CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Shan awoke abruptly, his nightmare so real he flinched, thinking the touch on his shoulder was that of another prison guard’s baton.

“Shan,” Yuan whispered, shaking him. “She’s here, been parked outside for two hours. She’s at the door.”

He groggily followed the professor, tucking in his shirt, to the entry.

Meng stood in the dim predawn light. “We need to be going,” she declared.

“Going?” Shan asked through his fog.

“Have you truly forgotten what day it is? It’s the first Sunday of the month.”

Whether from fatigue or disbelief, he could find no words. He followed the lieutenant to her car and obediently climbed in, then stared out the window, strangely ashamed.

They had left the sleeping town far behind before he turned toward Meng. Her uniform was disheveled. “Did you sleep in your car?” he asked.

“Not much.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“It’s Sunday. Isn’t this what couples do on Sunday, take carefree drives in the country?”

“Meng Linmei, you really don’t. It won’t be pleasant.”

As if in response she tossed a paper into his lap. He slowly, painfully opened it. It was the letter he had written to Ko in Liang’s cell. “It was good of you to—”

“You look like hell,” she interrupted. “Get some sleep.”

He stuffed the letter inside his shirt and leaned his head on the window, watching the sky. Stars were blinking out as dawn spread across the sky. He watched the shadows retreat across the mountains.

Much later, he stirred at the sound of voices outside the car. Meng was speaking to soldiers. A security gate that blocked the road was being lifted. Suddenly he was wide awake, rubbing his eyes, then reflexively looked down as a patrol drove by. They had entered a penal zone. Arrows pointed the way to each of Colonel Tan’s hard-labor camps.

His mouth went dry as the 404th People’s Construction Brigade came into view. His eyes were unable to move from the long, decrepit barracks where he had lived for years, where he had met Lokesh and the lamas who had built him anew out of the broken, drug-dazed body that had been dumped there by Public Security. The shabby structures had become chapels to him. Many good and innocent men had died in them, and on the execution ground outside, men who still visited him in his dreams and nightmares.

Meng shook his shoulder. They were at the main gate, a guard leaning inside the window with a clipboard. “Your son’s name, Shan. They need his name.”

“Shan Ko,” he said, his voice breaking. “Barracks fourteen.”

The guard paused as he heard the name, then glanced pointedly at Meng and lowered the clipboard without looking at it. “Don’t waste your time,” he muttered.

“Is he or isn’t he a prisoner in the Four hundred and fourth?” Meng demanded.

“Of course he is. But he is in solitary. Locked up this past week. No visitors for those in solitary.”

Only when Meng cast a worried glance at him did Shan realize a moan had escaped his throat.

“We are coming in,” the lieutenant stated.

The guard shrugged and pointed to a strip of gravel inside the gate.

Shan did not argue when she told him to stay in the car. He watched the compound behind the razor wire, saw the rail-thin prisoners shuffling around the perimeter, saw old men too weak to walk being carried out into pools of sunlight, the Sunday rituals of the camp. This was no reeducation camp, this was where Beijing ground its enemies into dust. Shan found himself clutching the seat, as if part of him expected to be seized and thrown back inside the wire at any moment. It was always like this when he waited on visiting days. Some days he would pace back and forth in front of the gate, calming himself before going through. Once a prisoner always a prisoner.

It was nearly an hour before Meng finally returned, a guard at her side. “Only fifteen minutes,” she announced. “I’m sorry.”

As he climbed out he shot a confused glance toward her, knowing he should thank her. Here in the prison, with her standing by him in her uniform, he could not forget that more than once he had been interrogated, even beaten by women like her. But getting a prisoner out of the special punishment lockup, however briefly, was nothing short of a miracle.

They left him alone in the sterile, drafty chamber reserved for visits, with barred windows and four heavy metal chairs bolted to the cement floor, each with two stools in front of it. He stared out a window, looking for familiar faces among the prisoners until he heard the closing of the metal door at the end of the long corridor leading to the isolated room, then quickly sat on a stool, facing a chair. He knew better than to watch.

The rattle of the chains down the hall was always a slow torture for Shan. They seemed to wrap around his heart and wrench it with each step. He forced himself to stare at the metal chair, not looking up even when he realized the rattle was different this time, not the usual sound of Ko’s foot manacles.

Then suddenly they were beside him, two beefy guards flanking their slender prisoner. Shan clenched his jaw to keep from crying out. A heavy leather collar had been placed around Ko’s neck, with a link through which a chain was fastened. The chain was wrapped around hand manacles and connected to a link on his foot chains. The guards shoved him into the chair and looped still another chain to bind him to a metal ring on the chair before retreating.

When he looked up his son was grinning. “They seem to think I am the wildest tiger in their cage.”

Shan opened his mouth to speak and found he couldn’t. He swallowed and tried again. “What happened?”

“When I didn’t get your letter I was worried. But then they pulled me out of the barracks one night and dragged me to the lockup. Then I knew everything was all right.”

“But why, Ko? What was it?”

“Nothing. That’s what I mean,” Ko said, still grinning. “I didn’t do a thing this time. That’s when I realized you must be okay, that you had just done something that really pissed them off.”

Ko had been a handsome youth but his years in prison had aged him prematurely. He was hard and thin and scarred. Two fingers, once broken, had never healed properly and were permanently crooked. His grin revealed teeth chipped from beatings. He smelled of urine.

“Do they feed you?” Shan asked.

“Sure. Piles of beef and chicken. So much I had to go on a diet.”

Shan offered a hollow smile. He fought the compulsion to leap up and embrace his son for fear of bringing the guards from the back of the chamber. “I had a dream the other night,” he said to his son. “A memory really, but so vivid. I was visiting you when you were five or six. I took you to the cricket market in Beijing. There were hundreds of crickets, fighting crickets, singing crickets, crickets bred just to be beautiful, each in its own cage. I couldn’t drag you away. We stayed for hours, talking to the old men who sold them. Even the cages were amazing, intricate little things of bamboo and rosewood and molded gourds with carved ivory caps. One of them let you take his cricket for a walk on a leash of braided silk thread. You couldn’t stop laughing. I told you about my grandfather, who had a green cricket with a funny name that always sang at midnight. You kept laughing at the name, kept repeating it all the way home.”

Ko was staring at him now with an empty expression, as if he did not hear. Sometimes he would stay like that for Shan’s entire visit. For several months he had been confined to a hospital for the criminally insane, where experimental drugs had been used.

Shan kept speaking, about the weather, about Lokesh, about how he had made some friends in the new Pioneer town. He always kept talking when Ko blanked out, though he didn’t know if he did so for Ko, for himself, or for the guards.

“There’s an owl who comes,” Ko suddenly said.

Shan cocked his head.

“I have one of those tiny windows near the top of my cell. He comes in the middle of the night. He spits out fur and bones from his prey and I eat them.” Ko’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He dropped a feather the other night. I have to keep it hidden because they would confiscate it. But when the guards aren’t near I take it out and study it. It’s a miracle, you know, a feather.”

“I know what Lokesh will say. A deity has sought you out in owl form.”

Ko grinned again. “Five years ago I would have laughed at that. Now I am not so sure.”

“Then there is hope for you yet, Son.”

They both smiled. Despite where they were, despite the tortured paths their lives had taken, when they were together they smiled a lot. But Ko had seen something in his father’s eyes. “You have to push it down,” his son declared.

“I’m sorry?”

“You taught me that. The greatest power of a prisoner lies in pushing down his fear.”

The words made Shan’s throat constrict. He offered a small, slow nod.

Ko kept smiling as his face drifted back into the vacant, unfocused expression.

Shan became aware that the guards were at his side, releasing Ko from his chair. “Be well, Son,” he said quietly. “Lha gyal lo.”

When he turned he saw Meng waiting, staring at the two of them from the back of the room. She too was silent as his son was escorted past her into the corridor. Halfway down the hall Ko’s voice rang out. “Thunder Dragon!” he shouted. “Grandfather’s cricket was called Thunder Dragon!” He staggered as a guard pounded his shoulder, then slowly straightened and marched on.

Shan kept watching until the heavy metal door slammed behind his son.

*   *   *

It was Meng who broke the long silence on the drive back to the valley. “He’s going to survive,” she said in a tight voice. “I can see it in his eyes. They burn like yours.”

He pointed to a family of partridges crossing the road. He had no stomach for talk of prisons and prisoners. The visit with Ko had been more painful than most. He knew he would relive it, every second of it, the next time he tried to sleep.

Meng dropped him off where she had found him that morning. No one answered, however, when he knocked on Yuan’s door. He considered walking the miles to Lung’s compound for his truck but knew the repairs would not have been completed. In the square he sat on a bench across from the plinth. The statue that had been on it was gone. Someone had placed a little souvenir Buddha there instead, looking ridiculously small on the big stone base. It stood on its own plinth, a red book of Mao’s quotations.

He could not remember when he had felt so powerless. The valley, which for so long had been a stronghold of Tibetan tradition, was falling, soon to become another landscape of internment camps and immigrant settlements. Jamyang and the abbess, Lung Ma and the German, had died for nothing. No, a despairing voice said, they had died because of Beijing, had died to fuel the machine that was grinding up Tibet.

It was no longer the truth that was eluding him, it was what to do with the truth. Extracting the truth usually felt like pulling some shiny bauble out of a quagmire. But this time the truth had claimed him, pulling him down into the murk. He was suffocating in it. There was no path open to him. No Tibetan would believe him now if he tried to confront the killer. Shan would just be another bitter bonecatcher, resentful of a Tibetan hero. He rose and walked the streets, walked around every block of the small town. Those he passed turned away from him.

Finally he found himself at the side door of the police post, and sat on the step. The world was closing in around him. Liang and those he served had won. Shan and Jamyang had lost. The only real mystery had been why he had ever thought he could change things. He stared at the night sky a long time, until suddenly he heard his son’s words again. Push down your fear. It is the greatest power a prisoner can have.

He stepped inside and found Meng staring at two papers on her desk. She raised one. “I am ordered to initiate a process against Professor Yuan and his daughter to revoke their Pioneer status.”

“Meaning what?”

“They will be given a chance to provide evidence of their loyalty. Meaning they will have ten days to inform on unpatriotic activity known to them. Or they will be revoked and sent back to face their original charges. Certain prison for the girl.”

She shook the paper and laid it on the desk. “That one came to me over the Public Security computer.” She raised the other paper. “This one I found on the old fax machine in the outer office they use for messages to the constables. An arrest order for Abbot Norbu. Not to me,” she said pointedly, “to the local Tibetan constables. They are supposed to join Armed Police at Chegar tomorrow night to make the arrest, at the monks’ evening assembly.”

“The charges?”

“Political activity by a registered monk. Organizing unauthorized public assemblies. Suspicion of conspiracy against the government.”

“The constables,” he observed. “Do you ever wonder why those who blow their horns are never caught?”

“Only why we would trouble over them.”

“Liang never intends to arrest Norbu. It’s why the order went only to the constables.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Liang is gone. Call headquarters and ask. He is done here. This order is his farewell gesture.” He saw Meng’s uncertain expression. “Call now,” Shan insisted. “Ask for him.”

The lieutenant frowned and picked up the phone. She spoke to one office at headquarters, then another, before hanging up. “He packed up the office they loaned him,” Meng reported. “Officially he is gone, on to his next posting. They say he may be at that guesthouse. It’s still the weekend. He probably won’t leave until tomorrow.” She looked back at the papers on her desk. “Why issue the order now?”

“He wants the word out to the Tibetans, and sending the order to the constables is how he achieves that. Did they see it?”

“One of them read it and left.”

Shan nodded, as if it proved his point. “He wants everyone to believe Norbu is in grave danger, so there is no hesitation in the plans for his flight from Tibet. It’s the endgame,” Shan said. “The final act of their drama, to ensure he doesn’t arrive in India as just another refugee, but as a hero. We’ve run out of time. The full moon is tomorrow night. By the time the police arrive for him he will have disappeared in the smuggler’s truck.”

“I don’t understand.”

He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to her.

“What’s this?”

“Me and Ko. Our registration numbers.”

Her face tightened. “Why do I want this?”

“I have to get Liang back here. I can’t go to the monks and tell them their abbot is a spy and a murderer. They will never believe me now. It has to be a secret they steal from Major Liang.”

She raised the slip of paper again. “Why do I want this?” she asked once more.

“Liang only has authority to imprison me for a year. I can take a year. It will be like a meditation retreat enforced with chains. But there’s a chance he will make good on the threat he made the last time he arrested me. Keep me for years, keep me invisible by moving me around. If that happens, I ask a small favor. Every few months, maybe once a year, just check the central records. It’s important to me, Xiao Meng, a great favor to me. One I will never forget. Then get word to each of us where the other is. Public Security can get messages to prisoners. Otherwise…” he was having difficulty getting the words out. “Otherwise I will never find him. Otherwise today will have been the last day I ever see my son.”

Her face drained of color. “What are you going to do?”

“Lokesh once told me that words are just hollow things. Truth can only be found in the heart, and in actions.”

“Please, Shan. No more riddles.”

“The Tibetans will not accept the truth from my lips, or yours. It has to be shown to them. I will force Liang back here so Tibetan ears will hear what I have to say, so the constables will grasp the truth by Liang’s reaction and get the word to the monastery. It’s a great risk to his mission for him to appear again in the valley. He had to take things to a boiling point, then back away. Otherwise he risks everything. He could frighten away the purbas, the ones waiting to escort Norbu to India. There are only two things that would make him ignore the risk. A chance to complete his vengeance on me and a way to correct his failure to capture the American woman. I will give him both. Everyone already knows me as the bonecatcher who killed a lama. It will come as no surprise when I demand more bounties for killing those who were going to expose his agent and delivering Cora Michener.”