Beautiful Ghosts (32 page)

Shan and Yao were in the corridor thirty seconds later, moving into the shadows at the rear, where it reached the outer stone wall of the compound. An old plank door led outside. Shan put his hand on the latch and paused. There was a sound like a moan coming from another old door, locked with a small beam set in two metal brackets. Yao lifted the beam and cracked open the door. An acrid odor of ammonia and soap wafted out of the darkness inside. As Yao lowered his hand from the door it swung open, propelled by a limp arm that had apparently been braced against it. Blotches of fresh blood were on the hand that landed at their feet. Yao leapt back. Shan knelt, touching the hand. It was warm, had a strong pulse. He pushed the door against the corridor wall, letting the dim light inside. It was an old meditation cell, converted to a janitor’s closet, cleaning chemicals on its shelves, mops and buckets arranged against the walls. A Tibetan man had been dumped inside. He was sprawled atop a pile of musty rags, one leg over a bucket. His face was puffy and bruised, blood oozed from several small cuts on his face. Shan thought he must be unconscious, but after a moment the hand moved. It was missing two fingers.

“Tashi, it’s Shan,” he said as he bent over the injured man. The informer leaned forward, nodded, the effort bringing obvious pain to his eyes.

“Please no more!” Tashi cried.

“It’s me. I will not hurt you.” He lifted a rag and dabbed the blood on the informer’s face. “Who was it? What did he want to know?”

“That old man with you in the mountains,” Tashi said. “Lokesh. After you left we spoke about the old ways, about my life. He told me to tell my mother there were monks in the mountains.” Tashi pushed himself up against the wall.

“Was it Ming?”

“Now she won’t let me tell them anything about Zhoka.” Blood trickled down the side of his face.

“What is it you can’t tell him?” Shan asked.

“He asked about the Lord of the Dead, like he asks everyone. But I know nothing about that. Then he made everyone else leave the room and he asked about the Mountain Buddha. He said he could make me rich.”

“The Mountain Buddha?”

Tashi forced a smile and took the rag from Shan to wipe his face. “My mother told me about it. The golden Buddha of Zhoka, who lived in Nyen Puk.”

Nyen Puk. The cave of the mountain god, the words Lodi had written and Surya had covered. As Shan studied the informer Yao darted into one of the rooms along the hall, reappearing a moment later with a bottle of water which Tashi gulped down. The informer held onto the doorframe and stepped into the hall. “I have to get them to listen to me. They think I lie for the Chinese. I never lie, that’s how I stay alive. This isn’t the time. They have to bury it, hide it again. My mother, she rejoiced when she heard the eyes of the golden Buddha were open again.”

Tashi closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and cast a plaintive gaze at Shan. “In the mountains they think it will protect them. There’s an old lama who appeared at Zhoka. He says they will use it to liberate all the prisoners in the construction brigade. They understand nothing,” he said wearily. “But these people from Beijing, when they come worlds change. People dying, that means nothing to them. What that Ming wants most of all is to interrogate the dead.”

Without another word he rushed past Shan and Yao, pushed open the door, and disappeared into the night.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

“He made it sound like some sort of monster coming out of the hills,” Yao said as he drove toward town in the half light of dawn. “Mountain Buddha. What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Shan admitted. “I’ve never heard of it.” Surely he had not heard correctly, he kept telling himself, or surely Tashi for once had it wrong. No one could possibly think they could liberate the prisoners.

“Ming beats Tashi to find out about it, and when Tashi, Tan’s top informant, refuses to speak for the first time in his life,” Yao pointed out, “Ming decides he urgently needs to be back in the mountains.” He had been silent for most of the drive, withdrawn into the same brooding silence that had seized him the night before, after Tashi’s escape.

The inspector had led Shan into the room assigned to him as sleeping quarters, and silently written in his pad for half an hour before throwing a blanket and pillow onto the floor for Shan. The dilemma that troubled Yao, Shan knew, wasn’t how to make sense of his investigation but how to make sense of the politics. Yao had arrived in Lhadrung at the head of a criminal investigation in alliance with Ming. Now Ming had commandeered his resources, opened communication directly with senior authorities about the investigation, even obtained new authority on his own in Lhasa. Ming had seized the political initiative in the strange game they were playing.

Shan had tried to slip away in the middle of the night but Yao’s hand had closed around his arm as he had opened the door to the corridor, pulling him back inside.

“It isn’t going to end like this,” the inspector said. “Just because Ming may not be after the same thing anymore doesn’t mean anything. I will get what I came for.” He seemed to be arguing with himself.

“I have a teacher,” Shan said. “He says strong spirits have to be careful about the truth they seek, for that truth may come back to seek them.”

“What do you mean?”

Shan looked down the corridor of shadows. “When the stakes grow high enough, even the most senior investigators become expendable.”

Yao glared at him. “You think I’m scared?”

“I am frightened for you.”

The inspector’s eyes narrowed. “Sometimes I think you are nothing but a political officer. For the Tibetans.”

Shan stared into the shadows.

Yao released his arm. “I still need a guide.”

“I refuse.”

“Then I need a helper,” Yao countered.

“For what?”

“To catch an art thief.”

“Then you’re a fool. You’ll destroy yourself if you still think it’s only about art theft.”

Yao gazed down the darkened hallway. “To stop Ming,” he muttered.

Shan met Yao’s gaze and nodded. “I need a helper,” Shan said.

Yao’s eyes hardened. He gestured Shan inside the room and switched on the light. “A helper for what?” he asked, closing the door behind him. “To regain your son?”

The question silenced Shan for a moment. Yao and the others seemed to wield his son like some weapon, attacking when he least expected. “I will tell you exactly what I want when you tell me the same,” he said at last.

Yao gazed at Shan with an intense expression. “How will I know when what you seek begins to interfere with what I seek?”

“You won’t.”

“Will it? Will it interfere?”

“Almost certainly.”

When Yao finally nodded he seemed almost grateful. He stepped to his bed and hastily packed a canvas bag.

They had nearly reached the courtyard outside when Shan held up a hand. A quiet, irregular tapping sound was coming from the assembly hall. Yao cracked open the door. The earnest young woman with the short hair who had been assisting Ming sat at the table, working at a laptop computer, with no light but that from the screen. The woman’s head jerked up in alarm as she discovered the two men staring over her shoulder.

“Are you cleared for the Amban Project?” Yao asked sternly as she began to lower the screen.

“Of course,” she said defiantly and, as if to prove it, raised the screen again.

She was working on what appeared to be an essay, or article, complete with footnotes. Across the top of the page was the title P
OLITICAL
A
SSASSINATIONS IN
L
HADRUNG
C
OUNTY
.

“Director Ming’s discoveries are too important for us to wait for the return home,” the woman declared. “He wants a draft sent to Beijing this morning.”

“I wasn’t aware he had made his discoveries yet,” Shan said.

“If someone had been assassinated here,” Yao observed, “we would have known about it.”

“State secret,” the woman replied. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” she asked in a patronizing tone. “The way the local population has cleverly concealed the truth.”

“But no one has been assassinated,” Shan pointed out.

“The missing amban was killed by reactionaries right here in Lhadrung,” Ming’s assistant stated. “We are going to correct the history books.”

“The nephew of the Qian Long emperor?” Yao asked. “It’s been centuries.”

“It makes no difference. The people’s justice knows no bounds.” The woman frowned as she saw the skeptical expressions both Shan and Yao wore, as if deciding her audience was not sophisticated enough to understand. “This is vital work. The final copy will be circulated to the full team later this week,” she said and dismissed them with a wave of her hand.

Outside, they searched the army vehicles until they found a small utility truck with the keys in the ignition, then Yao climbed in behind the wheel. “I never asked where we are going,” Yao said.

“I’ll know when I smell it,” Shan explained.

Now, as they entered town, Shan rolled down his window. Five minutes later he directed Yao to park the truck two hundred feet down the road from a small complex of mudbrick buildings. As they approached the buildings, Yao began to slow, lagging behind Shan, his hand over his mouth and nose. The stench of human waste was almost overpowering.

“So far the main secrets of Tibet you have shared with me seem to be a charnel ground and this place,” the inspector observed. “No doubt next we’ll be tunneling into a garbage heap.” He waved Shan on.

Shan passed a line of battered bicycles, each with heavy wire racks mounted on either side of the rear wheel, then three sturdy wooden carts with a heavy
U
-shaped front handle, designed for two people to step inside and push. As he stepped into a shadow of the first building a woman appeared, a yoke on her shoulder, balancing two large clay pots. A brown crust extended down the side of each pot. A man in a coat that was so tattered it seemed about to disintegrate appeared behind the woman and headed for the row of bicycles. The sun was rising. After dawn large ceramic pots of night soil would be waiting behind houses and tenements all over town, to be transported to the fields as fertilizer, an occupation as old as China itself.

“I came to see Surya,” Shan said to the woman. “The old monk.”

The woman gave a bitter laugh. “We have no monks. Look in the mountains. Look in the prison.”

“I mean him no harm. I am a friend of his.”

The woman did not speak but reached into one of the carts and produced a long wooden ladle. She dipped it into one of the jars lined up behind the building and it came out dripping with a brown sludge. Shan took a step forward. The woman flung the contents of the ladle at him. As he stepped to the side the sludge landed where he had been standing. From behind him he heard Yao curse. Shan held his ground. Two more women appeared, each grabbing a ladle, each filling it with night soil. “Chinese!” one of them hissed, and flung another ladle of waste at him. Splatters hit his shoe.

“You want to give us shit, leave it on your doorstep,” one of the others barked. Shan glanced behind him. Yao had retreated to the truck. He heard a murmur of alarm among the Tibetans and turned to see them lowering the ladles. In the rising light they had recognized the military markings on the truck.

“Surya came down from the mountains,” he tried again. “He was asking for alms. Tell him it is Shan.”

The first woman disappeared around the corner, returning less than a minute later. “He says he knew a man who once knew Shan,” she announced in an uncertain voice.

Shan ventured forward a step. When no one reacted, he pushed past them into the yard of the little compound. Surya sat on the stone wall of what looked to be a central well. Three small children sat in front of him. Behind them half a dozen men and women, dressed in the soiled, tattered clothing of the gatherers, stood before what appeared to be an old stable. Shan glanced about the compound. Sleeping pallets had been pulled outside to air. A blackened kettle sat on a smouldering fire. The gatherers didn’t just work from the compound, he realized, they lived there, shunned, no doubt, by the rest of the town.

Surya seemed not to notice when Shan sat beside him. He was making a small doll out of dried rushes, tied with straw.

“Rinpoche,” Shan said, “we must go back. They need you. They are frightened for you.”

Surya absently looked up, not at Shan, but to his own side, then over his shoulder, as if to see whom Shan spoke to.

“Gendun. Lokesh,” Shan said. “They need your help. There are things that have to be understood at Zhoka.”

Surya’s eyes slowly found Shan’s. “I am sorry, comrade, you have mistaken me for someone else. Our fragrances sometimes confuse strangers.” The children laughed. Surya finished tying the doll and handed it to a young girl.

“You met Director Ming at the old stone tower. Did he ask about the death deity?”

“He met a young Chinese, a great abbot. No one can understand the great one’s ways,” Surya said. His voice had a strange absent quality to it. “The abbot makes beautiful paintings, holy paintings, with one finger, one word.”

A cold shudder passed down Shan’s spine. Surya was still speaking of his prior life in the third person. “Why is Zhoka so important to Ming?” he pressed. “Is he one of the thieves you feared?”

“The things that are important at Zhoka seem to be different, depending.”

“Depending on what?”

Surya lifted his head and grinned, exposing a row of crooked yellow teeth. “Whether you are Chinese or Tibetan,” he said and chuckled, the sound rasping over his dry throat. “Comrade,” he added, and laughed again.

Shan pressed his hand to his forehead in frustration. He was not speaking with Surya. The man in front of him was truly different, the way Lokesh had said people become different when struck by lightning. “If I don’t know the secrets how can I protect the lamas?”

“It is not secret. It just has no words. It cannot be explained between people, only between deities.” The words that rushed out of the old man’s mouth seemed not to belong to him this time. He looked deeply confused, almost shocked. He touched his tongue with a finger, and something in him seemed to sink, as if disheartened.