The Lord of Death is-6

by Eliot Pattison

  “He took a radio call, then ordered his deputies away. No doubt a ruse by the American woman.”

  “I told you I would get the real killers. Give me time.”

  “A bluff, to persuade me to keep Tan within reach. But you were right about that as well, Comrade Shan. I need him here. With the breakthrough given to us by the martyred Xie we will be able to have our trial in a matter of days.” Cao gestured to the receiver connected to Tan’s cell. “You heard yourself how well it is going. At this rate I am confident the silent colonel will find his tongue when we put him in the dock.”

  “You fail to understand him. Letting you shoot him isn’t an act of contrition for Tan. For him it will be a redemption.”

  Cao’s eyes flickered with confusion for a moment but he would not be diverted. “The last three monks. I will have them and the American woman. Perhaps all the monks need to say is that they were manipulated by Tan and the American. If so we could be generous, let them avoid the firing squad.”

  “And serve what? Twenty, thirty years in the gulag?” It was, Shan realized, driven by the new shape of politics in Tibet. The government preferred not to be seen as unduly harsh on Tibetans.

  And certainly it was more palatable to put them away as common criminals, not for political reasons.

  Cao shrugged. “They were accomplices to two murders.”

  “All they did was get on a bus. I told you before. Look at the bullets from the clinic’s autopsy on the sherpa. They destroy your case.”

  Cao smiled. “The day that sherpa’s body was stolen, there was an extraordinary event at the clinic, comrade. A phantom attacked an orderly and stole his identity badge. The badge later showed up on a bus seat. No one recalls much about the phantom. The nurse only remembers another lunatic patient in his underwear. And unfortunately the clinic has not received sufficient funds to install video monitors. It did spend money last year on that new electronic locking system. It tracks every time a security badge is used to open a door. The phantom had the run of the entire clinic. He could have taken drugs, lab equipment, surgical devices. But all he did was enter one room. I went back to the clinic today, to speak with security there. Imagine my surprise when I was shown the names of the inmates in that room.” Cao took a long draw on his cigarette and looked down. “I will have that woman and the monks, Shan.”

  Shan’s tongue seemed to have difficulty moving. “He isn’t really. .” he murmured, then desolation froze his tongue.

  “Not your son? Of course he is,” Cao said in a gloating voice. “The records confirm it. Shan Ko. Not much family resemblance but his file is the spitting image of his father’s. A troublemaker, unable to accept authority, too clever for his own good. In desperate need of reform.”

  “He isn’t really sick.” The words came in a tiny, hoarse voice. “Tan sent him there for punishment.”

  Cao laughed.

  “I have no idea where the monks are. Do you think they would trust a Chinese?” Shan asked.

  Cao leaned across the desk and lifted a small stack of papers. “Experimental surgery is being pioneered by the brave doctors of our clinic.” He dropped the top paper onto Shan’s lap. “So far it has been extraordinarily effective at curing antisocial behavior.”

  A black worm seemed to crawl through Shan’s heart as he read the memo, a report from the yeti factory to a medical research agency in Beijing. The procedure was called cerebral pasteurization. It consisted of drilling a dozen holes into the skull and inserting red-hot wires to cauterize pockets of brain cells.

  “Your son is scheduled for the procedure in forty eight hours,” Cao announced. “Bring me the monks,” he declared with an icy gaze, “or in the name of socialist progress we will steam his brain.”

  Shan walked in the darkness without knowing, without seeing, something inside directing him to his quarters long enough to lift a tattered sack from a peg on the wall then taking him up the half-mile path to the ledge above town where he sometimes meditated. He lowered himself to the ground, facing the south, the massive moonlit peaks of the Himalayas glowing along the horizon.

  He was a breathing shell. There was nothing left inside but a black emptiness. Everything he had done had been for his son but all his actions had steadily, inexorably condemned Ko to a living death. He was no closer to the killer, no closer to stopping the killing, no closer to understanding the strange drama the Americans had been involved in. He had stirred up Public Security against the villagers and by encouraging the monks to flee from the bus he might have simply ensured their destruction. He gazed with an unfamiliar sense of fear toward Everest, sensing that he was trapped in some tormenting zone where the wrath of the mountain from above overlapped with the wrath of Public Security from below.

  He was not aware of willing his hands to move, only watched as they lit a small fire from the wood he kept stored there, then extract a bundle of worn yarrow sticks from the sack. He stared at the throwing sticks, used by generations of his family for meditation on the verses of the Tao, then tried to will himself to start stacking them in piles, to get lost in the ancient ritual, as his father had taught him, to push away all distraction, all torment. But something kept pushing through, past the Tao. Other verses came into his mind, those of the old Chinese poets, as if his father were reaching out to him with a different lesson.

  Su tung-po had been a Sung dynasty official who retreated into poetry and Buddhism after being exiled for offending the emperor. A thousand years earlier Su had written a verse about mountains on a wall at the then-ancient Xilin temple. As Shan looked out to the shimmering peaks of the Himalayas he spoke the words, and then, with a catch in his throat, spoke them again. He could hear his father’s voice over his own.

  Regarded from one side, an entire range from another, a single peak.

  Far, near, high, low, all the peaks different from the others.

  If the true face of the mountain cannot be known

  It is because the one looking at it is standing in its midst.

  He closed his eyes, repeating the words again, and again, very slowly. Eventually they triggered a memory of a day long ago when his father had begun teaching him about the Tao and the poets with the words “Let us speak about the way of the world,” and then another, when they had sat on a rice paddy levee watching winter stars, in violation of the curfew of their reeducation camp. His father had told him of a monk he had known who, in the peculiar blend of Taoism and Buddhism that prevailed in much of China, believed in reincarnation, but both prospectively and retroactively, so that rebirth could be sometime in the past. Shan and his father had lain under the night sky speaking about who in the past they might become, usually settling on hermit scholars or renegade Sung dynasty poets. In prison he had passed many nights lying in the dark, in near starvation, lost in visions of himself and his father in another life.

  His father waited for him on the mountainside beside a small comfortable bungalow of wood and stone, completing a painting of intricately detailed bamboo in which a thrush sang. Sipping water from a wooden ladle, the old scholar looked up and gazed expectantly down the misty trail.

  Shan reached into his pouch and withdrew a paper and pen.

  We are journeying to your Sung house, Father, he wrote. Ko with fresh brushes and I with a basket of lychee nuts. Not long now, until we slip these chains. Keep the tea warm. Xiao Shan, he signed it. Little Shan.

  Shan stared at the letter, fighting his recurring guilt over never having written to his father with the full details of his own imprisonment, for fear he would disappoint the old scholar. He lifted the pen again but instead of writing drew a small simple mandala in the margin then folded another sheet of paper as an envelope around the letter and wrote his father’s name. With overlapping sticks he built a small square tower in the fire and laid the letter on it. He watched it burn, watched the glowing ashes rise high up into an oddly gentle breeze and float toward Chomolungma.

  After a long time he extracted more paper, thi
s time addressing it with the names of the two Tibetans whose lives he cherished more than his own. He had been sending a letter every week to Gendun and Lokesh, in their hidden hermitage in Lhadrung, and now wrote without thinking, in the Tibetan script they had taught him, of the events of the past ten days, wrote of everything, explaining how first a sherpa, then an American woman, were dead and not dead, playing ongoing roles in the strangest of dramas. He had begun to believe that the mountain goddess was indeed using them, he wrote, though he could not discover her purpose. I have lost the way of finding the truth, he finally inscribed. Teach me again.

  He held the letter in his hands, convinced more than ever that the old Tibetans would be aware that he was sending a message, asking them to help him discover the truth across the hundreds of miles that separated them.

  But there was no truth, he could hear his friends say, at least none that could ever be spoken, there was only the particular goodness that resonated inside each man, and each man’s form of goodness was as unique as each cloud in the sky.

  He sat long after he had burned the second letter, watching the fire dwindle to ashes, driving the world from his mind the way Gendun and Lokesh had taught him. Finally he went to the lip of the high ledge and folded his hands into the diamond of the mind mudra for focus, looking over the sleeping town and the snowcapped sentinels on the horizon. After an hour he found a quiet place within. After another hour he began to let each piece of evidence enter the place, turning it, twisting it, prodding it, looking for and finally finding the one little ember that was smoldering under it all.

  Shan was at the entry to the Tingri County People’s Library when it opened, wearing his best clothes, respectfully greeting the Chinese matron who administered the collection, moving to a long row of shelves under the side window. It was a compact, sturdy building, freshly painted and containing a bigger collection than would seem justified by the size of the town, reflecting the largess of the local Party.

  The books Shan focused on were all identically bound, all labeled in block gold ideograms Annual Report of the Tingri County Secretariat of the Communist Party of China. He picked up the volumes for the early 1960s and began quickly leafing through them. They consisted almost entirely of pronouncements from Beijing, the only local content being commentary on the evolving campaign against the local landlord class, with lists of assets, down to the number of sheep and yaks. It was a familiar saga, in which local cooperatives, formed from what Beijing termed the peasant class, gradually increased their power over the social structure.

  “May I be of assistance?” came an aggrieved voice over his shoulder.

  Shan turned to the librarian with a smile. “This early period of socialist assimilation fascinates me. When I was younger I spent days and days in the archives in Beijing.” That much at least was true. “Each region has its own particular version to tell.”

  The woman came closer. She smelled of strong soap and peanut oil. “You are supposed to sign in to use the reference materials,” she chided, extending a clipboard.

  Shan apologized and quickly wrote his name at the bottom of a list of names.

  “Beijing?” she asked in a more relaxed tone.

  “My home.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “I am from Tianjin! Practically neighbors.”

  “Practically neighbors,” Shan agreed. He fixed the woman with a meaningful gaze. “Surely there was much drama during this region’s transformation. So remote. So close to the border. So many locals mired in the old ways. I used to go to Tianjin,” he added. “I used to watch the ships.”

  The woman gave an exclamation of excitement and Shan listened patiently for several minutes as she recounted tales of walking the docks with her parents when she was a child, of an uncle who used to sail on freighters that traveled all over Asia. At last she stood, retrieved a stool, and searched the shelf over the window, producing a dusty volume that she handed to Shan with a satisfied smile. “So many just want to come in to read about yeti, or all the foreigners who have died on our mountain. And until I arrived last year the collection was so incomplete, it took me months just to understand where she had left off.”

  “Left off?”

  “My predecessor. Poor woman had lived here for fifteen years without ever going up to the base of Chomolungma. And the one day she finally decides to drive up her car fails her.”

  Shan leaned forward. “Are you saying she died?”

  The librarian’s eyes widened as she gave a melodramatic sigh. “Brakes failed; off a cliff she flew.”

  “And books were missing after she died? They were here once, and were stolen?”

  The woman shrugged. “Stolen, misplaced. They were part of the overall collection she had been compiling on the local history of the People’s Republic. I had to make calls to Shigatse to get these, the only ones in the county I think. I can’t imagine why the most important book of all for those interested in local history should be missing.”

  The book was a limited edition, published by the Party, entitled Heroes of the Himalayan Revolution. After passing over several pages of Party platitudes, Shan reached a dry chronicle, written in a clerical style, which opened by stating that the struggle to unlock the grip of the landlord classes in the region required more resources than elsewhere-the Party’s way of acknowledging that there had been genuine resistance from the local Tibetans. He passed over pages with more lists of the landlord class, expanded as the fervor of reform spread to include not only the large landowners but smaller and smaller farms. Those who owned fifty sheep, then those who owned ten sheep. Those who owned a yak and a dog. As the reform committees, led by ranking members of the peasant class guided by Chinese, began to redistribute the wealth, “hooligans in the mountains” sought to interfere. A company of infantry was brought in. A brigade. A battalion. It was the closest an official chronicler would come to admitting there was an ongoing armed rebellion against the Chinese. Campaigns to eliminate the hooligans were launched along the border with Nepal, in the hills above Shogo, in the valleys below Tumtok village.

  But real reform had not started until Mao had dispatched his youth brigades, the Red Guard. Few members of Shan’s generation would speak openly of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s euphemistic caption for the years during which the Red Guard inflicted chaos and terror on the country. Youthful zealots, often no more than teenagers, had set themselves up as de facto rulers in many regions, even taking over units of the army. Only when the Red Guard had established itself in Tibet had the systematic destruction of monasteries and temples begun.

  The book switched format to reprints of newspaper articles, complete with photographs. A description of the Red Guard moving against small monasteries came under the headline HEROES DEFEND HOMELAND, with a flowery passage about Mao’s Children, one of the Guard’s many labels, attacking members of the reactionary Dalai Lama gang in the fortresses they called monasteries. Coarse, grainy photographs followed of lamas being paraded through town wearing the conical dunce caps often placed on the subjects of political struggle sessions. THE LEADERS OF THE EXPLOITER CLASS AT LAST BROUGHT TO SUBMISSION BY THE 117TH YOUTH BRIGADE, read one of the captions. In another photo the flag of Beijing was crossed with another, its insignia blurred by the wind. Others showed mountain gompas in ruin, piles of weapons seized from remnants of the exploiters, smoking remains of the houses of suspected rebels. In one of the pictures members of the Brigade posed with weapons like warriors, wearing bandoliers, waving heavy automatic pistols over their heads. Finally he reached a large photo, carefully staged, of more old Tibetans in conical hats sitting in a struggle session before a raised table of revolutionary inquisitors in the courtyard of the old gompa. Hanging in front of the table was the flag of the youth brigade, consisting of a hammer crossed with a lightning bolt on a dark background. At the center of the table sat an attractive young girl with familiar features. The caption read TIRELESS COMMANDER WU LEADS ANOTHER STRUGGLE SESSION IN SHOGO.

 
; Reports of speeches followed, from National Day ceremonies, visits of Party dignitaries, followed by an article captioned Final Campaign Against Traitors in Mountains, a brief description of how the Hammer and Lightning Brigade was finally scouring away the last vestiges of resistance by machine-gunning all herds and leveling most of the villages in the high ranges.

  The book abruptly ended with no conclusion, no final chapter celebrating Beijing’s victory. Shan closed it and looked at the librarian, who was watching him with a satisfied expression. “The story ends rather suddenly,” he observed.

  The woman sighed and pointed to a small legend at the base of the spine. Volume One.

  “May I see the next?”

  “I wish you could. After all the trouble I took to get it last year, it has now gone missing.”

  Shan chewed on the words. “Missing since when?”

  “A week ago, maybe two. Our reference works are not for circulation. Someone,” she declared in a pained voice, “stole it.”

  “Stole it again, you mean.”

  The woman frowned, then nodded.

  “Surely you can determine who could have committed such a crime.”

  “We are not crowded usually but during the season many people come and go.”

  “During the season? You mean foreigners?”

  “It is why we have fresh paint, a new roof, more funding than any other library our size in the county. When the weather doesn’t permit treks to the mountain, tourists need something else to do. We have a display of local artifacts in the adjoining room.”

  “Would foreigners do research?” Shan asked, working to keep his tone casual.

  “A few. Not many can read Chinese.”

  “Surely you make them sign in? I work for Tsipon,” he added quickly in a confiding tone. “I could make inquiries of the foreign climbing parties.”