CHAPTER FIVE

Months earlier Shan had seen the trucks transporting people and equipment into the low hills beyond the Chinese settlement. But in a land of many prisons and constant military operations you learned not to make inquiries about strange convoys and stayed away from the dust clouds that marked new construction. He remembered pulling over for such a convoy and grimly reading the insignia on the escorting vehicles. Bureau of Religious Affairs, Beijing’s favorite arm for turning Party dogma into ethnic propaganda. Public Security. The Institute for Tibetan Affairs, responsible for distributing the swelling ranks of Chinese immigrants and redistributing native Tibetans.

Clear Water Camp was one of the new relocation facilities, Lokesh had reported after he had encountered some of its residents digging for roots to eat. The government abhorred the nomads of the changtang, the high wilderness prairie that comprised much of central Tibet, for out in the vastness of the grasslands they were almost impossible to locate and even more difficult to control. They were, according to government fact-finding missions, hotbeds of Tibetan tradition. Settlements like Clear Water were built as transition communities, temporary stopping places where Tibetans were processed into lives that would be more aligned with the socialist cause.

As his truck crested the hill a gasp escaped Shan’s lips. He halted, hands on the wheel. He had traveled across the changtang, had befriended some of the joyful, free-spirited nomads whose clans had called that wild land their home for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. The nomads had been corralled like sheep in a pen. Scores of small identical square buildings lay in rows before him, all with the same corrugated metal roofs and metal doors, the same single window and steel pipe chimney.

As he left his truck by the entrance a plump Chinese man bounded out of a long cinder block structure that apparently served as the camp’s office.

He greeted Shan as if he were a long-awaited guest. “Comrade! Welcome to Clear Water Resettlement Camp!” He paused, glancing at Shan’s truck, parked far enough way so that its faded government insignia was visible, but not the words underneath. “How may I assist?”

“Just a quick look on my own,” Shan ventured, then turned to the man with a stern air. “How many do you account for here?”

“We accommodate one hundred and twenty-seven citizens, with room for dozens more. One of the great successes of redistribution.”

“Successes?” Shan asked.

“Of course. We are able to administer medical care, provide dry sleeping quarters, provide two meals a day. Schoolteachers may arrive any day. None of which they had before. Sixty percent have already taken Chinese names, qualifying them for electrical feeds, so electrical distribution into households of reformed nomads is at unprecedented levels. Nearly half are taking the Chinese history modules sent by Beijing. Very encouraging statistics. We are passing out new bedding,” he added, pointing to a pile of tattered sheets by the door of his office. “Historic breakthroughs.”

Shan saw the empty stares of the Tibetan men and women who sat before the little huts. The encouraging statistics.

“Where do they work?”

“No need. They are provided for. Employment will be found for them in a few months, after they graduate from my finishing school,” the manager explained, grinning at his own wit. “Some have found a few sheep to tend to. More like pets.” The man gestured toward the administration building, the stuccoed wall of which was adorned with a mural of ebullient factory workers. “I have the numbers if you wish to review them. We are ahead of our quotas. Best performance in the entire prefecture.”

Shan fought a shudder. “I think I will just look for myself,” he said.

“Let me just lock up,” the manager said.

“Alone.”

“I don’t usually let—”

“You would rather have me tell Colonel Tan you impeded my report?”

The man shrank back and shot a nervous glance up the road before retreating into his building.

None of the displaced shepherds would look at Shan as he walked down the first of the narrow streets. The little prefabricated structures, each the size of a small garage, had metal frames into which sheets of plywood had been inserted. Only a handful of the metal chimney pipes showed any smoke. Several of the inhabitants were cooking at small braziers by their doors. Electric wires dangled low between buildings. A woman carrying towels herded three children from a long squat structure at the end of the block, apparently the community washhouse. Half a dozen other women waited with buckets in a line at a spigot that was spitting up brown water.

Shan tried to look into the faces of the shepherds. Most turned their backs on him. An old man, sitting on a bench made of cinder blocks and planks, looked up from the block of wood he was carving. Shan sat beside him, offering the man a roll of hard candy he found in his pocket. The man accepted the token with a nod and returned to his work. He was whittling the figure of a sheep.

“Tell me, Grandfather, what became of your flocks?”

The man rubbed his stubble of whiskers before replying. “They waited until we had the flocks all gathered. We were preparing for our clan’s lambing festival. Two sets of livestock trucks came that day. One set took the sheep, one took the shepherds. At some camps they just machine-gunned the animals, even the dogs. My granddaughter managed to get her puppy on the truck. The next day a soldier killed it with the butt of his gun. He told her it was just the right size for the army stew pot.”

Shan glanced back at the administration building. The manager was watching him through a crack in the door. “I am sorry.”

The man nodded again.

Shan studied the man’s leathery, wrinkled face as he whittled. He was old, in his eighties or even nineties. “I traveled in the changtang once,” Shan said. “For as far as I could see it was a sea of grass, rolling like waves in the wind. I don’t think I ever felt so free.”

“Some in our clan ran away that day. I was their headman. Rapeche they call me. They need me. I am worthless here. The soil of our lands flows in my blood. I tried to go back. Last month I started walking down the road but a day later the knobs picked me up.” The old shepherd paused, then shrugged. “They gave us papers that say we have to stay in this county, unless we get their signature on a pass. Except they never give their signature.”

They were in a prison without bars. Shan looked up and down the track between the houses. “Where are the young men and women?”

“The Chinese from the relocation office told all the families that their young had to serve the people. Sent to factories in China. I said to them we were people too, and they laughed. My granddaughter is in Guangdong now. She writes us once a month. She makes socks for sale in America. Works twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day. Sleeps in a dormitory with two hundred other girls. She says she found an old temple and borrows a bicycle to ride there on her day off. She lights incense for us.”

Two young boys ran past, kicking a tin can, then stopped near the spigot. One of the women had fallen to her knees, crying, as another kicked the spigot.

The headman frowned. “The fools who built this place knew nothing about campsites. No protection from the wind. Hardly any water. They drilled half a dozen wells and they all went dry but that one. Clear Water, my ass.” He shrugged again. “They say they will leave a tank truck in the parking lot.”

“I am looking for a man named Jigten. He has a limp.”

“Which is why they wouldn’t take him for the factories,” Rapeche said. “His mother hardly has the strength to get out of bed. Her lungs are rattling. He does things to help her that she would never approve of, if she knew.” He shrugged once more and kept whittling. “We do what we have to do to survive.”

The hut the old man directed Shan to, the last in the northernmost row, appeared unoccupied. There were no coals in the brazier by the door, none of the carefully tended vegetable shoots that grew along the front walls of other huts. But from a rope fixed to a nail on the rear corner bits of cloth fluttered in the wind. Someone had turned their new sheet into prayer flags.

The flimsy door was ajar. Shan warily pushed it, and when there was no response he stepped inside. He passed through a small cubicle of a kitchen into the room that comprised the rest of the hut. Under the solitary window Jigten lay slumped against the wall, apparently passed out in exhaustion. Before him, an old woman lay on a pallet. Her leathery face spoke of great strength and determination, though it seemed to take great effort for her to move her head toward Shan. Despite her obvious sickness, her smile was welcoming. “We don’t get many visitors to our tent,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Shan offered the traditional greeting. “Tashi delay.”

“I should make tea.” Her voice was like sandpaper.

“I have had tea, Grandmother,” he replied. “I like your prayer flags.”

“Jigten worked on them all night, asking me to bless each one as he finished. I said that fat goat of a manager will be upset. But my son said once the flags were up the gods would make them invisible to officials.”

Shan reached into his pocket to extract one of the little clay deities he had purchased at the market in Baiyun and pressed it into her hand.

The woman’s grateful smile was broken by a series of hacking coughs. For the first time Shan saw the beads of sweat on her brow. She had a fever. On a stool beside her was a bowl of water and a cloth. He soaked the cloth, wrung it out, and wiped her forehead.

“I was on the changtang once,” Shan said. “I saw herds of antelope. They moved like the wind across the grass. On my last day a big one, an old male, came up to me. He looked at me with an apologetic expression, like he was saying what a poor fool I was to have only two legs, then he sprinted away. I swear his hooves never touched the ground, he was just flying over the grass. I still have dreams about him.”

“A chiru. His spirit mixed with yours. A good sign,” the woman said, then began speaking of her youth, when the herds of antelope numbered in the tens of thousands.

Shan was wringing out the cloth for a third time when suddenly he heard a sharp gasp and Jigten leapt across the room as if to strike at him. His arm was already raised for Shan’s jaw when he froze and looked down. His mother’s bone-thin hand was wrapped around his ankle. “We have a hearth guest,” she said in a chiding tone, as if Shan had just entered their yurt on the prairie.

“He’s a Chinese!” Jigten protested. “An official!”

“No, he’s something different,” his mother insisted. “He saw the prayer flags. The spirit of a chiru dwells in his dreams.”

Jigten sagged. He glanced upward, and for the first time Shan saw a plank laid over two cement blocks, the family altar. Sitting on it was the old bronze dakini Jamyang had given the thief. With a look of great sorrow he straightened and lifted the little statue, extending it to Shan.

“No,” Shan said, refusing the altarpiece. “This is her place, watching over your hearth. A protector demoness.”

“I think he came to speak with you, Son,” the woman said.

The crippled thief gently tucked his mother’s hand inside her blanket. “I could make some porridge,” he said stiffly, for his mother’s sake.

“I would be honored,” Shan said. “On my next visit perhaps. Why did you go to Jamyang’s shrine?”

Jigten’s head snapped back toward his mother, his eyes wide in alarm. He did things the old woman would not approve of. “Sometimes things just appear when you need them,” he said awkwardly.

“Why that day?”

The shepherd glanced at his mother, who stared expectantly at him, then frowned. He was not going to be able to lie in the presence of his dying mother. The shepherd’s words came out in a whisper. “There was an old cairn by the highway. A truck had hit it. I saw him down there, rebuilding it.”

Shan looked back at the old woman. He stole for medicine. If Jamyang had known, he would have given him most of the items on his altar. He gestured Jigten toward the kitchen before asking his next question. “You talked about outsiders buying cans of food and blankets. You were selling things to foreigners. A German man and an American woman. Where did you meet them?”

Jigten frowned. “We were working at the old convent, hauling debris. Two or three times I saw them there. Once on the hills above, taking photographs. There’s a shepherd girl with a scarred face who wants to be a nun. She watches over them.”

“Where were they staying?”

“They always came from the direction of the hermitage, with that girl acting like their guide.”

“What did you sell them?”

“Some ropes and food. Some blankets.”

“Where would you get such things?”

“Mostly from the Jade Crows. I do odd jobs for them. They deliver supplies to the pacification camps. Sometimes I drive or do repair work for them.”

Shan looked at him in surprise. “But the camps are run by the People’s Armed Police. You mean they have a contract with the police?”

“Sure. The green apes. They run the camps, they provide the trucks.”

He considered the shepherd’s words. “The Chinese men who disturb the farms in the hills. It’s the Jade Crows, doing the work of the police.”

Jigten shrugged. “Like I said, they have some kind of arrangement. The police prefer not to go up into the hills. They get bitten by dogs. They hear the phantom horns. They get hounded by ghosts.”

“An arrangement with the Armed Police,” Shan said, thinking out loud. “But not with local Public Security.”

Jigten offered no reply. Shan needed none. Those who had attacked Meng in town held Public Security in contempt. Meng had not only been attacked, she had lied about it as if she feared reporting it. He hesitated a moment, puzzling again over why she had been attacked. Not even the most arrogant gangs would risk assaulting a knob without a good reason.

“Our headman Rapeche made a protection charm for the manager,” Jigten said abruptly, speaking toward the shadows at the back of the room. “That fat one at the gate. He gets frightened sleeping alone in that concrete building. Old Tibetan ghosts rise up in the night to haunt the Chinese in this valley,” he added with an air of satisfaction. “He confided in Rapeche after that, said we won’t stay here forever. More trucks will arrive. They will break us up and take us away to Chinese cities. They say there are entire blocks where nothing green grows, where the wind is full of grease and chemicals. Then we’ll look back at this place as a happy time. At least here we still have most of the clan together.”

He cast a worried glance at Shan, as if remembering who his visitor was.

“Lha gyal lo,” Shan whispered in a pained voice.

“You don’t know what’s happening in Tibet. Before long, Tibet will be nothing but camps and the keepers of camps.” Jigten’s voice grew hollow. “They converted an old army base to a pacification camp on the other side of the mountain. The police bring in another truckload of Tibetans almost every week. That don’t call it a prison but that place has razor wire and guards with guns. It’s a cage with no way out. Last month they started a graveyard there.”

As he spoke voices were raised in alarm outside. Jigten shot up and ran out the door, Shan a step behind.

A man on the low ridge above the camp was shouting frantically, pointing down the valley. The Chinese manager was at the front gate now, crying out in his high-pitched voice, ordering everyone to return to their huts. The shepherds ignored him and ran up the ridge.

Shan arrived at the top of the ridge panting, his gaze following the arm of a nearby shepherd as the man pointed first to the line of dense, black clouds rolling off the sacred mountain and then to the red and blue flashes in Baiyun. The town was more than a mile away but the blinking lights of police cars were plainly visible. A line of shadow was moving across the fields. Half the population of the town seemed to be fleeing their homes.

Shan ran to his truck.

He saw more than a dozen police cars as he reached the town, and half a dozen big trucks, all troop carriers of the People’s Armed Police, the green apes who did the heavy lifting for Public Security. He didn’t have to look for Meng. She stepped in front of his truck, then climbed into the passenger seat, as if for protection. Police were swarming in and out of the buildings, herding the few remaining inhabitants into the central square, while other officers stood at the edge of the field, blowing whistles at the retreating residents.

Meng gestured to the chaos. “Welcome to our model Pioneer community,” she said. “If Major Liang had his way he’d probably burn the town down.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The bodies. Late yesterday someone stole the bodies.”

Shan considered her words. “Late yesterday,” he pointed out, “someone attacked you. The constables came running, leaving that meat locker unattended.”

“The owner of the store has fled. Only one thing keeps Liang from arresting the whole town.”

“Officially the murders haven’t taken place,” Shan inserted. “Hard to explain arrests for stealing murder victims when no murder has been reported.”

“Exactly.” Meng was watching the dark clouds that were rapidly overtaking the town. “We don’t want to put a blemish on the heroic faces of our Pioneers. We just—”

At first Shan thought Meng was interrupted by someone throwing stones at his truck. Then the sound was more like rifle shots, accelerating into a machine-gun staccato. People began crying out in pain, flinching, clutching at their arms and shoulders as if they were being stung. Some of the immigrants dropped to the ground, curling up with their hands over their heads. Others ran, dashing for the nearest cover.

Hailstorms in Tibet came quickly and left just as quickly but they always brought with them destruction and terror, sometimes even death. Shan looked back toward Clear Water Camp. The ridge was empty. The dropka might ignore the orders of their camp manager but they knew how to read clouds.

Shan pulled his wide-brimmed hat low on his head and leapt out of the truck. He grabbed two of the buckets from the back and ran toward the fields. He pulled up an old man who had fallen to his knees, blood running from the hands that shielded his face, then held a bucket over the man’s head. The man gasped in confusion, then grabbed the bucket and pointed to a woman who had fallen a few feet away.

“I have her!” Shan shouted over the roar of the storm, then pulled the woman to her feet and covered her head with the second bucket. They ran, like most of the people in the fields, toward the open-walled pavilion that had been erected for the market. As Shan pushed the woman inside and turned back toward the field, the hail abruptly stopped.

People were crying. A donkey brayed. Dogs were barking. The police seemed to have forgotten their search and were climbing back into their trucks. Several stared dumbfounded at their cars. Most of their rooftop light fixtures were in pieces. Three windshields had been shattered. Voices, some frantic, crackled on their radios. One constable, a Tibetan, stared somberly toward the huge mountain that hovered over the valley. The angry storm had come from Yangon, home of the deities who protected the valley.

Shan searched the crowd, spotted the grey-haired man with the wire-rimmed glasses he had seen playing checkers and followed him to a small bungalow on the side street behind the town’s modest teahouse.

As the man paused at his front door to speak with a neighbor, Shan quickly circled the house and entered the rear door. He was sitting in the kitchen when the man entered. He did not seem surprised to see a stranger in his house.

“Your men already searched here,” the man said in a level voice. “You can see we have few possessions and even less space to hide anything.” His voice trailed away as he noticed Shan’s muddy boots and tattered work clothes.

Shan did not speak. He reached into his pocket and set the little jade dragon from Jamyang’s altar on the table in front of him. “You can buy these from stalls off Tiananmen Square for forty renminbi. A genuine relic from the Kang Xi emperor, the vendors will say, and the tourists never know any better. But my instinct says this is not a reproduction.”

The man sank into a chair, his gaze fixed on the little dragon. “So you’re here to tell me it belongs to the state,” he declared in a tight voice. His long, thin face seemed to grow weary as he spoke.

Shan studied the man for a long moment, his eyes were deep, uncertain pools. There was great intelligence in them, and also a hint of fear. “My father had a small collection of seals from the imperial times,” Shan explained, “which he cherished. When I was very young he would take me in the closet and show them to me with a candle, exclaiming over the history they must have witnessed. Sometimes he would visit antique stalls in the market, hoping to find a document with a seal print that would match. But by then the Red Guard had burned nearly all the imperial documents. When we were sent for reeducation in the country he buried them in a field and never was able to recover them. Probably long since destroyed by a bulldozer.”

The man stared at Shan. “It was one of a matching pair,” he ventured at last. “I had to trade the other years ago for medicine when my daughter first became ill.”

Shan pushed the intricately worked seal across the table to the man, who stroked it with a gentle hand, gazing at it with a sad smile. He pushed it back to Shan as a police radio barked from the street outside. “It is not safe here. If those goons had found it today they would have stomped it under a heel and laughed. It has a new guardian in the mountains.”

“Jamyang is dead,” Shan stated.

The man’s eyes widened in alarm. “No. Not Jamyang. He knows how to survive.”

“I was with him when he killed himself.”

The man’s face twisted in pain, draining of color. He pressed a fist against his mouth as if to stifle a sob, then dropped his head into his hands. “I think I shall make some tea,” he declared with a sigh.

“I am called Yuan Guo,” the stranger explained as he waited for his hot plate to boil water. “I raise goats.”

Shan paused a moment. There had been another Yuan, on the tablet in the mountains. “I am called Shan Tao Yun,” Shan replied. “I inspect ditches, which means mostly I dig mud and manure. I didn’t always inspect ditches. You didn’t always raise goats.”

Yuan’s expression began to warm. “In Harbin,” he said, referring to one of the large cities of Manchuria, “I was a professor of history, ever since the university was reopened twenty-five years ago. I decided to join the Pioneer program. The state promises me land rights if I stay five years. And meanwhile”—he gestured about the sparse, cold room—“I get all this.” He lifted a fork and began chipping leaves from a brick of tea. From a room down the darkened hall came the sound of coughing.

“I met an old relative of yours, Yuan Yi. I want to bring him back to you.”

Yuan’s hand froze in midair as he spun about to face Shan. “You mustn’t!” he cried out, then he seemed to collect himself and turned back to silently sprinkle the leaves into two chipped cups before joining Shan at the table. “Please,” he said in a low, plaintive voice. “He must stay on the mountain. He too is in exile.”

Shan waited until his cup was filled, then spoke through the steam of his cup. “Perhaps you should start with Harbin.”

Professor Yuan Guo had lived most of his life in Harbin, he explained, and had been a graduate student at the university there until it had been shut down by Mao, then worked at a locomotive factory until the university had reopened. He had helped establish the Chinese history department and had married another professor, who had worked in a chemical factory during her reeducation. She had died of cancer ten years later. Yuan had raised his daughter alone, then had retired four years earlier and enjoyed a peaceful existence reviewing old manuscripts in the university library until his daughter Sansan had been arrested for antigovernment activity on the Internet. “She faced a few months imprisonment but Public Security asserted what they called aggravating circumstances. She was identified as ringleader in a group of prodemocracy advocates. All were children of the retired professors in our building. There was a meeting, the kind we used to call criticism sessions. We were found to be politically irresponsible. If Mao had still been alive we would have been branded hooligans and paraded in dunce caps.”

Shan sipped his tea. “My family was sent to the rice paddies for being in the Stinking Ninth,” he said, referring to the most reprehensible of Mao’s infamous list of bad elements, the intellectuals.

Yuan grinned, leaned forward, and began his tale in more detail. They were two old soldiers sharing stories of the war. Yuan had specialized in the history of Imperial China, his wife in Western history. Their daughter had graduated from the university with a degree in anthropology and had been working for a Western computer company for two years when she had been arrested at an Internet café. The café owner had been arrested the week before for failing to record the identification cards of all the Internet users in his café and negotiated his freedom by agreeing to help Public Security snare his customers.

“We were told we could have our children sentenced to long prison terms or we could all join the Pioneer program. Each family in our building was told to report to the train station at three A.M. with no more than a hundred pounds of belongings.”

“Surely not the entire building?”

“We were a special case, a building of professors or retired professors, with children who had grown up well educated and well versed in Internet democracy.” Internet democracy. It was one of the terms of the new age, for those who practiced dissidence anonymously over the Internet. Except the government had learned ways to make sure no one could use the Internet anonymously. “We were contaminating the educational environment, someone in the Party said. They wanted us gone. From the university. From the city. From Manchuria. Some of my colleagues tend to think it was because a land developer in the Party wanted to level the building and erect a high-rise.”

“Everyone agreed to go to Tibet?”

Yuan offered his sad grin again. “We were put on a train. We had escorts. We had no idea where we were going. Nostalgic in a way. Like old times.” He meant the years under Mao when entire city blocks were simply ordered to the new Chinese cities being built in the Muslim and Buddhist lands of western China.

Shan cocked his head in disbelief. “You’re saying the government kept a cell of dissidents intact and just transplanted them?”

“They knew where we were going. A high-altitude wilderness. Barely enough for us to subsist on. They were confident Tibet would break us. We could do no harm here. And the Party had set ambitious goals for the number of new Pioneer settlements. They were having trouble filling their quotas.”

“But the life of a retired professor in Harbin…” Shan’s voice trailed away. Both men knew what he meant. Professors labored their entire careers at low pay because of the privileges they were assured at the end, the comfortable housing, the open access to university resources, the ability to study and write what they wished, the appointment to prestigious committees.

“My daughter Sansan has always been frail. She never would have survived prison. Now we have daily walks in the fresh air. The goats give us milk. She gets stronger every day.”

“Professors and Jade Crows. Quite the socialist experiment.”

“More than ninety percent of us are from Harbin. The others are from the jungles of Yunnan Province.”

“Criminals who bribed their way into exile instead of prison,” Shan suggested.

A sliver of a smile creased the professor’s face. “We prefer to think of them as a tropical social club with wanderlust. The prisons of Yunnan are quite overcrowded I hear.”

“But already they have begun to—” Shan’s words were cut off by new shouting in the street. Yuan darted to his front window.

More police were visible now, pushing apart a stack of trash cans, opening the backs of vehicles. As an officer in grey began walking toward his front door, a small gasp escaped Yuan’s throat. He quickly stepped to his dining table, grabbed a roll of paper, and sank into one of the two easy chairs in the room, hiding the roll in the small of his back as he picked up a book to read. As he did so a thin woman in her late twenties ran out of what Shan took to be a bedroom. A computer screen lit up at her touch and keys rattled as Yuan’s daughter quickly worked the keyboard, then withdrew what Shan took to be a memory card and darted back into the bedroom.

The knob sergeant did not bother to knock or announce himself. He threw open the door and glared at the professor, his eyes full of challenge. “Our house is open to you,” the professor said as he looked up from his book, then went back to reading.

“Of course it is,” the officer spat, then gestured two companions inside and down into the other rooms. He began roaming the main chamber, lifting books, pulling back cushions stacked against a wall. Faint martial tones rose from the darkened corner. Sansan had brought up one of the patriotic Web sites of the Party, where soldiers and factory workers paraded twenty-four hours a day.

The officer opened the closet by the door, then kicked up a corner of the carpet as if he might discover a trapdoor. As he stepped into the kitchen he tapped walls, even opened the refrigerator. “It’s broken,” he announced, lifting out a box of salt crisps and a book.

“It’s never worked,” Yuan said cheerfully. “But it’s a great status symbol. Tibetans never have them.”

The officer nodded his approval. His men appeared. As the three marched out the kitchen door, the officer gave orders to search the little toolshed at the rear of the yard.

“They searched your house twice today,” Shan observed as Yuan stepped to the door, watching the knobs as they entered the shed then, moments later, left his yard. “Was it Public Security both times?”

“I don’t know,” Yuan said with a worried glance back toward the bedroom. “No. The first were just some of those Armed Police. They ordered us all out on the street with megaphones. They’re not as subtle.”

“Bodies from a murder scene were stolen from the store’s meat locker. The first time they were trying to find them.”

The professor returned Shan’s gaze without expression. He knew about the murders. Shan looked back to the grey vehicles on the street, then surveyed the room again. “The Armed Police were looking for dead bodies,” Shan observed. “But these knobs were looking for a live one.”

The professor said nothing, just frowned, opened the door, and gestured Shan out of his house.