CHAPTER EIGHT

Shan halted and slowly turned toward the nun. “Say that again.”

“Some of us went to the Golmud highway to help with those convoys of relocated shepherds. There was a truck station where they stopped for rest.” Chenmo cast another worried glance toward the internment camp. “We can’t linger here. They will see us and send soldiers.”

Shan gazed forlornly back at the camp but let her pull him back over the crest. “Jamyang was helping with the shepherds too, you mean,” he said when they were out of sight of the camp.

“No. He was in a big black car, like the government uses. He and others, mostly Chinese, got out and went inside for tea. They were wearing suits, like on a business trip.”

He searched her eyes, trying to understand the trick she was playing. “Chenmo, you are mistaken.”

“He had that mark on his cheek. The abbess said it was the sign of the lotus flower, a bud of the flower, and that it must mean he was a reincarnated teacher.” She spoke of the little birthmark over Jamyang’s jaw. The lotus was a symbol of purity. It was believed that those spiritually advanced lamas whose reincarnations could be traced more than hundreds of years, the tulku, often had prominent birthmarks to aid their identification as infants.

He struggled to focus on what she said, considering the meaning of her words. “You told the abbess about seeing him?”

“There was no point. She spoke often about how such a tulku had to be treasured by all of us. She would not have believed me. I am just a novice. She liked to say I still had the wildness of my clan in me.”

“But you are certain?”

“I was at a water spigot filling some of the cans from the back of the trucks. A can spilled and splashed water on one of the Chinese men, who cursed at me and raised an arm like he was about to strike me. This tall Tibetan with him rushed forward and calmed him, saying it was only an accident, then picked up the can for me. He helped me refill it. He laughed when he got splashed himself, then he squeezed my hand and offered a prayer before he rushed to the others. I saw his face plain, saw that mark. When I looked into my hand there was a folded currency note in it. Ten yuan. I bought incense to put in the back of each of the trucks so the gods would follow and know where those poor shepherds were going. It was Jamyang, Shan, I know it was.”

Shan stared at Chenmo, desperately wanting not to believe the tale but seeing in her eyes that the woman spoke the truth. He gestured her back down the hill toward the truck.

*   *   *

He did not bother to speak to the manager of Clear Water Camp, who was affixing a poster to the wall of his building as Shan climbed out of his truck. He felt the man’s worried gaze on his back as he marched through the gate.

“This is China’s century, Comrade!” the stout man shouted to his back. It was, word for word, the caption on the poster.

The sparse structure that Jigten shared with his mother seemed empty as Shan pulled back the burlap that shuttered the window. He knocked once on the door, then stepped inside before hearing the shallow, raspy breath and saw that what he had taken to be a pile of grey blankets on the pallet was the old woman, curled up like a sleeping cat.

He silently searched the contents of the main room, raising clouds of dust as he probed a basket of clothing, then lifted a crate used as a stool. Inside the crate a cloth bag had been tacked. It held three small hand calculators and two watches that appeared to be broken.

It was the small closet at the back of the kitchen that held Jigten’s main inventory. On its top shelf, behind a row of empty water bottles he found what he was looking for. He pulled the blue nylon backpack into the light cast by the open door, examining each of its zippered pockets. As he searched the last of them a shadow appeared in the doorway.

Jigten’s expression changed quickly from surprise to resentment as he stepped inside. “You can’t just come in and steal things,” the shepherd said in a deflated voice.

“I will take the truth where I find it,” Shan replied. “Even if it means stealing it.” The pockets of the pack were stuffed with freeze-dried food, the main compartment filled with more food, half a dozen carabiners, and a small gas stove wrapped in a windbreaker. On the inside flap was a name in black ink. Cora Michener.

“Truth.” Jigten spat the word like a curse. “Like the Chinese who dumped us in this camp said they were just interested in our welfare. I remember one prick who laughed as he shot our sheep. He asked if I could feel my chains dropping away.”

Shan extended the pack toward Jigten. “I could take this to Public Security. When they discover it belonged to their dead foreigner they will assume the worst. They are looking for someone to blame the murders on. This would be the only piece of evidence connected to the German.”

The color drained from Jigten’s face. He leaned against the wall by the door, seeming to lose strength, then slowly slid to the floor. “They were gone,” he muttered. “They weren’t coming back.”

“How did you know that?”

“The German was dead. That American was a frightened mouse in a field of cats. If I hadn’t taken the stuff someone else would have.” As he spoke Jigten extracted a small bottle of medicine from inside his vest and looked toward his sleeping mother. “I have expenses,” he whispered.

“How did you know where their camp was?”

“That girl. Sometimes a few of us would go and help at the old ruins. My mother said I should do it, that I needed to gain merit with the gods,” he said with a bitter grin. “Hauling away rubble. Patching and whitewashing that old chorten. She was there sometimes with the nuns. I thought she was a nun at first. She wore an old chuba, a shepherd’s coat, and a derby, like some Tibetan girl. I never heard her speak so I thought maybe she was under some kind of vow. But one day we were resting from hauling heavy rocks and she broke up a chocolate bar and gave us all pieces. I saw the wrapper. It was from America. She tried to respond when everyone thanked her, but her Tibetan was terrible.”

“So you followed her, like you followed Jamyang to his shrine.”

“My grandfather said you always need to know the land. He knew every stream, every rabbit burrow, every wolf den. ‘You can’t be sure of someone,’ he would say, ‘until you know where they sleep at night.’” He glanced up at Shan. “I didn’t follow from the convent. They were usually given a ride in the truck with the monks, to the bottom of the Thousand Steps. I went to the nun’s hermitage and watched. Hell, Westerners like that throw away things that would be worth a month’s wages to one of us.”

Shan fingered the seams of the nylon pack. “Where are the pictures?”

“I never saw pictures.”

“Little cards with cartridges in plastic cases.”

Jigten shrugged. “No good to me. A bunch of plastic. Not real things.”

“So you saw them, and left them?”

The shepherd slowly nodded. “No good to me,” he repeated.

“How many cameras?”

“One for video. One for photographs.”

“Where are they?”

“Gone.”

“Where exactly? Did they have photos stored in them?”

Jigten’s expression hardened. “Who knows? Even if anyone in Clear Water Camp had money to buy such things, no one knows how to use them.”

“So you would take them to Baiyun?” Shan studied Jigten a moment. The exiled professors in Baiyun could hardly afford such luxuries. “The Jade Crows. Lung’s gang. They would know how to move such things on the black market.”

Jigten frowned. “I won’t do anything that gets people in more trouble. Everyone in that town made someone in Beijing angry too, like us. That’s life in Tibet. Everyone in Tibet has someone in Beijing angry at them. All that matters is who’s angry and how deep their anger is.”

It was, Shan thought, the wisest thing he had ever heard Jigten say.

The dropka looked up with a desolate expression. “How mad are you?” he asked.

The words hurt more than Jigten could have known. He gazed at the shepherd in silence, not having the strength to tell him that if the police found out about the cameras anyone who had touched them could disappear. He tossed the pack toward Jigten. “You must get that name off the pack,” he said, then sat on the doorsill. “Cut it off. Don’t just black it out with more ink, for they will have ways to see what’s underneath. Don’t get caught with it like that.”

Jigten looked uncertainly at Shan. “You won’t tell the knobs?”

“I won’t tell the knobs.” Shan hated the fear in the man’s eyes. Had Lokesh been with him, the old Tibetan would have found a way to bring a smile to the man’s face. But alone Shan only brought fear.

“Don’t go,” Jigten said after a brittle silence. “Don’t go to Lung today.”

“They already burned their leader’s body. I saw the pyre yesterday.”

“Not that. One of the young ones, that Genghis, was beaten real bad. By knobs working for that Major Liang. The Jade Crows thought the Armed Police would keep them protected as usual. But not this time, not now, not from Liang.”

Shan hesitated, searching Jigten’s face. “I need to know about the camp on the other side of the mountain, Jigten. The one with razor wire and machine guns. You said you drive supplies there sometimes for the Jade Crows. I want to know about the trucks. I want to know about their schedules.”

Jigten shook his head grimly from side to side. “You don’t talk about demons. It makes them more powerful.”

“I have friends there behind the wire.”

“No you don’t. Not anymore.” Jigten saw the uncertainty on Shan’s face, then glanced uneasily toward his sleeping mother. “There was one of our clan, the son of our headman, who carried on the old ways, learned all the tales of the grandfathers and the songs from hearths before time. He was our strength, the one who made us believe in ourselves. He was always telling us the Chinese were just visitors in our land, that we were the true people, just like yaks and sheep were the true animals of the changtang, and no one in Beijing could ever change that. But he spoke too many times in front of caravans and other travelers. One day they came and took him away to a pacification camp like that one on the other side of the mountain. He wrote us at first, said he was fine, that he would be back in a few months. Then the letters stopped coming. We told his mother, who was blind, that the letters still came, even pretended to read some to her. It would have broken the heart of the old ones to know the truth. Two years later his nephew found him begging in some town.” Jigten glanced back toward his mother. “He could barely walk. They broke his feet. They broke something in his head. He had no more songs, except those party anthems he kept singing under his breath instead of his mantras. No more laughter, no more light in his eyes.”

In the silence that followed Shan realized the steady breathing from the bed had stopped. The old woman had pulled the blanket over her head but Shan could see her hollow eyes, open, staring at them in horror. She had been listening.

“You will have no more friends there,” Jigten said, his voice strangely hoarse now. “They will be no more. People go in but only hollow shells come out.”

*   *   *

The sun was low in the sky when Shan rose from the tall grass where he had been sitting, watching the Jade Crows compound. There was no sign of sentries. The big trucks were gone. Jigten had explained that twice a week they made long hauls, either to the southern border or up the northern road to Chamdo, Tibet’s third biggest city, even sometimes beyond, into Sichuan Province, to pick up supplies for the camps. The compound seemed nearly deserted except for the solitary figure he had seen climbing to the run-down stable on the slope above the farm. He cast a long, worried glance in the direction of Lokesh’s new prison, then muttered a prayer and began climbing the hill.

There was no door on the little building. For several moments Shan watched the man at the altar of planks and stones, then extracted a stick of incense from his pocket and lit a match against the wall.

Lung Tso spun about, his eyes flaring as bright as the match. “You have a lot of balls coming here, Old Mao,” he spat. His hand drifted toward the dagger Shan knew was in his boot.

“I bring incense to honor your gods.”

The words cut through Lung’s anger. He glanced back at the altar, seeming uncertain how to respond. On one side of the altar sat a simple sandalwood statue of Buddha, on the other a stout, decorated Buddha of the tropical lands. Beside them were two thick candles, a butter lamp, a glass of wine, and a white khata scarf, an offering scarf. At the very edge sat a small toy truck with another khata wrapped around it.

Shan wedged his smoking stick of incense between stones in the wall above the altar, murmuring a quick mantra before turning to the new Jade Crow chieftain. “Tell me something, Lung. Did your brother make this altar before or after his son died?” He half expected Lung to pull out his blade, but then he saw there was no fight in the man before him.

Lung Tso watched the smoke of the smoldering stick as he spoke. “After. Even then he kept it hidden. The night we burned his boy’s body he never came back to the house. I found him here, just before dawn, setting out the little statues.” He turned to Shan. “When we were young our mother took us to the temple. People would bring little things like images of houses and money and burn them. Should we burn something?”

“That was a temple of the Taoists,” Shan explained. “The Buddha does not expect it.”

“My brother said he had been having dreams about going to the temple with our mother,” Lung continued. “He said maybe we had been wrong to ignore the gods after she died. Maybe it was wrong to have roughed up all those Tibetans in the hills, he said, just because the police said so. He said our mother had warned him about making deals with demons.”

“You mean he thought his son’s death was some kind of punishment.”

“I told him his son died in a truck accident, that our dealing with the police was just good business, that the Jade Crows always made the best of their situation, it’s how we survived. But he wouldn’t listen. He said bringing the old nun was too late, that he should have done so long before.”

Shan paused. “You were here when she came?”

“The first time she came to us with another nun, right up the stairs as we sat at the table playing tiles. She demanded that we stop raiding the farms. My brother made sure she wasn’t hurt, even stopped the others from laughing at her, but agreed to nothing. When my nephew died he seemed to reconsider things. Lung Wi was a good boy, very smart, very lively. Always laughing. My brother was devoted to him. If we had stayed in Yunnan some of us might have avoided jail but my brother wouldn’t be separated from his son. The others don’t know it, but it’s why we came here, so my brother and his son would be together.

“When the boy’s body was brought back he wept. The only time I ever saw him weep. He pulled out an old box of our mother’s things and sat with them a long time. Then he took them and placed them around his son’s body. After a couple hours of sitting there in silence he left without a word. When he came back that old nun was with him. They washed the boy’s body and they said words together.”

“Your brother and the abbess?”

Lung shook his head. “The abbess and that other nun, the older nun. The monk too, though the abbess was in charge.”

“A monk? What was his name?”

“That Jamyang.”

“The tall lama with the red spot on his jaw?”

As Lung nodded Shan recalled he had seemed to know Jamyang’s name on his first visit. “Not as good as the nuns,” the gang leader added.

“What do you mean?”

“He disrupted things, stopped the prayers. He ran out like he couldn’t bear to be with the dead. What good’s a monk who is scared of death?”

Shan stared at the gang leader in confusion. “Where was the boy going when he died?”

“Jade Crow business,” was Lung’s only reply. He turned back toward the altar. “Do you have more of that incense?”

Shan found himself settling down in front of the altar. He absently handed Lung his last stick of incense. The gang leader lit it and stared at the little Buddha in the exotic garb, his head cocked, as if trying to understand how to speak to it. The last rays of the sun reached into the stable, bathing the altar in a golden glow.

Shan reached into his pocket and extracted the folded piece of paper he had found in Lung Ma’s holster. “This is what you wanted. This is what I took from your brother’s body.”

Lung Tso seemed not to hear for a moment, then he slowly turned and accepted the paper. His brows knitted in confusion as he read it. He looked up at Shan and gestured him closer to the little Buddhas. “My mother said in front of the gods no man can lie. This was it, this was all you took?”

“I swear it to you. These were the words that brought him to the convent that day.”

“Just dates and towns?”

“Certain dates. Certain towns, towns on the border, where things get moved out of China. And at the bottom that address in Chamdo. It was written by Jamyang.”

“This is why my brother died? I don’t think so.”

“A man cannot lie in front of the gods, Lung. Were the Jade Crows smuggling things across at those towns? Things like the cameras of those foreigners?”

Lung’s nod was so small as to be almost imperceptible.

“Where are they, where are the cameras?”

“Gone. Probably in some Katmandu market by now.”

“Look at the last two entries, Lung. One town, with two dates that were in the future when Jamyang gave these to him. One passed a few days ago. You’re planning operations there, to smuggle across the Nepali border on those dates. Someone is watching you.”

Lung’s eyes widened, as realization had finally hit him. “Fuck me.”

“Your nephew died,” Shan slowly declared. “Your brother and the abbess and Jamyang met here, because of his death. Then they and the German all died.”

“Fuck me,” Lung murmured again, repeating it several times. It had the tone of a prayer, the Jade Crow mantra.

Wind began to rustle the grass outside. They both stared at the little altar. The candles flickered. A nighthawk called.

“I want you to make a burnt offering after all,” Shan said at last. Lung looked up. “I want you to burn a truck for your brother.”