CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lung Tso was strangely subdued when Shan arrived the next day to ask his favor. His question had come not from resentment but confusion.

“Why in hell would you want one of my men to drive along the valley in your truck?”

“Drive, and stop at places I mark on the map, playing with a shovel in the ditches for a while then driving on.”

“And where will you be?”

“He is going to drop me off at dawn behind the monk’s compound at the end of the valley. With one of your motorbikes. Bring the truck back to the stable in town at the end of the day.”

“You’re going to spy on monks.”

“There’s more than meets the eye at that gompa.” Shan stared at the smuggler with challenge in his eye. Lung still had not explained what business he conducted with the monks.

“We have a rule we try to follow. Only have one enemy at a time. That way you can keep an eye on him, make sure he is not creeping up behind you. But you, Shan, you just piss off everyone. You have no instinct for self-preservation. Who’s following your truck?”

Shan kept staring at him.

“That monk Jamyang. You said he is dead.”

“He died the same day as your brother. He convinced your brother to go the convent. He had me stop on the high ridge above there to confirm that your brother’s truck was there. Then we went to his shrine and he shot himself in the head as he sat an arm’s length from me.”

Lung grimaced. “Monks don’t kill themselves.”

“Monks don’t kill themselves,” Shan repeated. He gazed steadily at Lung as he extracted the folded paper from his pocket. There were two dates that were yet to arrive when Jamyang gave this paper to your brother. One was last week. What happened when you took your truck to the border last week?”

“Not a thing.”

“They have to examine papers, open a few cartons to verify contents.”

“They stamped the papers and waved the shipment through.”

“Because you bribed them.”

Lung said nothing.

“I need to know what you do for the monks, Lung.”

“Same thing we always do.”

Shan leaned closer. “What exactly are they smuggling?”

“Boxes. Not good business to look inside a customer’s goods.”

“What size? What did the monks tell you?”

“The monks come to meetings but they don’t do the talking. It’s those Tibetans from the other side.”

“Purbas?”

Lung shrugged. “I don’t know the Tibetan name for outlaws. They usually go across the high mountain passes but the army has heavy surveillance there now. They wanted a test run on a new route. That’s what happened last week.”

“Test run?”

“A couple big boxes.”

“How long?”

“Big enough for a cabinet. I figure they have altars and such they want to protect from Beijing.”

“The next shipment. Did they say to expect the same kind of shipment?”

“The same, sure.”

Shan slowly nodded. “Like I said. I need a favor.”

The leader of the Jade Crows frowned then disappeared into one of the farm buildings. As Genghis appeared, pushing a motorbike, Lung returned and stood by Shan, silently looking out over the abandoned barley fields, not turning when he spoke again. “If you don’t find the bastard who killed my brother then the Jade Crows will. We’ll go through the damned monastery monk by monk. We won’t be so subtle.”

*   *   *

Chegar gompa was a small, nervous shadow of its former self. It had been built for at least two hundred monks but as he watched from the rocks above Shan estimated it currently held no more than thirty. Half its buildings lay in ruin, still bearing the powder marks from the artillery shells that had destroyed them decades earlier. The little village at its front gate also bore signs of shelling, its structures showing a patchwork of repairs.

The wall that had once enclosed the compound like a fortress was in rubble on the north and east sides, giving Shan a clear view into the courtyard. A chorten, its white surface weathered to grey, sat at the rear center of the yard, allowing room for assemblies of monks and the ritual galas of festival days. But now that space held a new creation, a raised pedestal nearly as high as the base of the stupa, bearing a tall pole with the flag of the People’s Republic.

The brush behind him rattled and he turned to see an old woman stepping into the little clearing. She held a sack of grain in one hand, a stone pestle in the other. She began to settle by a worn indentation in the rock when she gasped, startled by his presence.

“I am only passing by,” Shan offered.

The woman seemed about to back away, then her gaze fell on the gau that had slipped outside of Shan’s shirt. “A pilgrim?” she suggested.

“Just a pilgrim,” Shan said.

“A pilgrim in the shadows,” the old Tibetan observed.

Shan took the words as an expression of suspicion, but then the woman sighed. “The only way a pilgrim can be safe in these times is to walk in the shadows like the rest of us.”

She settled onto the ledge and emptied the grain sack into the bowl in the rock. As she lifted her pestle she looked up at Shan. “It’s something my grandmother used to do when she was a cook for the gompa. Every village used to have a rock like this. I come up once a month, to keep the rock alive.”

Shan nodded. “My grandmother used to let me work the bellows on her stove when she made dumplings. She would tell me that no one could say they made their own dumplings unless they made the flour themselves.”

An uncertain smile crossed the woman’s countenance and she silently began grinding the barley kernels. Shan watched her with a strange ache in his heart. The sound of the grinding was like that of a stream flowing over pebbles. A wren lit on the ground and the woman extended a kernel on her palm, which the little bird readily accepted.

“Your grandmother fed many more monks than live here today,” he said after turning back toward the compound.

“They have a difficult time. Most of the monks refused to sign those loyalty oaths and the government was going to close it down, finish the demolition they started so many years ago. But Abbot Norbu came. He saved the monks. He saved the gompa.”

Shan looked back at the courtyard. “He saved it by raising a Chinese flag?”

The woman shrugged. “He saved it. He saves it every month,” she added with a nod toward a nondescript building just outside the gate.

Shan saw monks on the bench by the door of the building, then fought a shudder as a monk emerged from the door, followed by a grey-uniformed officer.

“Public Security comes every month?” he asked as the officer gestured the next monk inside.

“Sometimes the knobs. Sometimes Religious Affairs. Sometimes both.”

Gompas were audited. Gompas had periodic fidelity reviews. Gompas were required to certify allegiance and verify registration of all monks, but Shan had never heard of such a small gompa attracting monthly enforcement visits. “Why so often?” he asked. “What is so special about this gompa?”

When the woman looked up there was a perverse grin on her face.

“Perhaps not the gompa,” Shan ventured. “The village. What did the village do?”

“Ten years ago there was a farmer here whose children came home one day with Chinese names pinned to their clothes. When they told him the teachers would no longer allow them to use their birth names, he decided to start his own classes, at night, after the Chinese teachers were gone. By the time the Chinese found out about it he had become famous in the valley. When they came looking for him he retreated into the mountains, and they arrested a few who had helped him. He came down to help those in trouble with the government. He began guiding Tibetans across the border, past the army patrols. Public Security put a bounty on his head after he took his family to India. He is in the exile government today, an important official. Public Security knows he has relatives here.”

“Any who are monks?”

“One. A nephew named Dakpo.”

“Were any in the gompa arrested?”

“One. But he came back.”

Shan watched the monks nervously waiting on the bench, saw now how those who finished with Public Security reentered the compound and disappeared into one of the buildings. “Arrested for what exactly?”

“Speaking the way a Tibetan should speak,” she replied. Challenge entered her voice. She would speak no more.

Shan murmured his thanks, then slipped down the path toward the village. He stepped into a stable and studied the hamlet through a gap in its plank walls. On the slope behind a farmhouse, out of sight of the knobs, a woman hurried an adolescent girl away with a basket of grain, the reflex of a people used to being harassed by tax collectors. An old man with a wispy beard wearing a black vest sat upright on a chair outside the door of another house, his hand perched on a cane, his head slightly cocked toward the gompa as if listening for something. Two children ran by, chased by a puppy. A woman laughed as a goat pulled a piece of laundry from a clothesline and ran down the street. The old man did not react to any of the movements. He was blind, Shan realized.

He waited as one monk, then another, finished with the knobs, exiting the building without a word to their companions, looking straight ahead, their faces tight with fear. Many such knob squads worked under a quota, so that they would always find someone to be punished. Each of the monks gripped tattered papers in one hand. Examinations always started with a knob scrutinizing identity cards and Religious Affairs registrations, sometimes questioning every line anew.

He saw the despair on the faces of those who sat waiting on the bench. Some of them were young novices but most were old enough to understand that this kind of scrutiny meant the gompa was in grave danger. A few hasty signatures from Religious Affairs and Public Security and all their hopeful prayers, their reverent memorization of thousands of lines of scriptures, all the flames of their offering lamps, would be snuffed out. Padlocks would be mounted on the compound doors. Prayers would be spoken no more, forever.

A thin clear note suddenly split the silence. The monk who had just finished his interview quickened his pace. Another note brought monks out of several gompa buildings. A monk stood by one of the inner doors, ringing a ritual bell. Several villagers hurried to the buckets by the entries to their houses, rinsing their hands and faces. Only the monks on the bench did not move.

The old man rose on shaking legs, leaning on his cane. Shan pulled his hat low over his brow and darted outside, reaching the man in time to steady him as he tripped on a stone.

The blind man turned his head only slightly, hesitating. “You’re a stranger,” he said in a neutral tone.

“Allow a poor pilgrim to gain favor, Grandfather,” Shan replied, putting his hand lightly on the man’s elbow to guide him.

The man sighed, then nodded. “My niece is in the pastures or she would take me. Just as well when these vultures come to town.”

“Lha gyal lo,” was Shan’s reply.

The little temple was lit only by sputtering butter lamps along the altar. Incense curled around a simple bronze Buddha. In a voice as thin as the smoke, a monk below the altar read scripture as Abbot Norbu stood silently beside him. The assembled monks and villagers murmured responses then, when the reading was done, Norbu led them in a long mantra. The words were pronounced softly at first, in the near whispers Shan usually heard in such rituals but then to his surprise, the blind man beside him lifted his bowed head and interrupted, speaking a new mantra, more loudly toward the ceiling. Shan watched in confusion as the voices of the others faded, then joined him. As the volume rose, seeming to take on what seemed almost a defiant tone, a monk rose and pushed a bolt on the door. Norbu cast a nervous glance toward the door, then pushed aside a dark swath of felt hanging below from the altar and reached into the shadows, extracting an ornate silver bell with a dragon elegantly worked around its handle. A shiver of excitement coursed through the congregated monks as Norbu bent again and pulled out another deity which he set beside the Buddha. It was a morbid, frightful image of a bull-headed god holding flayed human skins and skulls. The image unmasked by Norbu was one of the most fierce of the protector demons. Norbu reached behind the altar for a cloth that he draped over the figure. It was the flag of free Tibet.

Shan glanced back with worry at the locked door. Not only would the officials outside be livid if they knew of the ritual in the little chapel, they would violently disrupt it and arrest those leading it.

Norbu took up the chant himself now, but not as a leader. He made his way to the rear of the little hall, reached the other side of the blind man, and lowered himself to the stone flags like the rest of the devout, looking up to the blind man.

The old man Shan had helped into the chapel was more than some energetic worshiper. The abbot was paying him homage. The blind man’s vest had fallen open and Shan saw now the gau that hung from his neck. A band of maroon cloth was tied around the amulet, the sign of a former monk, or an illegal monk. As he gazed into the man’s serene face and listened to the quiet fire in his voice, Shan knew he had been more than a monk. He had been a lama, a teacher, a leader who was now healing the wounds of the monks.

Shan ventured a glance toward Norbu. He understood now the affection, the fierce loyalty, the monks felt toward their abbot. He knew the words to say to appease Public Security, but alone with his flock he dropped his pretense. He nurtured the old ways, kept alive the spark that Beijing tried so hard to extinguish. He did so, moreover, in a village that was obviously under close scrutiny by the knobs. What he did was reckless but it clearly endeared him to his flock. They would tolerate a Chinese flag and loyalty oaths in the open because they knew what happened when the chapel door was locked.

As the ritual concluded the abbot rose, hid the bell, the demon, and the flag, then led the monks outside. Shan lingered until the chamber was nearly empty, then approached the altar where Norbu’s attendant Trinle was lighting fresh butter lamps. Shan silently began to help.

“I thought I was leading the blind man,” he said after a few moments. “But now I know he was leading me.”

Trinle glanced outside before replying. “It is very brave what he does,” the monk offered. “Just coming back here was brave.”

“Back here?” Shan asked, confused.

The monk kept working as he explained. “He got ten strings for opposing the loyalty oaths. Some would have just lost their robes. But they have to make an example when it’s an abbot. They let him out early.”

Shan stared at Trinle in confusion. Ten strings. When an imprisoned monk left followers or loved ones behind they would try to send a new rosary each year. But no one got early release for opposing loyalty oaths. “How early?”

“He went blind. It was a grand day for us when Norbu first appeared, with the dragon bell in one hand and old Patrul in the other.”

“Patrul was the abbot of this gompa?”

The monk paused and nodded. “It’s not enough to just say abbot. Patrul was one of the old ones. One of the original ones,” he said, meaning the blind man had been a holy man in old Tibet, before the Chinese came. “The only one most of us have ever met.”

There was much more to Chegar gompa than met the eye.

“I am called Shan,” he said. “You are Trinle. I met you and Dakpo with Abbot Norbu at Thousand Steps.”

The monk nodded again. “I saw you sometimes with Jamyang at the old convent. Is it true he has thrown his face?”

“He died the same day as the abbess and the others.”

Trinle gave a small sigh of despair. “Truly the gods were looking elsewhere that day.”

“It was a bad day,” Shan agreed. “None of those who died were prepared. They are owed the truth about why they died.”

Trinle studied Shan a moment. He recognized the invitation in Shan’s words. “That is government business. Monks are taught to stay away from government business.”

“For a place that stays out of government business you have a lot of government visitors.”

Trinle straightened and fixed Shan with a sober expression. “The best way to deal with evil demons is to bring them among demon protectors.”

Shan returned his gaze. “The demon who killed the abbess and the others won’t come willingly. Help me find him.”

Trinle cast a worried glance toward the door. “This is a place of reverence. Why would you look here?”

“Because someone in a monk’s robe was there that day. He was the killer.”

Trinle stared in disbelief. “No. I could put on one of those grey tunics. It wouldn’t make me a knob.”

“Fake monk or real monk, all the gompas and convents will take the blame when the government discovers it. It was someone convincing, someone who looked at ease in a robe. A Tibetan with the close-cropped hair of a monk. Tell me, Trinle, has anyone left the gompa in the past year?”

The question seemed to trouble Trinle. “One went across.”

“You mean he died?”

“Across to India. He is safe now, has a job in the Dalai Lama’s government.”

Shan reminded himself that Chenmo had spoken of purbas in the valley, the resistance fighters who came from India. Chegar had a monk now in the exile government. The close scrutiny of Public Security was beginning to make more sense.

Outside, a loudspeaker interrupted the quiet of the courtyard, first with a burst of static, then with a repetitive call for a monk to report to the gatehouse. Shan recognized the name. Dakpo.

Trinle stepped to the entry and edged his head around the doorway to glance furtively into the courtyard. The voice on the speaker grew impatient as it called again for the monk. Trinle’s face clouded.

“Dakpo is missing?” Shan asked.

“He isn’t here.”

Shan considered the monk’s worried tone. “You mean he left without permission.”

As Trinle watched the activity in the courtyard he gripped the door frame as if to steady himself. Monks were hurrying into buildings. “He has duties elsewhere. If the abbot doesn’t calm them down, they will search every room.”

“And they will find contraband,” Shan asserted.

Trinle turned to Shan with challenge in his eyes. “We of Chegar gompa are true monks.”

There was something in his tone that unsettled Shan. Every gompa harbored secret, illegal photos of the Dalai Lama. Now he knew Chegar sometimes even displayed a flag of independent Tibet. Trinle seemed to be speaking of something else.

Shan looked back to where the demon protector was hidden. It was very old, very valuable. “If they come searching, put that protector deity on the altar and drape it with prayer scarves. They won’t know what they are looking at.”

Trinle considered Shan’s words a moment, then nodded. Shan stepped back out into the courtyard.

Norbu was speaking urgently with another monk near the gate. Shan slipped along the shadow of the opposite wall, keeping his head down, mingling with the handful of villagers who were paying homage, pausing as they did at the shrine stations along the wall. He heard only snippets of the abbot’s conversation. Norbu was clearly upset.

“How long?” the abbot demanded. “How long has he been missing?”

“He left two nights ago. After midnight.”

Shan ventured a glance toward the monk. He was clearly frightened. Norbu kept the gompa safe from Public Security by maintaining tight control. One errant monk could tip the balance.

Shan stepped closer.

“Perhaps he went on a pilgrim’s path, to visit the shrines,” the monk suggested.

Norbu muttered something like a prayer under his breath. “He is on a mediation retreat in the mountains,” the abbot declared more loudly, as if rehearsing the line. “When he returns he will gladly renew his loyalty oath.” Norbu straightened his robe and stepped back to the waiting knobs.

Shan kept his head down as the officers converged upon the abbot, slipping out the gate and into the village.

As in many such gompa villages, the old pilgrim paths converged near the gate. Without thinking Shan found himself pausing at the small stations along the main road, many of them nothing more than cairns of mani stones. It was what he and Lokesh would do, and he realized again how much he missed the old Tibetan. The past few months, when they had been together nearly every day, had been a blessing and he guarded himself against expecting he could go back to that simple, peaceful routine when the turmoil in the valley subsided. The troubles might never subside. The valley as it had been for centuries was not going to survive, and its demise would widen the gap between Lokesh and himself.

As he reached the edge of the hamlet he became aware of a low steady rattle coming from the long timber structure that had no doubt once been a barn for the gompa. With cautious steps he entered, following the sound to a stall at the back where the Tibetan woman who had been grinding flour now spun a handheld prayer wheel. She faced the deeper shadows at the rear of the stall. It took Shan a moment to make out the old man. Patrul sat cross-legged on a low table, his sightless eyes cast downward, looking like an altar statue more than a living human. Before him, like an offering, lay an aged brown mastiff.

Shan said nothing, did not move, did not want to cause the woman to break the rhythm of her wheel. Patrul’s hand left his mudra long enough for him to gesture Shan to sit.

“Your Tibetan is good,” the old man declared. “I have always been able to sense a Chinese. But not you. Why do you suppose that is?”

“I have been immersing myself in good Tibetan mud for the past few months.”

The blind man’s smile was serene.

“Rinpoche,” Shan said. “I had a friend, a hermit who passed over suddenly last month. He needs my help.”

Shan knew better than to expect a quick reply. The old man looked down as if studying his fingers with his blind eyes, then rested his hand on the head of the big brown dog, who instantly opened its eyes to stare at Shan. He had the uncanny sensation that the old lama was looking at him through the animal’s eyes.

“Jamyang was my friend too,” the old teacher said. “First came the news of his death. Then the others. It was a storm of death that day.”

“They still need us,” Shan said. He found himself addressing the dog.

“We still need them.”

Shan paused over the words. They were the perfect words, the exact thing that needed to be said. “I think the deaths were connected,” he offered.

“The deities needed them all elsewhere, all at once.” It was the old abbot’s way of agreeing.

“A monk was at the convent when the abbess and the other two died.”

The dog blinked.

“Are you some kind of policeman?” the blind man asked. The woman stopped moving her wheel.

“I am a pilgrim.”

“He is the one who digs ditches with Lokesh, Rinpoche,” the woman interjected.

The old man’s face brightened. “You almost died saving that lamb trapped in quicksand. They say the mud was nearly up to your shoulders.” A strange wheezing noise came from his throat. It took a moment for Shan to recognize it as a laugh.

“That lamb and I weren’t meant to die that day.”

“You gain much merit in doing such things.”

“Lokesh said in time I will find that the lamb saved me.”

The former abbot slowly nodded. “A man can easily put on a robe. It could mean many things.” They were talking about the murders again.

“Where is the monk Dakpo?”

The dog raised its head.

“Dakpo has gone beyond the mountains. He knows he must return before the full moon.”

“You mean India?” Dakpo had family with the exile government, Trinle had said.

“The other direction.”

Shan puzzled over the words. The other direction was north, or east, deeper into Tibet. The full moon was in five days. Dakpo had confided in Patrul, but not Norbu.

“Why,” he asked hesitantly, “would he leave without the abbot’s permission?”

“Without the government’s permission,” Patrul said, as if correcting him. Some monasteries, Shan reminded himself, had to secure government permission for its monks to travel. Dakpo had not wanted the government to know. Or was it that he didn’t want Major Liang to know?

“Rinpoche,” Shan asked, “you said Jamyang was a friend. Was he a new friend or an old friend?”

“We weren’t sure, he and I.” It was a very Tibetan answer. “When he came to the valley he traveled all the pilgrim’s paths and found me on one up on the mountain. He spent the day with Dakpo and me, praying, cleaning old shrines along the paths, and I invited him to come to the gompa. He declined, said he had become a creature of the high paths, like the wild goats. He said he felt a great affinity for our valley, as if he had been here before. I reminded him that over the centuries many gentle spirits like his had lived at our gompa. He wasn’t certain that day but as time went by he seemed to be convinced he had been here previously, that he had some duty from another time that he still owed the gompa.”

“He said that? A duty?”

The old man offered another serene smile as he turned to stroke the dog. “I told him the devout owed a duty to all of Tibet.”

“To all of Tibet, wherever it is located,” Shan ventured after a moment.

Patrul turned back with surprise on his face. It seemed his eyes were alive again. They fixed Shan with an intense gaze, fixed not on his face, it seemed, but something behind his face. “Once in Tibet there were earth-taming temples to subdue the demons that threatened it. They are lost to us today, but there are new ones, secret counterparts to the old.” When he leaned forward the woman stopped spinning her wheel. His final words came in a low plaintive whisper. “Are you the demon tamer we have prayed for, Shan?”

*   *   *

Shan left the motorbike hidden among rocks and made the long climb to Jamyang’s shrine. The visit to the monastery had been strangely unsettling. Patrul had been trying to tell him that Chegar had a secret connection to Dharamsala. The trail of a murderer had led him to Tibetan freedom fighters. He had no heart for exposing a killer if it meant also exposing more dissidents. But Liang would relish the opportunity. Revealing a killer in a nest of dissidents would earn him another promotion.

He paused at the intersection of two trails, recognizing the old pilgrim’s path. His last hours with Jamyang continued to haunt him. Words had been spoken that he had not understood, then or now. From where he stood he could just glimpse the little flat where Jamyang had asked him to stop, where the lama had prostrated himself to the mountain. Shan put his hand on a cairn of mani stones, lingering for a moment as if to consult them, then turned onto the path.

When he reached the flat he stepped to the nearby road, trying to reconstruct each of Jamyang’s movements when he had asked Shan to stop his truck there. The lama had warned Shan that he did not understand the dangers of the valley, echoing Shan’s own words. He had asked to stop at the cairns where pilgrims communed with the powerful mountain that protected the valley. The old abbot had said Jamyang felt a connection to the valley, as if he owed it something. He had prayed at each of the cairns and … Shan froze. As the wind lapsed for a moment he heard a new sound, a low, quick murmuring coming from over the edge of the drop-off.

Shan warily approached, seeing now how one end of the prayer flags Jamyang had left had blown out of its anchor and was dangling over the edge. He stared for a moment in disbelief as he saw the white-haired figure huddled on the steep slope at the end of the strand of flags, then carefully climbed down to join him.

Lokesh was tightly clutching the last of the flags in the strand. He nodded as Shan sat beside him. Shan had come to view the silence that often preceded Lokesh’s words as something of a benediction, a way of building reverence before speaking.

“It was always going to be the way of his life,” the old Tibetan said at last. “There was never a chance you could change that.” He spoke as if Shan needed comforting. “Chenmo and Ani Ama came. They are with the American,” he added, acknowledging the question on Shan’s face.

Shan looked back at the flag. Lokesh was again doing exactly what Shan was doing, except in a totally different way. The old Tibetan had gone to the flags to understand Jamyang. Shan had been in a rush with Jamyang, had not paid attention to the lama’s flags, assuming they were traditional mani mantra flags. Now as he lifted one he saw something unexpected, an intricately rendered, unfamiliar deity.

“There are thirty-five flags,” Lokesh said, as if the number were significant. “I saw him working on these. I thought it was for the shrine.”

Shan examined another flag, and another. Each of their images was different, each a painstakingly rendered image of a deity of a different color or shape. Each would have taken hours to complete.

“This would have been the first one,” Lokesh explained, pointing to the white-bodied, highly ornamented deity at the end of the twine. “Vajrasattva. This is how it begins,” he added, pointing to the words inscribed below the image.

“Namo gurubhay, namo Buddhaya,” Shan read, then looked up in query.

“Some call it the refuge prayer, others the prayer of remorse. It is the beginning of the ritual, invoking the first of the Confession Buddhas. There are thirty-five in all. Each must be invoked to purify corruption. Scores of thousands of mantras must be offered to empower each. I remember in the last month how tired Jamyang always seemed.”

Shan nodded. “He was going without sleep to complete this.”

Lokesh gazed upon the anchor deity again, as if in silent prayer, then sighed. “We should go up. We should fasten the flags as Jamyang intended.”

Shan rose and put a hand out to help Lokesh up the slope. They tied the strand tightly around the biggest stone they could find and placed it on top of a cairn. He gazed on the flapping flags, ashamed that he had not paid attention when he had been there with Jamyang, ashamed too that he not seen the lama’s need for confession earlier. He reached and touched one of the flags. “I have seen this one, or a bigger one like it. Jamyang kept it by his altar.”

Lokesh stretched the flag and examined it. “There are gods for confession of theft, of lying, of sacrilege,” he said, pain now entering his voice. “But this one”—he looked up at Shan with a lost expression—“this one is for killing.”

After a long moment the old Tibetan settled onto folded legs in the center of the square defined by the cairns, as if to continue the dialogue Jamyang had started with Yangon, the sacred mountain. Shan knew better than to persuade him to come with him. He turned and headed back to Jamyang’s shrine.

He was not sure why the shrine drew him, not sure when he arrived why he felt the need to clean the offerings again. Halfway through the task he realized he had stopped and was staring at the carved deities. “I’m sorry,” he said. The words came out like a sob. More than ever he felt he had let Jamyang down, had failed the Tibetans. The murders were going to be used to destroy the valley, to sap the essence that made it so important to Tibetans. He looked down the slope. Part of him still seemed to be searching for Jamyang’s ghost. He was more confused than ever about who Jamyang was, but knew now that he had felt great anguish in his final days. If Shan had only seen it, perhaps he could have spoken with the lama, helped him find a path other than the day of death.

He finished cleaning the offerings, checked to confirm that Yuan’s ancestral tablets were still in the little cave, then found a patch of grass above Jamyang’s shrine, where he could gaze on the sacred mountain and let the wind scour his pain. As he closed his eyes memory swept over him.

*   *   *

The visiting chamber was deliberately kept unheated in the winter, to encourage visitors to spend less time with their imprisoned family members. Shan and Ko had shared the room with an aged woman and her skeletal-looking husband, who spent more time coughing than talking, until she had given up and just murmured mantras beside him.

Shan remembered details, every detail of every minute in that room, etched in his memory. They came back unexpectedly, unbidden, often unwelcome.

“We were digging a roadbed when one of the men found a nest of beetles,” Ko said. His voice was always very low, conditioned by years in cells. “He tied them in his sock and sold them that night, for men to mix in their porridge the next morning.” In his own time Shan had seen many prisoners mix insects into their gruel, for the added protein. “I bought one, a big fat black one, for a purple stone I had found. But that night a lama started talking. He said the souls who had the hardest times as humans sometimes came back as beetles. He took out one of the bugs and began reciting a mantra to it. The thing just looked at him at first, never moved, then damned if it didn’t put its front legs up, together, like it was praying. In the morning all the Tibetans went over to the wire and released their beetles. They looked at me and I made like I was going to eat my beetle. They cried out and starting offering me new stones for my big boy. Red stones, yellow stones, blue stones. That lama didn’t offer anything. He just came over and touched a finger to my forehead.”

“What did you do?” Shan asked.

“I let the little bastard go. All those stones would have just weighed down my pockets.”

They stared at each other in silence. Then Ko grinned and Shan grinned back, one prisoner to another.

*   *   *

“I was hoping I might find you here.”

Shan stirred from his dream to find Professor Yuan sitting beside him.

“I used to go up on the roof of our apartment building in Harbin when I wanted to contemplate the world in privacy.” He gestured to the broad landscape of rich rolling hills, with the majestic Yangon towering behind them. “On the whole I think I prefer this to smokestacks and highways.”

“Your tablets are safe for now, Professor, but I can’t be responsible for them. Others could come.”

Professor Yuan ignored Shan’s words. He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a rolled-up towel. It was tattered and needed washing but he treated it like a treasure, straightening it on his lap with great care. “He was one of a noble few, our Yuan Yi. A censor, a very senior censor in the court of the Kangxi emperor. You no doubt know about the censors.”

“Scores of thousands of officials ran the empire and a few hundred censors watched over the officials to keep them honest.” The current government had perverted the term, but once censors had been the elite of government officials.

“Exactly.” Yuan lifted the towel in his hands, working his fingers into its seams. “Service in government was a sacred trust to such a man. He used the truth against many corrupt officials and made many enemies in doing so. He was in his twentieth year of service when he was sent to investigate corruption in one of the northeastern provinces, in the emperor’s own Manchuria. He discovered the entire province was run as a criminal enterprise, that the governor himself was the ringleader, siphoning off a third of what was supposed to be sent to the emperor. When he returned and made his report to the emperor’s counselors in Beijing he was arrested and tried for corruption himself, sentenced to be beheaded. An old eunuch who was favored in the court came to his cell the night before his execution and told him the emperor knew of the governor’s corruption but could not act against the governor because the governor was the emperor’s strongest supporter in the region. The emperor asked Yuan Yi to withdraw his report. Yuan Yi instead demanded to be executed the next morning to prove he stood by the truth.

“The next morning he was taken to a private temple the emperor used for ceremonies honoring his greatest mandarins, his most trusted advisers. An executioner was there with his sword. Yuan Yi was shoved forward to the block but only to see that his commission as censor was on the block. The executioner cleaved it with his blade.”

“Killing the censor,” Shan said.

“Yes. The emperor stepped out of the shadows and bowed to Yuan Yi. The gate through which mandarins left after receiving honors from the emperor was thrust open and the emperor escorted him to it. Politics prevented him from arresting the governor but honor prevented him from killing a man for speaking the truth. As Yuan Yi reached the arch he pulled off his badge and handed it to the emperor. Kangxi bowed to him and handed it back. Then Yuan Yi stepped through the gate and fled the capital. He found his way back to Manchuria and formed a group of men who began raiding the caravans carrying the governor’s riches. He spread the riches all over the province, to needy families, to temples, to schools. He was an outlaw the rest of his life, but the emperor would never sign the warrants for arrest sent by the governor. For the rest of his years he lived the life of the bandit, helping those who suffered at the hands of the corrupt.”

“The years have a way of embellishing stories, Professor.”

Yuan only smiled, then gripped the towel and ripped it apart. There had been two towels, sewn together.

Shan’s heart stopped beating for a moment when he recognized what was inside. It was impossible.

Yuan held up the secret treasure, a square of silk worked with exquisite embroidery. For hundreds of years, spanning multiple dynasties, there had been nine ranks of official mandarins, each with its own badge of office worn as a square of cloth over dark blue ceremonial robes. The peacock at the center of Yuan’s silk was the emblem of the esteemed third rank. Arranged around the bird were the clouds, peonies, and bats that traditionally brought good fortune to the wearer. Yuan was holding the badge of office his ancestor had worn nearly three centuries earlier, the badge touched by an emperor.

“A lesser man would have burned this after what the emperor did,” the professor declared. “But Yuan Yi kept it as a token of honor. He said his duty was to the people, that he kept the badge for all those who served the truth no matter what the government said. My family preserved a letter from him, for over two centuries, until the Red Guard burned it. My father used to read it to me. Yuan Yi wrote it as an old man to a grandson. In it he said the most important thing he had ever done was step through that arch, the Mandarin Gate, that the most good he ever did for the people was in leaving the government behind.”

Shan’s hand trembled as Yuan handed the silk badge to him. “My father would have been speechless to behold such a thing,” he said. “As I nearly am.” With a racing heart he held the badge closer, examining its intricate artistry, seeing also now butterflies and a sun, and a dark blotch that could have been a very old bloodstain.

“My grandfather would hold this and describe the processions of the court officials before the emperor,” Yuan explained. “I could close my eyes and hear the drums and smell the incense.” He held up his hand when Shan extended it back to him. “For now this is yours. I loan it to you, until the crisis in the valley is resolved.” He cast a pointed gaze at Shan. “It will not be resolved, my friend, except by you.” He extended his open hand downwards, toward the earth. “I say this with the mountain as my witness.” The professor was learning something of the Tibetan ways.

Shan had no words. “I am just the ditch inspector,” he said at last. “A very bad one, since I have neglected my duties for many days.”

“You are the one who keeps clear water flowing. Clear water keeps us alive.”

“I am the one who is arrested and beaten and tortured. I cannot be trusted with this. Liang would burn it, just to spite me. You think I can walk through that gate but I can’t.”

“You must understand something,” Yuan said in the voice of an old lama. “It isn’t valuable because it is so old. It is valuable because of all the risks taken for it, and with it, for so very many years. There are still censors that keep the government in check. We need them more than ever. I think, my friend, you stepped through that gate on the day Jamyang died.” Yuan handed the pieces of towel to Shan. “There is so little I can do. Let me at least do this. One of my great-uncles kept it on him in the last war. He said it made him bulletproof.”

“You think too much of me, Yuan. I can’t even understand who Jamyang was.”

The professor extended a piece of paper to Shan. “Sansan found this. The symbol on Jamyang’s paper. A hammer and a chorten.”

Shan studied what looked like a printout of a website page, with the hammer and chorten featured prominently at the top. He looked up in confusion. “The Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute?”

“In Chamdo. On the grounds of an old monastery.”

Shan shrugged. “He was trying to build bridges between people. The Bureau of Religious Affairs has many such places.”

“You misunderstand. Sansan dug deeper. There is no connection to Religious Affairs. The institute is an arm of Public Security.”

*   *   *

Lung Tso and Jigten were waiting with his truck at the stable when Shan arrived.

“That last date on the paper Jamyang gave your brother is the night of the full moon,” Shan stated.

“What of it?”

“You spoke about a young monk you dealt with at the monastery,” Shan said. “Dakpo. He ran away three days ago but he has to be back for the full moon, because that is when you have a truck taking a cargo for India. I think he is party to your secret business with Chegar. Where did you take him?”

“Ah yi,” Lung muttered. “You never stop.”

“Not until the killer is caught, no.”

“Damn it, Shan. My world is based on secrets.”

“So is the killer’s. Where is he?”

Lung glanced at Jigten, who waited by the truck. “Fine,” he spat. “Chamdo. He knew we run to Chamdo twice a week, to the warehouses where shipments arrive from the east. He was desperate to go, said he would help with the loading of the truck if need be. He borrowed some work clothes and rode in the back.”

Shan had somehow known. He pressed the badge of Yuan Yi, sewn back into its towels and tucked inside his shirt. “Then I am desperate too. When is your next truck to Chamdo?”