“Twos?”
Yates turned to a page near the front of the pad and pointed to the words, written in English. “Religious Affairs office burns,” he read, and drew a line beneath it that extended past the words. “Tenzin killed” he said, and drew another line. “Minister Wu is killed.” Another line. “Director Xie is killed, on the same day Gyalo is attacked and left for dead,” he finished with another line. With the tip of the pencil he quickly wrote numbers in the spaces between the lines. “Two days, two days, four days. All twos or a combination of two. Ama Apte would probably say the mountain breathes in for a day, then breathes out.” He shrugged. “It’s nothing. I’m possessed by a math demon. Although,” he added in a curious tone, “it’s been two days since the last violence.”
Shan stood, strangely disturbed by Yates’s words, glancing back and forth from the map to the lines and numbers drawn by the American. He stepped to the edge of the cliff, letting the chill wind slam against his face, considering the pattern of life down in the world. Then abruptly he turned and darted over to Yates. “There is a place,” he announced as he urgently packed up the items on the bench, “that lives by a pulse of twos. If we hurry we can be there by sundown.”
Yates had not stumbled upon the rhythm of the mountain, Shan explained as they pulled into the dusty truckers’ compound in Yates’s red utility vehicle, but the pulse of the Friendship Highway. Shogo was strategically situated on the truckers run between the Nepalese border and Lhasa.
“It’s the natural break point. Drivers can get food and gas, then they sleep in their trucks or buy a cot in the back of the teashop. At dawn they pull out and reach their destination before nightfall. The regular drivers turn around the next morning and repeat the trip.”
“Putting them here every two days,” Yates concluded.
“Gyalo said the men who attacked him were strangers. He knows nearly everyone in town. Everyone else seems to think they were Public Security soldiers. But if they weren’t knobs,” Shan said, “they were transients.”
“So now we’re looking for murderous truck drivers? How many theories are you allowed before you admit failure?”
“Gyalo said someone watched from the shadows as he was beaten. Wu’s killer had help. Two men in black sweatshirts. Most truck drivers would know how to operate a bulldozer, and could arrive at the base camp in a small supply truck without raising suspicion. More than a few are former soldiers.”
They watched until dark, studying every truck that entered the compound, watching for those few that had pairs of drivers, then ventured inside after Yates found a hooded windbreaker to cover his features. The American uttered a low choking sound as they opened the door of the cafe to a powerful scent of grease, cabbage, cigarettes, motor oil and burned rice, then followed Shan to a table in the back corner, where they pushed aside dirty dishes and sat with their backs to the wall.
They ordered noodle soup, which was not as bad as Shan expected, and momos, which seemed to be made of cardboard.
“This is your plan?” Yates muttered. “Sit and wait for two drivers to walk up and confess?” He poked at his stale momos. “Of course they might prefer jail to these dumplings.”
“The plan,” Shan said as he spotted a familiar face exiting the cafe, “is for you to stop speaking English and sit here.” Shan grabbed a newspaper from an empty table and tossed it in front of Yates. “Pretend you read Chinese. I’ll be back.”
Shan stayed in the shadows as he exited the building, following the path that led to the latrine at the rear of the complex then stealing around the parked trucks until he reached the mechanics’ workshop at the far side of the complex. The man under the hood of a small truck was too engrossed in his work to notice Shan enter and lean against the workbench behind him.
“Last I saw him,” Shan declared, “your father was sleeping. I think he will make it.” Jomo’s head jerked up so fast it hit the lifted hood of the truck.
“They don’t allow visitors in the garage,” he groused, pulling an oily cloth from his pocket to wipe his hands.
“When I said it wasn’t Public Security who attacked your father you didn’t seem surprised.”
“I can’t afford trouble. I did a year in prison when I was younger. It still could have been the knobs. They hire people sometimes.”
“As informers, yes. But not for that kind of work. For sake of argument, let’s say it was strangers, like your father said. This is the local market for strangers, you might say, full of Tibet’s new nomads. Men looking for a little extra money, who wouldn’t be recognized.”
“Last spring when an avalanche covered one of the roads they put a sign up here and quickly hired twenty drivers for a couple of days.”
Shan nodded. “What was your year away for?”
“A disagreement over the sky.”
“The sky?”
“All my life I walked the town at night and watched the stars, would sit right in the town square and count meteors. Then someone decided to install street lights, those ugly orange vapor lamps. No more stars. I used to spend summers with shepherds when I was a boy. I have always been good at throwing stones.”
“Civic pride,” Shan suggested, “can take many forms.”
Jomo forced a slow, uneasy grin in reply.
“What if I had a special job, no questions asked? What if I wanted two men in black sweatshirts who weren’t afraid of bending the rules?”
The Tibetan turned to the bench, began sorting through a pile of wrenches. “You are the only one in town interested in saving that Chinese colonel.”
“That Chinese colonel didn’t kill Tenzin or Director Xie.”
Jomo shrugged. “Tenzin was from Nepal. And no one cries over Religious Affairs bureaucrats.”
“When the real killer finds out your father is still alive those two men will probably be sent again. If they can’t find him they will start with you.”
The Tibetan lifted a wrench and looked at Shan, as if considering whether to use it on him or the engine. “I have work to do,”
he complained, then bent over the engine again.
“If you don’t choose a side,” Shan said, “others will choose it for you.” He retreated, though only around the two vehicles in the bays, where he watched Jomo from the shadows.
After several minutes the Tibetan paused and straightened, looking toward the parking lot. He glanced around the garage, then disappeared behind a crude plank door into what no doubt was a tool storage closet. Shan gave him another minute before he followed.
The door of the closet was ajar. Shan hooked a finger around it and silently pulled it open. Jomo stood between two walls on which tools hung, facing a small workbench that had been cleared of all tools. On it sat a small Buddha, a cheap steel casting with streaks of oil on its face. The Tibetan was placing pieces of sweet biscuits in front of the Buddha, as offerings.
“I was still young when the Red Guard became active,” Shan said to his back. Jomo’s breath caught at the sound of his voice but the Tibetan did not move. “They came to my school and made the students gather up every book in a foreign language. They made us put them in a big pile in the courtyard and said we would have a beautiful cleansing fire the next day. That night I went back to school. I pulled out twenty books of history and poetry and replaced them with twenty books of the Chairman’s essays I took from the classrooms.”
“Did they find out?” Jomo asked in a whisper.
“No. But years later, after we returned from reeducation camps in the country, they found my father with Western books he had kept hidden. Some were those I rescued that day. He died from the beating they gave him. He died holding my hand, smiling at me. I always felt somehow responsible.”
“It’s hard to know the right things to do,” Jomo said, speaking toward the Buddha. “It’s hard to know how to be.”
Shan waited for the rest of the sentence then realized there was no more. “It’s hard to know,” he agreed.
“An old
shepherd knew my father,” Jomo said, “before. . before everything happened. As a boy I used to run away every month or two when my father got really drunk, because he would beat me, and the shepherd gave me shelter. He told me about my father the monk, said he had been a good man who came to the herding camps each spring to bless the new lambs. He would sit at their campfires and recite sutras and the old poems for hours, then sing songs with the herding families. He said no matter what my father did, that was the man I should see in my mind, that he had been a very holy man, probably would have become the abbot when he got older, that the holy man was just lost inside him somewhere.”
“I have a friend who is a lama,” Shan whispered. “He says the holy things are still everywhere, just harder to see. Consider it a test, he says.”
They stared at the little steel Buddha. Shan found a walnut in his pocket and put it with the other offerings.
“It’s a green truck,” Jomo suddenly declared. “One of the big heavy ones. Some of those with two drivers keep going through the night, switching drivers. But when those two stop for gas they usually park with the rigs that spend the night here. Sometimes they pay for women in the back where the cots are. Sometimes they walk down the road as if to meet someone. Sometimes their rig stays parked for twenty-four hours. They’re due tonight.”
“How would they know when to go meet someone?”
“Some kind of signal I think. Sometimes just before dusk I see a yellow bucket turned upside down at the side of the road, a hundred yards before the turnoff. They’re always angry, often drunk. They’d rather stab you than look at you.” He turned back toward his makeshift altar and touched the top of the Buddha as if for a blessing, and said no more.
Yates, restless as ever, did not need to hear Shan’s news. As Shan passed the closest truck to the teashop entrance the American pulled him into the shadows and pointed toward the fuel pumps. Two tall, square men clad in black sweatshirts were fueling and cleaning the cab of a large green truck.
“Christ, they’re huge,” Yates muttered.
“Manchurians,” Shan ventured. One of the men paced along the tires, hitting them with a wooden baton.
“So now what?” Yates asked. “Make a citizen’s arrest? Stand in front of their truck until they confess?”
“You are going to wait while I go inside,” Shan replied. “And when I return you are going to cover your face, walk behind me, and not say a word.”
The man with the baton jumped on the running board and the truck began to move, easing into the ranks of vehicles parked for the night.
Yates did not protest, kept his eyes on the men who climbed off of the truck as Shan darted toward the teashop. Inside, he checked through a window that Yates had not moved then asked for a telephone. Five minutes later the American followed Shan in the direction of the green truck. Shan did not aim directly at the truck, but at two strangers who sat at a concrete table at the edge of the gravel parking lot, playing mah-jongg by the light of a lantern. Shan stepped into the circle of light. “We’ve got good artifacts,” he announced in a loud voice. “The real thing. Triple your money in Shigatse or Lhasa.”
The men at the table looked up in surprise then cast worried glances toward the green truck. “The real thing,” Shan repeated. “We control the artifact trade in this town.” He watched the truck, saw movement in its shadows. When he looked back the two men had disappeared, leaving their tiles and lantern still on the table.
A rough, seething voice emerged from the darkness before Shan could make the black shape moving toward him. “You have shit,” the man spat. “You have nothing for sale!” Another shape appeared, brandishing a tire baton.
“Everything is for sale,” Shan replied, “Opportunity abounds, for one yellow bucket. What’s the price of bulldozing a man into a stone wall?”
They sprang like cats, swinging their batons. Shan sidestepped the first assault and Yates charged into the second man with a shoulder to his chest, knocking him to the ground. But the batons moved with determination. A blow to the back of his head knocked Yates to his knees. For every swing Shan dodged, another connected with his arms and back. Yates was on the ground, the second man straddling him, the baton swept back for a bone-crushing blow, when the headlights of a moving truck illuminated the American’s head, no longer covered by his hood.
“Bai ren!” the man spat. Foreigner! The baton froze in midair, the man’s partner muttered a curse, and as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone.
Shan and Yates, numb from the encounter, sat on the gravel, blood trickling down the American’s cheek as the green truck, its trailer unhitched, revved its engine and began rolling away.
“That went well,” Yates observed dryly in English as he rubbed his head.
Shan, looking up as he finished writing the license plate number of the truck on his forearm, wanted to say it had gone as well as could be expected, when he saw the green truck stop. The driver spoke with a man at the fuel pumps. A figure moved in front of Shan, blocking his view. It was Jomo, his face full of fear, his mouth opening and shutting as if he could not find the words he meant to say.
“Christ! No!” Yates shouted and staggered to his feet as the green truck made a U turn and began speeding in reverse toward Yates’s utility vehicle. Shan leapt up, grabbing the American’s arm as he took a step forward. Yates’ resistance lasted only a moment. They stood, transfixed, as the rear of the truck slammed into Yates’ vehicle, crumbling the fender, jerking forward and back again, pushing the vehicle into the boulder behind it. Then suddenly it was on fire. The green truck swerved away, steering toward them as it gained speed, blaring its air horn as they leaped to the side. It roared past them, out onto the highway.
The American took a step toward his burning truck.
“Yates, wait!” Shan insisted.
“For what?” the American shot back. “I have things in there. I have got to-” But his protest died away as he heard the sirens coming down the road from town.
“Let bystanders tell them what happened,” Shan said.
“What the hell did you do inside?” Yates growled at Shan. “They never could have gotten the alarm this fast.”
His question was answered a moment later. Two black utility vehicles with blinking lights sped into the compound, spraying gravel as they slammed on their brakes and Public Security soldiers poured out of the first. From the second stepped Major Cao and the diminutive Madame Zheng. Shan watched as a witness spoke excitedly with Cao, then pointed at Shan and Yates.
“You must have a death wish,” Yates muttered as the major marched toward them.
Shan said nothing as Cao erupted, demanding to know what Shan had done, did not react when Cao slapped him. He extended his forearm with the license numbers written on it toward the knob officer. “A green truck left here minutes ago. In it you will find the men who killed Director Xie.”
“Idiot!” Cao snarled. “You don’t think I see that everything you do is to distract me from the truth?
“Then why do you suppose they destroyed this American’s truck?” Shan asked in a level voice.
Madame Zheng was behind Cao now, staring toward the burning vehicle. A soldier ran up to her with a section of the shattered bumper, bearing a bumper sticker, with the words, in English, Climbing Rocks! She stared at it, as if it were a vital piece of evidence, and was still staring at it when two knobs appeared from the shadows of the parked trucks dragging a limp body between them.
“Trying to sabotage the fuel pumps as well,” one of the soldiers declared.
Shan’s heart leaped to his throat as he recognized Jomo, his face battered and bleeding, a dark stain down his shirt. The knobs too had batons.
“Who else is with you?” the knob demanded, raising his stick at Jomo.
Shan sprang forward, covering the Tibetan, taking the blow to his own shoulder as the knob struck.
“It wasn’t like that,” Jomo cried as the soldiers tried to pry Shan away. “The man a
t the fuel station shoved me against a pump. I threw a can of oil at him and it burst open.” Shan saw now that the stain was indeed oil. “I only wanted to stop him.”
“Stop him from what?” Shan asked, dropping to his knees by the Tibetan.
Jomo pulled several sheets of paper from inside his shirt. “He paid me to draw a map of the roads between here and Everest, with the villages and old shrines marked. I thought he wanted to make offerings.” He spoke only to Shan, his face contorted not with pain but with shame. “But then I found him selling copies, selling them to some of the truckers. I threw his money back at him, demanded he give me the maps.”
Cao took a step forward, then halted as he saw the attentive way Madame Zheng listened.
“Why?” Shan asked. “Who needs maps?”
“It’s those monks. The truckers in the dormitory are all excited. Word spreads fast among those kind. Someone is paying a bounty for the escaped monks, or their gaus, those unique ones with lotus flowers from Sarma gompa.”
“Why the gaus?”
“Because the monks will never give them up. If someone brings in one of those gaus the monk will be dead. It’s the proof, for the bounty.”
The fight went out of the knobs. They gazed at Major Cao as Shan pulled Jomo out of their grip. But it was not Major Cao who spoke.
The silent Madame Zheng finally found her voice, the cool, peremptory one of a woman who would brook no discussion of her commands. “The American is bleeding, Major. Get your medical kit.”
Cao glared at Shan, seemed about to strike him again, then retreated as Madame Zheng stepped to Shan’s side.
Shan spoke matter-of-factly to the woman from Beijing as he watched Cao jog away. “I want to see Colonel Tan,” he stated. “Now. I want him to have a meal, a real meal, sitting in one of the front offices with a window onto the street.” Zheng gazed at Shan attentively without responding. “I want the major to stand outside the window, under a streetlight, where Tan can see him.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Lord of Death is-6 Page 25
