that sometimes I connected in the café, that sometimes the owner, another old professor, left the circuits on without controls when he left at night, and that he always kept the shop unlocked.” She cast a pointed glance at Shan. Beijing required those who provided public access to the Internet to record the identity of every user.

“Sansan, surely you don’t mean Jamyang wanted to use your computer.”

“That’s exactly what he wanted. And he knew about security controls. He said he would be able to conceal whose computer it was.”

Shan stared at the woman in disbelief. He wanted to shake her, to tell her to stop concocting such tales. But he saw her eyes, and knew she understood the weight of her words. Jamyang’s ghost was not the lama Shan had known.

“What did he do?”

“It was after midnight. I took him to the tea shop and started to wait outside but he told me to go. Like an order. He was not like a lama for a moment. More like … I don’t know. A soldier. He said he would leave the computer on the workbench here. I found it the next morning, with one of those khata scarfs wrapped around it, like it had been blessed. The owner of the café found another scarf hanging on his counter, with a little Buddha drawn on a napkin.”

The ache in Shan’s head was growing again. He had a sense of slipping away. Every truth he clung to was becoming an untruth. “Sansan, the owner of the teahouse was detained by Major Liang, for failing to control Internet usage.”

“But he’s back, Shan, everything’s fine.”

He looked at her in alarm. “That only means he cooperated, that he spoke about an unknown user who left a prayer scarf. It means Liang obtained what he was looking for, and it was not about the murders.” Shan looked back at the screen, at the disturbing image of the chorten and hammer. Nothing made sense.

There were times, Lokesh had told him, when the only way of knowing was not knowing.

*   *   *

Shan touched the side door of the police post, then withdrew his hand and sat on the step instead. He needed to see Meng, he wanted to see Meng, but didn’t know what to say to her. He could not stop worrying about Lokesh and Cora, knowing the grave dangers they faced, knowing how innocent each was in their own way.

He stared into the night sky and suddenly was with Ko again. It was the previous autumn and on arrival he had been taken to the prisoners’ infirmary, which was just another barrack lined with single cots instead of double and triple bunks. His son had a fever, an undiagnosed and untreated fever, with a violent nausea that let nothing stay in his stomach. Ko had been too weak to speak, and all Shan could think when he saw him was that this was the last time, that by his next visit the guards would have thrown his son into an unmarked grave and wouldn’t even be able to tell him where it was. For the entire visit Shan had just held his son, rocking back and forth with tears streaming down his cheeks.

He became aware that Meng was sitting beside him. He did not know how long she had been there. “If you hadn’t called Tan—” he began.

She raised a hand as if to cut him off. “He is not particularly pleasant on the telephone,” she said with half a smile as she extended one of her bags of sunflower seeds to Shan.

“The evidence from the murders,” Shan asked. “Is it here?”

“Locked in my file cabinet.”

“In the pocket of Lung Ma there was a metal object. I want to see it.”

“You know there are rules about handling evidence. I would have to make entries in the log.”

“Such rules are for taking evidence to trial, Lieutenant. There is never going to be a trial. You know that.”

Meng looked into the bag, as if searching for something. “I was a captain once,” she said. “I had a driver, access to special facilities for senior officers.”

He hesitated, not for the first time wondering about the part of Meng she always kept hidden. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I can’t ask you to put your career at risk.”

His words seemed to hurt Meng. “A triple homicide was committed in my district,” she replied. “I have a file.”

“You have a file,” Shan underscored. “Does Liang? The major came all this way but I am beginning to think the only file he has is on that American woman. You said he took the bullet. But I doubt you’ve seen a test on it. He doesn’t deal in evidence. He deals in fear and manipulation.”

“If all he wanted was a political victory,” Meng said in a hollow voice, “he could have declared that dead lama the killer, like you suggested. But he didn’t. He stayed despite telling us about his urgent business elsewhere.”

“He has to stay, because of the American.”

“He said he had to go to Rutok.”

“He said he had to go because of unrest over another monk who immolated himself. I haven’t actually heard of such a suicide. Usually the Tibetans are quick to speak of such things wherever they happen. It wouldn’t be hard for you to check.”

Meng said nothing. After a long moment she rose and retreated into the building. Shan finished the seeds in his hand before following.

The evidence, scant as it was, lay across her desk. Three bundles of clothing in plastic bags. The severed yak hair necklace of the abbess. The ankle holster worn by Lung, with his keys, cigarettes, and the piece of metal that had been with them. Shan took a pencil and lifted the tapered piece of metal through one of its two holes. He had seen it in the cigarette pack. It had a newly wrought feel to it, though it was clearly made to look old. The edge was tapered but not sharpened as a blade.

“Some old Tibetan thing,” Meng suggested. “The Jade Crows sell artifacts on the black market. He must have picked it up in the ruins.”

“A Tibetan thing, yes. It is a fire striker. Tibetan shepherds carried these for centuries, to use with flints. Lung Ma brought it with him. But it’s not old, not from the ruins.”

“You mean it is like a souvenir, something for tourists.”

“Something like that,” Shan said uncertainly.

“But why would the chief of the Jade Crows carry such a thing?”

Shan grabbed the fire striker and inserted his fingers into the holes. They fit perfectly. He made several strokes with his hand, as if striking a flint. Then he pushed the metal farther down his knuckles and made a different motion, an upward cut with the edge of the striker pointing out. “Did you see the body of the Lung boy who died in the truck?”

“I went out with the constables, for a death report.”

“He had taken a severe blow to his windpipe.”

Meng nodded. “The steering wheel crushed it, then his ribs.”

Shan slowly shook his head as he stared at the striker. “No. Either the windpipe takes the impact or the ribs, not both.”

“I saw his neck, Shan. It was crushed. It had a terrible bruise.”

Shan spanned the edge of the striker with his fingers then raised them, keeping them spread. “About that long?”

The color drained from Meng’s face. “It was an accident. Everyone said it was an accident. Routine. I saw the ruined truck. I just had to—”

“Overlook a murder?”

Anger lit her eyes, but just as quickly it faded into shame.

“They wouldn’t let you have the body,” Shan said, as if to console her.

“That’s no excuse,” she snapped. “I could have taken it.”

“From the Jade Crows? The Lung brothers would have loathed you for coming that day. They could have planned any number of distractions while they stole the bodies but they decided to assault you in that alley. If I hadn’t been there it would have gone even worse for you.”

“No excuse,” she said again, and lowered herself into her chair. “Why?” she asked. “Why would someone kill that boy?”

“Right now,” Shan replied, lifting the striker in his fingers again, “I am more interested in why his father had the murder weapon.”

*   *   *

Lung Tso was sitting at his table with a glass and a bottle of vodka when Genghis escorted Shan up the stairs. “I spent half a day with some damned officer from the internment camp explaining why the trucks they gave us were death traps, how the damned Armed Police had themselves to blame for that truck exploding like that. I told him it was just a matter of luck that the truck was only carrying some bags of rice and not a squad of his thugs.”

Shan stared at him in surprise. “You said that?”

“I said it was my patriotic duty to point it out. He wound up providing another truck, a better one he said. Instead of a thirty-year-old piece of shit I have a twenty-year-old piece of shit.” Lung studied Shan. “But I could just as easily been thrown inside the wire if someone had seen me ignite the oily rags I put in the engine, or if they had been organized enough for head counts to show they were missing prisoners. We’re finished, Shan. No more favors. Get out. Don’t make me show you my blade again.”

Shan ignored the threat. “You were ready to torture me because you thought I took something from your brother’s body. What did you think it was?”

Lung drained his glass. “I don’t know. That lama gave him something. I wanted it, to understand what happened. It can’t just have been that piece of paper. Sure, it showed someone was tracking our smuggling but that wasn’t enough to transform him. It was like the lama worked some kind of damned magic, the way he changed my brother.”

“When did Jamyang come back?”

“The day before my brother died. They went up to that shrine of his in the old stable. They were there for an hour or more, then my brother stayed up there another hour after the lama left. When he came back in he had something small wrapped in a piece of felt. He wouldn’t show me, wouldn’t talk with me.”

The fire striker gave a metallic ring when Shan dropped it on the table. “That’s what it was. The police had it.”

Lung picked the striker up and leaned with it closer to the lantern. “It’s some kind of monk thing.”

“No, just a Tibetan thing that happens to have prayers on it. It was used to kill your nephew.”

Lung Tso went very still. Shan returned his cold, steady gaze until he broke away to pour more vodka. He drained his glass again. “Tell me.”

Shan demonstrated how the striker could be used as a weapon to crush a windpipe as he explained. “He was murdered,” he concluded. “The killer staged the truck accident afterwards.”

“That fucking lama.”

“No. Jamyang somehow recognized the killer’s blow, somehow identified the killer, somehow got his hands on this striker. Tell me something. Why didn’t your brother go to the monks when his son died? Why the nuns?”

“You don’t ask a favor of those you do business with.” Lung’s eyes flared. “That damned lama.”

“Jamyang was helping your brother. Jamyang connected everything. He came and told your brother, told him to go to the convent the next day because he arranged for his son’s killer to be there. Just like he told the abbess of treachery at Chegar gompa. The killer wore a robe but it was not Jamyang.”

A small gasp from the stairway broke the silence. Jigten stood there, carrying a tea thermos, his eyes wide. He backed down slowly, into the shadows.

*   *   *

You don’t ask a favor of those you do business with. Like some distant echo, Lung’s words came back to Shan as he drove up the mountainside. The dead gang leader, the smuggler, had been doing business with a monk, and a monk had killed him. He pulled the truck into a small grove of trees off a rough, remote track, then sat in the shadows, beginning a half-hour vigil to make sure he was not followed before he ascended the narrow goat trail that led to the small valley above. As he waited the questions came like a flood. The few pieces of the puzzle he had found only seemed to make the puzzle impossibly more complex. What were the favors Lung had done for the monks? Why would Jamyang have sent both Lung and the abbess to confront the killer? How could Jamyang have possibly found the weapon that had killed the Lung boy? He would never know what had happened at the convent on the day of death until he knew the truth about Jamyang.

The American woman was sleeping on a pallet inside the small hut when Shan finally arrived. It was one of the remote, unused shelters that Shan and Lokesh had discovered when looking for lost shrines. The old Tibetan had a mysterious ability to trace what he called the spirit fixtures of such places, pointing out the thin stain along a wall that was the sign of incense having been burned beneath over many years, prying up what looked like random stones along foundations to show Shan the prayers that had been inscribed on them, discovering the rotted ends of twine around a branch or peg that had secured prayer flags in another century. He would clean off the old mani stones and renew such places with new incense and new prayer flags, even if it meant ripping up his shirt to make them. Then he would offer hours of mantras so the deities that dwelled nearby would know they had not been forgotten.

In his uncanny way, Lokesh had seemed to expect Shan. A pot of soup sat at the edge of the small brazier by the door. He did not ask about Shan’s imprisonment, did not offer an account of his travails since escaping out of the death pit, but simply handed Shan an old wooden bowl and poured in the soup. The old Tibetan laid another blanket over Cora, then lit a stick of incense in the brazier and stuck it in the stones of the wall above her before sitting beside Shan.

“I know a cave,” he said after a long silence.

Shan’s chest tightened. It was a conversation they had had before. Lokesh wanted him to leave everything, to go on a meditation retreat.

“I will go with you. We could take the American. Just two or three weeks. You walk too close.”

Too close to the edge, Lokesh meant. Other friends might speak of the physical dangers Shan faced, the torment he had endured as Liang’s prisoner, but not Lokesh, never Lokesh. He meant Shan was perilously close to tumbling from the true path, the enlightened path, the Buddhist path. Lokesh believed in finding the truth but also fervently believed Shan went too far when he interfered in events, when he became an actor in an unfolding mystery. Rescuing a lamb showed respect for lower animal spirits. Manipulating events and deceiving the government showed disrespect for his own spirit.

“Jamyang told us his story,” Lokesh continued. “It is but for us to understand it. He left us the sutra of his life. We simply need to learn how to read it.”

“It is what I am doing, old friend, in the only way I know how.”

“No. You ride with police. You speak with those who raid our farms. You attack statues. You invite Public Security to beat you. You have learned other ways, Shan. From where you stand if you lose your footing you lose all chance of being human again.”

The words tore at Shan’s heart. They were the words of a gentle Tibetan father to a son who had become so wayward he was in danger of losing his family. They were perhaps the harshest thing Lokesh had ever said to him. Human existence was a precious thing, won only after thousands of incarnations in lower forms, and those who abused it, for whatever reason, would sink to the bottom of that cycle.

Shan had no reply. He only stared into his now empty bowl.

After a long silence Lokesh gestured outside. “There will be meteors,” the old Tibetan said and, seeming to sense Shan’s weakness, extended a hand to help him up.

It was a rare evening, with a gentle breeze stirring the fragrant junipers, the stars shimmering in a cloudless sky. Shan lay back on the blanket Lokesh had stretched over the grass for him, longing for a chance to at least share another meteor shower with his friend, but unable to resist the fatigue that wracked his body. As his eyes fluttered closed he heard the faint murmur of a new mantra. He seemed to hover in the warm suspension just before sleep and a sad smile settled onto his face. This time, he knew, Lokesh was praying for him.