The Skull Mantra is-1

by Eliot Pattison

  "Are you eating?" Shan asked.

  "The kitchens were ordered closed," Trinle explained. "Only water. Buckets are left at the gate at midday."

  Shan pulled the paper bag that contained his uneaten lunch from his coat pocket. "Some dumplings."

  Choje received the bag solemnly and handed it to Trinle to divide. "We are grateful. We will try to get some to those in the stable."

  "They opened the stable," Shan whispered. It was not a question but an anguished declaration.

  "Three of the monks from a gompa to the north. They sat near the gate, demanding an exorcism."

  "I saw the troops outside. They look impatient."

  Choje shrugged. "They are young."

  "They will not grow old waiting for striking prisoners."

  "What can they expect? There is an angry jungpo. It would be but the work of a day to restore the balance."

  "Colonel Tan will never allow an exorcism on the mountain. It would be a defeat, an embarrassment."

  "Then your colonel will have to live with them both." There was no challenge in Choje's voice, only a trace of sympathy.

  "Both," Shan repeated. "You mean Tamdin."

  Choje sighed and looked about the hut. There was another unfamiliar sound. Shan turned and saw the khampa, sitting by the door. The man had a frightening gleam in his eyes.

  "Gonna get us out, wizard?" he asked Shan. He had removed the handle from his eating mug and was sharpening it on a rock. "Another of your tricks? Make all the knobs disappear?" He laughed, and kept sharpening.

  "Trinle has been practicing his arrow mantras," Choje observed as he watched the khampa with sad eyes. An arrow mantra was a charm of ancient legend, by which the practitioner was transported across great distances in an instant. "He is getting very good. One day he will surprise us. Once when I was a boy I saw an old lama perform the rite. One moment there was a blur and he was gone. Like an arrow from a bow. He was back an hour later, with a flower that grew only at a gompa fifty miles away."

  "So Trinle will leave you like an arrow?" Shan asked, unable to disguise his impatience.

  "Trinle knows many things. Some things must be preserved."

  Shan sighed deeply to calm himself. Choje was speaking as though the rest of their world would not survive. "I need to know about Tamdin."

  Choje nodded. "Some are saying that Tamdin is not finished." He looked sadly into Shan's eyes. "He will not show mercy if he strikes again. In the time of the seventh," Choje said, referring to the seventh Dalai Lama, "an entire Manchurian army was destroyed as they invaded. A mountain collapsed on them as they marched. The manuscripts say it was Tamdin who pushed the mountain over."

  "Rinpoche. Hear my words. Do you believe in Tamdin?"

  Choje looked at Shan with intense curiosity. "The human body is such an imperfect vessel for the spirit. Surely the universe has room for many other vessels."

  "But do you believe in a demon creature that stalks the mountains? I must understand if- if there is to be any chance of stopping all this."

  "You ask the wrong question." Choje spoke very slowly, in his prayer voice. "I believe in the capacity of the essence that is Tamdin to possess a human being."

  "I do not understand."

  "If some are meant to achieve Buddhahood then perhaps others are meant to achieve Tamdinhood."

  Shan held his head in his hands, fighting an overwhelming fatigue. "If there is to be hope I must understand more."

  "You must learn to fight that."

  "Fight what?"

  "This thing called hope. It still consumes you, my friend. It makes you wrongly believe that you can strike against the world. It distracts you from what is more important. It makes you believe the world is populated by victims and villains and heroes. But that is not our world. We are not victims. Rather we are honored to have had our faith tested. If we are to be consumed by the knobs then we are to be consumed. Neither hope nor fear will change that."

  "Rinpoche. I do not have the strength not to hope."

  "I wonder about you sometimes," Choje said. "I worry that you are too hard a seeker."

  Shan nodded sadly. "I do not know how not to seek."

  Choje sighed. "They are holding a lama," he observed. "A hermit from Saskya gompa."

  Shan had long ago given up trying to understand how information spread through the Tibetan population and across prison walls. It was as if the Tibetans practiced a secret form of telepathy.

  "Did this lama do it?" Choje asked.

  "You think a lama could do such a thing?"

  "Every spirit can lapse. Buddha himself wrestled with many temptations before he was eventually transformed."

  "I have seen this lama," Shan said solemnly. "I have looked into his face. He did not do it."

  "Ah," Choje sighed, and then was silent. "I see," he said after a long time. "You must obtain the release of this lama by proving that the murder was done by the demon Tamdin."

  "Yes," Shan admitted at last, looking into his hands, his reply barely audible.

  The two men sat in silence. From somewhere outside the hut came a long disembodied groan of pain.

  ***

  Yeshe refused when Shan explained his task the next morning. "I could get arrested just for asking about a sorcerer," he complained.

  Feng was driving them through the low rolling hills of gravel and heather that led to town. A meandering line of willows and high sedges marked the path of the river that, having cascaded through the Dragon's Throat, moved at a more languid pace down the valley. They passed a field where bulldozers had flattened a hill, cultivated with rows of now dying plants, so twisted and contorted by the wind and dryness that they were unidentifiable. Another failed attempt to root something from the outside that Tibet neither needed nor wanted.

  "What did they punish you for?" Shan asked Yeshe. "Why were you sentenced to a labor camp?"

  Yeshe would not reply.

  "Why do you still fear them? You've been released."

  "Every sane person fears them." Yeshe smirked pointedly.

  "It's your travel papers, is that what troubles you? You think you won't get them if you work with me. Without new travel papers you'll never get out of Tibet, never get a job in Sichuan fitting your station, never get your shiny television."

  Yeshe seemed to resent the comment. But he didn't deny it. "It's wrong to encourage these people who cast spells," he said. "They hold Tibet in another century. We will never progress."

  Shan stared at Yeshe but did not reply. Yeshe shifted in his seat and scowled out the window. A woman, enveloped in a huge brown felt cloak, walked down the road, leading a goat on a rope.

  "You want a history of Tibet?" Yeshe asked sullenly, still facing the window. "Just one long struggle between priests and sorcerers. The church demands that we strive for perfection. But perfection is so difficult. Sorcerers offer shortcuts. They take their power from the weakness of the people and the people thank them for it. Sometimes the priests rule, and they build up the ideal. Then the sorcerers rule. And in the name of the ideal the sorcerers ruin it."

  "So that is what Tibet is about?"

  "It's what keeps society moving. China, too. You have your sorcerers. Only you call them secretary this and minister that. With a little red book of charms written by the chairman himself. The Master Sorcerer."

  Yeshe looked up, aghast, suddenly aware that Feng may have heard. "I didn't mean-" he sputtered, then clenched his fists in frustration and turned to the window again.

  "So these students of Khorda, they scare you?" Shan asked. Maybe they should all be scared, he realized. If you want to reach Tamdin, Choje had suggested, speak to the students of Khorda.

  "Students? Who said students? No need. People are always talking about the old sorcerer. He lives. If that's what you call it. They say he doesn't need to eat. Some say he doesn't even need to breathe. But we'll have to find his lair."

  "Lair?"

  "His hiding place. Could be a cave deep in the
mountains. Could be in the market place. He is very secretive. He moves about, from shadow to shadow. They say he can disappear into thin air, like a wisp of smoke. It may take some time."

  "Good. The sergeant and I are going to the restaurant, then to Prosecutor Jao's house. After that, the colonel's office. Meet us there when you find your sorcerer."

  "This Khorda, he will never talk to an investigator."

  "Then tell him the truth. Tell him I am a troubled man badly in need of magic."

  ***

  They tried to close the restaurant when Shan arrived. "You knew Prosecutor Jao?" he called to the head waiter through a crack in the door.

  "I knew. Go away."

  "He ate here with an American five nights ago."

  "He ate here often."

  Shan put his hand on the door. The man moved as though to push it shut, then saw Sergeant Feng and relented, trotting back down the front hallway.

  Shan stepped inside and followed the shadow of the fleeing waiter. In the hallway busboys cowered. In the kitchen no one would look at him.

  He caught up with the man as he reentered the dining room through a side door. "Did someone bring a message that night?" Shan asked the waiter, who was still beating his awkward retreat, picking up trays and nervously setting them down a few steps later, then pulling a stack of plates from the counter.

  "You!" Sergeant Feng shouted from the doorway.

  As the man flinched, the plates slipped from his grip, shattering on the floor. He stared at the plates forlornly. "No one remembers. It was busy."

  The man began shaking.

  "Who has been here? Somebody was already here. Somebody said don't speak to me."

  "No one remembers," the waiter repeated.

  As Feng took a step inside the door, Shan raised a palm in resignation and walked away.

  "Who's going to pay for the plates?" the waiter moaned behind him. Shan could still hear him, sobbing like achild, as he moved out the door and back into the truck.

  Prosecutor Jao had lived in a small cottage in the government compound on the new side of town, a square stucco structure with two rooms and a separate kitchen. In Tibet it was the equivalent of a grand villa.

  Shan lingered at the entrance, making a mental note of the way the heather along the wall of the house had been recently trampled. The door was slightly ajar. He pushed it with his elbow, careful not to smudge any prints that might be on the handle. Here, he hoped, could be the answer to why Prosecutor Jao had detoured to the South Claw. Or at least, the picture of Jao the private man that would help Shan understand his motivations.

  It was an orderly, anonymous room. A decorative mah-jongg set lay on a small table in the corner, under a poster of the Hong Kong skyline. Two large overstuffed chairs comprised the only furniture. Shan stopped, aghast. A young man was slumped in one of the chairs, deep in slumber.

  Suddenly he heard voices from the kitchen. Li Aidang appeared, as sleek and well scrubbed as when Shan had first seen him in Colonel Tan's office. "Comrade Shan!" he exclaimed with false enthusiasm. "It is Shan, isn't it? You did not formally introduce yourself when we first met. Very clever." The man in the chair stirred, blinked at Shan, stretched, and shut his eyes again.

  Beyond Li, a team of Tibetan women was washing the walls and floor. "You're cleaning his house before the investigation is completed?" Shan asked in disbelief.

  "No need to worry. Already searched. Nothing here."

  "Sometimes evidence is not always obvious. Papers. Fingerprints."

  Li nodded as though to humor him. "But of course the crime was not committed here. And the house belongs to the Ministry. It can't be left idle."

  "What if the murderer was looking for something? What if he came back here and searched the house?"

  Li spread his arms. "Nothing was taken," he said. "And we already know the movements of the killer. From the South Claw to the cave. From the cave back to his gompa." He held up his hand to preempt further discussion, then called out to the man in the chair. The man stirred again, extending a folder. Li took it and handed it to Shan. "I took the liberty of assembling Jao's schedule. Committees he served on. Details of the prosecution when the accused Sungpo was jailed as one of the Lhadrung Five."

  "I thought we would speak with his secretary."

  "Excellent idea," Li said, and shrugged. "But she always takes her leave concurrently with Jao. She is in Hong Kong. Left the same night as Jao. I took her to the airport myself."

  Outside Shan paused beside the truck and watched in disbelief as the crew began hosing down the outside of the house.

  "Little birds have big voices," Feng said with amusement as he climbed behind the wheel.

  Suddenly Shan remembered. The only person he had told about going to the house and the restaurant had been Yeshe.

  ***

  Dr. Sung appeared in the clinic hallway wearing a surgical gown and bloody gloves. A koujiao mask hung around her neck. "You again?"

  "You sound disappointed," Shan said.

  "The nurse said there were two men with questions about Prosecutor Jao. I thought it was the others."

  "The others?"

  "The assistant prosecutor. You two should engage in a dialectic."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Talk to each other. Do your own jobs right so I can do mine."

  Shan clenched his jaw. "So Li Aidang was asking about the body?"

  Sung seemed pleased with Shan's discomfort. "Asking about the body. Asking about you. Asking about your companions," she said, casting a glance down the hall where Feng and Yeshe lingered. "They took the receipts for the personal possessions. You never asked for the receipts."

  "I'm sorry," Shan said, without knowing why.

  Doctor Sung stripped off her gloves. "I have another surgery in fifteen minutes." She began moving down the corridor.

  "The colonel had the head sent here," Shan said to her back, following her.

  "A lovely gesture, I thought," she said acidly. "Someone could have warned me. Just like that, out of the bag. Hello, Comrade Prosecutor."

  Surely the doctor should have known what to expect from Tan, Shan considered. Then he understood. "You mean, you knew him."

  "It's a small town. Sure I knew Jao. Said goodbye last week, when he left on vacation. Then suddenly I'm unwrapping the colonel's package and he's staring right at me, as if we had unfinished business."

  "And what were your conclusions?"

  "About what?" She opened a closet and scanned its nearly empty shelves. "Great." She put the gloves back on. "I wrote to ask for more gloves. They said just sterilize the ones you have. The fools. Just what do they think would happen if I put latex gloves in an autoclave?"

  "The examination of the head."

  "Ai yi!" she exclaimed, throwing her head back. "Now he wants an autopsy of a head," she said to the fly-specked ceiling.

  Shan just stared at her.

  "Okay. One skull, intact. One brain, intact. Hearing organs, sight organs, taste organs, smell organs all intact. One big problem."

  Shan moved closer. "You found something?"

  "He needed a haircut." She moved down the corridor as Shan stared.

  "You looked at his dental records?" he said to her back.

  "There you go again. Thinking you're in Beijing. Jao had dental work, but it wasn't done in Tibet. No records to verify against."

  "Did you try to match the head to the body?"

  "Exactly how large is your inventory of headless bodies, Comrade?"

  Shan stared at her without reply.

  Sung muttered under her breath, tightened her gloves, and threw him a koujiao from the shelf.

  They walked in silence to the morgue. Inside, the stench was far worse now, nearly overwhelming. Shan pulled the mask tighter, looking over his shoulder. Sergeant Feng and Yeshe had refused to enter. They hovered in the hall, watching through the small window in the door.

  A soiled cardboard box was on an examination table, resting on top of a
covered body. He turned away as Dr. Sung removed the contents of the box and leaned over the body.

  "Amazing. It fits." She made a gesture of invitation to Shan. "Perhaps you would like to try? I know. We'll cut off the limbs and play mix and match."

  "I was interested in the nature of the cuts."

  Sung cast him a peeved look, then retrieved a bottle of alcohol and washed the flesh around the neck. "One, two… I count three cuts. Like I said before, not violent blows. Precise, like slices."

  "How can you know?"

  "If the killer had relied on force the tissue would have been crushed. These are very neat cuts. A razor-sharp instrument. Like a butcher makes."

  A butcher. He had reminded Sung before that Tibet was the only land on the planet with butchers trained to cut up human bodies. "Did you look for a bruise on the skull?"

  Sung looked up.

  "As you said," Shan added. "He was laid down before the incisions. No blood on his clothes. He must have been knocked unconscious. Then the cuts were made."

  "We seldom have a need for complete autopsies," she muttered, and wheeled a lamp on rollers to the edge of the table. It was the closest she would come to an apology.

  Sergeant Feng paced in the corridor outside as she examined the scalp.

  "All right," she said at last. "Behind the right ear. A long ragged contusion. Some skin was opened."

  "A club? A baton?"

  "No. Rough-edged. A rock could do it."

  Shan produced the card taken from the prosecutor's body. "Do you know why Jao would have been talking to someone about X-ray equipment?"

  Sung studied the card. "American?" she asked, handing the card back. "Too expensive for Tibet." She pulled a pad from her pocket and busily wrote notes.

  "Why would he want such equipment?"

  She shrugged. "Must have been for an investigation." She turned the collar of her blouse up as if suddenly cold.

  "What about the Americans at the mine? Would someone need this type of equipment for them?"

  Sung shook her head. "They have to use the clinic like everyone else. Allocation of medical resources has been carefully planned."