Beautiful Ghosts (11 page)

“He knows our friend Surya,” McDowell announced to Ming, keeping her eyes on the road.

“I didn’t mean to interfere,” Shan said, and began looking for a safe place to leap from the car.

“Where can I take you?” McDowell asked with an oddly mischievous tone.

“Nowhere. I’ll get out here,” Shan said, his hand on the door handle. “Please.”

“Nonsense. How do you know Surya? Is he really a monk? And if you don’t tell me where you are going you’ll wind up at the old brick factory south of town.”

Shan settled back in his seat. “The brick factory will be fine,” he said uneasily. The dilapidated building was less than two miles from the foot of the mountains.

Ming leaned forward, suddenly interested. “You know how to make the old monk talk?” He spoke as if he wanted Surya to confess something, something other than murder. He studied Shan a moment. “You were the one with Tan this morning.”

“Surya has sometimes gone a month without speaking,” Shan said truthfully.

“But he knows so much that needs telling,” Ming said in a disappointed voice. “It could be worth a lot to get him to speak with us again.”

Shan could not make up his mind about the earnest young Han. He would not have become the youngest director of one of the country’s premier museums based on his scientific skills alone. “Did you visit him at the ruins?”

“Three times,” Ming readily admitted. “He explained to me what he was painting, at that old tower. I asked about old shrines. It is quite valuable for my research.”

“Were the two of you in the mountains two nights ago?” Shan asked abruptly.

Ming fixed him with a hard, almost threatening stare for a moment, then shrugged. “He has suffered a mental collapse. I thought it was a stroke. But an army doctor was called in and said he was fine, in extraordinary shape, actually. Except he forgets who he is or anything about the art. He moans about death and killing.”

“It was you who arranged for the army to pick him up?”

A smug smile crossed Ming’s face. “A number of government resources have been made available for our project.” Shan would have thought it impossible without having heard it from Ming himself. The museum director had borrowed troops from Tan so he could interrogate Surya about his historic research.

McDowell gave an exasperated sigh. “Comrade Ming fantasizes that he’s some kind of party boss,” she said, grinning at Shan. She slowed and pointed to a yak pulling a plow in a field. “I keep telling him he just runs a museum. Billionaires aren’t interested in him, they’re interested in his art.”

“Billionaires?” Shan asked, looking at the woman. He realized his hand was creeping toward the old gau he wore under his shirt, reacting the way Lokesh did when the old Tibetan sensed demons.

She continued to look at the yak, smiling, as if the scene gave her pleasure. “You know,” she said at last. “Patrons. Customers. The ones who pay for new museum wings. The shareholders in Director Ming’s business.”

When they pulled into the old factory site it appeared still abandoned. But as McDowell drove around the front of the building a line of Tibetans came into view, mostly women with small children, and beyond them a small red minibus with a Lhasa registration plate. Over a door in a corner of the crumbling brick building was a hand-lettered sign. Free Children’s Health Exam, it said, in Tibetan only. Several of the Tibetans began waving at McDowell. As she waved back and switched off the ignition she noticed the question in Shan’s eyes. “The relief group only has money enough for the medicine and travel expenses of the nurses. I help where I can. Get in line and we’ll find you some vitamins.” She opened the door and climbed out to a chorus of greetings.

“Twenty minutes, no more,” Ming called to her, then climbed out himself and lit a cigarette. Shan grabbed one of the loose papers on the seat, stuffed it inside his shirt, and opened his door. He was nearly out of the compound when Ming spoke to his back.

“Who else was in the ruins with the old monk?”

Shan turned. “There were outsiders.”

Ming’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know this?”

Shan pulled the little cigar stub from his pocket and held it up. “This came from no Tibetan. Is it yours?”

Ming’s gaze grew suddenly intense as he saw the cigar. “Let me have that.”

Shan set the stub on the trunk of the car and backed away. Ming slowly lifted it, holding it to his nose, then dropping it and crushing it with his shoe. “Not me. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing,” Shan repeated.

But it was not nothing. Ming stared at the shreds of tobacco at his feet, then gazed angrily toward the mountains. “If you truly know Surya,” the museum director said in a voice gone suddenly cold. “If you know his friends who hide in the mountains, the hermits, tell them time is short. If it’s not going to be Surya, who will it be? We won’t settle for half of death,” he declared to Shan, staring as if watching for a reaction. “The emperor has waited far too long already.”

“The emperor?” Shan asked, certain he had not heard correctly. “Half of death?” Shan was no longer looking at the affable scientist he had heard at the school yard. Ming’s eyes were small and hard. “What do you want in the mountains?”

Ming frowned and glanced back at the shredded cigar. “I want another monk. One of those old ones from the high mountains.”

Shan’s mouth was suddenly bone dry. “Why?”

“Bring me a monk and I’ll pay you.”

“There are no monks in—”

Ming cut him off with a raised hand. “There are bombs, you know, made for terrorists in caves. They don’t destroy the cave, just take all the oxygen out so everyone inside suffocates.” A young boy ran by the car, chasing a ball. Ming smiled and waved at him, then turned back to Shan. “Tell them soon the whole world will know who died. It will be too late for them then.”

“You know who died?”

“For now,” Ming sighed, motioning him away with his fingers, “that remains a state secret. Bring me a monk. Or I will inform Colonel Tan that Surya did kill someone.”

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

It was early afternoon before Shan reached the hills above the valley. Surya’s desolate face, and the strange words of Ming and the second beggar, haunted Shan as he climbed the slopes. He had gone to the town to try to find answers, but had come away more confused, more filled with dread, than ever. A murderer roamed the hills, godkillers stalked the mountains. But if Zhoka was indeed an earth taming temple there would be nothing more important to the old Tibetans than protecting it. Shan would never give Ming the second monk he demanded, but Gendun would willingly go if he thought it would help Surya, or protect Zhoka.

Something new began to gnaw at him as he climbed, Tan’s strange way of describing Shan. In trying to dismiss Shan as a pitiable former prisoner Tan had said Shan’s family was destroyed. A year earlier Tan had taken pleasure in reporting to Shan that his wife had divorced him during his imprisonment and remarried. His wife had considered Shan a political embarrassment even before his imprisonment, had doubtlessly convinced their son that Shan was dead. But Tan had not said Shan had lost his family, or that his family had abandoned him. He had said his family was destroyed. It was Tan’s way of expression, Shan kept telling himself. Probably Tan did not even recall Shan’s personal history and had used the words just to complete Tan’s portrait of one of the wretched ex-convicts who wandered the county.

When he reached the crest of the first ridge he lowered himself onto a rock, trying to push his mind into a place as quiet as the mountain meadow he sat in so he might make sense of what he had heard. His brief moments with Ming felt like a waking nightmare. Surely he had misunderstood, surely the urbane museum director had not been casually threatening the lives of the monks. No one in Lhadrung knew of the secret hermitage. No one, he realized with a pang, except Surya.

He had to find the monks, had to convince them to flee from the outsiders who had come to Lhadrung. But even as he looked toward the eastern peaks that surrounded Yerpa he knew they would never flee.

As he replayed the scene with McDowell and Ming he remembered the paper he had taken from McDowell’s car. It was in a Chinese font, printed from a computer, but it was a Tibetan document, filled with Tibetan place names and instructions for prayer. A
neyig,
he realized after reading it twice. The British woman was reading a pilgrim’s guide, one of the ancient books written to help pilgrims find important shrines and sites of spiritual power. Someone had gone to a great deal of work to translate one of the old books word for word. It was numbered at the bottom, Volume fourteen, page fifty-six. He read it once more, recognizing some of the names now. Kumbum. Sangke. They were hundreds of miles to the north. But this was volume fourteen, meaning someone had put huge effort into compiling and translating many of the old guides. If Ming was seeking old shrines in the mountains, the old pilgrim books would tell him how to find them, at least most of them. They would be in caves, in old Tibetan houses, in sheltered sites considered power places. Shan was not familiar with this part of the mountains, did not know many of the sacred places. But he did know one structure that had looked very old when he had found it in the night.

Half an hour later he was gazing down at the house whose outline he had seen in the darkness, a small stone structure with a grey tile roof, built into the side of the hill. Additions had been built into the ends of the house, one of pressed earth, one of plywood and timbers salvaged from a bigger building. Shan approached the house warily, remembering the dog he had heard in the night. Beyond the house was a small field of barley, outlined with rows of stones. A structure with hay beside it was clearly a stable, but a second structure was not for storing fodder as he would have expected. The small sturdy building was constructed entirely of stone, its roof consisting of thin stone slabs, its small chimney constructed of dry laid stone. He stepped toward the building, which looked even older than the house. There was no door, only an opening framed in aged timbers through which Shan saw a domed stone shape like an oven. In front of it was a device with a foot pedal, leather belts that drove a large, horizontal wooden wheel on top. It was a potting wheel and a kiln that had probably been used for centuries.

Sheep dung lay scattered across the small enclosure made of earthen walls in front of the stable, though there were no sheep to be seen. In the sheltered area between the stable and the house the earth had been compacted and a frame of timbers supported a tattered felt blanket, creating a makeshift porch. In the shade of the blanket was a line of clay jars, each covered with a cloth top tied with twine. It was the way Tibetans often stored butter and milk. Beyond the jars, on a square of homespun woolen, lay a mound of coarse salt. Near the doorway sat three small
dronma,
churns used to make buttered tea, and five feet beyond an iron cooking tripod held a kettle over a smoldering fire. Under the edge of the blanket awning thin clay tablets were lined up, perhaps a hundred of them, tsa-tsa, stamped with the images of saints, in the process of being painted.

The weathered plank door still hung ajar. Shan knocked on it once, called out, then stepped inside. The house’s single window illuminated a tidy central room, swept clean, the faint scent of incense lingering in the air. It was as if a gathering had been planned, then abandoned by the inhabitants. The pressed earth walls created an alcove that served as a shrine, holding an old cloth thankga and an altar on which were arrayed a painted ceramic statue of the Historical Buddha and the seven offering bowls of Tibetan tradition. He bent to study the thangka and statue. They were old, both extraordinary in their detail, the work of accomplished artists.

Opposite the altar, in the wing made of plywood and cardboard nailed onto timber posts, lay several sleeping pallets tied in rolls and more than a dozen heavy blankets. Only one pallet and one blanket lay open, recently used. He paced slowly along the walls, uneasy with his intrusion but unable to stop wondering about those who lived there and what had happened to them. Suspended on a pole over the rear wall of the main chamber was a large cloth, thin as a sheet, adorned with painted flowers which were all faded to shades of grey and brown. He paced along the wood planks of the floor, studying a small chest in one corner on which cooking implements were stacked, then stepped back to the flowered cloth and pulled it aside, exposing half a dozen deep shelves. The bottom shelves held household items, crockery and pots, long wooden spoons, a bowl of buttons.

On the shelf just below the top were several peche, traditional Tibetan books, their long loose leaves tied between two wooden end pieces with silk cords. Beside the peche were half a dozen other books bound in Western fashion, all in English.
The Works of William Shakespeare. Great Poems of Britain.
A novel by Graham Greene.
Ivanhoe
by Walter Scott. A surge of emotion washed through Shan as he ran a finger down the spine of the
Ivanhoe.
His father had read the book to Shan in secret, in a closet with his mother keeping watch, before the Red Guards had burned his father’s books. The novel, like all the other books, was many decades old. It was, he became certain as he examined the frontispiece depicting a straw-haired groom helping a knight with his armor, the same edition his father had read to him.

The only objects on the top shelf were a ceramic bust of a rosy-cheeked, plump Western woman wearing a crown and a large wooden case with a leather handle and brass latches. He looked back across the empty room toward the open door, then pulled the case down. Twenty inches wide and nearly ten inches deep, its brass fittings were as well polished as the walnut case itself. He set the case on the rough little table and stepped to the door. There was still no sign of anyone. He paced uneasily about the room, then returned to the table and quickly opened the case.

It was a porcelain tea set, packed in matted packing fibers, painted with patterns of blue and golden flowers. He lifted the delicate pot, studying it in confusion. Its long spout was painted with blooming vines, and a rosebud finial adorned the top of the lid. It was not Tibetan, nor Chinese.
Staffordshire,
it said on the bottom. Arrayed around the pot had been six matching cups and saucers. One cup, but not its saucer, was missing, leaving its shape in the packing material. He fingered the fibers and suddenly remembered the English word, because in the lessons his father had given him inside their locked closet they had laughed over the way it rolled off the tongue, and because his father had declared Shan a top pupil for mastering the difficult pronunciation.
Excelsior.