Beautiful Ghosts (18 page)

“Lhadrung.”

“Exactly. But by the time I got here he was gone, into the mountains they say in town. Being hidden by Tibetan friends after committing the biggest theft of Tibetan art ever.” Corbett did not wait for Shan to reply, just stepped into the fresco chamber where Yao was already at work.

Yao had illuminated the room with half a dozen lanterns and was busily writing in his notepad. He looked up as Shan entered.

“But there’s no market for expensive art in Tibet,” Shan said.

Yao ignored the comment. “You were interrupted last time,” he said. “You were explaining how this fresco was stolen.”

Shan stood silently a moment, watching the frustration build on Yao’s face. “First tell me why Ming wanted Surya.”

“Ming found him in that tower painting one day and discovered he knew about the old art, about how art gets hidden in the mountains. Ming says we are dealing with thieves with a political agenda. Restoring plundered art to its native land, that sort of thing.”

“Ming suspected Surya?”

“Only of knowing secrets that could be useful to us. Surya spoke in riddles about the pictures and what he called power places. It seemed to intrigue Ming. But in the end he was just a crazy old man. He insisted he had never even been to Lhadrung. He acted as if he lived in the rocks, like some burrowing animal. Said he was a monk, then said he wasn’t a monk. He kept playing with the light switches in the office, turning them on and off like he had never seen electric lamps before.” Shan glanced at Corbett, who had told him Surya had been asked to draw a picture of death. Meaning, he was convinced, a picture of the demon that protected Zhoka, whose name no one could utter.

Yao aimed his hand lamp into the tunnel that led to the underground stream, looking at the darkness with a wary expression.

“Why do you connect the thieves to these ruins?” Shan asked. “You didn’t know the fresco was stolen until I showed you.”

“We don’t,” Corbett said. “We just know this William Lodi went straight from Seattle into the mountains above Lhadrung. Experts say these mountains still have old Tibetan artifacts in the ruins, places where artifacts have been kept for centuries, in caves and old shrines, that they were never systematically searched like elsewhere. If Ming is right, Lodi is taking the stolen items to one of them, maybe just to leave them, seal them in a cave perhaps. Maybe return some to the same shrines they were taken from decades ago.”

“And to what shrine would he return an eighteenth-century Italian fresco?”

Yao shot him an irate glance. “I said it was one theory.”

Corbett advanced a few steps down the tunnel, then stopped. “They’re finished here. Took the art and moved on. So should we.” He seemed reluctant to continue toward the treacherous water below.

“Perhaps they left something,” Yao said. “This is the most evidence we have had yet of their presence.”

“Like what?” Corbett asked.

Yao frowned at Shan a moment, then shrugged. “A pool of blood.” As he spoke he held up a wooden prayer bead between two fingers.

A chill ran down Shan’s spine. If there had been thieves in the tunnels, stealing sacred art, Shan could not predict how Surya would have reacted.

Corbett gave a frustrated sigh, then pulled from his pack a headband apparatus with a light which he arranged over his head, pulled out a lantern with a purple lens, then dropped onto his hands and knees, switching on only the hand-light. “Ultraviolet,” he explained, and began searching the trail of blood, which now glowed, following the stream of stains that led to the little cell with the indentations in the floor for an altar, where Shan had found the old manuscript leaf written in English.

“In the old tower,” Shan ventured, “you used that light to show the old writing.”

“A lot of good it did,” Corbett grunted. “Since we couldn’t—” he looked up. “You could read it?”

Shan looked from the American back to Yao. “Just an old mantra.” He still did not understand why Surya had been so desperate to obscure the reference to the mountain palace and the cave of the mountain god, why he wanted to eliminate the signs of the pilgrim trail.

Yao dropped his own small pack, drew out a bottle of water, and drank without offering any to his companions. “I want a tour,” he said. “I want to know what you see, Comrade Shan. You can talk like a Tibetan but can you see like one?”

“I don’t know these ruins.”

“But you know what to expect in a monastery like this.”

“It is not helpful to generalize about anything in Tibet,” Shan said stiffly.

“If I go back and tell Tan all his warnings about you were correct, that you have failed so quickly at your chance at rehabilitation, where will you expect to find refuge? Do you think you will ever see your son again?”

Shan returned Yao’s stare a moment, then gazed down the dark corridor ahead of them. “Below the ground, there would usually be a
gonkang,
” he said, “a chapel for demons and other fierce protector deities. Near the gonkang might be where ritual implements were stored.”

“Ritual implements?”

“Costumes and masks used on festival days. Special paintings taken out on festival days.”

“Treasures.”

“In the eyes of the monks, yes.”

“Was this chamber with the fresco the gonkang?”

Shan lifted one of the battery lanterns and stood in the doorway again, surveying the walls. There was no sign of an altar, none of the heavy soot that would have risen from butter offerings that he had always seen in gonkang chambers. “No. This is an entryway, a place to prepare for the gonkang. You might linger here to become calm before proceeding.”

“I’m calm enough,” Yao pressed. “What else?”

“I don’t know. There could be storerooms underground, many storerooms for a gompa so big.”

“Hiding places, you mean. The kind of places thieves might use.”

Yao began to descend the sloping tunnel toward the stream, Shan following, then pausing to examine a four-inch piece of old wood that had been recently splintered away from something. There were no beams, no posts, nothing of wood in sight. In the few patches where dust had accumulated on the floor there were fresh tracks, two narrow parallel lines eighteen inches apart. Something other than a body had been dragged along the tunnel, perhaps a makeshift stretcher bearing the body. Yao was at the waterfall when Shan caught up with him, shining his lamp on the faded markings on the wall beyond. “Can you read them?”

They were words, written long ago in an elegant hand. He saw the letters for life, near small images of humans. “No,” he said.

Shan had not had time to study the corridor along the stream when he had run down it toward the frightened American. As they continued along the passage he saw now that once the passage had been lined with frescoes, though most had crumbled to dust or were riddled with cracks and holes. But three had been recently destroyed, transparent tape over some crumbling sections, thin tissue paper glued to others. Someone had tried to saw along the top of one, to chisel or cut along the top of another.

An angry mutter escaped Yao’s lips and he began examining the crumbling frescos in detail. “There were no fingerprints left at the imperial cottage,” he said, “only traces of latex. This mess, it doesn’t look like the same professional work.”

“Old plaster can have many different constituents, many different properties,” Shan suggested. “Even a professional might have to practice.”

After ten minutes they moved down the corridor, discovering a series of doorways, half a dozen low entries close together.

“Meditation chambers,” Shan explained. They aimed their lights inside each as they passed it. The walls were rough stone, the chambers unfurnished. Yao stepped inside the last one, followed a moment later by Shan.

A faint hint of incense hung in the air. A dust-covered scrap of cloth in one corner may have been a monk’s blanket.

“They would sit in here,” Shan explained, “sleep in here, eat in here, chant their beads in here. For days, sometimes for weeks.” He studied Yao, whose face had shown a flicker of uncertainty. “When the Tibetans meditate they can go away, to a place unfamiliar to you and me.”

Yao frowned but stepped to the blanket and squatted in front of it, pushing his light close to it. He seemed unwilling to touch it. “This is my fourth visit to these ruins,” he said. “Each time I sense I hear something, and I strain to listen but there is nothing, only perhaps a lingering vibration, like an old echo. Not a sound, but an intuition of sound.”

Shan studied Yao. It was a strange language the inspector spoke. Sometimes he sounded like a policeman, sometimes a party member. But other times he spoke more like a professor. Yao looked back at him with amusement in his eyes. Was he mocking Shan? Was he somehow mocking the gompa?

He stood and fixed Shan with a cool, steady stare. “You have a decision to make, comrade. There is another way to proceed, Colonel Tan’s way. Saturate the mountains with troops. Bring every man, woman, and child in, every goat and yak, and see what kind of confessions spring forth. Tan says it always works.”

“I need to know you are not lying to me,” Shan said. “About my son. About your investigation.”

For a moment Yao looked uneasily at the doorway past Shan, as if wondering whether Shan might try to prevent him from leaving the meditation cell, even try to fling him into the stream. Then his gaze hardened. “I’ve told you.”

“What you are speaks louder than what you say.”

“What—an investigator for the highest government offices? It’s what you did for twenty years, comrade.”

“Exactly.”

One side of Yao’s mouth twisted into something like a smile. “Colonel Tan said you might be desperate, that you would be irrational about protecting Tibetans. He said to weigh all your words carefully. He said you never did anything by chance or from stupidity. You may recall he wanted to send soldiers with us today, but I turned him down. This time. You were supposed to see that as a gesture of good faith. To show my commitment to your rehabilitation.” He took a step toward Shan but Shan did not move. “All I want is the truth,” Yao said.

“No,” Shan said. “Like you said, I spent many years doing what you do. I know exactly what you want. What you want, all you want, is to close your file, get a politically palatable answer to close your file. There are prosecutors who have discovered that Tibetans are the answer to every open case. Social misfits. Genetically inferior, some scientists will testify. No one to defend them. Hostile to Beijing. By definition politically undesirable. But sturdy enough to contribute years of hard labor.”

Yao frowned again. “So far,” he sighed, “your rehabilitation appears to be a failure.” The inspector pushed past him into the corridor, then paused and reached into his pocket, produced a slip of paper which he handed to Shan. It was a long grouping of numbers, in a familiar format. Without conscious effort Shan rolled up his sleeve and compared the digits. It was a lao gai registration number.

“It is his number. His facility is in northwestern Xinjiang,” Yao explained, referring to the vast province north of Tibet, a land of deserts and remote, inhospitable mountain ranges, a favorite venue for gulag camps.

Shan gripped the paper in his fist. “You still haven’t told me why you are here. It’s not just because the FBI is here or because of the timing of the crime.”

“Among the old papers in the Qian Long cottage Ming found a copy of a letter from the emperor saying he was sending something beautiful from his personal cottage, in tribute to his friends in Lhadrung.”

“What friends?”

“We don’t know. Like you said, he had lamas in his court.”

“How do you know the letter was genuine?”

“Because Ming said so,” Yao snapped. “It was Ming who reported the theft to the Chairman, and the letter.”

“You’re saying the fresco was taken as the tribute promised from Beijing to Tibet two centuries ago? That it was a political crime?”

Yao just smiled, then stepped away to explore the two remaining chambers that opened into the passage above the pool from which Corbett had almost fallen to his death.

One chamber was empty except for a corner where dust had accumulated, preserving the prints of heavy climbing boots, expensive boots, not the kind Tibetans would wear. There were over a dozen prints, in at least two different sizes. In the second, the last chamber, which had the benefit of the sunlight coming from the stream’s outfall, they found chaos. Shards of clay pots littered the floor, which was carpeted with what had been the contents of the pots. Flour, sugar, rice, the contents of torn envelopes of dried soup. A small butane stove, its frame bent as if crushed by a boot. Tea leaking from the small bags used in the West, each with a tiny English label. A box of latex gloves, into which a jar of honey had been dumped. Down, from two sleeping bags that had been slashed open.

Yao pointed to the bootprints outlined in the spilled flour and sugar.

“At least three pairs of boots. The owners of the supplies,” Shan suggested, and showed him how all the tracks were at the front of the room where those in the boots had surveyed the damage, except for one set that led straight to the farthest corner. Two pairs of tracks showed the heavy treads of Western-style boots, the third was smooth, from the type of soft boots worn by many Tibetans. He followed the single set of tracks to another clay pot in the corner, under a blanket. It held batteries, still in plastic packs, the size used in the metal light Shan had found on his first visit, and an empty package of cigars. Soaked in rum, the English label said.

Yao made a small satisfied sound like a purr, then began examining every inch of the room, shining his light in each corner, studying even the ceiling. Within five minutes the inspector had found a small battery powered saw, its circular blade covered with plaster dust, and, in another clay jar, loaded ammunition clips for a rifle.

“I can compare chemical composition of the plaster from the emperor’s cottage,” Yao announced as he held up the saw with a victorious gleam, then popped off its blade and inserted it into one of his glassine envelopes. “If even a microscopic portion remains we’ll find it.”