Beautiful Ghosts (30 page)

Shan reached the bucket and scooped it up, taking a step toward the burning barrel as if to help.

“You!” the youth growled at Shan. “Old man! I’m not done!”

Shan feigned surprise, spun about, the bucket leaving his hand, propelled outward by a quick thrust, so it landed among the seated Tibetans, ten feet away, spilling its contents.

The trusty glared at Shan but said nothing. He was trying to gauge Shan. Shan was not Tibetan, did not wear the rough blue clothes of a trusty. But one of the prison guards at the barrel seemed to recognize Shan. He was at Shan’s side in an instant, and just as quickly slammed the butt of his rifle into the back of Shan’s knee.

Shan collapsed, and found his hands covering his neck, an instinct he had acquired during his years in the gulag.

But no blow came. The guard retreated. The Han trusty continued his strange dance, swirling his streamer, kicking dirt at Shan, then with a final flourish deposited the two prayers into the fire. When Shan looked up he was staring into the moist eyes of a Tibetan woman, who clutched her beads with trembling fingers.

“In some parts of China,” he said quietly, in Tibetan, “people burn prayers as a way of delivering them to the deities.” The woman nodded her head and offered a sad smile. He saw she had retrieved one of the fallen prayer rolls and held it tightly in her other hand. Near his fingers lay another. He pushed it under her leg, out of sight of the guard who was trying to collect the contents of the spilled bucket. The soldier returned no more than ten of the old prayers to the bucket, then straightened, cursing, and emptied the bucket into the flames.

“Lha gyal lo,” a hoarse voice called out from the crowd.

“Bzzzz,” the young trustee offered in reply, flapping his arms like wings as he mocked the Tibetans. “Bzzz. Bzzzzzzz.”

The sound of a heavy door opening and shutting at the far end of the main building interrupted the performance. The guards and trusties fell instantly silent as a slender red-haired figure appeared. Elizabeth McDowell, clad in tee shirt and blue jeans, appeared from the shadows with a bucket and a dipper, moving toward the Tibetans in the courtyard. The angry young trusty seemed to forget what he was doing and just stared at the British woman. Her eyes were swollen, her gaze lowered to the ground. No one moved, no one spoke as she left the water bucket with the Tibetans and stepped back inside.

As she did so Shan saw Yao standing by the main door, arms akimbo, glaring at him. Shan started back across the yard.

Inside, Ming was at the table, interviewing an old man. A soldier was videotaping the interview. The old man was shaking. His words came out in sobs. “There are no treasures left. There are no deities left.” He scrubbed his eye with a trembling hand. “The age of deities is past.”

The wave of emotion that swept through Shan was so powerful he felt nauseous. Hand on his belly, he stepped back out of the room.

No one stopped him when he stepped through the gate out of the compound past the vehicles parked along the wall. The soldier who had picked up Yao and Shan on the road, Tan’s sergeant, was sitting against the rear wheel of his truck, asleep. Shan walked a hundred yards down the dry, dusty road to the edge of the woods and settled against the trunk of a hemlock facing the far side of the valley. He could see the steep rugged slopes, miles away, that stepped upward toward Zhoka. Gendun was there somewhere, and Corbett, and Lokesh, all in danger because of thefts in Beijing and America. He stared at the ground in front of him, trying to calm himself, trying to forget for a moment the torment on the faces of the Tibetans Ming had detained.

Shan found his hands driving his fingers into the soil on either side of him, as if something inside was struggling to hold on. He kept them in the soil and closed his eyes again. After what seemed a long time, he caught a whiff of ginger, a passing scent from some door that had come ajar in his memory. With a sad smile he cupped his hands and lifted them, depositing each handful of sandy soil in front of him. Leveling the two small piles he drew with his finger, without thinking, letting his unconscious direct his hand as his father had shown him, as a meditation technique. After a moment he saw that on the first little platform of soil he had drawn a figure like an inverted
Y
inside a large
U,
with a long tail. On the second he had drawn a more complex figure, which he absently traced again with one finger.

“What do they mean?” a quiet voice asked.

He looked up into the green eyes of Elizabeth McDowell. “Nothing,” Shan said, and moved to erase them.

“Please don’t,” she said, and knelt beside him. She had been crying. “They’re old ideograms. What do they say?”

“My father used to use them, like poems,” Shan said after a moment, pointing to the inverted
Y,
“This is the sign for human, and this”—he outlined the
U
shape, “means a pit. A human falling into a pit. Together they mean misfortune. Disaster.” He let the words sink in a moment. “I know Lodi was your cousin. I am sorry. He was also a criminal.”

“Not much of one,” McDowell said. “He had too big a heart. Like a Robin Hood.” She looked up. “I’m sorry. Robin Hood was—”

“He stole from the rich to give to the poor. And you must have helped him,” he added.

She offered a melancholy smile. “I’m just a consultant. What is the other one?”

Shan erased it and drew again, starting with a flat line with a short perpendicular bar in the middle, small marks like apostrophes on either side of the bar. “This is a roof, keeping out the wind and rain.” He drew a rectangle below the marks. “A window under the roof.” He added a line through the window. “A pole,” he explained, then drew a loose waving shape from the pole. “A banner. It is a banner that flies always, no matter what the weather. Together they mean Absolute.”

The British woman stared at the figure soberly.

“What people from the outside never understand about the traditional Tibetans, like those in the deep mountains,” Shan said, “is that they deal only in absolute terms. There is no in between, there is no maybe, there is no borrowing, there is no tomorrow. There are only the true things, and the need to devote everything to those things. Nothing else matters. Not political power. Not money. Not electric blow-dryers.”

McDowell seemed to think Shan was criticizing her. She leaned backward, her sorrow seeming to deepen. “I never thought Ming would do this, would bring in these people, or raid their altars. I was at the clinic. I would have tried to stop it if I had known. He just wanted to find some old shrines, that’s all. He wants to know about some symbols of the death deities. He’s … he’s obsessive.”

“He’s ripping the prayers out of sacred figures,” Shan said woodenly. “And you call it obsessive.”

McDowell pressed her palm onto the second ideogram and pushed it, holding it there as she looked up at Shan. “Just let him finish and leave. No one wants the Tibetans to get hurt.”

“Did Ming have your cousin killed?”

She stared him, not with surprise but with sadness. “Of course not. We were all friends.”

“You were partners,” Shan suggested.

McDowell shrugged. “People in the archaeology and art business often engage in a little trade, to help pay the bills. Ming and I know the markets, Lodi could supply original pieces of art.”

“And the men in the mountains, they were your partners, too? The short Chinese and the Mongolian.”

“No.” The pain returned to McDowell’s eyes. “The big one is called Khan Mo, the other Lu Chou Fin. They work for the highest bidder. They will do anything for the highest bidder. Ming introduced them to us, but they are not working with Ming.”

Shan studied her face, which was wracked with worry. “They are competing,” he ventured, “looking for what Ming is looking for, trying to get it before he does.”

“I never would have thought so.”

“Until Lodi was killed.”

McDowell nodded, then traced her own finger over the ideogram for misfortune.

“Why does Ming care about a prince who died two hundred years ago?” Shan asked.

“Because he is so interested in power and gold. But he’s no murderer,” McDowell said. She suddenly stood, turning away.

“He’s just a godkiller,” Shan said to her back. The words stopped the woman, but she did not turn, and after a moment moved on toward the compound.

*   *   *

When he reached the trucks on his return to the compound the sergeant was awake, sitting on the hood of his truck, smoking a cigarette. He grimaced when Shan approached but did not move away.

“You’re in and out of government center,” Shan said. “Have you seen the old man who was begging? His name was Surya.”

The soldier slowly exhaled a plume of smoke. “The killer monk?” he asked with a mocking grin. “Colonel Tan took care of him.”

Shan felt his breath catch. “Took care of him?”

“Kicked him off the square. No more begging.” As the sergeant inhaled the cigarette he studied Shan with amusement. “Had no job,” he continued as smoke drifted out of his nostrils and mouth. “People were coming to watch him, as if begging was something to be admired. The colonel had one of his officers make a little speech in the square, saying it was a form of hooliganism.”

“Where was he taken?”

“The colonel told him to go get a job in a factory, like good Tibetans do. He had him dropped off on the road to Lhasa, five miles east of town. But one of my men said he saw him back in town sitting with the shit dippers. If that Ming sweeps for old ones again he’ll be picked up.” He turned his head languidly toward the compound gate as a truck roared out. Its door was marked 404th People’s Construction Brigade, its rear bay crowded with Tibetans.

“Trustees stay here,” the sergeant said. “Locked in the stable after the meal.”

Shan stared at the man in confusion. “Trusties?”

“He’s a wild one. They cautioned us when they left him here, said he attacked a guard with a shovel last week. You saved him from a discipline squad.”

“Saved who?”

The soldier shook his head and sighed, as though astounded by Shan’s stupidity. “Your son, you fool.” He gestured with a thumb over his shoulder, toward the courtyard.

Shan took a step backward, his heart suddenly racing, then ran through the gate.

The men in blue clothes were all in the open front shed opposite the main building, eating handfuls of steamed rice that had been brought to them in a bucket. A guard watched them from a stool by the wall. Shan slowed, looking for the smallest of the figures, trying to find the battered, frightened teenager among them, the one with a scar on his chin from falling on an icy street when he was a boy.

“Shan Ko!” a rough voice boomed behind him. The sergeant had followed Shan.

No one moved in the shed.

The sergeant advanced, hand on his truncheon. “Tiger Ko!” He shouted.

One of the old trusties was shoved aside and a figure emerged from the shadows. But it wasn’t his son, it was the surly prisoner who had taunted the Tibetans.

The sergeant pulled the prisoner by his sleeve, into the light of the yard. “Meet your daddy,” he said with immense amusement in his voice. The guard on the stool laughed.

“This old thing?” the youth snapped. “Bullshit. My father is a leader of a powerful gang.” He turned slightly, as if speaking for the benefit of the other prisoners. “He eats soldiers for breakfast.”

The sergeant turned to Shan, grinning widely. The soldier on the stool rose and took a step forward, as if expecting still greater entertainment.

Shan became small and cold inside. There was a flicker of a shadow on the prisoner’s chin. A small scar where he had fallen on the ice. Shan stood, paralyzed, barely hearing the laughter now, feeling only the baleful glare of the young prisoner.

“Cao ni ma!”
the youth spat at the sergeant, and disappeared back into the shadows. Fuck your mother.

Clutching his belly, Shan stumbled back toward the main building, finding and staying in the shadow of the entry hall, calming himself, gradually becoming aware of a loud voice coming from the main chamber.

Inside, Ming was presiding over a dinner meeting with his team of well-scrubbed assistants. Heaping bowls of fried rice, chicken and vegetables, fried pork, and several other dishes lay at the far end of the table. Ming’s assistants sat eating around the table, watching Ming, who stood in a corner, writing on the large easel. Yao sat near the door, balancing a plate of food on his lap. The elderly Tibetans who had been in the room were gone, the only evidence of their having been there a stack of four videotapes on a chair by the door.

“A breakthrough!” Ming was proclaiming as Shan stepped into the chamber. The museum director proceeded to explain how the old altar messages had provided vital clues that would lead them to the criminals they had sought for so long. He was going to telephone Beijing with the good news, and turned the discussion over to the earnest young Han woman Shan had seen extracting the prayers outside.

Yao gestured Shan toward the food but Shan had no appetite. He sat in a chair by the stacked tapes as the group applauded Ming, who disappeared through a rear door. The woman began to explain the results of what she called their excavation of reactionary messages. Based on the repetition of names in the artifacts, the matrix devised by Ming had identified half a dozen primary sites as candidates for illegal hordes of state assets hidden by the monk class who had formerly ruled the people because, as everyone now understood, the monks always kept the wealth of the people for themselves. The messages had pointed to places called Bear Cave, Cave of Light, Miracle Cave, and Lama Throne Cave, each now identified with caves in the mountains south and east of Lhadrung. The messages gave no indication of the exact locations, but did refer to geologic features such as peaks shaped like spires which, with the help of the People’s Liberation Army, surely would be found, the woman assured her audience.

Shan rose and quietly slipped back outside, pausing to gaze with a cold, painful emptiness toward the trustees, then walking back out of the gate and into the trees. After fifty paces he turned, confirming no one followed, then sat, trying to understand the emptiness his son’s appearance had caused. Not finding understanding, he instead pushed it back inside, reminding himself the Tibetans in the mountains still needed him. He pulled a videotape from his shirt. It had not been difficult to lift the top tape from the pile as everyone’s eyes had rested on the woman. He smashed the tape against a rock until its case broke away in splinters, then he pulled some of the exposed tape out, breaking it from its spool. With a small flat rock he scraped a shallow hole in the soil and buried the remains of the video.