Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (16 page)

The room reeked of urine and vomit. The first two inmates lay comatose on their metal frame beds, their skulls shaved and wrapped in bandages. Two others, older men, stared blankly at walls, another sat against the wall between two beds drawing with a pencil on a pad of paper, surrounded by sheets torn from the pad, all covered with precise penciled triangles, hundreds of triangles. The last inmate was tied to a corroded metal armchair facing the small, dirty window. Shan’s heart raced as he approached the chair and looked past the ragged, tangled hair. His son was alive, his son was intact. And completely oblivious to Shan and everything else in the chamber.

Ko stared, unfocused, toward a snowcapped peak on the horizon.

Shan tried to speak his son’s name but could summon only a hoarse moan. He put his hand on Ko’s arm. His son did not react, did not even blink. He began to untie the tethers, latex tubes knotted at his wrists and ankles, then reconsidered and only loosened them. Lowering himself onto one knee in front of the chair, he saw for the first time the fresh bruise that ran the length of Ko’s jaw, the work of a baton to the face, and two broken fingers crudely bound with duct tape, a tongue dispenser used as a splint. He rolled up Ko’s sleeve. The skin inside his right elbow was perforated with syringe holes. A long ugly line along his forearm showed where one of his veins had collapsed. His chin was caked with dried salvia and grime. Shan wiped it clean and stroked his son’s cheek.

“It’s your father,” he whispered after scrubbing a tear from his own cheek. “I am here.” Words were useless, words were ridiculous. He found himself examining Ko’s body again, finding more bruises, old and new, checking his pulse, his fingernails and toenails. It could be worse, he told himself. If he had to be tied, Ko must still have use of his arms and legs, must still have some dim spark left that flared up from time to time. He found a plastic crate in a corner and sat on it beside his son, draping Ko’s limp fingers over his own hand, looking out with him through the smudged window to the same distant peak. Images flashed in his head of Ko as a laughing infant. This wasn’t how he had imagined it would be when he had strolled with his baby son through Bei Hai Park in Beijing.

He fought to stay in the moment, pushing away the world, but an incessant voice inside kept shouting that the alarms would sound at any moment, that he would never be able to help Ko if he was captured and tethered to another chair. There was a bus, he had been told, a shuttle bus that took workers through the gate, into town. He had to find the bus and board it using the stolen identity badge, before they discovered its true owner.

Shan rose and checked the empty bed beside Ko, finding another plastic crate under it with his son’s possessions. A worn denim prisoner uniform. A comb. A stick of plastic with a few bristles at one end, the remains of a toothbrush. A pencil. A red book of the sainted Chairman’s teachings, issued by the prison system, with several pages ripped out. In the pocket of the pants was another pencil, its end built into a bulge with layers of tape and paper. Shan recognized the device. It was used by diehard prisoners to vomit up drugs.

He rinsed out a tin cup at the small metal sink in the corner, filled it with water, and held it to Ko’s lips. His son did not react at first but when Shan tipped it, letting some of the moisture spill onto his lips, Ko reflexively swallowed and drank half the cup. His eyes wandered, still unfocused, but did not find Shan.

“I have had a pleasant visit in the mountains,” Shan heard himself say in a whisper. “There is a place I will show you, with waterfalls and butterflies. You will come stay with me in my cottage in the hills by that snow-topped mountain you look at. Little birds fly in my window.” At first he wasn’t entirely sure why he lied, then he realized it was simply because he couldn’t bear to tell the truth.

“From the Red East rises the sun,” Ko suddenly said in a wooden voice. “There appears our Mao tse-tung.” He rocked back and forth. His fingers began to tremble. He repeated the words, putting them to a feeble melody. He was singing the Party’s favorite anthem,
The East is Red
.

Shan shuddered then gently placed two fingers on his son’s lips to silence him and bent closer to his ear. “Living water needs living fire to boil,” he whispered. “Lean over the fishing rock and dip the clear, deep current.” The words of the ancient poet Su tung-po came out uninvited, but he did not cease speaking them when he recognized them, a thousand-year-old poem that was one of his father’s favorites:

Store the spring moon in a big gourd, return it to the jar
Frothy water, simmering, whirls bits of tea
Pour it and hear the sound of wind in pines.

His son’s eyes blinked and he turned in the direction of the sound. For a moment Shan thought he might have seen a flicker of recognition in Ko’s eyes, then his son looked away, staring in confusion at Shan’s hand, entwined with his own. Shan repeated the poem again, all of it this time. Ko cocked his head toward the sky and a vacant grin crossed his face.

One of the many old lamas Shan had known in his gulag camp had, like Shan, been a rare survivor of such a knob medical facility. They had spoken about it once, on a frigid winter night as they watched the stars. Shan had confessed that he could not explain how he had survived, could not even find words to explain how he had felt, only that when he was released he had been amazed to find only sixty days, and not ten years, had passed.

“Those soldier doctors had no feeling for the truth of what they do,” the lama had explained. “They think they can destroy you by breaking your body. It isn’t like that.”

Shan had always known better than to ask questions of such men. He had stayed silent, pointing out a shooting star.

“There are many levels of hell,” the lama went on. “They don’t exist to test your body or mind but to test your soul. I realized that the doctors were but smiths at the forge who push the iron into the furnace, then pound it with hammers. The only thing of any importance is going on inside the iron. You drift in and out of consciousness. You live in dreams and nightmares all day and night, in the furnace, under the hammer. What brings you back are the moments when you wake and find a little shard of reality. That’s what keeps you anchored to the real world, so you don’t entirely drift away. A monk with me had a hummingbird feather, another a tiny piece of sacred wood. I had a small turquoise pebble my mother had given me as a boy. I kept it in my mouth for days at a time.”

When the alarm finally came it was not a claxon in the hallway but a chicken from the beds. One of the sleeping men had awakened, was pointing at Shan and crowing like a rooster.

Shan was on the man in an instant, injecting the syringe into his thigh, apologizing as he did so, straightening his blankets as the man slumped back into his pillow. When he looked back, Ko was staring at the horizon again. Shan stroked his cheek for a moment, took a step toward the door then paused. He moved quickly to the window and wiped a pane with his sleeve, so Ko could see the mountains more clearly, then lifted one of the sheets of paper covered with triangles and grabbed the pencil from his son’s crate. On the reverse of the paper he quickly wrote the ancient poem then, before slipping out into the hall, he left it in the pocket of Ko’s shirt. Something inside Ko had heard, he was certain, and Shan was leaving him a little shard of reality.

Chapter Eight

AFTER FIVE FALLS you die. The warning about fatigue in climbing ropes had been the first of the many warnings he had received during his first visit to the base camp. Kypo had offered no greeting before tossing the length of rope Shan now held. He had simply appeared as Shan sipped his morning tea by his front door and thrown the rope at him with a resentful expression. One end of the rope had been cut; the other, stretched and frayed, had been snapped by a heavy load. The thick kernmantle ropes took amazing abuse on the high summits, but they were retired to serve as base camp laundry lines after taking the stress of five falls.

“I was at the first advance camp yesterday,” Kypo explained. “I asked a porter why this piece of junk was there. He said he thought he should keep it because it was Tenzin’s rope, the one he was using when he died.”

“But he would never—”

“Right,” Kypo interrupted. They both knew a seasoned sherpa would have checked his rope before climbing. “Tenzin was just setting a practice wall, for customers to use while acclimatizing for the final climb.”

Shan looked at the crushed, frayed end of the rope. He recalled Tenzin yelling at a porter for stepping on a rope in camp. A careless step could press mineral particles into the rope, which would gradually cut the fibers.

“We don’t know where this has been for certain. I wasn’t there when it was cut off him.”

“No,” Shan agreed. “I thought he was free climbing and slipped.” Tenzin had been renowned for his unassisted climbs up sheer rock faces.

“It looked like he was just taking some equipment to the bottom of the wall, a quick up and down.” Kypo was silent a moment, clearly disturbed by the thought that his friend Tenzin, who had climbed the summit with him, had died from such an obvious mistake. “It was written that the mountain would call him,” he murmured. It sounded like he had been speaking with his mother.

“The rope came from the Americans’ supplies,” Shan observed. “It’s their advance camp.”

“Tsipon wanted Tenzin and me to take the Americans on the final leg to the top. I told Tsipon I would think about it.”

Shan considered the edge of emotion in the Tibetan’s voice. “You don’t trust Yates?”

“He plays with the truth. I was in Tsipon’s office when Yates first came in to speak about moving his spring climbs from Nepal to here. Tsipon said Yates should come with him to apply for the permits the next day, since foreigners always get sent to the front of the line. Yates declined, saying he had to go to Shigatse on business. But the next day I saw him in the opposite direction of Shigatse, standing in a field of barley.”

Shan cocked his head, not sure he had heard correctly. “Standing in a field doing what?”

“All by himself, tramping down some poor farmer’s crop, tearing apart an old cairn in the center, the bastard.”

“He lied?”

“He lied, then paid the farmer twenty dollars when the man discovered what he’d done. Told him to keep quiet about it.”

“But you spoke with the farmer,” Shan surmised.

“When I passed on my return. The farmer said Yates had gotten out of his car and kept looking at the sky, as if expecting something to come down and meet him.”

“He must have had a satellite phone and was trying to get reception.”

“No. Everyone here knows what those big phones look like, because every other foreigner has one.”

“And the farmer spoke with you, after taking money to keep quiet.”

“In Tibet, comrade, keeping something secret means keeping it quiet from the Chinese.”

A loud horn from the road broke the silence that followed. They looked up to see Jomo with his beloved old blue truck, his battle junk. Kypo faded into the shadows.

By the time Shan reached the truck the wiry mechanic was standing at the curb, gazing at Shan with an apologetic expression.

“Tsipon says Director Xie needs you. I am supposed to take you to him and help you.”

Shan pushed back the dark thing within him that rose at the mention of the wheelsmasher’s name. “Help me?” As Shan spoke, several Tibetans appeared from an alley on the opposite side of the street and began climbing into the cargo bay of the truck.

“The engine is unpredictable. He doesn’t want you stranded,” Jomo said plaintively, then gestured toward the half dozen Tibetans settling into the bay. “They heard we were going up the mountain.”

“Are we? Going up the mountain?”

“Xie is up there,” Jomo replied. He climbed in and with a loud cough and a cloud of smoke the old truck began to move.

It was not unusual for trucks to give rides to Tibetans, who seldom had their own vehicles, but when Jomo halted for four anxious older women near the truck stop where the road to Chomolungma left the highway, Shan turned to the mechanic. “Don’t you think I should know at least as much as they do?”

“What they know is that Religious Affairs is in the mountains,” Jomo replied in a tight voice, leaning forward as if needing all his concentration to negotiate the winding curves.

“Then tell me this,” Shan tried. “What happened between Ama Apte and your father? What prevents him from going into the mountains?”

“Before my time,” Jomo shot back.

“They avoid each other.”

“They hate each other. If my father sees me speaking with Kypo, he berates me and throws things at me like when I was a little boy. He calls her the false prophet, says everything she does is a lie, says all of Tumkot hangs on the thread of a lie.”

“Surely, Jomo, you have wondered what that lie is.”

“Before my time,” Jomo replied again, and would say no more.

Shan studied the Tibetan, doing some rough calculations.

Jomo’s time would have begun, he decided, sometime in the late 1960s.

DIRECTOR XIE HAD his fox-fur hat pulled low against the chill wind as he waited for them at a crossroads that connected to one of the valleys defined by the long, high ridges that jutted out from the Himalayas.

“Excellent!” Xie exclaimed to Shan. “You brought laborers! Such foresight!”

Shan nodded uncertainly, then with rising foreboding complied with Xie’s gesture and climbed into the back of his government sedan.

He did not recognize their destination until they were within half a mile of it. The only other time he had seen Sarma gompa, the small monastery, had been weeks earlier, from the ridge above when he had been hiking on a pilgrim’s path. The compound of centuries-old stone and timber buildings nestled against a high, flat rock face. Sheltered to the west by tall junipers and rhododendron, it had seemed a serene oasis in the dry, windblown valley.

“We are closing in, comrade,” Xie declared. “This is the landscape of our victory,” he added with the tone of a field commander, and was rewarded with a vigorous nod from the young deputy who sat in the front seat.

Shan glanced from the bureaucrat to the gompa. What landscape? What victory? Then Xie answered his unspoken questions with an announcement that sent a shudder down his back.

“That Cao has not even found this place,” Xie said with a conspiratorial gleam. He was competing with the Public Security Bureau.

“Major Cao,” Shan ventured, “seems overly rigid.”

Xie laughed. He was enjoying his field trip immensely. “A dinosaur. Pretending he can deal with an assassination without severing the root it grew out of.”

Shan’s confusion over Xie’s intention disappeared as they pulled to a stop by the gompa, renowned in the region for its ancient murals. The faces of the Tibetans who climbed out of the truck told him everything. Some scrubbed tears from their faces, others clenched prayer beads or gaus with white knuckles. Jomo tried to scurry away as he climbed out of the cab, but Shan stepped in front of him. The mechanic slowly turned his guilt-stricken face up to Shan. He often worked at the town garage. He would have known when the dump truck, now parked near the trees, had been dispatched, would have known it was pulling a trailer carrying a compact bulldozer. Sarma was the gompa of the fugitive monks.

One of the Tibetan women uttered an anguished cry when the bulldozer roared to life, another clutched her breast as if she had been stabbed. Men in white shirts appeared by the buildings, Xie’s deputies from Lhasa. Several of the Tibetans Jomo had brought from town settled on a knoll by the front gate, folding their legs under them, pulling out their prayer beads.

The sound of the machine plowing through the gate and into the brittle old wood of the temple at the front of the gompa nearly brought Shan to his knees. Shards of painted plaster flew into the air. Splinters of wood popped and cracked over the metallic clinking of the treads as the bulldozer cut a swath from one wall to the next. The wide eye of a god that dropped onto the cage of the operator seemed to take on new expressions—shocked, then terrified—before slipping away to be crushed. The end of an old altar became trapped under one end of the blade and was dragged along until shattering into a dozen pieces. Suddenly the machine emerged from the building, massive holes now in opposite sides of the structure. The bulldozer pivoted on one tread and slammed into one of the standing corners. The building staggered, swayed violently, then collapsed. Two of Xie’s deputies clapped. Jomo fell against the front of the truck, his head buried in his arms.

Shan fought the temptation to race to the machine and seize the key from the ignition, to stand in front of the blade. But nothing he did would change the fate of the serene little gompa, which had withstood storm and strife for so many centuries, sheltered so many prayers, only to be annihilated at the whim of a bureaucrat. Eventually, through his numbness, he realized that half the Tibetans had disappeared. He recalled that the pilgrim path rose up the ridge from the shadows of the trees, past the painted rock face in the rear courtyard. Slowly, inconspicuously, he paced along the front of the compound, seeing movement in the shadows of the trail. There were storerooms in the back, the last place the bulldozer would reach. Some of the Tibetans had come to save what treasures they could.

He returned to Xie’s side and pointed to a building with a fierce demon painted on its wall at the corner farthest from the storerooms, out of sight of the trail. “The
gonkhang
,” Shan explained, choking his guilt. “The protector chapel should be next.”

Shan watched in silence as Xie gleefully directed the bulldozer into the sturdy little building, saw the demon crumble, the lathe and plaster of the wall burst apart, an odd wooden frame with wooden screw mounts shatter as the blade hit it. The rumble of the machine drowned out the sob that escaped Shan’s throat. He felt his knees giving way, and braced himself against Xie’s sedan. It had not been a protector chapel, it had been a
barkhang
, a traditional printing press. There had been one old printing press left in the region, Kypo had told him, one place where the reverently carved rosewood sutras could still be used. Shan shut his eyes as dozens of ancient printing plates, each a unique treasure, fell from shelves and were crushed under the tread of the bulldozer.

Xie’s fox-covered head bobbed up and down enthusiastically as he watched the destruction, and he called out to one of his deputies before gesturing for Shan to follow him past his limousine. Several chests had been removed from inside, and were lined up by the dump truck.

“You are the expert,” Xie said as he opened the first of the chests.

“I don’t understand.”

“The cults. The factions. The separate cadres within the church. We will need to inventory everything here for our warehouses. Bur first I need you to tell me what they say about the links between the monks of this compound and others nearby.”

So Xie did know something about the Tibetans he regulated. There were several sects of Tibetan Buddhism and affiliated gom-pas supported each other. The director opened the second trunk, which was loaded with ritual implements. “We have people who know the names of all these artifacts,” he boasted.

Shan slowly walked along the chest, lifting some of the implements as he identified them. “
Purba
,” he said, as he raised a ritual dagger, then “a
dorje
, a
drilbu
, a
kangling
, a
damaru
,” indicating a scepter, a bell, a bone trumpet, a skull drum. He looked up to meet Xie’s impatient gaze. “This gompa was one of a kind,” he lied. “It is not affiliated with others here, only some in Nepal and India.” He looked back over the chests, all of which Xie had now opened. Most were only half full. The slow moving dump truck and its heavy load must have been dispatched the day before. The Tibetans in the surrounding hills would have understood. They had already salvaged many of the treasures.

“Still,” Xie observed, “a lost sheep looks for any flock it can find.”

“But the others,” Shan ventured, his voice growing strangely hoarse, “have signed loyalty oaths.” Only one gompa had been targeted for a raid.

“True.”

“Then your mission is successful. You have dealt in a permanent way with those who would not sign.” He gestured to the chests. “You have added artifacts worth several thousand to the government coffers.”

“Still,” Xie said, “this region seems so—” he searched for a word—“fertile.”

Another shudder moved down Shan’s spine.