Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (22 page)

Bones, heart, head. At first everyone had thought he had died from the fall that had crushed so many bones. Then two bullets had been shot into his heart. Shan investigated the third killing of Tenzin by studying the back of his head.

Somehow murder always seemed abstract to Shan until he saw the sign of the deathblow. A dark, empty thing began gnawing inside him as he gazed at the mark at the base of the sherpa’s neck, but the foreboding was quickly replaced by shame. He should have known. He had failed Tenzin, and by doing so had given room for the murderer, then the knobs, to play their games with the people of the hills.

After a moment he spoke into Kypo’s ear, then waited as Kypo disappeared, the Tibetans getting more and more restless, until a minute later Kypo returned from his supply stores holding a foot-long steel pin, pointed at the bottom.

Shan took the pin and extended it for all to see, then pushed back the thick hair at the base of Tenzin’s neck. “He was sleeping at his new advance camp. There’s enough soil and gravel there to use tent stakes like this. Someone came up and sank this one into the back of his neck. It was over instantly—no blood, no pain. Then the killer pulled him from his sleeping bag, dressed him, in his haste putting the boots on the wrong feet, and dropped him over the side.” He glanced at Kypo. “Using a frayed rope certain to break to complete the image of someone who had died in a fall.” It had seemed so obvious that he had died in a fall no one had bothered to ask any questions. Shan looked back at the small puncture at the base of Tenzin’s neck, noticing a speck of soil at the edge of the wound. The pin had probably been taken out of the ground then reinserted after the killer was done.

The villagers reacted as if they had seen Shan himself drive the pin into Tenzin’s spinal cord.

“The mountain people don’t kill each other,” the blacksmith growled. “You outsiders killed him!”

“I didn’t kill him,” Shan shot back, then gestured toward Yates. “This man didn’t kill him.” A man stepped forward, an ax in his raised hand. Yates retreated into the shadows. So much for allies, Shan thought. He eased backward to avoid the man’s swing but then another villager advanced at his flank, his face dark with anger, his hand clutching a short club.

Suddenly the American was back, brandishing a long hoe, swinging it to clear a radius of several feet around Shan.

“We can finish this here!” the blacksmith snarled. “We will have justice for once! A pyre can hold three as easily as one!” He moved forward, followed by the man with the club and the one with an ax.

Suddenly Ama Apte was at Shan’s side, holding out a hand from which hung a necklace with an ivory skull as its pendant. She extended it in an arc, taking in the entire crowd, causing them to step back, then dangled it in front of the blacksmith’s face.

“It’s enough, Ama Apte,” the blacksmith said loudly, though his voice had more pleading than anger in it now.

“It will not end here, nor with Tenzin’s pyre. The mountain is still at work,” Ama Apte declared, then stepped between Shan and Yates, who had lowered his hoe. She lifted Shan’s arm. “This one has been bonded to the dead of the mountain,” she declared, then startled Yates by raising his wrist in her other hand, showing the Tibetans his missing fingertip. “And the mountain has marked this one too,” she declared. “She has plans for them. My dice have confirmed it, this very night.” She kept the arms extended, squeezing them tightly. She smelled of aloe, used by many Tibetans for healing. On the heel of the hand that held Shan was a patch of dried blood. As she moved, there was a soft jingling, from her silver necklaces, and Shan recalled the words of the driver from the ambushed prison bus. When the yeti had gone inside the bus—to steal the prisoner files, Shan now knew—the driver had heard tiny bells.

The astrologer’s challenge was not enough for the angry men in the front, but her words were like magic for the others. Their rancor was gone. Some nodded and melted back into the shadows outside. Kypo slipped between his mother and the blacksmith, fixing the smith with challenge in his face until the bigger man muttered and broke away, taking his companions out into the street.

Shan turned to the dead sherpa’s sister as the chamber emptied. “We will help you wash him again,” he said in an apologetic tone. Kypo turned and soon brought new sticks of incense, his wife basins of water. The sister accepted their help in the preparation but would not let them touch the body again. As Shan and Yates watched from the shadows of the stalls Shan asked the American about the night before Tenzin had died.

“Three sherpas had gone up to scout locations for our staging camps,” the American explained, and offered a familiar description of the strenuous work involved in establishing a new line of support camps above the base camp, testing ice ledges, anchoring safety lines along the most difficult rock faces, trying to locate resting points protected from the frigid, incessant winds of the upper slopes. The three had planned to stay together but sudden blizzard conditions had separated the party on their descent after they had pitched a tent for an upper camp and Tenzin had continued down while the others had given up and gone back to the upper tent for the night. The next morning Tenzin, always the tireless worker, had announced on his radio that he would begin setting up a practice climb for the customers who would have to wait at the camp to acclimatize. When the other sherpas finally arrived they could not find him and radioed Megan, their climb captain. A search was begun from above and below. Two hours later Megan spotted his body in her binoculars. “There were over a hundred people at base camp that night,” Yates explained, “and since the sky had cleared, leaving a bright moon, any of them could have made the climb to the camp where Tenzin was sleeping.”

“The most important question,” Shan mused, “isn’t who could have made the climb, it is why a sherpa who just arrived from Nepal for the season so threatened someone that he had to be killed.”

The bonfire in the square had begun to die as Shan and Yates slipped outside, Shan pointing the way to Ama Apte’s house. They had reached the side of the square when Kypo stepped in front of them. “When did you meet my mother?” he demanded of the American in an unsettled tone.

“I never have, until now,” Yates replied, with a pointed glance toward Shan that said he had not forgotten the strange encounter with her at the base camp. Shan saw that the American was gazing at the truncated finger Ama Apte had raised to the crowd. “It’s nothing,” he added hastily. “She noticed my finger and decided to use it to help quiet the mob.”

As his two companions stared uneasily at each other, a red light flickered in the sky along the southern horizon then disappeared behind a peak. The mountain commandos sometimes patrolled with infrared scanners, and outside the Everest zone were known to shoot at anything that moved within a mile of the border, whether man or beast. Shan watched the light absently, nearly overcome with fatigue, following Kypo toward his mother’s house, past the center square. Half the villagers still lingered there, listening to a man’s harangue about how Religious Affairs had destroyed a farmer’s barley stores because the Bureau suspected he had helped the fugitive monks, how the knobs would do the same to all of them when they came.

Another red light appeared momentarily between two ridges to the north.

Shan, now wide awake and frightened to his core, grabbed Kypo’s arm. “You have to send them home!” he insisted. “Put out the fire and send them home!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The knobs are coming
tonight
, not tomorrow! They want the village worked up, they want resistance so they can justify detention of every man here.”

Kypo raised his lantern close to Shan’s face, searching it as if hoping for a sign of deception, then just shook his head despondently. “It’s gone too far. Some of them have been drinking. They
want
a fight with the knobs.”

“Then your mother—“ “My mother,” Kypo shot back, “has put herself in enough jeopardy tonight.”

A vise seemed to be tightening around Shan’s chest. He knew what Public Security was capable of, but he was probably one of only a few in the village who had seen it firsthand. He stared forlornly at the fire, seeing in his mind’s eye how the destruction of Tumkot would become another of the tragic tales told at campfires, another story of Tibetans battered by a century they hadn’t chosen to live in.

“Then get Gyalo away.”

“What are you talking about?” Kypo protested. “I don’t know—”

“There’s no more time for games. He is at your mother’s house. Get him out, back to Yates’s truck, back to the sunken chamber at my stable. And get me four sober men who can be trusted.”

MAJOR CAO SAID nothing as Shan opened the door and slid behind the wheel of his utility vehicle parked below the village, did not react when four dark figures took up position around the vehicle. He was used to figures in shadow, and would never for an instant have believed anyone but other knobs would be so bold.

Shan put his hands on the wheel, in plain sight, before speaking. “You’re going to call off the raid tonight,” he declared.

Cao’s head snapped up, his hand went to his holster, then he froze as he took notice of the figures outside the truck.

“You’re a dead man, Shan,” he hissed.

“Your disadvantage, Major, is that you don’t understand investigations for the top ranks in Beijing. But I carried them out for twenty years. Everything is in motion, everything is in play, including the investigator. Especially the investigator. They will turn on you in an instant. The number of antisocial Tibetans you arrest won’t matter. Have you asked yourself why they sent you, an investigator from Lhasa, and not someone from Beijing for such an important investigation? You are the failsafe. If things don’t go well you become a conspirator. A few adjustments to your investigation file and suddenly you’re part of the crime.”

“I will start with the bones of your feet,” Cao said. “I will keep you alive for a month or two. But after the first hour you will never walk again.”

“Do you think Madame Zheng is here for the mountain air? Have you even bothered to ask what her role is?”

“An observer.”

“No. She is from the Ministry of Justice. I don’t know her but I know her type. She is credentialed as a judge prosecutor, I wager. And for you that makes her the most dangerous person in the county right now.”

“Ridiculous. She just sits in meetings and takes notes.”

“She will ask for your file. That’s when you know they are beginning to doubt your ability, beginning to consider their own version of the crime.”

There was just enough moonlight for Shan to see the wince on Cao’s face.

“A Public Security bus is ambushed and a state minister killed a stone’s throw away. She knows these events must be related, and every hour you lose pretending otherwise puts you that much closer to disgrace.” Cao seemed to stop breathing for a moment. Shan’s guess about Madame Zheng was right. “You have a few more days at most. Then new reports will be written, your name will go into the file.”

“You are delusional. I have fifteen years with the Bureau. That would never happen.”

“You have all the proof you need that it does.”

Cao’s head moved toward Shan.

“I am that proof. Read my file again.”

Cao was silent for a long moment. “For all I know, you were Tan’s partner in the killing.”

“The other element you don’t appreciate is that there are foreigners here.” As Shan spoke, the right side of the vehicle began to sag. As Shan had instructed, Kypo’s men were releasing air from the tires. It was the subtlest act of resistance but enough to cause Cao to hesitate. He had no way of knowing how many of the shadowy figures lurked in the darkness around his car.

“There’s nowhere you can hide, Shan,” he snarled. “When you attack a Public Security officer your life is forfeit.”

“Pay attention to the subtleties, Major,” Shan replied in a level voice. “At this point in your career they make all the difference. This is just an informal conversation. Let’s call it career counseling. What you are doing tonight will make headlines in the Western press. Climbers and trekkers from America and Europe are all over this area, most with cameras. By noon tomorrow they will be giving interviews by satellite telephone to reporters in their home countries. The jackbooted oppressor attacks a hamlet of peaceful Tibetans, practically in the shadow of Everest, as a pretext so a Public Security bureaucrat can divert attention from his failed investigation. You may be under tremendous pressure now, yet you still have a chance to come out victorious. But your career is over with the first phone call from an embassy to the Minister of Public Security. They will find you a latrine on the Vietnamese border that needs cleaning for the next ten years.”

“My case is finished. I have the murderer. The trial will be next week.”

“No. You and I know you wouldn’t be here tonight if you were finished. You never had to deal with a prisoner who wouldn’t speak. You have to have evidence from some other source. You have to dirty your hands. That’s why you’re here, to test the market for new witnesses.”

“We’ll just include you in the sweep,” Cao spat. “You’ll be lost in the confusion. When you have no papers no one needs to account for you. A nobody can become nothing in an instant.”

Shan gave an exaggerated sigh as he lifted the door handle. “I leave you to your witticisms. I think I told you before you are overeducated for your job. Too much wit, not enough judgment. You fail to grasp the most fundamental truth of those you work for. The higher you aspire, the lower must be the denominator on which you base your actions. I fear for you, Major. You may not survive as long as I do.”