Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (18 page)

Shan gave an exaggerated shrug and gestured to the amulet, still in Yates’s hand. “I guess we have proved the gau doesn’t work on foreigners. Or maybe it’s lost its power after all these centuries.”

“Your boss is going to be very unhappy when he finds out I won’t be doing business with him.”

“But we found that missing body. Porters from the village are already arriving.”

“I was thinking more about whether I want to work with you.”

“The better question,” Shan rejoined, “is whether they will want to work with someone who steals from them, then insults them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Taking the deities is bad enough. But giving them back damaged, that’s demeaning.”

The ember that had been smoldering in the American’s eyes was about to ignite. He pointed to the entry. “Get out!”

“I found the instrument you use to spy inside the statutes. Now all I need is a high-power drill. Where’s your workshop?” Shan paused, suddenly remembering the structure of cartons in the outer tent. He stood and backed away, ready to dodge the fist that Yates seemed about to throw at him. “I understand how the government handles these matters, Mr. Yates. Write a confession about the thefts and the murders. I’ll hold it for a day, long enough for you to drive across to Nepal.”

The American’s fury seemed to paralyze him as Shan slipped out between the blankets. He darted to the carton structure and began shoving the outer cartons away, quickly revealing a narrow passageway between the stacked boxes.

“No!” came a frightened gasp from behind him. Yates leaped at Shan, arms outstretched to grab him just as, from the corner of his eye, Shan saw movement at the entry.

“Shan!” Constable Jin stepped inside the tent. “Where are you, you bastard?”

Shan pushed forward, reaching a small, dark chamber in the center of the block of boxes as Yates seized him by shoulder, desperately trying to pull him away.

“Shan!” Jin called again. The constable began walking toward the boxes.

Three Tibetan men in tattered, soiled robes looked up at Shan with terrified expressions. Yates was hiding the fugitive monks.

Chapter Nine

SHAN SPUN ABOUT and rammed his shoulder against Yates, shoving him out of the passage, lashing out sideways with his arms to collapse the entry to the hidden chamber before pushing the confused American, toward the constable. Yates stumbled, landing in a pile of long limbs and ragged hair at Jin’s feet.

“This foreigner,” Shan declared, with a furtive glance toward the cartons to make certain they gave no evidence of the hollow inside, “is a smuggler.” He hovered over Yates, as if to prevent his escape. “I have discovered that he brought several crates of food into our country and declared them as climbing equipment that would be reexported after the season. Evading the payment of customs fees is a crime against the People’s Republic.”

Jin seemed a bit frightened, glancing uneasily from Shan to Yates. Then he rose to the occasion as Shan began carrying full boxes from the front of the stack and dropping them at his feet. A case of powdered chocolate. A case of energy bars. A case of oatmeal.

“A serious crime,” Jin affirmed with a new air of authority as, with a tentative finger, he pushed open the top flap of a carton. “Smugglers go to prison in our country. If you are lucky, Mr. Yates, you will only be fined and denied future entry.”

“We can wait until we return to town to contact the Ministry of Tourism,” Shan stated in a sober tone.

“Tourism?” Jin asked uncertainly.

“At least three climbing expeditions will have to be cancelled,” Shan added. “But I know that won’t stop you from doing the right thing, Constable. And of course there’s the notification to Public Security.”

Jin’s face clouded. “I am fully familiar with procedures,” he interjected. The constable glanced nervously out the entry, toward the main track of the camp, where his truck was parked. Shan brought another box to the pile. Dried fruit. The constable took a step outside, surveyed the compound and returned, his chest inflated. “Perhaps I may be able to handle this administratively,” he suggested in an inviting tone. “But the contraband must be confiscated,” he declared. “You understand it is my duty, Mr. Yates.”

Yates settled into one of the folding chairs, looking duly contrite. “How am I going to feed my customers?” he asked, finally taking his cue.

“You should have thought about that when you first decided to cheat the People’s Republic,” Jin chided.

Yates slumped over, hanging his head.

Jin victoriously escorted Shan as he carried the cartons to the constable’s vehicle, then offered a conspiratorial grin as he climbed inside.

Shan watched the dust plume as the truck disappeared down the barren valley toward Rongphu gompa, then turned back to the supply tent to see Yates at its entrance, shouting at a Tibetan woman in a black dress who was walking briskly away from a red tent a hundred feet away.

“You! Hey!” Yates yelled, taking several steps toward the woman as she raised one of the baskets used by the porters to her shoulder, then halted to look back at the small tent. “It’s Megan’s tent,” he explained as Shan reached his side, then broke away to follow the figure in the black dress.

The woman did not turn but, seeming to sense her pursuer, lowered her head, hastening toward the maze of tents that marked the center of the makeshift international village. Yates shot across a low pile of gravel to intercept her, reaching the head of the path she hurried down, blocking it, waiting with crossed arms to confront her.

When she stopped ten feet from the American and raised her oddly fierce countenance Shan almost called out Ama Apte’s name, but the words died away as he saw the strange flood of emotion on the astrologer’s face. Her face went blank for a moment as she looked at Yates, then contorted in confusion, even fear, before shifting into a small, worried grin. The American wavered, as if intimidated by the woman’s intense emotion, and said nothing more as she pressed her hands together in a traditional leave-taking gesture, then, with a remarkable burst of speed broke off to the right, over another mound of gravel, and disappeared into the throng of porters.

“What the hell was that about?” Yates asked as he returned to Shan. “She was in Megan’s tent.”

“You haven’t met Ama Apte?”

“The astrologer? Never did.” He looked back toward Megan Ross’s tent, as if thinking of investigating further, then shrugged. “She and Megan are friends,” he added, then motioned Shan back into the supply tent.

He followed the American back into the entry to the hiding place, which Yates had already rebuilt. The fugitive monks gazed fearfully at Shan as he knelt in front of them, studying each in turn, looking for injuries. Each clutched his gau tightly, with whitened knuckles, and each of the gaus, Shan saw, was an ornate box with intricate lotus blossoms worked in silver. He recognized the young one with the scar on his chin who had lingered by the bus with the old lama.

“I mean no harm,” Shan said in Tibetan. “Hiding among foreigners was very clever,” he offered. “The sherpas helped you?”

The monks’ only answer was to look toward Yates.

“The only risks I want the sherpas to take is above twenty thousand feet, juggling oxygen containers for my wheezing customers,” the American stated in a flat voice.

Shan looked back and forth from the monks to Yates. “My God,” he said in an astonished whisper, “you speak Tibetan.”

“You keep stealing one secret after another from me,” the American replied, a trace of resentment in his voice.

Shan could count on one hand the number of Westerners he had met who had taken the trouble to learn Tibetan. He replayed in his mind his prior encounters with the American. “Tsipon doesn’t know,” he concluded. Shan reminded himself of the conversation in which Tsipon had switched from Tibetan to slander the American.

“He and I do fine in Chinese. No need to complicate our relationship.”

A dozen questions leaped to mind but a movement at his side caused him to turn away. The monks were folding and tying the sleeping bags they had sat on, as if preparing for travel, glancing nervously at the strange Chinese in their midst as they worked. He raised his hand, palm open. “There is no need to leave. I only have some questions about what happened after you went up the slope that day.”

The youngest monk paused, lifting the solitary candle closer to Shan’s face. “You’re the one!” he exclaimed, then turned and whispered urgently to his companions..

“The one?” Yates asked suspiciously.

“He was there,” the young monk explained. “Just after the rocks hit the bus. He made me understand we had to flee. He pointed out the safe way to go. Without him we would have been taken by those soldiers again.”

Shan glimpsed the confusion on the American’s face before leaning forward toward the monks, taking the candle, and holding it close to each of them in turn. They were bruised and scratched, their robes in tatters. A hollow desolation had begun to settle on their faces. It was an expression he knew all too well. The three Tibetans had probably spent their entire lives since boyhood in their remote, sheltered gompa. It was entirely possible they had never seen a gun, had never been inside a motor vehicle, that the only outsiders they had ever experienced had been the occasional bureaucrats from the Bureau of Religious Affairs who had tried to tame them for Beijing, until they had been herded at gunpoint into a prison bus.

Now here they were, hidden by an American, surrounded by cartons of strange supplies in a camp of Western climbers bundled in gaudy nylon and down, raucously speaking half a dozen languages. They had been stripped of their prayer beads, stripped of the peaceful, prayerful existence they had carried on in the high ranges, cast out into an alien world.

Shan bent, silently lifted a large, flat pebble from the ground, then turned to Yates and extracted the felt-tip pen extending from the American’s shirt pocket. He quickly wrote on the stone and handed it to the young monk.

“A mani stone!” Yates exclaimed.

Shan had written a mantra on the stone, the mani prayer to the Compassionate Buddha that could be found on stones of all sizes, all over Tibet, left at shrines, stacked in walls leading along pilgrims’ paths. He held the pen up in silent query toward Yates, who offered a nod, then handed it to the young monk, who enthusiastically began scooping more pebbles from the ground.

“I had a mule that day with a dead man on it,” Shan stated after the monk had made two more stones. “Did you see it?”

The monk nodded. “There was a mule on the trail we cut across above the road. It was wandering up the mountain, eating grass along the way.”

“Was its burden intact?”

“With its burden,” the monk replied with a nod. As he made another prayer stone his brow wrinkled. “Later, when we had climbed for an hour, I looked down and saw it like a little toy creature far below. A toy horse was coming up behind it with a toy man chasing the horse. But the man stopped when he reached the mule.”

“What happened?” Shan asked.

“We kept climbing, faster than before. Some of the soldiers had begun shooting into the rocks, as if we were wild game.” One of the two older monks leaned toward the novice, whispering. “We must find our friends, the other members of our gompa,” the novice announced.

Shan and Yates exchanged an uneasy glance.

“Ten of you were on that bus,” Shan said. “Six of the others have been recaptured. Another was killed.”

Small moans of despair came from the monks. They clutched their gaus again.

“The old one, at the side of the road?” the young monk asked, his voice cracking.

“They took him away. He’ll be in a prison somewhere by now, far from here.”

The novice sank back against the wall of cartons. One of the other monks, the oldest, placed a hand on the young one’s shoulder. “We will begin anew at our gompa, when things have quieted down,” the monk offered in a consoling tone, then explained to Shan and Yates. “We are in a line of caretakers who have kept the old shrines there for more than four hundred years. The books Sarma gompa makes have been used all over Tibet for centuries.”

Shan’s mouth opened but he had no words. “Your gompa,” He stated at last, his voice gone hoarse, “has passed on.” He could not bear to meet the puzzled gazes of the three monks.

“Passed on?” asked the oldest.

“The government went back with machinery,” was all Shan could say.

The silence was that of a death rite. Yates cursed. Another anguished cry escaped the throat of the youngest monk, and he squeezed one of his new mani stones until his knuckles were white. With trembling hands, one of the older monks formed a mudra, an invocation of the protector goddess.

Yates stared intensely at the ground, his eyes filled with pain. Shan could see in his eyes that, like Shan, he felt a share of the guilt for the gompa’s destruction.

“That old Buddha,” the older monk said at last. “Does he still live?”

Shan recalled the painting on the rock face at the rear of the gompa. “The last time I saw, he was untouched.”

The monk nodded gratefully and spoke in a serene tone. “Now he will be able to see the mother mountain without any obstruction.”

The American’s face flooded with emotion. He looked at Shan with a mournful, pleading expression.

“I need buttons,” Shan said to him in English.

“Buttons?”

“I need three hundred twenty-four buttons. And some of the thread used to repair canvas tents.”

Yates stood warily, shaking his head but gesturing Shan to lead the way out of the chamber. They searched together in the big chest of tools, then in several smaller plastic chests that contained miscellaneous supplies. When they found the heavy thread but no buttons, Shan asked for washers, but they could only find two dozen, all in the tool chest. He studied the stack of cartons, then pointed to one near the top.

“You want rolls of candy?” the American asked incredulously.

“And a tin plate,” Shan said.

When he returned to the hidden chamber, Yates a step behind, Shan carried the spool of heavy thread and twenty rolls of candy rings. He broke three rolls open, dumping their contents onto the plate. The oldest monk, understanding immediately, reached out with a grin and started tying a red candy circle to one end of the thread.

“
Malas
,” Shan explained to Yates. “They need to have prayer beads. One hundred eight to the string. In my prison,” he added, “the old Tibetans sometimes made them out of fingernail cuttings.”

They left the monks, working on their makeshift malas, Yates leading Shan in silence back to his makeshift quarters. The American lit his little stove, produced two metal mugs, two black tea bags, and brewed each of them a cup of tea before speaking.

“What the hell do you want, Shan?”

“An innocent man is being held for those murders. I mean to find the truth.”

“That man Tan is a colonel in the army, head of some gulag county, one of those that goes around destroying monasteries. They say dozens of monks have died in his prison. No one would call a man like that innocent.”

“I mean to find the truth,” Shan repeated.

“And you want me to help free a monster like that? Not likely. You were a prisoner yourself once they say.”

“I was his prisoner.”