Yates gave Shan a sour look. “What’s your game? She is alive. Why would you say otherwise?”
“She died in my arms.”
“It’s a nasty kind of game to play with me, Shan. She didn’t die. I had a message. A porter gave it to me that afternoon. A chance at one of her mountains came up. She said she’d be back in a few days.”
Shan leaned forward with new interest. “What porter? Was the message in her own writing?”
“Nothing was written. He told me and was off. I don’t know many of the porters by name.” Yates shrugged. “Megan’s been coming here for years. She knows most of them.” He fixed Shan with a challenging gaze. “It wasn’t her. I saw them put two bodies in an army truck. Neither was her.”
“You saw what?”
“I told you. I was waiting above. But after a while I got in the car and drove downhill. At a switchback I got out, a couple hundred yards above the minister’s sedan, close enough to see two bodies. I didn’t have my binoculars but I could see well enough. They were Chinese, or Tibetans. No blond American.”
“They put a wool cap on her. From a distance you wouldn’t have seen her hair. Then they switched her body for that of the dead sherpa.”
“You’re going to look like a fool when she comes walking in for a cup of tea.”
“What else did you see?”
“Enough soldiers to start a small war, scattering over the slopes. An army truck that took the bodies away. That was all. Later, I saw that she hadn’t even used my suggestions for triggering the rock slide.”
“You mean you went back there, afterwards?”
“The knobs had cleaned everything up. They’d left a few markers and some tape. It’s the only road in to the base camp, they couldn’t keep it closed for long. I stopped, started climbing the slope up to the ropes. A knob sergeant tried to stop me and I explained they were my ropes, stolen from my depot. He let me go under escort, on the condition that I didn’t disturb anything. I didn’t have to touch a thing to see that she had not used the configuration I had sketched for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I sketched involved putting a log on the road to act as the release for the rock slide. A heavy vehicle hits the log, tied to a rope, and triggers the slide from above. She changed it, made it simpler. Except with her version someone had to be there to release it.”
Shan considered Yates’s explanation. “For the first week or so,” he began at last, “Cao was considering whether to ignore the rockslide, pretend the bus just had an accident, since adding an act of sabotage against Public Security might complicate his case too much. He’s a man used to quick, easy kills. But now he’s thinking this could be the one case he’s been waiting for, that with this case he can fire a shot that will be heard all the way to the Politburo itself. If he succeeds he’ll be a colonel in a month’s time, feted as a hero of the people in Beijing. A medal, a banquet with senior Party members, maybe a new job as secret investigator for the Party bosses. So he’s decided to raise the stakes. Which means whoever triggered that ambush had better find a new planet to live on.”
“There was something else, which they didn’t find at first. On a rock near where the avalanche was released there was an old sickle.”
“A sickle?”
“A reaping hook, for cutting grain. I climbed up to where the rocks slid from. It was jammed in a crack in a rock, deliberately left there. It had words etched on the blade, and what looked like the image of a range of mountains. I was thinking about hiding it when that sergeant came up to check on me and saw it. He took it down to his vehicle.”
Shan had seen such a blade, a stack of such blades, in the shed where old Gyalo kept his artifacts.
“Later I asked one of the older porters about it at base camp. It scared him, scared him a lot, not the blade but the writing I described. He said I should not speak of such a thing, that we should all pray the Chinese do not know what it is.”
“What were the words?”
“I don’t read Tibetan. I asked him what he thought it said, from my description. He knew, I could tell, but he wouldn’t say.”
“You keep telling me about other people,” Shan said after a moment. “I haven’t heard the truth about you. I haven’t yet heard why I shouldn’t warn the Tibetans that an American is raiding their shrines.”
Yates rose, paced back and forth, paused to study Shan, then paced again. “My father,” he finally said, “died somewhere near here, when I was three years old. He was a scientist, studied the anthropology of religions, was trying to piece together evidence of the various emigrations of the Buddhists across the Himalayas from India.”
“By chopping up religious statues?”
“By taking metallurgical samples of the metals used. You can date the statues that way, but you can also establish where the metal came from. The exact mixture of alloys is like a fingerprint.”
It did not have the ring of truth, Shan sensed, but it was a step in the direction of the truth. “And now you are continuing his work?”
“Right. I want to conclude his research. Maybe get something published, in both our names. I never really knew him. Doing this brings me closer to him than ever before.”
Shan touched the tool on the bed beside him. “So you do use this instrument, this borescope?”
“Sure. Sometimes its helps show the thickness of the metal, and internal structure of the casting, which also can be like a fingerprint.”
“You could have asked to borrow the statues, even asked a Chinese university to help.”
“How long have you lived in Tibet, Shan? An American working with Tibetans on a project that shows how Tibetan culture came from over the mountains and not from China? They would deport me in a second, and do much worse to any Tibetan who helped me.”
That much, Shan knew, was the absolute truth. But Yates had done nothing to close the biggest hole in his story: Why, if he was studying the metal of religious statues, was he only taking those of the Lord of Death?
Shan stood. It was late in the day. He still had a long drive back to Shogo. Yates followed him into the pool of sunlight by the entry, the worry on his face proof enough that he had finally grasped Shan’s point. He and Megan Ross had unleashed a chain of events that were endangering every Tibetan in the shadow of the mountains.
“When she comes back,” Yates said, “Megan will know how to patch things up. She’ll know where to take the monks.”
“She’s not coming back,” Shan said.
“Nonsense. I told you. I saw the bodies. No Megan.”
“She died in my arms,” Shan tried again.
Yates shook his head in disagreement, then turned his back on Shan.
“ ‘The raven,’ she said at first, then ‘is it me?’” Shan told him.
The American froze for a moment, but did not look back before disappearing into the shadows.
Chapter Ten
He stopped the truck at the crossroads where Xie had waited that morning, looking in the dusk for signs of the director’s watchers. The local people would descend on the ruins after Xie and his men departed. There would be prayer stones to retrieve. Even smashed prayer wheels would still be considered sacred. The Tibetans would know that the government tended to return to such sites, with excavators, to remove every stone, to scour the site to bare earth and salt it so nothing would grow. But that would be in the daytime, and in Tibet, everywhere but the cities, the night belonged to the Tibetans. He waited for five minutes, seeking signs of watchers, then turned onto the valley road.
The weathered, compact structures of the gompa were gone. Three thick stone walls alone remained standing, their soot-stained murals exposed to the elements. Everything else was leveled, reduced to a rubble of stone, plaster, and wood. Chairs and tables lay in splinters, smashed not only by the bulldozer but by what looked like sledgehammers. Shreds of old tangka paintings trapped in the rocks fluttered in the wind. There was no sign of any Tibetans. Then he
paused, seeing why no one was salvaging anything. In the shadow of the trees at the far side he could see the low, dark shape of the director’s sedan.
He wandered into the rubble without conscious thought, numbed again by the devastation, vaguely aware of a rhythmic, metallic rumble, the sound of an engine straining, revving then ebbing. He walked past a patch of whitewashed stones that marked where the old chorten shrine had stood, passing a futile moment searching for the bronze or wooden box with relics that would have been secreted inside. Then he stepped toward the sound of the engine, past the three standing walls that had been too thick to topple, to the rock face that defined the back of the compound.
The small bulldozer had been aimed at the Buddha painted on the rock face. Driverless, its engine was on, but something in its drive gears had broken so that it was pushing forward several inches, hitting the rock face, revving and falling back, repeating the process over and over. With new foreboding, Shan looked about the compound for any sign of the driver, then approached the machine, intending to switch off the ignition. Two steps away he froze. The levers that controlled the steering had been fastened in place, tied with old khatas, white prayer scarves. As he reached for the ignition a splash of color by the blade caught his eye. He looked at the scrap of red fur with a vague sense of recognition, not seeing the blood and fragments of expensive overcoat until he was inches away. He staggered, bracing himself against the rock wall, fighting a spasm of nausea. Caught between the rock and the heavy metal blade was a different, bloody rubble, the remains of Director Xie of the Bureau of Religious Affairs.
He did not know how long he stood against the wall, gripped by horror, but eventually he turned and switched off the ignition, using his knuckles on the key so as not to leave prints. He covered what was left of Xie’s head with a scrap of tangka. The Radiant Light of Pure Reality, said a prayer on the scrap, from the beginning of the Bardo death ritual. The words stopped him. Xie might have been a wheelsmasher, might have come to the county to enhance his reputation at the expense of the Tibetans, but no one deserved such a fate. “Recognize the radiant light that is your death,” he murmured, continuing the rite, “recognize that your consciousness is without birth or death.”
He searched the grounds in the dusk, trying to understand how Xie could possibly have let himself be alone with his killer, half expecting to find the bodies of one or more of his deputies. But there were no other bodies. As darkness fell he found a hand lantern in his truck and searched Xie’s car, finding nothing but a box of ritual tools that he removed to the hidden trail at the rear of the gompa. Then he methodically paced along the packed earth.
It was crisscrossed with tire and boot tracks, probably of more than two dozen different people and half a dozen vehicles. He wandered a few paces up the pilgrim trail, where he knew many Tibetans had traveled that day. If they had seen anything they would be burrowing deep into the hills by now.
Shan did not hear the approaching vehicle until it was too late to hide. It came rolling into the compound with its lights out, coasting the last hundred feet with its engine off. He switched off his own light and took refuge in the deeper shadow of one of the standing walls.
“Lao Shan?” came a nervous voice from the dark, a respectful call in Chinese, as lanterns were lit from the road. Shan stepped toward them to find a small pickup truck overflowing with Tibetans, most of them porters from the base camp. In the back of the truck were shovels and a wheelbarrow.
They would not be dissuaded from their salvage efforts, not by Shan’s warnings, not by being shown the grisly remains in front of the bulldozer. These were men who had been hardened by the mountains, who were no strangers to death, and their reverence for the objects that might be buried in the rubble overcame all fear. This was how they preserved their faith.
“Quickly,” Shan urged at last, “let us move the trucks so the headlights light the rubble. If you have canvas, cover the murals. Those walls may yet survive.” Giving up all hope of finding evidence of Xie’s killer, he worked with them for an hour, uncovering many more ritual implements, intact robes, even some costumes used in religious festivals. Some were tied into larger bundles and set on pack frames that several men carried up the moonlit trail. Others were piled on the trucks.
They were sorting through the rubble, retrieving every stone inscribed with prayer, when the man left to watch the road whistled. The lights were extinguished and they watched with rising fear as a single headlight wound its way up the road. The Tibetan on the battered motorcycle had barely dismounted when he was told the news of Xie’s murder.
“The death demons are out this night,” the newcomer said in a hollow voice. “In the mountains. In the town. It will mean the end of us.”
“The town?” Shan asked.
“The knobs attacked Gyalo. When they finished they threw him in the gully with all the other ghosts.”
Nearly an hour later Shan climbed off the back of the motorcycle a block from Gyalo’s compound. The shutters of every house on the street were closed, every gate and door shut fast. Shogo town was bracing for a storm.
The storm had already struck at the old farmhouse of the drunken lama. Half the contents of the household were strewn about the courtyard. The house itself had been attacked. Something heavy, a sledgehammer perhaps, had slammed into the plastered walls, the window sashes, the door. The brittle plaster had shattered and fallen, some hanging loose on the horsehair that had been mixed with it in another century. The windows were nothing but splinters of wood and shards of glass. The door dangled on its bottom hinge. Inside, the two wooden chests that Gyalo had kept his clothes in had been reduced to fragments of painted wood, their contents scattered across the stone flags of the floor. The acrid scent of sorghum whiskey hung in the air from a jug smashed against the wall.
He retreated slowly, watching the street for any movement, then approached the shed at the edge of the dump pit. He had nearly reached the decrepit little structure when the sound of voices caused him to dart into the shadows behind it. He edged along the walls until he could glimpse the speakers.
Kypo and Jomo stood at the lip of the low cliff where trucks dumped their loads of garbage, studying the shadows below, speaking in low, worried tones as the odor of decay wafted up from the pit. Shan glanced inside the shed before approaching the two men. The inside walls were bare, the packed earth floor empty. The artifacts Gyalo had secretly hoarded there were gone.
The two men greeted him with silent nods, and the three stood wordlessly, staring into the shadows below.
It was Jomo who finally broke the silence. “It’s how you destroy infestations of insects, my father used to say,” Gyalo’s son said in a mournful voice. “First dig into the heart of the colony. Destroy them by the thousands at the heart, collapse every chamber they live in. Expect it to take a long time because you will find colonies hidden in the most unexpected places. But eventually there will be only a few left, surviving alone, and when you find them smash them hard, leaving only little greasy stains on the floor.”
“We have to get him out,” Shan interjected. “We can’t just. . ”
“They beat him before they threw him over the side,” Jomo said in a desolate voice. “Hard to tell, though, how many of the broken bones and cuts were from the beating, and how many from the rocks they threw him on.” He glanced at Shan with a grim expression. “Being drunk probably saved him, kept his muscles relaxed, kept him from fighting back, from trying to move and making his injuries worse.”
“He still lives?” Shan’s question came out in a hoarse whisper. “Where?”
“He lives for now,” replied Jomo. “Gone from town. Where no one will ever expect him to be,” he added with a glance at Kypo.
Shan looked back at the shed, noticing for the first time the three bulging burlap sacks near the gully’s edge. Jomo seemed about to block Shan as he stepped toward the sacks, but Kypo restrained him with a hand on his arm.
The first of the sacks wa
s stuffed with prayer wheels, all of which were damaged, some crushed nearly flat, like tin cans being sent to a dump. The second ritual implements, many bent and disfigured. The third held old barley hooks, many of the sickle-like blades corroded and pitted. Shan rubbed his fingertips over the blade of one, then extended it into the moonlight. He could barely make out the crude outlines of mountains, Tibetan script scrawled underneath, too dim to read. “What are these marks?” he asked. “Why do they scare everyone?”
“What does it matter now?” Jomo shot back. He was growing more nervous, casting worried glances toward the street. “If Public Security comes back it will just infuriate them more to find these.”
“Because it could be why he was attacked,” Shan quickly explained what he had learned about the barley hook at the bus ambush.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gyalo’s son replied, lifting the sack with the hooks. “We just know it won’t happen again.” He began to swing it, to throw it deep into the darkness below.
Shan touched his arm. “No. I have a better place.”
“There is no better place,” the Tibetan said in a bitter tone.
“For your father’s sake. He wanted them preserved.”
“So I should trust you?” Jomo snapped. “It was your kind who did this to him.”
Shan did not reply but hoisted one of the bags to his shoulder and turned to the short trail to the stable.
At first the two Tibetans did not want to enter the old stable at the mouth of the gully. They had climbed down the trail in silence, each carrying one of the heavy sacks over his shoulder but Kypo and Jomo set theirs down at the door when Shan stepped inside to light a lamp. Though they had both been there before, it had never been at night.
“They say this place is haunted,” Kypo said hesitantly. “They never did recover all the bodies from the old gompa.”
“One thing I can tell you for certain, Kypo,” Shan said as he began to drag the sacks inside. “All the dead are on our side.”
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