Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (29 page)

Shan waited for the rest of the sentence then realized there was no more. “It’s hard to know,” he agreed.

“An old shepherd knew my father,” Jomo said, “before . . . before everything happened. As a boy I used to run away every month or two when my father got really drunk, because he would beat me, and the shepherd gave me shelter. He told me about my father the monk, said he had been a good man who came to the herding camps each spring to bless the new lambs. He would sit at their campfires and recite sutras and the old poems for hours, then sing songs with the herding families. He said no matter what my father did, that was the man I should see in my mind, that he had been a very holy man, probably would have become the abbot when he got older, that the holy man was just lost inside him somewhere.”

“I have a friend who is a lama,” Shan whispered. “He says the holy things are still everywhere, just harder to see. Consider it a test, he says.”

They stared at the little steel Buddha. Shan found a walnut in his pocket and put it with the other offerings.

“It’s a green truck,” Jomo suddenly declared. “One of the big heavy ones. Some of those with two drivers keep going through the night, switching drivers. But when those two stop for gas they usually park with the rigs that spend the night here. Sometimes they pay for women in the back where the cots are. Sometimes they walk down the road as if to meet someone. Sometimes their rig stays parked for twenty-four hours. They’re due tonight.”

“How would they know when to go meet someone?”

“Some kind of signal I think. Sometimes just before dusk I see a yellow bucket turned upside down at the side of the road, a hundred yards before the turnoff. They’re always angry, often drunk. They’d rather stab you than look at you.” He turned back toward his makeshift altar and touched the top of the Buddha as if for a blessing, and said no more.

Yates, restless as ever, did not need to hear Shan’s news. As Shan passed the closest truck to the teashop entrance the American pulled him into the shadows and pointed toward the fuel pumps. Two tall, square men clad in black sweatshirts were fueling and cleaning the cab of a large green truck.

“Christ, they’re huge,” Yates muttered.

“Manchurians,” Shan ventured. One of the men paced along the tires, hitting them with a wooden baton.

“So now what?” Yates asked. “Make a citizen’s arrest? Stand in front of their truck until they confess?”

“You are going to wait while I go inside,” Shan replied. “And when I return you are going to cover your face, walk behind me, and not say a word.”

The man with the baton jumped on the running board and the truck began to move, easing into the ranks of vehicles parked for the night.

Yates did not protest, kept his eyes on the men who climbed off of the truck as Shan darted toward the teashop. Inside, he checked through a window that Yates had not moved then asked for a telephone. Five minutes later the American followed Shan in the direction of the green truck. Shan did not aim directly at the truck, but at two strangers who sat at a concrete table at the edge of the gravel parking lot, playing mah-jongg by the light of a lantern. Shan stepped into the circle of light. “We’ve got good artifacts,” he announced in a loud voice. “The real thing. Triple your money in Shigatse or Lhasa.”

The men at the table looked up in surprise then cast worried glances toward the green truck. “The real thing,” Shan repeated. “We control the artifact trade in this town.” He watched the truck, saw movement in its shadows. When he looked back the two men had disappeared, leaving their tiles and lantern still on the table.

A rough, seething voice emerged from the darkness before Shan could make the black shape moving toward him. “You have shit,” the man spat. “You have nothing for sale!” Another shape appeared, brandishing a tire baton.

“Everything is for sale,” Shan replied, “Opportunity abounds, for one yellow bucket. What’s the price of bulldozing a man into a stone wall?”

They sprang like cats, swinging their batons. Shan sidestepped the first assault and Yates charged into the second man with a shoulder to his chest, knocking him to the ground. But the batons moved with determination. A blow to the back of his head knocked Yates to his knees. For every swing Shan dodged, another connected with his arms and back. Yates was on the ground, the second man straddling him, the baton swept back for a bone-crushing blow, when the headlights of a moving truck illuminated the American’s head, no longer covered by his hood.

“
Bai ren!
” the man spat.
Foreigner!
The baton froze in midair, the man’s partner muttered a curse, and as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone.

Shan and Yates, numb from the encounter, sat on the gravel, blood trickling down the American’s cheek as the green truck, its trailer unhitched, revved its engine and began rolling away.

“That went well,” Yates observed dryly in English as he rubbed his head.

Shan, looking up as he finished writing the license plate number of the truck on his forearm, wanted to say it had gone as well as could be expected, when he saw the green truck stop. The driver spoke with a man at the fuel pumps. A figure moved in front of Shan, blocking his view. It was Jomo, his face full of fear, his mouth opening and shutting as if he could not find the words he meant to say.

“Christ! No!” Yates shouted and staggered to his feet as the green truck made a U turn and began speeding in reverse toward Yates’s utility vehicle. Shan leapt up, grabbing the American’s arm as he took a step forward. Yates’ resistance lasted only a moment. They stood, transfixed, as the rear of the truck slammed into Yates’ vehicle, crumbling the fender, jerking forward and back again, pushing the vehicle into the boulder behind it. Then suddenly it was on fire. The green truck swerved away, steering toward them as it gained speed, blaring its air horn as they leaped to the side. It roared past them, out onto the highway.

The American took a step toward his burning truck.

“Yates, wait!” Shan insisted.

“For what?” the American shot back. “I have things in there. I have got to—” But his protest died away as he heard the sirens coming down the road from town.

“Let bystanders tell them what happened,” Shan said.

“What the hell did you do inside?” Yates growled at Shan. “They never could have gotten the alarm this fast.”

His question was answered a moment later. Two black utility vehicles with blinking lights sped into the compound, spraying gravel as they slammed on their brakes and Public Security soldiers poured out of the first. From the second stepped Major Cao and the diminutive Madame Zheng. Shan watched as a witness spoke excitedly with Cao, then pointed at Shan and Yates.

“You must have a death wish,” Yates muttered as the major marched toward them.

Shan said nothing as Cao erupted, demanding to know what Shan had done, did not react when Cao slapped him. He extended his forearm with the license numbers written on it toward the knob officer. “A green truck left here minutes ago. In it you will find the men who killed Director Xie.”

“Idiot!” Cao snarled. “You don’t think I see that everything you do is to distract me from the truth?

“Then why do you suppose they destroyed this American’s truck?” Shan asked in a level voice.

Madame Zheng was behind Cao now, staring toward the burning vehicle. A soldier ran up to her with a section of the shattered bumper, bearing a bumper sticker, with the words, in English,
Climbing
Rocks!
She stared at it, as if it were a vital piece of evidence, and was still staring at it when two knobs appeared from the shadows of the parked trucks dragging a limp body between them.

“Trying to sabotage the fuel pumps as well,” one of the soldiers declared.

Shan’s heart leaped to his throat as he recognized Jomo, his face battered and bleeding, a dark stain down his shirt. The knobs too had batons.

“Who else is with you?” the knob demanded, raising his stick at Jomo.

Shan sprang forward, covering the Tibetan, taking the blow to his own shoulder as the knob struck.

“It wasn’t like that,” Jomo cried as the soldiers tried to pry Shan away. “The man at the fuel station shoved me against a pump. I threw a can of oil at him and it burst open.” Shan saw now that the stain was indeed oil. “I only wanted to stop him.”

“Stop him from what?” Shan asked, dropping to his knees by the Tibetan.

Jomo pulled several sheets of paper from inside his shirt. “He paid me to draw a map of the roads between here and Everest, with the villages and old shrines marked. I thought he wanted to make offerings.” He spoke only to Shan, his face contorted not with pain but with shame. “But then I found him selling copies, selling them to some of the truckers. I threw his money back at him, demanded he give me the maps.”

Cao took a step forward, then halted as he saw the attentive way Madame Zheng listened.

“Why?” Shan asked. “Who needs maps?”

“It’s those monks. The truckers in the dormitory are all excited. Word spreads fast among those kind. Someone is paying a bounty for the escaped monks, or their gaus, those unique ones with lotus flowers from Sarma gompa.”

“Why the gaus?”

“Because the monks will never give them up. If someone brings in one of those gaus the monk will be dead. It’s the proof, for the bounty.”

The fight went out of the knobs. They gazed at Major Cao as Shan pulled Jomo out of their grip. But it was not Major Cao who spoke.

The silent Madame Zheng finally found her voice, the cool, peremptory one of a woman who would brook no discussion of her commands. “The American is bleeding, Major. Get your medical kit.”

Cao glared at Shan, seemed about to strike him again, then retreated as Madame Zheng stepped to Shan’s side.

Shan spoke matter-of-factly to the woman from Beijing as he watched Cao jog away. “I want to see Colonel Tan,” he stated. “Now. I want him to have a meal, a real meal, sitting in one of the front offices with a window onto the street.” Zheng gazed at Shan attentively without responding. “I want the major to stand outside the window, under a streetlight, where Tan can see him.”

Chapter Fourteen

TAN DID NOT notice Shan at first when they brought him into the office, washed and wearing tattered but clean prisoner denims. Although the guards had removed the chains on his feet, he moved into the room with the half steps of the prisoner accustomed to hobbles. He halted, looking down his feet, then saw Shan. His face flushed and he looked away.

“The barber came today,” Tan announced in a flat tone as he reached the window and, as Shan knew he would, as every prisoner did after days in a cell, looked up at the sky. After a moment he gestured to the plate and steaming cartons of food on the desk. “I thought I would be allowed to select my own last meal.”

“Consider this a dress rehearsal,” Shan said. He studied the colonel. Although he stood almost straight, something in his back was preventing him from reaching his usual ramrod posture. A finger was splinted and taped. The tips of four other fingers were covered with bandages. The left side of his face was gray-green with old bruises.

Tan sat with a ceremonial air, letting Shan dish out the food as his left hand squeezed his right, to stop it from twitching. Shan watched him eat, wary that his words might ignite the colonel’s instinctive rancor. After several minutes of ravenously consuming the chicken, noodles, and vegetable rolls Tan paused and, without looking at Shan, pushed the container with the remaining rolls toward him. Shan lifted the container without a word and ate.

When Shan finally found his tongue he spoke into the empty container. “I was only a boy when the Red Guard first appeared,” he said in a low voice. “They started with those sound trucks cruising along the streets, shouting out the Chairman’s verses or demands for people to assemble for political instruction. Sometimes they ordered everyone to surrender things. Books. Anything made in a foreign country. Any correspondence from abroad. Photos of foreigners. I remember an old man down the hall who had a wooden figure of a horse maybe ten inches high, his pride and joy, sent by a cousin who had gone to live in America. They had a trial for that horse in the street, condemned it as a reactionary and beheaded it with an ax. I kept wanting to laugh but my mother was crying. She put her hand over my mouth. After that whenever the soundtrucks came, my mother burst into tears.”

Tan’s hand absently went to his shirt pocket and came away empty. Shan stepped to the door, spoke to the guard, and a moment later a package of cigarettes and matches were tossed onto the desk.

“I wasn’t supposed to be one of them,” the colonel said after he lit a cigarette. “I was just a soldier, a corporal at one of the new nuclear test facilities, at the edge of the desert north of Tibet. They came through in convoys of trucks, with orders from Beijing to go south and construct a new socialist order in the land of the Buddha. It was like they were going on an extended vacation, a party on wheels. They sang songs about the Chairman, held rallies that went on for hours. They scared the hell out of the officers but we were under orders from the Chairman himself to cooperate. They got anything they wanted. Food. Blankets. Weapons, and men who knew how to use them. I was told to escort them to Lhasa. They stopped in towns along the route, organizing processions of old men and women and encouraging their children and grandchildren to throw eggs at them. They forced people into town squares and renamed all their children with Chinese names or conducted struggle sessions with landlords. When I started to turn back in Lhasa their commanders told me the army was for old men, that I could be part of the past or part of the future, that I could be one of the anointed of Mao if I chose.”

He turned and faced the window, still speaking in a wooden voice. “They were more organized by then, with brigades and a command structure. The commander of my brigade demanded the most difficult assignment, so we could prove our love for the Great Helmsman.” Tan’s hand twitched again, flinging ash against the glass.

“Tingri County.”

Tan nodded. “It was a wilderness, a wild frontier. No maps. No real organized government. Vicious yetis and snow leopards that swallowed men whole, if you believed the stories. A reactionary with a gun behind every rock. The town was nothing like this,” he said with a gesture toward the street. “It was mostly just the monastery and a few shops. Army patrols came through sometimes, often with wounded men, sometimes with trucks stacked with the dead from an ambush. They wouldn’t stay. Our Youth Brigade scared them as much as the reactionaries did.

“We settled in, took over the main halls of the monastery. But we didn’t touch the monks, not at first. Our commander was too smart for that. If we had attacked the main monastery first the local people would have wiped us out. She knew we had to do things in stages. Destroy the small fish and the big ones have nothing to feed on, she liked to say. We moved into the ranges.” Tan paused, fidgeting with the frayed cuff of his denim shirt. “I thought you said I’d have my uniform in the end.”

Shan knew this was the only reason Tan was talking. He was certain he was going to die. “It has to be cleaned.”

Tan nodded.

“So Commander Wu began to engage the rebels,” Shan suggested.

“I don’t recall saying it was Wu.”

“I’ve seen the old records, Colonel.”

Tan shrugged. “After the first year we got more equipment, had soldiers assigned to us. No one would say no to her. She had the energy of wildcat, she was smart, she was beautiful. She made me a lieutenant, in charge of her military operations, enticed me into her bed. We would go into the mountains and make the local people dismantle their own religious buildings, every shrine, every little monastery, and organize new cooperatives, hold struggle sessions with all the senior monks and landowners, discipline anyone who resisted. We were gods, she would say to me at night when we lay together.”

Tan took a long draw on his cigarette, exhaling slowly. “We were children,” he said in a whisper, then looked out the window, his gaze lingering on the figure of Major Cao, who leaned against a car on the opposite side of the street. Shan did not miss the subtle relaxation in the muscles of his jaw, the reaction he expected when Tan saw his interrogator was outside the building. “Who would have thought that she and I would come back after all these years to die here?”

“Were there foreigners in the mountains?” Shan asked.

Tan shrugged again. “Foreign equipment. There were always rumors that Americans were coming, that Americans were being diverted from Vietnam and would parachute onto every mountain. She got film footage of the war in Vietnam and made us watch it, again and again, so we would know the imperialist enemy.” He drew deeply on his cigarette, blew the smoke toward Cao outside. “I never saw any foreigners. It was bad enough with just the rebels. They were magnificent. Four Rivers, Six Ranges, they called their army. They were eagles swooping down to engage fields of crows. Disappearing into their secret mountain nests. Climbing like mountain goats. Coming out of snowstorms like ghosts. But we could always call in more troops, always shoot more Tibetans on suspicion of collaboration. An eagle might defeat the first hundred crows, and the next hundred, but when the hundreds keep coming eventually they will be picking eagle bones.”

“And you were lord of the crows.”

“Deputy lord of the crows,” Tan corrected, and lit another cigarette.

“You had a different kind of cigarette back then,” Shan observed as Tan exhaled a plume of smoke.

Tan winced. “She called it a symbol of class struggle. At one struggle session with old monks she rolled up prayers and forced them to smoke them like cigars. After a while it became something of a habit. She passed them out to everyone on the tribunals.”

“When you arrived at the hotel, she wasn’t receiving any visitors, so you found a way to make sure she knew it was you. Why did you want to see her?”

Tan shrugged. “It had been over thirty years.”

“You could have had lunch together. Instead you sent her a rolled-up peche page and met in her room.”

Tan faced the window. “She sent me a letter last year, saying she had never married, that she and I had been married to the People’s Republic. I thought she might have changed, mellowed.” He glanced back at Shan. “I seem to recall you were married once.”

“My wife started out mellow. Then she married the government.” Shan saw the beginning of one of the cold grins he had often seen on Tan’s face but it ended in a grimace.

“She had covered her lamp like some teenager. There was a bottle of wine. She always expected tribute. In the last year of the brigade she started demanded payment from villagers to spare their homes from destruction.” Tan shrugged again. “As soon as I saw her, she began rattling off statistics, of the number of employees she had in her ministry, her budget, the foreign exchange earnings her work brought in. She began drinking, urging me to join her. I told her I needed to go. She unbuttoned her blouse. She said we should play like the old days, like we had learned to do in this very town. I told her I was tired from the long drive. That’s when she took my pistol, to play with. She used to carry one of those heavy American pistols we captured from the rebels, using it as a gavel at the tribunals, and for executions when the Hammer and Lightning Brigade took prisoners. She put it under her pillow and said I would have to come back for it the next night when I was rested.”

Tan paused and inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “Why did he do that, that monk in the cell? Why would he leap out to take the blow meant for me?”

“It was his way of acknowledging the truth. He knew you didn’t deserve it. And he doubted if you could take many more blows.”

Tan shook his head. “The fool.”

“What happened in the end?” Shan asked after a long silence. “How were the rebels finally beaten?”

Tan turned back toward the window, his face clouding. “Damn you! What are you doing to me? I don’t talk like this to people.”

“We used to talk about death all the time in prison, not with fear but with curiosity. It was among us all the time, it was like an old companion. A herder in our barracks told us that when a man senses death getting close a door opens inside his spirit and releases the most interesting surprises, that old forgotten truths will find their way out. When he lay dying, he kept talking about a white yak he had seen as a boy, said that he could see it flying down from a cloud to take him away. He had half the barracks watching the sky, trying to spot it.”

Tan watched Major Cao, who paced along the sidewalk. Cao began yelling at a Tibetan boy approaching on a bicycle, ordering him into the street. When the confused boy did not comply Cao kicked the bike as it passed, catapulting the boy over the handlebars, smashing the bike into a light pole. The boy pulled himself up, glanced at Cao with terror in his eyes and ran into the night.

Tan clenched his jaw. “I don’t want him touching my body afterward.”

“I don’t expect to be invited to the occasion,” Shan observed.

“They usually have a cleanup squad,” Tan said in a distant voice. “They take a picture before they dispose of the body. It’s the last thing that goes in the file.”

“I could notify your family. A brother? A cousin? An old neighbor?”

“There is no one. There’s you.” He glanced at Shan self-consciously. “Not that you’re a friend,” he hastened to add. “It’s just that you’re . . . reliable. An honorable enemy.”

“What happened in the end?” Shan tried again. “Where the rebels were finally defeated.”

“We wore them out. The American government stopped supplying them. If a village supported the rebels we bulldozed it. If a herder gave them food we machine gunned his herd. That Tibetan leader in India summoned them across the border, sending a tape of a speech asking them to lay down their arms.”

“You mean the Dalai Lama,” Shan said. The name was taboo to officials in Tibet.

“The Dalai Lama,” Tan agreed in a whisper, then repeated the name with a perverse, oddly pleased expression. The two men had entered new territory, someplace they had never been. “There was a last group,” Tan continued, “the core, the best fighters, maybe twenty or thirty men and women. Wu hated them. She was impatient for her final victory, for the destruction of the big monastery here in town because the monks there continued to hold public ceremonies in defiance of her orders. She kept asking me when I would have their bodies for her to display in the town square. But they always retreated high into the mountains, into their eagle nests. They had hiding places, where they disposed of the bodies of their comrades so we would never know the effects of our bullets. None of the Youth Brigade would join me, they were getting scared. They knew so little of real fighting that they were often killed when they tried to engage the rebels. But by then there were border commandos being deployed here. I was given two companies of real soldiers. Finally we reached the rebels through the back door.”

The words hung in the air. “Are you saying,” Shan asked, “that there was a traitor?”

“Officially,” Tan replied, “someone made a heroic conversion to the socialist cause.”

Shan’s mind raced. It was, he realized, the link to all the pieces of his puzzle. “Who was it?”

“No idea. Wu brokered the deal. By then she and I were not so close. I had started sleeping in the army barracks when the infantry moved to town. She gave me directions, where we could find them, with a very specific hand-drawn map, showing a secret path. There was a village that was not to be touched. It wasn’t easy to find their hiding place. Two of my soldiers died on the climb. But we surprised them as they ate breakfast, killed half right away, and chased most of the others across the border. They officially named me a hero, took me back into the army, made me a real officer.”