CHAPTER FOUR

When Shan did not respond, Meng turned and pointed down the dusty street, toward the center of the town. They walked in silence, past another gas station, past a post office in a prefabricated building, then into the small structure that appeared to be Baiyun’s main food store. One of the Tibetan constables sat by the front door. A matronly clerk at the counter saw them and fled into a rear corridor.

Meng led Shan into the same corridor, into the back storeroom. A door leading outside hung ajar. The clerk had not only fled from the counter, she had fled the building. Meng stepped to the closetlike meat locker, opened the heavy metal door, and gestured Shan inside.

The freshest meat lay outstretched on three long tables, with frozen chickens tossed in a pile at the rear of the metal-lined chamber. Two tables were against the walls and the third so filled the center of the locker that Shan barely had room to squeeze between the tables. The bodies were covered with sheets. Adhesive tape around their thumbs identified them only according to their positions at the crime scene. Bei. Nan. Xi. North. South. West.

“These should be in a forensics lab,” he said uneasily.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re hundreds of miles from a lab. Such a valuable resource would never be allocated to”—she paused, searched for words—“a local crime.”

Shan studied the knob officer. They were both treading on dangerous ground now. “I think we are here, Lieutenant, because you know this is not some local crime. Because you know about special troubleshooters called in from afar, you know their priority isn’t to dig into the truth but to dig into the politics. But can it be possible that you are actually interested in the truth?”

Meng ignored the question. “Nan and Xi died elsewhere and were dragged to the chorten. You were right. The woman Xi died at the wall, where a nine millimeter bullet was recovered. Bei was shot and bled out after being dragged to the chorten. The man Nan had an empty holster but no pistol has been found. He was attacked at the corner of a building by the front gate. His blood stained the wall and pooled on the ground.”

As she spoke Shan stared at the body of the woman. On the sheet covering her lay a sprig of heather. “Who was here?”

“No one,” Meng said. “We are watching the place.” She pushed the heather onto the floor.

Shan glanced at her. She meant the constables were watching the place. Her Tibetan constables.

“I asked you about that lama,” Meng pressed.

Shan returned her steady gaze. “Lamas don’t commit murder.”

The lieutenant frowned, then stepped to the side of the body marked Bei, the faceless man. “That first night the bodies were here Liang came in with a doctor. As far as the major is concerned my job as local liaison means I am his escort, charged with keeping locals out of his way. The doctor was interested only in this one. Liang stepped to his side and ordered me to my station to write a report for him on the local political situation. The next morning I came back. The owner was terrified. He didn’t object when I came back in here. I found this—” She lifted the sheet over the man’s naked thigh. His skin was paler than that of the others. There was an incision eight inches long, closed with fresh sutures.

Shan bent over the incision. There was no swelling, no bruising, no scabbing. He pointed to the ridge of tissue above the incision. “He cut open the dead man’s leg along an old scar.”

Meng silently nodded.

He stared at her warily, sensing a trap. Knob officers were not permitted to be so headstrong. It was unthinkable that one would seek to intrude on the secrets of her superiors. She was only a lieutenant, he reminded himself, when most officers her age were of higher rank. “If you were to cut open these sutures it would be insubordination,” Shan concluded. “So you want me to.”

There was mischief in Meng’s narrow smile, but also a certain nervousness Shan had not seen before.

“Do you have the times of death?” he asked as he lifted a knife from a wall rack.

“Of course. Sometime during the past week, give or take a day. I admire your faith in our abilities. We have their personal belongings, two shell casings and a timber ax that was found with tools stored near the front gate that is consistent with the weapon that severed Nan’s head. No blood on it. Liang took the bullet we dug out of the wall. We’re pretty certain the victims are two males and a female. That, Comrade, is the extent of our forensic investigation.”

“But Liang has resources, access to labs. You said he brought that doctor.”

“As far as I can tell what the major is doing is reviewing the files on every inhabitant of Baiyun.”

The incision was deep, all the way to the femur. Except there was almost no femur. The bone had been shattered long ago, replaced with a prosthetic. As he stared at it Shan felt his chest tighten.

“I don’t understand,” Meng said as she bent to the incision, prying the flesh apart with her hands.

“Titanium,” Shan explained. “This was not done in China.” He quickly moved to the man’s mouth and pried it open. At least half a dozen teeth had been extracted. “Bodies will speak of their home if you look close enough.”

“A foreigner!” Meng gasped.

It changed everything. Her curiosity was gone, replaced by fear. She grabbed the sheet and covered the body, her movements suddenly frantic. “We must leave! Now!”

“No,” Shan replied. “You must leave. Go outside. Forget we were here.” He stepped to the other man, Nan, the Chinese whose head had nearly been severed.

“Not him!” Meng said. “No point.”

He began to pull away the sheet. The second man’s head had been crudely sewn back in place. Even so the man was short, Shan realized. Short and stocky and dark-complected.

Meng paused as she reached the door. “Major Liang is expected today. It won’t matter whom you work for if Liang finds you with a murdered foreigner.”

“All the more reason for you to leave.”

She eyed him coolly, then turned and left without another word. Shan quickly pulled away the rest of the sheet from Nan. The holster on the man’s ankle had been removed, like everything else. He looked at the black bird tattooed on Nan’s forearm. With his expensive clothes the man had seemed like an affluent businessman, perhaps even a senior official. Now, as he returned the sheet, Shan was not so sure. Meng had known him, had seemed oddly dismissive of the man, and of his death. But Jamyang too had known him, and given him a paper with a list of Tibetan towns. He paced slowly along the man, lifting his appendages, even examining his long black hair and scalp, then sniffed at the black deposits under his fingernails. Motor oil.

Meng was nowhere to be seen as he stepped outside. The sleepy little town of Baiyun was coming to life in the late afternoon. Trucks were pulling off the valley’s only paved road into the gas station. The smell of steamed rice and onions wafted from the little tea shop. In the square, two pairs of Chinese men, all older than Shan, were playing checkers. He pulled a newspaper from a waste barrel and sat on a bench, pretending to read as he studied the checker players and the buildings beyond.

Baiyun, in the remote mountains of central Tibet, had nothing of Tibet. It was a Chinese town, or some distant bureaucrat’s notion of what a Chinese town in Tibet should look like. White Cloud town. A pretend Chinese town in a pretend province of China. Someone had tried to plant gingko and plane trees along the edge of the park but the plants were nearly all dead or dying. The park benches that had been placed along the square were falling apart. Some of their planks were missing. The fiberglass statue of Mao, meant to be the focal point of the town square, was already being corroded by the harsh, dusty winds that often roared up the valley. Scores of such statues had been assembled in government warehouses, destined to replace the centuries-old stone chorten shrines that had once been fixtures in Tibetan villages. There was a new political slogan favored by the Party head in Tibet: The Communist Party Is Your New Buddha. When he had first heard it, Shan had actually thought it was some kind of joke. But now the slogan was emblazoned on public walls and banners all over Tibet and offered up for Tibetan schoolchildren to recite like a militant mantra.

Shan looked back at the statue. The only Tibetan writing he had seen anywhere in Baiyun was inscribed along the top edge at the front of its pedestal: PRAISE THE GREAT LEADER TO WHOM WE OWE OUR LIVES AND PROSPERITY.

He gazed absently at the words as he forced himself to reconstruct the grisly scene in the store’s refrigerator. Liang’s special doctor had opened Bei’s leg up, and extracted his teeth. They had suspected him of being a foreigner but finely worked teeth were becoming less reliable an indicator of foreign origin in modern China. The titanium rod was unquestionable proof. They had closed up the scar then pulled the teeth for good measure. He looked up, surveying the streets again. He still had the sense of something unnatural about the pioneer town, and not just because it was one of Beijing’s prefabricated formula settlements.

Folding the paper under his arm he wandered around the square, sitting again, closer to the checker games that had been set out on upturned crates. Once more he surveyed the park and the modest windblown houses beyond it. There was another slogan on the back edge of the pedestal, in Chinese. It was faded, barely legible even though the statue was probably no more than a year old. He found himself rising again, trying to read the words. They were carefully written, in a very light hand that gave the impression of an official inscription that was weathered. But it was no official slogan: Superior leaders are those whose existence is merely known.

He stared at the words in disbelief, reading them again. It was the first verse of the seventeenth passage of the Tao Te Ching, written more than two thousand years earlier. The chapter explained how the best leaders were those barely known to their people, the worst were those who interfered with daily life. They were words that Beijing would choke on, the words of dissidents, though not of Tibet.

As he turned back toward the checker players he sensed movement, as if they had all been watching him. He slowly walked among them. Curiously, the players all had books beside them. A book of European history, in English. A book about the bone oracles of early China. A book of rites from the last dynasty. All but one of the players glanced up, nodding absently at Shan. The fourth man, an older, refined-looking gentleman wearing a grey sweater vest and wire-rimmed spectacles, seemed to studiously avoid acknowledging Shan. In his lap was a book of Sung dynasty poetry.

Shan moved on, pausing under one of the trees to look back. There were professors in Baiyun, Jigten had explained. He had been taking Jamyang’s spirit tablets to sell to a professor. A young man walked by, carrying a cloth sack of rice on his shoulder. He was compact, his skin almost olive-colored. Most of the town’s inhabitants were tall, long in the face, with prominent features, people of the distant northeast, of Manchuria. This man had the features of China’s tropical southwest, not far removed from the tribes of the rain forest. Shan watched the figure as he disappeared into an alley. He had seen the features before, on the tattooed dead man.

He looked back at the men in the square, trying to understand his odd discomfort, feeling more than ever the urge to flee, to find Lokesh and take him to safety. But he also felt a growing need to understand this strange, unreal town with three bodies in a refrigerator.

A cry of pain broke him out of his paralysis. Low, rushed voices rose from the alley off the square. A woman cursed from the shadows, then gasped. Figures ran away, between buildings.

Meng was on her knees when Shan reached her, retching onto the ground.

“I’m all right!” she growled when Shan put a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re not all right,” Shan said. “You were attacked. I should find a doctor.” He quickly scanned the shadows. Rice kernels were scattered around her, the bag they had been in on the ground a few feet away. He looked warily about. A figure in the shadows turned and ran as Shan took a step toward him.

“No doctor!” Meng snapped. She leaned over, shaking the rice from her hair, then, bracing herself on the building, rose unsteadily. Her hand went to her upper lip. Blood was dripping from her nose. “I’m prone to nosebleeds,” she said. “You know, the altitude.”

“You were just attacked, Lieutenant.” He handed Meng her hat. “A Public Security officer was attacked.”

“Nonsense. We … collided,” Meng said weakly. “Not looking where I was going.”

Shan looked up the alley, out to the square. “You were watching me. Following me.”

“I strive to learn from my elders. Like I said, you are wise in the ways of Beijing.”

He stared at her. The more he interacted with Meng the more of an enigma she became. There should be urgent radio calls, plans for a sweep of the town. People were sent to prison for years for lifting a hand against a knob officer. He considered her words. Which ways of Beijing worried her?

“You knew who they were,” he said. It was not a question. “Just like you knew who that other man was. The one labeled south. His tattoo was like the banner of a gang.”

Meng fished a napkin from a pocket and held it to her nose. “They describe themselves as more of a social club. The Jade Crows they call themselves, a group of undesirables from Yunnan. Someone there decided to give them transportation to Tibet instead of prison.”

“You mean they bribed some court official.”

Meng acted as if she had not heard. “It’s part of the model for pioneer towns. Mix the populations. Don’t let one group take over the town.”

“They show every sign of having taken over the town, Lieutenant. Your town.” He turned at the sound of footsteps in the alley. The Tibetan constables were running toward them.

Meng seemed about to argue, then looked at her bloody napkin. “It’s late. I have a long drive to headquarters,” she said, then turned and disappeared around the corner of the building.

Headquarters. She meant the district Public Security headquarters, twenty miles north of the Lhadrung County line. Shan reminded himself that she did not report to Liang but to other officials, officers who had set pacification as her primary duty. He was tempted to follow her, but outside the county Shan’s meager protection would not exist. Outside Lhadrung he was no one, a former gulag inmate who had ignored the rules requiring former prisoners to remain in the county of their registration.

He looked back at the square. The checker players had all disappeared.

*   *   *

The responsibilities of the Irrigation Inspector for the northern townships of Lhadrung County were far-reaching. Shan’s district encompassed nearly a thousand square miles. His first annual reckoning to the county seat had reported two hundred and twenty-five road culverts, twenty earthen dams, and three hundred and fifty miles of ditches used for drainage. In a lighter moment he had once mentioned to Lokesh that his was an honored post, an office that had existed in the old Chinese empires, and for the next week the old Tibetan had addressed him with imperial honorifics. In reality it was a job that kept Shan covered in mud much of the time. His assignment had been the clever, and cruel, inspiration of the county governor, Colonel Tan, who had grudgingly accepted the obligation to protect Shan after he had saved Tan from a false accusation of murder the year before. But Tan had wanted Shan as far away as possible, and so humiliated he might be tempted to flee. The appointment, and moving Shan’s son Ko to Shan’s former prison camp in Lhadrung were, Tan had sternly warned, the last favors he would ever do for Shan.

The silver lining to Shan’s cloud was that he had no direct supervisor, and could travel anywhere he wished within his district in the battered old truck that came with the job. He leaned on his shovel now, watching the convent ruins below. A police barricade, manned by two officers, still blocked the road into the murder scene but there was no sign of activity inside the convent compound itself. He lifted his shovel like a badge of office and set off down the path that led to the ruins.

There had been only one vehicle at the gate when he had looked with Jamyang. The nun, the foreigner, the Chinese man, and their killer had been there, and surely they had not all arrived together. Above the convent there were several old pilgrim paths but as they approached it they converged, so there was one main path from each direction that reached the old walls.

Half a mile from the compound he stopped at an intersection with another path, looking up the trail that arrived from a narrow hanging valley above him. It was the route to Thousand Steps, the nuns’ hermitage. The murdered nun had no doubt come to the convent down that path. It had been a beautiful early summer day. The birds would have been singing, her step would have been light. Once at the ruins she had taken up her restoration work on one of the old prayer wheels. Once one or two of the wheels were done and being spun by the devout, Lokesh had told him, the convent would be invincible, as if the wheels would defend it as surely as great guns.

He slowly turned in a circle, surveying the landscape. The nun had come from above, the Chinese man had driven, but what of the foreigner, what of the killer? The convent had once been the hub of the upper valley. Other trails converged from the shepherds’ homes high in the mountains, still others from the farms and even Chegar gompa, the monastery at the mouth of the valley miles away. Keeping out of sight of the police at the roadblock, he found the other trails that led into the ruins of the gates along the side and rear walls. They were all intersected by a line of heavy boot prints where police had circuited the building, but all the tracks leading up to the walls were those of the soft, worn footwear of Tibetans. At the rear wall, where the trail was soon lost in a tangle of brush, Shan discovered the track of a single bicycle. It had been ridden to the convent and hidden among the boulders, then later ridden away.

Bicycles were becoming more common among the people of the valley floor, who were being pushed away from using yaks and donkeys, but he never recalled seeing one anywhere but on the roads. Few paths were in good enough condition to allow any kind of wheeled passage. He studied the rocky landscape where the trail disappeared. The path might lead to the trails of the upper slopes but he doubted a bicycle could be used on those trails. Much more forgiving would be the large path that ran along the lower part of the ridge, the more heavily used pilgrim path that connected the convent and Chegar monastery.

As he began to climb over the crumbling wall he heard a sharp cracking sound. He spun about to see a robed figure standing fifty yards away, frozen, staring at Shan.

Shan ran, but the monk was faster, weaving around boulders before disappearing into the field of outcroppings. Finally halting, panting for breath, Shan watched the rocks, hoping for another glimpse of the stranger. He saw him only for an instant, a close-cropped head wearing a pair of sunglasses that peered out from behind a rock, then disappeared. The monk had not been there for the restoration project. Shan ventured to the point where the man had first appeared, starting for a moment at another cracking sound under his own foot. He bent and picked up a black piece of plastic, then saw another, and another, then small shards of thick glass. Behind a boulder the ground was strewn with more, dozens of pieces. Gathering several of the biggest, he laid them on a rock and tried to reassemble them. A camera. Someone had smashed a camera against the rocks. A very expensive camera, judging from the pieces he saw. It had not been done by the monk, who had inadvertently stepped on the plastic. Had this too been the work of the killer?

He returned to the compound, hugging the shadows now, moving from one building to the next, pausing often to watch behind him. Yellow tape had been hung near the chorten, cordoning off where the rectangle of red paint, still faintly visible, showed where the bodies had lain. Shan paced around the tape, oddly loath to step over it, then headed to the prayer wheel station where the nun had been killed. Without conscious thought he pushed the wheel, then paused, watching it. It was a reflex he had acquired during his years with Lokesh, something most Tibetans would do whenever they were near such a wheel.

The nun had probably been the last to push the wheel. Now, as Lokesh would say, Shan had picked up the chain of prayer, adding his link to the dead woman’s, as nuns and pilgrims had done at this spot, with this very wheel, for centuries.

He kept the wheel moving, the low grinding sound his accompaniment as he pictured the nun at work. She had been shot in the back, though at an angle. There had been a separate pool of blood. The Westerner had been with her, helping. The killer had shot him in the neck, then quickly shot the nun as she had begun to turn.

Shan spun the wheel again, watching it with a forlorn expression before facing the courtyard, forgetting for the moment that it was a murder scene. He had visited many such places with Lokesh, and the old Tibetan always somehow gave him a sense of their former grandeur, of the elegant reverence that had dwelt there for so many years. But today, alone, Shan felt small and empty, just another wandering pilgrim who had lost his path.

He hesitantly stepped toward the chorten. Only a few weeks earlier there had been much laughter in the dawn as Shan had helped Lokesh and Jamyang whitewash the shrine. Its loose stones had been relaid, and a fresh coat of stucco applied, and as they prepared their brushes the two Tibetans had described to Shan the many types of chortens in the old teachings. Marking in the sand with sticks they had drawn images, naming each for him. The enlightenment chorten, the lotus chorten, the wheel chorten, the miracle chorten, the descent from heaven chorten, the victory chorten, the nirvana chorten. Shan recalled now how Lokesh had paused as he had discovered a stone at the base that had pushed through the new stucco, as if something had forced its way out from inside. The old Tibetan had not said anything then, simply jammed the stone back and painted over it, but Shan had seen the worry on his face. He knew there were other chortens that were constructed to trap and subdue demons.

Shan stepped now to the far side. The new stucco was cracked. The stone had fallen out again.

He found himself backing away, staring uneasily at the dislodged stone, then turned and moved to the front gate. The smudge of color marking another pool of blood was clearly visible at a corner of the building closest to the gate, where the third victim had been nearly decapitated. He looked inside the little alcove near the front gate where the Tibetans had been storing tools. Meng had reported that a woodcutter’s ax had been discovered there and was being held as the likely butcher’s tool. But surely such a long-handled tool was too clumsy. It seemed unlikely to Shan that an ax had been responsible for the broad, clean slices that had cleaved away the flesh from the foreigner’s skull, but the meager inventory of tools presented few alternatives. A crude spade. Two hoes. A rake. A small and very dull sickle. He paused, remembering now a crew of farmers who had begun clearing brush from along the back wall.

It took him several minutes to locate the farmers’ store of equipment, inside the little chapel where he had first encountered Meng. Under a piece of tattered felt lay a chain, a rope, a small pry bar, and a heavy brush hook with a long curving blade mounted on a rough handle as long as his forearm. Carrying the hook into the sunlight, he ran a finger along the edge of the blade, recalling now that he had seen the farmers at work, using the blade to slice through branches as thick as his thumb. He held the blade close, examining it in the sunlight. Its pockmarked surface held rust but flecks of something darker also stained the metal. He tore off a piece of the felt, wrapped it around the blade, and leaned the hook inside the doorway of the chapel before studying again the tracks outside the building. Meng had been studying the ground when he had first seen her there. There were now at least half a dozen other tracks. Two or three sets were from police boots, two sets were his own, but two more sets were of soft rope-sole shoes, leading back over the wall. One of them led to where the bicycle tracks began, which led in the direction the monk had fled, in the direction of Chegar gompa, the monastery, at the head of the valley. He paused for a moment, debating whether to follow the tire marks, then picked up his shovel where he had left it and turned back to the trail he had arrived on. He could not risk having his unattended truck discovered by the police.

Half an hour later he stood at his truck, gazing in frustration at the ruins below, as he endeavored once more to piece together the movements of those who had been in the convent the day of the murders.

“Maybe it doesn’t want to come back to life yet.”

Shan turned slowly to face the stranger, gripping his shovel tightly. It took a moment for him to discern the young woman, for the brown robe she wore blended with the hillside. She sat, legs crossed under her, by a clump of heather.

“There was an old lama who used to come to our tents when I was a girl,” she continued. “He said at such places ancient spirits are slumbering. You can’t force them awake, he said. They will wake at their chosen time. He said when they do they could walk among us and look just like another man.”

She was barely out of her teens, but the girl’s face, half of which was heavily scarred, the other half fixed in melancholy, said she had seen much of life. Her robe marked her as a lay nun, an unofficial companion to, and a student of, ordained nuns. It had become one of the ways that Tibetans evaded the ever-more onerous restrictions on donning a maroon robe.

“I have learned to trust a lot of what old lamas say,” Shan replied, and loosened his grip on the shovel.

“Abbess Tomo isn’t coming back, is she?”

“Abbess?” Shan asked in surprise.

“The head of our hermitage.”

The woman had not been just a nun, she had been the senior nun of the valley. He shook his head slowly. “She’s not coming back.”

“No one wants to talk about her. They act like maybe she just went on a retreat somewhere.”

“I saw her body.”

The woman bit her lip. “She raised me since I was ten. Since—” she pointed to the ruin of her face. “My father borrowed a truck to take our sheep to market. It was going to be like a holiday, my mother and grandmother were going with us. No one told him the brakes were bad. We went off a mountain road. There was an explosion and fire when the truck crashed at the bottom. Only a lamb and I survived. Not even all of me,” she added, gesturing again to her face.

“My name is Shan,” he said.

“I am Chenmo. Some of the older nuns are reciting death rites in secret, in one of the old hermit huts. I thought they were for Jamyang so I went last night to sit behind the hut and join in. When I heard them say her name the grief seized me so hard I could barely breathe.”

“There are many ways to say good-bye.”

Chenmo offered a small, sad nod. “They started the death rites for Jamyang after Uncle Lokesh stopped to speak with the nuns. He carried the body of the lama hermit on a mule. Now they say rites for two. I do not understand the day of blood.” She paused and scrubbed at the tears on her cheeks. “He said to watch for a Chinese with eyes like deep wells and mud in his fingernails. He said that the man would wear purple numbers on his skin. Uncle Lokesh said we could trust him.”

Day of blood. The terrible afternoon of murder and suicide would be marked indelibly in the mental calendars of the local people for years, maybe generations.

“I see everything but the numbers,” Chenmo said, forcing a smile. “What did he mean?”

Shan rolled up his sleeve and extended his forearm.

“Oh!” Chenmo said with surprise in her voice, then again “Oh,” more darkly, as she realized what they were. “Lokesh said you see secrets in deaths. Were you a murderer then?”

“No. Some ministers in Beijing felt safer if I was sent away. They didn’t understand the blessing they were bestowing on me by sending me to a prison full of lamas and monks. I didn’t either for the first few weeks. But eventually I was reincarnated.”

Chenmo nodded, as if she understood perfectly. “We know Uncle Lokesh but we have never seen you before.”

“I do not wish to disturb the tranquility of convents.” Lokesh would always be welcome in such places, he knew, but not necessarily a Chinese with a government job, however menial.

“Not a convent. A hermitage for nuns. Not a place for visitors.”

“But I was going to come. I have something to leave there.”

When Chenmo did not respond he pointed to his truck, parked near the ledge above them. She rose and warily followed him, staying several steps behind. Her uncertainty disappeared as he reached under the dashboard and pulled out the gau he had retrieved from the dead woman. Chenmo’s hand trembled as she accepted the silver amulet box, then she sobbed and clutched it tightly to her breast.

The gau seemed to release the tide of grief that had been swelling in the young novice. Tears began streaming down her cheeks. She let Shan lead her to a large flat boulder, where she sat weeping, staring at the gau in her hands.

After a few minutes he brought her a bottle of water from the truck and sat beside her as she drank.

“I am sorry,” Chenmo said. “I tried not to cry in front of the nuns.”

“I am sure they cried too, just in their own way,” Shan said.

The young woman offered a melancholy smile.

“Did you ever help Abbess Tomo in the old ruins?” he asked.

When she nodded, he continued. “There were two other people with her, two others who were killed with her in the ruins. A Chinese man with tattoos and a foreigner. Did you know them?”

“No Chinese came, not to the ruins.”

“But there was a foreigner.”

Chenmo stared at the gau as she spoke. “Mother Tomo said not to speak of it. They were secret, brought in by secret people.”

Shan weighed her words. There was more than one foreigner. “You mean the resistance. The purbas.” The local Tibetan underground had taken to calling themselves after the dagger used in Tibetan ritual.

“They don’t use any names. Dharamsala, is all. They say it like a password.” It was the town in northern India that was the capital of the Tibetan government in exile. “Sometimes they come across from India. They work in the shadows and go back in shadow.”

Shan had seen the secret ways. There were prayers brought from senior lamas and secret letters carried for families separated by the closing of the border. But there were also fuel trucks that mysteriously caught fire and pylons for remote power lines or phone towers that toppled in the night. Public Security might be obsessed with finding renegade monks but when they caught scent of such operatives they became rabid hounds. The most aggressive of the young resisters did not always adhere to the pacifist ways of their elders.

“She said think of them as phantoms, protector demons who can’t be seen. Is that what you are?”

Shan shrugged. “I am just a former convict, here for all to see.” As he digested her words, he grew more alarmed. “You mean the purbas brought in the Westerners?”

Chenmo stared at the old gau again, as if consulting it. “Jarman. Amerika,” she said, using the Tibetan terms for Germany and the United States. “They make films. They told us if they could film the restoration project and show the film in the West it would protect it, that Beijing couldn’t destroy it then.”

“Why you?”

“Because it was ours. I mean the hermitage was part of the convent once. We are where the spark is kept alive, after the convent was bombed.”

“And the foreigners were filming the restoration?”

“Yes. Using little cameras. Doing interviews.”

“You mean video cameras?”

Chenmo shrugged and made a circle with a thumb and a finger and held it to her eye. “Little cameras.” There were still many Tibetans, Shan reminded himself, who had little or no experience with modern technology, and little or no inclination to gain any.

“Were these foreigners staying at your hermitage?”

“These are dangerous times, the abbess would warn us. There are Chinese in the hills. Bonecatchers, and others who beat up farmers. We couldn’t risk bringing them to Thousand Steps. Only a few of us at the hermitage were to know. She said if the government discovered we were harboring illegal foreigners they would destroy the hermitage, ship us all to prison.” The northern townships of Lhadrung County were one of the regions of Tibet that were still off-limits to foreigners, because of their many prison camps.

Shan knew the young woman was still wary, that there were layers of secrets in places like hermitages, which had to be carefully peeled away one layer at a time. “Lokesh says we can learn much about what goes on inside Tibet by listening to those from outside. What were their names?”

“Rutger and Cora. They were never apart,” she murmured, then quickly looked up, frowning, as if she had not intended to reveal the names.

“Rutger,” Shan said. “Dark hair. Three or four inches taller than me. A square jaw.”

“If you have met him, why ask?”

“I only met him briefly,” Shan said. Without his face. Without his teeth. Without his life. “He is gone too, Chenmo, with the abbess.”

Chenmo replied with a somber nod. She knew the German was dead.

“I worry about the woman Cora. All alone now. Do you know where she is?”

“Pray her screaming in the night stops. Pray for the silent,” Chenmo replied. “Silence is how she must live now.”

Shan did not understand. “You mean she is at the hermitage?”

But Chenmo just pointed to a butterfly. Without another word she rose. Only after she had followed it, drifting away, did he grasp what she had told him. Cora and Rutger were never apart. Cora was having screaming nightmares. She had to stay silent to stay alive. The missing American woman had witnessed the murders.