CHAPTER TWO

The nightmare of death had seized Shan once more. He had to be having one of his soul-splitting visions that haunted his sleep with images of tortured lamas and executed monks. A low sobbing moan echoed in the shallow cavern and he glanced frantically about for its source before realizing it came from his own throat. Then he saw the crimson rivulets rolling down his hand where blood had sprayed on him. He leapt to Jamyang’s side.

The lama’s eyes were open, aimed at the carved deities above the altar. But he was beyond seeing. The bullet hole in the center of his forehead was neat and round, like a third eye. The place where the bullet had torn out the back of his skull was a bloody knot of bone and tissue.

Tears ran down Shan’s face as he cradled the dead lama in his lap, “Recognize the radiant light that is your death.” He had heard the words of the Bardo, the traditional Tibetan death rite, so often that they left his tongue unbidden. Jamyang’s soul would be confused, would be terrified at the difficult journey it was so abruptly beginning, and the living had to comfort it. “Recognize that your consciousness is without birth or death.” The words came in tiny choked breaths, lower and lower until finally they died away.

He did not know how long he sat, paralyzed with his grief, did not know how long Lokesh had been there, but when he looked up his friend was standing a few feet away, staring at the dead lama with a stricken expression.

“We had cleaned the offerings,” Shan explained in a forlorn whisper. “I had never seen this pistol before. I was going to get rid of it tonight. But he picked it up and pulled the trigger so suddenly I couldn’t—” Lokesh stepped forward and knelt by the body. Shan’s question came out in a hoarse croak. “Why, Lokesh? Why? We were going to celebrate his gods…”

With a trembling hand the old Tibetan lifted Jamyang’s head from Shan’s lap and they laid the dead man out on the earth before the shrine. Lokesh stood motionless, staring at the body, then, as if the reality finally struck him, he sagged and fell onto his knees. Shan’s heart wrenched as he watched his friend press the dead man’s head to his breast and rock back and forth. Backing against the stone face he slid to the ground, numb with the horror before him, as he began reciting anew the words of the Bardo chant. The old Tibetan did not bother to wipe at the tears that flowed down his leathery cheeks.

At last Shan rose and stepped to the pail, splashing cold water on his face before stepping away, out into the cool wind, lifting his face toward the sky. The souls of the purest lamas were said to ascend toward the sky in a rainbow stream of light. But there would be no rainbow for Jamyang. At the end of his pure life he had committed a grave sin, an impure act that would condemn his soul to be reincarnated among the lowest of life-forms. In their prison the old Tibetans had called it “taking four,” finding release from the agony even though it meant reincarnation as a four-legged creature. Shan choked away another sob. What had been Jamyang’s agony? He had had so much to live for. Impossibly, inexplicably, Jamyang had taken four.

He had to push his fear and grief away, he knew. There was much to be done, and grave risks to be taken.

“The farmers and shepherds could come anytime,” he said to Lokesh. “It will be impossible to hide this.” Word of an unregistered monk dying of a bullet in his head would attract too much attention. “The knobs will learn of it,” he said, referring to the dreaded Public Security bulldogs, the elite of Beijing’s many enforcement arms. They both knew that if the knobs discovered that one of the monk outlaws had been living here protected by the local Tibetans they would use it as an excuse to round up two or three dozen and ship them to one of Beijing’s new pacification camps.

Lokesh looked up from his task with query in his tear-soaked eyes.

“We have to carry him to the hut so he can be cleaned,” Shan continued. “I will go and bring back help from the hermitage.” The hermitage of nuns, five miles away, was tiny but he knew its inhabitants had shared Jamyang’s secrets. “We have to remove him quickly, before word leaks out. If the knobs discover the shrine they will destroy it.” Shan looked at the little bas-relief deities with new torment. Only a week ago Jamyang had said they had to treat every such shrine as if it were the last in Tibet, the last in all the world, for someday one of them would be. Beijing did not abide such secret places of worship. The knobs had special teams, godkiller squads, who used dynamite, even portable air hammers, to destroy them. “Jamyang would not want that. He was the opposite of a godkiller.”

All this time Lokesh had not stopped whispering the Bardo, mouthing the ancient words as Shan spoke, but now he paused. “The old convent ruins are closer,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Nuns from the hermitage are likely there, working on the restoration.” He lifted Jamyang’s shoulders, and gestured for Shan to take his feet.

*   *   *

Shan eased his truck to a stop by a wide, sloping ledge and quickly climbed to the edge, checking to be sure there were no new vehicles at the abandoned convent, largely destroyed fifty years before. He took one look toward the ruins below and shrank back in alarm. Quickly he retrieved his binoculars and crept back up the ledge, dropping to a prone position as he reached the top.

The site was alive with activity. He had expected to see the truck he had seen from a distance earlier in the day, and perhaps some of the tractors and donkeys used by the local Tibetans. Instead, parked beside the truck by the front gate were an ambulance and three of the utility vehicles favored by the police. Uniformed figures were gathered in the courtyard inside the front gate.

He turned onto his back and gazed toward the southern horizon, toward the distant mountain that marked the gulag camp where his son Ko, his only flesh and blood, was imprisoned. Shan had long ago given up on his life as a high-level investigator, had declined offers to return to Beijing even after serving years in the gulag himself. But he would never give up on his son. He lived in two-week intervals, for the first Sundays of each month on which he was permitted to visit Ko and the midmonth letter he was permitted to write to him. Colonel Tan, the ironfisted military governor of the county, had made it clear that Shan would lose all visiting rights if he stirred up new problems for Tan. He would never give up on his son, but he would also never give up on the old Tibetans.

There could be any number of reasons the police had descended on the ruined convent—the most likely one being that they suspected smugglers were scavenging it for artifacts—but if the officers chose to interrogate any of those helping to restore the old buildings, the frightened Tibetans could well tell them about Jamyang’s shrine. A new and terrible possibility occurred to Shan. If the police found Lokesh with the body and an illegal pistol, it would be the end of the gentle old man, a thought that Shan could not bear. He had to know what the police were doing, had to keep them away from the ridge, had to find a way to keep Jamyang’s irreplaceable relics out of the hands of the godkillers. He slipped down the ledge to his truck and began brushing off his clothes.

Half an hour later he stood in the shadows at the rear of the ruins, having left his truck in the rock outcroppings behind the complex. Quickly he recalled his mental map of the old convent. Although it had been small, it had rigidly adhered to Buddhist tradition in its construction. Below the courtyard was the dukhang, the main assembly hall with ancillary chapels arranged along the walls. At the rear had been two kangtsang, residence halls, and the small, somber chapels reserved for protector demons, where the restorers had been sheltering some of the most important artifacts recovered from the rubble. In the center of the courtyard was a chorten, one of the ancient relic shrines resembling an onion topped with a steeple, which had been the first structure to be restored. Only a few weeks before, by the light of a rising sun, he and Lokesh had helped Jamyang whitewash the chorten. He ventured a glance from the corner of one of the crumbling buildings toward the front of the compound. Nearly a dozen figures stood on the opposite side of the courtyard, most in uniform, facing away, looking into the shadow of the shining white chorten. He stepped purposefully across the open ground separating him from the closest of the old demon shrines, his heart pounding as he reached the rear of the little stone building. Leaning against the wall, calming himself, he glanced back through the gap in the rubble that used to be the rear gate, wondering whether he should try to rescue some of the artifacts secreted in the building. Anything the police found would be declared property of the state, destined for destruction or removal to some dusty warehouse in the east.

“They say these old ruins are filled with ghosts.”

He spun about to face the woman who had spoken. Her uniform looked freshly pressed, the red enamel star on her cap recently polished.

“More and more all the time,” the Public Security lieutenant added absently as she glanced up at him then returned to scanning the ground near Shan’s feet.

Shan struggled to keep his voice steady. “People lived here for centuries. Lived and died.”

The woman, in her midthirties, glanced up again long enough to cast him a cool grin, as if he had made a joke, then bent and studied the patterns of shadows in the dirt around them. “Even a shallow footprint can speak to you when the light is right,” she declared in a professional tone.

As she knelt Shan saw the latex gloves folded into her belt, beside a small automatic pistol. He fought the compulsion to bolt toward the outcroppings, then retreated a step toward the corner of the stucco-walled building and found his hand resting on a faded religious symbol, painted in another century. An all-seeing eye.

“You’ll never lift prints from a wall like that,” the officer said as she rose, straightening her uniform.

“But rough surfaces can snag a fiber from a passerby.” Shan felt a flush of shame that the words of the former Beijing investigator would leap so readily to his tongue. He had forsaken that life, left it far behind after finding his new incarnation in Tibet.

The woman cocked her head at him, assessing him, studying for a long moment his tattered clothes and scuffed boots, then offered a hesitant nod of agreement and reached into one of the deep pockets of her tunic. With a chill he watched as she produced several cellophane bags and handed them to him. Each was imprinted with a single line along the bottom: Public Security Bureau Evidence. “Major Liang is a stickler for procedure,” she stated as he took the bags, then she moved on, scanning the ground again as she disappeared around the corner.

Shan stared with foreboding at the bags in his hand. The woman was not there to destroy the convent, not looking for smugglers. And why had she accepted him so readily? She had assumed, despite his shabby appearance, that he somehow was helping with an investigation. He stepped away from the building to study the figures gathered in the central square fifty yards away. Beyond the cluster of uniformed men, plumes of dust rose from the road. More vehicles were approaching. He wanted to run. He had to run. Then he remembered Lokesh, waiting at the shrine with the body of their friend. Jamyang had seemed unusually interested in the ruins that afternoon. Shan pressed his hand against the eye of the deity again, murmuring a quick prayer, then began a slow, deliberate circuit toward the police gathered in the square.

He feigned interest in the ground as he walked along the stations where large prayer wheels had once been spun by pilgrims, pausing at a pile of carpentry tools left by the restorers, lingering again at a small circle of red paint drops by one of the few remaining wheels where a paint pot had apparently rested. Someone had been painting the cradle of the wheel and been interrupted. On the wall behind it red paint was spattered. A worn brush, its bristles congealed with paint, lay on the ground at the base of the wall. The spatters formed a high arc, except for one patch in the center that was a slightly different hue, the identical color of a small drying puddle six feet from the wall. He covered a hand with one of the bags and used it to insert the brush in another bag, then dropped the brush back into its original position. As he looked up he felt the stare of a Public Security officer sitting on a bench in the shadows by the front gate. His cold, flinty expression did not change when Shan offered him a nod. He kept staring at Shan as a subordinate trotted to his side, kept staring even as he listened to the junior officer and snapped out a curt reply that sent the younger knob retreating like a frightened courtier.

Shan fought a shudder as he broke away from the man’s icy gaze and walked around the end of the chorten. Then he froze at the butchery before him.

He had seen death in Tibet more times than he wished to recall, had seen it that very day, but he had never seen anything like the death that had come to the old convent. Three bodies lay sprawled on the ground in a pool of red. They were arranged in the pattern of a U, the two largest lying beside each other, four feet apart, the third lying perpendicular to them, under their feet. The head of the man farthest from Shan lay against its owner’s shoulder, nearly severed, the flesh chopped and sliced with repeated blows of a heavy blade.

The body closest to Shan had no face. The man’s head had been hacked at, so that his face and the sides of his head were nothing but raw, torn flesh. His skull glinted white between shades of red. Most of the red wasn’t blood, Shan realized. The two bodies were nearly covered in paint. In the center, their hands, one left, one right, were held down by a stone. The worn hiking boots of the closest man lay on the belly of the third body, which Shan now saw was a Tibetan woman wearing a wool cap. The expensive athletic shoes of the second man lay on her legs.

The mechanical click of a camera stirred Shan from his paralysis. Two officers were taking photographs of the corpses. He stepped behind them then circled the bodies, forcing himself to look at the gore. The woman had a bullet hole in her chest. He saw now that it was not simply a pool of red the men lay in, it was a rectangle, and the killer had not just used red paint. In the upper-left corner there was a large yellow-spiked blotch with four smaller ones, in an arc at its lower right. The brown eyes of the man whose face had been sliced away gazed lifelessly at the chorten, a pool of blood under a bullet hole in his neck. The figure whose head hung by a few ligaments lay with his face toward the shrine, locked in a brooding, angry expression. He was Chinese. A Chinese man, a Tibetan woman, a faceless monster; all three murdered in the shadow of the mountain where a lama had just killed himself.

One of the police taking photographs suddenly clutched his stomach and darted away to retch up his last meal. A young officer scolded him and shoved him back toward the bodies. “We must have complete images of the murder scene!” he barked at the cowering policeman.

“Scenes.” Shan had whispered the word to himself, unmindful of the silence in the courtyard.

“You dare to correct me?” the officer snarled. “You…” He studied Shan in confusion.

Shan turned to retreat and found himself looking into the thin face of the female officer he had encountered earlier. She returned his gaze expectantly, then broke away to address her colleague. “I am not sure jurisdiction has been established,” she declared, as if to defend Shan. The officer winced at the words, and for the first time Shan took note of the different uniforms. The young officer who had challenged him wore the olive of the People’s Armed Police, the thugs of Chinese law enforcement. The green apes, many Tibetans called them. The woman wore the grey of the Public Security Bureau. Two other men, both Tibetans, wore the blue of the local constables, still others the light green of medical attendants.

Jurisdiction. The woman was savvy enough to understand that those who wielded the most power in the People’s Republic wore no uniforms at all. It was the slender thread by which Shan’s freedom now hung. He would be arrested in an instant if he were found to be there on false pretenses. Those who impersonated police were shot.

The lieutenant turned back to Shan with a questioning look. He had no choice but to continue with the charade. Shan took a deep breath, then pointed to the man with the mangled face. “Only this one was killed here. He was bleeding from a bullet that pierced his jugular. Only he has a pool of blood under him.” Shan pointed to the woman. “She has a bullet hole in her chest but no pool of blood.”

The woman looked unconvinced. “But it’s all red. How can you know?”

“Look closer. The blood is darker. It dries differently.” He pointed to where the two shades of red met. “The difference is subtle for now but noticeable. In another hour the blood will be nearly brown. The wounds on the other two did not bleed out here. There would have been marks showing where they were dragged from but—” He shrugged and gestured toward the feet of the assembled police. The ground all around the courtyard had been trampled by their boots.

Shan’s gaze lingered for a moment on a pot of red paint at the base of the chorten, then turned back to the red rectangle with its pattern of yellow spots. The killer had gone to a lot of trouble in arranging the scene, as if for a message. A chill crept up his spine as he at last recognized the rectangle constructed under the bodies. It was the Chinese flag, red with one large and four smaller yellow stars in the upper-left quadrant.

“Fools!” the young officer barked at the others, then he quieted at the sound of footsteps behind him, the anger on his face suddenly replaced with fear. The gaunt older officer had risen from the shadows. For a moment Shan thought the man in the green uniform was going to drop to his knees.

“Everyone back!” the older knob growled. “You and your men,” he declared to the officer in the olive tunic, “will have site security. One at the gate, the rest to set up a roadblock half a mile up the road.” What had the knob lieutenant called the senior officer? Major Liang.

The young officer shrank back, then murmured hurried orders to his men. The men in blue, the local constables, retreated toward the gate without another word. As the men in green marched away, two more men in grey appeared out of the shadows. The question of jurisdiction was resolving itself.

“Her hands,” Shan said, gesturing to the dead woman. “That is red paint on them, not blood. She was painting the old prayer wheel by the wall. The paint is spattered in an arc where her brush went flying. Under the arc is a pattern of blood. She was shot there, taken by surprise as she worked, facing the wall. I think you will find that bullet went through her back. It came out her chest and is probably in the wall. Unless the weapon was a revolver there will be a bullet casing on the ground nearby.”

The female lieutenant spoke in quick, clipped syllables, and the knob soldiers moved toward the wall. Major Liang shot Shan a warning glance, then followed the squad.

Suddenly Shan was alone with the bodies. He gazed for only a moment as the police retreated around the far side of the chorten, then moved quickly, letting old instincts take over. He knew from experience that such officers could do strange things with the truth of such killings, could make inconvenient murders disappear. Worse still, they could use murders at such a holy place as an excuse to destroy what was left of it. He owed it to Jamyang, to Lokesh, and all the old Tibetans, to understand what had happened.

He ran his fingers over the dead flesh, lifting limbs, testing for rigor mortis and temperature. They had been dead for four or five hours. He stooped over the faceless man, clenching his jaw at the butchery. The face had not been simply sliced off, the flesh and skin at the front and sides of the skull had been hacked away, like bark being chipped off a log.

The pockets of the man with the nearly severed head held only car keys and a package of unfiltered cigarettes. A bird, perhaps a crow, clutching a snake in its talons was tattooed inside his forearm. The savage blows that had nearly taken off his head had ripped apart another tattoo at the base of his neck, a creature with scales that might have been a dragon. Shan saw now the dirt caked on the heels of the man’s expensive shoes, bent to study the direction of the trail made by the heels before it disappeared, stomped away by police boots. The man had been dragged from somewhere near the front of the compound, perhaps even from the gate. He lifted one of the shoes that lay on the woman to examine the dirt embedded in its heel, then felt something more at the ankle and pushed up the pant leg. He paused in surprise. He had not seen an ankle holster for years. It was a subtle, hidden thing seldom seen outside the big cities of the east. There was no subtlety about the use of guns in Tibet. The holster held nothing but a piece of folded paper jammed in the bottom. He glanced back to confirm the police were still out of sight then stuffed the paper in his pocket. He rose and leaned over the body once more, pushing his fingers deeper into the pockets. He tapped the half-empty cigarette pack and felt a hard, unyielding surface. A piece of iron slid out of the pack, an intricately worked trapezoid with Buddhist prayers etched around two large holes in its narrow end. A flint striker. The dead Chinese wearing expensive clothes was carrying a primitive Tibetan tool for lighting fires.

He stuffed the striker back into the pocket then looked more closely at the two hands at the center of the flag. It wasn’t a stone that held them down, it was a weathered fragment from the ruined carvings that had been scattered around the grounds before the restoration had started, an image of one of Tibet’s Eight Auspicious Signs. He bent and saw the lines that represented stacked garlands of cloth. It was the Banner of Victory, which hailed the triumph of Buddhist wisdom over ignorance.

Shan moved hesitantly to the woman, knowing likely he had no more than another minute before the knobs returned. She appeared to have been in her fifties, with a delicate face, though her tattered brown frock and rough hands were those of a farmer. The necklace strand around her neck had been severed, probably when the killer had dragged her body. With two fingers he gently closed her unseeing eyes and murmured a prayer.

Quickly he found the bullet hole in her tunic, over her heart. It was a large, ugly wound, the hole of the bullet’s exit. She had indeed been shot in the back. The bullet’s exit had pushed out threads of other fabrics, red and white. He pried at the fabric and found that her chest had been bound with a length of cotton. A small stiff rectangle the size of an identity card extended from underneath. With a guilty shudder he lifted the cloth and extracted the rectangle, quickly stuffing it inside his pocket without taking the time to look at it. If they knew who a Tibetan victim was, they could make life very uncomfortable for the family, whom they would have always assumed hid information about the dead. He was taking a terrible chance. The knobs would be back at any instant, furious if they found him interfering with the bodies, but he did not trust them with the evidence, and felt strangely unable to leave the woman. He pulled at her frock, awkwardly trying to cover her grisly wound. For the first time he saw that her frock had dried paint on it, in several colors. It was a just a work frock. She had put it on over her dark red dress.

Run, a voice screamed inside, flee into the maze of rocks. Lokesh needs you.

With another anxious glance in the direction of the knobs, he bent to study the severed necklace. It had been made of tightly braided yak hair. He tugged on one end, releasing from under her shoulder an ornate silver box. A gau. She had been wearing a traditional necklace with a traditional amulet box.

Another siren rose in the distance, rapidly approaching, but still he did not move. With a shudder he pushed off the wool cap on her head and saw the short brush of black hair, then he pulled back the work frock.

A small choking sob escaped his throat as he recognized the maroon cloth. It was a robe. At the ancient, ruined convent, a Buddhist nun had been murdered and placed under the feet of two Chinese men. He grabbed her gau and fled.