Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (24 page)

When Shan returned to the colonel’s cell, Tan’s expression was oddly triumphant. “I don’t understand your obsession with rearranging facts, Shan,” he said. “When an artist is halfway through his masterwork you can’t just run and up and steal his paints. It’s unbecoming.”

“Cao is no artist. What exactly has he done?”

“He went away for half a day. When he returned he announced he had found the witness he needed to destroy me. He had the monk worked on for a few hours in the back rooms. When it came time for the climax he moved his little opera to this corridor, to the table there in the center so I could hear it all. The Tibetan has confessed to obstructing justice by not coming forward as a witness to the crimes. Cao promised him only a month’s imprisonment, and something for some other monk, a lama who will be released so long as he takes off his robe. So he signed a statement that he saw me with the pistol. Otherwise the lama was to get ten years’ hard labor.”

Shan felt his frail hopes slipping away. Cao had used the old lama from Sarma, the one who had been captured because he insisted on tending to the injured driver.

“Cao made him shout out his confession, like at one of the struggle sessions we used to have, just to be sure I could hear.”

Shan, suddenly feeling weak in the knees, gripped the bars in both hands.

Tan opened the bottle, dumped out several pills and swallowed them. “I think,” the colonel continued, “that Cao was considering a story of more texture, a more interesting tale for the audience back home. But he seems to have changed course. It is to be a simple trial. A forensic report says the victims died from shots from my gun, a witness says he saw me pull the trigger. He has spunk, that little Tibetan. They raised a baton to strike me when I started laughing and he leaped up to block it, and took the blow on his skull.” For a moment Tan hesitated and Shan saw confusion cloud his eyes before derision returned. “The fool.”

“He was apologizing for what he had done.”

Tan frowned. He had no reply.

“There was another death. Director Xie of Religious Affairs. How will such a report explain that killing?”

Tan shrugged. “The guards told me about it. No doubt it will be recorded as an industrial accident.”

“You have to stall him,” Shan said in a plaintive voice. “Tell him there was a conspiracy, suggest that Minister Wu was corrupt, that this was about a conspiracy of bribery reaching high into the government. He will have to pause, think about involving others in Beijing. It will buy us a few days. Tell me where you were. Maybe I can help confirm that you were somewhere else that day.”

Tan gazed without expression at Shan, then his lips formed a thin grin, made crooked by his swollen lips.

“Do you understand nothing I’ve said?” Shan asked. “Another day of this and he’ll have a confession from you. That is the prize he is after.”

Tan turned away to face the wall.

“We don’t have religion in China,” Shan said to his back. “We have confession. For a zealous Party member it is the moment of consecration. When the bullet enters your skull, some pampered niece of a Party official will watch and realize at that moment that the Party is her god. And that, Colonel Tan, becomes the entire point of your life.”

Tan turned back, his lips still curled up in the lightless smile Shan had seen so often in his Lhadrung prison camp.

Realization hit Shan like a sack of stones. He tottered backward, sank onto a nearby bench. “You want to die!” he gasped, burying his head in his hands. “You want the bullet in your head.”

Shan looked up once, twice, three times, each time with a new argument on his tongue, each time meeting the colonel’s crooked sneer. Finally Tan lay down on his pallet, his back to Shan.

Numb with despair, Shan stared at the floor as he shut the door and walked toward the rear exit. He did not at first notice that the Tibetan cleaners were gone until he nearly collided with a knob guard barring his path, automatic rifle slung forward. A single office was illuminated, cigarette smoke hanging in the air before it.

Shan let himself be herded into the office. The face of the man at the desk was hung in shadow above the metal shade of the gooseneck desk lamp, but the fearful expression of the guard told Shan all he needed to know. He lowered himself into the chair in front of the desk as Major Cao leaned forward and shut off a receiver on the desk. Shan’s mouth went dry as he recognized the device. Cao had been listening to his conversation with Tan. “I want the other monks,” Cao declared in a venomous tone. “All of them.”

“I hear there are a lot of Tibetan monks in India.” Shan fought to keep his voice steady. He was in Cao’s world now, an automatic rifle aimed at his spine.

“You know where they are, or can find them. You’re going to get them. You’re going to make sure they give me more witness statements against Tan.” Cao rose and walked around the desk, leaning on the front, barely three feet from Shan, as he lit another cigarette. “You won last night,” the major declared. “No raid. No detention of those villagers. You were right. It was very old school, what I was doing. A blunt instrument when what is needed is a surgeon’s scapel.”

Cao let the words hang in the air. Shan’s gut began to tie itself in a knot.

The major lifted a small silver and turquoise bracelet. “Director Xie put up a noble fight with his killers before he was knocked unconscious. He was still holding on to this when the cowards dragged him before the machine. It has been identified as belonging to the American Megan Ross. You were right after all. The American was at Wu’s killing. She was there, helping Tan. Now she and the monks roam as a criminal gang in the mountains. You are going to bring them to me.”

Cao glanced over his shoulder. For the first time Shan noticed a small figure in a chair in the dim corner of the office. Madame Zheng.

“You know this woman Ross,” Cao observed.

Shan gazed woodenly at the major. What Ama Apte had said was true. The American woman kept coming back to life. It was as if she had a truth to speak, a quest to fulfill, and she would not let a little thing like death interfere with its completion.

“The bracelet was planted. Her belongings are still in a tent at the base camp, anyone could have taken it. You need to find out who met with Xie at Sarma gompa. Why was he there alone?”

“He took a radio call, then ordered his deputies away. No doubt a ruse by the American woman.”

“I told you I would get the real killers. Give me time.”

“A bluff, to persuade me to keep Tan within reach. But you were right about that as well, Comrade Shan. I need him here. With the breakthrough given to us by the martyred Xie we will be able to have our trial in a matter of days.” Cao gestured to the receiver connected to Tan’s cell. “You heard yourself how well it is going. At this rate I am confident the silent colonel will find his tongue when we put him in the dock.”

“You fail to understand him. Letting you shoot him isn’t an act of contrition for Tan. For him it will be a redemption.”

Cao’s eyes flickered with confusion for a moment but he would not be diverted. “The last three monks. I will have them and the American woman. Perhaps all the monks need to say is that they were manipulated by Tan and the American. If so we could be generous, let them avoid the firing squad.”

“And serve what? Twenty, thirty years in the gulag?” It was, Shan realized, driven by the new shape of politics in Tibet. The government preferred not to be seen as unduly harsh on Tibetans.

And certainly it was more palatable to put them away as common criminals, not for political reasons.

Cao shrugged. “They were accomplices to two murders.”

“All they did was get on a bus. I told you before. Look at the bullets from the clinic’s autopsy on the sherpa. They destroy your case.”

Cao smiled. “The day that sherpa’s body was stolen, there was an extraordinary event at the clinic, comrade. A phantom attacked an orderly and stole his identity badge. The badge later showed up on a bus seat. No one recalls much about the phantom. The nurse only remembers another lunatic patient in his underwear. And unfortunately the clinic has not received sufficient funds to install video monitors. It did spend money last year on that new electronic locking system. It tracks every time a security badge is used to open a door. The phantom had the run of the entire clinic. He could have taken drugs, lab equipment, surgical devices. But all he did was enter one room. I went back to the clinic today, to speak with security there. Imagine my surprise when I was shown the names of the inmates in that room.” Cao took a long draw on his cigarette and looked down. “I will have that woman and the monks, Shan.”

Shan’s tongue seemed to have difficulty moving. “He isn’t really . . .” he murmured, then desolation froze his tongue.

“Not your son? Of course he is,” Cao said in a gloating voice. “The records confirm it. Shan Ko. Not much family resemblance but his file is the spitting image of his father’s. A troublemaker, unable to accept authority, too clever for his own good. In desperate need of reform.”

“He isn’t really sick.” The words came in a tiny, hoarse voice. “Tan sent him there for punishment.”

Cao laughed.

“I have no idea where the monks are. Do you think they would trust a Chinese?” Shan asked.

Cao leaned across the desk and lifted a small stack of papers. “Experimental surgery is being pioneered by the brave doctors of our clinic.” He dropped the top paper onto Shan’s lap. “So far it has been extraordinarily effective at curing antisocial behavior.”

A black worm seemed to crawl through Shan’s heart as he read the memo, a report from the yeti factory to a medical research agency in Beijing. The procedure was called cerebral pasteurization. It consisted of drilling a dozen holes into the skull and inserting red-hot wires to cauterize pockets of brain cells.

“Your son is scheduled for the procedure in forty eight hours,” Cao announced. “Bring me the monks,” he declared with an icy gaze, “or in the name of socialist progress we will steam his brain.”

SHAN WA L K E D I N the darkness without knowing, without seeing, something inside directing him to his quarters long enough to lift a tattered sack from a peg on the wall then taking him up the half-mile path to the ledge above town where he sometimes meditated. He lowered himself to the ground, facing the south, the massive moonlit peaks of the Himalayas glowing along the horizon.

He was a breathing shell. There was nothing left inside but a black emptiness. Everything he had done had been for his son but all his actions had steadily, inexorably condemned Ko to a living death. He was no closer to the killer, no closer to stopping the killing, no closer to understanding the strange drama the Americans had been involved in. He had stirred up Public Security against the villagers and by encouraging the monks to flee from the bus he might have simply ensured their destruction. He gazed with an unfamiliar sense of fear toward Everest, sensing that he was trapped in some tormenting zone where the wrath of the mountain from above overlapped with the wrath of Public Security from below.

He was not aware of willing his hands to move, only watched as they lit a small fire from the wood he kept stored there, then extract a bundle of worn yarrow sticks from the sack. He stared at the throwing sticks, used by generations of his family for meditation on the verses of the Tao, then tried to will himself to start stacking them in piles, to get lost in the ancient ritual, as his father had taught him, to push away all distraction, all torment. But something kept pushing through, past the Tao. Other verses came into his mind, those of the old Chinese poets, as if his father were reaching out to him with a different lesson.

Su tung-po had been a Sung dynasty official who retreated into poetry and Buddhism after being exiled for offending the emperor. A thousand years earlier Su had written a verse about mountains on a wall at the then-ancient Xilin temple. As Shan looked out to the shimmering peaks of the Himalayas he spoke the words, and then, with a catch in his throat, spoke them again. He could hear his father’s voice over his own.

Regarded from one side, an entire range
from another, a single peak.

Far, near, high, low, all the peaks
different from the others.

If the true face of the mountain
cannot be known
It is because the one looking at it
is standing in its midst.

He closed his eyes, repeating the words again, and again, very slowly. Eventually they triggered a memory of a day long ago when his father had begun teaching him about the Tao and the poets with the words “Let us speak about the way of the world,” and then another, when they had sat on a rice paddy levee watching winter stars, in violation of the curfew of their reeducation camp. His father had told him of a monk he had known who, in the peculiar blend of Taoism and Buddhism that prevailed in much of China, believed in reincarnation, but both prospectively and retroactively, so that rebirth could be sometime in the past. Shan and his father had lain under the night sky speaking about who in the past they might become, usually settling on hermit scholars or renegade Sung dynasty poets. In prison he had passed many nights lying in the dark, in near starvation, lost in visions of himself and his father in another life.