Beautiful Ghosts (9 page)

Shan watched the scene with growing unease. It was still early. The government building was quiet, appearing almost unoccupied. He studied the windows of the top floor, where the senior officers worked. Drapes were drawn in several of the offices. He could discern no movement.

Two men in grey uniforms appeared a block away, semiautomatic weapons slung from their shoulders. Another new feature of life in Lhadrung. He pushed deeper into the shadows and watched, futilely twisting the doorknob of the restaurant, looking for a hiding place should the soldiers approach. They turned at the corner before the square and disappeared down a side street. A moment later one of the Tibetans at the truck advanced hesitantly to the old woman, knelt beside her, and began speaking in low, urgent tones, gesturing toward the street in the opposite direction of the patrol, trying to pull her up.

Suddenly two men burst out of the front doors of the government center. The man kneeling by the woman froze, the color draining from his face, then he stood, turned his back to the doors, and stiffly walked away.

The men on the steps were both Han Chinese, with the air of senior officials. One, a tall sleek man in his thirties wearing neatly pressed black trousers, blue dress shirt, and red tie, extracted a wide roll of paper from what appeared to be a map case and began speaking rapidly, unrolling it in a pool of sunlight on the low wall beneath the Mao bust. The shorter man, perhaps ten years older than his companion, was clad in a brown sweater vest over a white shirt, without a tie. His uncombed hair, showing signs of grey, was long, hanging over his ears, and as Shan watched he used a silver pen to point at the map, a question in his eyes as he spoke. Not a map, Shan saw in surprise as the younger man lifted it from the wall. It was a thangka, a traditional Tibetan cloth painting, an old one judging by its faded colors.

The older man seemed to listen to his companion with thin tolerance, and appeared about to interrupt, when a Western woman with curly russet colored hair stepped outside to join them. She made repeated, vigorous gestures toward the thangka, as if emphatically explaining something about it, then took it and reversed it, pointing to something on the back. Her action quieted the men, both of whom offered her reluctant nods. Shan took a step forward to see the woman better. She was in her thirties, dressed in blue denim jeans with a short, stylish brown jacket over a white blouse. Something hung from her neck on a black cord. A magnifying lens.

The tall man uttered a few syllables, shrugged, rolled up the painting, packed it back in its case, and stepped back inside, followed a moment later by his older companion. The woman lingered, moving to the edge of the steps, putting her hand on Mao’s shoulder to lean over, studying the beggars. Worry seemed to cross her face. She rolled a finger in a lock of hair that dangled at her shoulder and spoke. Shan could not hear the words, but the man in the center, wrapped in the blanket, looked up, seeming to understand. Had she spoken Tibetan? The man’s face was in shadow, but he seemed to shake his head as though in answer. The woman glanced toward the door then darted down the stairs, reaching into her jacket pocket as she ran. She produced an apple, dropped it onto the lap of the beggar closest to the door, the one draped in burlap, then ran back inside.

As she disappeared, a helicopter burst into sight, flying low and fast over the town center toward the north, in the direction of the prison camp. It was gone in an instant, leaving a cold, fearful silence in the square. When Shan looked back the apple was in the hands of the second beggar, the one draped with the blanket.

Shan stared at the empty doorway, then the beggars. He was certain the two Han men had been government officials, senior officials. They had seen the beggars and done nothing. They had been discussing a Tibetan painting, perhaps arguing over it. Then the woman had appeared and seemed to settle the argument. Had they not acted against the beggars because of the Westerner? He waited another ten minutes, then approached the beggars, walking along the perimeter of the square. He dropped his only coin in the bowl of the old woman, who offered a grateful nod. The other two figures, their faces still obscured, seemed not to notice him, but then the man with the blanket over his head pushed his leg out as Shan approached, as if to trip him. Shan carefully stepped over the leg, squatted by the man who wore the burlap hood, and looked into the shadowed face.

“Surya!” he gasped.

The monk stared at him with glazed eyes, showing no sign of recognition. The side of his face was heavily bruised. His right hand was covered with a bloody cloth. Shan touched the monk’s cheek. Surya moaned and pulled away.

“We thought … What happened?” Shan blurted out. “They took you into that helicopter.…”

Surya stared dumbly at his bandaged hand. Under the burlap he still wore his grey muslin underrobe, torn in several places.

Shan pulled on Surya’s arm. “Please. Gendun thinks—” Surya resisted.

Shan stood, examining the square, wondering where the foot patrol had gone, then bent and tried to pull Surya again. “They think you are dead.”

“Surya
is
dead,” the monk said. “He was killed, too.”

Shan glanced back at the doors and the street beyond. If a bounty was posted for him, anyone in the street, not just the soldiers, was a possible threat. “You can’t leave them. You are part of them.”

A stray dog, skin hanging loose over its ribs, appeared and settled beside Surya. “The only honor he had left to give them was to leave,” the old man said. “Even the low creature he has become knows that.” His voice had changed. It was cracked and dry and hollow, not the voice of the serene throat chanter Shan had heard the day before. Surya’s head lowered and his jaw dropped open. His gaunt, absent expression matched that of the dog.

“I looked inside the lower gompa,” Shan whispered. “There was no body. There was only blood. Help me understand what happened.”

Surya’s mouth turned into a twisted grin, his upper lip stuck on one of his front teeth. “He knew what he did. He saw the black thing in his heart afterwards. If you try to change that, Chinese, that would be dishonor as well.”

Chinese. The word wrenched something inside Shan. He and Surya had been friends, had shared many stories of their lives while sharing tasks at Yerpa, had often laughed together. But now Shan was simply another Chinese. “The soldiers will take you if you stay here. Take you again,” he added, still perplexed over why Surya had been released. “What did they ask when they interrogated you? Who is the woman with red hair?”

“Soon they will accept the truth,” Surya said in his jarring new voice. A string of saliva dangled from his mouth. “They will do to him what killers and eaters of vows deserve. Meanwhile he will pretend to be alive.”

Shan suppressed a shudder. He touched Surya’s bandaged hand. “Let me clean your wound.”

But Surya pushed him away and scuttled crablike past the dead tree, into the shadow cast by the steps of the building.

Shan backed away, across the square. As he paused in the shadows of the restaurant doorway again, a wave of emotion surged through him. Twenty-four hours earlier Surya had been about to embark on a new life at Zhoka, about to change the world. Now the world had caught up and changed him, and Shan felt guilt and confusion, even a fleeting revulsion, at the twisted, hollow thing Surya had become.

*   *   *

Shan waited until morning traffic began moving down the street, battered trucks with broken mufflers, carts drawn by small, aged horses, an old man with a wispy beard pushing a hand barrow full of greens. The wind from the mountains mixed the scents of onions and manure, roasted barley, and diesel. When Shan finally stepped into the street he kept in the shadows, circling the block to reach the rear of the government center. He circled the building once, stealing furtive glances toward the upper windows, and found himself by the automobiles parked in the side alley. The tires of the silver car had red gravel in the treads, gravel that had not been picked up on the streets of Lhadrung. He bent closer to the treads, vaguely recalling he had seen the little red chips before.

Suddenly a strong hand seized his upper arm and dragged him backward, into a doorway on the opposite side of the alley. He was unable to wrench free before a door slammed behind him and he was released. He was in total darkness. He squatted, hands over his head to shield him. A single naked lightbulb flickered on, revealing a small storeroom, its shelves stacked with tins of cooking oil, baskets of vegetables, and sacks of rice and barley. A man with close-cropped grey hair and a face like a hatchet pulled out a chair from the crude plank table in the center of the room, resting his well-polished black boot on it.

“I thought you were dead,” the man growled. “At least gone down some hole in the mountains, and smart enough to stay there.” He wore the plain, sharply pressed uniform of an army officer, without adornment, without any indication of rank other than the pockets on his tunic.

Shan breathed in deeply and returned the man’s steady stare. “I prefer to be gone, Colonel,” he said in a brittle voice. “But here we are.”

Colonel Tan had been administrator of the county for years—for so long, Shan knew, he had lost all hope of advancement, all hope of transfer out of the remote, impoverished county, which only added to his capacity for fury and brutality. He clenched his jaw, surprised at the anger Tan’s sudden appearance had released, but acutely aware that with a single command Tan could send him back to the gulag.

“You have new deputies,” Shan observed after he calmed himself. A year ago Tan had unofficially released him after Shan had proven that the murder of the local prosecutor had been committed not by the monk held for the crime but by a ring of local officials.

“Just visitors. I get many offers of assistance these days. Nobody ever heard of Lhadrung until I made the mistake of asking for your help,” Tan said acidly.

“You mean no one knew that three of your most important offices were run by drug runners and killers.”

Half of Tan’s mouth curled upward. It was one of the colonel’s distinctive expressions, a half grin that felt like a snarl. “I was reminded that someone of lesser reputation would have been dismissed in disgrace.”

“Congratulations.” Shan knew Tan expected gratitude but in all his years in Lhadrung Tan had never lifted a finger to stop the brutality at his former labor camp.

Tan looked as if he were about to leap across the table to take a bite out of Shan. “You don’t exist,” he hissed.

In the harsh silence left by the words Shan lowered himself into one of the chairs at the table, all the while keeping his gaze on Tan, the way one watches a coiled snake. The colonel meant the words as a threat, as a reminder of how easily Shan could be made to disappear.

Shan broke away from Tan’s cool glare and conspicuously studied the storeroom. Why hadn’t Tan taken him into his administration building? Was he hiding Shan, or was it the fact that he knew Shan? “There are beggars out front,” Shan ventured. “You don’t permit beggars.”

Tan extracted an unfiltered cigarette from his uniform pocket, lit it, and blew a stream of smoke toward Shan. “I’m not asking for your help this time. I am telling you to stay away.”

Shan stared at Tan again, trying to hide his confusion. “One of them was brought by helicopter from the mountains. His name is Surya. He was arrested and released. Why?”

“The use of government resources in this county is for me to decide, not for some senile Tibetan ranting about imaginary crimes.”

“You mean it is inconvenient to have another murder in Lhadrung.”

“He was never officially detained. There was no murder. There is just another pathetic Tibetan who needs help.” Tan inhaled deeply on his cigarette, examining Shan. “Why are you so interested? Perhaps I should call one of the social intervention agencies.”

Shan fought a shudder. It was an idiom of senior officials. The agencies Tan referred to were government facilities for medical experimentation or special mental health clinics run by Public Security. Lokesh, like Shan, had spent time at one of the institutes for the criminally insane. He said it was where chemicals were used to drive out a man’s deity, where a simple injection could turn a man into a lower life form. Shan stared at the floor a moment then forced himself to look back into Tan’s eyes. “The Western woman. Who is she?”

“A visitor named McDowell. An art historian.”

“We’re hiding from an art historian?”

“We hide from no one.” Tan watched the smoke drift from his mouth, following it to the ceiling, then sat, interlocking his fingers on the table with the smoldering cigarette jutting from the top. Shan had seen the gesture before. Tan had his own mudras. “If I had to do it over, I would not change anything I did a year ago,” Tan said slowly. He seemed to struggle to get the words out.

Shan could not understand the strange pain that rose in his heart. What did he mean? Was it Tan’s strange way of trying to shame Shan? A terrifying thought occurred to Shan. Tan could order him to find evidence against Surya, could threaten Shan with imprisonment if he did not cooperate. “I am sorry if you were punished for it,” he said after a long moment, looking at the tabletop.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Tan snapped. “It wasn’t about you, it was about having all those criminals operating under my nose.”

“I didn’t come looking for you, Colonel. I, too, had decided it would be easier if our paths didn’t cross again.”

“Then why come to my office? Because of that beggar? I would prefer he go. Take him away.”

“He won’t go. He acts as if he is chained to the building.” Shan understood much about Tan. He had worked for people like Tan in Beijing for years, only they had used larger limousines and smoked more elegant cigarettes. But he did not understand the strange game they were playing now.

Tan stood and pointed toward the door. “Then go. Slip down your hole again. In a few more years I’ll retire and you can try the world once more.”

“If you don’t want me in Lhadrung, why offer a bounty?”