Bones of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  As innocuous as it sounded, Shan knew it meant the colonel placed his trust in the officer. “Doing anything for the colonel requires a certain degree of bravery,” Shan observed.

  Zhu grinned again. “Should I go change then?”

  “Yes. Finish checking the hotels for any stay by the American. And I don’t want the Lhasa police or Public Security to know you are asking.”

  Zhu began to salute then reconsidered and dropped his hand. “Evasive reconnaissance. My favorite kind of mission.” He took a step away and turned back, reaching into a pocket. “Almost forgot. She said to give it to you. Your eyes only,” the lieutenant added in an inquiring tone. Shan took the envelope, confirmed that it was addressed in Amah Jiejie’s elegant hand, and then to Zhu’s obvious disappointment, put it in his own pocket. “There’s a tea shop with a big red door on the north side of Barkhor Square,” Shan said. “See you there in four hours.”

  * * *

  On the waiting room wall of the drab building that sat behind Lhasa’s temple complex a plaque proclaimed that the Bureau of Religious Affairs was the “lifeblood of cultural responsibililty in Tibet.” Shan sat for nearly half an hour, contemplating the many ways the words might be interpreted, before he was ushered into a surprisingly elegant meeting room.

  The two men waiting for him seemed almost excited to see Shan. “Welcome, Comrade Inspector. We are so grateful to at last receive some recognition from the government of Lhadrung County,” declared the older man, who introduced himself as the regional director. He pushed a porcelain cup of tea across the table to Shan.

  “I just had some questions about a criminal case,” Shan said, unable to disguise his confusion.

  “Yes, yes, so the note you sent up explained. Religious Affairs is a pillar of cooperation.”

  “A man named Metok Rentzig sent you some photographs.”

  The regional director looked down into his folded hands, then glanced at his companion. “That case is closed, we hear,” the younger man offered.

  “Just tidying up the file,” Shan said. “Did Rentzig send any explanation, perhaps a description of the subjects of his photos? Perhaps a detailed location or even some suggestion why he, as an engineer, would be sending them to you directly?”

  The two men exchanged wary glances. “The photos from the Five Claws are safe in our warehouse on Kunming Road. We are willing to make a compromise.”

  His hosts seemed to think Shan came to negotiate. “A compromise?”

  “Surely that is why you came, to resolve things with Deputy Director Jiao.”

  Shan took a deep breath. “There’s much to resolve.”

  “But still two years before the Chairman comes for his glorious visit.”

  “To visit the Five Claws, you mean.”

  “Exactly. Surely Jiao must understand our claim to jurisdiction is well-founded.”

  “I am here about Rentzig.”

  “Yes, well, we are willing to say the photos came from Jiao himself,” the regional director suggested. “We can be practical. The involvement of a criminal was just coincidental. We will, of course, support development of the project, even postdate the report if he prefers.”

  “I would have to understand what Metok said.”

  “But there is no need to include his name anywhere, I assure you. We were already asserting jurisdiction.”

  Shan’s mind raced. “So you can have a place at the table when the Chairman visits,” he said.

  “Astutely put, comrade. You have pierced the essential point. And, of course, Colonel Tan will be there. We can add his name to our report if he wishes. We just want Jiao to provide some reciprocity. Where would he be if we had not already tamed the Tibetan reactionaries?”

  Shan had to swallow his bile. “You did assess the photos from Metok, but your report will dismiss the artifacts as unnoteworthy.”

  “Not exactly,” the younger official replied. “Better to indicate that they presented a challenge which we were able to overcome through painstaking and expert evaluation to minimize their importance. We call it mitigation. We will say we mitigated the problem to advance the interests of the motherland.”

  * * *

  Metok’s apartment was in one of the new blocks of apartment buildings on the south side of the city. Shan knocked for a long time and was about to give up when a weary woman in her mid-thirties opened the door, took in his uniform, and fixed him with an accusatory stare.

  “I am from Lhadrung,” Shan said. Metok’s wife wore her hair in a tight bun at the back of her head. She wore a dirty sweatshirt, and her eyes appeared puffy from crying.

  “I think,” the woman replied in a surprisingly sharp voice, “that we are finished with Lhadrung.”

  Shan cursed himself for not rehearsing a better opening.

  “Could there be anything left for you to do to us?” the woman snapped. “Evict us today instead of in a month? Maybe you’re here to reclaim his work clothes—I might be able to find some mud-caked shoes you can take back as trophies.”

  “My name is Shan. I am just a constable. I want to try to set things right.”

  Metok’s wife gave a bitter laugh. “A bit late for that, isn’t it, Constable Shan? Perhaps you came to collect the cost of the bullet that killed my husband? I hear Public Security does that sometimes.”

  “I am not Public Security. They would be furious if they knew I was here.” Shan cast a nervous glance down the hall, where an elderly woman carrying a bag of cabbages had paused to gawk at him. “Please, may I come in?”

  “You people always do what you want,” she said as she stepped aside for him to enter. “No point in saying no.” She turned her back on Shan and called toward the kitchen. “Dolma,” she said to the teenaged girl who emerged. “Go to your room,” she instructed, then sat in one of the two worn armchairs in the modest sitting room.

  Shan admired the shelves of books that lined two of the walls of Metok’s apartment. It was a well-read household. Instead of the usual framed quotes of Mao that were often hung in rooms that visitors might frequent, there were two quotes from Buddhist scripture. Another wall held several photographs of Metok standing by bridges, tunnels, and a highway—no doubt souvenirs from past projects for the civil engineer. The shelves on the remaining wall were stripped empty, with cardboard cartons stacked below.

  Metok’s wife stared at the carpet as he sat. Her voice cracked as she spoke. “You killed him for no reason,” she said, pressing a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob.

  Public Security had been careful to keep Metok’s trial and execution a closely guarded secret. How could she have known he was dead? “A note was smuggled out of his cell,” Shan said. “Your husband asked that the messenger deliver it to someone who lives by the truth.” He realized after he spoke that he had answered his own question. The old janitor Jampa could easily have smuggled out more than one note.

  She scrubbed at her eyes then studied Shan with a confused expression, which gradually turned sour. “And that’s supposed to be you? You, in your scuffed shoes and tattered constable’s uniform? You don’t strike me as anyone’s savior.”

  “I was there,” he said, switching to Tibetan. She looked up in surprise. “In the official witness gallery. I was forced to watch. He looked at me only for an instant, but it was long enough. In his note your husband said he was being silenced because he saw something, because he knew about a crime at the Five Claws. If that’s true, then what I witnessed wasn’t an execution. It was a carefully orchestrated murder.”

  The words triggered a new flood of tears. She picked up one of the photos of Metok and fixed it with a forlorn stare as she spoke. “My husband was a good man. He worked hard, for his family. For the…” she seemed to force herself to say the word, “the motherland.”

  “Did he ever say anything to you about archaeologists working at his project? A foreigner and a professor from Chengdu?”

  Metok’s widow spoke to the floor again. “Someone who knew about such
things could suffer the same punishment as my husband. My daughter has only one parent left. I can’t afford more trouble.”

  “I am not Public Security,” he said again. “I am not the military. I can see things that are sometimes not so visible to others.”

  “And what are you doing here?” the Tibetan woman asked.

  “Following a little spark that might brighten into a spotlight. No one knows I am here. No one need know.”

  “They’ve taken our apartment away on one month’s notice. If they suspected I was talking about this, they would take away my job too.”

  “Your job?”

  “I am an English translator for the travel service. Which means I am mostly a tour guide for Westerners. They watch us closely. Any hint of disloyalty and I would be finished.”

  “No one will know,” Shan assured her.

  She frowned but gave a curt nod. “My name is Lekshay,” she said, then wiped at a new tear that streamed down her cheek. “You mean my husband died because he knew something that more powerful men couldn’t have him reveal.”

  “I think so.”

  “Surely that’s impossible. Do you know how many would have to be involved in such a conspiracy? Public Security, the Ministry of Justice, judges, Party officials, not to mention people at the project.”

  “Not as many as you would think. Only those who falsified the evidence. No more than a handful. I saw your husband’s file. He was shot for corruption.”

  “Which is ridiculous. Our salaries are modest but they suffice.” She cast her gaze around the apartment. “I probably couldn’t afford to keep this place anyway. And I’ll never have enough on my own for my daughter’s education.” She stifled another sob.

  “The case was based on a Hong Kong account with two hundred thousand American dollars in it.”

  “Never! He never took a bribe. He never even went to Hong Kong!”

  “The officer who signed the report about the bank account also signed a statement that he had seen Metok in Hong Kong. Then there would have been someone in Public Security here in Lhasa who assembled the file. Probably three or four people were likely involved in conspiring against your husband, no more.”

  Lekshay wrung her hands then looked up at the altar in the middle of the central bookshelf, where a little ceramic Buddha sat beside a flickering battery-powered candle. “It’s impossible. No one could hope to punish such men.”

  “I don’t think your husband was looking for revenge. Just the truth.”

  She stood and went to the Buddha, as if consulting it. When she turned back to Shan, there was a glint of determination in her eyes. “I don’t know how I could possibly help, Constable.”

  “Just talk with me,” Shan said. “I want to hear about Metok, about his job, about Director Ren and Deputy Director Jiao at the Five Claws.”

  “And I would like to know about that message,” she said. “Maybe if I could meet with that messenger from the jail, if I could hear about my husband’s final hours, I think it would ease the pain somehow.”

  “Just an old man who works at the jail. Did your husband ever speak about Director Ren and Deputy Director Jiao from the Five Claws?”

  They spoke for nearly an hour about Metok and the hydro project. Metok had not been getting along with the director, who in fact had no experience building dams, but had been selected because he had been successful building new highways in Manchuria and, more importantly, had recently attained membership in the Party. Jiao, she had heard, had successfully completed an important project in Sichuan Province. The deputy director had been furious when he had discovered Metok had made a makeshift Buddhist altar in a supply shed where Tibetans could go in their time off and had threatened to report him to Religious Affairs.

  “Your husband had a friend named Sun Lunshi,” Shan said as the widow gave him her phone number in case he had follow-up questions. “He died on the sky train the day after your husband was executed.”

  “It has been a season for sorrow,” Lekshay said. “I didn’t know Sun, except for what my husband spoke of him. A tragic accident. I saw it in the newspaper. That train is more dangerous than people think.”

  “He was accompanying cargo for the Five Claws.”

  “Then he died performing his duties. A hero.”

  “A season of sorrow indeed. An American student and her Chinese professor died as well.”

  Lekshay looked confused. “I think I read something in the paper about an American dying.”

  “Natalie Pike and Professor Gangfen. Did your husband perhaps know them?”

  “Of course not. I recall they died near their archaeology project, west of here. Far from the Five Claws. One of those terrible road accidents in the mountains, I recollect.”

  “Your husband was arrested the day after they died.”

  She shrugged. “Metok may not have shared all his secrets, to protect me, but he could not have possibly known them.”

  “Sun died the day after your husband was executed,”Shan reminded her.

  She shrugged again.

  Shan himself did not think the deaths could all be related. But Metok had sent an urgent message while he waited for his execution, asking for Sun to be warned, as if those who wanted Metok dead would soon be pursuing Sun. Sun had died before he could be warned, with no other clue to his fate than the card of an exotic bar in Lhasa.

  * * *

  Jamalinka Island, though located within the traditional boundaries of old Lhasa, did not seem part of Tibet. Shan had seen it from afar several times but had always avoided it, for it was the center of the predominantly Chinese nightlife district. He had left his uniform tunic in his car and bought a cheap sweater to pull over his uniform shirt but still felt conspicuous as he walked across the bridge and reached the first strip of karaoke bars. Small groups of tourists, mostly Japanese and Western men, were wandering through what looked like a neon labyrinth. There was almost no sign of anything Tibetan except for a remarkably lifelike mannequin in the doorway of the bar he was seeking, made up to look like a naked dakini goddess.

  Some of the tired-looking women sitting outside the bar glanced up at him and quickly looked away. Most were Chinese, and he recalled stories of how, after train service began, entire brothels had relocated from eastern cities to serve the burgeoning Lhasa tourist traffic. He was surprised, however, at the number of Tibetan women he saw, and he recalled other tales of how for centuries practices of polyandry had deprived many country women of husbands, and they had gravitated to night work in Lhasa. Early chronicles had even reported that the short-lived Sixth Dalai Lama had been so obsessed with the brothels of seventeenth-century Lhasa that he had never taken his final monastic vows.

  He fought a sudden impulse to flee and stepped into the alley to summon the courage to go inside. As two patrolling Public Security officers walked by on the street, he reminded himself that a female knob officer from Lhasa had been seeking him.

  A teenage boy on a delivery bicycle approached the building from the shadows, and Shan stopped him. For a handful of coins, he bought the boy’s cap, then on impulse he showed the boy the card. “Gymnast,” the boy said. “Sure, everyone knows her. It’s because she can bend in amazing ways. She works here sometimes as a dancer. That’s what people call her, the gymnast.”

  “And this?” Shan asked, pointing to the handwritten line that said: 75 curry 2.

  The boy shook his head. “No Curry Road, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What about a name from India?” Shan asked.

  The boy laughed. “You mean like it was someone’s idea of a joke, or one of those codes.” He threw a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing behind him, then pointed to an alley leading to another street beyond the neon-lit corridor. “Bombay Road, back there, or Delhi Pass, the block ahead of us. Maybe Number Seventy-Five, second floor?”

  Shan found an empty cardboard box marked Adult Toys in four languages, hoisted it on his shoulder, and ventured back into the brightly lit stree
t. Delhi Pass proved to be a utility road lined with small warehouses and the loading docks for the bars and clubs that faced busier streets. Bombay Road, though a narrow cobblestone track that was little wider than an alley, proved more promising. Its old tenements were in various states of disrepair but many appeared to be occupied. Shan found a shadowed alcove and watched Number Seventy-Five for a quarter-hour, until a blond woman in a miniskirt raced past him and up the stairs of the building. As she put a key in the door of the second-floor apartment, he darted up the stairs then stepped in behind her and pushed the door shut behind them. As she turned with a surprised gasp, he saw that she was not a Westerner but a Chinese woman trying to look Western, with blond hair and a tight silk blouse.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and began reaching for his badge.

  She grinned. “I’m sorry,” she echoed, just as something slammed into Shan’s skull.

  * * *

  When he regained consciousness, he was in a metal armchair, his forearms bound to the chair with duct tape. He blinked away the pain in his forehead and saw a thin, athletic-looking woman with short black hair in a kitchen alcove preparing a meal.

  “Tink will share some noodles with you, before you go,” came a deep baritone voice from the shadows along the wall, “just to show no hard feelings. First timers sometimes get smitten and don’t always understand it’s hands off. She’s a dancer, and sometimes a masseuse, but that’s all.” It was a Western voice, but it spoke perfect Mandarin.

  “Tink?” Shan asked. The fog in his head was slowly clearing, and he turned toward the speaker, who now approached. The American had a strong, lean face. Its small scars from close-in fighting had not shown on the grainy security video.