CHAPTER FOURTEEN

They were twenty miles up the highway when Jigten flipped his cigarette out the window and cursed. “They’re following us. I slow down, they slow down. I speed up, they speed up.”

Shan leaned to look out the side mirror and his heart sank. The grey Public Security vehicle was the only car on the empty road but it was hugging the rear of their big cargo truck. “Pull over,” he told Jigten.

“To hell I will. We’re going to Chamdo,” the shepherd spat with unexpected vehemence. Genghis had been scheduled to make the run to the remote city but at the last minute had been seized with terrible stomach pains. Jigten, lingering in the garage, had readily volunteered to replace him.

“I admire your spirit but I doubt they are here for you.”

Jigten frowned but began to downshift. The truck eased to a halt with a hiss of air brakes. As Shan opened his door to confront his tail, the top of his head felt as it were burning again.

But there was no team sent to retrieve him for Liang. A solitary figure in a rumpled uniform climbed out of the car.

“Lieutenant Meng, we left your district miles ago,” Shan declared.

“I recall that your registration papers don’t allow you out of the county,” she replied.

“We have already established my scofflaw tendencies. But what’s your excuse?”

Something like defiance burned in her eyes. “Three people were murdered in my district. One of the men assigned to Liang says the bullet we took from the murder scene is just sitting on his desk. You were right. He never sent it to the lab. And yesterday there was a general notice, an alert for all Tibetan offices, about an official German delegation arriving in Lhasa to recover the body of a victim in a climbing accident three hundred miles from here. They took Rutger and dropped him off a cliff. The only one who is doing anything about solving those murders is you.”

“Those are dangerous words, Lieutenant. Especially for someone who’s been broken in rank already. Take my advice and go home. You’re only a lieutenant this time. A sergeant’s pay is hard to live on.”

Meng shrugged. “Less paperwork. More time in the field. I enjoy the fresh air.”

“You’ve been in Tibet too long. I sense a perilous contamination.”

“What are you doing?”

“You said it before. I am the only one interested in finding out why Jamyang and the others died.” He studied Meng. Behind the weariness on her face was a glint of determination. “Go home,” he repeated. “Go back and do whatever it takes to get Major Liang out of your district.”

“The highway’s being shut down for twelve hours starting at noon. Prisoner convoys. There will be checkpoints and guards everywhere. You’ll never make it through without an escort.”

“I fear for you, Lieutenant. I sense you are dangerously close to an antisocialist act.”

Meng leaned against her car. Her gaze became distant, aimed toward the far horizon. “I have a confession. I was ordered to make sure a canvas was tied around that statue of the Helmsman after you smashed his face. But I went back last night and cut the ropes holding the canvas, let it blow away in the wind. And I didn’t even leave. I sat on a bench and stared at him. I remember a story I heard once about an emperor with no clothes. No one would ever call him naked. A dog came up and peed on the pedestal. I laughed out loud. I felt more free than I had in years.”

Shan stared at the woman, not understanding the flood of emotion her words released inside him.

“I checked what Liang said about that monk in Rutok,” she declared. “There was no report of an immolation in Rutok. He lied to us, like you said. He started asking me about that dead lama, Jamyang. About whether I could find his body, about where he had been living, who his friends were.” The wind tugged out a strand of her hair. She let it hang across her face, then turned away as she felt his gaze. “Who was he, Shan? Who was that lama?”

“I don’t know. I am following his ghost to Chamdo.”

She had no reply.

“What exactly are you proposing to do?” he asked.

“I am going to pull in front of you and escort you to Chamdo. We’re going to find his ghost together.”

*   *   *

The journey to the northeast was much slower than Shan would have liked but after an hour, when they encountered the first roadblock, he knew they would never have had a chance without Meng. With a knob officer as an escort they were able to crawl past several groups of heavily guarded trucks. In the middle of the afternoon they were forced to stop not for another checkpoint but for a disabled truck that had broken down in the center of the road, blocking both lanes. Two dozen men in threadbare denim had been off-loaded and allowed to sit on the bank at the edge of the road.

Shan’s heart lurched as he saw the prisoners. Most were emaciated veterans of years in the gulag, wearing the dull, battered expressions of those without hope. Scattered among them was fresh meat from the east, new prisoners whose faces were tight with fear, not of the guards but of their fellow prisoners, the gaunt reflections of the creatures they would become.

Shan had wondered why so many truckloads were on the move that day, but now he saw the smaller truck behind the first, its open cargo bay piled high with shovels and picks, and stacks of the baskets used for hauling dirt and stones. There were special hard-labor mines for such prisoners, opened only in the summer, some in deep treacherous tunnels prone to cave-ins. Others would go to uranium pits where the radiation would cause every prisoner’s hair to fall out by the end of the first month. They were considered the lucky ones, for they would work in the open air and the guards tended to keep their distance for fear of contaminating themselves.

“Buddha’s breath,” Jigten gasped. “Look at the bastards. Half of them are walking skeletons.” He pulled out a cigarette and tossed it to one of the rail-thin prisoners. Another prisoner jerked forward, grabbing it out of the air. With a victorious expression he stuffed it into his mouth and ate it.

*   *   *

The grounds of the former monastery used by the Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute had been lavishly restored. Through the open gate at its entrance, statues of Mao and Buddha stood at either side of the courtyard, staring at each other, an elegant, newly built chorten in between. Shan and Meng, dressed in hastily acquired civilian clothes, watched from an outside table at a café across the street. Monks entered the Institute carrying books. Chinese men and women in business suits moved in and out of the gate. Tibetan townspeople passed through the gate to stand before the Buddha, sometimes draping a traditional prayer scarf over its wrist. At times the compound seemed to convey the air of a traditional monastery, at others it seemed more like a busy government office complex.

They sat in silence, finishing their tea and then accepting a new pot from the waiter. Shan found his gaze drifting toward the street traffic and the flow of urban life. A woman hurried a young girl in pigtails across the street. Two boys teased a puppy with a feather tied to a string. A Tibetan woman hawked hot noodles and momos, meat dumplings, from plastic pails covered with towels. A tall Tibetan led a donkey down the street, the black sash woven in his hair marking him as a Khampa.

“You said you had a son,” Meng suddenly said. “So you are married?”

It was part of her cover, he told himself at first. They were supposed to be a man and a woman having tea together. Then he saw the shy way she looked at him.

“No,” he replied. “Not now. Not ever I guess.”

“You guess?”

“My wife had the marriage annulled.”

“But you have a son.”

“We never spent more than two weeks together. She was in the Party, got an assignment in another city. By the time I was sent to prison she was a vice mayor. After my son was arrested as a drug dealer it was better for her to deny her connections with us.”

“So she got a divorce, you mean.”

“No. Too messy. My son and I would still be on her record. More politically expedient to get a judge in the Party to issue a decree for the records to be erased. It was as if we never existed in her life.”

“That must have been painful.”

Shan shrugged. “I was busy building roads and trying to stay alive on corncobs and sawdust gruel. It was years before I even knew.”

They sipped tea in silence, forgetting the gate for a long moment.

“Surely you…” Shan was not sure how to finish his query.

“Surely I was married? Yes,” Meng said matter-of-factly. “He studied literature and drama. He wrote very well but couldn’t find a job so he took one in a faceless building where they wrote public scripts for the government. Eulogies for Eighth Route Army veterans. Tales of worker heroes, real and otherwise. He was good at it, good at finding words to tug at the heartstrings of the proletariat. He got noticed. They promoted him. He began writing speeches for officials and news releases for the Party.”

“Propaganda.” The word slipped out before Shan could stop it.

Meng gave an awkward nod. “I didn’t like it. He didn’t like it, not at first. He drank. They kept promoting him and he kept drinking. That was the first time I was a lieutenant. When they assigned him to Beijing, they made me a captain, arranging security for officials. I begged him to quit. I said he had sold his soul, that he was better than that. He hit me.”

Shan lifted his cup and stared at her over its lip, wondering what it might have been like if he had met Meng like this, not wearing a knob uniform.

“I asked to leave the job, leave Beijing. They broke me and sent me to a stable in Tibet.”

“A stable?”

“Public Security jargon. Where officers who have fallen out of favor are sent to be mere workhorses, to plod along without hope of advancement. The jobs no one else wants, in some god-forsaken backwater. Baiyun’s a stable, though they told me to consider it rehabilitation, that my record once had been so good I might still might find advancement in four or five years. A few months after I arrived I got the papers saying he had divorced me.”

Shan forced himself to look at the gate again, to avoid her eyes. “You didn’t have to tell me that,” he said. When he looked back she was staring at a pigeon. She looked like a young, lost girl. He looked at her hand on the table and realized he wanted to touch it.

Her face hardened as she felt his stare. “It’s an interrogation technique,” she said, wincing as if she had bitten something sour. “Let the subject know we are all comrades in the same difficult struggle.”

They fell silent again for several minutes, watching the gate again.

“People go in and don’t come out,” Shan observed.

“There’s a chapel. People go in and meditate. They may take an hour or two.”

“It’s an Institute,” Shan replied. “Those carrying briefcases are not going in to meditate.”

“There’s an official public description,” Meng observed, waving a brochure she had picked up in the guesthouse they had registered at, two blocks away. “And there are official private descriptions.”

“I don’t follow.”

The lieutenant unfolded the brochure and began reading. “The Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute is building bridges between the Han and Tibetan ethnic groups that reside in this region of the People’s Republic. By teaching the oneness of our great peoples we build happiness and socialist prosperity in every home.”

“Socialist prosperity,” Shan echoed. “It wasn’t written by a Tibetan. And the first Han seen here wore the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army. This is Chamdo, traditional capital of Kham province, where Tibetan warriors using muskets were mown down by Chinese machine guns.” He frowned, not understanding why he felt the need to goad her.

Meng ignored him. “There are places on the Internet reserved for the government. They require special passwords.” She touched her cell phone and the screen came to life.

Shan cast a nervous glance around the cafe´ and leaned forward. “You know passwords for the Institute?”

“Public Security has a new database, like a reference guide to organizations that officers may need to know about.” She lowered her voice and read from the little screen. “The Peace Institute in Chamdo is a unique facility,” Meng recited, “where Buddhist teachers acquire the perspectives needed to lead their cadres into the future. Those who graduate from the Institute are awarded provisional membership in the Party. Some go on to serve the Motherland in strategic and often heroic capacities.”

The words raised a cold knot in Shan’s stomach. “Do they have a list of graduates?”

Meng worked at her screen as Shan sipped his tea. “It’s classified,” she said uncertainly. “A secret even within the Bureau. The screen keeps going back to what the Institute calls its internal manifesto.” As she made a movement to turn off the phone Shan grabbed it.

The manifesto was short and to the point: “Tibetans are not born traitors, but taught to live the lie through the influence of ego and prejudice in the religious class. Our goal is to use proven socialist methods to correct the error of their ways, to help them overcome the tyranny of their tradition.” He pushed the phone back and looked away.

After a moment he drained his cup, then took off the lid of the little teapot, a sign that it needed refilling. When the waiter ignored it, Meng rose and carried the pot inside. The instant she entered the building he slipped into the crowd. He needed to be alone, needed to be away from Public Security. Jamyang had lived in this town. He needed to find his ghost. He needed to understand the terrible foreboding he felt about the Peace Institute.

Shan found himself at a bus stop, lingering in a crowd of children in school uniforms. He let the crowd push him as a bus approached, did not turn back even as he found himself going up the steps of the bus. He sat at a window, not seeing at first, not feeling anything except impossibly tired.

When he shook himself awake, the bus, nearly empty, was on the outskirts of town. Tracts of shabby houses were giving way to fields and arid pastures. He got out at the next stop, crossed to the stop on the opposite side of the street and sat on its plastic bench. He heard a laugh and turned, seeing the back of a tall Tibetan with shaggy white hair, dressed in tattered clothes, and for a moment felt the ridiculous hope that it was Lokesh. Then the man turned and saw Shan, lowered his head and hurried away.

The hill on which he sat overlooked the town. Chamdo was Tibet’s third-largest city but it was isolated, so remote that it was seldom visited by outsiders, and even those were permitted only in organized groups. It was the perfect place for the government to conduct operations out of the public eye. He saw the warehouse complex where Jigten was loading the truck, then located the long block of buildings that comprised the Institute, some of the best-kept structures in the city. Jamyang had been there, at the anonymous complex in the anonymous, remote city. He had left in a suit and reappeared in a robe.

An hour later he was back at the bus stop where he had started, studying its city map, tracing the shaded, anonymous square of land that comprised the Institute. He turned for a moment, and realized that he was looking at the tea shop, unconsciously searching for Meng. Another mystery kept nagging at the edge of his consciousness, the mystery of why she so unsettled him. It was not fear of her he felt when he was with her. It was fear of himself.

Retreating from the corner, he followed the side street along the western wall of the compound. A row of well-manicured houses sharing common walls stretched out in front of the wall. At the end of the first block he crossed and walked slowly, studying the houses. They all had the same hardware on the doors and windows. There was no way through them, no way around them. They were just a buffer, like a moat around a fortress.

He glanced down the street, mindful of two men in spotless coveralls leaning on brooms at either end of the block, then approached the nearest door. It was locked. The window by the door was covered by a curtain but he could see through a narrow opening in the middle. The house was empty. Pressing his head close to the glass he saw through a window at the back. Behind the house was another wall, perhaps eight feet tall, not visible from the street. Strung along its top was razor wire.

Shan hurried on, rounding the next corner, to the back of the compound, where the street was busier. He settled onto a park bench under a tree, studying the buildings at that end of the block. Here too were houses that appeared empty, that seemed to serve as outer barriers to the compound, but in the center of the block was a store of some kind, and across from that a small police station. Monks went in and out of the shop. He searched the faces of each, watching for Dakpo. His hand unconsciously pressed against his chest, touching the badge of Yuan Yi, the mandarin bandit.

“It takes up two city blocks,” a voice said over his shoulder. Meng was facing the compound as she spoke. “Nothing but old shops and businesses along the wall on the other side. All with signs saying they were closed for an urban renewal project. Except the paper is all yellowed and dried-up. Like it’s been there for years.”

“The main gate is the only entry,” Shan observed. “Everything else is locked up except for this one shop.”

Meng started across the street even before he rose from the bench.

The shop was dedicated to religious literature and memoirs of the Communist struggle. A poster of Mao’s calligraphy stood over a stand of little Buddhas holding the flag of the People’s Republic. They browsed as if they were a tourist couple, buying a package of the inexpensive prayer scarves that pilgrims left on shrines. At the rear of the store was a room identified by a sign as the library. Inside, a small display case held several artifacts from the original monastery and two larger cases commemorated the Chinese youth brigade that had captured it fifty years before. Their patriotic efforts, the display explained, had liberated more than two hundred monks. It was the uplifting explanation favored by propagandists. It generally meant the monks had been freed of their earthly existence.

A stiff matron sat at a desk at the head of a narrow corridor marked PRIVATE ARCHIVES, tapping the keys of one of the electronic mahjong games that had become so popular in China. During the ten minutes they watched, half a dozen men and women were admitted by the woman after showing identity cards in black leather cases. They were all Chinese, all with cool, arrogant faces.

Meng reached into her pocket and had taken two steps toward the desk when Shan grabbed her hand. “Our bus!” he chided, and pulled her out of the room.

“You fool!” Meng snapped as they reached the street. “I could get in. Those were Public Security identity cards. Somewhere down that corridor is a file with Jamyang’s name on it.”

“That game she had was for show. There was a keyboard on a shelf below the table top. She was recording every officer’s name as they went through. Five minutes after you walked down that hall Liang would have known you were here.”

The anger on Meng’s face changed to relief. “Ah yi!” she muttered. “Thank you.” She looked down and grinned. Shan was still gripping her hand. He flushed and pulled away.

They sat on the bench again. “There’s no need to go inside,” Meng ventured. “We know what they do.”

“Indoctrinate wayward monks.” The words were like acid on Shan’s tongue.

“They redirect those who have strayed from the ever-correct path of socialism.”

Shan would have been repulsed by Meng’s words were it not for the bitter tone with which she spoke them.

He watched a group of four men leave the shop, two Chinese and two older Tibetans in robes. “This is not about political calibration,” he observed. “There are camps that do that. This is different. This is for very special training.” Two limousines pulled up and deposited half a dozen Chinese men near the door.

“It’s like a private club,” Meng observed. As she spoke the group of four who had left the Institute walked by them. A gasp of surprise left Shan’s throat. He shot up and followed, getting closer. The robes of the two Tibetans were loosely belted. Hanging from the belts of each, like trappings of a uniform, were three identical items. A set of red rosary beads, a small ornate pen case, and a bronze wedge-shaped flint striker, identical to that used to kill the Lung boy.

*   *   *

The sun had been down for at an hour when Shan returned to the guesthouse. He had declined the evening meal, leaving Meng alone while he searched the shrines of the town for Dakpo. He climbed the wooden stairs slowly, weary not so much from physical exertion as despair. The monk could have gone on a pilgrimage, Meng had suggested. But not on a moment’s notice, Shan had explained, not in a rush to return by the full moon. Dakpo would not have had travel papers. More likely, he had been picked up, and was just a number in some distant detention center by now. The full moon. It was only a few days away now. Shan paused, then pulled out the note on which he had recorded the dates given to Lung Ma by Jamyang. One date, the date for the monk’s test run to Nepal, had already transpired. The last date was the date of the full moon.

He washed, then secured Yuan Yi’s badge in the bottom of his pack. He settled onto his bed but knew he could not sleep, so he rose and lifted the window, taking in the sounds of urban life. The low rumble of trucks rose from the highway half a mile away. Dogs barked. A child squealed with laughter in a nearby alley. Someone dumped bottles in a trash bin. The scent of fried onions and rice wafted in the night air. Shan was suddenly famished.

“I told them to save our dinner.”

Meng stood in the doorway that connected their rooms, holding two tin boxes. She handed Shan the still-warm containers and disappeared back into her room, returned with another chair and a small table that she set below the window. She laid out a towel for a tablecloth and topped it with a candle in a soda bottle. “There’s a brownout. The front desk was passing out candles.”

“You’ve been busy,” Shan said awkwardly as Meng struck a match and lit the candle.

“Not really. I shopped a little and fell asleep on my bed.”

Shan looked away, aware that he had been staring at her. She was not the austere woman he was accustomed to. Her hair hung loose and long over a blouse of red silk. As she opened his box of food and handed him a pair of chopsticks, she offered an uncertain smile. “We’re just two travelers tonight, experiencing a strange city together.”

Shan did not recognize the flicker of emotion he felt, was not sure why he stared after her when she stepped back into her room for a thermos of tea.

“There was no sign of Dakpo,” he said between mouthfuls of dumplings and fried vegetables.

Meng poured him a cup of tea. “I saw a park this evening where a boy was flying a kite with an old man,” she said in a quiet voice. “When I was young my uncle used to take me to a park like that every spring. We would leave very early, have to take several buses. I remember getting onto that last bus that took us to the park and how most of the passengers would be children with kites. The kite brigade my uncle called it. I thought it meant we were all going to be soldiers. But I didn’t want to be a soldier. Once, I saw a soldier with a kite in the park and I ran and hid because I thought he had come for me.”

Shan realized he had stopped eating.

“What is it?” Meng asked.

“I don’t…” Shan struggled for words. He stared at his food. “I don’t know how to do this. I’m sorry.”

“This? You don’t know how to eat your supper?”

“I mean you and me like this.”

“I seem to recall we have sat in more than one teahouse together.”

“Not like this. Not talking like a man and a woman.”

Meng’s face tightened. “You want me to leave?” she asked in a near whisper.

“No,” Shan said, too quickly. “I’m sorry. I’ve done too many things. I’ve seen too many things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In the gulag you learn to let scars grow over certain places in your heart.”

Meng was quiet for a long time. It was her turn to stare at her food. She bit her lip. “Then we will just practice for a while,” she said at last.

The melancholy in her eyes almost took Shan’s breath away.

They ate in silence.

“I had two camels when I was a boy,” he heard himself say in an oddly parched voice. He drank some tea and tried again. “Little wooden camels. They were my treasures. My uncle had been a trader in Beijing and gave them to me one New Year’s. We would light candles and he would speak long into the night about the way Beijing was when he lived there. In the winter there would be long caravans of camels, two humped camels, winding down the streets carrying huge baskets of coal. Sometimes he would go out and the alley he lived on would be entirely blocked by camels waiting to be unloaded. The handlers were all Mongolians, and in those moments he said it was like the great khans who built the city had never left. He expected to see Marco Polo at the next corner. I loved those stories, and I kept those camels even when we were sent to the communes for reeducation. My mother told me to pack my extra shoes but I packed my camels instead.”

The words began flowing freely then, and they spoke of tales of their childhood, of schooldays, of youthful visits to the sacred mountains of the east, of anywhere but where they were. It was nearly midnight when Meng packed up the empty dishes and returned them to her room. Shan went down the hall to the washroom, then stripped and lay under his sheet, watching the moon through the window.

She entered so quietly he was not aware of her until she stepped into a pool of moonlight ten feet from his bed. She was wearing only a sleeveless undershirt.

“What is it?” he asked, pulling the sheet up over his bare chest.

In reply she pulled the shirt over her head. “I’m not so old, Shan,” she said as she let the shirt drop on the floor.

“You—you should probably go.” He had trouble getting the words out.

“Do you have any idea, Comrade, how many years go by without my even meeting a man I respect enough?” She took a step closer.

“Surely not me,” Shan whispered. “I’m so much older.”

“You’re not so old.”

“I feel old,” he said. “That’s gone from my life.”

“You told me you couldn’t talk like a man with a woman. Then we talked for hours.”

“That was different.”

She was at the edge of his bed. “Then we will just practice for while,” she said, and lifted his covers.

“This isn’t the way we should…” The words died in his throat. Meng had her own way. His hand trembled as she raised it and placed it on her body.

Afterwards she lay in the round of his shoulder. “What happened to them?” she asked. “To those two wooden camels.”

“My mother got sick that first winter. We burned them to make her some tea.”