The Skull Mantra is-1

by Eliot Pattison

  "I want this thing over," Fowler said with a new tone, almost pleading. "If you get caught it may never be over." She turned toward the back seat. The haunted countenance Shan had seen after she returned the demon's hand was there again. "They came last night. I guess that's what you were trying to warn me about."

  "Who came?"

  "Public Security. Not the major. Tyler called the major to complain. It was a squad of technicians, seemed like. All they did was search the computers. Looked at every hard drive and disk."

  "Big MFC show," Kincaid observed with a small, sour smile. "Just to keep us scared. Routine. They know we help Jansen. We know they know. We know they want it to stop. They know if they push too hard the UN could get really interested, call out the watchdogs."

  "The UN has watchdogs?"

  "Human rights investigators."

  Shan stumbled on the words. Human rights investigators, he repeated to himself. The Americans used the words so casually. They didn't come from another part of his world. Surely they came from a whole different planet. He looked out the window and sighed. "What did the major say when you called?" he asked.

  "Couldn't get through," Kincaid replied. "Busy with preparations for the American tourists."

  "One of them talked a lot," Fowler continued nervously. "He kept going at me, taunting me like he hated Americans. Asked if I knew the penalty for espionage. Said it was death, no matter who you were." She looked at Kincaid. "No one would stand up for us then. Not the UN. Nobody."

  Kincaid felt her gaze and turned to her, strangely affected by her tone. "It's all right," he said uncertainly. "We'll be okay. You know there's no damned spies. Just their damned games." His hand moved across the console and rested on her leg.

  "I don't know," she said, speaking to the window. "I've been so jumpy. I get scared for no reason. Premonitions."

  "About what?" Kincaid asked.

  "Nothing. I mean, nothing, exactly. Like smelling something rotten for a second, then it's gone, something in the wind." She pushed his hand away.

  "Everyone's jumpy," Kincaid said. "Ever since the knobs arrived. They killed a man at the prison." Shan noticed that the American was wearing a piece of heather in his pocket.

  "They can't do that, can they?" Fowler asked. There was a small tremble in her voice. "At the prison. Luntok said they're on strike, and the knobs have machine guns. He says it's like the old days. He's scared. Is that where you-?"

  Why was it so hard for him to talk with Fowler about the 404th? He broke away from her green eyes and looked out the window. They were following a wide river lined with willows. "I'm scared, too," he said. Kincaid was right. Everyone was jumpy.

  They passed fields lush with barley. Near the river there was enough water for irrigation. "Why do you do it?" Shan asked. "Why did you start helping them, looking for the artifacts? Just running the mine, wouldn't that be enough?"

  "Because it has to be done," Fowler said without hesitation.

  "There're others who could do it."

  "But we're the ones who are here."

  "It's one of the things that scares me," Shan said quietly. "I fear you don't understand the danger."

  Fowler took offense. "You think we do it for a lark?" Her voice grew louder than Shan had ever heard it. "What, so we can brag about it when we get home? That's not it, dammit!" She looked down, as though taken aback by her own outburst. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "It's just that Tibet gets inside you. It's real here. More real than anything back home."

  She had used the word before, Shan remembered, to describe the moment when she had returned Tamdin's hand and the beast had howled. Real.

  "It's important here," Fowler concluded.

  "Important?" asked Shan.

  She twisted in her seat and looked back at him, her eyes moving as though searching for the right words, but she did not speak.

  "We make a difference here," Kincaid continued, as if he and Fowler had discussed the topic many times before. "Back home the world sits and watches MTV. Buys cars. Buys houses. Has one-point-eight kids."

  "MTV?" Shan asked.

  "Never mind. Life is wasted back there. There, they just live on the world. Here, you can live in the world. The Buddhists, they have eight hot and eight cold hells. But there's a whole new level in America. The worst one. The one where everyone's tricked into ignoring their souls by being told they're already in heaven."

  "But you must have important things at home. Family."

  "Not much," Kincaid quipped brightly, as though he were proud of it.

  Not much, Shan considered. What was it Fowler had told him? That Kincaid would be running the company, that he would become one of the wealthiest men in America.

  "My parents and I don't speak much."

  "No brothers or sisters?"

  "Had a dog," Kincaid said whimsically. Shan envied the American his ability to be so carefree. "The dog died," Kincaid concluded with a wide grin.

  "But you're rich at home," Shan offered clumsily.

  Kincaid shot Fowler an exaggerated frown, as though to chastise her for talking too much. "Not anymore. Gave it up. My father's rich. Guess I'll be rich again. I try not to let it upset me. Rich doesn't make a home. Rich doesn't give you peace of mind." He cast a sideways, hopeful glance toward Rebecca Fowler. "Hell, in Lhadrung, I feel more at home than I ever did in the United States."

  Fowler gave him a weak smile. "The poor lost soul finally finds a roost."

  "Don't make it sound like I'm the only one," Kincaid chided, still grinning.

  Shan saw Fowler stiffen, then hesitantly turn toward him, as though she owed Shan an explanation. "My parents divorced fifteen years ago. I lived with my mother, who now has Alzheimer's disease. Destroys the memory. She hasn't recognized me for over four years. And I haven't seen or heard from my father in eight years." She looked out the window. "I guess I needed a new world, too."

  It didn't explain anything for Shan. It just made him sad. Maybe in the spirit realm Lhadrung was another kind of catching place, where lost souls collected and were battered about until, worn and hard as old stones, they were safe in the world again.

  Shan closed his eyes, and his mind drifted toward what he had seen in Colonel Tan's service record. Service in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Fujian. But nothing in Tibet before 1985. He stared out the window at the desolate landscape. Everything was wrong. Everything he had assumed had been mistaken. He had thought the key had been Director Hu, but he had been wrong. He had thought it had been about the skull cave, but then he found Yerpa. He had hoped it had merely been a battle between looters, but a looter didn't kill over one shrine to protect another. He had thought perhaps it had been only Li, then Li and the major, but neither had any connection to Tamdin. He had thought it could never be Sungpo, yet who but a monk would have reverently arranged the dislocated skull in the cave? He had thought the Lotus Book provided the answers, the motives, but the Lotus Book was wrong. They were all pieces of the puzzle, but the shape of the puzzle eluded him, and he had no idea how many more pieces he needed before they began to make sense.

  To know of not knowing is best, Tsomo had reminded him. He had to begin again, erasing it all, assuming he knew only of not knowing. There was so much he did not know. He did not know who had the Tamdin costume. He did not know who had given the ragyapa the stolen military supplies. He did not know why the purbas would have recorded lies in the Lotus Book. He did not know why Jao was interested in water rights on a remote mountainside. He felt no closer to an answer than he had the day they found Jao's head. If he did not find answers in Lhasa, he would have no hope of finding the true killer, no hope of saving Sungpo. No hope of saving himself, or the 404th, when he refused to write the report condemning an innocent monk.

  They drove to a warehouse at the far end of the airport, where a sleepy customs officer waved them through and two freight handlers waited for Fowler to hand them each a ten renminbi note before unloading the crates and wheeling a dolly bearing
a rack of empty cannisters to the truck. In less than fifteen minutes they were on the road to Lhasa.

  ***

  An hour later they passed the familiar blocks of low, slate-colored barracks that Beijing built for urban workers all over China. The paths along the highway began to fill with figures in gray and brown clothing. Carts pulled by haggard ponies hauled plastic barrels of night soil out of the city. Farmers carried cabbages and onions in huge net bags. Chickens and small pigs were trussed on sticks balanced on bicycles. Grandparents walked to market with children. The streets seemed more Chinese than Tibetan, and with a pang of sorrow as sharp as a blade Shan remembered why. Beijing had "naturalized" the city by shipping in a hundred thousand Chinese to join the fifty thousand Tibetans already living there. As far as he could see, Lhasa, which in Tibetan meant the dwelling place of God, had been converted into one more of the gray, smokey urban tracts that comprised modern China.

  "There should be something more we can do," Fowler said as Kincaid eased the truck to a stop in front of the drab two-story building that housed Jansen's office. "You want the water permit records. But they won't let you see them. Not without identification."

  "I may find a way. I know how the bureacrats speak." Shan stepped out and turned away from the truck, facing the old city for the first time.

  "No. Tyler will go. It's perfectly normal. They won't say no to him, asking to see his own permits."

  But Shan could not reply. For there it was, on top of the small mountain that dominated the city. Or rather, it was the mountain that dominated the city. Its huge lower walls, brilliant white and sloping steeply upward, gave the main structure the appearance of a vast, golden-roofed temple floating above Himalayan snows. The precipice of existence, Trinle had once called the walls in a winter tale, so high, so rigid, so alluring that they recalled for him the path to Buddhahood.

  Never before in his life had Shan been afraid to look at something. He felt unworthy to stare at the building. He had been wrong. Something did survive of the dwelling place of God. He gazed down at his feet a moment, wondering at his sudden flood of emotion, then, unable to stop himself, his gaze moved back to the Potala.

  "What are you doing?" Kincaid asked suddenly, his hand reaching out as though to catch Shan.

  Shan realized that he had unconsciously dropped to his knees. "I guess," he said, still in wonder, "I am doing this." And he touched the ground with his forehead, the way a pilgrim might on first seeing the holy building.

  Most of the old yaks had their own names for it, or were fond of reciting the many appelations given the structure in Tibetan literature. The Seat of Supreme Being. The Jewel in the Crown. The Sublime Fortress. Buddha's Gate. One of the younger monks had proudly reported that in a Western magazine he had seen the Potala listed as one of the wonders of the world. The old yaks had all smiled politely at the news. Now Shan knew what they had all been thinking: The Potala wasn't of this world.

  Maybe five years before he could have visited Lhasa and seen the structure as a tourist might, as a massive stone castle, impressive for its size and age and historic role as the Buddhist Vatican. But Shan had not seen it five years ago, and now he could see it only through the eyes of those who told the winter tales.

  An ancient priest, the same who had gone out into the snow to die the year before, had first visited it in 1931, when the Thirteenth Dalai Lama was still in residence and again two years later when the salt-dried body of the old ruler was interred in a solid silver chorten in the Red Palace of the Potala. It had been the Thirteenth who warned on his deathbed that soon all Tibetans would be enslaved and would have to endure endless days of suffering. Later the same priest had been fortunate enough to be assigned to the library of the Potala. It contained the original plans of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama, who had started construction of the Potala in 1645 and asked that his death be concealed so that it would not interfere with the work. The old yak had described the plans in detail to his awed, shivering audience at the 404th. Richly worked walls of stone, cedar, and teak joined by hand without a single nail created a thousand rooms over thirteen floors that once held the hundredfold shrines. Only in the third retelling of the tale had Shan understood that the reference was not merely figurative. The Great Fifth's palace for Buddha contained a hundred times a hundred shrines, ten thousand altars, and on them sat two hundred thousand statues of deities. As he gazed on the huge walls Shan remembered the monk telling them they had been built for eternity. Maybe he was right- later Shan had learned that the exterior walls, in some places thirty feet thick, had been strengthened for the ages by pouring molten copper inside them.

  Much later, in the Tibetan year of the Earth Mouse, 1949, Choje had visited the same library. Seven thousand volumes of scripture he had seen there, most of them one-of-a-kind manuscripts dating back centuries. Some, he explained in a childlike tone of awe, had been written on palm leaves brought from India a thousand years earlier. In a special collection of illuminated manuscripts, which Choje spent ten months studying, there were two thousand volumes in which the lines of scripture were written in alternating inks made of powdered gold, silver, copper, turquoise, coral, and conch shell. For the Red Guards who invaded the Potala during the Cultural Revolution, nothing had symbolized the Four Olds better than these manuscripts. They had made a public display of destroying the volumes on the temple grounds, ripping many into pieces which were sent for use in Red Guard latrines.

  Rebecca Fowler's hand on his arm brought Shan back. "Tyler should go instead," she repeated.

  "Piece of cake," Kincaid agreed with a gleam of mischief. "Been to the Ministry of Ag before. They'll probably recognize me. Kowtow to the big American investor."

  Shan nodded reluctantly, then stood and handed Fowler the canvas bag he had brought with him. "Give this to your friend Jansen."

  "What is it?"

  "From the cave. One of the gold skulls. I asked for it as evidence."

  Kincaid looked at him uncertainly.

  "I didn't say for evidence of what," Shan continued.

  Kincaid's eyes widened. "Son of a bitch," he said with a grin. "Son of a bitch." He accepted the bag eagerly and glanced inside.

  Shan pulled out an envelope. "These are the resumes of Director Hu's geologic exploration staff. I thought it might be of interest."

  "Resumes?" Kincaid asked.

  "Hu has eight staff members assigned to find new mineral deposits. Six of them were transferred last year by Wen Li at the request of Hu."

  "But Wen is Religious Affairs."

  Shan nodded. "The six have no geology training. They are archaeologists and anthropologists."

  Kincaid stared at the envelope in confusion, then comprehension lit his eyes. "Shit! His mineral exploration- it's all about looting. He's not looking for mines," Tyler exclaimed to Fowler, "he's looking for caves! Shrine caves. Wait till Jansen sees this!" With a huge grin he grabbed Shan's hand and shook it, hard. "Be careful, man," he said awkwardly, glancing up at Fowler's amused face and turning back to Shan. "Really. I mean it."

  The American paused and solemnly reached into his shirt to pull out a white cloth that had been hidden there. It was a silk khata scarf, a prayer scarf, that the American had been wearing around his neck. "Here," Kincaid said. "It's my good luck charm. Keeps me alive when I climb."

  "I can't," Shan said uncomfortably. "This is not for-"

  "Please," Kincaid persisted. "I want you to have it. For protection. I don't want you getting caught. You're one of us."

  Shan accepted the khata with a blush of embarrassment, then joined the flow of pedestrians, praying the faded army coat he had brought from Lhadrung would persuade any onlooker that he was nothing but a straggling soldier who had hitched a ride.

  But as he rounded the corner toward the center of the city, the Sublime Fortress was there again. Lokesh had been there, too, Shan remembered, first as a young student who, by excelling at his exams, won the honor of scraping the candle grease from Potala altar
s. The memories of that first visit, spent in the darkness of the lower floors, had been almost entirely aural. Lokesh related that he had constantly heard the tingle of tsingha cymbals but never in a month's stay had he been able to locate its source among the maze of rooms. There had been the high-pitched jaling horns blown at the opening of special rituals and the melodious vajre bells rung to call monks to the services that seemed to begin every few minutes somewhere in the complex. Finally there had been the twelve-foot long dungchen horns, so deep they were like a groan of the earth, and so resonant that Lokesh insisted that their echoes rolled about the lower floors for hours after being blown.

  As Shan approached the museum the hairs on the back of his neck stood, the skin tingled. He made two slow circuits around the building, lingering in a throng watching a chess game on the first circuit, moving to a bus stop queue after the second. It was a very small Tibetan man who was following him, wearing a blue worker's jacket and carrying a cabbage. His long, limber arms and sharp restless eyes belied his slow, feeble carriage. Shan tested the tail by rapidly walking down the street three blocks, then sitting on a bench. The man followed on the opposite side, lingering at a vegetable stall while Shan pretended to read a newspaper gleaned from a trash can. Shan watched until he was certain the stalker was alone. Public Security operated tails with teams of at least three.

  Chiding himself for not considering that Jansen's office could be watched, he found a public washroom where he removed his coat. Outside, he climbed aboard a bus and got out at the first stop. He switched to a second bus, watching with his ears around his eyes, as a Beijing instructor had once described, meaning watching with every sense, sensing the rhythm of the crowd so he could see where the rhythm broke, watching the way every pedestrian watched the others. It was the ones who ignored the others who were the ones to fear.

  After six blocks he emerged back into the sunlight and began walking not toward the street of the museum but parallel to the street, still testing the pavement.