Beautiful Ghosts (54 page)

No one responded. Dolan kept glancing toward the open hole where Gen-dun spoke with the dead. “You will forget everything. Nothing here can be so important to you,” he said in an oddly plaintive tone. He reached into his pocket and produced a checkbook, began writing. “I am not an evil man, I am just a very busy man.” He tore off a check. “One hundred thousand dollars,” he announced, and dropped it at Shan’s feet. Shan did not look at it. Dolan wrote again. “Another hundred thousand,” he said, and dropped the second check onto Corbett’s lap. Corbett ignored it. “Dammit. You people have nothing to gain and everything to lose. This is just business.” He wrote a third time and dropped a check in front of Yao. “Made out to cash. Use it any way you want.”

Corbett slowly picked up the check on his lap. “Fine. I’ll help,” the FBI agent said. “But for a hundred thousand dollars I want you to say you killed the girl in Seattle.” He dropped the check into the fire. The action seemed to upset Dolan, who dropped to his knees and for a moment seemed about to reach into the coals to extract the smoldering check. “We’re alone,” continued Corbett. “No tape recorders. No witnesses who could be relied upon back home. Only us. You’ve already said our testimony will mean nothing. I just paid you a hundred thousand dollars. Just business.”

When Dolan looked up to return Corbett’s stare, his eyes seemed dull, almost confused. “I just want to get what’s mine and leave. I can make you rich,” he added in a hollow voice. “That’s all anybody wants.” As he spoke Lokesh rose and approached the brazier. His proximity seemed to disturb Dolan, who looked at Khan, standing fifty feet away with the rifle.

“We are finishing that cairn,” Lokesh said to Dolan, “to honor the abbot and that British monk. Each of us will put on one more stone and offer a prayer.”

They all stood. Dolan said nothing as they began to move toward the cairn, did not react when Ko slipped out of the darkness to pick up the two remaining checks where they had fallen.

Lokesh had found a prayer scarf somewhere, probably one of those that sometimes blew around the rubble, and laid a corner under the top of the stones. No one spoke as they laid on the stones, Ko lifting a large flat one for the cap. Without speaking they formed a half circle around the cairn, facing the open chamber where the dead lay. The stars were coming out and the single butter lamp by the cairn sputtered in the sand and seemed about to go out.

Suddenly Dolan appeared out of the shadows, a flat rock in his hands. He placed it on the cairn. “I didn’t mean to disturb them,” he said in an uncertain voice. “I wouldn’t have…” he began again, and stopped. “Ming should have told me,” he said, and awkwardly bent to pick up another rock. “What went on fifty years ago between China and Tibet, that has nothing to do with me, you know.” He spoke quickly, gripping the rock tightly, using two hands as if the small stone had grown immensely heavy. He looked up, suddenly angry again. “Let it be a lesson!” he growled. “Tomorrow’s the last day,” he added in warning, and marched away.

“He has become,” Corbett said, “the scariest person I have ever known.”

“His deity is gasping,” Lokesh observed in a heavy voice.

They wrapped themselves in blankets for the night, Khan standing watch with the rifle, Ko appearing and settling into a corner of the crumbling walls. Shan dropped into a troubled sleep and awoke abruptly, from a terrible nightmare, though he could remember nothing but a great sense of loss. It had been about Ko, something terrible happening to Ko, because Shan and the others had failed to act. He rose and, finding Khan asleep at his post, wandered into the moonlit ruins. He found himself in the foregate, sitting on the broad lintel stone Gendun had used on the festival day. He did not know how much time passed, an hour or more, when suddenly a voice spoke at his side.

“Why did you bring him? He’s going to get himself killed. He acts like he wants to get himself killed.” It was Yao.

The words did not hurt as much as Shan might have expected, because the thought had already occurred to him. “When this is over they will take him away,” Shan said. “Dolan and Ming know he is a witness. He will be buried in the gulag so deep no one will ever find him. You know what they do when they want prisoners to disappear, if they don’t execute them. They’ll change his name, give him a new tattoo, a new background, destroy his old file. I’ll have no way of ever finding him. I’ll never see him again.” The last words came out in such a rush of emotion Shan bent and buried his head between his hands.

“When this is over Dolan and Ming will be in prison.”

“No,” Shan said, lifting his head to gaze at the stars. “All we can hope for is to keep them from the treasure, keep them from hurting the lamas. Get them out of Lhadrung,” he added, realizing as he spoke them that the words echoed those of Colonel Tan.

“Things can be different,” Yao said. “I mean for you and Ko.”

“I can’t see how.”

“When I get back to Beijing I’m going to see people I know. Judges. I can convince them. People who disappeared can also be brought back to life. I can bring you back to life, get you a fresh start in Beijing. You’re one of the best investigators I know. I can get you work, maybe create a new job in my office for you. Once that happens we can find Ko, together.”

“You’re going to have enough problems in Beijing without me.”

Yao gazed at Shan in silence, then seemed to force a grin. “What, that recall? It happens every year or so. Not the first time. I’ll go home, have a few candid exchanges of views, and all will be forgotten.”

“Not the recall. The fact that you ignored it.”

The inspector’s silence lasted longer this time. “I don’t let criminals go free. That’s not what I do.”

“Go home,” Shan said. “Let me find a way.”

“And steal all my glory?”

“No,” Shan said, and looked away. “Because I don’t want you to become like me.” He spoke to the darkness.

Yao didn’t speak for a long time. “You and I, if we had met in Beijing, we would have become good friends.”

Shan pointed to a shooting star.

“Two things I promise you,” Yao said in a determined voice. “I will get Ming. And I will rehabilitate you. It’s how you can save Ko. We can save Ko.”

In the stillness that followed Shan replayed the conversation in his mind. Yao wanted to take Shan back, to start over in Beijing. He remembered he was supposed to be on a retreat, because he had cried out in delirium he wanted to go home. Strangely, he wondered where the cave was that Gendun had selected for him. He needed a month of silence, needed time alone to settle the unfamiliar emotions that had been surging through him since the festival day.

He did not know how long had passed when he turned to find Yao gone. He felt in his pocket and found a box of stick matches, which he put in front of him on a rock. He tore the top edge off the airline ticket envelope in his pocket, the only paper he could find, and pulled a pencil stub from his pocket.
Father,
he wrote in the moonlight,
My fear for my son wakes me up, shaking. I used to laugh when I was a son.
He stared at the words, blinking, awash in memories of his joyful youth, then lifted the pencil once more.
Show me a way to make them take me, instead of him,
he finished, then folded the paper. He made a little fire of the matchsticks and set the message on it, watching the ashes float skyward, sending his message to the heavens. Suddenly he smelled ginger and somebody was sitting beside him. But when he dared to look, no one was there.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

The last day arrived in a tempest, one of the rare midsummer storms that broke across the Himalayas into Tibet. Wind tugged at the flaps of the tent Dolan had erected, rain put out the cooking fire before breakfast could be prepared, and thunder shook the frail, crumbling walls around them. Gendun had disappeared without a trace, and Lokesh was standing in the rain when Shan found him in the foregate, looking into the sky. “It won’t be much different below,” the old Tibetan said to Shan, awe in his voice. “The earth is speaking today.”

Dolan raged like a storm himself, full of fury, with no sign of the strange hesitation that he had shown the night before, no sign of what Lokesh had called the gasping of his deity. Ko, too, seemed like a changed person, his own brooding uncertainty replaced with a fawning attention to Dolan. Shan heard him explain to the American that they could escape the storm by going below, that he knew the way to the third level even if the others would not tell Dolan, that he would show Dolan little treasures in the chapels along the way.

“He has the checks,” Corbett muttered. “Two hundred thousand dollars. He figures maybe he has a way out after all.”

The checks. Shan had forgotten how Ko had retrieved the checks from the ground after the others had left them there.

Shan watched his son in dismayed confusion as they descended into the underground palace, leaving Lokesh in prayer by the cairn. Ko would not return his gaze, and seemed eager to keep Dolan or Khan between him and Shan and the others, even joked with Khan about the little golden Buddha Ko had stolen and given him. By the time they had climbed out of the tunnel chipped into the first level Ko had convinced Dolan to send Khan with the others to the third level while Ko showed Dolan the chapel treasures. Dolan readily agreed, letting Ko lead, holding a light while the American carried a sack into which he began stuffing altar pieces even as the others watched. Yao and Shan exchanged a weary glance.

No one spoke as they climbed first the stair of pegs then the narrow passage up to the mask room. As they reached the third level Shan silently led the group to the amban’s quarters and lit several butter lamps. He was examining the old paintings on the walls when a low, haunting moan rose from outside the door. Warning them not to leave the chamber, Khan stepped into the corridor. Through the darkness a moment later came a groan. Corbett leapt out the door and seconds later reappeared, holding Khan’s feet. The man was unconscious. Ko, holding his arms, cast a victorious glance at his father, then set Khan into the chair. As Yao began tying him to the chair with his own bootlaces, Ko retrieved the rifle from the hallway, handing it to Corbett.

“Where is Dolan?” Yao asked.

“He carried a load outside,” Ko said in a hurried voice. “We must leave before he gets back.”

“Where is Dolan?” Shan repeated.

“He’s not a problem for us now.”

Shan searched his son’s turbulent face. “You left him in the maze,” he said with sudden realization. “You took the light and you left him in the blackness.”

“He isn’t so smart for being so rich. He let me hold the only light. I didn’t hit him hard, just enough to knock him down.”

“You planned it,” Corbett said. “It’s why you told him about the chapels, why you befriended him this morning.”

Ko did not seem to hear. He just stared at his father with challenge in his eyes. “You wanted justice. This is justice. I told him her body was in there with him, in one of the chapels. McDowell’s.”

“He could die in there,” Shan said.

“He killed Punji,” Ko shot back. “When it was over he was probably going to kill all of us. But then I saw how scared he was when he found those dead monks. That’s when I saw what should happen to him. We should go now. Into the mountains. Back to Lhadrung if that’s what you want. Leave him to rot.”

Khan began to stir. He struggled against his bindings, emitted a loud roar, like a caged beast. Corbett knocked the butt of the gun against his head and the man slumped forward, unconscious again. Corbett looked at the gun and shrugged. “Sorry,” he said, as if the weapon had moved on its own, then leaned the rifle against the shelves.

Shan and Yao turned back to their examination of the room, looking at the peche, studying paintings again, trying to understand the last puzzle of the mandala palace.

“We have to go,” Ko urged again after several minutes.

“We have to understand,” Shan said.

“Then I’ll leave alone,” Ko said, challenge back in his voice.

Before Shan could reply, Lokesh tumbled into the room, propelled toward the bed by a violent shove from the back. Behind him entered Dolan, a pistol in one hand, a butter lamp in the other.

As Corbett took a step toward the rifle, the pistol cracked twice. Two feet past Corbett’s head, near the shelves, wooden splinters exploded into the air. “Keep going. Give me a reason,” Dolan snarled. His face seemed to have lost all its color, a trickle of blood ran down one cheek. His eyes appeared to have sunk. He appeared to have aged several years. As Shan picked up one of the splinters and stepped to the shelves Dolan advanced toward Ko, who had retreated to the shadows along the wall, and slammed the pistol against his temple, knocking him to his knees.

“You didn’t know the old man was coming inside with a light to find his friends, you little bastard! You were going to leave me there!” Dolan’s voice still held an edge of the horror he must have felt in the darkness, thinking he was entombed in the ancient temple.

“You needed to go on retreat,” Ko growled, holding his head, still kneeling.

Shan looked at his son in surprise, and took a step closer to him. Dolan warned him away with a gesture of the gun.

“That’s what you think, isn’t it, that my money makes me shallow, that all your mumbo jumbo about souls somehow makes you all superior.” An unsettling wildness was in Dolan’s eyes now. The darkness had touched him, perhaps exactly as Ko had intended. “You know nothing! I’ve won awards, humanitarian awards, all over the world. I earn my treasures.”

“No,” a slow, steady voice said. Lokesh had stood, and was staring at Dolan with an intense, accusing look. “Maybe once you understood such things, maybe once you loved them. But now you only love the owning.”

“You old fool,” Dolan spat back, “what do you know about the world? You people sit around and stare at your navels while people like me are shaping the world.”

“You need to go back, and find what you lost,” Lokesh said.

The words seemed to stab Dolan. He twisted about, grimacing, but he seemed unable to break away from Lokesh’s gaze. Khan began to stir. He looked up with a gloating expression. “My hands,” he growled. “Untie me and I’ll teach them a lesson.”