Beautiful Ghosts (56 page)

Dolan was making a strange sound that one moment seemed like a prayer, the next a groan. Beyond him Corbett stood staring into the whirlpool.

Dolan picked up the black statue, which had been described in the amban’s letters, staring at it, and set it by the entry to the chamber. His face had become grey again, and confusion passed over his countenance as he looked from the statue back to the empty place on the altar where it had sat. He rearranged the figures that had flanked it as though to hide its disappearance.

Shan was convinced he could persuade this Dolan, the uncertain Dolan, to leave; persuade him to reconsider, to at least buy time, let them attend to the dead monks who haunted him before stealing from them. But it seemed impossible to predict when the angry, violent Dolan would emerge, the one who killed people one moment and forgot it the next. Something was stirring inside Dolan which Dolan himself seemed unable to recognize.

But as the doubting Dolan stared at the altars, Corbett suddenly towered over him. “I can’t let you do this anymore, Dolan,” the FBI agent declared.

The defiance revived the angry Dolan. His face went hard again, and the pistol rose in his hand.

“That little Italian shooter of yours has a clip of eight shots,” Corbett said. “You’ve got three left. There’s four of us.”

“If I kill one or two, that will stop the rest,” Dolan sneered.

Corbett shook his head. “Here’s how it happens. I charge you, maybe knock the gun away. Maybe you pump a round into me, maybe not. But I’m a big guy and you’re a lousy shot. It’ll take more than one to put me down, long enough for the others to get the gun away. Without a gun you’re just another two-bit looter.”

“But no matter what else, it leaves you dead.” Dolan seemed to welcome the new game Corbett was playing.

Corbett shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about that. These people here, the people to whom Zhoka really belongs, they’re more important than you’ll ever be. I have no one back home. If I die, then I know that people like Lokesh will sit with me and say the right words. You know what this place has taught me most of all? No matter how people like you screw up the world, the true things stay true. There’s always another chance.”

Dolan’s hand with the gun trembled. He pressed his free hand around it, steadying it, then suddenly aimed it at Shan. “I don’t have to kill you to stop you and Yao. I will shoot Shan if you come closer. He’s the one who caused all this. He’s the one who tricked me into coming here. I didn’t think it would be like … I should have stayed home and sent others. The rest of you can leave, but he has to die, no matter what else, he is going to die. He’s like one of those damned protector demons, who think they will frighten you away. They think Dolan kills. They think Dolan doesn’t love the beautiful things.”

Shan did not move. Dolan’s eyes flared, he took a step toward Shan and pulled the hammer back on the gun. “You think Dolan is a lousy shot? Watch this.”

A shape streaked across Shan’s vision, an arm shoving him aside as the gun fired. Shan watched, confused, his ears ringing with the explosion of the bullet, while Yao, as if in slow motion, twisted with a shudder, a hand on his belly, and fell to his knees. Dolan stepped backward, shock in his eyes, mouth open as if to protest something. Then, still as if in slow motion, Ko launched himself through the air. Ko hit Dolan hard, wrapping his arms around him, trapping the hand with the gun against his body, pushing him back, off balance, back one step then two, under the golden mark of the north. And then they vanished.

“No!” Shan cried. In an instant he was at the edge of the floor, over the water. Ko had taken the American directly into the whirlpool. They were gone.

He turned to see Corbett kneeling beside Yao, who was leaning against one of the altars, speaking to them. Yao’s hand was on his abdomen. Blood was seeping through his fingers.

“Go!” Yao shouted. He was on the floor, leaning against one of the altars. “Ko may be hanging on below! Both of you! Run!”

Shan hesitated, looking at Yao’s wound. His shirt was drenched in blood.

“It’s nothing!” Yao snapped. “Go!”

Three minutes later Shan and Corbett reached the side of the underground stream, below the waterfall, sweeping their lights from side to side, studying the banks as they jogged along its course toward the outfall. At the end, where the stream cascaded into the chasm, the last iron bar, the corroded one to which Corbett had clung to two weeks earlier, was broken, twisted outward as if a great weight had hung from it. As Shan stared at the broken bar a terrible emptiness welled within.

“He probably hit his head,” Corbett said in a mournful voice. “I doubt he felt anything.” Shan knew he wasn’t speaking of Dolan.

“Go help Yao,” Shan said. “Get him to the surface.” When he turned back after watching Corbett run up the tunnel a low moan rose from his throat and he dropped to his knees.

After a long time he stood, still numb, and began walking back toward the temple. There was no sign of Corbett and Yao. When he climbed through the narrow tunnel chipped in the rock he paused, then found himself walking away from the peg stairs to the next level, into the first corridor of chapels they had visited.

At first when he reached the north gate, the chamber they swam into, it seemed empty. But when he swept the room a second time with his light there was a pile of rags on the far side, hanging over the water. He approached slowly, as if in a dream, until suddenly something seized his consciousness and he was awake, running. “Ko!” he shouted.

His son was lying with an arm in the frigid water, breathing but apparently unconscious. Shan rolled him over, pulling his head onto his lap, stroking his son’s hair, rubbing warmth back into his hands.

“He was carried away by that stream,” a weak voice said. “I was caught under the falls. He struggled, pushed me into the falls, than he was swept away by it, and I was sinking. I kept falling, deeper. I am sorry. I still had two of those little gold statues. Then Lokesh was with me and he said those words again. You have to let it all go to start over. So I emptied my pockets, let the gold keep falling, and I began to rise.” Ko rushed the last words out, and began coughing.

*   *   *

A quarter hour later they were ascending through the temple, Ko wrapped in Shan’s jacket. Shan kept expecting to meet Corbett and Yao, kept listening for signs they were descending, but only silence came from above. “They’ve all gone outside,” Shan explained when he saw that Lokesh had left the Stone Dragon’s chamber, Khan’s body still on the floor.

But when he finally set foot on the golden beam he paused. There was a new quality to the silence. Then he heard the words and a sickening paralysis overtook him once more. He managed two steps before he had to lean on one of the golden mountains for support. Lokesh was reciting the death rites.

Corbett looked up from where they sat with Yao as Shan stumbled into the chamber. “He wanted you to go,” Lokesh said in an apologetic voice. “He didn’t want you to see how bad it was. He had to write a letter.” The old Tibetan pointed to a folded paper tucked in Corbett’s pocket.

Ko appeared and, emitting a groan, knelt at Yao’s side.

“The bullet hit an artery in his abdomen,” Corbett explained. “He was almost gone when I returned. He knew there was no chance, he said, when he felt how hard his belly was, because it was filling with blood.”

“The letter?” Shan asked.

“It’s for Colonel Tan and the Council of Ministers,” Corbett explained.

Ko rose and, inexplicably, began wiping the dust from all the statues.

A silent sob wracked Shan, then he settled onto the floor, numbly straightening Yao’s clothing, mouthing the death rites with Lokesh as his son cleaned the deities who resided in the center of the universe.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

The silence just after death is a sound unto itself, like an empty scream, a deep wrenching rumble that reaches not the ears but the essence behind the ears. Shan took Yao’s hand, still warm, and pressed it between his own.

Lokesh paused to sip from a water bottle offered by Corbett and saw the pain in Shan’s face. “He’ll have no trouble here,” he said in a calm, assuring whisper.

“Here?” Shan asked in a breaking voice.

“Zhoka. Even for a soul as meager as that American’s, there might be a chance, because it was released among all the beautiful ghosts who dwell here.”

Shan offered a small, sad smile. “That letter, what did he…?” he asked Corbett. His question was interrupted by a desperate cry from below.

Ko darted out of the chamber and returned seconds later. “It’s Jara!” he reported. “He says soldiers are invading Zhoka!”

The herder stood at the foot of the stairs in the third level, agony in his eyes. “They landed in helicopters by the old stone tower,” he reported, “many soldiers, all running this way.”

“We must meet them,” Shan said wearily. “Or else they will keep searching until they find the temple.”

“We have to bring Yao,” Corbett said in a grim tone. “Or they will search for him.”

Even with Jara’s help it was difficult work carrying Yao’s body back through the temple, sealing the secret doors as they descended, but after a quarter hour Shan and Corbett were climbing the stairway to the surface.

They were almost into the sunlight when several voices simultaneously demanded that they halt. Green uniformed soldiers sprang from the shadows of the side walls, guns leveled at them. A minute later they were standing in front of Colonel Tan, who was leaning against the chorten, a cigarette in his mouth, anger in his eyes.

He pulled a folded paper from his pocket and tossed it at Shan. It was one of Ming’s draft memoranda to Beijing.
Prison Insurrection in Lhadrung,
read the heading. He seemed not to notice the grim expressions worn by Corbett and Shan. “It says it happens today.”

“There was a terrible tragedy, Colonel,” Corbett interjected. “Yao was killed by looters. Dolan fell to his death trying to resist them.”

Shan stared at Corbett, struggling not to show his surprise.

Tan studied each of them in silence. “You’re lying.”

Corbett extracted Yao’s letter and handed it to Tan. “Inspector Yao explained it all before he died. He was … he was a hero.”

Tan stared at Shan without opening the letter. The colonel’s gaze drifted past him and Shan watched as his anger changed, not extinguishing, but growing somehow weary. He straightened, then stepped past Shan to the wall nearest the chorten, to a white patch under a protecting shelf of stone, a patch of white flour left from the festival. Tan touched the patch, put his finger to his mouth, and turned back to Shan with an accusing glare. “If Ming’s right, if this is all some scheme to help prisoners escape, it will be the end of you.”

“The end of both of us, Colonel,” Shan countered. “Why would you come here if you were worried about the prisoners?”

“Because Ming said so.” Tan grimaced, as though regretting his words. “Because he said Tibetans are moving a large golden Buddha, the Mountain Buddha, as a means of inciting insurrection, that the prisoners are planning to escape so they can take it across the border as a gift to the Dalai Lama, enlisting local citizens as they go. He’s says it’s all been a conspiracy by outsiders for political destabilization of the county.” His hand tightened around the letter as he stared at it with an uncertain expression, then he looked back at Corbett. “No doubt the bodies are missing,” he growled.

“Only one,” Corbett said.

They went down the stairs, slowly, soldiers deploying ahead as if wary of ambush. At the base of the stairs Lokesh and Ko sat with Yao’s body, which was propped against the wall. Tan squatted and grabbed one of Yao’s arms as if to shake him, as if to call their bluff. He instantly dropped it and recoiled from the now cool flesh. A low groan escaped his lips.

“They never understand in Beijing.” It sounded as if he were apologizing to Yao. Then, abruptly, all business again, he stood and demanded to see where Dolan had fallen.

They walked slowly down the tunnel, past the waterfall, in complete silence, Tan’s aides looking uneasily at the wall paintings, Tan pausing more than once to gaze at the demons, looking as if he wanted to ask questions, but each time moving on.

“Was he still alive when he was washed out of the mountain?” Tan asked as they stood at the outfall, looking at the twisted, broken iron bars.

“We don’t know,” Shan said. “Probably.”

“We’ll need his body. His heirs will need to be certain.” He stepped closer to the outfall. “It’s too dangerous for a helicopter down there.”

“The gorge opens into the valley five miles from here,” Shan explained.

“I’ll send a squad.”

“There’re two bodies,” Shan said. “Others should go, to say things.”

Tan frowned. “You mean the McDowell woman. You mean Tibetans should go to say prayers for an American and a Briton? Ridiculous.”

“To say prayers for two people who died in a Tibetan monastery. Take Lokesh.”

“And me,” Ko said, stepping forward. “I am going.”

“You need a doctor,” Shan protested. Ko’s wounded hand still dripped blood.

Tan frowned again. “You are a prisoner. You go where I say.”

Ko seemed to shrink. Shan watched his son look into the swirling black water as he replied in a slow voice. “I am a prisoner. I go where you say.”

Tan began snapping orders to the aide who stood behind him. “Manacles,” he added when he was finished. The officer extracted a pair of handcuffs from his belt and stepped toward Ko.

“Not him,” Tan said, and pointed to Ko. “I order you to go with the recovery squad up the gorge, to help the old Tibetan keep up with my men. Tomorrow Public Security officers come to take you back to your coal mine.”

He took the manacles and fastened one end around Shan’s wrist. “This one goes with me,” he said, “to stop the prisoner uprising.” Tan closed the other end of the manacles around his own wrist.

Ko paused as the officer herded him up the tunnel, pulling some papers from his pocket and, without looking at his father, pushed them into Shan’s pocket. Shan glanced down at Dolan’s checks. Ko’s last hope of freedom. He held Ko for a second with his free hand, then pulled something from his own pocket for Ko, who glanced at it then quickly covered it, pushing it inside his shirt. It was the sketch of Punji McDowell Shan had taken at Bumpari.