Beautiful Ghosts (19 page)

Shan simply stared and nodded. He had been studying the tracks as Yao worked. The soft imprints had been there before the final set of boot tracks, as if a solitary Tibetan had destroyed the supplies. Surya wore soft-soled boots.

Ten minutes later they found Corbett bent over a flat rock, holding a pair of long tweezers over a small piece of paper on which he had assembled the fruits of his fastidious search. Three cigarette butts, without filters. Another of the small cigar butts with the sweet tobacco. Four single-edged razor blades that had been shoved into a crack. A piece of wide adhesive tape, folded, stuck to itself. Several chips of what looked like bone. Fragments of a dark blue stone that might have been lapis lazuli, one of the stones favored in Tibetan artwork. More of Surya’s prayer beads, over fifty. And tiny grey specks Shan could not recognize.

“Silver,” Corbett explained. “Flecks of silver.” He raised the largest in the tweezers and held one of the lamps close to it.

“For what?” Yao asked.

“Maybe there was other artwork here,” the American suggested. “Something with silver and jewels that had to be pried loose perhaps.” He lowered the flake, picked up another that had a small kernel shape. “This one is different. I spent a few years in a forensics lab. A silver filling from a tooth.”

“The Tibetans that live in these hills,” Shan observed quietly, “do not have teeth filled with silver. If a tooth goes bad it gets pulled.”

“The blood drops start there,” Corbett said, aiming his beam at the cell where Shan had found the manuscript leaf. “Where the first attack was made, where the wound was opened. He was bleeding severely by the time he got inside the door. Stepped in his own blood, I think.” The American held the light on a point in the gruesome trail Shan had missed, where the toes of a boot had stepped over the blood. The sole of the boot made a waffle pattern, similar to those he and Yao had seen in the chamber below. Corbett continued to trace the trail with his light. “He fell, after trying to hold on a moment.” Corbett lit the stone wall on the side of the doorway. There was a print, a red smear that showed part of a palm and fingertips. The spot of light followed the tracks on the other side of the pool Shan had seen before, the smudged prints of sandals. “Someone else was there while this one lay dying. Or just after.”

“Surya,” Shan whispered.

“This is not the crime we are investigating,” Yao said with warning in his voice.

A strange stillness fell over the chamber as Corbett kept the light on the prints, showing how Surya had gone to the corner, then to stand in front of the nine-headed deity, below which the beads had collected in the crack in the floor. Corbett, Shan sensed, understood Surya had retreated to the corner in horror, then stood in front of the deity and broken the cord of his prayer beads.

“There is no partial truth,” Shan heard himself say in a voice that was somehow sad. “There is only the whole truth.” He looked up to see both men staring at him.

“What do you mean?” Yao demanded.

“I mean,” Shan said with a certainty that seemed to well up from some unknown place within him, “you will never understand what happened in Seattle and Beijing without understanding what happened here, in this room, without seeing what that deity witnessed.” He looked up at the powerful image on the wall above the pool of blood.

He expected anger, or at least ridicule from his companions. But they said nothing, only stared at the deity with the nine heads. Had it been blinded because it had seen what had happened?

“There’s another thing,” Corbett said, and aimed his light on the lower wall just outside the chamber. “He tried to leave a message.” The American pointed to the oval with the circle and square inside. “Someone drew that and wrote a word.” He pointed to what Shan had thought was another smear of blood above the drawing, perhaps where the dying man had supported himself as he drew. But in Corbett’s light figures glowed through the smear.

“What glows is blood,” Corbett said. “Over it is pigment, nearly the color of fresh blood.” He switched off the purple light and the letters disappeared. “Someone wrote in blood, someone else covered it with paint, the same color that was used up at the tower to cover the writing.” He switched back on his light. “What does it say?”

“Nyen Puk. It means Cave of the Mountain God,” Shan said. “It must not be complete. Sometimes the dying will write one last prayer.” Surya had desperately wanted to obliterate any reference to the Mountain God, but the dead man used his last breath, his last blood, to tell about it.

“You mean the dead man was Tibetan,” Corbett said.

Shan’s hands closed around the chip in his pocket. “I don’t know,” he said and pulled the chip out. “This was in the pool of blood. Maybe it was his.” It was as if the dead man were Tibetan, but not Tibetan.

Corbett’s eyes lit with excitement. “Not the dead man’s!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t you—” He didn’t finish the question, just snatched the chip and studied it. “He was here, this proves it.” He tossed the chip to Yao, who frowned at it without examining it further. “The bastard killed again,” he said in a tone that was almost hopeful. “He tossed it at the dying man, like a taunt, an act of contempt.”

The American looked up at Shan. “We searched Lodi’s recent travel history. Before Seattle he had flown in from London but spent three days in Nevada. Reno.”

Corbett may as well have said he had proof the man came from a bayal, one of the mythical hidden lands. It seemed impossible, as if somehow life in two alternate universes had briefly overlapped in the dim chamber, leaving a dead man, the nine-headed deity, and a plastic gambling chip inside a forgotten earth taming temple of ancient Tibet.

“Surya came to the surface saying he killed here,” Shan said. “I was here minutes later. He could not have carried out the body without being covered in blood, couldn’t have dragged him away without leaving a trail of blood. When I came down minutes later, the body was gone.”

“Because Lodi was still here,” Corbett said. “Hiding, waiting to destroy the evidence of what he did.”

“The thieves store supplies here,” Yao reminded Shan, and explained to Corbett what they had found. “Your old monk must have seen him, could have been frightened and confused about what he saw. He ran to the surface.”

“But why would Lodi steal a fresco already in Tibet?” Shan asked.

The American sighed, staring into the darkness again. “What the hell is this place?” he asked in a voice that was suddenly weary. It seemed he was speaking to something in the shadows.

They stepped into the corridor that led to the stairs, studying its walls this time. The space somehow felt incomplete to Shan. There was no gonkang chapel, only a place to prepare for the gonkang, a place to pray and compose one’s self for meeting the fierce protector deities. He slowly walked twelve feet to the end of the corridor. The rock wall that formed the end of the passage, consisting of a solid slab with smaller stones along its edges, was canted slightly inward at the top. The mani mantra was painted on the smooth stone, in big red letters. Shan played the beam of light slowly over the mantra, studying the letters. In places the paint was flaking away. He touched the edge of the paint and another piece fell away. It had been applied with a wide brush, in thick, bold strokes, less refined than the other writing he had seen. He played the beam along the corners of the back wall, running his fingers along the cracks in the loose stone rubble that had fallen in the corner. There was an odd sense of motion. Air. He aligned his fingertips along one of the cracks. The flow was almost imperceptible, but air was moving out of the crack. He aimed the light beam slowly upward, following as it covered the stone above his reach, settling on a smudge of color over ten feet above the floor, where the ceiling met the rear and left walls.

“What is it?” a voice snapped behind him. Yao shined his own light into the corner.

“Nothing,” Shan said uncertainly. “Something on the rock. Probably lichen.”

“Lichen doesn’t grow where there is no light,” a deep voice said behind them. Corbett approached, shining his own lamp toward the ceiling before stepping closer to the rear wall. He bent with his light over the writing. “This paint is different from all the rest. Not the old stuff. It’s like cheap house paint.” He picked up one of the chips of paint and pulled on both ends. It stretched.

Shan gazed back at the smudge of color at the edge of the ceiling.

“I’m the heaviest,” Corbett declared. “Which of you two wants to climb?”

A moment later the American bent, and Shan climbed onto his back. Then, with Yao supporting him, he put his feet on Corbett’s shoulders. The American slowly straightened, Shan leaning on the wall for support. As the American reached his full height Shan’s head was less than an arm’s length away from the top corner.

“What is it?” Corbett asked with a groan.

“Someone is looking,” Shan said slowly. An eye was painted on a fragment of plaster, partially obscured behind the broken wall. He recognized the eye. It was one of the symbols used in murals and thangkas, and probably had been part of a larger mural that covered most of the side wall. The back wall wasn’t meant to be a wall. It was a slab that had collapsed from the ceiling, probably during the bombing of the gompa, but someone had carefully removed the remains of the painting, leaving only the eye hidden in the shadows. He put a hand on the rocks at the corner of the walls, aiming his light downward, quickly discovering that the rocks had not fallen randomly but had been carefully mortared in place. Someone had deliberately hidden part of the old ruins.

As Shan hopped off the American’s back he realized the American had noticed. Corbett shone a light along the sides to examine the cleverly concealed mortar.

“What’s back there?” Yao demanded.

Shan studied the two men uncertainly, then felt his hand close around the registration number Yao had given him. He asked Yao for a sheet of paper and sketched two maps. First, on the left side, he drew the gorge and the surface ruins as he recalled them, marking the point where the water poured out of the cliff face. Then he turned the paper over and drew on the left side the broad stairway corridor, the fresco chamber and the tunnel leading to the waterfall inside the mountain. He turned back to the top side and folded the paper in half so that the surface drawing covered the sketch of the underground complex.

“Very pretty,” Corbett said. “What are you trying to prove?”

Shan pointed on the diagram to the pattern of buildings surrounding the stairs, flanked at the entrance by pedestals for prayer wheels, then to the lines he had drawn on the opposite side of the surface compound. “It was constructed to be symmetrical. The surface was almost obliterated. But if you climb the slopes above I think you could see an identical pattern of rock walls and prayer wheel pedestals on the other side. They line up, two hundred yards apart.”

“Symmetrical,” Yao repeated, uncertainly.

Shan nodded. “The entire compound was carefully laid out by artists and lamas.” He lined up the sketches again. “The walls on the other side line up with the stairway here.”

“Another stairway,” Corbett said.

“Two stairs, at each end of a broad subterranean corridor. Which means,” Shan said, “we haven’t seen the main underground complex.”

They climbed to the surface, Shan leading them slowly, watching for signs of Gendun. Five minutes later they stood on the opposite side of the gompa, gazing at the ruins of two rock walls, in a perfect line with those flanking the stairs to the west. At the end of each wall was a pedestal for statuary. Large statues, particularly those carved of stone, were not common in Tibetan monasteries, but in this, like so many other points, Zhoka seemed an exception. On the right another pedestal held a life-sized foot in a sandal, the only remains of its statue. On the left was a figure in a monk’s robe sitting in the lotus position. It had been decapitated. Between the walls was a tangle of loose rock, shards and slabs that completely filled the stairway, overgrown with lichen and a few small struggling shrubs. A building above the stairs had collapsed into them.

Corbett wandered along the north wall, then stopped fifty feet away and called for them. He pointed downward as Shan reached his side, toward a shadow in the rubble, a shallow hole five feet across and seemingly five feet deep. But Corbett picked up a pebble and dropped it into the hole. It bounced upward. It wasn’t a shallow hole. It was a shaft covered by a canvas expertly painted in browns and greys to blend with the rocks. Corbett leaned over and pulled away a corner of the cover. The shaft continued downward for another twenty feet, a makeshift ladder leaning on one side. Someone had been excavating a small passage through the rock debris.

“So someone else knows about your underground complex,” Corbett muttered and turned to survey the grounds again.

“Why now?” Yao asked. “All these years, and suddenly someone starts digging.”

Why now indeed, Shan thought. Could it have been the monks? Could it somehow be part of Gendun’s plan to secretly revive the gompa?

Corbett bent and picked up a cigarette butt, extended it for them to see. It was recent, like the ones he had collected earlier. Someone other than monks had been here.

“Lodi,” the American suggested. He pointed to the words on the filter. “He smokes American cigarettes. Same as I found near the pool of blood.” He smelled the tobacco. “Still fresh. A few days old at most.” Suddenly the American stiffened and leaned his head toward the south. “Do you hear that? Someone’s crying.”

Shan and Yao exchanged a glance. Shan heard nothing.

Corbett studied the harsh landscape in the south, then took several small hesitant steps in that direction. Shan and Yao began searching the ground for other evidence. They found several large squares of barren soil among the rocks, which probably had once been gardens. There were long shallow imprints in several, which could have been caused by the same boots that had marked the floor below, but the wind had eroded them, making it impossible to be certain. When Shan looked up, Corbett was gone. Yao was staring at the decapitated statue, wearing an oddly worried expression.