Beautiful Ghosts (20 page)

A sudden moan broke the silence. Shan darted to where he had last seen Corbett. The American was sitting on a rock, his face drained of color. He held up a warning hand as Shan approached.

“This isn’t what I do,” Corbett said in a small, tight voice. “What is this place?” he asked for the second time that day, toward the soil beneath his feet.

Yao darted past Corbett, around the ruins of a high stone wall beyond the American. Shan found him a moment later, staring at a macabre display in the center of what appeared to once have been a small courtyard. On a makeshift plank table were bones. Nearly twenty skulls, yellow with age, were carefully lined up in the center of the table, seeming to return their stares from eyeless sockets. Arrayed before the skulls were smaller bones. A fully articulated hand. Half a dozen femurs. At either end of the table was a small brazier, for burning the fragrant smoke that attracted deities.

Yao stared, transfixed, as Shan circled the display.

“Like a massacre,” a deep voice said. Shan looked up to see Corbett standing beside Yao, his hand on his belly. “It must have been a massacre,” the American said in a tight voice. “We’ll need a forensics team.”

Yao’s eyes began to turn toward Shan, then his gaze dropped and he pulled out his pad of paper. “No one else is needed,” he said in a voice that was nearly a whisper. “This is not our concern.”

But Shan did not believe it. Someone had been excavating through the debris that had filled the deep stairwell. Above the stairs may have been a chapel, collapsed into the stairs that horrible day nearly fifty years before, a place where monks might have gathered as the end drew near. Perhaps it had not been looters but Tibetans, finally paying homage to the dead.

As Shan leaned over the rock table, Corbett took a step forward.

“There are curses,” Yao said, pointing to a line of script that ran along the edge of the thick plank at the side of the table. “The kind of people who do this leave curses for those who try to interfere.”

Shan looked back at the writing. It was recent, and had been made in chalk or with a piece of plaster. He struggled to make sense of the Tibetan letters. After studying the line of text he realized he could read the words, but could not make sense of their combination. He stared at it, reading it again and again. “It is not a curse,” he said at last. “It says…”

“Says what?” Corbett asked, staring at the bones.

Shan had not realized he had stopped speaking to look back over the ruins with a new sense of wonder. “The words are these,” he said, and pointed to them as he read. “Not time but beauty has claimed us.”

He reverently placed his fingers along the side of the first of the yellowed skulls, as though resting his hand on the cheek of an old loved one. When he looked up Yao was staring at him with a strange defiance in his eyes.

“It only proves that it’s Tibetans at work here,” Yao said, finding his investigator’s voice again. He lifted one of the femurs from the table. “You said you saw such a bone below,” he observed to Shan. “Tibetans use them, don’t they, comrade,” he asked, as if he were trying to force Shan into a confession.

“They make trumpets out of them,” Shan confirmed.

“And they gild them with silver,” Yao added, “perhaps to sell them through Lodi’s craft store in Lhadrung, or overseas, as antiques. If Lodi and his accomplices are so fond of collecting bones,” Yao said from the shadows, “do you suppose they are particular in how they obtain them?” He walked away without awaiting a reply, reaching into his pack. As he disappeared around the ruined wall Shan saw a small black radio in his hand.

Corbett still stared at the skulls.

“Did you understand what happened yesterday when you almost died?” Shan asked. “I don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the old writing on the wall. It had nothing to do with William Lodi, nothing to do with your case. But you took off your boots and stepped into the frigid water and nearly died. Because you had to see old Tibetan words on a wall.”

Shan’s words seemed to cause the American pain. He looked into his hands a moment, then stood and circled the table of bones. “I thought one of these could have been him, the one who died below. But none of these died recently, did they?” he asked after a moment.

“No.”

“So who’s been—? There must be graverobbers digging here.”

“There are no graves in this part of Tibet.”

The American gave a peeved frown. “Right. No one dies here.”

Shan found his gaze drifting back to the skulls. “What do you know of Tibetan history, Mr. Corbett?”

The American said nothing.

“What did the inspector tell you about this place?”

“A school of some kind, they said. An old art school that closed a long time ago. Looks like a century or more. Yao and Tan put it on their list of places outlaws might use.”

“It was a monastery. A gompa. The army and the Red Guard destroyed nearly every gompa in Tibet, thousands of them. Places like this, too remote for the infantry, were bombed from the air. I’ve heard eyewitness accounts about places like this. A lot of monks had never seen planes before. They waved at them as they began their bombing runs because they thought they were some kind of sky deity.”

The American’s gaze shifted from Shan to the skulls and back to Shan. He appeared troubled, then just confused. “Look, the history here has nothing to do with me. It’s not my land, not my country. I’ll be here a couple weeks, then I’ll be going home, never to come back.” His gaze drifted slowly back toward the skulls. “They just bombed them?” he asked after a long silence. “Monks?”

A shiver ran down Shan’s spine and he turned to see Yao in the ruined gateway, glaring at him. “Even in your country, Mr. Corbett, I suspect criminals have their own peculiar views about their society and its history.”

Corbett nodded slowly. “Still,” he said pensively, rising and walking to the table. “A funny thing about these skulls. I spent a year in a forensics lab.” He pointed to the seams joining the plates of the skulls. “They all died young. Not one of these was older than forty, I’d wager.” He shrugged at Yao then stepped past him out of the courtyard.

Yao’s face was flushed. His eyes were like two blades stabbing at Shan. “I think Colonel Tan was wrong,” the inspector growled. “You really are stupid after all. Spreading reactionary views hurts us all, most of all you. I’m not sure why you were released from prison. It was on Tan’s order, that’s all I know. But Tan’s orders can be countermanded.”

Shan stared at him impassively. He warned himself again not to be fooled by Yao’s disheveled, undisciplined appearance. The man was a top official, doubtlessly a high-ranking party member, and he could easily summon the cold calculation, the casual cruelty that were usually bred into such men. “If you want to understand the people of these hills,” he said after a moment, “you have to understand what you see on this rock, you have to understand what they have experienced in the past fifty years.”

“No,” Yao shot back. “Tibetans commit crimes out of fear, out of greed, out of passion, just like anyone else. It’s always the same. In the end it is because the criminal mind fails to embrace the socialist imperative.”

Shan did not break away from his intense stare. “You must be wildly successful in Beijing, Inspector Yao.”

Yao’s jaw clenched and unclenched several times, then he shrugged and raised the radio. “Helicopter patrols report six or seven Tibetans in the mountains south of here. A man and a child, another group of three or four with sheep. We’ll pick them up, let them make their contribution. You’ve changed my mind, Shan. I very much want to know what happened to the man who died here, where his bones wound up. Right now I can think of nothing more important.”

A man and child. The patrols had seen Lokesh with Dawa.

“You can’t,” Shan blurted out.

“A squad has already been dispatched.”

“Send more helicopters into those mountains and every Tibetan for miles will scatter,” Shan warned, trying to control his own sudden anger. “They will run so deep into the ground they won’t be seen for days, weeks even.” He looked back at the skulls for a long moment. He sensed he was betraying someone, but not certain whom. “I know where the dead go to,” he said in a low, resigned voice. “I know who can tell us about bones. Call off the soldiers and I’ll take you to the dead.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

“She was floating face up, her eyes looking right at me,” Corbett said in a brittle voice. The American was explaining how, incredibly, he had encountered the body of the murdered governess. They had paused at a stream in their steady ascent toward the southern peaks. “Must have been a hundred people there, looking over the rail, crying out, fainting, shouting for the crew. But she was looking at me.” He had turned his gaze from the distant mountains back toward Shan and Yao, with an awkward, forced grin. “I know a medical examiner who says sometimes the dead can be like that, their eyes looking nowhere and everywhere, following you like some zombie Mona Lisa.”

“Mona Lisa?” Shan asked. He squatted to scoop water from the stream.

Corbett shrugged. “A painting. I went out with the harbor patrol to recover her. I helped pull away the seaweed that was wrapped around her arms and legs.” He looked into his hands. “Twenty-three years old. She was wearing earrings shaped like little silver turtles. Supposed to bring long life, turtles, isn’t that what Chinese say?”

“How do you know about Chinese things?” Shan asked after a moment, cupping the water in his hand for a drink, then sluicing another palmful over his head.

“I started as a policeman in San Francisco. When I made detective I worked Chinatown for seven years.”

As they started up the trail again, the American’s strangely despairing mood vanished, and he walked beside Shan, almost lighthearted, asking him for words in Tibetan, the names of flowers, more than once exclaiming about the spectacle of the snowclad Himalayas in the far southwest, even picking up a stone that lay by the trail, carved with figures nearly obscured by lichen. “It’s a prayer, isn’t it?”

“A
mani
stone,” Shan explained. “Pilgrims buy them, or make them, and leave them behind, to bless others, to gain merit. This one could be centuries old.”

Corbett stopped, insisted that Shan teach him how to correctly recite the prayer, the mani mantra on the stone, then repeated it as he made a little mound of gravel and laid the stone upon it. “I pray to find William Lodi,” he said as he rose. “Double murderer.”

“It’s unsettling work, to be looking for bodies in water,” Shan said when they paused again a quarter hour later.

“I wasn’t,” Corbett said. “She found me. I was just on the ferry crossing the bay. I didn’t even know she was missing. I had been assigned to the Dolan theft, but no one had mentioned her. There had been a back-page story about a missing college girl I hadn’t even read. But suddenly she was there in front of me, the Dolan governess whom nobody had seen since the night of the theft. A few hours later I made the connection. An eyewitness caught and disposed of by Lodi before he went out and celebrated in those bars.”

“So you’re here because of the girl?” Shan asked.

Corbett seemed to resent the question. “I told you. I was assigned to the case. I could speak Chinese. Someone had to follow Lodi.” The American clenched his jaw and continued up the trail. He was finished talking.

They passed through some of the steepest, most treacherous land Shan had ever seen, walking in a brooding silence most of the way, Yao clutching his radio like a weapon. Half an hour after passing the trail intersection where Lokesh, Dawa, and Liya had camped, they entered a chasm with nearly vertical two-hundred-foot walls. When at last they exited the darkness of the chasm, Corbett gasped and stepped back into the shadows as if frightened. The slope they had emerged onto was jammed with sculptures—eerie, twisted shapes of stone that seemed to have been placed to warn travelers from the southern route. They were not human forms, but hulking shapes that suggested the vague, dark creatures of nightmares.

“It was just the wind,” Shan said uncertainly. “It’s just how the soft rock was carved by wind.” He found himself searching for signs of Lokesh and Dawa. It was the kind of place his old friend would linger for hours, wandering among the distorted columns with awe on his face, touching the stones, because Lokesh would be convinced it could not be the wind. Shan found himself stepping to the first of the columns, a ten-foot-high formation that looked like a human contorted in pain. In dimmer light they would look like giant skeletons and grotesque, misshapen animals. If this was the way the local deities shaped the land, how had they shaped its people?

Movement in the shadows caught his eye, and for a moment he thought Lokesh was there after all. But the man who stood with his hand on one of the skeleton columns, gazing at it with intense curiosity, was Yao. Shan watched the inspector for a moment, then hurried on, following the winding trail through the columns, Corbett close behind.

When they reached the end they paused, waiting for Yao.

“Is it true, Agent Corbett, that in America justice is simply a matter of facts?”

“Of course. The evidence tells it all.”

“Then you must be very careful here,” Shan warned in a low voice. “You are in a world that is not constructed of facts.”

“I don’t give a damn about Beijing politics. And I know a fact when I see it.”

“I’m not speaking of politics now,” Shan said, and gestured toward the nearest column of rock. “What do you see there?”

“Crumbling sandstone.”

“Many Tibetans would not see stone at all, but the work of powerful gods. Others would consider them perfect symbols for meditating on the frailness of the world. Many would travel a hundred miles to pay homage here.”

The American frowned and looked expectantly toward Yao, as if hoping for rescue.

“Two years ago an old man was stopped on a road near Lhasa with a golden statue. He had sold everything he owned to buy the statue, so he could leave it at a holy mountain to gain merit for the soul of his dead wife. He was certain she had died because he had cut down the prayer flags that always flew over their house to use the rope to tether their last two sheep. He was arrested because he told someone he had killed his wife. Someone else reported that he had given a man money for the death of his wife. It was the money given to the goldsmith but no one bothered to explain. He was accused of having stolen the statue and did not deny it, because the house he had sold to buy it had belonged to his wife.”